Fire Lover (2002)

by Wambaugh, Joseph

  Sandra Flannery was the first prosecution lawyer, and she said, "Well, I thought I would begin by wishing you a good morning, but I do have to say, to come to you on behalf of the people of the state of California and ask you to impose the penalty of death causes me hesitation to ever call this a good morning. But that is what I am here to do. And I do ask you to choose for John Orr the penalty of death."

  She told them that they were the "conscience of the community," and that they were here "because of John Orr's choices."

  "It was not an impulsive act," she said. "It was an act done with great deliberation. It was a choice. With each match that John Orr took out of that matchbook he made a choice. As he positioned those matches on that cigarette in just the right manner, at just the right position to create the amount of delay that he wanted and that he needed, he made a choice. He used his specialized knowledge of fire dynamics to set a fire in a place and in a manner that would send that fire racing against life itself. That was the choice.

  "He could have set his device anywhere he wanted. But he chose to go onto the side where there were no ceiling sprinklers. He made that choice. You see, when it came to his own personal safety, and the safety of his family, John Orr was keenly aware of fire dangers and chose to prevent them. But when it came to the safety of the people at Ole's, John Orr was keenly aware of the fire dangers and chose to exploit them.

  "He knew, based upon his specialized knowledge of fire dynamics, that by going to the housewares department and choosing to place his ignition device in the polyfoam, he would be setting a fire of inescapable proportion. John Orr would like you to believe that he was driven by some obsessive compulsion to set fires, and yet if that were the case, how did he restrain himself enough to make it to the polyfoam stack, which he knew would ignite as though it were petroleum itself?

  "He alone knew how many minutes separated life from death. He was as much a killer as someone who shoots their victims face-to-face. Only how John Orr did it was with so much more terror and deception. Under the guise of being the protector of good, John Orr was in fact the perpetrator of evil.

  "John Orr, through his job, was given power, but that power was not enough. He needed more power and he wanted more power, and he set his fires to gain that power. I guess you could say that knowledge is power. If that is the case, then isn't it also true that secret knowledge is secret power? He had secret knowledge and that gave him secret power over the lives of other people through setting the fires, watching their reactions, seeing who would survive.

  "How long did his delay last? Ten minutes perhaps. When you deliberate in the jury room, take ten minutes to be alone with your thoughts. Ten minutes is a very long time to reflect upon what is the right thing to do. And yet in those ten minutes did John Orr make the choice to turn around?

  "He could have gone back. He could have extinguished his device. But instead he chose to let his device burn and extinguish the lives of Carolyn Krause, Jimmy Cetina, Ada Deal, and Matthew Troidl. Then, as the fire burned and ravaged the inside of that building, where was John Orr? He was outside taking photographs.

  "The defense has suggested to you that there's some type of obsessive-compulsive behavior going on, driving John Orr to set these fires. A doctor came in and suggested that in three interviews he had gotten to know the real John Orr. But I suggest to you that each of you have gotten to know the real John Orr. John Orr's fires were moral decisions. He chose to set them. The mere inability to understand why someone can do something, and have an outlook on life that is so different from yours, doesn't transform that outlook into a mental illness.

  "John Orr had an attitude about life. His attitude was that he wanted power, that he was superior to others, that he could create circumstances and situations that no one could figure out but him. He had secret knowledge that gave him secret power.

  "To not require the ultimate penalty for the ultimate crime would be to diminish and devalue those lives that were taken. It would be an act of cruelty to the victims, under the mistaken belief that you are extending compassion to the defendant. If John Orr is permitted to live and replay the Ole's fire and its pleasure over and over and over again in his mind, then it will be as though he has killed Carolyn Krause, Jimmy Cetina, Ada Deal, and Matthew Troidl over and over again. Thank you."

  It was easily Sandra Flannery's best work. Lawyer-spectators in the courtroom were impressed with her flashes of eloquence in a long trial that had seen so little of it.

  "Ladies and gentlemen," Peter Giannini began, "John Orr will be punished in this case. As a society you will be protected from him. The only question is not will he get out of prison. The only question is when. Will he die, because you say he must die, by lethal injection? Or will he die when God decides that he dies, if he is sentenced to life without the possibility of parole? It is a long, slow, tedious kind of death. Is it worse than death? I don't think so. I think life is sacred. Every life is sacred. John's life is also sacred.

  "Every one of you individually is being called upon to make one of the most difficult decisions of your life, and it is not a collective decision. It is your decision individually. There is nobody else to turn to. If every single one of you doesn't agree that death is the appropriate punishment, it isn't.

  "What did God do? What did he do when Cain killed Abel? He put a mark on his head, set him out to wander alone in the world. He banished him. He gave him life without the possibility of parole.

  "The prosecutor said in her closing statement that the ultimate crime deserves the ultimate punishment. You have to ask yourself is this the ultimate crime? There are thousands of homicides in the county of Los Angeles every year. Very few of those are death-penalty cases where you get to first-degree murder with special circumstances. Where you have to start talking about the possibility of a penalty phase. What does that mean in this case? The only special circumstance charged against John Orr in this case is that more than one person died in that fire. If everything else about this case was the same, everything else you had heard in this case was identical, but only one person died in that fire, we wouldn't be in this phase of the case. There'd be no penalty phase."

