Fire Lover (2002)

by Wambaugh, Joseph

  Simpson, Matassa called Stein "The Mole," as in defense mole.

  Stefan Stein got something with which to bust Matassa's chops when they took a trip to the Central Valley and Central Coast to re-interview witnesses, including Marvin Casey. On the way to Atascadero they were stopped for speeding by a CHiP officer. In the front seat were Matassa and Lucero, in the back were Stefan Stein and Walt Brown.

  When the CHiP approached the car, Matassa and Lucero showed their hands and Matassa said, "We're cops and we're packing."

  The CHiP officer stuck his face in the car window and said, "Yeah? So what"

  For months thereafter, whenever he was called "The Mole" by Matassa, Stein would throw up his hands, and cry out in falsetto: "We got guns! We got guns!" And then in the deepest bass he could manage, reply, "Yeah? So what, asshole!"

  After reading Points of Origin, the Pillow Pyro Task Force decided that you couldn't find that many erections at the Playboy Mansion on New Year's Eve. It seemed that every time Aaron Stiles so much as thought about setting a fire he'd end up choking the ferret. And the erections didn't stop with the arsonist. The "good" firefighter, Phil Langtree, had his share of woodies as well, causing task-force banter about the author's description of what happens to Phil Langtree after fighting a blaze.

  When Phil Langtree wakes up the next morning in the house he is sharing with his friends Bill and Judy, he staggers into the kitchen in his underwear and Bill embarrasses him by calling attention to the bulge in his shorts, saying that it must have been "a pretty good fire."

  So all of the firefighters turned arson investigators, like Glen Lucero, got hit with the question: "Do you guys really get chubbies from dragging that big hose around?" And, "Do all you guys check each other's bulge in the firehouse to see if it was a pretty good fire?"

  There were so many contemptuous references to cops in the novel-even more by the "good" fireman Phil Langtree than by the "bad" one Aaron Stiles-that it seemed both despise the police equally. And it surprised the task force, even the firefighter investigators like Glen Lucero, that many members of the arson-investigator community were suspicious of the allegations against John, and some were downright hostile. The publisher of the magazine for whom John had written eight articles opined, "If they arrest John Orr for writing a book, they'd arrest Conan Doyle for writing Sherlock Holmes."

  Mike Matassa responded that Conan Doyle couldn't have written some of the scenes from Points of Origin unless he'd been there. When Matassa first learned about the arson attempt back in 1984 that had been made at Ole's Home Center's sister store, he verbalized for the others how he thought John Orr felt after the sheriffs called the Ole's calamity an accident:

  "How could you call this an accident? It's my work! And you cops are too stupid to figure it out! Cops! I hate them! What do I gotta do, burn down another Ole's to convince you fucking idiots?"

  John Orr's protagonist, Phil Langtree, has a romantic involvement with a woman named Chris, as did the author for months prior to his arrest. In the novel, the fictional Chris learns about serial arsonists from Langtree, who mixes the disorganized serial arsonists with the organized kind, but nevertheless makes interesting comments.

  In one passage of dialogue, Phil Langtree says of the serial arsonist that the fire becomes a friend and sometimes a lover, "actually a sexual thing," to which Chris replies, "Bullshit."

  Some members of the task force reacted like the fictional Chris does: Bullshit! The fire as lover? My lover, the fire? Pseudoliterary bullshit!

  Others weren't so sure. The task-force interviews were already revealing that John Orr had often said to his present wife, and presumably the other wives and paramours: "My job is my life. My mistress."

  Skeptics dismissed that as his rationale for philandering, but a few wondered if he could have meant it literally, as a reference to what they believed was his real job, the secret work that possessed him, allowing him to embrace the object of overwhelming desire.

  My mistress. My lover. The fire.

  Chapter 11

  CONSPIRACY

  The legal reason used to justify the prosecution of John Leonard Orr in a United States district court rather than a California state court was that he was accused of torching buildings "used in interstate commerce and used in activities affecting interstate commerce." Of course, the fire at Ole's Home Center might have qualified for a prosecution by U. S. attorneys, but the government prosecutors slipped free of that because of the statute of limitations on federal arson, even when death results from it. With no statute of limitations on murder, the state could take its time and try to develop a case against John Orr for a capital crime.

