“In the book, chocolate mints’re placed on their hotel pillows at the arson convention,” Steve Patterson argued.
“Chocolate mints are everywhere!” he was told. “So what?”
It was always: So what? Steve Patterson went back to his copy of Points of Origin because he was sure there was something else.… And then it hit him!
At the beginning of the terrible description of the “Cal’s” fire, he read: “While standing in the parking lot sharing a chocolate mint cone, she decided to entertain Matthew further by walking through Cal’s.”
If his neck hairs had swayed before, now they were break-dancing.
There were other duties that had the potential of getting Steve Patterson into trouble, aside from his quest to solve the murder of Mary Susan Duggan. He had occasion to interview an uncle of John Orr who had a business near an area where brush fires had broken out frequently. After a routine chat, the uncle called his wife, who called the Glendale fire chief, who called the Burbank fire chief, who called Steve Patterson and said, “You leave John Orr’s family alone!”
The Glendale and Burbank fire departments had a close relationship, and there were still firefighters who did not want to believe that Captain Orr was a serial arsonist.
Steve Patterson later said, “I was like a dog on a leash. I was constantly being jerked backwards by my masters.”
He tried working on other leads. John Orr’s first wife and two daughters lived in Orange County, and John had gone to visit them for Christmas in 1990. A Thrifty Drug Store in their neighborhood burned on the very day he’d visited. Steve Patterson learned of other Thrifty Drug Store fires in Orange County, in addition to the pair of Thrifty fires in March of 1991 that they were sure he’d set. Patterson and Bill Donley went to the home office of Thrifty Drug Store in Hollywood and discovered that a secretary there knew John Orr.
It was always sex and fire. That brought Patterson back to Mary Duggan. He discovered that her former place of employment had experienced a fire while John Orr had been doing insurance work for his PI friend, so could he have met Mary on that occasion?
It wasn’t difficult for Patterson to see that some of the cops were really getting sick and tired of his hunch and his theories. He’d hear remarks like, “We’re trying to put together a capital murder case! What more do you want?”
To which Steve Patterson had an argument: “What about Mary Duggan’s family? And how about Mary Duggan herself?”
When he’d be challenged with, “Do you think you’re smarter than the detectives, Steve? Is that it?” He’d say, “I’m not smarter than the policemen. I’m not. I’m just a fireman, but … it all seems to fit!”
He’d unwind by working in the yard. He figured that during those days he’d mowed more grass than the grounds crew at Lakeside Country Club.
There was, however, a bit of task-force work done on Steve Patterson’s Mary Duggan theory. Rich Edwards and Walt Scheuerell did look at car fires where women’s bodies had been found. The victims were hookers, a few in Los Angeles and one in Pasadena, but nothing matched up with the murder of Mary Duggan.
Steve Patterson wanted more. He was frustrated to learn that nobody had ever checked with the cab companies to see if they’d picked up anyone in the vicinity of the 7-Eleven store on the night that her car and body had been left there. And he wanted very much to talk to the Duggan family.
Because of his badgering, a detective did call her family to ask: “Did she ever date a lawyer? Did she ever date a policeman? Did she ever date a fireman?”
But they had no answers. Steve Patterson wanted to come right out and ask it: “Did you ever hear Mary mention the name ‘John Orr’?”
Finally, Steve Patterson could not contain himself. He had to interview the family of Mary Duggan, and that request found its way to the Burbank detectives. Patterson was called into the office of his boss at the Burbank Fire Department, and there waiting for him was not his boss but a detective lieutenant.
There was no debate, no explanation, no desire to know what Steve Patterson had learned. The detective lieutenant said, “Take your fucking nose out of police business and stick it somewhere else!”
The “discussion” was over. The detective left him there, fuming. But now his chain had been jerked and cinched up tight.
Mike Cabral told Steve Patterson that being a young prosecutor he did not have the gravitas to take on the Burbank Police Department, that maybe Patterson better just forget Mary Duggan for now and get on with the work they must do.
