Fire Lover (2002)

by Wambaugh, Joseph

  And one more time the balkanization of American law enforcement was demonstrated. Palmer had never been told by anybody from the other agencies about the potato-chip file, not by anyone, including the defendant. Nobody had talked about market fires as possibly being diversionary arsons. Nor was Palmer ever told anything about the prior polyfoam fires, nor that Builder's Emporium in North Hollywood had experienced such a fire. Everyone kept everything to himself. And nobody had seemed willing to dispute the Lean Green Machine.

  When the witness left the stand, observers would have to say that he hadn't significantly helped either side. The case was not going to be decided by Sergeant Jack Palmer's testimony. He had refused to fall on his sword for the D. A. In fact, all he'd been willing to accept was a paper cut.

  The next witness, Marc Lewis, a former lumber salesman for Ole's, testified to the stunning speed and agility of the fire, leaping across display racks.

  Then the lucky young man said, "As I was leaving, I heard the fire door starting to go down. I saw a guy come out this other door, and then flames came flying out after him!"

  On cross-examination, Ed Rucker worked at finding out from where the fire had emanated, and the witness said he'd seen it coming from a rack of welcome mats, both woven and plastic, not from the polyfoam racks, possibly indicating a secondary fire.

  Then Mike Cabral called one of his task-force members, Rich Edwards, who testified that he'd been with LASD for twenty-six years, but when the Ole's fire had occurred, he was a new kid on the block as far as arson investigation was concerned.

  He said that he was the only investigator who'd been present on the scene in 1984 and had also had the opportunity to examine all of the later task-force information.

  "And based on all of this information," Cabral asked, "do you have an opinion as to the cause and origin of this fire?"

  "The fire was incendiary, or arson," Edwards said. "And the fire started in highly combustible merchandise that was stored adjacent to the southeast corner of the aisles."

  When Ed Rucker got the witness, he made sure that the jury understood that Edwards's opinion was based on information he'd gathered since the task force was formed in 1992, eight years after the Ole's fire. But Edwards was the first sheriff's department investigator to testify that he'd heard Investigator Jim Allen complaining that he wasn't being given enough time at Ole's to conduct his investigation.

  Edwards gave an astonishing statistic: since the task force was formed, they'd secured reports on twenty thousand fires to see if they fit the M. O. And moments later, much to the surprise of everyone, Cabral rested his Ole's case insofar as prosecution witnesses being called to testify.

  Eleven days after the start of trial, Sandra Flannery took over her part of the prosecution of John Orr, and began calling witnesses to the College Hills fire. Her first witness was a retired U. S. Air Force major.

  She asked, "On June twenty-seventh, 1990, did you have an occasion to drive into the city of Glendale?"

  The witness testified that he was driving on Verdugo Road near Glendale College at about 3:30 p. M. when he saw that the hillside was in flames. He'd decided to stop his car to alert people in a nearby apartment building that they were in danger. When he'd slowed to stop he'd seen a man outside the building talking to a woman.

  In response to the prosecutor, the witness said he'd seen a pickup truck parked nearby, and that after the man stopped talking to the tenant, "He stopped and looked, and he just momentarily stared at me with a kind of a shocked look."

  The witness then had decided that the tenants had been alerted by the man, so he'd driven to the nearest gas station to make a 911 call.

  Sandra Flannery asked, "At some later date, did you have an occasion to see any photographs of that man you saw?"

  "One evening on the news there was a flash of an individual who was supposedly involved in an arson case, and all of a sudden I just told my wife, I said, 'That was him. The gentleman we saw at the Glendale fire.' "

  Flannery asked, "What was it that caused you to recognize the man in the photograph as the man you saw on the landing by the fire?"

  The witness answered, "When I see something that is very unusual and it happens to go in my memory bank, I don't realize it. Later on when I recognize something, it just pops out. It ties back and I say, that's him."

  The witness testified that at the grand jury he'd been shown a photo six-pak, and chose the photo of John Orr. But of course, that was after the face had been fixed by TV coverage. Then he identified the defendant seated in court, allowing for the fact that the defendant had aged and gained weight.

  "I am a retired air force pilot," the witness explained. "And in the training of air force pilots you make momentary or split-second memories of items that you see. And that was carried throughout my air force career. At times I would be behind the Iron Curtain, and I would be required to identify an individual or look at an individual. And then when I would be returning, I would have to identify who they were or try to tie them back to some kind of a photograph."

  When the witness was handed over, Peter Giannini asked several questions to establish where the witness had been in relation to the fire and the apartment building, and more important, that he'd seen no other cars on the street except for the pickup truck. It was helpful to the defense because John Orr drove a white Chevrolet Blazer.

  When Giannini got to questions about the witness's extraordinary memory, the witness said, "I was both qualified in photographic intelligence, and learned how to recognize various things in hundredths of a second. I should tell you I have a photographic mind, so something that is important automatically clicks."

