Glendale Arson Investigator Gets 30 Years for Setting Fires

A former Glendale arson investigator was sentenced to 30 years in federal prison on Monday in Fresno for setting fires that were nearly identical to ones he described in an unpublished novel.

U.S. District Judge Oliver Wanger described John Leonard Orr, 43, as “a danger to the community” in handing down the maximum sentence on three counts of arson.

Orr, then a captain with the Glendale Fire Department, originally was charged with setting five fires while in the San Joaquin Valley for an arson investigators’ conference in January, 1987.

A jury acquitted him of setting two fires in Fresno but found him guilty of fires prosecutors claimed he set while returning home to Glendale. The judge ordered Orr to make $225,971 restitution for those three fires, primarily to a Hancock Fabrics outlet in Bakersfield.

The most unusual trial evidence was a novel that Orr, 43, wrote in 1990 about an arson investigator attending a conference who set fires in Fresno, Bakersfield and Tulare.

One fictional fire in his book, “Point of Origin,” was in a Kmart shopping center; so was one of the real fires. Two fabric stores set on fire in the book belonged to the same chain; so did two stores involved in real fires. And the incendiary devices were similar.

But the most important prosecution evidence was a fingerprint found on a piece of yellow lined paper that was part of a device used to start a fire at Craft Mart in Bakersfield. A test showed that the fingerprint was of Orr’s left ring finger, according to prosecution testimony.

Besides the Craft Mart and Hancock Fabrics fires in Bakersfield, Orr was convicted of setting a small fire at Family Bargain Center in Tulare. He was cleared of a House of Fabrics fire in Fresno and one that destroyed Fresno’s Hancock Fabrics store, causing a $1-million loss.

All of the fires were in foam products such as pillows stacked in bins, except for one in dry flowers at Craft Mart.

Orr still faces a trial in Southern California on a separate federal indictment that accuses him of setting fires here during another arson investigators’ convention.