Fire Lover

by Joseph Wambaugh

  “‘Madeline held Matthew close to her, and stopped briefly to look down the aisle where she saw the fire boiling out of the displays fifty feet away. She stared at the fire, not yet feeling the heat, fascinated, yet terrified.… The fire burned through a light fixture and shorted out all the lights in the annex … leaving Madeline, Matthew, one other man, and three employees in complete darkness.

  “‘Quickly, the tremendous heat breached the attic above the fire and found a ready source of oxygen. The smoke, just above head level when the lights went out, now crashed down on the heads of Madeline and Matthew. Instinctively, they dropped to the floor as they heard the black man’s voice. She screamed back at him and within seconds he was at their side. Still in total darkness, the toxic smoke attacking their lungs, the three crawled.… The smoke, choking and thick, was stealing their oxygen quickly and causing disorientation.

  “‘He held Madeline’s hand as Matthew clung to her neck. She heard Matthew’s sobs as well as her own. She now felt the heat and saw flames in front of them. She screamed at the employee as he squeezed her hand tightly, continuing down the aisle toward the fire.… He suddenly realized he was going the wrong way, turned back and they reversed their direction.… She felt herself losing her grip on Matthew and his grip loosened from her neck, and slipped down her body as they crawled.

  “‘Unable to go any further, she felt the employee’s hand drop hers. He continued on. The last thing she heard was a tremendous roar as the fire burned through the roof and vented to the outside. The smoke momentarily lifted, but was then replaced by solid fire as the contents of the annex exploded into flames. Their last breaths were of eight-hundred-degree heat that sealed their throats closed.

  “‘When Madeline’s body was found, she was on her back with Matthew clinging to her ankles. The employee leading them was found face down five feet in front of Madeline, just twenty feet short of an open fire escape door. One other employee had managed to escape and collapsed outside. Ironically, the other dead employee and customer were also found within ten feet of Madeline.

  “‘There was never a follow-up investigation. The fire was ineptly termed accidental. Aaron was so furious that he set a nearly identical fire in Hollywood, at another hardware store. The investigating agency termed the fire arson, but no correlation was made to the Cal’s fire. Aaron wanted the Cal’s fire to be called arson. He loved the inadvertent attention he derived from the newspaper coverage, and hated it when he wasn’t properly recognized.’”

  Cabral was not yet ready to read the final lines, which described how the arsonist felt about the people he’d killed. When he put down the manuscript there were jurors staring at John Orr, and the courtroom was very very still.

  The prosecutor said, “The people submit to you that chapter six of this book is the Ole’s fire. It describes the Ole’s fire in detail, even down to the ice cream store.”

  Like most lawyers, Cabral couldn’t leave a word unsaid, and he then sent jurors slumbering with a lot of talk about the technical testimony they’d heard. However, what was possibly the most remarkable thing about this prosecutor was his uncanny recall of what those hundred witnesses had said during the month of testimony. Seldom did he misstate the evidence, as often happens in long closing arguments after a complicated trial. Jurors could’ve hoped that he’d kept things more chronological, but nothing was missing. He just didn’t forget anything, and that made for a tedious but always amazing performance.

  Cabral had begun talking at 9:30 A.M., and other than during the lunch break, was still at it when court adjourned at 4:00 that afternoon.

  The next morning the crossword puzzler was late, but after she arrived, Cabral resumed his closing argument by launching his assault on all of the investigators who had called the fire an accident. Probably his most scathing criticism was reserved for Sergeant Jack Palmer of the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department.

  “He spent about an hour, hour and a half, before making his determination,” Cabral said. “The people submit to you that was inappropriate. He had four dead citizens. He doesn’t talk to Mr. Obdam until the next day, after he’s already made his decision. He’s already reached the conclusion before he even talked to a single witness who could tell him what happened inside that building. And the people submit that that is a fatal flaw, and that flows to every conclusion of every investigator who didn’t go inside that building and dig it out. Because they all say only one thing: I relied on Sergeant Palmer.

