Pod Insights Infamous America ARSONISTS Ep. 2 | John Orr: “The Fingerprint” About this episode In 1987 and 1989, destructive fires erupt in conjunction with arson investigation conferences in California. Bakersfield Fire Captain Marvin Casey doesn’t believe the timing is a coincidence. He finds a fingerprint on an incendiary device at the scene of one of the fires, and he believes the arsonist is a firefighter. On Casey’s short list of suspects is arson investigator John Orr.
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1:07 Speaker 01 A slow buildup of suspicious fires had been happening in the Los Angeles area for about 10 years, from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s. The fires were centered around the small communities of Glendale and Pasadena, both of which sit below the San Gabriel Mountains northeast of LA. Some of the fires were in the dry, brushy hills that led into the mountains. Others were in big retail stores like supermarkets or home improvement centers. Up until 1984, firefighters and the general public had been lucky, all things considered. The fires had done limited damage before they were put out by sprinkler systems or alert employees or fast-acting fire crews.
1:50 Speaker 01 But the luck ran out on October 10, 1984. That night, at about 8:00 PM, a fire started at Ollie's Home Center, a home improvement store in South Pasadena. The fire tore through the building and destroyed it with shocking speed. Four people died: two employees and a grandmother who was with her two-year-old grandson.
2:13 Speaker 01 At the same time, a fire was burning in a supermarket a few blocks away. And a couple hours earlier, there was another fire at a different supermarket. At both supermarkets, the fire started in the potato chip aisle. Investigators declared those fires arson. But the destruction at Ole's Home Center had been so thorough that it allowed the lead investigator on the case, a longtime deputy with the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department, to classify the fire as "undetermined." The deputy sheriff believed the fire was likely an accident caused by faulty electrical wiring. Others weren't so sure. And one man, John Orr, knew it wasn't an accident.
2:58 Speaker 01 John Orr was the arson investigator for the Glendale Fire Department, the department that served the community that was right next to Pasadena. He was a respected investigator, even if he wasn't well-liked and was viewed as overly zealous. No one realized it at the time, but Orr's career with the Glendale Fire Department mirrored the rise in suspicious fires in the area. It would be several more years before law enforcement investigators worked backward through the old cases with a new viewpoint.
3:30 Speaker 01 On that tragic night in 1984, and in the days that followed, there was no direct evidence that linked John Orr to any of the three fires. There were only some curiosities which would have more meaning years later. He was on the scene of the first fire incredibly fast after he received a call from dispatch. It was almost as if he were already in the area, except he didn't live or work in Pasadena. He made it from the first fire to the second fire so quickly that it was like he had been expecting the emergency call and knew exactly where to go. The second fire was the Ole's Fire. And at the scene, John Orr stood there taking pictures of the burning, crumbling building while the other firefighters battled the blaze.
4:13 Speaker 01 At the time, his behavior wasn't suspicious since he was an arson investigator and not a frontline firefighter. Afterward, when the deputy sheriff who was the lead investigator believed the fire was an accident, John Orr was convinced it was arson. He believed it was highly likely the fire had started in a group of products that were stuffed with foam. The foam in couch cushions, chair cushions, and mattresses was extremely flammable. If a fire started in an area that was packed with those items, it could spread with frightening speed and cause the devastation that was seen at Ole's. Then, almost as if to prove John Orr's point, several days after the Ole's fire, a fire
4:56 Speaker 01 started in the mattress section of a store called Builders Emporium in North Hollywood. Two months later, a fire started at a second Ole's location in Pasadena. The point of origin was in the aisle that contained foam cushions. After those five fires in a two-month period, investigators knew they were dealing with a serial arsonist, even if the first Ole's fire wasn't officially classified as arson. And they knew the arsonist had been at work for several years. The proof was found at the last two fires in 1984. The same type of device had been used to start both fires, and that type of device had been found at other fires which dated back at least four years.
