Ex-Fire Captain Charged in 4 Deaths in 1984 Store Blaze : Arson: Once acclaimed investigator, now serving a 30-year sentence for setting six fires, could face death penalty if convicted of South Pasadena crime.

A former Glendale fire captain serving a 30-year prison term for setting six fires was charged Monday with murdering four people who perished in a 1984 hardware store blaze he allegedly started in South Pasadena.

John Orr, who was once nationally acclaimed for his investigative work, was also charged with 22 additional counts of arson for allegedly setting fires in 1990 and 1991, including one that destroyed 67 homes in the College Hills area of Glendale.

Because prosecutors attached a special circumstances provision to the murder charges, Orr could face the death penalty for the fire at the former Ole’s Home Center on Fair Oaks Avenue, whose victims included a 2-year-old boy shopping with his grandmother.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Michael J. Cabral, who filed the new charges Monday in Los Angeles Municipal Court, said some investigators have suspected for years that it was Orr, now 45, who ignited the deadly blaze.

The fire began in a section displaying foam rubber and moved through the vast hardware store so quickly it trapped employees Carolyn Kraus, 26, and Jimmy Cetina, 17, as well as patron Ada Deal, 50, and her grandson, Matthew Troidl.

But sheriff’s detectives were unable to eliminate all possible accidental causes, and at the time Orr was a highly respected fire investigator who seemed immune from suspicion, Cabral said.

It was not until his arrest almost three years ago for setting several fires around Los Angeles and Fresno that local investigators took a fresh look at the Ole’s blaze, Cabral said, particularly after the disclosure of an unpublished novel in which Orr chronicled the life of a firefighter who was really a firebug.

The bizarre manuscript, which federal prosecutors said provided them with a road map to his 1992 conviction, offers “a very detailed analysis” of a hardware store fire that bears striking similarities to the one at Ole’s, Cabral said.

“It even went into very detailed information” about what people were thinking inside the store as the flames spread, the prosecutor added.

The new investigation also led back to an eyewitness--a firefighter responding to the scene--who saw Orr standing outside the store taking photos, Cabral said. Again, Cabral said, Orr’s reputation as an aggressive investigator shielded him from questioning about what he was doing there.

Peter Giannini of Century City, an attorney for Orr, said Monday he did not know of any new information stemming from the 1984 blaze other than the fact that Orr had been convicted of setting unrelated fires.

“I thought they had terminated this particular investigation,” Giannini said, adding that he thought the cause had been deemed accidental.

But Cabral said that the fatal fire’s origin had remained undetermined, and that it now appears to fit the same pattern as those for which Orr has been convicted.

All occurred in stores open for business that sold hardware or housewares, including highly flammable fabrics and foam, Cabral said.

Orr was convicted in U.S. District Court in Fresno of setting fire to the Family Bargain Center in Tulare and the CraftMart and Hancock Fabrics stores in Bakersfield on Jan. 16, 1987, while he attended an arson investigators conference in the area.

Last year, he pleaded guilty to three additional counts of arson--one for a 1990 fire at a Builder’s Emporium in North Hollywood and two more along Pacific Coast Highway in the Atascadero area. The latter he set while returning from a 1989 conference of arson investigators.

The new arson charges stem from a June 27, 1990, fire in the College Hills area of Glendale that destroyed 67 homes; an Oct. 2, 1991, house fire on Kennington Drive in Glendale; a Nov. 22, 1991, fire at Warner Studios that engulfed the set for the “Waltons” television series; and three brush fires on Nov. 23, 1991, in Glendale and the La Canada Flintridge foothills.

No arraignment date has been set for Orr, who is in custody at Terminal Island Federal Prison and has to be transferred to Los Angeles County Jail. Because of the murder charges, he will be held without bail.

For years, Orr had an uncanny knack for finding incendiary devices where his colleagues had failed, and after his arrest he became a suspect in dozens of Southern California fires--some of which he investigated.

But it was his unpublished novel “Points of Origin” that provided the most sensational evidence against Orr, who had touted the work to agents and publishers as “fact-based.”

“He felt fright but it excited him,” Orr wrote of a fictional firefighter who attends an arson investigators conference in Fresno and sets fire to a fabric store there.

“His fires gave him the much-needed attention he craved,” the fictional work continued, “providing him with feelings of importance and recognition.”