Fire Lover

by Joseph Wambaugh

  At 1:25 P.M., on Saturday afternoon, the day before the conference was to officially begin, and while people were still arriving, a second fire broke out, just nineteen miles away in the town of Salinas at the Woolworth’s store, in the bedding stock where foam pillows were stored. The building was heavily charged with smoke and heat and experienced severe damage, but no one was injured. The fire was thought to be incendiary in nature.

  The conference was a success, ending on the eighth of March. Most of the conferees checked out of their rooms that day.

  The next morning, two hours south of the conference site, just off Highway 101 in the town of Atascadero, there began a startling spree. At 9:30 A.M., an employee at Pacific Home Improvement noticed a scorched roll of foam padding on one of the shelves. He pulled the padding from the box and found a cigarette with three matches attached by a rubber band, all of it wrapped in yellow notebook paper.

  Almost two hours later, at the Atascadero branch of Cornet Variety Store, a fire erupted in the back of the building in the shelves that contained plastic bags full of shredded foam rubber. The sprinkler system activated and confined the fire until the arrival of an engine company.

  Suspicious customers included a sandy-haired couple in their twenties and an incredibly anal customer in his forties who insisted on paying for his merchandise even as the store was filling with smoke and flame and everybody else was hauling ass.

  At 12:09 P.M., at Coast to Coast Hardware, a fire erupted in rolls of plastic sheeting and foam products, but was extinguished by employees using dry chemicals. There were no suspects worth reporting. All three fires had erupted on El Camino, near Highway 101, as though the fire setter had just been trucking along, going, “Eeney, meeny, miney …”

  “Moe” occurred that evening at 7:55 P.M., twenty minutes south of Atascadero in the city of San Luis Obispo, at The Party Exchange and Et Cetera, a retail outlet selling gifts and decorations. The store manager, who was new on the job, was alerted by a customer to a column of smoke and flame behind the staircase. While ushering customers out and scrambling for a fire extinguisher, she was overcome by smoke and had to be helped to safety. The building was totally destroyed. Fire investigators believed that the blaze had been set in combustible packing material.

  And then, after six fires in Morro Bay, Salinas, Atascadero, and San Luis Obispo, all in retail stores open for business, the spree ended. The weather station reported that it was cool, calm, and cloudy once again.

  Captain Marvin Casey of the Bakersfield Fire Department was forty-five years old and had nearly twenty-two years on the job on the day he heard about the fires on the Central Coast that had broken out before, during, and after the Pacific Grove arson symposium. He was energized and adrenaline charged. It had happened again!

  Casey once more quietly obtained a roster of symposium participants, but this time he could pare down a suspect list to only those from Southern California who had attended both the Fresno seminar two years before and this one. Instead of fifty-five names, like last time, there were now only ten.

  Marv Casey reported that his superiors scoffed. “I couldn’t get anyone to believe me,” he said, “because they didn’t want to believe me.”

  The people on the list were respected arson investigators. One of them, John Leonard Orr from the Glendale Fire Department, Casey knew rather well. Two years earlier he had taken a class from John Orr in Glendale in order to get his state certification. Prior to the training session, Casey had heard about John Orr and was excited to meet him. He had hoped to mix and network at the Holiday Inn in Burbank where they gathered after class. Casey had found a group of fellow students in that bar, but John Orr was schmoozing a blonde that evening. Marv Casey figured correctly that he wasn’t going to get any networking with his instructor that night.

  While Casey had never been able to stir up enthusiasm for his idea, at least the Bakersfield fire marshal had given him permission to indulge himself in his spare time. So he once again phoned ATF Special Agent Chuck Galyan in Fresno, who agreed to submit the photo negative of Casey’s latent fingerprint, along with the ten names Casey had culled from the rosters of both conferences, to the Department of Justice Regional Criminalistics Laboratory in Fresno.

