MrBallen Podcast: Strange, Dark & Mysterious Stories - Firestarter (PODCAST EXCLUSIVE EPISODE)

Episode Date: October 24, 2022

In 1984, a 19 year old hardware store employee named Jim, was walking from one end of the store to the other, when he noticed something odd in one of the aisels. He stared at it for a second, not really sure what to make of it, before turning around and walking back where he came from, to start telling staff and customers to evacuate. Little did Jim know, in a matter of seconds, that building was going to turn into a living hell.For 100s more stories like this one, check out our main YouTube channel just called "MrBallen" -- https://www.youtube.com/c/MrBallenIf you want to reach out to me, contact me on Instagram, Twitter or any other major social media platform, my username on all of them is @MrBallenSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

In 1984, a 19-year-old hardware store employee named Jim was walking from one end of the store to the other when he noticed something odd in one of the aisles. He stopped and stared at it for a second, not really sure what to make of it, before turning around and walking back where he came from to start telling staff and customers that they should evacuate. Little did Jim know, it was already too late, and in a matter of seconds, that building was going to turn into a living hell. But before we get into that story, if you're a fan of the Strange, Dark, and Mysterious Delibered in Story format, then you've come to the right podcast because that's all we do, and we upload twice a week, once on Monday and once on Thursday. So if that's of interest to you, please peel all of the bananas in the 5-star review buttons home, but don't take a bite out of any of them. Also,

please subscribe to the Mr. Ballin Podcast wherever you listen to podcasts so you don't miss any of our weekly uploads. Okay, let's get into today's story. I'm Peter Frankopan and I'm Afua Hirsch and we're here to tell you about our new season of Legacy covering the iconic, troubled, musical genius that was Nina Simone And I'm Afua Hirsch. And we're here to tell you about our new season of Legacy, covering the iconic, troubled musical genius that was Nina Simone. Full disclosure, this is a big one for me. Nina Simone, one of my favourite artists of all time.

Somebody who's had a huge impact on me, who I think objectively stands apart for the level of her talent, the audacity of her message. If I was a first year at university, the first time I sat down and really listened to her and engaged with her message, it totally floored me. And the truth and pain and messiness of her struggle, that's all captured in unforgettable music

that has stood the test of time. Think that's fair, Peter? I mean, the way in which her music comes across is so powerful, no matter what song it is. So join us on Legacy for Nina Simone. Hello, I am Alice Levine and I am one of the hosts of Wondery's podcast, British Scandal. On our latest series, The Race to Ruin, we tell the story of a British man

who took part in the first ever round-the-world sailing race. Good on him, I hear you say. But there is a problem, as there always is in this show. The man in question hadn't actually sailed before. Oh, and his boat wasn't seaworthy. Oh, and also, tiny little detail, almost didn't mention it. He bet his family home on making it to the finish line. What ensued was one of the most complex cheating plots in British sporting history.

To find out the full story, follow British Scandal wherever you listen to podcasts. Or listen early and ad-free on Wondery Plus on Apple Podcasts or the Wondery app. It was October 10th, 1984, in the small California town of South Pasadena. And for 17-year-old Jimmy Satina, the big news that day was the national sporting event that was going on just two hours south at the Jack Murphy Stadium in San Diego. There, California's San Diego Padres baseball team was playing the second game in the World Series against the Detroit Tigers. Not that Jimmy could even watch the game on TV. When the first pitch was thrown at 5 30 p.m. local time, Jimmy was

working his part-time shift at Oli's Home Center, a popular family-owned hardware store located in a strip mall on Fair Oaks Avenue, just one town south of Jimmy's home. But Jimmy didn't need to see the baseball game to enjoy it. He could listen to it on the radio and envision everything that was going on. Set to graduate next spring, Jimmy was himself an exceptional baseball player. And while he never bragged about any of his accomplishments, every student and teacher at Pasadena's Blair High School knew that the friendly and popular star center fielder was being scouted by the Chicago Cubs professional baseball team. And as much as Jimmy might have liked to be watching tonight's

ball game, he needed his job at Ole's, and it would never have even occurred to him to miss a single shift or call in sick or leave early. As one of seven siblings, Jimmy had spent years collecting empty bottles and cans so he could use the deposit money to buy his own sports equipment. Now, this regular gig in Ole's houseware department that he'd started almost exactly one year ago meant that he'd be able to do more than just buy baseball cleats and gloves and bats. These days, he earned enough money to help out his whole family. With his paycheck from Oli's, Jimmy would soon be able to purchase the car insurance policy they needed to get the used Volkswagen that was parked in their backyard back out on the road.

