The Californian Trail Blazer - John Leonard Orr 🔥🔥

 

California is a magnet for fire starters due to its climate and expanses of wilderness. In the 1980s a series of wild blazes ran across the Los Angeles area, sometimes as many as three per day. In one incident alone sixty-five homes were reduced to smouldering ash, but it was October 1984 that the first human lives were taken by it.

 At 7:00pm Ole Home Centre in South Pasadena blared out an emergency warning. Smoke was billowing out of the hardware department, as Jim Odin, a cashier tried to help escort customers out of the store. Although he survived the ordeal he was badly burnt in the process, his co-workers Jimmy Cetina and Carolyn Kraus did not survive, neither did customers Ada Deal and her grandson Matthew Troidi . 

 The police discovered during an investigation that this was an electrical error, as no signs of arson could be found. Captain Marvin Casey who was a seasoned arson investigator disagreed with this verdict and was convinced that this fire had been set purposefully by someone igniting a stack of cushions. 

 In January 1987 a number of suspicious fires broke out north of Pasadena, in a craft shop Marvin found an incendiary device in a bin of dried flowers, it was crudely made yet effective. Late that same day ANOTHER blaze started and a trail of arson attacks ensued. 

 Marvin began a theory that one of their own three hundred arson experts was the arsonist. A partial fingerprint was found on the yellow paper surrounding a discovered incendiary device, the experts were able to render it a substantial and usable print. AFIS failed to make a match so he decided he wanted all fifty-five of the arson experts attending a conference in the area fingerprinted and checked against the partial print. This request was denied and the case sat in limbo for two years. 

 In March 1989 more fires flared up very close to the venue for the annual arson investigators symposium. By comparing attendees to both events he had narrowed down his list of suspects to ten. He convinced Fresno attendants to stealthily obtain the fingerprints, but the results came back negative. 

 In the 1990s the fires started once again and the "pillow pyre" task force was set up. In this task force, Marvin found an ally in Tom Campuzano who believed his theory. Casey handed over the partial print to him and they ran it through a database of everyone who had ever tried to apply to the LAPD.  The results came back with a match, the fingerprint belonged to John Leonard Orr. 

 Orr was a forty-one-year-old fire captain with many years of experience investigating arson and he was well-liked, he had a reputation of always being first on the scene when a fire broke out. They promptly bugged him by placing a tracking device on his car. Orr found it and removed it immediately, so the police then fixed another on his dashboard when he brought in his vehicle for maintenance. 

 On the 22nd of November 1991, the set of "The Waltons" caught fire. The tracker showed that Orr had driven away from the scene at 3:30am, He received the dispatcher's report which incorrectly named the address but despite this Orr managed to go to the correct one. 

 They quickly applied for a warrant to search his home and found a cache of matches and cigarettes, and his car held rubber bands and rolls and rolls of yellow paper. He had even recorded footage of a house in Pasadena after the blaze. Police also found a half-written novel about the life of an investigator who set fires, the details were too eerily similar to be a coincidence. 

 He was arrested in December 1991 and charged with five accounts of arson, then in June 1998 he was charged with four counts of murder. He was psychopathic, manipulative, vain and lacked any remorse for his actions. He denied the charges through both trials. The book also includes the rape of a girl and the setting light to a vehicle. The police believe they may have found unsolved cases that match these events detailed in the book but lack any evidence to pin them on Orr.