  Despite the hyperbole about thousands of homicides, that argument by Peter Giannini probably represented his finest moment in the case, effectively exposing the quirkiness of the law: One arson murder, no capital crime. Two arson murders, capital crime.

  "I think his history speaks for itself," Giannini said. "He's extremely sick. He's not normal. He lacks the kind of control the rest of us have. With John Orr it's always the same or similar conduct. Repeated conduct. It's a compulsion. The testimony of Dr. Markman is uncontradicted. The people could have put a psychiatrist up here to say there's nothing wrong with this guy. They chose not to do that. You have to ask yourself why. I think the reason is because he does suffer from a mental defect. He couldn't stop himself. He knew he was suspected. He knew he was being tracked."

  So it was Peter Giannini himself who became the one to confront the premise of his earlier argument, that John Orr was too smart to have torched Warner Brothers, Kennington, and San Augustine, knowing that he was probably being tracked. Giannini had at last decided that compulsion trumps intelligence.

  "When this trial is over, you're going to want to put it behind you. If you vote to kill him, it might not be that easy to do. You'll have to live with it for the rest of your lives. The challenge here is to punish him, to protect all of us, and to hold John Orr responsible for the rest of his life for what he did. And the challenge here, I think, is to do that without losing sight of our own human values, our higher values, and our ability to show mercy.

  "It's never wrong, it's never weak, it's never a mistake to let somebody live. However you might feel about John, you've got to take pity on his father, his mother, his daughters, his four-year-old grandchild. These are innocent people too. They haven't done anything. If you kill him, you're going to destroy them. An eighty-three-year-old man is sitting back ther
e. Let them live out their final years without the horror of John's execution ruining their lives every day. His grandson needs his grandfather to be alive. How do you say, 'My grandfather was executed at San Quentin'? If you do this, you're condemning him too.

  "You can't bring back the people who died in that fire. God didn't give you that power. God only gave you the power to take life, not to give it back. All you do if you kill John is you create another funeral. Another innocent mother and father suffering the same anguish that we've seen. That's all. Another death, another funeral, another grave.

  "There's been enough death here. There's been too much death, too much suffering. Don't make it worse, Don't make these other people suffer. They didn't do anything to deserve this. I'm asking you to show mercy to John, to his father, mother, daughters, and grandson. Give him life without the possibility of parole. Thank you."

  When Mike Cabral had his moment, Rich Edwards from his arson task force was there, and Sandra Flannery, as usual, sat in the second chair. When Cabral got up, he said, "Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I stand here before you with a heavy heart, because as a representative of the people of the state of California, I'm going to ask you to go back and deliberate. And at some point to come out of that room and look at me, Ms. Flannery, Deputy Edwards, Mr. Rucker, Mr. Giannini, and the defendant, John Orr, as well as the thirty-one million people in the state of California, and say that that man there deserves the death penalty for his crimes.

  "A man who, twenty-some-odd years ago, undertook an oath to protect the people of the city of Glendale, to be a firefighter, to save lives. And then his reign of terror came down upon the citizens of California. And when you come out that door after deliberating on this, you will have to tell us all that justice was served in this case. The people submit to you that the only morally justified punishment in this case is death.

  "It is not an easy decision, but that is, in fact, the case about a man who is trained to protect and investigate and arrest the exact people that he has become. That's what we trained him to do, but he took that training, that special knowledge that we gave him, and turned it against us. He used it to take the lives of four innocent people, four innocent people who went to work that day or to shop that day."

  Mike Cabral called on a righteous God and biblical passages to counter Peter Giannini's Cain and Abel allusion, just in case scriptures would carry the day. Then he confronted Giannini's characterization of the Ole's crimes.

  "Now, Mr. Giannini says, well, Mr. Orr really has not crossed the line into the worst of the worst. He has taken the lives of four innocent citizens. How is that just your ordinary arson murder? The people submit that would be a gross miscarriage of justice and deny the victims their due day in court.

  "Now, Mr. Giannini spoke to you, and right near the end of his argument he said the defendant is a man of compassion and empathy, saying look how he'd tried to help the man at Bell's Cottage. But I ask you to scour the evidence in this case for signs of a conscious empathy on the part of the defendant. Did he show any empathy for the victims of the Ole's fire? The evidence reflects he took pictures. Then what did he do to add insult upon Mr. Troidl's two-and-a-half-year-old son? He used his name in his manuscript. This is what the defendant has to say about those four people in the Ole's fire."

  Cabral then picked up the manuscript and said, "Now, if you look at page ten you'll see that it ends with, 'Aaron had already killed five people in one of his fires.' But what does the rest of that paragraph say?"

