Was It a Fireman?

Posted on October 29, 2007 in Santiago Fire

We may never catch the person(s) who set the Santiago Fire. It is always very difficult to track down an arsonist and in the case of the Orange County blaze there is little to go on except a lead in the form of the driver of a white Ford F-150 who may be nothing more than a witness. Word is that whoever did it knew what (s)he was doing. Could this person be following in the footsteps of a creepy legend?:

A case in point was John Orr, a renowned Glendale fire captain and arson investigator who set dozens of blazes throughout Southern California and was the subject of Joseph Wambaugh’s book “Fire Lover.”

In an interview, Wambaugh said Orr was caught after a 1987 Bakersfield fire in which he uncharacteristically left a clue. At the scene, investigators found a yellow piece of notebook paper that was part of an incendiary device. The paper bore a fingerprint. A Bakersfield fire captain, Marvin Casey, who suspected a firefighter was the arsonist, tried to identify the print, but a database in Sacramento could not make a match.

Three years later, the ATF matched the print using a Los Angeles database containing Orr’s fingerprints from a decades-old application to become a police officer.

It didn’t help Orr’s case when an unpublished novel he wrote, “Points of Origin,” seemed to outline how he went about setting fires.

“His character is a firefighter who is an arsonist, and he described in living color what it was like to set arson fires,” Wambaugh said.

Orr was sentenced to 30 years in federal prison for setting fires nearly identical to the ones he described in the novel. Six years later, in 1998, he received a life term for a 1984 blaze in South Pasadena that killed four people.

“John was a legend. For him, I think, it was the thrill of being a hero,” said the ATF’s Carroll.

Fire is strange stuff when it burns across the ridges of the brain.

[tags]Santiago fire, California fires, California wildfires, wildfire, wild fires, wildfires, disasters, arson, arsonist, crime[/tags]