Fire Lover

by Joseph Wambaugh

  About the time that John Orr was waiting for comments from hired critics, Mike Matassa and the task force had come up with a new wrinkle to catch him in the act of setting a fire, thus speeding up the maddeningly slow and methodical investigative moves required by the assistant U.S. attorneys. John Leonard Orr was about to become a law-enforcement footnote: the first crime suspect on whom a Teletrac device would be tested.

  He couldn’t have known of its existence. The L.A. Sheriff’s Department had obtained the Teletrac from a Los Angeles dealer who’d been using it like the Lo-Jack device that locates stolen cars. Upon hearing about it, sheriff’s arson investigators who’d done work on the Pillow Pyro case said, “Let’s give it a real test on John Orr.”

  With the Teletrac they didn’t need an eyeball at all. The device could relay information to a receiver screen that looked like a Thomas Brothers map grid. A little cursor traveled on the map and could feed back the tracker location every second or every hour, as they wished. They decided to set it up so that it relayed information every five seconds when they had a surveillance team on him, and every fifteen minutes when they did not.

  The monitoring equipment included a printout that told them where it was within their selected time frames, and the assistant special agent in charge of the L.A. ATF office scanned the printouts. For their computer cursor, they chose a little rectangle with a single word inside it: “Fire.”

  Now they only had to wait for Captain Orr’s city car to be taken to the garage for its regular service. The device would be installed behind the dashboard, hardwired into the electrical system to run off the battery. And this one had no antenna for him to see.

  For the remainder of the hot smoggy summer, the task force was taking trips to the Central Valley and Central Coast to interview more witnesses for the assistant U.S. attorneys. On one of those trips by Mike Matassa and Ken Croke, they found themselves at a shit-kickin’ bar in the boonies, looking for a former employee of a burned retail store. Both Matassa the Pennsylvania guy and Croke the Massachusetts guy learned just how far away the rural Central Valley of California is, culturally speaking. There wasn’t a single copy of The Hollywood Reporter for miles around.

  When they walked into the saloon in their arson-nerd business attire, the music literally stopped, or so they claimed. Somebody might’ve pulled the plug on Travis Tritt or Vince Gill or whoever the hell it was singing about bad love, bad booze, and hangovers. And the two feds found themselves part of a frozen tableau in a place where there were no waitresses named Crystal or Brittany. All the ones there were called Mavis and Flo, and there were no busboys named Chad. In fact, there were no busboys. And all the guys around there, and a few of the women, dipped snuff and drove trucks with NRA bumper stickers that said, “GUNS, GUTS AND GOD,” with more firepower in those pickups and possibly on their persons than ATF had in its entire L.A. gun group.

  So the feds were extra polite, and if they bought a brew they drank it straight out of the bottle, wiped the foam away with a coat sleeve, and became acutely aware that they had left the L.A. city limits.

  More bricks and mortar were added in September when Constance Schipper, an employee from Builder’s Emporium in North Hollywood, talked with Glen Lucero and chose photo number five as having been to the store at some time before the fire. Also in September, the official review of Captain Orr’s personnel file from the Glendale Fire Department revealed that he’d been scheduled to work on the date of every fire that had occurred between December 10, 1990, and March 27, 1991. A week later the review was completed on Glendale call-out sheets, which showed that he was not at any fire scenes in the city of Glendale during the dates and times of Pillow Pyro fires. In short, he was still unaccounted for when every one of the arson fires had occurred, and he had always been alone. Joe Lopez was on a day off, or in training, or elsewhere, when the arsons had taken place.

  Mike Matassa said, “Let’s see him chalk it all up to coincidence. Let’s see him produce an alibi witness for even one of them.”

  The U.S. Attorney’s Office was talking about affidavits for search warrants as the time to arrest John Orr drew near. The lawyers wanted Mike Matassa, for the record, to specifically ask Marvin Casey of Bakersfield if Captain John Orr of the Glendale Fire Department ever could have touched the notebook paper that Casey had collected back in January of 1987. And that meant that Marvin Casey had to be let in on the secret.