  He read aloud the paragraph that he'd been holding back for this moment: " 'He rationalized the deaths as he did everything. It wasn't his fault. People to him just acted stupidly. And their death had nothing to do with the fact that he set the fire. They just reacted too slowly. It was too bad about the baby, but, shit, it wasn't my fault.' "

  Cabral diluted his message by overexplaining what they'd just heard. After that he turned to the manuscript and read more: " 'He loved the inadvertent attention he derived from the newspaper coverage, and hated it when he wasn't properly recognized. The deaths were blotted out of his mind. It wasn't his fault. Just stupid people acting as stupid people do.' "

  He put down the manuscript, and again characterizing the novel as a memoir, said, "Now, I ask you, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, if you have heard any evidence that Carolyn Krause, Jimmy Cetina, Ada Deal, or Matthew Troidl did anything to be called stupid, because of the way they died? The only thing those individuals did was they had the misfortune of getting in the path of the defendant as he continued his reign of terror throughout the state of California.

  "You heard Dr. Markman. He says the defendant is a sick man. Well, you heard the testimony of his former girlfriend concerning her car. Rather interesting, since the defendant supposedly set fires only under compulsion, trying to relieve the tension from his obsessing over something, we're not certain what.

  "The people submit to you that his fire-setting pattern was all about power and control. He talks about that in that book, how he loves the power of watching these people come screaming out of the store. The power as it affects everybody's lives. And he requires the fire department to come in and bring all their units. He's in control.

  "And then what does he do with that? Well, if he's got a video camera, he turns it into a video so everybody can see it. He's got his little secret. His little secret is that he knows he did it. He knows that he did it.

  "Dr. Markman goes on to say it would be devastating to his life if the defendant had to actually admit that he had done these things. All he did was plead guilty, and then felt he was being undercut in doing it. Dr. Markman says it would be devastating to his life because it would be an admission that his life was a failure.

  "Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, the people submit to you that his life is a failure. That's what the evidence in this case clearly establishes, that he is a complete failure in life."

  Mike Cabral talked about punishment and retribution, saying that life in a prison cell was much better than what the defendant had given to his victims. And he asked them to remember the frail and devastated Billy Deal, the first prosecution witness in the case-and it must have seemed long ago to that jury. He talked of how Billy Deal had lost the wife with whom he'd wished to grow old, and his grandson, and that now Billy Deal could not grow old in peace.

  "The defendant took that away from Mr. Deal," Mike Cabral said. "But he asks you to give it to him. To allow him to have that. And the people say, once again, that the only moral, just penalty in this case is death."

  For the remaining several minutes he kept repeating what the victims and their families had lost, but each repetition seemed to diminish the impact. In a sense, Mike Cabral's remarkable memory, which had allowed him to cover every detail, might have worked against him here.

  In the end, he chose not "conscience of the community," as Sandra Flannery had done, but retribution and revenge: "Certainly the defendant's family is entitled to your sympathy. There's absolutely no doubt about that. But the people submit to you that their sympathy is outweighed by the impact that this fire had on all the victims, including Matthew Troidl, Ada Deal, Carolyn Krause, and Jimmy Cetina. Because the defendant's grandson, unlike Matthew Troidl, will get to see his grandfather again, to tell his grandfather about the happy events in his life, to grow up with his family, spend time with his family. The very things that the defendant has denied his victims.

  "And twenty years from now, as Mr. Giannini referenced, John Orr's grandson will be twenty-four years old, a young man. He may have a family just like Carolyn Krause did. May actually be able to go and see his grandfather and show him the family pictures. But Carolyn's children won't have their mother there to show pictures to, and to gush over the children that they have raised. Her children won't have their mother there to prepare for all the rites of passage that we have in our teenage years and into adulthood.

  "The defendant asks you to give him that mercy. The people submit that it is unjust
to give him that mercy. The people submit to you that the aggravating factors in this case, the circumstances of the crimes, the impact that it's had on the victims and the defendant's secret knowledge, all aggravate this case well beyond any of the mitigating evidence in this case. And we ask you to return with a verdict of death. Thank you."

  The victim's families, particularly Kim Troidl talking about her son and mother, had shown this jury the face of consummate human agony. A juror's mixed feelings about capital punishment, retribution, or the value of human life might count for little upon recalling that woman's desolation. Facts could be forgotten, the law ignored, in a rush to provide her with a drop of solace. One could easily imagine a juror thinking: Put him to death if that's what it takes. Kill him. Kill him twice. Anything to ease that woman's everlasting torment.

  Ed Rucker knew that, and his argument was unlike any of the others. It was intensely personal, at times was as much about himself as it was about the defendant. He said, "I'm the last lawyer who will speak to you and we'll be through with the arguments today. This is a rather awesome responsibility, speaking to people who we can't have a discussion with, about whether we are going to take somebody's life. I sure don't feel qualified to do it. I wish we had the ability to bring someone in here to help you. To bring in a minister, priest, rabbi, somebody to speak to you with some wisdom, with more humanity. I don't feel wise enough to do that. But this is our system, and I am going to do the best I can to help you with this.

  "The last few days I haven't slept much. I was up in the middle of the night walking around the house thinking what I could say. And I think the best thing to say is what I think you might be concerned about, and what you would think about before you'd reach a decision of this magnitude.

  "This is a crime from South Pasadena. I lived in South Pasadena for twenty years, raised my family there. My sons went to junior high school and graduated from South Pasadena High School. Every Fourth of July we go back to South Pasadena High School to watch the fireworks.