Infamous America - ARSONISTS Ep. 4 | John Orr: “Firebug”

Episode Date: June 11, 2025

John Orr proves to be a slippery target for the Pillow Pyro Task Force. Investigators have a lot of evidence against him, but they want to catch him in the act of starting a fire. In the wake of two more brush fires and a fire at the Warner Bros. movie studio lot, investigators decide they can’t wait any longer. They arrest John Orr and put him on trial for arson and murder. Join Black Barrel+ for ad-free episodes and bingeable seasons: blackbarrel.supportingcast.fm/join   Apple users join Black Barrel+ for ad-free episodes, bingeable seasons and bonus episodes. Click the Black Barrel+ banner on Apple to get started with a 3-day free trial.   On YouTube, subscribe to INFAMOUS+ for ad-free episodes and bingeable seasons: hit “Join” on the Legends YouTube homepage.   For more details, please visit www.blackbarrelmedia.com. Our social media pages are: @blackbarrelmedia on Facebook and Instagram, and @bbarrelmedia on Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In 1991, there was one of those strange coincidences that sometimes causes people to use one of the phrases, art imitating life or life imitating art. On May 24th, the major Hollywood movie Backdraft released in theaters. It was directed by famous actor-director Ron Howard, and it featured an all-star cast that included Kurt Russell, Scott Glenn, William Baldwin, Jennifer Jason Lee, and Robert DeNine. For a fun Hollywood fact, William Baldwin was chosen for the movie over an up-and-coming actor named Brad Pitt. Without giving away any key details, the film follows a company of firefighters in Chicago who battle a series of increasingly devastating arson fires. The movie was filmed in Chicago and it wrapped production on December 8, 1990. Two days later, an arsonist started a series of

fires in Los Angeles. The film was released two months after the same arsonist lit another series of fires in March 1991. That series led to the creation of a joint investigation between the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms and the Los Angeles Fire Department. The investigators nicknamed their unit the Pillow Pyrot Task Force. And in May of 1991, as backdraft was being released, they had just completed a whirlwind two months on the trail of their prime suspect, John Orr. Orr was the senior arson investigator for the Glendale Fire Department in the Los Angeles metro area. He was now linked to a series of fires in California Central Valley in 1987, a series in coastal communities in 1989,

the series in L.A. in 1990, and the second series in L.A. in 1991. Those events totaled 29 fires, and if John Orr was responsible for all of them, which now seemed likely, who knew how many more he had started? There was a cluster of five fires back in 1984, three of which happened on the same night and were tragically highlighted by the Oli's Home Center fire that killed four people. L-A-F-D arson investigator Dennis Foote had been keeping a file of similar and suspicious fires that dated back to at least. in the last 1977, when a fire destroyed Webb's department store in Glendale. That fire happened just two years after John Orr joined the Glendale Fire Department. And every year since then, there had been brush fires in the hills above Glendale, the most devastating of which was the College Hills Fire in June 1990, that damaged or destroyed

66 homes. The task force had accumulated a sizable amount of evidence against John Orr by May of 1991, but they needed more. They had a fingerprint that connected Orr to a fire in Bakersfield, California in 1987. They had multiple examples of his signature delay device, a cigarette bundled with three matches and wrapped in a piece of yellow notebook paper. They had multiple witnesses who had confirmed that John Orr was at the scenes of notable fires before the fires started.

And they had checked his records for the Sprees in December 19. 1990 and March 1991. In the case of every fire, he was on duty, without his partner, out of the office, and his whereabouts were unknown. But arson cases are notoriously hard to prosecute, so the task force was doing round-the-clock surveillance in an effort to get the last piece of evidence which would secure a conviction at trial. They needed to catch John Orr in the act of setting a fire. The task force followed and waited and watched all summer and into the autumn of 1991.

But John Orr laid low. And then, when the next major fire happened in November at a Hollywood movie studio, the task force was terrified it had missed its chance. From Black Barrow 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 4. John Orr.