  Glendale fire captain Greg Jones took the stand and testified that he'd seen the defendant uphill from them when they'd arrived, and he'd found it "a bit strange" because he couldn't understand how John Orr had got his car there without passing the fire engine, implying that he must have been at the area of origin before anyone else had arrived.

  The witness told how he'd asked the defendant to take a hose to a house that was threatened, but that John Orr "was agitated and didn't seem in control of what he was doing." He related how the defendant had just tossed "a salvage cover" over a couch and left the scene, while firefighters were fighting a blaze that was threatening the house itself.

  Moses Gomez, of the state Fire Marshal's Office, told of his peculiar and aimless drive around the fire scene that night with the defendant in his white Blazer, and of John Orr showing him a cigarette-lighter incendiary device that he'd stored in a vial. He described a strange press conference where the defendant told the media everything about the device, thereby destroying its confidential value to investigators if an actual suspect was found.

  Giannini's cross-examination sought to show that John Orr's behavior during the press conference when he'd told about the incendiary device was not detrimental to a later investigation, and that he'd been asked by his boss to make a statement to the press.

  The witness testified that two months after the fire, at a round-table meeting of arson investigators, John Orr had informed the group that he was no longer sure of the cause of the College Hills fire because subsequently he'd found additional disposable lighters in the area.

  The questioning intensified after the witness expressed an opinion that the College Hills fire was incendiary in nature.

  Giannini said, "I'm confused. Are you calling this an arson now?"

  "If I'm allowed to explain," the witness said.

  "Well, no. Just answer my question. Are you calling it an arson?"

  "Yes, I am."

  "So that's different than what you said before?"

  "Yes."

  "You're changing your opinion as you're sitting here talking?"

  "I'm changing my opinion based on the questions that are posed to me to explain how I did things on that particular afternoon."

  "Well, let me ask you, did you eliminate all possible accidental causes?"

  "Base
d upon where I was, no."

  "It might have been an accidental fire, isn't that right?"

  "That's correct."

  "So how can you call it an arson?"

  The witness tried to say that his opinion on this day in court was based on information he'd later received that he thought was credible.

  The judge interjected, "And in your brief reviewing of the scene, you didn't see anything to contradict that. Is that what you're saying?"

  "That's correct," the witness said, probably grateful that the judge was testifying for him.

  "All right," Judge Perry said. "Because you didn't investigate as thoroughly as you would've had it been your responsibility to do the investigation?"

  "That's correct, Your Honor," the witness said.

  "I think we've covered it," said Judge Perry.

  John Orr reported later that he saw the judge as a witness for the prosecution.

  One of John Orr's associates was his former partner Don Yeager, who had retired after twenty-seven years with the Glendale Fire Department. When Yeager was called to the stand he testified that when he'd arrived the day after the fire he'd found his partner at the command post appearing "tired and haggard."

  Yeager recalled that when he'd suggested canvassing the neighborhood for possible-suspect leads, the defendant had told him that he'd turned that job over to the police department, which Yeager had found very strange. And after Yeager had taken it upon himself to do some canvassing, he'd learned that the police had not done anything, the suggestion being that John Orr had just stonewalled the whole thing.

  All of the testimony was directed toward the hypothesis that the defendant had done almost nothing to investigate the greatest fire disaster that his city had ever experienced, and didn't seem to want his partner working on it either.

  When Giannini took the witness, his questions were designed to show that John Orr's duties might have been extensive, if not apparent to Yeager.

  Suddenly, the judge interrupted Giannini, but this time his questions helped the defense elicit the testimony it needed.

  "Let's try to get through this," the judge said. "Mr. Giannini was talking about Mr. Orr getting statistics together, information on how the homes burned, basically trying to defend the fire department or at least putting information together that the fire department could use in talking to the public. The point is, he was involved with statistics he was gathering in relation to the College Hills fire?"

  "Oh, yes, absolutely," the witness agreed.

  "You wanted more investigative effort put in the investigation on the cause of the fire?"

  "Yes, yes," the witness agreed.

  "And you became frustrated and you went to the supervisor, is that correct?"

  "Yes."

  "All right," said the judge, "but you're not saying that Mr. Orr was not working on College Hills?"

  "No, absolutely not," Yeager said.

  Giannini said, "Thank you, Your Honor, I couldn't have done it better."

  Judge Perry seemed to feel, along with many observers, that the lawyers and witnesses were in desperate need of a good editor. Regardless, the defendant still saw him as Judge Roy Bean, with a law book in one hand and a rope in the other.

  Then came the reference to something that had been mentioned in opening argument, a "DR number." It was the number assigned to a crime, by which the reports could be tracked for all time. The prosecution wished to show that in such a major disaster, one that the defendant had initially called an arson, there had never been a crime number requested or assigned, as one would do with something as ordinary as juveniles setting a trash can on fire.

  At this point, late on a Friday afternoon, the judge seemed frustrated with the lawyers on both sides for not having asked fundamental questions in a straightforward manner.

  Judge Perry said, "I will just ask it. Would you have expected a DR number to have been pulled for the College Hills fire?"

  The witness replied, "Absolutely."

  "All right, let's wrap it up," said Judge Perry.

