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The average fireman, that's their job.

For a pyromaniac, it's their life. He is consumed by it.

A guy like that has such a mass, such a facade of normality, that it's almost

impossible to detect something is wrong.

The fact that he seems to set all his fires in crowded places during the day

where people could potentially die is important.

much, much more dramatic, and it's much more stimulating, much more eroticized

for the pyromaniac.

Welcome to Very Scary People.

I'm Donnie Wahlberg.

On October 10th, 1984, flames swept through a crowded store in California,

trapping some employees and shoppers inside.

There was panic and confusion, and not everyone escaped in time.

Investigators combed through the debris to try to establish the cause.

Was this an accident or arson?

More mysterious fires followed, and a pattern emerged.

There was an arsonist on the loose.

Now the hunt was on. This is part one of The Fire Starter.

Ole's Home Center in South Pasadena was big and had pretty much anything you

could think of from cheap tools to Christmas lights.

It was actually in a building that had once housed a grocery store and a drug

store.

They cut two holes in the wall between the two stores and put a couple of roll

-up doors in there so that people can go in between, and those things will drop

down as soon as there's a fire.

The roll -up doors would stop the fire from spreading from one side of the

to the other.

On October 10, 1984, there were dozens of people in the Ole's hardware store,

among them employees and shoppers.

I was 19 and just started working full -time.

I could have never imagined that evening. It would have totally changed

The store was pretty quiet that evening because it was the game two of the World

Series.

Billionaire to deal. They live in the neighborhood, and they're babysitting

their grandson, Matthew Troy.

And decide that, hey, you know, it's a nice sort of warm night.

Let's go down to Oli's and do some shopping.

Of course, little Matthew isn't really having it, doesn't want to be in the

cart. And they say, oh, don't worry.

We'll get you some ice cream. We'll take you to Baskin -Robbins.

Ada and Matthew, grandmother and grandson, are perusing aisles in the

department. And Billy is up in the tools section, which is in a completely other

part of the store.

All of a sudden I heard somebody yelling, hey, we need to clear the

need to get out of the store.

I looked over and noticed that there was a column of smoke.

I went back over to the hardware department all the way in the back of

and saw a couple of customers, told them, hey, we need to leave the store

now.

Jim Obdom encounters Ada and Matthew in one of the aisles.

And there was a lady with her grandchild in the very last row of the department

that was looking at the merchandise.

And I told her that we needed to leave the store, that there was an emergency.

And he asked her to follow him, and he began walking towards the closest fire

door to them.

And I told her, take your grandson out of the cart, because we need to move

quickly out of the store.

As we were walking down the main aisle, I looked over to the right and saw that

that pillar of smoke was not a pillar of smoke anymore.

It was a wall of flame.

As he walked towards that fire door, the fire door suddenly came down.

I was trapped because two roll of doors closed on me, blocking my way from one

side of the door to the other building.

It traps them in this building.

that a raging blaze is just about to consume.

And as I see the flames on one side of me, all of a sudden the light flickered

and turned off, and everything turned black, and it was just an orange glow.

You have nothing on your mind but sheer panic.

He's hoping he can save this grandmother and her grandbaby, but he also knows

he's got to get out of there.

I went so fast that I don't even remember seeing the lady with her

there. I lost her.

It was pitch black in the store, and I couldn't see anything really. So at that

point in time, I just prayed and said, you know, Lord, get me out of here.

It was just totally chaos.

And I was trying to figure out where to go from here.

I headed toward the back wall.

and built my way along the aisle in the dark.

It just seemed incredibly hot.

He makes his way through the smoke toward the one emergency door that he

that leads out to the back of the hardware store.

As I was working my way down the back aisle toward the exit, it was just the

intense heat. It was extreme.

He had to shield his head and body with his arms from the fire as it became so

intense.

And it just seemed like forever to get to those emergency exit doors.

So I felt like giving up.

But then here are the doors.

I was like, I'm going to be the last one out of these doors.

And when he gets outside and turns around and looks at where he came from,

building is engulfed in flames.

I remember seeing smoke coming out of those doors, and it was just black.

I knew that there would be people that perished in the fire.

In less than five minutes, this fire went from a small fire to a fully

12 ,000 -square -foot building.