  Mike Matassa called Marv Casey and asked the question and was given the expected negative answer, and Matassa explained how he would like to have informed Casey sooner, and Casey asked to be allowed to take part in the arrest of John Orr. Understandably, he felt a proprietary interest in the case and wanted a piece of it. Mike Matassa told him that he’d be in touch when the time came.

  And when he’d hung up, Marvin Casey at long last had his vindication. They had scoffed for years, even ATF agents. And now an ATF agent had phoned to say that Casey had been right all along. Marv Casey wondered if he’d ever be given proper credit for what he had done. He doubted it, feds being feds.

  Around the first of October the task force was reminded of something that Battalion Chief Gray of the Glendale Fire Department had advised them of back in April: John Orr was writing a novel about fire fighting called Points of Origin. What piqued their interest for the first time was that Gray had found his secretary doing some typing for John. It was a cover letter that he was sending to publishers.

  Gray took a look and discovered that in his letter John indicated that the novel was about a fireman who is also a serial arsonist. When Gray relayed this to the task force, it was decided that they should find a way to take a peek at his literary effort. They thought there just might be something in it after all.

  They lost Ken Croke that month to an assignment back at the academy for two months of new-agent training. Mike Matassa told Croke they’d try not to pop John Orr until he returned.

  On October 2, on a hot and dry Indian summer afternoon, another brush fire broke out in Glendale, in Chevy Chase Canyon, where so many had occurred in the past. This fire’s point of origin was determined to be just off the street, in a gully that formed a perfect chimney to take the flames up the hill in the direction of a house perched nice and high with plenty of brush around it. The house was a sitting duck for an arsonist.

  Deputy Rich Edwards of the L.A. Sheriff’s Department arrived twenty-five to thirty minutes after the alarm was given, but by then the house on Kennington Road was completely engulfed. Edwards was one of the sheriff’s arson investigators who’d learned back in August, when the Teletrac was installed, that John Orr was the one and only suspect of the Pillow Pyro Task Force. He looked for John at the fire scene but at first did not see him.

  Five minutes later, John arrived in his city car, got out and accompanied Rich Edwards to the point of origin. The fire had begun beside Chevy Chase and had swooped up the hill in a classic V pattern. Both Rich Edwards and John Orr concurred that it was an arson fire. Nobody had been in the house at the time of the fire, but the dwelling had burned to the ground.

  What do cops in L.A. do when they’re up against a tough situation? They draw on Hollywood, except it usually comes in the form of movie memories. “Here’s how Bruce Willis did it.” Or, “Remember how Mel Gibson drove in that movie?”

  Well, this time they went directly to Tinseltown. Producer-writer-director John Herzfeld was a friend of Hollywood Mike Camello of the task force. He was fascinated by arson and fire-related themes, and had met Camello when he’d made a fire-fighting film.

  The task force thought that Herzfeld might feign some interest in John Orr’s literary effort and get his hands on the manuscript on the pretext of movie possibilities. They invited John Herzfeld to the L.A. police academy for lunch, where they gave him a general overview, then took him to the U.S. Attorney’s Office in downtown Los Angeles for a confidential meeting. They told him some of it, as much as they had to, and he seemed very curious.

  And
then an assistant U.S. attorney started talking about confidential grand jury information, and warned that a leak could be considered obstruction of justice. But it still looked as if Herzfeld was on board. Then the assistant U.S. attorney used a word that Mike Matassa wanted to grab out of the air and shove back in the lawyer’s mouth. He said to Herzfeld, “You’ll become an informant.”

  And there it was: The Informer! Victor McLaglen dying on a Dublin street, gunned down by the IRA. The informer was always gunned down, or had his throat cut, or worse. And was always despised as a rat. The producer thanked everybody and said adios, as Matassa knew he would. You don’t use the word informant around any respectable witness, let alone a guy who’s in a business where the snitch is always tits up in the last fucking reel!