5:40 Speaker 01 It was a simple but effective firestarter. A small bundle that contained a cigarette and three matches which were wrapped in a piece of yellow notebook paper. When the cigarette was lit, it burned down and lit the matches. The matches lit the notebook paper and created a flame. The flame lit the flammable material around it and grew into a fire. The system was called a delay device because it gave the arsonist about 15 minutes to leave the area before the fire started. Investigators had never publicized the type of device that they had been finding at the scenes of fires.
6:16 Speaker 01 That meant there was virtually no chance that the recent fires were the work of a copycat, or that they were amazing coincidences in which different arsonists were using the same type of device at the same time. A mysterious serial arsonist stalked the neighborhoods around Glendale and Pasadena, and yet John Orr, one of the most talented arson investigators in the region, had no leads on the suspect, nor did anyone else. It wasn't until 1987, when the arsonist left Southern California and set a series of fires in Central California, that investigators narrowed their focus to a shocking possibility. It was almost too crazy to believe, but at least one investigator started floating
7:00 Speaker 01 the possibility that the arsonist was a firefighter, and maybe even an arson investigator.
7:18 Speaker 01 From Black Barrel Media, this is Infamous America. I'm your host, Chris Wimmer, and this season, we're telling the stories of two of the most notorious arsonists in American history: John Orr and Paul Keller. This is episode two, John Orr: The Fingerprint.
7:41 Speaker 01 During the year that followed the five significant fires at the end of 1984, the city of Glendale saw a 78% rise in reported cases of arson. That year, 1985, was the fifth anniversary of the Arson Investigation Unit at the Glendale Fire Department. That unit was essentially one man, John Orr. He had joined the department in the mid-'70s and had been appointed the first official arson investigator in 1981. His reputations inside and outside the department were complex. In the realm of arson investigation, he was considered top of the range. He was a respected investigator who had busted several arsonists.
8:23 Speaker 01 He taught classes to new recruits, and he wrote multiple articles for a publication called American Fire Journal. He was known for his uncanny ability to find the point of origin of a fire. In the future, detectives and prosecutors would understand that it helped that John already knew the point of origin before he arrived at the scene. Outside of the department, he was not an easy person to like or to live with. By the end of 1985, he was on his fourth marriage, and he would soon get rid of his first partner at work. At the time, John Orr, the arson investigator for the Glendale Fire Department, was partnered with an arson investigator for the Glendale Police Department.
9:05 Speaker 01 The firefighter and the cop worked as a team to investigate and arrest arsonists. By most accounts, John and his first partner were a successful team, but John wanted a change.
9:21 Speaker 01 At the end of 1986, John convinced his boss that the partnership wasn't working. John's partner was transferred to a different assignment in the police department, and John received a new partner just in time for the next major round of arson fires. If the fire captain who had managed the scene at the deadly Ole's Home Center fire in October 1984 had been astonished that two fires were burning at two retail stores at the same time within a few blocks of each other, that would be nothing compared to what would happen in January 1987. The mysterious arsonist who had plagued and terrorized the Los Angeles area for years was about to go north, and the timing would be too coincidental to ignore.
10:06 Speaker 01 For three days in Fresno, in the Central Valley of California, there was a convention that was hosted by the California Conference of Arson Investigators. Nearly 250 firefighters, cops, lawyers, insurance representatives, and arson investigators converged on Fresno to discuss fire prevention, suppression, and investigation. For those in attendance who may have remembered a major news story from a few years earlier, they were arriving in Fresno five and a half years after a man called Big John Burgess was arrested for building, delivering, and detonating a bomb at Harvey's Wagon Wheel Casino in State Line, Nevada. John Burgess, his two accomplices, and his two sons were arrested in the Fresno area
10:51 Speaker 01 in August 1981.