Still, when Jimmy looked up at the wall clock, he was happy to see back out on the road. Still, when Jimmy looked up at the wall clock, he was happy to see that it was already 7.30 p.m. If all went well, he'd be home in about an hour or so. Then he and his older brother could talk baseball. And around the same time that Jimmy was glancing at the clock inside the houseware department, a middle-aged couple and their two-and-a-half-year-old grandson were just pulling into the strip mall parking lot outside of Oli's. Like Jimmy inside, Billy and Ada Deal, the middle-aged couple who had just pulled up, they also knew the hardware store would be closing soon, so they told their grandson, Matthew, that he'd need to wait until after they were done their

shopping before they could stop for ice cream at a nearby Baskin-Robbins ice cream parlor. To save time, the grandfather, Billy, would go by himself to the lumber department for the lengths of wood he needed to complete a small home repair project, and his wife, the grandmother, 50-year-old Ada, would take Matthew to the paint department. A few minutes later, as Ada pushed Matthew in the shopping cart along the aisles lined with paint cans, 26-year-old Carolyn Krause looked up from her workstation in the paint department and smiled as she heard William chatting in toddler talk to his grandmother. Carolyn, who was married to a lieutenant in the Los Angeles Police Department, had two children of her own, a three-year-old son and a two-year-old

daughter. Now, Carolyn also glanced at her watch. Her own mother was taking care of her two children while Carolyn was at work. But her mom would be stopping by in just a few minutes to pick up the keys to Carolyn's house so she could put the two kids to bed. Carolyn pushed her blonde hair back behind her ears. She thought maybe she heard the little boy in the shopping cart say the words ice cream. Carolyn smiled as she pulled the house keys out of her purse and slipped them into her pocket to give to her mom. Over in the hardware department of Oli's Home Goods, 19-year-old Jim Obden had worked one of the longest shifts of anyone at the store that day. He'd arrived during the day and was staying on into the evening until the store closed. Like Jimmy Satina, Jim Obden

would be glad to get home and catch up on the World Series. The San Diego Padres had lost the first game the night before, but Jim was betting that the Padres would even the score that evening. Just after 8 p.m., Jim Obden heard a muffled announcement over the store's public address system. He couldn't understand the words, but that was nothing new or surprising. The sound from the speakers was low quality, and it always echoed in the big open space of the store, which was about one-third the size of a football field. And Jim was headed to the front of the store anyway, so if there was any news he needed to know, he'd find out soon one way or another. But before Jim could reach

the south-facing entrance, he looked sideways into one of the aisles, vaguely aware of something that seemed out of place. That's when he noticed a column of dark smoke in the air that must be rising from one of the display racks. Right away, Jim veered off to his right towards the paint department. He wasn't feeling afraid of the smoke. If there was a fire, it must be a small one that they could extinguish very quickly, and he could already see customers heading towards the exit. But in case that muffled announcement had been an evacuation order, Jim wanted to make sure that all the customers in the store, along with the staff, knew they had to get out.

It shouldn't take long, not this close to the time when the store was closing anyway, but he knew how reluctant a lot of people could be to just walk away from a cart full of items they hadn't had a chance to buy yet. So when Jim saw Carolyn at her workstation in the paint department, he just asked her quickly if there were any customers still in her department, and right away she jumped up and told him she would go check. After that, Jim headed towards the hardware department, where he instructed a few customers who were looking at tools to get out as quickly as possible. And that was when he saw a middle-aged woman pushing a few customers who were looking at tools to get out as quickly as possible. And that was when he saw a middle-aged woman pushing a small boy who was seated inside

of her shopping cart. It was Ada Deal and her grandson Matthew. When Ada didn't respond right away to Jim's request that she and the little boy exit the store immediately, Jim spoke again to Ada, but this time with a little more authority in his voice. You should probably leave the cart right here, he told the woman. Just take the child out of his seat in the cart and follow me. And then Jim turned, leading them towards the nearest exit. Jim still wasn't too worried about the smoke

he'd just seen, especially since that was all he'd seen, just smoke and no fire. But that changed a moment later when he turned around and for a few seconds, his brain could not even process what he was seeing. In a matter of minutes, the column of smoke he had seen earlier had turned into a literal wall of flame. And a moment after that, the fire behind him seemed to take off across the ceiling overhead, and the air around him was suddenly so hot it felt like his skin was on fire too. Then Jim heard the heavy steel fire door starting to come down from the ceiling behind him, and Jim felt a jolt of pure fear race through him. Those floor-to-ceiling barriers were only programmed to roll down in the event of a catastrophic fire, one so hot and already so completely out of control

that it had already melted the locks in the regular doors. The purpose of this steel fire barricade was to segment the space inside of the open building and confine a fire, especially one that started outside of business hours when the building was empty, to just one part of the building. But if those doors were coming down now while staff and customers were inside, the barricades cut off access to the fire emergency exits around the edges of the building that led to the outside. Jim had been told that these barricades had doors on them that allowed people to go through them, but with the smoke and the heat in the air all around them, Jim wondered how on earth anyone could find those doors if they

