A LOOK AHEAD * Already imprisoned on federal charges, a former Glendale fire captain faces more counts as . . . Trial Is Set to Open in Store Blaze That Killed 4

The manuscript reads like pulp fiction or perhaps a psychological thriller.

For nearly a decade, a serial arsonist ignites brush fires and torches businesses across California.

Authorities believe the culprit is a firefighter but can’t pin him to the crimes. And during his spree, the elusive firebug sets a Pasadena hardware store ablaze, killing five people who perished in 800-degree flames, including a woman and her 3-year-old grandson.

This week, seven years after scripting this elaborate tale, former Glendale fire captain and nationally recognized arson expert John Leonard Orr, 49, is scheduled to go on trial in a downtown Los Angeles Superior Court, accused of virtually the same crimes he detailed in the work of supposed fiction.

Orr, in custody since 1991 and serving 30 years in federal prison, has pleaded not guilty to more than two dozen state charges of arson and murder.

The four first-degree murder counts stem from a 1984 blaze at Ole’s Home Center on Fair Oaks Avenue in South Pasadena that killed 50-year-old Ada Deal, her grandson Matthew Troidl, 2, and two employees, Carolyn Kraus, 26, and Jimmy Cetina, 17.

If convicted of the slayings, which bear a striking resemblance to the sixth chapter of his novel “Points of Origin,” Orr could be sentenced to death, which is why prosecutors are trying him in state court.

Orr, a 17-year veteran of the Glendale Fire Department, also faces 21 counts of arson in connection with fires in Burbank, Glendale and La Canada Flintridge in 1990 and ’91.

Included in those charges are a blaze that erupted on the back lot of Warner Bros. Studios in Burbank on Nov. 22, 1991, that destroyed the set of the long-running 1970s television series “The Waltons.” The other was a fast-moving brush fire June 27, 1990, that destroyed 67 homes in the College Hills area of Glendale.

The trial--which was delayed for seven years by the federal trial, pretrial actions and civil suits by the families of fire victims--is expected to last three months.

The 350-page manuscript for Orr’s novel was seized by federal investigators when he was arrested. Deputy Dist. Atty. Michael Cabral said last week that the unsold novel will be only a small part of prosecution evidence that will include video and audio tapes made at dozens of fires, communications with law enforcement authorities, queries to literary agents and testimony from more than 100 witnesses.

Over vigorous defense objections, Superior Court Judge Robert J. Perry has also ruled that prosecutors can present evidence and witnesses employed by federal prosecutors to convict Orr of setting a different batch of fires.

Defense attorney Peter Giannini attacked the state’s case by asserting in court documents that there was no direct evidence to connect his client to the deadly South Pasadena fire.

“They have taken isolated actions by a man who had a distinguished career as an arson investigator and twisted them in attempt to make them look like he started the Ole’s fire,” Giannini said last week. “There’s no physical evidence and no eyewitness evidence to put Orr at the scene of [the] Ole’s [fire] until he was supposed to be there as an investigator for the regional arson strike force team.”

Giannini fought the prosecutor’s efforts to introduce evidence from federal court into the state case, court documents show.

Arguing that “no combination of the proffered uncharged fires establishes any kind of unusual pattern,” Giannini also disputed the contention of federal prosecutors that Orr used a signature device to set off fires, a simple time-delay fuse made up of a rubber band, a cigarette and matches.

Giannini declined to discuss specific incidents or to elaborate on his client’s federal convictions and their role in the state trial.

But it appeared from pretrial discovery motions that some of the most damaging evidence will come from Orr’s own words.

In the manuscript of his novel, Orr details the activities of a serial arsonist named Aaron, who “favors large brush fires but graduates to burning businesses.”

The manuscript describes a fire set at a Pasadena hardware store called Cal’s in which Aaron places a slow-burning incendiary device--made from a cigarette and a rubber band--into polyurethane foam cushions, setting off a fire that traps several employees and characters called Madeline Paulson and her 3-year-old grandson Matthew.

“The last thing she heard was a tremendous roar as the fire burned through the roof and vented to the outside,” reads a passage from the text. “The smoke momentarily lifted but was then replaced by solid fire as the entire contents of the annex exploded into flames. Their last breaths were of 800-degree heat that seared their throats closed . . . “

Pitching his novel in a 1991 letter to the L. Harry Lee Literary Agency, Orr called it “a fact-based work that follows the pattern of an actual arsonist that has been setting serial fires in California over the past eight years. He has not been identified or apprehended, and probably will not be in the near future.”

“As in the real case,” he continues, “the arsonist in my novel is firefighter.”

Orr was arrested in December, 1991 after federal investigators suspected his link to the fires and began tracking his movements. A task force made up of agents from the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms and local law enforcement noted that fires broke out near the sites of conferences Orr attended.

In 1992, Orr was convicted on three federal counts of arson for setting a series of hardware store blazes in the San Joaquin Valley around the time of a state arson investigators convention in Fresno. The following year he pleaded guilty to setting three additional blazes, including a 1990 fire at a Builders Emporium in North Hollywood and two others near Atascadero in 1989.

Since then, the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office, with help from local firefighting agencies, reviewed records of more than 1,100 fires, according to Cabral.

By the time of his arrest, Orr had 21 years of experience as a firefighter, in Glendale and elsewhere. He commanded an eight-member arson/explosives investigation unit and claimed to have personally trained more than 1,200 firefighters and investigators.

In one of his letters to a literary agent, Orr contended that an arsonist “not only stays close by, but sometimes even participates in the discovery and extinguishment of ‘their’ fire.”

That’s a good description of one particular type of arsonist, according to Dian Williams, an arson profiler and president of the nonprofit Center for Arson Research Inc. in Lafayette Hill, Pa.

“There are multiple reasons for setting fires and there are seven recognizable subtypes, including delinquents, revenge setters and fire bombers, accidental or curiosity seekers, deliberate fire setters, fraud arsonists, psychotics and thrill seekers,” Williams said.