10:54 Speaker 01 Now, in January 1987, John Orr left his new partner in Glendale to handle regular business, and John made the four-hour drive to Fresno for the seminar. But if he made any appearances at the convention, they must have been brief. The excitement started Tuesday night, January 13th. The weather's getting colder, and maybe some thoughts are starting to drift in the direction of holiday gifts. Even if you're not there yet, it's still time for sweatshirts and hoodies, in most places, which I wear almost every day while I'm working. My newest purchase from Quince is the Flowknit Performance Hybrid Pullover Hoodie. It's a long name, but it's ultra-soft, lightweight, and amazingly affordable.
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13:40 Speaker 01 The night most attendees arrived in Fresno for the convention. An employee at a shop called Payless Drugstore on North Blackstone Avenue noticed smoke rising from a cabinet which was packed with sleeping bags. While the employee watched, the smoke erupted into a fire. Smoke from the fire set off the sprinklers in the ceiling. The sprinklers began to douse the flames as the store manager grabbed a fire extinguisher, ran to the cabinet, and blasted the fire with the extinguisher. The fire was out in seconds, but the mystery was just beginning. No one had been seen in the area of the fire before it started, and there was no obvious evidence to suggest how it had started.
14:23 Speaker 01 But it wouldn't take long for investigators to guess the how when a spree of destructive fires started two days later.
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15:41 Speaker 01 On Thursday night, two nights after the fire at Payless Drugstore on North Blackstone Avenue, a shopper noticed smoke in a store called Hancock Fabrics. The store was also on North Blackstone Avenue and was less than a block from Payless Drugstore. The shopper watched as the gray smoke turned black, and then the black smoke exploded into a fireball. The flames raced up the walls to the ceiling as the shopper stood transfixed by the speed of the fire. Then a voice shouted "Fire!" over the speaker system in the store, and everyone started running. All the employees and shoppers made it out of the building just in time. The fire raged out of control to the point where the first firefighters on the scene
16:25 Speaker 01 couldn't even attempt to go inside. They were forced to stay outside and limit their work to making sure the fire didn't spread to neighboring buildings. Then, as fire crews soaked Hancock Fabrics, they received another emergency call. One block away, at a store called House of Fabrics, an employee saw smoke and traced it to its source. The employee found a burn mark on the wall in an area that was stacked with foam pillows. Luckily, the incendiary device that had been left behind did not ignite into a full-on fire. But the feeling for firefighters must have been surreal. They were standing in a triangle of targets in the middle of Fresno. They could spin in a circle and see Payless Drugstore and Hancock Fabrics and House of
17:10 Speaker 01 Fabrics. Three fires at three retail stores in two days, all within two blocks of each other, and all while 250 cops and firefighters were in town for an arson convention. Investigators were stunned by the brazenness. And as it turned out, the fires on Tuesday and Thursday were just a warm-up for the main event on Friday.
17:36 Speaker 01 At 10:45 on Friday morning, in Tulare, California, an hour south of Fresno, a fire broke out at a store called Surplus City. As with the fire on Tuesday night at Payless Drugstore, the fire at Surplus City started in a rack of sleeping bags. Forty-five minutes later, at 11:30 a.m., another fire started in Tulare. That one was in a store called Family Bargain Center. Smoke began drifting out of a display that was stocked with foam pillows. A customer spotted the smoke, and the store manager ran over, yanked out the pillows, and put out the fire. In Bakersfield, California, one hour south of Tulare, it happened all over again.
18:20 Speaker 01 A pair of fires within an hour of each other at popular retail stores. At 2:00 p.m., an employee at a store called Craft Mart noticed smoke rising from an area in the center of the store. The store manager rushed to the spot and saw small flames burning in an arrangement of dry flowers. The manager quickly put out the flames with a fire extinguisher. Thirty minutes later, at 2:30 p.m., a sales clerk at Hancock Fabrics, two miles from Craft Mart, saw a small flame in a bin that contained foam products. Before she could do anything, the flame lit the foam products and a wave of fire rushed up through the bin.
