Fire Lover (2002)

by Wambaugh, Joseph

  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 weeks 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 fire-house, 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 fire-house 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 knowT, 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 approache
d 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 OP 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, 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.

  This agreement is not contingent in any way upon the outcome of any investigation, proceeding or subsequent trial.

  It would be extremely difficult to keep the Fire Monster out of the courtroom while John Orr's attorney was fighting for his client's life.

  By 1998, the high-power tank was loaded with crazies, and walking on the tier was dangerous. John could not believe that his guilty plea to the Builder's Emporium arson attempt in North Hollywood would be used by the district attorney to prove that an identical fire in an identical store, Ole's Home Center, had indeed been set by the defendant.

  John claimed that the legalese in his plea agreement had confused him, but that he'd been verbally assured by Giannini that it could never be used against him in the unlikely event of a future state prosecution. His attorney said, not true, that the plea agreement spoke for itself and that his client had assured him that he'd had nothing to do with any of the crimes that the state had been investigating, especially the Ole's fire.

  John's fourth ex-wife, Wanda, had been put into near bankruptcy. All of his legal fees totaled $110,000, and she'd come very close to losing her home. The only one of John's women who had stayed in his life was his last girlfriend, Chris. She ran documents back and forth from Giannini's office to the county jail.

  The defense had taken so long preparing its case that John Orr was numbed past suicidal thoughts. He alleged that Giannini would not return his phone calls and had thus become another of the lawyers that he hated. The only attorney left that he liked was Ed Rucker, but he claimed that he had not seen Rucker face-to-face for over a year.

  And at last, at long last, the court would not tolerate any more delay. The trial of John Orr was set for May 1998, and there would be no further continuances granted.

  In April of that year, Steve Patterson retired from the Burbank Fire Department after twenty-nine years of service. And it seemed that Mary Susan Duggan had nobody left to seek justice for her. It appeared that she had lost her champion forever.

  Chapter 16

  THE FIRE MONSTER

  On Wednesday, May 6, 1998, in Department 104 of the Superior Court of the State of California for the County of Los Angeles, Judge Robert J. Perry had a question for the prosecution and defense teams standing at the bench.

  He said, "We have a request from the L. A. Times for a still-camera photographer to be present in the back of the courtroom. He'll be shooting pictures of the attorneys during opening statements. Anybody have any objection to that?"

  Deputy District Attorney Michael Cabral, speaking for himself and his assistant, Deputy District Attorney Sandra Flannery, said, "The people don't."

  Edward Rucker, who stood a foot taller than the other lawyers present, with a crop of gray hair that made him look even taller, said, "I would object to it. I don't see where publicity really advances what we're doing here."

  Peter Giannini said, "I think it's distracting for opening statements."

  The judge said, "You've persuaded me. I'm going to deny the request."

  Thus began the murder trial of John Leonard Orr, with defense counsel demonstrating that they were not grandstanders and were fully aware that they were fighting for their client's life.

  The sinewy jurist, a devoted jogger, read, through gold-rimmed glasses, the jury instructions that John Orr would never forget. He talked about reasonable doubt and the presumption of evidence. The part of his reading that produced fear in the defendant was when he said, "Evidence will be produced for the purpose of showing that the defendant committed crimes other than those for which he is on trial. This evidence, if believed, may not be considered by you to prove that the defendant is a person of bad character or that he has a disposition to commit crimes.

  "It may be considered by you only for the limited purpose of determining if it tends to show a characteristic, method, plan, or scheme in the commission of the criminal acts, similar to the method, plan, or scheme used in the commission of the offenses in this case.

  "Now, if there is evidence that the defendant set a different fire-not one charged in the twenty-five counts, but other fires which are not charged in the indictment-you can't say, well, he set those other fires, therefore he must have set the fires charged in the indictment.

  "Evidence of the uncharged fires may be considered only if there is a uniqueness in the characteristics of the uncharged fires which helps identify the person who set the charged fires, if indeed a charged fire was set and not caused by an electrical short or some other accidental condition. We will be talking about these issues during the trial. If you are a little confused, don't worry about it. I am sure the attorneys will straighten you out."

  Sometimes on downtown jury panels you were looking at people you wouldn't dare make eye contact with if you were out on the street. And you only did it in the courtroom because there was an armed bailiff standing by. But none of these jurors looked like they might have a gun in their glove box. In fact, one of them was a lawyer who'd once worked for the City Attorney's Office as a prosecutor. And there was also a retired deputy sheriff on the jury. The defense apparently believed that these two potential enemies would go out of their way to be fair, and could explain complicated legal issues. John Orr didn't agree.

  Except for the lawyer and the cop, the jury was an ethnic mixed bag of working folks, as one might expect to find on a downtown Los Angeles jury. And after hearing all that stuff about uncharged crimes, they probably thought: Confusing, Judge? Not at all.

  If you're a fish, a strange fish.

  Most who saw John Orr at this trial, at this tim
e of his life, were looking at a man who'd aged. Three and a half years in a county jail cage does that to a person, any person who's had virtually no exercise or recreation. The defendant had lost the vigor that had been there at the Fresno trial. And now, wearing a mustache but not the beard that made him look professorial, he looked pale and soft and seedy.

  The prosecution's opening statement was given by Sandra Flannery, a slender, articulate prosecutor with shoulder-length auburn hair. She was Cabral's age but had limited trial experience.

  "A devastating fire was set on the evening of October tenth, 1984," she said. "It stole the lives of twenty-eight-year-old Carolyn Krause, seventeen-year-old Jimmy Cetina, fifty-year-old Ada Deal, and her two-year-old grandson, Matthew Troidl."

  She went on to describe Ole's Home Center and the community of South Pasadena, with its one fire station only two blocks from Ole's, stressing how quickly the fire department had arrived. She described how Captain Eisele, needing help desperately, learned that another engine company from Alhambra was being sent to a different fire several blocks away at a Von's Market, a diversionary fire. And she said that yet another diversionary fire had been set at an Albertson's Market in Pasadena.

  Sandra Flannery told the jury that 125 firefighters were needed to extinguish the Ole's blaze, too late for the victims trapped inside, and that ten minutes after the first engine had arrived, Glendale arson investigator John Orr was standing by the fire truck with a thirty-five-millimeter camera around his neck, asking for permission to shoot photos.

  The jury was told that within twenty-four hours after the fire, the defendant had told Karen Krause Berry, sister-in-law of one of the victims, that the fire was an arson, and he later told her it had been started by an incendiary device placed within polyfoam products.

  Sandra Flannery said she would present evidence of another uncharged act, the arson attempt at the CraftMart store in Bakersfield, where a fingerprint had been recovered. And that the prosecution would present evidence that a time-delay incendiary device had been used to set fires in Atascadero, as well as at Builder's Emporium in North Hollywood. And that the defendant had admitted to placing an incendiary device at each of those locations.