Fire Lover (2002)

by Wambaugh, Joseph

  The fire department did not dare enter the building to fight the out-of-control inferno, but confined suppression activities to the outer walls. The conflagration was amazingly hot and intense. They learned why the next day, after they could get inside, discovering that the point of origin was in a storage bin, in Styrofoam beanbag pellets used for stuffing pillows. Everyone was relieved that customers and employees had escaped without injury.

  Hancock Fabrics was just about completely destroyed, but a diligent sifting through the debris rewarded searchers with an incendiary delay device consisting of one partially burned cigarette with a tan filter tip and three paper matches fastened to the cigarette by a rubber band.

  A witness at the Hancock Fabrics fire described a nonchalant customer who had been loitering in the area of the fire prior to its outbreak. He was a white male, about sixty years old, standing six feet six inches, weighing 250 pounds, with a snow-white beard, wearing a blue sea captain's hat and a bright yellow rain slicker.

  The fire captain taking the report said, "So do you think he was trying to look inconspicuous?"

  And as if enough arson hadn't struck Fresno, later at House of Fabrics, another retail outlet just a block away from Hancock Fabrics and Payless Drug Store, an employee discovered, in a bin stacked with foam pillows, yet another incendiary device consisting of a cigarette, matches, and a rubber band. It had scorched the wall in an inverted V pattern, but had not ignited into a full-blown fire.

  Some said it looked as if somebody had been trying to burn down the city during a conference of the most prominent arson sleuths in the state. What was the arsonist trying to do? Was a statement being made to the investigators, or what? Neither the media nor the fire department could figure out what in hell was going on.

  At about 10:45 on the last morning of the arson seminar, one hour south in the town of Tulare-where people said the town's only claim to fame was that it was located midway between Fresno and Bakersfield, which were midway between San Francisco and L. A.-there was a fire. At Surplus City, a fire like the one at Payless Drug Store broke out in a display of sleeping bags.

  And forty-five minutes later, at the Family Bargain Center in Tulare, the unthinkable happened: another fire broke out. A customer in the rear of the retail outlet saw smoke, and the store manager ran to a wooden display bin that was stacked with foam pillows. The manager jerked the pillows out of the bin and extinguished the flames. At the bottom of the bin, beneath the pillows, he found a partially burned cigarette with a tan filter, two burned matches, one rubber band, and some pieces of yellow notebook paper.

  By the time a fire captain arrived, the store manager had a description for him of a white male with collar-length black hair, five feet ten inches tall, weighing 170 pounds, wearing a blue jacket and designer jeans. He looked as though he hadn't shaved in a day or two, and his age was described as "mid-twenties."

  The store manager recalled that when this man had entered the store about fifteen minutes before the fire broke out, he'd been carrying a yellow piece of paper with lines on it, just like the remnants of paper the manager had found under the pillows.

  As in Fresno, Tulare had never experienced two fires on the same day in retail establishments during business hours, and with the recovery of the delay device, it became obvious that the Tulare fires were incendiary in nature.

  It later seemed as though this arsonist had just decided to take a lunch break before resuming his activities. At 2:00 p. M., an hour south of Tulare, in the city of Bakersfield, an employee of CraftMart, a retail store open for business, spotted a column of smoke and incipient flames emitting from a bin in the center of the store where there were materials on display for making dry floral arrangements. The store manager put out the fire with a dry powder extinguisher while the engine company was en route.

  The fire captain called for a fire investigator, and Captain Marvin G. Casey of the Bakersfield Fire Department arrived in short order. Marvin Casey had nearly twenty years of fire experience, including training in cause and origin analysis, and he'd investigated hundreds of fires. The former Texan had thinning gray hair, a blue-eyed Panhandle squint, and a face creased from years in the dust and wind of the San Joaquin Valley. He'd have looked right at home in boots, a Stetson, and Wrangler jeans.

  Casey headed straight for the gondolas that held the display material, and found the heaviest burn there among the dried flowers. Then his gaze moved over the gondola bin and up about four feet. He looked inside and there, under the dry yellow powder from the fire extinguisher, he found an incendiary device composed of a cigarette with a tan filter tip, and three matches, two made of paper, one of wood, and a scorched sheet of yellow lined notebook paper.

  Captain Casey asked the captain of the engine company to guard the aisle, and he went to his vehicle to get some evidence cans and envelopes. When he returned to the point of origin he used a Swiss Army knife with a tweezer attachment to lift each item and drop it into a separate envelope.

  The notebook paper looked as though it had come from a standard legal pad, but Casey wanted to ascertain whether it could have been in the bin before the incendiary device ignited, or if it was part of the delay device brought into the store by the fire setter. He asked the store manager to bring him every yellow pad or loose sheet of paper in the store, but there was no yellow notepad in CraftMart that matched the piece of burned paper in his hand.

