09x21 - Point of Origin

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NARRATOR: For over a decade, suspicious fires

b*rned businesses and homes in Southern California.

Arson was suspected, but there was little physical evidence.

Investigators found an important piece of evidence

in a novel that described several fires

strikingly similar to the real ones.

How was it possible that the author knew

information never revealed to the public?

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South Pasadena, California, a town of only three square miles

located just north of Hollywood.

On the night of October , ,

most residents were getting ready to watch the San Diego

Padres take on the Detroit Tigers in the World Series.

Jim Obdam, just years old at the time,

was working as a cashier at Ole's Home Center.

JIM: And I was like, why is it so quiet in here?

I go, oh, yeah.

It's the World Series this evening.

I was thinking that it was nice and quiet in the store.

NARRATOR: Around : PM, Obdam heard an emergency announcement

over the public address system.

He went to investigate.

JIM: I was walking toward the front of the store

and I noticed a pillar of smoke, just

a grayish, white pillar of smoke.

NARRATOR: Obdam went to the hardware department

and began to lead customers toward the front of the store.

JIM: I looked down one of the side aisles,

even turned down the side aisle, and noticed at that point

in time that there was just a wall of flames.

I felt trapped and I didn't know where to go from there.

NARRATOR: Then, the lights went out,

and Obdam couldn't see the others.

Everyone inside the store desperately

tried to find a fire exit.

JOSEPH: The first unit to arrive at Ole's observed a column

of smoke coming from the roof area.

The chief in charge was not certain at that time

what they had.

He didn't realize the extent of the conflagration.

NARRATOR: Within a very short period of time,

the fire was a roaring inferno.

Jim Obdam barely got out alive.

JIM: My ears were singed.

The left arm was burnt.

As soon as I got out of the store,

I still remember touching my arm and the skin just

falling off of it.

NARRATOR: Four others were not so fortunate.

WOMAN: He was trapped in there.

He was dead.

That's all we know. REPORTER: Your son?

Your grandson? -My grand baby.

He would have been three in January.

NARRATOR: Matthew Troidl was the youngest victim.

His grandmother, Ada Deal, and two store employees, Jimmy

Cetina and Caroline Kraus, also perished.

When the fire was extinguished, investigators

searched through the rubble for clues.

-Just in normal fire investigation,

you have to first discover the area of the point of origin.

You can't find out what caused the fire unless you can

find out where the fire started.

NARRATOR: But investigators couldn't determine the origin.

JOSEPH: When one goes to the scene of an arson fire,

one finds-- essentially, a pile of trash.

Three feet of water sometimes.

And it's extremely hard to find the point of origin.

NARRATOR: The official explanation

was that the fire was accidental.

But John Orr, arson investigator for the nearby Glendale Fire

Department, strongly disagreed.

He was at the fire and took these photos.

-Within a day of fire, John Orr met with Karen Berry, who

was the sister-in-law of one of the terms of fire,

and he expressed his opinion that this,

in fact, was an arson fire.

NARRATOR: Orr believed the fire started in some patio cushions

which were made of polyurethane foam, a highly

flammable petroleum byproduct.

The debate didn't last long.

Soon, there would be other fires.

There was no doubt an arsonist was on the loose.

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Two months after the fire at Ole's Home Center

there was another suspicious fire at a second Ole's store.

This time, there was no dispute-- the cause was arson.

-The fire was set in the foam padding section

of the home products department.

NARRATOR: And miles away, there

were several other suspicious fires

in Bakersfield, California.

One of the fires occurred at a Craft Mart store.

Arson investigator Marvin Casey arrived at the scene

shortly after it was extinguished.

-Craft Mart is where they sell different crafts.

They sell foam rubber batting and dry vegetation

for making floral arrangements.

NARRATOR: And at this fire, investigators

found their first real piece of evidence

in a bin of dried flowers.

MARVIN: I looked in the bin and I saw a yellow-lined piece

of paper that was used to conceal an incendiary device.

It was readily recognizable because it had three matches

that were wrapped around a, uh, cigarette butt.

And it was attached with a rubber band.

NARRATOR: The incendiary device burns slowly,

allowing the arsonist time to make a getaway.

MARVIN: The burning cigarette will come down

and it will ignite the sulfur on the end of the match head.

You instantly have a going flame.

NARRATOR: And there was another fire that same day

in a nearby fabric store that started in a bin

holding pillows and foam rubber.

-It doesn't take a rocket scientist

to figure out that you have a problem

with, uh, a fire bug on the loose.

NARRATOR: There were other suspicious fires

in Fresno and Tulare, cities north of Bakersfield.

At one, investigators found an incendiary device

identical to the one found at the Craft Mart fire.