Firebug On October 2nd, 1991, a brush fire started in the affluent Chevy Chase neighborhood of Glendale. The whole neighborhood is built into a series of winding, brush-covered canyons in a slim set of ridges called the Verdugo Mountains. The fire raced up a slope and burned a home before it was put out by the Glendale Fire Department. It happened less than a mile and a half as the crow

flies from the destructive College Hills fire the previous year. But at the time, the task force wasn't associating John Orr with the ongoing series of brush fires in Glendale. John Orr was known as the guy who targeted highly flammable materials like pillows and foam products in retail stores using his signature delay device. But over the next two months, the suspicion of John Orr widened. The final surge to the finish line started Friday, November 22nd, one week before Thanksgiving. The task force was excited because it had upgraded, in theory, its tracking capabilities. John Orr had recently submitted his City of Glendale work vehicle for regular maintenance, and the task force used the opportunity to install a new tracking device.

It was called Teletrack, and it was a rudimentary version of a modern GPU. system. The LA County Sheriff's Office was the only agency that had it, and it had never been tested during a live criminal operation. It was a basic transmitter and receiver setup. The transmitter was hardwired into the electrical system of the target vehicle, and it sent a signal to the receiver. Investigators could now track in near real time John's car as it moved through the city. The task force hoped the new system would be a major upgrade from the system that had backfired spectacularly four months earlier. At the end of April 1991, John Orr had gone to a five-day training seminar in San Luis Obispo. The task force had attached a big, bulky tracking device

to the underside of his car. John found the device and created havoc when he thought it was a bomb. The task force had to scramble to convince him that the tracker was actually a fake bomb, that it was just part of a joke played by his buddies at the seminar. John seemed to buy the story, but the task force could never be sure. There was a very real chance their cover was blown. After all, John knew that a task force existed. That wasn't a secret, and its primary goal was to catch the arsonist who started the fires in December 1990 and March 1991.

In essence, John knew the task force was hunting him. He just didn't know the task force had identified him as the number one suspect. And he had no way of knowing about the teletrack technology or the installation of the device on his work vehicle. But even if he had, it probably wouldn't have mattered. He had the personality traits of a true psychopath. The task force had sent John's case to the behavioral science unit at the FBI, the group that had pioneered the practice of criminal profiling. The most prominent member of the unit was John Douglas.

He joined the unit in 1970. and he and his colleague Robert Ressler spent years traveling the country to interview some of the most infamous criminals in American history. Based on those conversations, John Douglas and the unit created the label, Serial Killer, to describe specific types of murderers. In 1991, John Douglas was four years from retirement, after which he would co-author a series of books. The most famous of the group was Mind Hunter, which was Linder, which was Lerner.

loosely adapted into a Netflix show in 2017. In 1991, analysts who worked on arson cases at the Behavioral Science Unit determined that John Orr had many of the same basic traits of a serial killer. Orr was egocentric, manipulative, and clever. He craved dominance and power. He had no genuine relationships. He could fake friendliness and caring for other people for short periods of time, but it never lasted. He was on his fourth partner at the fire department and his fourth marriage at home,

and the marriage was falling apart because he was having yet another affair. The behavioral science unit at the FBI labeled John Orr a classic psychopath. There was a void inside him that could only be filled temporarily by committing a violent crime. For serial killers, the crime was murder. For John Orr, it was arson. On December 22nd and 23rd, he set his final three fires. On Friday afternoon, November 22nd, 1991, a fire broke out at the Warner Brothers movie studio lot. It started in a cluster of buildings that were made famous by the TV show, The Waltons, which aired from 1972 to 1981. The buildings were used for exterior shots of the Walton family farm, a house, a barn, a sawmill, and a chicken coop. A fire engine at the studio put out

the blaze, but not before it destroyed all the wooden facades. Burbank Fire Captain Steve Patterson arrived at the scene. Captain Patterson was a long-time member of the Burbank Fire Department, but he was a relatively new arson investigator. He'd only been doing the job for about a year and a half, and that very day, he had been part of an arson class led by John Orr at the Glendale Fire Department. As Patterson and a colleague examined the damage at Warner Brothers, Patterson decided to call John Orr for help. Coincidentally, as Patterson believed at the time, John Orr was right down the street.

Orr volunteered to hop in his car and head to the studio. He asked Patterson for directions and then asked Patterson to stand outside a specific entrance to make sure he found it. Patterson was a little surprised by the request. Warner Brothers is a massive complex of buildings and a world-famous landmark. It's hard to believe that a firefighter who had lived and worked in the area for more than 25 years couldn't find Warner Brothers. But Patterson did as he was asked. And while he waited, John Orr slipped in behind him. After standing near an entrance for what felt like an extremely long time, Patterson called John Orr on the radio and learned that Orr was already on the lot.