But just when Steve Patterson knew that he could go no further with his pursuit of the murderer of this girl who was his daughter’s age, this girl who’d suffered such a cruel death—just as he was talking himself into getting over it now that it had turned into a pissing contest between the Burbank PD and an upstart fireman—Wally Scheuerell, the elder statesman of the task force, asked Patterson if he’d ever noticed what John Orr had written on page 272 of his novel in regard to one of the book’s leading characters.
When Steve Patterson turned to the page in question, he found a discussion in a Fresno hotel during an arson conference, between the protagonist, arson investigator Phil Langtree, and his lady love, Chris. Phil Langtree describes to Chris the arsonist’s attack on Trish, how he’d tied her up and tried to murder her, and that he must go back and investigate. Chris picks up the hotel phone to arrange a flight from Fresno to Burbank Airport, and for the first and only time in the novel, Chris gives her surname, which Steve Patterson hadn’t noticed before:
“This is Chris Kilmary, room 432, would you please call the airport …”
For an old movie buff, it felt as though every hair was standing electrified, like the Bride of Frankenstein!
Before he could say anything, the old detective said to him, “I already checked with DMV. There’s not a single last name like that in all of California’s motor vehicle records. Why would he choose that name?”
All that Steve Patterson could do was repeat it: “Kilmary. Kilmary. Kill Mary.”
There was one day remaining before the statute of limitations was to expire on the brush-fire arsons when Deputy District Attorney Michael J. Cabral presented a twenty-five-count indictment of John Leonard Orr before a Los Angeles grand jury on Monday, November 21, 1994. It charged four counts of murder and one count of arson for the Ole’s fire; one count of arson for the fire at Warner Brothers Studios; three counts of arson for the brush fires that burned homes on Kennington Drive in Glendale, Hilldale Drive in La Cañada, and San Augustine Drive in Glendale; and sixteen counts of arson for some of the homes burned in the College Hills fire of 1990.
That was a moment in time that John Orr would never forget. He was in his cell at Terminal Island listening to the radio when the program was interrupted by a commercial sponsored by the ABC affiliate, inviting the radio audience to tune in to the five o’clock news.
“The top story tonight,” the announcer promised, “involves a fire captain indicted for murder.”
Peter Giannini, the attorney for John Orr, told reporters that he was stunned, particularly in reference to the Ole’s disaster.
John stayed away from the television all that evening, and phoned his wife as soon as he could.
Wanda Orr was contacted by Peter Giannini, who offered his services, explaining that they would not have to pay for the defense, which he knew would be impossible. He said that he could represent her husband and be paid by the state of California through a court appointment.
Wanda Orr contacted the prisoner, who reported a feeling of numbing despair. He agreed to retain Giannini, and wondered how long he would be permitted to remain in the relative comfort of Terminal Island. His answer came surprisingly fast.
Mike Cabral writted him out of Terminal Island and had him transferred to the L.A. County Jail in a matter of days, into the Protective Custody Unit in the old jail, where they kept the “high-power tank” for the high-profile prisoners. John later described his early w
eeks in the county jail as “sleep time.” He said that he never had nightmares when he slept, and the only way to escape daytime horrors was to go to sleep.
His days in the high-power tank consisted of walking to and fro in a nine-by-nine-foot cage. Every other day he’d get to use the phone for a half hour. The prisoners were allowed to exercise once a week, and that year the only real entertainment was provided by hearing O.J. Simpson getting the word of the Lord from former football player turned preacher Roosevelt Grier when he came to visit.
Once, O.J. yelled, “I been covering up for that bitch for twelve years!”
The jail authorities insisted to the media that O.J. Simpson was being treated like any other prisoner. The inmates said, Right, if any other prisoner happens to be a pope.
John told his attorney that they had to get their case to court as soon as possible. Just after New Year’s Day of 1995, the prisoner said that he didn’t see how he’d survive more than a few months in that cage without trying to kill himself.