  They had to come up with another plan, and John Orr helped them do it. A week after the Hollywood debacle, John himself called the L.A. Fire Department to find out if they had a firefighter by the name of Aaron Stiles, or any firefighter named Stiles. He said that he was writing a novel and one of his characters was an L.A. city firefighter. He didn’t want to be sued for using the name of a real fireman.

  The task force couldn’t believe his timing. They knew of a retired LAFD arson investigator, A. A. Jackubowski, who lived in Santa Maria and was himself a writer. And John Orr knew him too. The task force had Jackubowski call the Glendale arson captain and say that he’d heard that John was writing a novel and was glad to hear it, and wondered if there was anything he could do to help a fellow firefighter get published. And that maybe they could exchange and compare manuscripts.

  Jackubowski told John he was in Hollywood for the day and could meet him in a restaurant, but for once John couldn’t get out of Glendale. However, he was clearly excited, and he sent a copy of the manuscript by overnight mail to Jackubowski in Santa Maria. And the day after that, Points of Origin was being photocopied at task-force headquarters, about to be eagerly read by Mike Matassa, Glen Lucero, and a couple of assistant U.S. attorneys.

  A memorable moment happened during the copying of the manuscript. The assistant special agent in charge of the ATF office was pulling out pages as they flew into the paper tray, and it got very interesting very quickly. Mike Matassa received a phone call from that ASAC, who said, “Believe it or not, John Orr is writing in detail about the very fires we’re investigating!”

  In a matter of minutes everyone was ganging up on the machine operator, grabbing at copies. In chapter 6 the author described how his villain set an arson fire at “Cal’s,” a hardware business in a “small community south of Pasadena.” In the novel, five people died in that fire, one of them a little boy named Matthew.

  The residential fire on Kennington Drive in Glendale was not brought to the attention of the Pillow Pyro Task Force, or if it was, nobody paid much attention to it. They were working on M.O. crimes, and the M.O. of their man had to do with fires at retail stores, not brush fires, even if they did take place in John Orr’s bailiwick and destroyed houses.

  By then the task force had enlisted the aid of behavioral analysts who did serial-arson profiles at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia. It was surprising to learn that government profilers had studied only half a dozen organized serial arsonists who had been caught and incarcerated. All of the others they’d studied fell into the disorganized category, mostly young men who torched random targets of opportunity, unsophisticated loners with poor social skills. Often they were nocturnal walkers who would just set a fire by applying open flame to anything combustible.

  The organized serial arsonists, the few they’d studied, went through a target-selection process. The task force was told that retail stores open for business would represent one of the most risk-filled, hence most fulfilling, of targets. The organized serial arsonist didn’t just want to start a fire, he wanted to start the fire, his own fire, his way. He was a somewhat older offender with experience. He had unlimited mobility, and sometimes drove for miles selecting targets. It had to be the best fire possible to meet his needs. A fire set in foam material, the task force was told, would certainly provide that kind of bigger, faster, better fire.

  The organized serial arsonist was generally employed and often vain about his appearance. He might project an image of authority, even cocksure competence in his other life, but his personal life was dismal. There were no monogamous relationships among those they’d studied.

  The serial arsonist, like other violent serial offenders, was conscienceless, egocentric, manipulative, cunning, and indifferent to societal rules and restrictions, with a compulsive need for excitement. In short, his was the classic psychopathic personality, with a unique component: the fire.

  Only the fire could temporarily satisfy the lust for power and control and possession. Only the flames could provide the irresistible thrill, the indescribable reward. The fire. The best fire. His fire.

  Having been installed in John Orr’s car during a “routine maintenance,” the Teletrac was up and running and being monitored on Friday, November 22, 1991. The system sent out signals from some forty towers covering the Los Angeles basin and far beyond. The signal was coded and got picked up by the transmitter on the target vehicle. The system measured the time it took a signal to travel from the target vehicle to the towers, after which a telephone line sent all information to a master computer, and then out to the star center at the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department.