  Ole's was left to the Los Angeles County District Attorney's Office, along with all of the residential fires such as the disaster in College Hills, which would be almost as hard to prove as the arson at Ole's. But if the federal courts could convict him in the cases more easily proven, then any state prosecution to follow-including one that could charge four counts of murder in a fire that had been investigated and deemed accidental-might actually become feasible. It was for the federal prosecutors to decide in which U. S. judicial district he should be tried first for the retail-store arsons, and how many counts should be charged.

  There were two reasons to let Stefan Stein and Walt Brown have at him initially in the Central District of Los Angeles: first, because Stein and Brown had been bird-dogging the case for nearly a year, and second, because the U. S. District Court for the Central District of California had the clout. If the case against John Orr could be won in Los Angeles, it would have judicial significance when it came time to charge and try him for arsons committed in Bakersfield, Fresno, and Tulare.

  By April, Stein and Brown were raring to go. They'd been busy writing a twenty-seven-page opening statement for the jury, which was well crafted and very lucid given the complexity of the circumstantial case. And since prosecutors are uneasy when there's not a single reliable eyewitness who can point a finger and say "I saw him do it," the prosecutors tried to lay out a case in their opening that the jury could not fail to understand. The task force was proud of the prosecutors' work. There was just a matter of the few annoying motions in limine that John Orr's lawyer had filed with Edward Rafeedie, the district court judge in Los Angeles who would be presiding.

  Stein, ever the worrier, sweated out one of the motions having to do with the fingerprint evidence that he'd had examined so many times he could have traced the ridge pattern himself. Then on April 6, a week before they were to go to trial, the judge ruled on what Stein and Brown thought was a frivolous motion.

  Douglas McCann had asked that John Orr's novel and his letters to agents be excluded as hearsay. That made the prosecutors snicker. They thought that the manuscript and letters were amazingly probative of the arsonist's modus operandi. One only had to look at the list of similarities between the novel and the actual cases. They soon stopped snickering.

  Judge Rafeedie was known as a jurist who wanted to move things along. Speed was important to him. His decision moved the case right out of his courtroom. The judge granted the defendant's request to exclude the manuscript and the letters, not because he agreed with the defense that it was hearsay, but because he believed the prejudicial effect of the manuscript was too great under general rules of evidence. That is, the M. O. of the fictional arsonist did not appear so unique as to justify a conclusion that John Orr had firsthand knowledge of the arsons charged against him.

  As the judge put it: "Claimed similarities between the events in the manuscript and the actual events underlying the crimes charged in the indictment . . . are not . . . sufficiently probative to substantially outweigh the tremendous prejudice to the defendant."

  The government's arguments did not move him. The prosecutors were stunned, but they pulled themselves together and asked for a stay of proceedings pending an appeal to the Ninth Circuit of the U. S. Court of Appeals. And it was granted by the judge.

  That stay was a m
ajor victory for the prosecution. It meant that they might not have to go to court without the book and the letters, but it threw Stein and Brown into the appellate mode, drafting briefs instead of preparing for trial. And it forced them to lateral the ball to their prosecutorial cousins up in Fresno in the Eastern District of California. Stefan Stein and Walter Brown were benched until the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals could get into the game.

  And while the prosecution of John Orr was being transferred to Fresno with all the briefing that entailed, the task force had their own major distraction-the Rodney King trial.

  While Mike Matassa was out of town on an investigation, the LAPD cops were acquitted of beating Rodney King, causing Matassa to say jokingly to his partners, "Let's get back to town before the riot starts."

  And it did. Within days, ATF was asked to do the cause and origin on all of the riot's retail-store fires because, as Mike Matassa put it, store proprietors were "burning down their own cribs." It was a perfect chance to collect insurance for failing and failed businesses, and there were enough store owners buying gas in five-gallon cans to jump-start OPEC production.