When Casey reviewed the dates and times of these fires,

he discovered a troubling coincidence.

They all occurred along Highway around the time

a group of arson investigators met

for their annual convention in Fresno.

MARVIN: So that just threw up a red flag in my mind thinking

that it could possibly be one of our own setting fires.

NARRATOR: Casey got the list of the people

who attended the conference and narrowed it down to people

based on where they lived in relation

to the convention center.

MARVIN: What these people had in

common was that they had attended the conference.

They had traveled alone.

They had passed through Bakersfield down .

NARRATOR: When Casey told his superiors that one of these

arson professionals was their serial arsonist,

he was ignored.

MARVIN: I was an outcast.

I was shunned for developing this theory

of a fire investigator setting fires.

-Nobody but nobody that I know of

believed that Casey was on to anything.

-As a matter of fact, when I would attend the conventions,

uh, I-- I couldn't talk to anybody about this theory very

much, because nobody would really want to listen ,

and nobody shared my idea with it.

NARRATOR: But maybe they should have.

The incendiary device from the Craft Mart fire

was sent to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms

for analysis.

It was a yellow piece of lined paper folded neatly

with a cigarette and some matches inside.

A*F's fingerprint expert selected ninhydrin

to look for possible prints.

CHARLES: Ninhydrin is a wet chemical that when

applied to the paper actually reacts to the amino acids which

are part of what makes up a fingerprint, uh, residue.

NARRATOR: It usually takes a day for the chemical to dry,

but heating the circulating air speeds up the process.

Miraculously, they found a partial print.

CHARLES: Fingerprints are referred

to as just a chance impression.

They may be there, they may not.

So to find a fingerprint, especially to find one that

was identifiable, the examiners as well as the investigators

were very lucky in this case.

NARRATOR: The color of the paper and the lines

obscured the print.

To bring out additional detail, criminalists

photographed it with a special filter.

CHARLES: The filters would then enhance not only the print,

but the ridge detail that makes up the pattern.

And then also with the filters, it

would eliminate any of the background colors

so that the pattern can be seen more clearly.

NARRATOR: The print was entered into AFIS, the Automated

Fingerprint Identification System,

containing prints of convicted criminals.

Unfortunately, the print did not match

any in the database of known criminal offenders.

Marvin Casey then asked the A*F to compare the print to the

individuals on his list of people who attended the arson

convention near the fires, but that request was denied.

-They felt like that was too many names

to submit to the different departments

to get their fingerprint cards to analyze.

NARRATOR: Casey's investigation had come to a dead end.

Then, two years later, there was another rash of store fires,

this time in cities along Highway .

When Casey examined the dates of the fires,

he discovered that they also coincided

with a nearby convention of arson investigators.

And on that list of attendees were individuals who

had also attended the earlier arson conference.

MARVIN: I was quite excited.

Now I felt like we have something we can work with.

-And he persuaded A*F to take these names to their lab,

surreptitiously obtain fingerprint impressions,

and compare them to the print that he'd found,

and could not come back with a positive finding.

NARRATOR: But they could find no match.

Casey couldn't believe it.

-And I was kind of discouraged, too.

Because I just felt like that-- that we're

going to get somewhere with these names off-- off

of this list.

NARRATOR: Another two years past.

Then, the arsonist struck again in Los Angeles,

setting fires in dozens of stores throughout the area

and causing millions of dollars in damages.

A*F Special Agent Mike Matassa headed the investigation.

-The MO was to start fires in retail businesses, midday

hours, primarily during open business.

NARRATOR: Matassa heard about Marvin Casey's

controversial theory that these fires were

started by an arson investigator.

And he also learned about the fingerprint

on the incendiary device.

So Matassa asked the Los Angeles County

Sheriff's Office to analyze the print.

They compared it to their fingerprint database

of everyone who had ever applied there for a job,

and they found a match.

-I was blown away.

I couldn't believe it.

NARRATOR: The print matched the left ring finger

of John Leonard Orr, an arson investigator

with the Glendale California Fire Department.

I'm

JOSEPH: John Orr wanted to be a Los Angeles

Police officer for a long time.

He applied in .

He passed all of the tests except one.

It was a psychological test.

NARRATOR: Orr then applied for a job

with the Los Angeles Fire Department

but failed the physical part of the training.

-He wasn't in good enough shape.

And that was a crushing disappointment in his life.

NARRATOR: Eventually, he worked odd jobs until finally getting

a job with the Glendale Fire Department.

-It was the lowest-paying fire department

in the Los Angeles area.

And he quickly rose through the ranks

and became an arson investigator.

And eventually, a captain.