  “He just said, a high fire here. Okay. Can’t eliminate electrical in the attic. Let’s go home. Let’s pack up our stuff and let’s go. We’re done. We’ve been here an hour and a half. Potential homicide off our hands. We’ve done all we need to do. We don’t need to talk to any witnesses. But oh, tomorrow, I’ll go talk to the one who was the last person out of the fire to see what they think.”

  Cabral related once again, from memory, the testimony of the defendant’s friend, Jim Allen of the Fire Marshal’s Office, about how he and John Orr were not satisfied with the finding of accidental fire. What was significant was that Jim Allen had never been told by his friend John Orr that he’d been at the scene of all three fires on that night.

  And then Cabral disparaged the opinions of defense experts. Cabral kept pointing out that virtually none of the experts had talked to any of the witnesses the jury had heard. It was effective to let jurors know that they’d heard testimony from the lips of survivors that expert witnesses had never heard before they’d arrived at the attic-fire conclusion.

  And finally, at noon, when a lunch break was imminent, Mike Cabral said, “The people submit that the evidence is clear, the evidence is incontrovertible, that on October tenth, 1984, the defendant, John Leonard Orr, entered Ole’s Home Center shortly before eight P.M. That he walked into that location, down to the aisle where the polyfoam is stored, placed a device consisting of the cigarette, three matches, a rubber band, and a piece of yellow lined paper into that polyfoam. And after he exited that store, that device ignited a fire which, within minutes, spread throughout the bottom of the area, caused the flashover, and took the lives of Jimmy Cetina, Matthew Troidl, Ada Deal, and Carolyn Krause. And I ask you to return a verdict as to guilty on those four counts. Thank you.”

  After lunch that day, Sandra Flannery summarized the other counts of arson that she maintained were linked by modus operandi.

  She said, “As to those counts, when compared one to another, the evidence also shows patterns and similarities which emerged, that dispute any type of explanation by which the defense could try to explain away these similarities. These patterns, these similarities, are like common threads of facts and circumstances that seem to reappear through these counts. They are the mark of a human hand, because we humans, whether we like it or not, are creatures of habit, are we not?”

  She first discussed the Kennington fire, and that John Orr had arrived before the first engine and had begun videotaping while the fire was still burning, when there was not a fire engine in sight. She discussed that on a portion of the tape the house was not on fire, denoting that he’d taken that video at another time, as a before-and-after lesson.

  She discussed the Warner Brothers fire, and that a security guard had testified that the defendant was also at that fire while it was burning, and that upon being called by Steve Patterson, the defendant had pretended not to know how to get there.

  She next talked about the Hilldale and San Augustine fires and she gave a compelling Teletrac argument: “Well, we know that the defendant was at the location very early on. We know that he showed up at the San Augustine fire within one to two minutes, even though the dispatch to the San Augustine fire gave the wrong location. And yet, John Orr, once again, in his remarkable timing, is there.”

  Then Sandra Flannery turned to her big case, the College Hills disaster. She talked about how the defendant had been seen by other firefighters near the area of origin in the early stages of the fire, once again emphasizing his “remarkabl
e timing.” And she discussed her witnesses, the air force major and the apartment-house resident who’d lived in the epicenter of the disaster, both of whom had identified John Orr after the news coverage of his arrest.

  Sandra Flannery gave a try at sanitizing the testimony of the woman in the apartment building who’d identified John Orr just prior to this trial, but had never done so before, even though he was in her bathroom. But at last she was forced to say, “The value of that experience is up to you to weigh and decide.”

  Sandra Flannery concluded her argument at 4:00 P.M. by implying that John Orr had dumped his partner Don Yeager out of the arson unit because he didn’t want a lot of investigation into Glendale’s fire of the century. Then she spoke the truest words that the jury had heard thus far: “Although we’ve gone on endlessly …”

  After that apology, she said, “I’m going to ask you, in evaluating this evidence, to understand that these patterns that emerge … these things that consistently come up make one thing clear, it’s impossible for all of these things to arbitrarily coincide in time and space with innocent explanations. All of these things as they converge create a clear pattern of circumstantial evidence which has only one reasonable interpretation: that John Orr set these fires.