  Because of the danger on the street during the riots, the task force was sent out in three-man cars. There were two ATF agents with one L. A. Fire Department investigator. The agents carried MP5s or AR-15s, and watched the investigator's back while he worked. It went on for three days with everyone sweltering in their "BDUs," the standard SWAT costume.

  They might have looked imposing and they might have been well armed, but so was the mob. The standard ATF repartee at that time included the line, "Hey, we just did a cause and origin-at thirty-five miles an hour. How about you?"

  And as bad luck would have it, the Matassas had had the biggest vacation of their lives planned for Easter. They'd booked a trip to Italy, but Linda Matassa had to take it without Mike. And he couldn't even get a weekend off to visit his brand-new thirty-foot Catalina sailboat, which was growing barnacles in Dana Point harbor. He just worked and took care of Mikey, a black-and-white terrier pup they'd adopted at Christmas after it had been abandoned. On a couple of occasions he couldn't get home to the frightened pup until 4:00 a. M., and then he'd have to be right back on duty in L. A. by seven o'clock. Linda Matassa was more of an animal nut than Saint Francis of Assisi. If she'd known that the pup was alone and scared she'd have flown home and put a scar on her husband's other eyelid.

  Glen Lucero loved Fresno's small-town atmosphere and hospitality. When they closed the shop for the day, the assistant U. S. attorneys would open the fridge and break out the beer.

  Fresno wasn't exactly the boondocks, but the jury pool was drawn from eleven largely rural counties. One could drive for miles past citrus groves, cotton fields, and grazing cattle, so the guys from L. A. were hoping for a jury that looked like a monthly meeting of the Rotary Club, instead of people who were into "lifestyle experimentation" with spiders tattooed on their chins.

  Forty-year-old Carl Faller, the chief of the office, and his thirty-four-year-old colleague, Pat Hanly, were aggressive and confident, more like state prosecutors. More like Mike Cabral or the other Los Angeles deputy D. A. S with whom Lucero usually worked.

  An assistant U. S. attorney from L. A. had described Captain Marvin Casey of Bakersfield as "folksy," and "unsure of what he had." But Carl Faller saw him as shrewd, with full knowledge of what he had, right from the very beginning.

  Carl Faller said of Marvin Casey, "When all is said and done, he's the ball game."

  So they were back to the baseball metaphors, and the Mighty Casey was going'to get another at bat.

  Assistant U. S. Attorney Carl Faller liked to say that he lived by an axiom taught to him by an old cop when he was a young prosecutor: "Don't screw up good police work." That alone endeared him to the task force, who believed that they had done some very good police work.

  Matassa and Hanly hit it off at once. Matassa liked to address the young prosecutor as "Paddy, me boy" because of Hanly's Irish roots, which had been planted in the soil of Solvang, a famous Danish community near Santa Barbara. Hanly explained that Solvang had originally been settled by the Irish, but because the Irish are such a disorganized lot, the Danes took over and turned it into a tourist mecca to celebrate Danish pride.

  When the prosecutors first met John Orr and his lawyer, Douglas McCann, in their office, Hanly made an observation about the defendant: "When we shook hands, his was fleshy, pasty; it was a small feminine hand. He just didn't strike me as a fireman."

  Pat Hanly made it a point never to speak a word to the defendant either in the courtroom or out of it, and as to Douglas McCann's fast-talking nervous style, they said he talked like Daffy Duck.

  Prosecution and defense were mutually contemptuous. John Orr said that Carl Faller was "a sneaky, backstabbing kind of prosecutor," and that Pat Hanly was "snide and slippery," always asking questions that he knew would result in an objection. The only lawyer in the case whom John hated more than the prosecutors was his own.

  John did his share of interviews, including extensive sessions with his hometown newspaper, the Glendale News-Press, which also excerpted his novel, Points of Origin. He'd been featured on Inside Edition, but he accused them of "manipulating the interview." He was never happy with his television coverage, believing that TV journalists existed just to sandbag people for ratings.