19:01 Speaker 01 The speed was stunning, but the fire sprinklers in the ceiling activated and drenched the store before the fire could spread to anything else. A fire crew arrived and made sure the scene was safe. Shortly afterward, Captain Marvin Casey, arson investigator for the Bakersfield Fire Department, arrived at Hancock Fabrics. He had driven straight from his ongoing investigation at Craft Mart to see for himself the improbable scenario at Hancock Fabrics. Two fires at retail stores, two miles apart, within thirty minutes of each other. That had never happened in Bakersfield. As Captain Casey was about to learn, it had also never happened in Tulare until it
19:44 Speaker 01 had earlier that day, and it had never happened in Fresno until it had the night before. Captain Casey was about to become a key player in the mystery, and he was the first to start assembling the pieces of the puzzle to form a picture that no one in the fire service wanted to see.
20:06 Speaker 01 Captain Marvin Casey met with investigators from Fresno and started learning about the nearly unbelievable spree of fires that had happened over the past three days. Three fires had started in Fresno during a convention hosted by arson investigators. Two more had started in Tulare on the day that everyone left the convention. And two more had started in Bakersfield that same day. All three cities were on Highway 99. If all the fires were the work of the same arsonist, which was very likely, it seemed as though the arsonist had been in Fresno during the time of the convention and then driven south down Highway 99 toward Los Angeles and set fires in Tulare and Bakersfield along the way.
20:50 Speaker 01 At the scenes of at least four of the seven fires during that period, remnants of the arsonist's incendiary device had been found. The devices were nearly identical. They were definitely a signature. They all featured a cigarette, three matches, a rubber band, and a piece of yellow notebook paper. Investigators in Fresno and Tulare had found the devices, and Captain Casey had one in Bakersfield, too. It was Captain Casey's evidence that would lead to the first real clue to the identity of the serial arsonist.
21:26 Speaker 01 At the Craft Mart Fire, the first of the two fires in Bakersfield, Casey had found the arsonist's signature device. He had placed the components in evidence containers and then rushed to the scene of the Hancock Fabrics Fire. After Casey spoke to other investigators in the region, they decided they needed to bring in a federal agency to help coordinate the effort to identify the arsonist. Casey sent his evidence to an office of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms outside San Francisco. A technician examined the cigarette and the yellow paper for fingerprints. Traces of a fingerprint on the cigarette were unusable, but the yellow paper was the jackpot. A fingerprint had been preserved in great condition.
22:10 Speaker 01 It would easily be enough to identify a suspect and possibly convict a suspect if they found one. The ATF ran the print through state and federal criminal databases, but they found no matches. The suspect did not have a criminal record. That was when Casey started thinking about a scary, unprecedented possibility. The fires had started during an arson investigation convention. They had moved south along Highway 99, the road that someone would take to go from Los Angeles to Fresno and back. The incendiary devices were simple, yet clever. They were all placed in similar groups of products in the stores. The arsonist clearly understood the highly flammable nature of the products and that
22:55 Speaker 01 they would make great sources of fuel. And the suspect had no criminal record. Captain Casey started his detective work. Casey called a contact and received a list of the 242 people who attended the convention in Fresno. He cross-referenced their homes and figured out which ones would have driven south after the seminar. Then he narrowed the list to people who would have traveled alone, since it was incredibly rare for arsonists to work in pairs or groups. When Casey was done, he had a list of 55 names. Understandably, he met a lot of resistance when he started to float the possibility
23:37 Speaker 01 that the arsonist was a firefighter or a law enforcement officer. For those at the ATF or other agencies who were at least willing to entertain the possibility, the immediate problem was that Casey's list was too long. No one was going to allow him to investigate 55 professionals in law enforcement or the fire service. So, for the moment, Casey was stuck. He would have to wait for more evidence. There was actually one more data point available at the time, but it was too vague to help narrow the list. Though in hindsight, it would be useful.