  After the fingerprint cards of the ten arson investigators were retrieved from the state database of people who hold public-safety jobs, they were analyzed by a veteran Department of Justice fingerprint expert. His report, dated April 3, was sent to Galyan. It said that the usable impression appearing on the submitted photograph was compared with the inked fingerprints of the ten men in question. The results were negative. No match.

  Casey thought that everyone could just have a good laugh at the hick from Bakersfield, a “city” they thought of as a sprawl of industrial parks, truck stops, and 7-Eleven stores, with a Kmart or two sprinkled in. They could chortle. This not-so-mighty Casey had finally struck out.

  A month after returning from the arson symposium in Pacific Grove, the results of the exam for fire captain were announced by letter to contenders. John Orr’s score on the exam was 98 percent. He had placed number one, and was appointed a fire captain on May 1. His pay jumped an extra six hundred dollars per month. With his daughter Carrie Lyn turning eighteen in June, her child support would end, so he’d realize a monthly boost of a thousand bucks. He immediately went out and bought a white Chevy Blazer.

  Captain Orr wrote three “Profiles in Arson” for American Fire Journal that year, and toyed with the idea of trying a novel. But on his days off it was too tempting to just join his wife Wanda in the backyard hot tub, with their Siamese cat and their dog, Cody, lazing nearby. Life was good.

  There were several brush fires in and around Chevy Chase Canyon that year, and the newly appointed captain complained that his partner, Don Yeager, wasn’t pulling his weight, and that Yeager resented the distinct supervisor-subordinate relationship now that John had been promoted. He said that none of his three partners had been dedicated to the arson unit, and he discussed his dissatisfaction with the fire marshal, Battalion Chief Chris Gray, explaining how difficult it was to be a supervisor with someone he considered a good friend. Captain Orr began wondering if, like wife number four, a firefighter partner number four might be the answer.

  In early 1990, John Orr began to have more of a yen to try a novel. He took a writing class, picked up a few tips, and in the spring began writing Points of Origin.

  5

  POOL OF FIRE

  There was another Fresno arson symposium in June 1990, but this time John Orr decided that his junior partner should go and he should stay behind tending to duties in Glendale.

  The temperature neared ninety degrees by 7:00 A.M. on Wednesday, June 27. By noon it was topping one hundred degrees. Santa Ana winds were blowing into the Los Angeles basin from the desert, and with humidity down to 10 percent, that spelled trouble. Every year there had been brush fires in the foothills of Glendale during the hot dry summers, when the hills were parched and brown. The arson unit had been called upon to investigate all of them, but never had much luck in locating or arresting likely fire setters. This year was hotter and dryer than usual, and the Santa Anas were blowing thirty-five miles per hour. This was the season to fear. This was the time of fire.

  At 3:15 P.M. that day, with the temperature in Glendale at 110 degrees, it felt like someone was firing a hair dryer in your mouth every time you took a breath. The Santa Anas were swirling through Chevy Chase Canyon and all along North Verdugo Road, where the local news media had covered brush fires every year, fires that John Orr had told them were probably set by the same person.

  And then a call came in. There was a brush fire sweeping up the hillside by North Verdugo. At 3:24 P.M. the first alarm was dispatched. One of the firefighters with Engine Company 226, the second to arrive, was rookie James Frawley. His truck raced along Verdugo Road on the wrong side while cars scrambled out of the way of an onslaught of emergency vehicles blowing air horns and sirens. Just
as Truck 26 was turning the corner to the reported fire location on Sweetbriar, the young firefighter saw a man standing at the base of the hill where the fire had reportedly been set, “sifting through things.” He recognized the man to be Captain Orr of the arson unit, and Frawley figured that he must have come with the very first engine. He thought no more about it and they set about helping Engine 25 deal with the several homes that were already threatened.

  Engine 29 had arrived at the fire scene with orders to set up structural protection from the leapfrogging flames that were being swept by the Santa Anas across the 134 Freeway. Captain Greg Jones, a contemporary of John Orr, saw him standing by his white Blazer on Swarthmore Drive. He wondered how his colleague could have driven to that uphill location near the area of origin without Jones seeing him arrive. Then John approached Captain Jones and asked if he needed help.