  And then he wished everyone a pleasant weekend, reminding them to allow plenty of time for their Monday morning commute. And everyone got out of there and careened into the nightmare of Friday afternoon traffic in Los Angeles, where frustrated people routinely stare at one another through tinted glass and contemplate acts of violence.

  On Monday of the trial's third week, John Orr's immediate boss, Assistant Fire Chief Christopher Gray, was called to explain how, because of the media blitz and public criticism, all personnel of the Glendale Fire Department had been ordered by the fire chief to account for their activities on the day of the fire. In describing his activities on that day, the defendant had written, "I was performing a reinspection at the end of Whiting Woods Road when the first alarm was called. I drove to the area and arrived as the final first-alarm units were arriving."

  When asked by Flannery, Chief Gray said that Whiting Woods Road was about two miles from the College Hills fire, and that a subsequent search for documentation of John Orr's reinspection activities was negative. In fact, he could not find documentation of a first inspection prior to the alleged reinspection.

  A fascinating question and answer had to do with the fact that after the College Hills disaster, the budget cuts that the fire department had been facing were never implemented.

  On cross-examination, Giannini had Gray explain the media madhouse that had surrounded the command post that day. The chief estimated that there were about sixty people milling around with cameras, boom mikes, and tape machines. As to whether he'd instructed John Orr to speak to the media, Chief Gray couldn't say, but agreed that it could've happened.

  The chief testified that it wasn't until a year after the fire that he'd learned from a story in the Glendale News-Press that his arson sleuth had changed his mind about the disposable lighter as having been the open-flame incendiary device that had started the massive fire, deciding instead that it may've been started by a time-delayed incendiary device.

  The next person called by the prosecution was Constance Schipper, who'd been manager of the paint and plumbing department of Builder's Emporium in North Hollywood. She testified that on the afternoon of December 14, 1990, six months after the College Hills fire and one year before the arrest of John Orr, she'd become aware of a small fire in a shopping cart full of throw pillows.

  The employees extinguished the fire, and in the white residue on the floor she'd noticed a small object that turned out to be a cigarette butt and paper matches wrapped by a rubber band. She also testified that eighteen months after that, she'd been shown a photo spread and had recognized photo number five as having been a person who frequented the store.

  Giannini asked some perfunctory questions, and the judge informed the jury that this was one of those "uncharged acts" they'd been told about at the start of trial. They were to learn later that this one resulted in a guilty plea.

  A Tulare police officer was called and talked about the fire at the Family Bargain Center on January 16, 1987, and that an identical incendiary device had been found, including a piece of unburned notebook paper.

  The judge said to the jury, "Let me remind you, 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 modus operandi."

  So all of the nonlawyers were supposed to believe that because the defendant had pled guilty to the Builder's Emporium arson, it would not necessarily mean that he had a disposition to set incendiary devices in retail stores. Nor should the jury think of him as a man of bad character. The Fire Monster might've keeled over laughing at that one.

  And then the witness was called whom many had dubbed "the ball game" as far as the prosecution of John Orr was concerned: Marvin G. Casey of Bakersfield. The fifty-seven-year-old retired firefighter testified to his twenty-eight years of service with
the Bakersfield Fire Department, and his current business experience as a fire investigator, and then he told about the CraftMart arson and of finding the incendiary device including the yellow note paper.

  One couldn't help but be reminded that had Casey received proper fingerprint analysis, John Orr would have been arrested and convicted in 1989. There would not have been a College Hills disaster, or an L. A. fire series, or a novel. And the Ole's fire would've remained an "accident." Many task-force members believed that nobody regretted the fingerprint screw-up more than did the defendant, John Leonard Orr, who doubtlessly would have been paroled in 2002.

  On Tuesday, May 19, Steven Harvey Patterson was back in the John Orr case, having enjoyed his first month of retirement from the Burbank Fire Department, and respite from his obsession with the murder of Mary Susan Duggan. Patterson told the jury about the events surrounding the Warner Brothers Studios fire. And the jury heard of all the curious business about Patterson standing out there with a flashlight, and after a while calling John Orr again only to learn that he was already at the Waltons set and hadn't needed directions at all.

  By far, the most damaging prosecution witness in the Warner Brothers case was John Egger, the studio's director of security, who testified that he had been there while the fire was raging, when only the Warner Brothers fire engine was at the scene.

  "As the fire was burning, did anyone approach and identify himself to you as an investigator?" the prosecutor asked.

  The witness said that a man had walked through the gate and that the man was John Orr, adding, "I didn't know him personally, but I'd been introduced to him and seen him at a few law-enforcement events."

  Peter Giannini did not confront the witness. He asked a few questions about the gate having been open, and ascertained that a security guard had been there, and that was it. If the witness was correct, John Orr had been at the scene twenty to thirty minutes after the fire call had been placed, and three hours before he'd met with Patterson and needed directions.

  Witnesses were called from the "uncharged" fires in Bakersfield, Lawndale, and Redondo Beach who'd identified John Orr as having been a customer in their stores.