Steve Patterson was sent back to the firehouse, where he looked forward to retirement in a few years. There was no point obsessing over the Mary Duggan case, making himself sick. Everybody seemed willing to forget her. It was as though she’d never lived.
But there were statistics, interesting statistics to which both of the task-force groups had access. The profilers at the FBI Academy had estimated that 70 percent of serial killers had been fire setters at some time in their lives. The incessant need for risk and excitement drove them to games of higher and higher stakes until “possession” of a fire wasn’t enough. Then came the compulsion to “possess” human beings.
Even though they’d discovered John Orr’s predilection for “tough love,” nobody wanted to entertain the notion that his compulsion could have gotten out of hand. Steve Patterson had run up against the same kind of cynicism that another fireman had faced, a man Patterson had visited after the Fresno trial, when the district attorney’s task force was re-interviewing all potential witnesses. Marvin Casey had faced that wall of blue ice. That cynicism which had killed more cops than all of the guns, knives, clubs, bombs, and cars combined. Cop suicides, the quiet statistic, outpaced killed-on-duty numbers just about every year in every major police agency.
Firefighters were not cynics, and the reason was simple: everybody loves a fireman. Gradually, Steve Patterson’s hypertension decreased and so did his time behind a lawn mower. Life back in the firehouse offered camaraderie and the old familiar comforts. But he never quite got Mary Susan Duggan off his mind.
Walt Scheuerell and Rich Edwards respected Mike Cabral for “having a vision” that was about to be given a unique test. Nobody had ever been convicted of arson without the prosecution eliminating the probability of accidental fire. And the two LASD investigators were up against a case where one of their own, a crack arson cop, had declared Ole’s an accidental fire.
After Scheuerell and Edwards talked with Sergeant Jack Palmer, their proud retired colleague, Scheuerell referred to Palmer as a “tired investigator” who just hadn’t interviewed enough witnesses at the Ole’s calamity of 1984. But finally, Palmer told them that if they came up with a different conclusion, they had to go with it.
Scheuerell said that he and Edwards, and others like them who investigated arsons for the Lean Green Machine, were the “stepchildren” of the L.A. Sheriff’s Department investigators. And their homicide detectives were a bit embarrassed about Ole’s. They were betting against Cabral’s efforts to stoke the ashes of that long-dead conflagration.
The defense had to be given an inordinate amount of preparation and investigative time, given the complexity of the capital murder case that the district attorney had filed, so Scheuerell and Edwards were left with the mop-up assignments, even though they’d mostly returned to their routine duties as LASD arson investigators.
Scheuerell was fifty-five years old in 1995, and Edwards was ten years younger. The senior citizen of the task force had a street cop’s suspicion of feds, and in dealing with the Pillow Pyro Task Force he’d always suspected that he hadn’t learned all there was to know, but wasn’t sure what was left. When John Orr had been arrested, he and Edwards were kept on the “arrest periphery.”
In 1996, Sergeant Walt Scheuerell had open-heart surgery and retired from the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department, where he’d served for thirty-five years. Although Scheuerell had been a “bit standoffish,” according to firefighters in the task force, always expressing his opinions as tersely as possible, the firemen might’ve been comforted to know that he was one old cop who’d never been scornful of their efforts.
Scheuerell said that he had wanted Steve Patterson to find a “fifth victim” somewhere, believing that there might have been a psychological need for John Orr to have cremated five people in his fictional version of the Ole’s fire. And he was the only career law-enforcement officer on either task force to say that the man who deserved the most credit for resolving the John Orr saga was not a cop but a fireman: Marvin G. Casey of the Bakersfield Fire Department.
After O.J. Simpson had been freed, the other prisoners got to go up to the roof twice a week for air and exercise. The Protective Custody Unit was a twenty-four-hour-a-day-lockdown experience. John Orr had occasion to complain in writing to the senior supervisor that his Playboy and Penthouse magazines had been stolen by deputies. And he believed that was what prompted a random search of his cell for contraband. He was stripped, handcuffed, and forced to watch as they tossed his cell.