were trapped on the wrong side of the barricade. And as Jim is thinking about this, he realized he was all alone. The woman and the little boy she was with, they were nowhere to be seen. A second later, there was a popping noise and the lights in the building went out. When Ada's husband, Billy, heard the muffled announcement come over the public address system at 8 p.m., he was still in the lumber department picking out the 2x4s he planned to buy. Billy could not make out the words he was hearing, but when he looked at his watch and saw the time, he automatically assumed that customers were being reminded that the store was about to close. And Billy could already see people starting to head

for the front of the store, some of them just leaving their carts behind them. And even after a young man jumped down from a forklift truck he'd been operating and yelled, my god, it's a fire! It was like Billy's mind refused to believe it. Billy felt like nothing could be wrong. He didn't see a fire, and he certainly didn't smell any smoke. But a moment later, Billy saw several people running through a fire door and heading in his direction. Billy took a few quick steps forward until he could actually see through this fire door into the west side of the building. And when he saw the huge cloud of dark smoke, he had only one thought. Where was his wife and grandson? Turning around, Billy ran as fast as he could towards the opposite

fire door, the one closest to where he knew Ada and Matthew had been shopping. But when he looked behind him just a few seconds later back towards that fire door, the cloud of smoke that he had seen had somehow turned into a raging column of flames licking from floor to ceiling. As Billy screamed Ada's name, he was praying that his wife and grandson had already left, heading out to safety through the same front doors they'd used to enter Oli's just 30 minutes earlier. But when Billy looked outside those doors now, all he could see were the flashing lights of a fire truck that had just pulled up to the curb. A few minutes after 8 p.m., when Jim Obden staggered out of the home center through one

of the emergency exits, he was covered in soot from the smoke and fire, and his arms, neck, and ears had suffered second and third degree burns. After the lights had gone out, Jim Obden had fallen to his hands and knees, and choking on the smoke in the air, he'd crawled along a wall until, by pure luck, he'd found an emergency fire exit and gotten outside. Now dazed and disoriented, Jim touched one hand to his wrist wondering why his skin was so hot, but the skin he touched just peeled right off his arm and fell to the ground. By the time the first six firefighters had jumped off Engine 81, flames were hissing and rolling out from under the southeast door of Oli's Home Goods. On the three-block drive from the fire station to

the hardware store, all the fire captain had seen at the roofline where Oli's was located had been a thin blanket of haze. That sight had reassured the captain and he had relaxed a little bit. The fact that he couldn't see any glow of fire or buildup of smoke over the store location made him think that this was probably a dumpster or nuisance fire, not a structural fire that could do serious damage to the building or anyone who had been inside. But, once on site, the fire captain knew he'd been totally wrong. And when Billy Deal, Ada's husband and Matthew's grandfather, ran over to the captain shouting that his wife and grandson might still be inside the burning building, the fire captain instantly began preparing for a rescue attempt, still confident

that his team could save anyone who was just 10 feet inside of the building. But as soon as the captain and his men entered that southwest door, all they saw was a blinding inferno. In just seven minutes, the fire at Ole's home center had flashed up from the ground level across the ceiling of the interior space, and the heat from the overhead flames had been so intense that it set practically everything in the store below on fire in an instant. The captain radioed for help. He needed more engines and more firefighters. But after repeating that the request was top priority, the captain could not believe his ears when he heard dispatch send one responding engine off in the wrong direction. What he didn't know at that time was that another fire had erupted at a grocery market just six blocks away, at almost the exact same time as the emergency call had come in from

Oli Hardware Store. And it would turn out that an hour and 15 minutes before that, a similar fire had erupted seven miles north of Oli's at yet another food market, this one in Pasadena. By the time the first arson investigator arrived at Oli's, he had just enough time to start snapping pictures of the fire before the one-acre roof in the center of the building caved in and a torrent of fire and sparks suddenly lit up the night sky in the center of South Pasadena. Standing next to this investigator was Ada's husband, Billy. Long after the investigator was sent away to the second fire just a few blocks away from Ole's, Billy would remain waiting in the parking lot of Strip Mall for the next 22 hours.

Before the night was over, it would take 32 separate fire engine companies and 125 firefighters to put out the blaze at Ole's. Early on the afternoon of October 11th, less than 24 hours after the first fire truck had arrived at Oli's home center, the investigation into the cause of the fire was called to a sudden halt. Arson investigators from the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department, as well as from the California State Fire Marshal's Office, had all arrived on the scene early that morning. These investigators are trained to look at what is left behind after a fire is put out and figure out whether and how the fire might have been started on purpose, a crime known as arson. Once at Ole's, the six-person team, armed with shovels and wheelbarrows,