He had used a different entrance, despite claiming he didn't know how to get there. Patterson hustled back to the scene of the fire and met John Orr. They discussed the fire, and according to Patterson, agreed it was probably an arson case. Orr left the scene with the understanding that further steps would be taken the next day. That evening and the following day, members of the task force learned about the suspicious happenings at Warner Brothers. The fire didn't initially register on their radar, because it wasn't a typical John Orr fire. It wasn't in a big retail store during business hours,

with plenty of potential victims present. But when they heard about it, they immediately investigated and were confused by the information from the tracking device. At the approximate time of the fire, 3.30 p.m., John Orr was not at Warner Brothers, but investigators would later believe that he was close. They believed he parked his car outside the lot

and walked up to one of the gates. He likely gained entrance by using his fire department badge. If so, he definitely repeated the process 30 minutes later. The head of security at Warner Brothers saw John Orr use his badge to walk onto the lot at about 4 p.m., while the fire was still burning. In addition, John had been there multiple times. His wife worked at the movie studio. He knew exactly how to get there and how to navigate

the maze of buildings once he was inside. But the task force didn't have a lot of time to dwell on the details. The day after the Warner Brothers fire, two more brush fires erupted in the hills and canyons of Glendale. Both fires were less than two miles from the fire that had destroyed a home six weeks earlier, and all three fires were about a five-minute drive from the big college hills fire the previous year. As always, John Orr was on the scenes of both fires of the fire, November 23rd with remarkable speed and accuracy, even though there was confusion about the locations as crews tried to respond to both fires at the same time. After three fires in two days, the task force and federal prosecutors couldn't wait any longer. The teletrack device was decent,

but it wasn't the game changer they'd hoped it would be. They needed to get all the legal paperwork in order and arrest John Orr as soon as possible. A little after 7 a.m. on the morning of December 4th, 1991. John Orr stepped out of the front door of his house to go to work. He was understandably surprised when a man with a gun jumped out from behind a bush and shouted, Don't move, you're under arrest. ATF agents rushed up to John and surrounded him.

They told him he was being arrested for arson, and they had a warrant to search his property and his cars. Orr claimed later that he was shocked he was being arrested for arson. He couldn't believe. leave it. And that's the stance he has maintained to this day, despite the wealth of evidence that the task force was about to collect from his home and cars. Investigators quickly found all the components of his signature delay device, cigarettes, matches, rubber bands, and yellow-lined notebook paper. They also found documents related to the tracking device that had been on Ores

Carr in April when he went to the seminar in San Luis Obispo. When he had discovered the device, he thought it was a bomb. The task force had leaned into the idea and hoped or believed it was a fake bomb that had been planted as a joke. Special Agent Mike Matassa didn't think John Orr bought the story, and he had been right. For the past eight months, Orr knew he was the subject of the task force investigation. In that time, it appeared as though he had still set four fires, three brush fires and the Warner Brothers fire. About 10 years earlier, one of the most infamous serial killers of all time, Ted Bundy, outlined the probable reason why. While Ted Bundy was in prison in Florida awaiting execution, he gave a series of interviews to a pair of reporters.

The reporters taped the conversations, and the tapes were the basis for the telling of the Ted Bundy story in a Netflix docu-series in 2019. Bundy never admitted any of his crimes directly, but he loved to talk about them. He talked at length about the psychology of the killer without ever admitting that he was the killer. In one specific passage, he outlined the inner need of the killer to commit his crimes. The killer felt a compulsion to kill that was so strong, it overrode any sense of risk. When the crime was committed, the killer felt a sense of gratification that he couldn't get from anything else. But the gratification always faded. The compulsion to kill again in order to feel the sense of gratification grew until the killer felt forced to act, no matter the risk. Or the need

to commit the crime was so overwhelming that it made the killer blind to the risks. He simply didn't see them. That seemed to be the perfect portrayal of John Orr. The compulsion to set fires was so strong that he didn't care about leaving a fingerprint or being identified by witnesses, or even that an entire task force was after him. He either didn't care or he was blind to the risk because he didn't believe there was a risk. Like Ted Bundy and John Wayne Gacy and many other notorious psychopaths, John Orr was supremely confident to the point of arrogance.

He likely believed he was too smart to get caught. And even after he was caught, he maintained his innocence as investigators uncovered increasingly damning pieces of evidence. Orr had an extensive collection of photographs and videotapes of fires. At numerous fires, many of which he was suspected of setting himself, he stood back and photographed or filmed the fire rather than jumping into help. Multiple tapes showed footage from John Orr's point of view as he sat in his car on the side of the road

and filmed the first fire crew rushing to the scene of a new fire. The only way he could have known where to be was if he already knew the location of the forest, fire before the first fire crew did. Multiple tapes showed specific homes, which had clearly caught John's attention. Later in the tapes, there was footage of those houses burning down in brush fires. It seemed clear that John Orr had been scouting certain homes and targeting them with brush fires, which was exactly what happened on October 2nd, one month before the Warner Brothers fire. The October 2nd brush fire had burned only one home, a home that had been. John Orr had videotaped a year and a half earlier. Orr was also well known for saying that a

firebug, the nickname for an arsonist, was oftentimes in the crowd of onlookers at the scene of a fire. Unlike killers who usually want to flee the scenes of their crimes as fast as possible, arsonists usually want to stay and watch the drama unfold. John Orr seemed to be the definition of a firebug who hid in plain sight. The videotape evidence was good, and it would produce satisfactory results at trial, but the most damning pieces of evidence were John's own words. He had written a book that he said was fiction, but was more like a memoir that explained his mind and confessed his actions. For about a year from the spring of 1990 to the spring of 1991, John Orr wrote a novel called Points of Origin. He said in a television

interview years later, that he had seen numerous stories, books, movies, and TV shows about police officers gone bad, but he had never seen a story about a firefighter gone bad. By that time, he had written several articles for a National Fire publication, and he felt he was ready for a bigger fictional project. He developed a story that centered on two characters. The antagonist, the bad guy, was a Los Angeles firefighter who became a serial arsonist and set fires all over the city. The protagonist, the good guy, was an arson investigator who was on the hunt for the elusive serial arsonist and slowly started to believe that the arsonist was a firefighter. John Orr essentially took his split personality and turned both halves into the main characters.

The task force obtained a copy of the book in October 1991 and poured over it with increasing speed and amazement. They couldn't believe what they read on each new page. The supposedly fictional book was a thinly veiled chronicle of some of the biggest fires with which John Orr was associated. The details were stunning and heartbreaking. In the book, the firefighter arsonist set brush fires in canyons. He used delay devices to set fires in retail stores in Fresno, to Lair, and Bakersfield on his way to and from an arson. investigation conference. He often set fires at multiple locations at the same time so that fire departments would be forced to divide their resources. That scenario happened frequently throughout

John Orr's career, including the big fire sprees in 1987, 89, 90, and 91, and of course, in 1984, on the night of the fire at Oli's Home Center. That night, while the first fire crews were struggling to battle the All-Out Inferno at Oles, other crews were diverted to a fire a couple blocks away at a Vaughan's grocery store. And the portrayal of the Oli's fire in John Orr's book was the one that really caught everyone's attention. The similarities between the real fire and the scene in Ores book were impossible to ignore. Mike Cabral was a deputy district attorney who worked with the task force during the investigation of the South L.A. fires in March 1991.

In an interview for the TV show, Very Scary People on the Investigation Discovery Channel in 2021, Cabral described the heartbreaking detail that was simply too coincidental to have been made up by John Orr. Four people died in the Oli's fire, two of whom were a grandmother and her two-year-old grandson, Matthew. The grandfather had been with them in the store at the time of the fire, but he became separated from his wife and grandson in the smoke and confusion. He made it out, but his wife and grandson did not. In the book, John Orr changed the name of the store to Cal's hardware store, but in the fictional scene, two of the victims were a grandmother and her two-year-old grandson,

whose name was Matthew. Orr had used the real name of the grandson in his book, and he wasn't done. He also wrote that Matthew had been eating a mint chocolate chip ice cream cone at the time of the fire. Deputy District Attorney Mike Cabral interviewed the grandfather about that detail and discovered the truth was almost worse. In reality, the boy had not been eating an ice cream cone at the time of the fire. The grandmother and grandfather told Matthew that they would take him to get ice cream after they finished their shopping at Oli's Home Center. And Matthew said he wanted mint chocolate chip ice cream. The only way John Orr could have known the story about the ice cream,

was if he had been standing nearby and had overheard the conversation right before he set the fire. The courtroom saga of John Orr was a six-year ordeal. After Orr's arrest, he vehemently maintained his innocence and hired a lawyer. There were going to be two trials in federal court, one in Los Angeles for charges related to the fires of December 1990 and March 1991, and maybe some additional charges, and one in Fresno related to charges for the fires in 1987. The trial in Fresno lasted about a week at the end of July 1992. John Orr was charged with arson for five of the seven fires that happened in Fresno, to Lear, and Bakersfield in 1987. The jury deliberated for three days and returned a mixed verdict.

The jury found him guilty for three of the five fires, and not guilty for the other two. The judge gave Orr a sentence of 10 years in prison for each guilty verdict, but he allowed the sentences to run concurrently, which meant Orr would serve all three sentences at the same time. He was facing 10 years in prison instead of 30. At the end of the proceedings, John Orr was allowed to make a statement to the court. In his long-winded speech, he asserted his innocence and declared he was the victim of a wide-ranging government conspiracy. And with that, Orr was shipped back to L.A. to face his next trial.

But the next trial never happened. In Los Angeles, John Orr faced eight counts of arson, three related to fires in 1989, and five related to fires in 1990 and 91. John Orr's new lawyer convinced Orr to accept a plea bargain in which he would plead guilty to three of the eight counts, and then the other five would go away. Orr was initially mad, but then he reluctantly agreed. He pleaded guilty to two of the fires in 1989 and one of the fires in December 1990. The judge gave Orr eight years in prison for each of the three counts, but again, all three sentences would be served at the same time. And they would all be served at the same time as his first sentence.

In essence, the three eight-year sentences did not add a single day of prison. time to John Orr's future. It looked like a sweet deal for John Orr. He was 43 years old, and he had been given 54 years worth of prison time. If he served all the years in a row, he would likely die in prison. But since he was serving them all at the same time, he would be paroled after just 10 years. Orr accepted the deal and went to prison at Terminal Island in Long Beach. But that was not the end of the story. Not by a long shot. Los Angeles Deputy District Attorney Mike Cabral had formed his own task force to try to prosecute John Orr for the College Hills Brush Fire in 1990, the Warner Brothers Fire in 1991, and the Olies Home Center fire in 1984. After a lot of study, Cabral's task force believed John Orr was responsible for the vast majority of suspicious fires in the L.A. area over a period of at least 15 years.

Their best guess was that he set somewhere around 2,000 fires during his time with the Glendale Fire Department. But the statute of limitations had passed on nearly all of them, so Cabral had to narrow his focus to the recent fires and the Oli's fire. But the Oli's Home Center fire would not be an arson case. It would be a murder case. There's no statute of limitations on murder, and Cabral wanted to make sure that John Orr spent the rest of his life in prison or received the death penalty for starting the fire that killed four people. Cabral used everything in the arsenal against John Orr, the patterns of fires, the signature devices, the book that closely mirrored real life,

and the guilty plea which showed that John Orr had admitted he was an arsonist. And Cabral needed every bit of that ammunition. When the trial finished in early June 1998, the jury deliberated for three weeks before it returned guilty version, for all four counts of homicide in the Oli's fire. Guilty for the College Hills fire, but not guilty for the Warner Brothers fire. There just wasn't enough evidence for a conviction

for the Warner Brothers fire. But the other guilty verdicts were enough. John Orr was sentenced to life in prison. He is now 76 years old, and he is still an inmate in the prison system in California. To this day, he has accepted no responsibility for the fires, admitted no guilt for the consequences, and expressed no empathy toward the victims. Next time on Infamous America, Paul Keller's story begins in Seattle in 1992.

Shortly after John Orr is arrested in L.A., Paul Keller begins setting fires almost daily across the city for six months, including a deadly blaze at Four Freedom's retirement home that claims the lives of three elderly residents. That's next week on Infamous America. 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 Ria Perrault. It was produced by Joe Garrow. Original music by Rob Valier. I'm Chris Wimmer. Thanks for listening.