Ex-Fire Captain Convicted on 4 Murder Counts

A former arson investigator turned arsonist was convicted Friday of four counts of first-degree murder, making him liable for the death penalty, for setting a South Pasadena hardware store blaze that matched in chilling detail a fire he described in an unpublished novel.

John Leonard Orr, a former captain in the Glendale Fire Department, slumped forward as the verdicts were read in Los Angeles Superior Court. He was found guilty of two dozen felonies, including 20 counts stemming from a string of fires he set in Glendale and La Canada-Flintridge in 1990-91.

Those counts included the devastating firestorm that damaged or destroyed 67 homes in the College Hills section of Glendale in June 1990. The six-man, six-woman jury, which deliberated two weeks, acquitted him of one count--of setting a fire on the Warner Bros. Studios lot in Burbank that destroyed the set of the 1970s television show “The Waltons.”

The penalty phase of the trial begins Monday, with the prosecution asking the death penalty for Orr based on the deaths of four people, including a 2-year-old boy, when fire swept Ole’s Home Center in South Pasadena on Oct. 10, 1984.

Deputy Dist. Attys. Michael Cabral and Sandra Flannery would not comment on the verdicts, citing a gag order imposed at the start of the trial by Superior Court Judge Robert J. Perry. Before the trial began, however, they had said that in a penalty phase they would present evidence that Orr was involved in as many as 40 additional fires.

Orr had already been convicted in 1992 of federal arson charges stemming from a series of hardware store blazes in the San Joaquin Valley. The following year he pleaded guilty to three additional blazes, including a 1990 fire at a Builders Emporium in North Hollywood and two others near Atascadero in 1989. He was serving a 30-year federal prison sentence before his trial on state charges began.

During the five-week trial, prosecutors presented evidence that Orr had engaged in a distinctive pattern of criminal behavior--setting fires during daytime hours, in polyurethane foam materials in the back of occupied businesses, using a “signature” time-delay device made from a cigarette, matches, a rubber band and yellow legal paper.

Prosecutors introduced “Points of Origin,” a manuscript Orr wrote detailing the activities of a firefighter who is secretly an arsonist and “favors large brush fires but graduates to burning businesses.”

In the novel, the protagonist named Aaron uses a slow-burning incendiary device to set fire to a Pasadena hardware store called “Cal’s,” which kills several employees as well as a woman and her young grandson.

The real life Ole’s fire in South Pasadena killed store employees Carolyn Kraus, 26, and Jimmy Cetina, 17, and customer Ada Deal, 50, and her 2-year-old grandson, Matthew Troidl.

“The investigating agency termed the fire arson, but no correlation was made to the Cal’s fire,” Orr wrote in “Points of Origin.” Aaron, Orr continued, “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.”

Pitching his work in a 1991 letter to the L. Harry Lee Literary Agency, Orr called it a “fact-based” story 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.”

Defense attorneys Edward Rucker and Peter Giannini countered there was no physical evidence linking their client to the charged fires. They dismissed the manuscript as “pure fiction,” comparing it to the 1991 movie “Backdraft,” which also was written by a firefighter.

The defense case was built around testimony by four arson investigators--from the county Fire Department and the Sheriff’s Department--that the Ole’s blaze was caused by faulty wiring in the ceiling. The defense team also cited a wrongful death case in which the families of the Ole’s fire victims collected millions of dollars after the jury determined the blaze was an electrical fire.

Orr became a suspect after federal investigators found his fingerprint on burned yellow legal paper at the scene of a San Joaquin Valley fire. They began tracking his movements to several fire scenes, and when he was arrested at his Eagle Rock home, authorities recovered a briefcase containing cigarettes, rubber bands, matches, rocks, paper bags, incense sticks and cigarette lighters.

In their investigation, the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office and local fire agencies pored over records of more than 1,100 fires, according to Cabral.

The trial’s most dramatic moment came when Cabral read a chapter of “Points of Origin” detailing the final moments of the hardware store victims:

“The last thing she heard was a tremendous roar as the fire burned through the roof and vented to the outside,” Cabral read. “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 . . . “

In pleading guilty to the federal charges, Cabral said, Orr had in effect “said under oath, ‘I did the crime that is described in my book and it was done in a strikingly similar fashion to what I described in my book.’ ”