spent the next several hours searching for human remains and trying to figure out where and how the fire had started. All around them, bulldozers and skiploaders were lifting, moving, and sorting through piles of blackened and smoking debris. But all that detective work instantly gave way to body recovery when workers in the northern section of the hardware store, far away from that first column of smoke that Jim Obden had spotted the night before, found their first charred human remains. At about 4 p.m. that afternoon, officials sifting through up to two feet of water and wreckage discovered the bodies of Oli employees Jimmy Satina and Carolyn Krause, both lying near one another, just seven feet from an emergency

exit door. Fifty minutes later, and about 40 feet away in the northwest corner of the building, officials discovered the bodies of Ada Diehl and her grandson Matthew. For Billy Diehl, along with the families of Carolyn Krause and Jimmy Satina, this news was devastating. In the 22 hours that they had kept vigil in the strip mall parking lot, they had hoped against hope that by some miracle, their loved ones might have survived. In the week that followed, more than 1,200 people would attend the church service for 17-year-old Jimmy Satina, and 50-year-old Ada Diehl and two-and-a-half-year-old Matthew would be buried

together in the same casket, the little boy cradled in his grandmother's arms. By late Thursday, October 11th, so one day after the most deadly fire in South Pasadena history had broken out at Oli's home center, investigators released a preliminary report on the cause of the blaze. According to lead investigator Jack Palmer, an arson cop and 25- the cause of the blaze. According to lead investigator Jack Palmer, an arson cop and 25-year veteran of the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department, there was no evidence that the fire had been set deliberately. Instead, Sergeant Palmer theorized that the fire was accidental and that its point of origin had been an electrical fire that started in the store attic. But not everyone who had

examined the scene at Ole's on the day after the fire was fully on board with the official report. According to an investigator with the California State Fire Marshal's Office, the fire had to have started somewhere inside the building close to the ground floor. And even though the fire itself had destroyed any real clues about its origin, Jim Allen was not ready to rule out the possibility of arson, and he filed his own report that listed the cause of fire as, quote, undetermined, end quote. And soon, the state fire marshal investigator had a very powerful ally who was even more vocal in disagreeing with the official line that the Oley fire was accidental. 35-year-old John Orr, the investigator who had stood next to Billy Deal in the parking lot

on the night of the fatal fire, had straight out told the family of fire victim Carolyn Krause that he believed the fire was an act of arson. And John was someone whose opinion carried a lot of weight among firefighters and arson experts. After joining the Glendale Fire Department as a firefighter 10 years ago, John's ability to ferret out the causes of suspicious fires had eventually earned him his job as arson investigator. When John stepped back and looked at the events of October 10th, what he saw sounded all of his alarm bells. Three fires at three retail stores all during business hours? His own investigation into the two smaller fires at the grocery stores on October 10th had shown that they were most likely set deliberately in racks full of potato

chips, an oil-saturated food that would catch fire and burn quickly. But even though there was no such point of origin at the Ole Home Center fire, and even though the Ole Fire had been much, much more serious, John did not like what he considered a pattern among the three fires. So even after the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department closed the books on the Ole Home Center fire, John decided to keep digging. And a few days after the fatal Ole Home Center fire, Orr believed his suspicions were confirmed when arson investigators responded to a fire at the building Emporium in North Hollywood. There, they found a low-tech but very effective time-delay incendiary device pushed into a stack of highly flammable polyfoam, a petroleum-based

product used as stuffing in cushions and mattresses, that burns violently when it catches fire. The incendiary device was a piece of yellow-lined notebook paper wrapped around a cigarette and three unlit matches, the whole thing bundled together with a rubber band. Once the cigarette was lit, an arsonist would have up to about 15 minutes to flee the scene before the cigarette burned down and lit the matches, which then lit the notepaper on fire, which eventually lit the foam and created a raging fire. As John read through the report on the building emporium fire, he thought of the fire at Oli's and how easy it might have been for an arsonist to have used that same low-tech incendiary device to set the fire that had claimed the lives of four people. But by then, the South Pasadena Home Center had been completely cleaned out and it was just too late for John or anyone

else to go back and look for any evidence that might support this new theory of how the Oli's fire might have really started. But if John was right and the bundle of matches, cigarette, and notepaper began to show up at other fires, then he and his colleagues had a very scary problem on their hands. It was possible that arson investigators might find themselves hunting for a serial arsonist. But in the months that followed the devastating fire at Oles, it looked like maybe John was wrong. of our biggest celebrities. And they don't get much bigger than the man who made badminton sexy. Okay, maybe that's a stretch, but if I say pop star and shuttlecocks,

you know who I'm talking about. No? Short shorts? Free cocktails? Careless whispers? Okay, last one. It's not Andrew Ridgely. Yep, that's right.

It's stone-cold icon George Michael. From teen pop sensation to one of the biggest solo artists on the planet, join us for our new series, George Michael's Fight for Freedom. From the outside, it looks like he has it all. But behind the trademark dark sunglasses is a man in turmoil. George is trapped in a lie of his own making, with a secret he feels would ruin him if the truth ever came out.

Follow Terribly Famous wherever you listen to your podcasts, or listen early and ad-free on Wondery Plus on Apple Podcasts or the Wondery app. If you're listening to this podcast, then chances are good you are a fan of The Strange, Dark, and Mysterious. And if that's the case, then I've got some good news. We just launched a brand new Strange, Dark, and Mysterious. And if that's the case, then I've got some good news. We just launched a brand new Strange, Dark, and Mysterious podcast called Mr. Ballin's Medical Mysteries. And as the name suggests,

it's a show about medical mysteries, a genre that many fans have been asking us to dive into for years, and we finally decided to take the plunge and the show is awesome. In this free weekly show, we explore bizarre, unheard of diseases, strange medical mishaps, unexplainable deaths, and everything in between. Each story is totally true and totally

terrifying. Go follow Mr. Ballin's Medical Mysteries wherever you get your podcasts, and if you're a Prime member, you can listen early and ad-free on Amazon Music. on Amazon Music. Over the next three years, the Glendale Fire Department in Southern California was plenty busy responding to emergency calls. But none of the brush fires, house fires, fires in retail stores and empty buildings that John investigated between 1984 and 1987

matched the ferocity of the Ole's Home Center fire and the two other fires that had all happened nearby and at almost the same time on that same evening of October 10th, 1984. But starting on January 13th, 1987, all that changed. Along a 100-mile stretch of Highway 99 between the cities of Fresno and Bakersfield, California, firefighters responded to more than half a dozen fires in the space of just three days. And like the Ole's Hardware Fire of October 10, 1984, all the fires occurred in retail stores during business hours, and all the fires appeared to have been set by placing an incendiary device in or near highly flammable foam rubber, styrofoam, or polyurethane. While there were no fatalities

like there had been at Oli's, these fires caused millions of dollars in damages. And at the scene of four of those fires, arson investigators found the same simple time delay device that John was now sure must have been used to start the Oley fire. A piece of yellow lined notebook paper wrapped around a cigarette and three unlit matches. But this time, John was not alone in voicing his suspicions that investigators might be dealing with a serial arsonist. John was now joined in that opinion by Captain Marvin G. Casey of the Bakersfield Fire Department, a 20-year veteran who carefully collected the evidence from each of the new arson scenes and sent it to the California Regional

Office of the Federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives for testing. Even though the Bakersfield fires were way out of John's jurisdiction, John watched the cases carefully, glad that the person working them was taking the same approach he himself would have taken. And Captain Casey was even going so far as suggesting that the fires might be the work not only of a serial arsonist, but of an insider. Someone who seemed to know so much about the art of setting fires that he or she might even be a professional firefighter. And when the Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms Crime Lab came back with a report that it had discovered a partial fingerprint left on a scrap of yellow notebook paper found at the scene of one of the fires in the Bakersfield

area, Marvin asked the fingerprint specialist at the scene of one of the fires in the Bakersfield area, Marvin asked the fingerprint specialist at the office to run that print against the names of more than 200 of the state's arson investigators. But not only did the office turn down Marvin's request, there were just too many names on that list, the very idea that the fires could have been set by an actual investigator made Marvin an instant outcast among most of the state's tight-knit group of arson investigators. Meanwhile, the fingerprint failed to match any of the prints that were stored in a federal database of known criminals. And once again, if there was a serial arsonist at work, the trail went cold, just as it had

a few years after the Oleles Home Center fire back in 1984. But while John, along with Marvin, insisted on keeping the serial arsonist theory alive, their warnings seemed to fall on deaf ears. In fact, it would take two more waves of fires before law enforcement took the theories of John and Marvin seriously enough to set up a new task force to investigate the suspicious and destructive fires that had all broken out within that two-year period. Calling itself the Pillow Pyro Task Force, this group of arson investigators targeted a criminal they now called, quote, a real pyro, end quote, someone with an uncontrollable need to set more fires. The first wave of fires that prompted the creation of this task force started on March 3rd, 1989,

in Pacific Grove, California, four hours north of Bakersfield. That's when area fire departments responded to a series of six suspicious fires that all fit the profile of the Bakersfield fires of 1987, as well as the profiles of the fires that had all occurred at nearly the same time in South Pasadena on October 10th, 1984, when the Ole Home Center fire claimed the lives of four people. Like those earlier fires, all the Pacific Grove fires happened in retail sites during business hours, and investigators again found evidence of the now-familiar time-delay incendiary device made from yellow notepaper, a cigarette, and unlit matches, all hidden inside the same highly flammable polyurethane materials. After this wave of fires, which caused millions in damages but no loss of human life, Marvin once

again floated his theory that the arsons were the work of an insider, and now he handed a much shorter list of names of California arson investigators to the California Office of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, asking crime techs to compare that one partial print found back in 1987 on the scrap of yellow notepaper to the names of just 10 arson investigators. Those names represented investigators, which included himself and John, whose work may have taken them to both the Bakersfield and Pacific Grove areas during the times when the suspicious fires had occurred. But once again, there were no matches,

and even Marvin had to admit that his theory of the arsons being an inside job had hit a total dead end. But no sooner had the fires in Pacific Grove cooled off than Southern California was practically lit up by a series of 19 arsons or arson attempts that took place between late June 1990 and early March 1991. This nine-month-long wave began on June 27th with a brush fire that broke out in the College Hills area of Glendale, destroying 30 homes and severely damaging another 37 properties. And this time it was John who was called to the scene and who eventually uncovered evidence that the devastating College Hills fire had probably been caused by the incendiary device that was by now a signature of the serial arsonist that would soon be the quarry of the Special Pillow Pyro Task Force. December, when seven retail stores in the Los Angeles and North Hollywood area went up in flames all within three weeks of each other, followed in March by eight suspicious fires in Hollywood, five of them set on the same day, March 27th. But even after finding the signature incendiary

device that John now believed traced all the way back to 1984 when Oli's home center burned to the ground, it wasn't until April 17, 1991, more than a year after the Pillow Pyro Task Force was formed, and seven years after the fatal Ole's Home Center fire, that law enforcement finally got the tip that would eventually help them uncover the identity of one of the most prolific serial arsonists of the 20th century. But first, the Pillow Pyro Task Force had to catch their suspect red-handed, actually setting a fire or somehow revealing themselves as the arsonist. But, thanks to a series of human errors early on in the task force's attempts to mount a surveillance operation, catching their suspect in the act took much longer than anyone on the

special task force ever expected. Because right after they got their first good piece of information, their suspect was seen stopping at a drugstore to buy cigarettes and matches. The task force surveillance team was horrified to see the suspect look under the back bumper of the car they were driving and discover the location tracking device that the surveillance team had installed to monitor and record their suspect's movements. After being in place for only just a couple of days, the device had come loose and the suspect had quickly spotted the device antenna that was practically dragging on the ground. Now, not only was the suspect on notice that they were being watched, the publicity surrounding the devastating series of fires in College Hills seemed to have scared the arsonist into putting away their matches, cigarettes, and yellow-lined paper.

was to show employees who had been working at the time of various arson fires that had taken place in the last four years, to see if any of those employees could pick the suspect out of a photo lineup. Even John and his colleague Marvin, who had long suspected the presence of a serial arsonist in Southern California, had no new ideas or information to offer frustrated investigators, except to say, hurry up, because it was only a matter of time before this arsonist would feel compelled to strike again, no matter the risk of discovery. And in the meantime, the Glendale Fire Department had plenty to do putting out the brush fires that were burning up the surrounding dry fields and hillsides, along with a suspicious fire that had burned down a stage set at Warner Brothers Studio in Burbank.

The fire at Warner Brothers happened on November 22, 1991, a full seven months after the Pillow Pyro Task Force had identified its new suspect. If, as John suspected, that fire had actually been the work of that suspect, it meant that their serial arsonist was back in business. And in the end, as John had predicted, it was the arsonist's growing need to go to the scene of the fires they had set that led to the suspect's capture and arrest. Just one day after the fire at the Warner Brothers studio, the suspect popped up on the scene of two separate arson fires before the location of the separate arson fires before the

location of the fires had become public knowledge, even for someone listening in on an emergency frequency scanner. And by December 4th, 1991, task force investigators were knocking on the door of the so-called Pillow Pyro Serial Arsonist, whose crimes now included the destruction of millions of dollars worth of property and business revenue and the fire-related deaths of four people back in the fall of 1984 at Olis. Based on police interviews and evidence discovered in the suspect's car and home, here is a reconstruction of what happened on the night of October 10th, 1984 at Ole's Home Center in South Pasadena, and here is how the arsonist was able to go from that night and set thousands more additional fires throughout Southern

California. Back on a cool, clear night in early October 1984, the arsonist stepped through the front doors of Ole's home center on Fair Oaks Boulevard. But before setting the fire they had planned so carefully, the arsonist allowed themselves the pleasure of walking through the store aisles and enjoying the open space plan of the building. Not only was this home center filled with material that would catch fire quickly and burn very hot, it had a fire containment system that the arsonist was sure they could hijack in a way that would cause even more terror and destruction. If the plan the arsonist had in mind worked, then the floor-to-ceiling fire doors that were designed to contain a fire that happened after

hours when no one was in the store would come down very quickly and maybe even trap inside the burning building some of the customers the arsonist now saw wandering through the aisles. Those customers included a middle-aged woman and a young boy who probably wasn't even three years old yet. The arsonist fingered the incendiary device inside of their pocket. It was simple and elegant, and just feeling the cigarette and matches rubber-banded together inside of the piece of rolled-up yellow notepad paper gave the arsonist a thrill of sexual excitement. After planting the device inside of a display of polyurethane cushions, the arsonist would make sure there was just the right combination of air supply and fuel before lighting the cigarette. Then, the arsonist would have 10 to 15 minutes to stroll casually out of the store before the matches and paper caught fire and transferred that small but hot flame

into the surrounding foam. But, before setting the cigarette alight, the arsonist spent just one minute full of secret pleasure, imagining the trajectory of the fire they were about to create and control. 45 seconds after the polyurethane caught fire, the flames from the cushions would race up the wall behind the display. Then the 1000 degree heat would push its way across the ceiling and walls and melt the door locks that would in turn trigger the roll down of the north and south floor to ceiling fire doors. Maybe the woman and the little boy would be trapped inside of one of those areas. The arsonist could imagine the woman pulling the little boy out of the shopping cart and

holding on to him as she looked down the aisles around her and saw flames boiling out towards where she was standing. There might be other people trapped in the store, employees and would-be heroes who would understand too late that what they thought was a little smoke was in fact a raging inferno, and they would try to get everyone who was still in the store outside. But they would be too late. By the time the fire shorted out all the lights, it would also burn through the ceiling into the attic, where the hot flames would find a fresh source of oxygen that would cause the fire to become even more intense and even more deadly. And by the time the first fire engine arrived, the firefighters would also be too late.

The arsonist would have exposed the fatal flaw in the store's fire containment system by starting a fire so hot that the automatic roll-down of the fire doors would actually prevent people from getting out and making it impossible for firefighters to rescue anyone trapped inside. The arsonist had also made sure that the emergency response, at least at first, would be inadequate, because the arsonist had set two other fires that evening, one that broke out at a food market in Pasadena just before 7 p.m., and another that would ignite any minute now in a display of oil-saturated potato chips at a food market just six blocks away. Those fires would be nothing, though, not compared to the one that was

about to engulf Ole's home center. The other two were just diversionary fires, ones that would mean fewer fire engines would be available to respond to the truly magnificent fire that the arsonist was about to set right now. Glancing around to make sure that no one could see what they were doing, the arsonist carefully, lovingly, lit the cigarette nestled inside its yellow paper in the nest of highly flammable polyurethane foam cushions. A moment later, as he passed through the paint department, the arsonist smiled at a young woman behind the counter who was handing a set of house keys over to an older woman who must have been the younger woman's mother. A minute or two after that, Glendale Fire Department's crack arson investigator John Orr, a man later known as the Pillow Pyro, left Oli's home center through the front door. John had already been to the site of the first fire he'd set that evening,

a food market in Pasadena. He had stayed there just long enough to take a few pictures and impress everyone at the scene with his uncanny ability to detect exactly how the fire started. In that case, he had led the store owner over to the potato chip display and explained how quickly a fire could feed off the oil-soaked snack food. Now John figured he had just enough time to check in on the progress of the second diversionary fire he'd set in another shelf of potato chips at a little grocery a few blocks away from Oli's. Then he would come back here in time to watch the main attraction, the total destruction of

this hardware store and everything inside of it. And sure enough, by 8.30 p.m., John was standing again in the parking lot outside of Oli's home center, watching and taking pictures with his 35-millimeter camera, even as the flames sent a tower of sparks high into the night sky, and the entire roof of the 18,000 square foot building collapsed inward. Standing near John was Billy Deal, whose wife and grandson were trapped inside of the burning building. Billy was still standing there when the sister of Carolyn Krause, the young woman who had been standing behind the counter in the paint department when John had left the hardware store at about 10 minutes before the fire broke out,

approached John. When she told him that her sister Carolyn was still missing, John glanced away from the viewfinder of his camera just long enough to tell her that once they went in to look for bodies, they'd be sure to keep an eye out for Carolyn. When state investigators arrived at John's house to arrest him seven years later on the afternoon of December 4th, 1991, they found a black canvas bag belonging to John that contained rubber bands, matches, a pack of cigarettes, and two cigarette lighters. And under the floor mat behind the driver's seat in the city car John drove, investigators recovered a pad of yellow-lined notepaper.

But it would turn out investigators had already discovered the key pieces of evidence that would eventually put one of California's most respected arson investigators behind bars. would eventually put one of California's most respected arson investigators behind bars. The problem was, they had dismissed those early clues as just too unbelievable to pursue, and possibly too damaging to their own public image. Because, going all the way back to 1987, Captain Marvin Casey from the Bakersfield Fire Department had had very solid grounds for suspecting that the wave of fires first in the Fresno area and two years later in the Pacific Grove area were the work of a professional firefighter. Because when Marvin had mapped out the time and location of those fires, he had discovered that each wave was clustered around a regional conference attended by state arson

investigators, including John Orr. And once investigators had recovered the partial fingerprint from one of the crime scenes, Marvin was able to narrow his list of possible suspects down to just 10 investigators. And that list included John and nine others who had attended both the 1987 and 1989 conferences, which meant each of the people on the list had been in the general location of the fires and each had traveled to and from the conferences alone, which meant they would have had the opportunity to set the fires without anyone seeing them. But due to a mistake at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms Crime Lab, a mistake at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms Crime Lab, crime techs failed to match the recovered print to the print they had on file for John Orr. It was a mistake that would allow

