Burning Obsession

Capt. John Orr of the Glendale Fire Department was one of the most respected arson investigators in Southern California. He wrote articles and organized seminars to train others in his specialty. If a fire broke out in any neighboring city, odds were that Orr would arrive to videotape it. Colleagues were amazed at his ability to “drive up, gaze at the area, stroke his mustache, and, like a water seeker with a divining rod, say, ‘I believe the point of origin is

As Joseph Wambaugh describes in his true-crime account, “Fire Lover,” Orr “would go to where he’d pointed and find the remnants of an incendiary device under a rock.” His fellow investigators “felt like applauding.”

The applause faltered when Orr came under suspicion of setting the fires himself--indeed, for being, in the words of an FBI profiler, “probably the most prolific American arsonist of the 20th century.”

Year after year, Orr set brush fires in the hills around Glendale, including the College Hills blaze in 1990 that damaged or destroyed 67 homes. He attended arson conferences in Fresno and San Luis Obispo, setting strings of fires in towns en route, driving so fast that investigators who later tailed him to see if he would repeat such crimes were comically unable to keep pace.

On Oct. 10, 1984, at what was then Ole’s Home Center in South Pasadena, Orr’s fiery touch turned deadly. He left one of his trademark 15-minute delay devices--a cigarette, a rubber band, three paper matches and a sheet of notebook paper--in a display of petroleum-based foam plastic products, knowing they were as flammable as gasoline. Orr would do the same at other stores, but this time, when the cigarette burned down and ignited the matches, the explosive flames outraced fleeing clerks and customers. Four people died, including a 2-year-old boy.

Wambaugh, famed for his police novels, including “The Blue Knight” and “The Choirboys,” and nonfiction crime books, including “The Onion Field,” follows the case all the way from the Ole’s fire to January of this year, when Orr, serving a life sentence for murder, lost his final appeal.

“Fire Lover” tackles several questions: What kind of man is Orr? How could he betray his fellow firefighters? How could an arsonist as clever as he was be caught? How could an arsonist as flagrant and compulsive as he was not be caught for so long? Finally, how did prosecutors convict him for the Ole’s fire, which had been declared accidental by Los Angeles County investigators?

The weakness of the true-crime genre is that, no matter how spectacular the crime may be, the criminal is usually a sociopath, lacking basic human equipment (such as a conscience) and therefore less, not more, interesting than the rest of us. This is partly true of Orr. A risk junkie, he was married four times and was a serial womanizer. He’d wanted to be a police officer but was rejected by the LAPD and later by the county fire department. Embittered, he loved setting fires under those agencies’ noses.

Fortunately for Wambaugh and the reader, Orr also proved to be quirky. As the College Hills fire raged out of control, he returned to warn the very people he’d endangered, as if he had a split personality. He even wrote a novel, “Points of Origin,” in which a good firefighter unmasks an arsonist colleague. It described a fire much like the one at Ole’s and gave the prosecution many of its leads.

Wambaugh’s theme throughout is the “Balkanization ... of American law enforcement”--the inability or unwillingness of federal and state prosecutors, or of firefighters and cops, to communicate. A Bakersfield arson investigator, Marv Casey--ironically a former student of Orr’s--broke the case by finding Orr’s fingerprint on a half-burned incendiary device, but nothing was done about it for years. Cops didn’t take police work by firefighters seriously. Many firefighters refused to believe that Orr could be guilty.

The federal arson case and the state murder case against Orr dragged on through the 1990s. Wambaugh does his best to cut through the legalese and enliven the courtroom proceedings with sardonic humor, but the second half of “Fire Lover” remains less compelling than the first, when Orr is still at large, setting more fires on the Ole’s pattern for no reason other than to make a “statement to the entire arson investigating community--that they had got it wrong the first time.”