  “And that’s why I’m asking you to return a verdict of guilty as to these remaining counts, five through twenty-five. And I’m asking you to find him also guilty of the special allegations on these counts. And I thank you very much for listening to me today.”

  On Wednesday, June 10, five weeks into trial, Ed Rucker was first up for the defense’s closing argument, and he gave the jury a dose of truth when he said, “Unfortunately, in this particular case, you’ve been put under a terrible burden. There’s a great obstacle, and I think it’s only right we talk about it. Let’s be straight with each other, okay? You’ve heard evidence that John Orr pled guilty to setting fires. Come on, that’s got to affect you. We’re rational people, but we’re emotional people. And an emotion can sometimes blow away, in the wind of anger, our ability to be rational and our ability to do what we know is right.

  “You may dislike John Orr. You may despise John Orr. You may think he’s done some terrible things. You may think, ‘Doggone it, he set fires before. Why am I sitting here struggling over this evidence? Why not convict him of this one too? What difference does it make? He’s not one of us. He stepped outside of us.’

  “You’ve taken an oath as a juror. And your service, I know, has become to many people a burden. It’s become sort of a subject of jokes. But we as a community, as a nation, hand over to you the most immense power that one person can have over another. You’ve got his life in your hands. You’re going to make important decisions in your life that affect you, affect your family, affect your loved ones. But how many times are you going to make a decision that affects another man’s life? In a sense, this doesn’t have anything to do with John Orr. In a sense this has to do with the integrity of our system. Are you going to decide the Ole’s case on the facts and the law, as judges?

  “The central question that you have to decide in the Ole’s case is the one everybody’s been telling you about: Did the fire start up in the attic, probably from an electrical cause, and smolder up there for a while because it didn’t have enough oxygen? And at some point during that phase, find a way to drop down some burning part onto the merchandise floor of Ole’s?”

  Rucker then sketched the prosecution scenario for the Ole’s blaze, and talked about how people arrive at conclusions based upon circumstantial evidence.

  “Here’s the point,” Rucker said. “A finding of guilt as to any crime may not be based on circumstantial evidence unless the proved circumstances are one, consistent with the theory that the defendant is guilty of the crime, and two, cannot be reconciled with any other rational conclusion.

  “An interpretation that points toward John Orr’s setting the fire—and an interpretation that this was an attic fire that dropped down—we’ve got two reasonable interpretations. What do you do? You must adopt the interpretation that points to the defendant’s innocence, and reject that interpretation that points to his guilt. That’s the law. That’s what this is all about: whether you’re going to be able to get over your anger at John Orr, and follow the law, and decide if a reasonable interpretation of the facts points to an attic fire.”

  Rucker reminded the jury that Sergeant Jack Palmer and other law-enforcement arson investigators had all called Ole’s an accidental fire, and he said something interesting. “When Sergeant Jack Palmer says it’s arson, it’s arson. When he says it’s not, it’s not.

  “How many men sit in jail cells right now, prison cells, on the testimony of these men? Now, none of these men in their entire professional careers was ever asked to reexamine one of these opinions. These are not rookies. These are not unqualified men. No prosecutor has ever come to them and said: ‘You know what? I think you made a mistake.’ Never. In fact, Deputy Rich Edwards worked under him, and could not name a single fire where he ever thought Sergeant Jack Palmer had made a mistake, not once. There were fifteen to twenty trained, experienced arson investigators there. Nobody disagreed.”

  Then Rucker began to examine the case, point by point, much as Cabral had done, but from his side of the courtroom. He talked about burn patterns, and shredded insulation, and charring, and twisted beams. And then he confronted the heart of the prosecutor’s thesis: the polyfoam.

