Manuscript Adds Fuel to the Fire in Murder Case

The manuscript reads like pulp fiction or a psychological thriller.

For nearly a decade, a serial arsonist sets brush fires and torches businesses across California. Authorities believe the culprit is a firefighter but can’t pin an individual to the crimes. In the midst of the spree, the elusive arsonist sets a Pasadena hardware store ablaze. People perish in 800-degree flames, including a woman and her young grandson.

This week, seven years after scripting this elaborate tale, nationally recognized arson expert and former Glendale Fire Capt. 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 his work of supposed fiction.

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

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 in the killings, which bear a striking resemblance to Chapter 6 of his novel, “Points of Origin,” Orr could be sentenced to death.

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 1990-91.

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

The trial--delayed 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 Orr was arrested. Deputy Dist. Atty. Michael Cabral said last week that the unsold novel will be only a small part of the prosecution’s evidence, which will include 40 videotapes and 70 audiotapes 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 also ruled the state can use evidence and witnesses presented by federal prosecutors in two previous trials.

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 an 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 prosecution’s effort to introduce evidence from the federal trial into the state case, court documents show.

“No combination of the proffered uncharged fires establishes any kind of unusual pattern,” Giannini argued.

He also disputed the contention of federal prosecutors that Orr used a device to set off fires, a simple time-delay fuse made from a rubber band, cigarette and matches.

Giannini declined to discuss specific incidents or elaborate on his client’s federal arson pleas and 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, 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 puts 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 two characters, 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 a firefighter.”

It is those words and others that prosecutors contend were the product of more than just an active imagination. Collectively, the manuscript and the letter “tends to prove Orr’s identification as the arsonist” as well as clarifying a motive, prosecutors said.

Prosecutors also argued the pattern of arson fires described in the novel “bears striking similarities to the pattern of charged and uncharged fires alleged in this case. These similarities reflect knowledge beyond that which Orr could have reasonably obtained as an arson investigator.”

Evidence will be admitted in the state trial from 13 other blazes. If Orr is convicted and the trial goes into a penalty phase, Cabral said, as many as 40 more fires will be considered.

Orr was arrested in December 1991 after federal investigators, suspecting his link to fires, began to track his movements. A task force of federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms agents and local law enforcement officers noted that fires had started near the sites of conferences Orr had attended.

“This guy was sought after for conferences and arson training across the country,” said an official familiar with the investigation who asked not to be named. “His presentations were educational and he was knowledgeable. Perhaps too knowledgeable.”

Evidence shows he volunteered to assist in the investigation of those fires, the official said.

In 1992, Orr was convicted on three federal counts of arson for setting a series of hardware store blazes in the San Joaquin Valley about the time of a state arson investigators convention in Fresno. The following year he pleaded guilty to setting fires at a Builders Emporium in North Hollywood in 1990 and a hardware store and home improvement center 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, Cabral said.

By the time of his arrest, Orr had 21 years’ experience as a firefighter in Glendale and elsewhere. He commanded an eight-man 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 said 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, said 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.

Orr’s description of his central character fits into the thrill-seeking category, Williams said. “It’s the fire setters who return to the scene, often make videotapes of their work, frequently collect souvenirs and are drawn to the fire service.

“Perhaps most importantly, it’s a game [for them] in which they are proving that they are smarter than the investigator,” she said.

In his manuscript, Orr wrote: “The investigating agency termed the fire arson, but no correlation was made to the Cal’s fire. Aaron wanted the Cal’s fire to be called arson. He loved the inadvertent attention he derived from the newspaper coverage and hated it when he wasn’t properly ‘recognized.’ ”

That describes a typical thrill-seeking arsonist, Williams said. “They want acknowledgment of how clever they were. They truly feel smarter than everyone else. They don’t think they are going to get caught.”

If an investigator volunteered to investigate his own fires, she said, “that’s the arrogance of it.”