I had first and second -degree burns on my arm and also on my ear, on my

forehead and face.

Outside the store, the crowd is gathering, and among the spectators is

Deal, and he's asking everybody, have you seen my wife, have you seen my

grandson? Do you know where they might be?

And these emotions are playing out in the parking lot of this hardware store

that is absolutely engulfed in this fire.

The captain is trying to direct his rookie firefighters into this massive

John Orr shows up. He was the fire investigator for the city of Glendale.

fire investigative community all knew John Orr very well, and he was a well

-respected investigator.

And he seemed to have a great deal of knowledge about fire that many other

people didn't have.

And he takes a bunch of pictures of the firefighters and the fire.

It was putting up quite a bit of smoke. I started taking photographs of the

always fire.

Because it's a good tactic to take pictures of the crowd.

If a fire ever turns out to be arson, then it's a good idea to have some crowd

shots.

John was known for telling all these investigators that the bug is always in

crowd.

So you should video it so you can figure out whether somebody's showing up at a

bunch of your fires, and then you'll know that that person is the arsonist.

I found in my experience as an arson investigator, their trait of coming back

the scene of the crime is almost universal.

It seems that the motivations are to see the damage that's done or being around

the excitement of what's going on and being the only one that knows what

actually happened.

I heard that there was nobody else that made it out of the store.

The Ole's Home Center fire started at 8 .04 p .m. on the night of October 10,

1984.

First arriving units found that fire was fully involved inside the west side of

the Ole store.

They saw smoke and fire beginning to come out of all of the open doors and

in the location, and within minutes it was through the roof.

People are watching, people who've been evacuated from the store, people who

worked in the store.

I was very much concerned for my co -workers.

inside will be homicide victims.

We came back the next morning, and by then the L .A. County Sheriff's

had taken over the entire scene, so we were excluded as investigators on that

case.

The investigation of the Ole's Home Center fire was led by...

The Los Angeles County Sheriff's Arson Homicide Division, they couldn't figure

out what happened because they couldn't decide whether or not it was electrical

fire. The fire was what we call undetermined, and it really became a

recovery effort fairly early on.

In all, there's four people that died in this Holy Fire.

Working in the store was Carolyn Krause.

People remember her leading people out of the store when this fire took place.

She was a very sweet young lady who got along really well.

Jimmy Satina was a high school kid.

And he was like an all -American athlete.

He was being scouted by the Chicago Cubs. He had a bright future.

Whenever you saw him, he always had a smile on his face, never in a bad mood.

He led people to safety and ultimately perished.

It was very saddening to hear that.

Among the victims were Ada Diehl and Matthew Treidel.

We were called last night and told he was trapped in there. He was dead.

That's all we know.

They were found about 20 feet from the door.

My grandbaby, he would have been three in January.

He'd be with his other grandmother.

They were in the store shopping with her husband, his grandfather.

She decided to go back for one more thing.

She took the baby with her, and I'm sure she did everything she could for him.

It was the next day that I found out that the lady and her grandchild passed

away in the fire.

All of the victims who died in this fire died from smoke inhalation, and that is

typically what happens in a fire.

People very rarely burn to death in fires.

Most of the time it's the smoke that kills them because they're not breathing

enough oxygen. Then the fire envelops them.

John Orr knew very well the sister of one of the victims in the fire.

And a couple of days after the fire, he specifically told her that he was angry

that they had not determined this was an arson fire.

And he tells her, this is an arson fire.

And I'm bound and determined to get to the bottom of why this fire happened and

who set it.

To investigate a fire scene, you start from a distance and work your way into

it, observing the scene itself and what's presented by the scene,

and then moving into the point or the area of origin.

The point of origin is where the fire started.

It was going to tell you the possible cause of the fire. It could be an

accidental fire due to electrical short.

It could be careless smoking.

It can be any number of things.

A good fire investigator can track back to the area where it originated and then

try and ascertain what it was specifically that started the fire,

a shorted wire or a pour of gasoline throughout a room starting.

the entire room on fire.

You have to assume it's going to be accidental from the beginning until you

eliminate all of the accidental causes.

And in fact, John Orr went to the area of origin and expressed his own opinions

as to why this fire was arson and different from what they said.