  The prosecutors had received a few offers from the defense that they'd rejected. The first was the offer to take a polygraph. The prosecutors believed that a polygraph would be useless. Their thinking was that a psychopath's underdeveloped superego, or conscience, made him unfit for the polygraph. An ego like a cruise missile, a superego like a BB, is how they looked at John Orr.

  Then the defense had another idea: "How about a plephysmograph?" they asked.

  And when the prosecutors said, "A what?" it was explained that a sensor could be attached to John Orr's frontispiece in order to measure blood flow, thus signifying an erection. It had been used with some success on child molesters in clinical settings.

  The prosecutors said no, videos of burning buildings and brush fires and Campfire Girls roasting wienies probably wouldn't prove much. They said that even though the fictional arsonist was always waxing his carrot at fire scenes, having John Orr hang a wire on his wang wouldn't be admissible even if he did get a woody.

  John Orr said well, he was game for just about any other test they could devise.

  The press flocked to the courthouse for the first day of trial, Tuesday, July 21, 1992. Presiding was U. S. District Court Judge Oliver W. Wanger, a snowy-haired jurist known for his relaxed, laid-back courtroom and his booming voice.

  The defendant, who'd been staying at a Fresno hotel under his lawyer's supervision, looked scholarly in a tweed jacket, a subdued necktie, glasses, and a gray-streaked beard.

  The government lawyers had charged John Leonard Orr with five counts of arson: two in Fresno, one in Tulare, and two in Bakersfield. Judge Wanger began by explaining to the jury the difference between direct and circumstantial evidence. He used the example of a witness seeing a man take a gun from the trunk of a car, which was direct evidence, and a witness seeing a man standing by the open trunk and being found to have a gun. That was circumstantial evidence. The judge gave the obligatory admonishment about not reading any news articles or listening to any radio or TV reports about the case, and everyone thought, Fat chance. You couldn't walk without slipping on the drool left by slavering hordes of reporters.

  Assistant U. S. Attorney Pat Hanly handled the opening argument, and after asking that witnesses be excluded from the courtroom, he described for the jury how John Leonard Orr, after attending an arson conference in Fresno, had set five fires in the Central Valley, then returned home and wrote a book about it.

  He described the incendiary delay devices found in Tulare, Bakersfield, and Fresno at the retail establishments, and he used the term signature device. Of course, he talked about the fingerprint collected by Captain Marvin C
asey, and how it was eventually matched with the defendant's left ring fingerprint.

  Hanly sketched the surveillance to San Luis Obispo when the tracking device was discovered by the defendant, as well as the defendant's failure to ever come forward to ask why he'd been targeted. Lastly, he discussed the letters that John Orr had written to agents and publishers discussing the arson series, including: "I was even considered a suspect at one point."

  When Hanly's synopsis was concluded, Douglas McCann began his opening argument by discussing the arson conference, and pointing out that the defendant had received a "completion certificate" for attendance, implying that John Orr must have been there until the end of the last day, during the time in which fires were being set. He was concentrating on an alibi for the hours between 8:00 a. M. and noon on January 16, 1987.

  McCann agreed with the government's thesis that one man had set all five fires, but not the man at counsel table. He disputed "consciousness of guilt," wherein the prosecutors maintained that because John Orr hadn't come forward after knowing he was a suspect, one could infer culpability. He summarized the evidence found in the black bag in the defendant's car, and implied that all the things in that bag were tools for an arson class that John Orr had been teaching, and that his partner, Joe Lopez, would verify it.

  As to the most damaging piece of evidence, the fingerprint collected by Marvin Casey, McCann informed the jury that in 1989, a Department of Justice fingerprint expert had examined the defendant's fingerprint, but had found no match. And that two years later someone else supposedly found a match, and because of that two-year gap and stark difference in the analysis-and because Marvin Casey hadn't written a date on that piece of notebook paper-the jury could question whether it actually had come from the arson attempt or had been fabricated.

  John Orr's attorney was more than hinting at task-force malfeasance by then, and he discussed John Orr's superior, Battalion Chief Christopher Gray, from whom the task force had heard details in October 1991 about the manuscript, according to the prosecution's version of events.