John to continue setting fires for another four years. It wasn't until April 17, 1991, after the head of the Pillow Pyro Task Force had requested that the crime lab run the fingerprint again, this time against the prints on file for all Los Angeles law enforcement personnel, that the crime lab came up with a match. Back in 1971, three years before John was hired by the Glendale Fire Department, John had almost realized his true lifelong dream, that of becoming a Los Angeles police officer. John had passed all the physical, oral, and medical exams, his fingerprints

were on file, and then came the bitter and devastating news. He had failed the psychological evaluation. According to the Los Angeles Police Department psychologist, John was a schizoid person who was withdrawn and who had issues with women and sex. Bottom line diagnosis? Personality trait disturbance and an emotionally unstable personality. Exactly the kind of man who would later leave the print from his left ring finger on an incendiary device recovered on January 16, 1987 from the site of a fire at the Family Bargain Center in Tulare, just south of Fresno, where state arson investigators, including John, were attending an annual conference. But important as that matching fingerprint would be in the court case against John Orr, there was another piece of evidence that John himself

handed over to investigators on a silver platter. another piece of evidence that John himself handed over to investigators on a silver platter. That piece of evidence was the manuscript of a fact-based book John was writing about an arsonist who lived in the Los Angeles area and whose crimes bore striking similarities to actual events in John's own life. John had started writing the book back in 1990, and it wasn't long before he was sending out letters to editors and publishers asking if they would buy it. At the request of the Pillow Pyro Task Force, a former firefighter turned published author reached out to John and offered assistance. John sent him the manuscript, which later wound up in the hands of the task

force. Instead of reading like the fact-based thriller John claimed it was, the manuscript read like John's own autobiography. The giveaway was how accurately John described real arson cases that he himself had not investigated. The only way he could have known so many details that had been withheld from the public, or left out of official accounts, was if John himself had set the fires that he had written about. In particular, John wrote a detailed description of his protagonist, a serial arsonist, setting fire to a hardware store in South Pasadena called Cal's, a fire that in the manuscript wound up killing five people, including a grandmother and her two-and-a-half-year-old grandson, a little boy named Matthew. In his book, which John titled Points of Origin, a phrase that refers to

the starting point of a fire, his arsonist was furious when investigators declared the hardware fire was accidental. Just as John in real life had wanted the Los Angeles arson cop investigating the real life fire at Oley's home center on October 10th, 1984, to recognize that conflagration as the brilliant work of a gifted serial arsonist. In particular, John wanted the credit he felt he deserved for the skill and artistry that he had put into creating a fire that burned so hot and fast that in the end, not everyone could escape the flames. Instead, the official report listed John's perfect arson as accidental. And in real life, John would spend the next seven years after the fire at Oli's hardware store drawing as much attention as possible to his theory that all of these fires

had been set by a serial arsonist who turned out to be none other than himself. John knew that back in 1989, he had been very lucky when the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms had failed to match that fingerprint found at an arson scene to John's own fingerprint. But what John had said about a real pyro not being able to stop setting fires turned out to be true of John himself. Even after he discovered the tracking device that had been installed under his car bumper, and he knew that he was a suspect in the pillow pyro investigation, ultimately John could not control his own compulsion. And by 1990 through 1991, he practically set entire areas of Southern California on fire. Right up until the moment in late November 1991, when even John could not explain how he managed to appear immediately on the scene of so many fires

before anyone else even knew those fires had started to burn. Starting with his first trial on arson charges in 1992, John would face a total of three state and federal trials. By 1998, John would be convicted of a total of four murder charges and 23 counts of arson. He is currently serving a life sentence at California State Prison. Before John's arrest in 1991, the number of brush fires in the foothill areas near John's home in Los Angeles had averaged 67 every year dating back to 1981. 67 every year dating back to 1981. After John's arrest, that number dropped to just one brush fire a year in that same area. When arson investigators conducted a similar survey of arson fires in retail stores during business hours going back 10 years, they determined that most of the 78 fires

they found that matched those criteria had probably also been set by John Orr. In total, California law enforcement would eventually attribute as many as 2,000 fires in Southern California set between 1984 and 1991 to John Orr, the so-called Pillow Pyro. ore, the so-called pillow pyro. Our major source of information for creating this episode was Joseph Wambaugh's non-fiction book titled Fire Lover, published in 2002. We also relied on the documentaries, court records, and historical newspaper articles you can find on our source list provided in the description. Thank you for listening to the Mr. Ballin Podcast. If you got something out of this episode and you haven't done this already,

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