  Jones told the arson investigator to grab a line and take it to the adjacent house, where a fire was very close to the structure but had not yet reached it other than burning the wooden fence in the backyard. Jones then went next door and began working on a house whose roof was on fire.

  A few minutes later, when he returned to the street, Jones saw that John had removed a salvage cover from the engine and was dragging the tarp into the house that Jones was hosing down. Captain Jones was puzzled. Protecting the contents was a low priority when the attic was still involved in fire and the whole damn area was threatened. But John Orr simply covered a living-room couch with the tarp, walked out of the house, and drove away, with embers falling into every room. And he had not hosed down the house next door.

  Jones later said that he’d seemed “agitated and not in control of what he was doing.”

  There were outbreaks everywhere in College Hills. The land was smothered by smoke and the skies were full of low-flying aircraft: helicopters belonging to the police and fire services, others from networks and local affiliates, and even fixed-wing observers, all of them having to veer and climb and dive to avoid one another in the blinding smoke storm.

  The College Hills fire was described by Los Angeles newscasters in terms both hyperbolic and sensational. One claimed that the devastation resembled a Vietnam carpet bombing. But John may have looked with a more aesthetic eye. As he later described the scene:

  The winds had again subsided as the water-dropping helicopters dove at the hottest flanks of the fire, unleashing over 350 gallons of water each time they swooped down.… The big Hueys looked like dragonflies in slow motion, skittering over a pool of fire.

  Engine companies arrived from every jurisdiction in the San Gabriel Valley and from the rest of the Los Angeles basin, as a blizzard of ash and soot, whipped and propelled by the Santa Anas, covered the ground for miles around with charred debris. Eventually, engines, trucks, and police units blocked every street and were parked helter-skelter like so many bumper cars at a theme park. And it seemed that every street was crisscrossed with hose lines manned by firefighters in yellow or red helmets.

  The cops were manning barricades, and in many ways were the most frustrated and helpless, as houses all around them were burning to the ground and residents of College Hills were racing home through red lights and stop signs, ignoring all speed limits, frantic to rescue irreplaceable belongings, precious pets, and children.

  Susan Raggio worked all the way across Los Angeles in Century City. She was the mother of six, including thirteen-year-old twin daughters and fifteen-month-old triplets. She had employed a nanny who left her the previous weekend, and her twins had to stay home that Wednesday to mind the three babies. Sometime after 3:00 P.M., Mrs. Raggio received a call from Jennifer, one of her twins, who said that she was frightened because there was a fire somewhere nearby and the entire sky was orange.

  Susan Raggio phoned her husband at his job and he said he’d leave work and go home. And she phoned the Glendale Fire Department, but was told not to worry because the fire was on the other side of the freeway from her home. She then called her daughter to reassure her.

  But Jennifer could see that vivid, violent sky, could smell the smoke in the air, could see the ash swirling, and she said to her mother, “We’re really afraid.”

  Her mother replied, “Get the babies all together and listen for the firemen if they come. I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

  She hung up and hit the freeway, but on any weekday afternoon in Los Angeles the traffic at 3:30 P.M. is horrendous. Couple this with the continual radio updates about a growing brush fire in the Glendale area and the traffic was worse. Then one of the helicopter newscasters announced that they could see flames around the Foxkirk area, and that was her street!

  By the time Susan Raggio reached Glendale the streets were closed off, so she took back roads and detours, and drove up Chevy Chase right through a barrier where she explained to the fireman, “My children are up there!” Then she saw houses burning all along the ridge.

  There were fire department engines and trucks on her street pumping water through a dozen lines, and she just drove over those charged lines and parked, and ran to the house that stood in front of hers. A fireman was hosing down the neighbor’s house and she couldn’t see her house at all through the wall of black smoke, but she sensed that her house was gone.