  “Mr. Cabral is probably the most able prosecutor you’re going to get in a courtroom, on this kind of case. Do you think after talking to Jack Palmer as many times as they have, if the facts would’ve changed his opinion, they would have asked him that? They didn’t. They asked him very cleverly: ‘Do you think that polyfoam on the floor is significant?’ Well, yeah. But they didn’t ask him: ‘Does that change your opinion?’

  “I asked him: ‘Did anything you’ve learned during all of this change your opinion?’ What did he answer? ‘No.’”

  During recess, in response to an objection by Cabral, the judge admonished Rucker about a reference to the fact that the jury was hearing a death-penalty case, making a life-and-death decision. The defense lawyer agreed that he wouldn’t do that again.

  After lunch it was back to ceiling leaks and even polyfoam, and a rehash of the testimony by Ole’s employees, but the defense interpretation was that the polyfoam had been ignited by a drop-down fire.

  Rucker was very effective when he got to the fires that the prosecution had called diversionary. He read to the jury the testimony of Pasadena arson investigator McClure, who had radioed for John Orr to assist him with his investigation at Albertson’s Market. If the opinion of Sergeant Palmer and others that Ole’s must be an accident was the heart of the defense case, the alibi time line was the lungs. Rucker indicated to the jury that it would have been impossible for John Orr to have set three fires and still have been where witnesses put him during crucial moments.

  “We know that at seven-forty-five P.M. McClure pages Orr,” Rucker told the jury. “At seven-forty-seven, they page Orr from Verdugo Dispatch. It’s on the tape. McClure said that Orr was there with him for about fifteen or twenty minutes. The first call to the fire department for Ole’s was at eight-oh-six. And we know that at eight-twenty-two Orr is calling dispatch. It’s on the tape: ‘I’m in South Pasadena. Here’s the number at the gas station.’

  “Let’s say it takes fifteen minutes to drive from Ole’s to Albertson’s. If he’s setting a device at Ole’s, he drives to Albertson’s and let’s say he meets with McClure for fifteen minutes, not twenty. And then he’s got to drive back to be near Ole’s at eight-twenty-two at the gas station where he leaves the phone number.

  “So, if as the prosecution tells you that he sets the device shortly before eight and drives to Albertson’s in fifteen minutes, and stays there for fifteen minutes, and drives back to South Pasadena, there’s no way he’s getting back there at eight-twenty-two. Can’t do it. The only way it works is if he�
��s near McClure in Pasadena on the night of the World Series. It could be he’s in a bar having a drink, watching the game. He’s near Pasadena. But here’s the point: if he’s near McClure in Pasadena at seven-forty-five, he’s not setting any device at Ole’s at eight, or even at seven-forty-five.

  “And if you throw in there that the prosecution wants him also to have set a fire at Von’s, down the street from Ole’s, when’s he going to do both of those? Get to Pasadena? Get back? It’s not going to happen.”

  It was a very good alibi scenario that Ed Rucker had presented, and Cabral knew that he’d have to deal with it on rebuttal.

  From that, Ed Rucker went to the manuscript of Points of Origin, and probably infuriated his client more than anything that had ever been said by lawyers on either side. Rucker said: “Now, the manuscript John Orr wrote, what’s that do for us? One, it gives you an example of some real bad writing, I’ll tell you that. But does it allow you to draw a conclusion that John Orr set the Ole’s fire? The fact that something is fiction that’s based on fact is just that, fiction. Every police officer who writes novels, every firefighter who writes novels, writes about what they know. They write about real fire, real crimes, changing the facts as best they can.”

  He pointed out that the scene John Orr wrote wherein the doomed child wants an ice cream from Baskin-Robbins was logical and coincidental, because there was a Baskin-Robbins store there by Ole’s. And that it certainly didn’t mean that he’d overheard the child talking while he was in the store setting an incendiary device.

  Rucker discussed the witness who was the cop’s wife, who remembered the defendant seven years after the Ole’s fire when she’d seen his face on the news, and later testified that she’d seen him in the store on the night before the fire.