  It was destined to be a busy day for investigator Marvin Casey. At 2:00 p. M. that same afternoon, at Hancock Fabrics, Bakersfield branch, sales clerk Laverne Andress was waiting on a customer who had just returned twelve yards of flawed drapery fabric. The sales clerk was very solicitous, and very concerned because the customer was so pregnant that delivery might commence at any moment right there on the cutting table.

  While the two women were checking for fabric flaws and cutting the sixty-inch material, the sales clerk smelled cigarette smoke. Neither customers nor employees were permitted to smoke in a fabric store, so the clerk excused herself and went looking for the smoker.

  It was then that she saw a man browsing among the shelves and racks of fabrics. She later described him as a white male, wearing a cowboy shirt and boots, five foot seven to five foot nine, with medium-brown receding hair graying at the temples, weighing 170 to 175 pounds with a "large tummy." She guessed his age at thirty to thirty-five years. She looked at his hands, but they were empty. She could find no one smoking in the store, so she went back to her pregnant customer.

  At 2:30 p. M., in the rear of the store, the sales clerk heard a hissing sound. Something was hissing in the vicinity of the bin that contained rolled foam-rubber batting. Then a very small blue flame appeared, and then a wave of fire rolled out of the bin and climbed up the wall. Just that fast.

  The automatic sprinklers went off and drenched that part of the store, holding the fire in check and flooding the store with two inches of water. The fire department arrived and completed the fire suppression, again calling Marvin Casey.

  When Casey arrived, he discussed the fire with the captain of the engine company and described the fire at CraftMart just two miles away. Casey said that it was unique to have two such fires within an hour in retail stores open for business. Such a thing had never happened in Bakersfield.

  By the next day, Captain Casey had received a phone call and met with some investigators from Fresno, learning not only about the Fresno fires but about the fires in Tulare. They were all eerily similar. All had been set in displays of volatile material, such as foam rubber and Styrofoam, by someone who must have understood the speed, power, and ferocity of a fire fed by this fuel.

  The remnants of the delay devices were the same right down to the number of matches and yellow notebook paper, but the suspect descriptions were varied. They had a deaf-mute, a tubby cowboy, a gigantic ancient mariner in a rain slicker. Nothing really matched when it came to suspect descriptions, but the M. O., type of establishments attacked, and merchandise that was set alight w
ere all just about identical.

  And all the fires took place very close to Highway 99, as though the fire setter had been in Fresno on Tuesday through Thursday night, then had driven forty-eight miles down the road to Tulare on Friday morning for two fires, then, maybe after a lunch break, resumed his busy schedule sixty-four miles farther south in Bakersfield, where he'd struck twice between the hours of 1:45 and 2:45 p. M.

  And then he seemed to vanish from the San Joaquin Valley.

  With all of this arson activity in three separate cities, the locals needed the resources of the Department of the Treasury's Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. When Captain Casey returned to his office, he had his evidence packaged and sent to the laboratory operated by ATF in Walnut Creek, California, where it ultimately ended up in the hands of Special Agent Clive Barnum, a onetime NYPD cop, now an ATF agent with more than thirty years of experience as a fingerprint specialist.

  Barnum was a descendant of Phineas T. Barnum, the legendary circus impresario, and was a well-known character in his own right. He tried processing the cigarette butt with a ninhydrin solution, and it brought out some ridge fragments of a fingerprint, but nothing identifiable. However, the ninhydrin processing of the partially burned yellow notebook paper produced a purple image that was eminently readable. When Barnum started charting points of identification on the fingerprint photo, he stopped counting at thirteen. The FBI was willing to go to trial with seven points of identification, and Barnum could see twice that many. This fingerprint would easily make a positive identification if they came up with a suspect. It was submitted to the state and national fingerprint databases, but drew a negative response. The owner of the print, whoever it was, had no criminal record.

  Still, Marvin Casey had the fingerprint of someone who had set, or attempted to set, seven fires while moving south from Fresno to Tulare to Bakersfield, and such an arson series had never been seen in Central California before. Casey made a wry comment that maybe the fire setter was someone who just didn't like arson investigators, and the more he thought about it the more plausible it seemed. He started getting some strange but exciting ideas.

  Casey made a call and got the conference roster of 242 names. He determined from their places of employment who would have driven home south from the conference, passing through each city where there had been a fire. Then he learned how many of those had traveled to the conference alone, because serial arsonists were solitary creatures. There were fifty-five.

  And though he could have guessed at the response he'd get, he had to turn to the feds for help on something multi-jurisdictional like this. He phoned the ATF office in Fresno and spoke with Special Agent Chuck Galyan, with whom he had worked on other arson fires.