His neighbor in the high-power tank was a forty-five-year-old Vietnamese cocaine trafficker who had supposedly fought in the war. The resourceful Asian figured out a way to turn a recessed light fixture into a little stove for boiling water, a luxury which he traded for instant coffee and candy bars. He gave bags of hot water to John Orr in exchange for letter-writing services, and it made John’s life more bearable. His wife had divorced him in 1996, so it was a particularly miserable Christmas.
Death-penalty cases had been starting to wear down attorney Edward Rucker. He had done eight by the time he was asked to join the John Orr defense as a court-appointed counsel, specifically defending against those four counts of murder. Only one of the defendants whom Rucker had represented ended up on death row, a man who’d shot down a cop during a traffic stop and then executed the fallen officer, a difficult death verdict to overcome.
Each death-penalty case had taken a toll on the lawyer, who recalled having watched a TV documentary that featured John Orr. It gave him an idea of how his client would be targeted by law enforcement for his betrayal of the profession. By the new year of 1997, Ed Rucker was fifty-four years old, and had been practicing law since 1967. He was a former basketball player for the University of California at Berkeley, where he’d also gone to law school. Six-foot-seven-inch attorneys have to be particularly aware during trial, careful not to get too close to the jury and intimidate by size. It may have contributed to his laid-back, courteous style in a courtroom.
When he agreed to occupy the second chair at the defense table he was given stacks of boxes full of discovery material that had not been indexed or organized. It just lay there, all for him. And the defense had already had the case for two years. He knew that the court would step in one day soon and put a stop to any further delay. Rucker wasn’t sure if his cocounsel would be on the winning side when it was over, but as he pored over some of the Ole’s material he thought that he had a shot with his part of the case, by creating doubt as to whether the fire was arson or an accident.
Upon being approached by Rucker about the death-penalty decision, prosecutor Mike Cabral said he didn’t care if John Orr’s life was spared, he only wanted him off the streets for the remainder of his days. It led to an off-the-record offer. Rucker reported that Cabral would be amenable to a guilty plea and would not seek the death penalty if John Orr would do what serial-arson profilers desperately wanted him to do: speak freely about this and all of his arson crimes, starting from
childhood.
All death-penalty lawyers remembered the time when America’s most notorious violent serial offender, Ted Bundy, had wanted to do some life-and-death trading. After he’d had such a great time representing himself at his trial, giving interviews and fielding marriage proposals, it all had stopped. When he was just days away from his appointment with the Florida electric chair, he offered to locate his victims’ bodies if the governor of Florida would commute his death sentence to life without parole. But the authorities told him, in effect, Too late, Ted. You got a date with Ol’ Sparky, and Satan is waiting for his number-one draft pick.
So timing was everything. When Rucker told his client about the district attorney’s interesting off-the-record offer, John was unimpressed and adamant. He would not plead guilty. He insisted that he was not guilty. And of all the crimes that John Orr had been charged with, both in Cabral’s prosecution and those by the U.S. attorney, Ed Rucker believed that perhaps he truly had not committed this one.
But Rucker was never under any illusion about himself and Giannini trying to convince a jury, that, yes, he’d pled guilty to some arsons, but he didn’t commit these arsons. His only shot was at persuading the jury that Ole’s had been an accident. They’d try to litigate his guilty plea out of the state trials, but if they couldn’t, it would be like sitting in the courtroom with the eight-hundred-pound gorilla, or more aptly put, a giant raging Fire Monster, perched behind the defense table, hissing like burning polyfoam.
Unfortunately for the defendant, page 6 of the U.S. attorney’s seven-page plea agreement contained the following language:
Except as expressly set forth herein, there are no additional promises, understandings or agreements between this office and you or your counsel concerning any other criminal prosecution, civil litigation or administrative proceeding relating to any other federal, state or local charges that may now be pending or hereafter be brought against you, or the sentence that might be imposed as a result of your guilty pleas pursuant to this agreement.
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