  At the star center the deputies could watch on screen as the target moved on a computer map, and could tell within one hundred feet where the target vehicle was located. There were some Teletrac printouts that afternoon that soon caught the attention of the task force.

  It was about 3:30 P.M. when a Burbank fire inspector was driving his city car toward his office and spotted a plume, a column of smoke rising in the air. He drove toward it and heard on his radio a full alarm assignment being dispatched to Warner Brothers Studios.

  By the time the fire inspector arrived through the studio gate there was already a Warner Brothers fire engine at the scene laying out lines, while other engines from the Burbank Fire Department were on the way. A large facade in the form of a house, barn, sawmill, and chicken coop, which had been used by The Waltons TV series, was engulfed, and a crowd of studio employees had gathered to watch.

  After several minutes, the fire inspector was joined by Captain Steve Patterson, the lead arson investigator for the city of Burbank. As the two men began looking for possible causes of the blaze they examined electrical substation boxes and found no obvious short circuits. But the fire inspector thought it was probably an electrical fire.

  Patterson found burn patterns on the floor of the chicken coop that resembled residue from flammable liquid, and he saw a tree next to the coop that was burned more on one side than the other, which puzzled him as to the direction of the fire. Steve Patterson, who had only eighteen months’ experience as an investigator, felt he needed some assistance in solving this one. He used the studio phone to call a colleague, Captain John Orr, who had hosted an arson-investigation class in Glendale which Patterson had attended that very day. Patterson was five years older, but considered the more experienced John Orr his mentor.

  John returned Patterson’s call, and was told by his friend that he could use some help investigating a fire at Warner Brothers Studios. John said that, coincidentally, he happened to be just a short distance away having dinner with a friend, and he’d be there in a jiffy. He told Patterson he was at Oak and Hollywood Way and asked for directions.

  Steve Patterson said, “Well, if you’re at Oak and Hollywood Way, you just proceed south on Hollywood Way to Olive, and make a left turn and … I can’t recall the first street you come to, but there you make a right turn and …”

  John interrupted him and said, “You know, your directions are somewhat complicated. Would you mind going out and meeting me on Warner Boulevard?”

  “Sure, John,” Patterson said. “See you there.”

  John added, “Make sure y
ou have a flashlight. If you see a car coming your way, flash the light at me so I’ll know where you’re standing.”

  Steve Patterson waited five minutes and looked at his watch. He looked again after ten minutes had passed. After fifteen minutes, he went to his car, got on the radio and contacted John, asking his colleague if he’d gotten lost. John told him not at all, that he was actually inside the studio at the Waltons set.

  As Patterson drove back to the fire scene he was puzzled. John had said he didn’t know how to get there and needed directions, yet he was inside at the fire scene. But Patterson didn’t question his colleague about why he’d been left standing outside in the dark with a flashlight; he was too glad to have his help.

  The two arson investigators pretty much reached agreement, as they assessed the cause and origin of the fire, that it was arson. Nothing was said to Patterson by John as to how he’d found his way in, or about having been in the vicinity earlier in the day.

  At a later time, John reported that after giving his partner, Joe Lopez, that afternoon off, he had to go to the school of his lady friend’s daughter for a parent-teacher meeting, and the school was only a mile from the fire. He’d seen a header of smoke and heard the fire call over his car radio, and since he was fifteen minutes early he’d decided to drive to the fire for “videotaping possibilities.” But due to traffic and time constraints he’d returned to the school and the parent-teacher conference. He also added that because he’d seen the header of smoke earlier, he knew approximately where to go, and had arrived quickly at the fire scene after leaving word for Patterson with a gate guard.

  He later denied that he’d agreed with Patterson’s assessment of arson, but that he was tired and hungry and “placated Steve, instead of arguing with him.” They both agreed to call for Blanche, the FIRST organization’s arson dog, to come the next morning and sniff for traces of any flammable liquid.