  Galyan was far more than skeptical, and later said, "Fifty-five names of respected arson investigators? I wasn't at all comfortable with this. I knew some of them. They were neat guys with lots of integrity. I certainly didn't think that Marv Casey's intuition was worth a wholesale inquiry into travel records and so forth."

  Using the baseball imagery that the Mighty Casey's name invoked, Galyan said, "I thought Marv Casey was out in left field somewhere."

  Everybody else with whom Casey spoke also implied that he should get over it. Maybe if there were just a few names. Maybe then he could go a little further with his notions. But Captain Marvin Casey could not get over the eerie feeling.

  He thought it was at least plausible that the fire setter had been somehow associated with the conference, maybe in some civilian capacity, even though the arsonist understood which materials were very combustible and how to place a delay device. Or maybe the arsonist was an outsider who truly did hate arson investigators. Maybe someone was mocking them, playing all of those arson sleuths for saps and suckers.

  Well, he had that someone's fingerprint successfully analyzed by Clive Barnum, whose ancestor P. T. Barnum said, "There's a sucker born every minute."

  It remained to be seen who would be the sucker.

  It had been nice working alone, but with John Orr's blessing, they had chosen another partner for him. At least this time the new cop would be the junior man. His name was Doug Staubs, an eight-year veteran of the Glendale Police Department. John thought it might work out. Staubs stood six foot three, weighed 220 pounds, and was ten years younger, so he could do any running and wrestling that needed to be done. He was as country as sweet potato pie, and was crazy about bowling alleys. Staubs called everyone "Buddy."

  But it was the shortest of all his "marriages." By October, Doug Staubs was history. John insinuated that Staubs was worn out from working an off-duty job. Moreover, he said that Staubs had too much of the "typical cop persona." Staubs was thanked and bounced back to the police department with a diplomatic memo that said, "Returned to ranks due to manpower shortage."

  In 1988, John was assigned a third partner, his hunting pal, Don Yeager. But John had plenty of doubts about what he described as Yeager's abrasive personality, calling him "Don Rickles without humor." At least Yeager was a firefighter instead of another Glendale police officer, but this made "a little resentment simmer at the cop shop," John said, especially since rumors had circulated that John had dumped the cop in order to make room for a firefighter.

  John insisted that the working cops knew all about Staubs's off-duty commitments but had never revealed it to their superiors. "Apparently, the unthinkable had happened," John said; "a secret was being kept at the police department."

  This was an allusion to what everyone who'd ever worked with cops knew to be true: they were the most gossip-obsessed blabbermouths on earth. If you wanted a rumor to circulate among every law-enforcement agency and media outlet in the county by Thursday, tell one cop your "secret" on Monday. If you wanted it on the same-day news shows, tell two cops. They'd compete to disclose it.

  John published another piece for American Fire Journal entitled "Profiles in Arson-The Serial Firesetter." Between his writing and his organizing training sessions for other agencies, there weren't too many fire investigators in Southern California who hadn't heard of John Leonard Orr.

  There was another important arson conference to be held, this time in the town of Pacific Grove, near Monterey. It was called the Symposium IV Arson Conference, a four-day affair scheduled to begin on March 5, 1989. As before, Glendale's senior arson investigator opted to go, and Don Yeager remained in Glendale.

  The drive, though not much farther in miles than the trip to Fresno, was slower and more scenic: north through Santa Barbara with those ocean vistas, on to Santa Maria and the Sierra Madres, past the Los Padres National Forest and rolling hills dotted with California oak, into San Luis Obispo, and north on Highway 101 through the Coast Ranges and Salinas. It was John Steinbeck country all the way west to Monterey and the conference site, in the town of Pacific Grove, population fifteen thousand.

  This was an ideal place for a conference, with spectacular scenery all along the Monterey Peninsula. Every golf enthusiast in the world had seen some of it on TV from Pebble Beach, and who wouldn't like to visit Carmel, where Dirty Harry himself, Clint Eastwood, was mayor? And just a short drive away, perhaps the most staggering vistas of all were at Big Sur. Of course, many of the conferees would arrive early and stay late for this one, taking advantage of the weekend before the sessions actually began.

  On Friday, March 3, 1989, at 5:49 p. M., two and a half hours south in the lovely coastal town of Morro Bay, business was brisk at Cornet Variety Store when a clerk heard a woman yelling "Fire!"

  The clerk grabbed a fire extinguisher, ran toward the screaming voice at the southwest corner of the store, and saw an incipient fire licking out from a pile of foam pillows in an aisle display. The blaze was extinguished quickly.

  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 pill
ows 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.