NARRATOR: Orr was of the people on Casey's list

who had intended both arson conventions.

The earlier fingerprint comparison

had simply missed it.

The print linked Orr to only one of the fires.

MICHAEL: Rather than arrest him on one fire

with minimal damage that probably would have a very

minimal sentence associated with it,

we decided to investigate and try to tie him into all

of the fires that had the same MO.

NARRATOR: And for that, they turned

to the latest in surveillance technology.

After a seven-year search for the serial arsonist,

California investigators finally had a suspect.

But the evidence against John Orr, a partial fingerprint,

linked him to only one of the fires.

So investigators decided to track Orr's whereabouts

by planting a device on his car called a Teletrac.

REX: The tracking device itself is

about the size of a videotape.

It can be installed anywhere in the car.

NARRATOR: The Teletrac system uses a network of communication

towers which transmit signals to the wireless device mounted

in the car.

In some ways, it's better than ground satellite systems.

REX: The one disadvantage of GPS is that if you're in a garage,

or if the antenna is blocked from seeing the sky,

it's very hard to get a good location.

With this technology, we don't need to see the sky.

NARRATOR: On November , , at : PM,

the Teletrac placed Orr near the Warner Brothers Studio

in Burbank, where a fire broke out

on the set of a television show.

Interestingly, Orr immediately drove home,

then received the official dispatch from headquarters.

The dispatcher inadvertently gave

the wrong address for the fire.

MICHAEL: We can watch him on the Teletrac device

leave his house, drive to the first fire location, which

was misidentified in the dispatch.

But yet, he makes it to the right location.

-And with that information, we couldn't tie him directly

to the cause of that fire, but we knew that we couldn't allow

him to be on the street any longer.

NARRATOR: With a warrant, investigators

searched Orr's home.

MICHAEL: We found in his briefcase cigarettes, matches,

rubber bands, the type of materials

that were used in the device.

And we found yellow lined paper in his car

NARRATOR: Orr denied that there was

anything sinister about the materials.

And also denied it was his fingerprint

on the incendiary device found at one of the fires.

-I've never set an arson fire, except in my training

exercises.

NARRATOR: And investigators found evidence

that Orr planned some of the fires

long before they happened.

On a home video found among Orr's things

was a close-up of a beautiful Hillside home in California.

There's footage of the same house months later on fire.

MICHAEL: He had what we would call before and after sh*ts

of the fire, and sh*ts actually as the fire

was being perpetrated before any fire companies could arrive.

-Other people said that he photographed the fires

so that he could relive the event.

For the same reason that serial K*llers photographic victims,

so that they can look at them later and relive the events.

NARRATOR: Also confiscated from Orr's home

was a manuscript for a book he had written.

It was about a fictitious firefighter

turned arsonist, Aaron Stiles.

The similarities between the book and the real crimes

were far too coincidental.

The Stiles character used delayed devices

to set fires in retail stores while

on his way to and from arson conferences.

-He discussed how he set multiple fires at the same time

in order to distract firefighting personnel to one

location to the other, so he could sit and watch

one of the other fires become rather large.

NARRATOR: And the book describes a fire at a Cal's Hardware

store similar to the fire in South

Pasadena that k*lled four people.

In the novel, one of the dead victims

was a young boy named Matthew, the same name

of the two-year-old who d*ed in the real fire.

-"The deaths were blotted out of his mind.

It wasn't his fault, just stupid people

acting as stupid people do."

NARRATOR: Joseph Wambaugh wrote a book

about this case called "Fire Lover."

JOSEPH: I think John Orr does a better job than anyone

in describing the psyche of the organized serial arsonist.

The power, the excitement, the thrill

that motivates these people.

In his novel, "Points of Origin,"

he has his arson investigator explain it like this.

"The fire becomes a mistress, a lover."

From those words of John Orr, I got my title, "Fire Lover,"

as I thought about it-- my mistress, my lover, the fire.

NARRATOR: John Orr was charged with numerous counts of arson

and for the m*rder of the four victims of the Ole's fire.

-We, the jury in the above entitled case,

find the defendant, John Leonard Orr,

guilty of the crime of first-degree

m*rder in violation of--

NARRATOR: He was sentenced to life in prison without parole.

JOSEPH: For the years prior to John's arrest,

there were an average of brush fires per year

in the hills above Glendale, Burbank,

Pasadena-- major fires.

And after John's arrest, the average number

of fires in that same area dropped from to .

-Well, it's my opinion that he set in excess of , fires

over a period of about years.

NARRATOR: John Orr is believed to be one of the th century's

most prolific arsonists, his long career brought to an end

by a scrap of charred paper and the relentless work

of investigators.

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