Forensic Files - Season 9, Episode 21 - Point of Origin - Full Episode | Forensic Files

[sirens] NARRATOR: For over a decade, suspicious fires burned 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? [theme music] South Pasadena, California, a town of only three square miles
located just north of Hollywood. On the night of October 10, 1984, most residents were getting ready to watch the San Diego
Padres take on the Detroit Tigers in the World Series. Jim Obdam, just 19 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 7:00 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.
[sirens] 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 90 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 99 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 300 people
who attended the conference and narrowed it down to 55 people based on where they lived in relation
to the convention center. MARVIN: What these 55 people had in common was that they had attended the conference.
They had traveled alone. They had passed through Bakersfield down 99. NARRATOR: When Casey told his superiors that one of these 55
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. ATF'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 ATF to compare the print to the 55
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 101. 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 10 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 ATF to take these 10 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 10 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.
ATF 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 1981.
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 1 of the 10 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 22, 1991, at 3:30 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 18 months later on fire. MICHAEL: He had what we would call before and after shots
of the fire, and shots 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 killers 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 killed 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 died 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 murder 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
murder in violation of-- NARRATOR: He was sentenced to life in prison without parole.
JOSEPH: For the 10 years prior to John's arrest, there were an average of 67 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 67 to 1. -Well, it's my opinion that he set in excess of 2,000 fires
over a period of about 30 years. NARRATOR: John Orr is believed to be one of the 20th century's
most prolific arsonists, his long career brought to an end by a scrap of charred paper and the relentless work
of investigators. [theme music]

In 1984, California firefighters had battled ten arson fires in three weeks. When cigarettes and a scrap of paper connected the southern California fires to several fires further north, the hunt was on for a dangerous pyromaniac.

Forensic Files is the longest-running true crime series in television history. Evidence and interviews with experts help solve real crimes, disease outbreaks and accidents around the world.

Brief Summary

John Orr, a fire investigator, was a serial arsonist responsible for deadly fires, including one that killed four people.

Key points

The Mysterious Fires. For over a decade, suspicious fires plagued Southern California, with little evidence to go on.
The Arson Investigation. Investigators found a crucial piece of evidence linking a novel to the real-life fires.
A Night of Horror. On October 10, 1984, a fire at Ole's Home Center trapped customers inside, leading to tragedy.
The Shocking Discovery. A fingerprint match linked John Orr, an arson investigator, to the fires he was supposed to investigate.
The Aftermath of Arrest. After John Orr's arrest, the number of fires in the area drastically decreased.

Episode highlights

Episode quotes

I still remember touching my arm and the skin just falling off of it.

Jim Obdam recalling his escape from the fire.

2:55WatchJan 1, 2022

Tension

85/ 100High tension

More from Forensic Files

Solve the Crime

Read a real case one clue at a time, then see how your call held up against the investigators.