One of the things that John was really good at was reading a fire.

He knew that arson fires start from the ground up, and electrical fires always

burn from the top down.

The little bit of investigation I was able to do after the fire was knocked

showed the appearance of being a fire starting low in the actual merchandise

area. I had great respect for John. I was impressed with his knowledge.

There would be a number of fire scenes where the investigators might be

struggling. to try to find out where the fire started, and he had a knack of

showing up on scene and being able to relatively quickly identify the point of

origin of the fire where other investigators had been stumped by until

arrival.

My dad was the hero of solving those fires and figuring out where they

and that they were arson. He was on the news quite often. There's a lot of

witness statements and a lot of possible suspects that were in the area at the

time of the fire.

To anybody that worked at a fire investigation at the time, his

almost larger than life.

Or tell them, there's something happening here that you are missing, and

ignore it.

We were taken out of the investigation, and it was taken over by the L .A.

Sheriff's Department.

Their method was basically bring in a D -9 caterpillar, tore down a couple of

walls.

Once they began to drive heavy equipment into the scene, You have now

compromised your scene investigation because you certainly can't figure out

substance was used to start a fire if you're driving heavy equipment inside a

location before you finish your investigation.

If the sheriff would only have listened to what he said, they would have

realized there was something far more sinister going on that night.

The loss of life in a popular retail store made headlines in Southern

California. Four people died in this fire, including a grandmother and her

-year -old grandson.

The other two were employees of Ole's Home Center.

The investigators, because they didn't determine that it was an arson fire,

didn't conduct any further investigations.

If they had done so, they may have realized that two fires... on that very

night, may have been connected to the Ole's home center fire.

The first one was about 15 minutes away from the Ole South Pasadena location.

John Orr was sent to investigate it.

I was paged to assist the Pasadena investigator at a supermarket fire.

It was a fairly small fire in a potato chip rack.

It seemed more of a juvenile type thing, a fun fire, or maybe a diversion.

Set the fire and then go over and steal liquor or expensive meats or gourmet

foods while the entire focus of the staff was to put the fire out. I just

on some basic information and then agreed to cruise around just to see what

going on in case something broke out.

The third fire that night was in another grocery store, also in the potato chip

rack.

So I went down, drove a half mile, and investigated the potato chip fire at

location, and then came back up and joined our group at the Ole's fire

John Orr participated in all three of those investigations during that night.

Investigators quickly determined the two potato chip fires were arson fires.

But because the fires were in grocery stores, investigators thought there was

way they could be linked to the giant blaze that happened at Ole.

very quickly dismissed any thought that there was some linkage between these

three fires.

If anybody had connected these three fires, they would have realized that

was something far more serious happening that night and that there was an

arsonist on the loose and he wasn't going to be satisfied until his arson

some real damage and he got some credit for it.

The only report that reflects that connection is a report that John Orr

He said that was the same person that started all these fires.

If you look at the pattern among pyromaniacs, they often do it in a spree

fashion, sometimes several fires in one day. Because it's so stimulating for

them, there's an inner drive to do it. They want to recapture that feeling

again.

By setting fires in a spree -like fashion, the arsonist can also cause the

greatest amount of damage.

There was a fire set in another Always Home Center store in the city of

Pasadena. That fire didn't really ignite.

And investigators go out, and they look at it, and they even find the device.

It was a device put in their polyurethane foam that someone

was still smoking.

And that device was a cigarette that had three matches attached to it by a

rubber band, and it was placed inside a piece of folded...

the yellow -lined notepad paper.

And the concept of that device would be once the cigarette was ignited, you

would have a time frame before it would burn down enough to light the matches,

and the matches would in turn light the yellow -lined paper.

And you'd need that amount of flame before you'd be successful in igniting

To John, it was clear that the same arsonist who set the fire at Ole's

in South Pasadena and killed... four people, was telling investigators that,

hey, you missed me.

I'm going to do it again so that you see it's an arson.

Orr was very, very good at fire detection. Why?

That was his life.

It was part of him. It was all -consuming for him.

Of course, his words fell on deaf ears.

In the two years that followed, there would be more than 6 ,500 fires in

Southern California, causing more than $20 million in damage. And nobody can

exactly how many of these fires were accidental or are.

I was working at the Bakersfield Fire Department as a fire investigator, and

had a call come in. It was a craft mart store out in the southwest part of

Bakersfield.

I traveled out there, and my cruiser was met at the front door by an engine

company captain that took me back to a dry floral arrangement where the fire

started. When I looked over in the vent, I saw what I knew to be an incendiary

device. It was three matches laying close to a cigarette butt that had been

severely burned and some rubber band -looking material.

Yellow line paper was laying in close proximity to it. I carefully picked it

with a pair of tweezers and put it into an evidence bag.

I had the manager bring me all of the yellow line paper that he had in the

store, and I compared it with the yellow line paper that I had obtained from the

bin, and none of it compared.

So that made me believe that the paper had to come from the outside.

I was quite surprised whenever I found that someone had intentionally done this

due to the time of day.

The store was busy, had employees in there, had customers in there. I felt

this was someone that was very bold.

This person knew that he could walk in there and do it without being detected.

I had the opportunity to interview the manager and other employees at the craft

mart store to see if they'd seen anybody suspicious or anything.

They hadn't really seen anybody or paid any attention to anyone that was in the

store.

I was still conducting my interviews when I received another call of a fire,

I thought, wow, this is a little unusual. I'm having two large department

with fires in them. What could possibly be going on here?

That's the second fire. There was one lady that was working that had seen a

come in. He was a real handsome cowboy, and she was watching him as he walked

around in the store. And he had something in his hands, and apparently

taken her eye off him for a while.

Shortly after the cowboy left the store, a fire broke out.

I got a call from the two investigators that had been to the...

California Conference of Arson Investigators up in Fresno.

The firefighters, they talk about their work hunting arsonists or how they are

investigating different crimes.

On the last days of the conference, there's a series of fires that take

All located along Highway 99, Fresno being the first one, and that's where

conference was, and they had Tulare, and then we had Bakersfield, and then they

seemed to stop.

So now I'm thinking this could very well be the person that attended the

conference.

Just a gut instinct I had, the fireman was setting these fires. There's a

fireman that attended that conference in Fresno who's lighting fires on his way

home to Bakersfield or Los Angeles.

One of the fire investigators that was there, he called me and says, hey, I'm

going to tell you something that's going to knock your socks off.

Welcome back to Very Scary People.

After a series of mysterious fires break out near an arson investigator's

convention, investigator Marvin Casey has a hunch. He thinks someone in the

firefighting community who attended the conference set the fires.

He has one critical piece of evidence, a scrap of yellow -lined notepaper that

was part of the incendiary device.

He thinks this could be key to identifying the fire starter.

Marvin Casey sends it out to a lab.

They dust it, and they find out that, hey, there's a fingerprint on this piece

of paper.

Well, this is great. I mean, they've got a fingerprint that they can link to a

device that started an arson fire in Bakersfield.

They ran their print through the National Crime Index. It's an index that

put everybody's fingerprints in. Everybody that's ever done anything

nationwide. The guy didn't have a criminal record. There was no hit on him

make a match.

Marvin Casey was disappointed, but he didn't give up. I obtained a roster from

the conference in Fresno, which was attended by 250 fire investigators,

insurance agents, and people like that.

I got my California map, and I traced it down and put indicators showing where

the fires had started. They had to be traveling alone because arson is really

secretive crime.

I narrowed it down to 55 individuals that was traveling down Highway 99

from the convention to the Southern California area.

What Marvin does is he offers the ATF the names of 55 firefighters and a

fingerprint and says, if you put this all together, you're probably going to

find a serial arsonist.

And they looked at the roster and said 55 men. I really don't think we can work

that many.

I was disappointed, but I still couldn't get it out of my head.

I continued to work the theory, and finally, the fire marshal that I was

for said, you know, put this on the back burner, you know, you beat this horse

to death.

For the next two years, fires continued to pop up all over California, but none

were connected to the 1987 fire spree.

It turns out there's a conference taking place in Pacific Grove where a group of

firefighters get together. It's just off the coast of San Francisco area. All

fire investigators get together and they're discussing the fires in

and how we were going to approach it in the future.

One of the fire investigators that was there, he called me and said, hey, I'm

going to tell you something that's going to knock your socks off.

There was other fires that had occurred during that convention, like someone had

just left the convention, was going back to Southern California, traveling down

101, and setting the fire in a different town.

This is very eerily similar to what happened just two years earlier.

This, to me, seemed like it was the same M .O. that had happened in 87.

These fires were during business hours when people were in the store shopping.

After I'd received information that there had been fire going down Highway

I pulled my map back out that I had used in 87 that I had identified as a person

traveling down 99. I knew that it had to be someone from Southern California

because that's the way the map was indicating.

So he asked organizers for a list of names, who attended this conference.

And he gets that list and compares it to the one that he had two years earlier.

Then I put the two together and compared them, and I came up then with ten

names, ten people that attended both conferences.

And on these ten names is the name of a firefighter who's probably responsible

for some of these fairly significant arson.

Then I recontacted ATF, and I said, listen, I've got it down to ten names.

we work with ten names? They said, yes, I believe we can.

So I sent the 10 names up to them, and they were to compare the fingerprint.

They run the names in the fingerprint, and there's no match to any of these

firefighters in that fingerprint.

I was starting to think, you know, well, maybe this will never be solved.

I'd taken a lot of gut from all these guys. They just didn't want to believe

that it was one of our own that was setting fires.

I was probably the only one that suspected it, that believed it.

June 1990 was an unusual fire season.

The fires had begun in spots all over California, and it stretched the

of local fire departments pretty thin.

We had Santa Ana winds blowing.

High winds blowing out of the hills are what moves most of our fires in

California.

You have dry, tender, hot conditions, and then winds that can sometimes get up

into the 50s. It's a perfect playground for an arsenal because you add a match,

and now you've got havoc.

On June 27, I went to my doctor's, and when I was coming back, right on the

hillside, the weeds, they were so dry.

It gave me a creepy feeling. I don't know why that feeling came to me. I

if somebody put a match to that weed, it would just burn.

We live in a two -story family home.

College Hills is a residential area of Glendale, nestled in a foothill

region of the San Gabriel Mountains.

I saw a very thick smoke, and I realized the fire is in our

street, right below us.

At about 3 o 'clock, 3 .30 in the afternoon, there was a report of a fire

area that had experienced a few fires before, right off of a busy thoroughfare

in the middle of town.

And by the time I arrived at the scene, the fire had ripped up a hill, included

about five acres, involved two or three homes.

That fire advanced up that hill pretty darn quick.

And it escalated because the Santa Ana winds were blowing.

There's a house burning and another house burning, and there's smoke in the

and you can feel the flames.

The fire was so intense and the winds were so strong.

It jumped an eight -lane freeway.

Everybody start evacuating now.

My husband.

He came to our street. He was blocked. And right in front of his eyes,

a house exploded onto people.

And fortunately, at that time, he saw a woman, an officer, and asked, go to

my house and tell my wife, just get out, get out of the house.

Right now, when I'm thinking back, it makes me very emotional.

After these women told us just get out, get out of the house, I pulled the car

from the garage. I drove down the street. I remember smoke. It was thick

And the whole street was covered with crisscross fire hoses.

We went to the shopping center and we just watched the fires on

the hills and seeing.

The houses that they were exploding like firecrackers.

It was just surreal.

At around 7 .30, 8 o 'clock, they put the fire out.

The fire destroyed or damaged approximately 67 homes in this College

community. It was very emotional that I saw that our house was saved.

It was the largest fire in the city of Glendale's history.

To this day, I can't believe that no one died in the College Hills fire.

It amazes me that all those people were able to get out of there.

It was a miracle.

But the circumstances surrounding this fire seem suspicious.

John Orr is the Glendale fire captain, and in this case, this fire, the College

Hills fire, is now happening in his city.

John's adamant that this fire is arson. He walks out into the middle of the

field and picks up a lighter.

He tells the other investigators that, well, here, we found the cause of this

fire, and it happened right here. It's this lighter.

He was uncanny about his ability to find these incendiary devices.

We have some very good leads.

John had great relationships with reporters.

And he recognized that the local media would be a pretty good way to advance

investigation. By saying, listen, this is an arson fire.

We're looking for a serial arsonist. Some of the evidence matches up with

individual and ties him into the fires.

We don't have an identity on him.