  She asked the fireman if he had seen two little girls and three babies, and the harried firefighter looked at her desperate face, left his hose line, made a call on his radio, but then shook his head.

  The fireman said, “You can’t go back there where your house was. You can’t go back there. Just stay where it’s safe and look around for them.”

  He returned to his duties, and Susan Raggio did not know if her children had perished in their home.

  Now the road behind her was blocked by more trucks, and she didn’t know what to do or where to look so she just started walking up the hillside, just walking, perhaps for an hour but she couldn’t say for sure. She walked until her skirt caught on fire.

  After she beat out the flame, she continued along the streets in all that chaos, past those other properties that firefighters were trying to save. By then, seventy-four emergency vehicles and three hundred firefighters were doing battle, but the fire kept skipping over the San Rafael hills, taking houses at random, sparing some. And there in the street she saw her babies’ stroller!

  Susan Raggio plunged forward more frantically toward the unburned homes, until she was overcome by smoke and fainted. When she was revived, she found herself lying on the front lawn of one of those intact homes, and she walked inside that house while firemen were on the roof soaking it with hoses. She phoned her husband’s office and his secretary told her that she had received a call from one of the girls. They’d been evacuated by neighbors and taken to the home of relatives, and other than the twins suffering third-degree burns on their feet when they had to flee barefoot with the triplets in their arms, they were safe.

  The house and everything in it was lost. But the children were safe.

  Late that afternoon, while in his West Covina office, Moses Gomez of the California State Fire Marshal’s Office heard a report of a major fire in Glendale. He called, offered assistance, and was asked to respond to a command post that had been set up in the 1100 block on North Verdugo Road. Due to rush-hour traffic he didn’t arrive until 6:00 P.M., and he identified himself at the police barricade and was waved through. Before getting to the command post, Gomez saw a white Chevrolet Blazer parked on the street. He recognized John Orr standing behind the Blazer removing his coveralls.

  Moses Gomez waved to John, offered his help, and was invited to join him.

  “My partner’s out of town,” John explained to Gomez.

  Gomez saw a nearby area that was marked by crime-scene tape, and John pointed and said, “That’s the area of origin.”

  But Gomez was not invited to leave the sidewalk and enter that burned-out brushland for a closer look. Since he would not impose on another investigator’s crime scene, Gomez asked, “Did you find a
nything in there?”

  “I found a delay device,” John told him.

  A few minutes later, when they were in the Blazer touring the fire that was still raging all over the foothills, John produced an evidence vial with a disposable lighter inside, and said that the extinguishing cap was jammed open by a clip attachment which allowed the butane to flow. That was the incendiary device used to start the fire, he told Gomez.

  As they toured, Gomez offered the resources of the state for the fire investigation. He told John that the next day he could have personnel on the scene to assist, and hopefully to get a lead on the person who’d set the incendiary device.

  When they arrived at the mobile command post, John was asked by Battalion Chief Gray to give some kind of statement to the press. The arson investigator told Gray that he didn’t have much to report, but when eager reporters spotted him and surged forward sticking a boom mike in his face, John not only gave a statement, but told them everything that he’d told Gomez about the point of origin, the butane lighter with the cap clipped open, all of it. Things that arson investigators never reveal, things that only the arsonist would know about and therefore must be kept secret.

  They began to drive some more, where the fires were still sweeping up the hills, burning anything in the way. As an investigator, Gomez kept wondering, Why aren’t we interviewing potential witnesses? Why aren’t we doing something? What are we doing up here?

  Thirty-five minutes later they were back at the command post where Glendale detective Robert Masucci told them he’d been assigned to assist the arson unit in interviewing some possible witnesses who lived in the apartment building across from the fire’s area of origin.

  They knocked at the door of a woman who’d reported something of great interest. She said that prior to observing the fire, she’d seen a man standing across the street where the brush begins, and that he was about five feet ten inches tall, had dark hair and a mustache, and wore khaki pants. He’d been standing with his back to her. The man drove a white or tan car, she said. The cop wrote down what she’d told them and they left.