John Leonard Orr
John Leonard Orr (born April 26, 1949)[1] is an American convicted serial arsonist, mass murderer and former firefighter.
Orr's modus operandi was to set fires using a timed device, usually comprising a lit cigarette with three matches wrapped in ruled yellow writing paper and secured by a rubber band, in stores while they were open and populated.
Desperate to be a firefighter, he applied to the Glendale Fire Department, which at the time was at the bottom in Los Angeles County for pay; he was accepted in 1974.
Orr studied fire science at a local college and worked at a 7-Eleven and as store security at Sears part time.
On October 10, 1984, in South Pasadena, California, a major fire broke out at an Ole's Home Center hardware store located in a shopping plaza.
[10] This, combined with the recovery of a single unmatched fingerprint left on a piece of notebook paper as part of a time-delay incendiary device,[11] led Captain Marvin G. Casey of the Bakersfield Fire Department (BFD) to suspect that a fire investigator from the Los Angeles area was responsible for these arsons.
In late 1990 and early 1991, another series of arson fires broke out in southern California, this time in and around the Los Angeles metropolitan area.
They found a highly detailed description of a similar fire in his novel Points of Origin which tells the story of a fireman who is also a serial arsonist.
Among those who covered the trial was award-winning journalist Frank Girardot, who would later collaborate with Orr's daughter Lori on a book about the case.
[29] The lead prosecutor on the case, Mike Cabral, opted to seek the death penalty in order to ensure that Orr would spend the rest of his life in prison.
The presiding judge sentenced Orr to four concurrent terms of life without parole for murder, plus an additional 21 years in prison for arson.
[31][32] A California appeals court vacated nine years of his state sentence on March 15, 2000, finding that the burning of homes in the College Hills blaze had only been incidental to his objective of starting a brush fire.
Some fire investigators and an FBI criminal profiler have deemed Orr to be possibly one of the worst American serial arsonists of the 20th century.
[24] Furthermore, arson investigators determined that after Orr was arrested, the number of brush fires in the nearby foothill areas decreased by more than 90 percent.
Orr's story was earlier chronicled by bestselling true crime author Joseph Wambaugh in his book Fire Lover.
On several occasions, film and television have also presented the story of Orr's arson activities and eventual arrest and criminal conviction.
An episode of the PBS science series Nova titled "Hunt for the Serial Arsonist" (airing November 14, 1995) chronicled his story.
[39] The investigation that led to Orr's arrest and conviction was recounted on the episode "Diary of a Serial Arsonist" of the A&E Network's true crime series Cold Case Files.
In July 2021, truth.media released the true crime podcast Firebug, hosted by filmmaker Kary Antholis and chronicling the investigation into the fires through interviews and excerpts from Orr's manuscript.
"[43] In 2022, YouTuber MrBallen, on his podcast, told the story of Orr from the perspective of an observer piecing together his actions and final arrest, starting with the Ole's hardware store fire.