24:18 Speaker 01 A witness at the Family Bargain Center in Tulare and a witness at Hancock Fabrics in Bakersfield gave remarkably similar descriptions of a man who had been seen in each store around the time of the fires. The witness in Tulare saw the man at about 11:45 a.m. on the Friday of the fire spree. The man was a white male with black hair, five feet 10 inches tall, 170 pounds, and appeared to be in his late twenties. An hour and a half later, in Bakersfield, the suspicious man was described as a white male with brown hair, five feet seven to five feet nine inches tall, 170 to 175 pounds, and 30 to 35 years old.
25:03 Speaker 01 In January of 1987, John Orr was 37 years old. He had brown hair, stood five feet nine inches tall, and weighed about 175 pounds. Investigators almost certainly had the description of their arsonist. They just didn't know it. Down in Glendale, John Orr had no idea his name was on Captain Casey's list of 55 potential suspects. Orr wasn't aware that two witnesses had provided physical descriptions of a suspect who was very similar to himself. And he didn't know that a fingerprint had been found on a piece of yellow notebook paper and had been logged and investigated.
25:43 Speaker 01 The print had not yet been helpful, but it was always there, lurking in the background. In Glendale, John Orr was back to his usual routine of investigating suspected arson fires, teaching classes to recruits, and writing essays for the American Fire Journal. In addition, he was trying to get rid of his second partner. Orr had succeeded in getting rid of his first partner at the end of 1986. Partner number two started right before the fire spree in January 1987. A year later, in 1988. The weather's getting colder, and maybe some thoughts are starting to drift in the direction of holiday gifts.
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27:22 Speaker 01 Orr convinced his boss that another switch was needed. At least partner number three was a fellow firefighter, instead of a police officer like the previous two partners. And the fireman was a friend of John's, though friendships and marriages were always volatile with John Orr. Like most serial criminals, he never really allowed anyone to get close. Other people were useful for one thing or another, but there were few, if any, genuine connections. And while John was grumbling about yet another partner, he was lobbying on his own behalf for a promotion. As the calendar flipped from 1988 to 1989, and the two-year anniversary of the unsolved
28:04 Speaker 01 fires in the Central Valley came and went, John Orr positioned himself to become a captain in the Glendale Fire Department. If he passed the captain's exam, he would receive a salary increase and solidify himself as one of the top officers in the battalion. More than that, more than anything, he hoped it would finally earn him the respect he craved from police officers, detectives, and federal agents. John had been with the Glendale Fire Department for nearly fifteen years. He was respected in the fire service throughout the state of California, but he still struggled with the fact that he had been rejected by the LAPD nearly twenty years earlier.
28:45 Speaker 01 With those plans and many more in mind, John packed up his car in March of 1989 for another road trip. There was an arson convention in Pacific Grove, a community in the picturesque coastal city of Monterey, and John planned to attend. Like before, he told his partner to stay in Glendale and man the fort. But unlike the arson convention in Fresno two years earlier, the spree of fires that accompanied the Pacific Grove convention happened both before and after the convention.
29:23 Speaker 01 The arson symposium was scheduled to begin Sunday, March 5th, 1989, in Pacific Grove. Pacific Grove would be considered by any standard one of the most scenic neighborhoods in the United States. It's on the northern tip of the peninsula that is home to the city of Monterey. For golf fans, it's on the opposite side of the peninsula from the world-famous Pebble Beach Golf Course. If you want to buy a house in Pacific Grove, you better have at least a million dollars handy. To drive from Glendale to Monterey, all you need to do is get on the 101. The 101 is considered a freeway in the city and a highway as it winds its way north along the California coast.
30:05 Speaker 01 It passes through Santa Barbara, the vacation enclave of the rich and famous from Hollywood, then up through San Luis Obispo and the wine country area around Paso Robles, and then to Salinas near Monterey Bay, where a driver would need to exit the 101 and head west to Pacific Grove. On Friday, March 3rd, two days before the conference, the fires started in cities along the 101. They were almost a mirror image of the fires that happened two years earlier in cities along Highway 99 in the Central Valley of California. Straight west of Bakersfield, the site of the final two fires in the 1987 spree, is the coastal town of Morro Bay.