There was all kinds of witnesses to the College Hills fire. In one case... A

woman describes having a man come to her door and say, hey, did you know there's

a fire in your backyard?

And, of course, this is before she can smell anything or see anything.

And, again, within seconds, he's gone, and suddenly the fire's going.

One of the witnesses sees a white Chevy Blazer right at the point of origin.

In the investigation of this fire, John was put in charge of a tip line.

And so...

As the active investigator, all the tips on this fire, anybody that saw anything

that had to do with it had to call this tip line, and John vetted all the tips.

In late 1990 and going into 91, there's an epidemic of fires that are happening

in retail stores all over L .A.

In each of these fires, there's a device that's very similar, and that device

was a relatively simple design but very effective, a cigarette.

It had three matches attached to it by a rubber band, and it was placed inside a

piece of folded yellow -lined notepad paper.

On March 27th of 1991, I learned that the L .A. Sheriff's Arson Unit had

responded to a large commercial fire in the South Bay area of Los Angeles. Later

that same day, I got a briefing from the investigators that responded to the

scene, and by that time, they learned that... It wasn't just one fire.

There had actually been three fires in the same area, and in each one of those

fires, it started in pillows or foam products.

Clearly, the conclusion was that we had a serial offender who had started those

fires, and we decided that it would be prudent to form a task force, and our

goal was to start visiting all of the local smaller jurisdictions in the

Los Angeles area.

and see if they had had any fires that met that same MO.

Within days, we were able to identify close to 30 fires in Los Angeles over a

four -month period from December through March.

The device is obviously a signature, but the MO goes beyond that.

We noticed that the fires were fairly close to freeway on and off ramp.

access, which would allow the perpetrator easy ingress from the fire

fires were all set in either hardware stores or fashion -type stores, stores

that would have polyurethane foam in them. And that is really the connection

between these fabric stores and hardware stores.

The fact that these fires were being started in the middle of the day in

businesses where there's customers was obvious to us that there's a large

of loss of life if we didn't solve this case soon.

Now that the task force is established, the lead investigators need to meet with

arson investigators in Los Angeles.

The treasurer of the association, John Orr, was well known to myself and others

as the arson investigator for the city of Glendale.

and we hoped that maybe he had some information to share.

After the meeting ended, our investigator got approached in a parking

California State Fire Marshal, and he says, I have to talk to you. I didn't

to say anything in the open meeting.

We think a fireman might be responsible, and we should be careful about what we

say in front of this group.

He said we had the exact same scenario in 1987 in Fresno.

This is Tulare and Bakersfield, and they had in fact recovered a yellow line

paper, cigarette, and match device from one of those fires.

Seems to be an exact match with the device you recovered.

You need to talk to Marv Casey, the arson investigator for the city of

Bakersfield. I get a call from the Los Angeles guys, and they want to come up

and take a look at the yellow line paper that had the fingerprint.

It was run against every fingerprint stored for any possible reason in the

system. So it was not only people that were arrested for crimes, but also

that had their fingerprints taken for any purpose, whether it be a law

enforcement officer or a fire service.

About three days after a phone call came in from the sheriff's lab, he says, you

got John Orr's fingerprints on it.

First thing they did was call me and tell me, you know, You tell John Orr to

quit touching that evidence. I said, he was nowhere around when I investigated

that fire. What are you talking about?

It made no sense that his prints should be on a device from Bakersfield.

I knew John personally. I've worked cases with him, worked on investigations

with him.

I've taken arson scene investigation training with him. He's trusted as one

us.

I thought it could be somebody just messing with the fire guys that were up

there for the conference. They're trying to tantalize or to torture or torment

the fire investigators, say, catch me if you can.

How could it be one of our own? The arsonist would remain on the loose, and

had no intention of stopping.

In the meantime, suspicious fires continued to pop up all over southern

central California.

Eventually, the fire is going to grow enough that someone's not going to be

to escape.

We could not allow that to happen.

Will investigators be able to catch the elusive arsonist before he strikes

again? Could the person starting these fires really be one of their own?

An arson expert?

A firefighter? Someone sworn to save lives?

The shocking conclusion in part two of The Fire Starter.

I'm Donnie Wahlberg.

Thanks for watching.

Good night.

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