30:47 Speaker 01 It's just a short jog off the 101, and it was the site of the first fire of the 1989 spree. At about 5:45 PM that Friday evening, at a business called Cornet Variety Store, a customer screamed "Fire!" An employee grabbed a fire extinguisher and quickly put out the fire, which had started in a stack of foam pillows. The next day, in Salinas, about 20 miles from Pacific Grove, a much larger fire started at 1:30 in the afternoon at a Woolworths store. Once again, the blaze started in a stack of foam pillows. This time, the fire scorched the inside of the building and did serious damage, but no
31:32 Speaker 01 one was hurt. That Saturday afternoon and evening was when most people checked in for the conference in Pacific Grove, which began the next morning. For the four days of the conference, from Sunday to Wednesday, all was quiet. On Thursday morning, as the attendees drove home, the spree resumed. Two hours south of Pacific Grove, in the small city of Atascadero on Highway 101, an incendiary device burned a roll of foam padding at a store called Pacific Home Improvement, but did not start a fire. The employee who spotted the problem found the delayed device that was now well-known to arson investigators: three matches bundled to a cigarette and all of it wrapped in
32:16 Speaker 01 yellow notebook paper. Two hours later, at a Cornet Variety Store in Atascadero, a fire erupted in the shelves that contained bags of shredded foam rubber. Forty-five minutes later, flames were spotted in a section of foam products at Coast-to-Coast Hardware Store, and a fast-acting employee put out the fire.
32:37 Speaker 01 Firefighters in Atascadero were now experiencing the same surreal feeling as firefighters in Fresno had two years earlier, when two businesses within a couple blocks of each other suffered fires at the same time. All three fires in Atascadero happened on the same street, El Camino Real, right off Highway 101. And the spree wasn't done. The biggest and most destructive fire was yet to come. About eight hours later, just before 8:00 PM, a fire started in a retail outlet in San Luis Obispo, which housed businesses called Et Cetera and The Party Exchange. San Luis Obispo is just 20 minutes down Highway 101 from Atascadero, and the eight-hour gap
33:21 Speaker 01 between fires remains unexplained. But the inferno burned the building in San Luis Obispo to the ground. Et Cetera and The Party Exchange were destroyed. Fortunately, there were no serious injuries. And fortunately for Bakersfield Fire Captain Marv Casey, there was a silver lining in the destruction. The fire spree had happened in conjunction with another arson seminar. Casey didn't believe it was a coincidence, and now he could narrow his list of potential suspects. By cross-referencing the attendees of both seminars, the list went from 55 names to 10.
33:58 Speaker 01 And one of those 10 was John Orr. Next time on Infamous America, John Orr lives the good life in Glendale. He receives a promotion, his fourth marriage is going well, and he successfully rids himself of another partner. But cracks start to form in his respected foundation when his actions during the worst brush fire in Glendale history are viewed as suspicious. A task force quickly locks on to John Orr as the primary suspect of the growing collection of unsolved arson fires. That's next week on Infamous America.
34:45 Speaker 01 Members of our Black Barrel Plus program don't have to wait week to week for new episodes. They receive the entire season to binge all at once with no commercials, and they also receive exclusive bonus episodes. Sign up now through the link in the show notes or on our website, blackbarrelmedia.com. Memberships are just $5 per month. This series was researched and written by myself and Rhea Perroin. It was produced by Joe Garro. Original music by Rob Valier. I'm Chris Wimmer. Thanks for listening.
Previous ARSONISTS Ep. 1 | John Orr: “Point of Origin” Next ARSONISTS Ep. 3 | John Orr: “The Task Force” Page updated November 3, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated