Original subtitles

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Welcome to "Very Scary People."

I'm Donnie Wahlberg.

During the evening, in October 1984, Ole's,

a home-goods store in South Pasadena, California,

erupts in flames.

Shoppers and employees scramble to escape the raging inferno,

but four people lose their lives that night,

including a 2 1/2-year-old and his grandmother.

Although investigators call the fire an accident,

the truth is far more sinister.

As the years go by, and more fires are set,

a pattern emerges.

Investigators realize there is a serial arsonist on the loose,

and he could be one of their own.

The hunt is on to find the Firestarter.

♪♪

Girardot: The night of October 10, 1984,

was game two of the World Series,

and Ole's home center, a store in South Pasadena, California,

was open for business.

Cabral: A handful of people were in there.

Two of the people that were shopping at the store

was a grandmother and her 2 1/2-year-old grandson.

Man: I was working at the back of the store,

and I heard somebody yelling,

"Hey, we need to clear the store."

And I noticed that there was a column of smoke.

Cabral: He immediately began to usher the customers out of the store.

I saw that that pillar of smoke was a wall of flames.

Cabral: The smoke became so thick that he couldn't see anymore.

He began feeling along the back of the building,

heading towards where he knew a fire door was.

Man: It just seemed like forever.

But then, I was like,

"I'm going to push these doors open,

and I can get out to freedom."

Cabral: In less than five minutes, this fire went from a small fire

to a fully engulfed 12,000-square-foot building.

Man: 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 all, there's four people that died in this Ole's fire.

Woman: My grandbaby.

He would have been 3 in January.

He was with his other grandmother.

And I'm sure she did everything she could for him.

Man: I found out that evening

that two of my co-workers passed away.

I was very saddened to hear that.

Cabral: The captain is trying to direct his rookie firefighters

into this massive fire.

And John Orr shows up.

He was the fire investigator for the city of Glendale.

Most of the people involved in fire investigation

in Los Angeles County knew who John Orr was.

Matassa: His reputation was almost larger than life.

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 it

until his arrival.

Orr was very, very good at fire detection.

Why? That was his life.

It was part of him.

It was all-consuming for him.

Cabral: John was known for telling all these investigators that,

"The bug is always in the 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."

Girardot: Orr tells them, "There's something happening here

that you are missing."

And they ignore it.

Cabral: Most arsonists do not set fires in buildings that are occupied,

except for those who intend to kill those people inside.

Girardot: Other mysterious fires began erupting in businesses,

frequently in the Los Angeles area.

And many of these fires had something in common --

a homemade incendiary device frequently found at the scene.

Matassa: And that device was a relatively simple design,

but very effective -- a cigarette

that had three matches attached to it by a rubber band.

And it was placed inside a piece of folded,

yellow-lined, notepad paper.

The device is obviously a signature,

but the M.O. goes beyond that.

The fires that we're looking at were commercial businesses,

in the middle of the day, when they're occupied.

We had, most likely, a serial offender,

an arsonist that had been starting fires.

And we decided that it would be prudent to form a task force.

We went out, and talked to all of the investigators,

and see if they had had any fires

that met that same M.O.

One investigator remembered that, years earlier,

a similar incendiary device was found at a fire about

100 miles North of Los Angeles, in the city of Bakersfield.

And it had a fingerprint on it.

When they first found it,

there was no match for the print,

but investigators decided to test it again.

And this time, they got a match.

Matassa: A phone call came in from the sheriff's lab.

He says, "You got John Orr's fingerprints on it."

It made no sense that his prints

should be on a device from Bakersfield.

As unbelievable as it was, John Orr was our suspect.

The excitement of the fire and...

Matassa: He was a top instructor,

a top voice for firefighters and arson investigators.

He was so well-known in the state,

and so well-respected.

If we were going to put a case together on that,

we had to have an iron-clad case.

As we're starting to get into our plans,

we learned that he's making a trip out of town

to a training conference

in the central coast area of San Luis Obispo.

And the opportunity that he may start a fire

and we can catch him in the act

was too critical for us to pass up.

We needed to get a warrant from the court to authorize us

to put a tracking device on his vehicle.

He left on a Saturday morning.

John gets in his car,

and begins the drive to central California,

with ATF agents following him.

And one of the things they discover

is that he's not easy to follow.

Matassa: Fortunately, we had aerial surveillance,

because, once he got out on the interstate,

he was driving at 90, 100 miles an hour,

using his emergency lights when someone got in his way.

He's forcing them to drive at these crazy speeds,

weave in and out of traffic,

pedal to the metal the whole way.

Matassa: Usually, the plane flies in circles,

to try to keep a vehicle under surveillance.

Well, he was driving so fast that the aircraft

was actually paralleling him up the freeway.

Once he arrived at his hotel in San Luis Obispo,

in the middle of the night we had a couple of our tactical

people crawl underneath his car, and attach the tracking device.

Now, it's not like what you might imagine

that things are today.

This is a round, circular, magnetic thing.

It was basically a unit that sent out a radio sound.

And the louder the sound was meant the closer you were

to the vehicle you're tracking.

So, in the end, it helped us stay close by,

but you really had to have a line-of-sight surveillance.

We watched him every day during the conference.

The second day, he was being followed by one of the agents,

and went into a drug store.

Girardot: He's there pretty quickly, and leaves.

So, what the heck did he get?

Matassa: Once he left, the agent ran in,

and asked the clerk what he had bought.

And the clerk says, "Oh, he bought a soft drink

and a pack of cigarettes."

Girardot: Well, that's really interesting, because, of all the people

that are at this firefighting conference,

the one person who is the most adamantly against smoking

is John Orr.

And he's just gone into this drug store,

and bought a pack of smokes.

A cigarette obviously was part of each one

of the devices we recovered,

so, we were really keyed up that something was going to be

happening on his drive back to Los Angeles.

And we had the surveillance teams all geared up

for when the class ended.

And no more than five minutes into it,

he pulled into a car wash in the city of San Luis Obispo.

And one of the agents realized that the tracking device

had somehow become dislodged,

and he had noticed the antenna from it.

When he identified the tracking device in his car,

we figured, "This is it. It's up.

How are we going to handle it? What's our tactic?

Are we gonna grab him?

I mean, we've got to do something."

Girardot: But lucky for investigators,

it didn't seem like he realized he was being tracked.

He thought he had a bomb on his car.

So, he gets in the car, and drives as fast

as he can to a police range

where they handle explosive devices.

And while he's doing that, investigators call ahead.

Matassa: From the airplane, I radioed down to the agent,

"Don't let him know it's a tracking device.

Tell him you're not sure what it is.

You'll analyze it, and you'll get back to him."

Girardot: John arrives, runs into the range,

and says, "Hey, I'm a fireman,

and I think there's a bomb attached to my car."

Matassa: A day later, the bomb tech called John, and told him,

"I took the device apart."

It's a hoax device."

It's somebody just messing with you."

We hoped that that story would work.

Within a few weeks,

he's attending another training conference.

One of our agents is actually attending the training with him,

and trying to keep an eye on him.

And he suddenly seems to disappear from the training

during a break.

And around that same time,

a trash barrel right outside the conference

has a small fire erupt.

And within minutes afterwards,

the agent inside sees John again.

And we're thinking to ourselves,

"Does he just know that we're here,

and he's just screwing with us?

Or is this just a coincidence?"

Investigators suspected John Orr of having set dozens of fires.

And so, they set out to interview witnesses

at each of those scenes.

Matassa: In between scrambling to handle the surveillances,

we're still trying to get our witnesses interviewed,

and we needed a photo lineup for John Orr.

We went out to the very first witness

at one of the stores that had a large fire.

And when we showed the photo spread,

she immediately picked John Orr's photo out.

She says, "Oh, he's been in here several times."

And I said, "Well, when was the last time?"

And she said, "The morning of the fire,

probably 15 minutes before the fire."

It was a remarkable start to being able

to get solid witness identification.

We're getting our arrest-and-search warrants in order

when I got a call from his supervisor.

He pulled out a letter, and he says,

"I found my secretary typing this,

this morning, for John Orr."

When I read this letter,

I couldn't believe what I was reading.

"My novel is fiction, but it's based on a real arsonist

who has again hit the L.A. area this year,

doing over $12 million in damage.

It is my feeling that the arsonist

could be a firefighter."

He was, in fact, trying to solicit a publisher

to read his manuscript.

The first thing I did when I got the manuscript

was hole myself up in an office,

and read it in its entirety.

And I found it to be very scary.

Matassa: It, frankly, floored me, and everybody that read it.

The manuscript was called "Points of Origin,"

and it's basically the story of a firefighter

who is a serial arsonist, setting fires in commercial

buildings throughout the state of California.

In some ways, it was more like a diary than a fiction.

He was using different names for businesses,

but in reality, describing the exact fires

that we were investigating him for being responsible for.

Cabral: We were able to say, "Okay, this is that fire.

Everything in this book likely really happened."

The Ole's fire is depicted in the book as "Cal's fire,"

is what he calls the location.

He specifically references the grandmother

and her 2 1/2-year-old grandson who died,

and then, makes one comment that he had no way of knowing,

unless he came in contact with her,

and that was that she had taken him

for mint chip ice cream at the Baskin-Robbins.

When we went out, and spoke to the surviving grandfather,

we asked him, "Did you go to Baskin-Robbins?"

And what he actually told us was,

"No. What we had done is, we had told the 2 1/2-year-old

that, if he behaved himself

while we were shopping in the store,

we would take him to Baskin-Robbins afterwards."

And his favorite ice cream was mint chip ice cream,

which was the exact ice cream

that John Orr referenced in the manuscript.

Girardot: The killer overheard that conversation,

and that conversation showed up

in the text of the fictional work.

♪♪

I was at a class that John had put together.

I didn't know that he was the focus of investigation.

And a short time afterwards,

I was dispatched to a fire at the Warner Bros. lot.

Located within the city of Burbank is Warner Studios.

I would say having a fire at the Warner Bros. lot

is a rarity.

I met up with the head of security.

I looked at the fire scene.

The fire was already out.

I looked at some of the burn patterns in the floor.

The fire was starting to look more and more

like it was an arson fire.

So, being that I had finished the class that day,

I called John.

And I say, "Hey, John, we had this fire

over here at the Warner lot.

I'd like you to come over, and take a look at it."

He asked me how to get into the lot,

so I told them that I would be at the gate

waiting for him on his arrival.

I waited there, at the gate.

And it seemed like I had been waiting there for quite a while.

I got on the radio --

"John, hey, I'm over here at the gate

waiting for you to come in.

Where are you?"

He said, "Oh, I'm already at the scene."

And I'm wondering, "He said he didn't know

how to get into the lot."

Never reached out to Steve, told him he found his way there.

Just left Steve out there.

Patterson: I found out from the head of security, later on,

that John had been on the lot a number of times.

His wife worked at the studios.

And he would come there,

and have lunch with her on occasion.

And we know that, just before the Warner fire ignited,

John Orr's vehicle was parked just outside the gate.

We decided we had to move on the case, and make an arrest.

Cabral: One day, John Orr left the office,

did a drive around the town, in just this circle,

and went right back to the office.

They realized shortly thereafter that,

along the route he had taken,

there had been a fire started in some brush,

just off to the side of the road.

So, it was, frankly, concerning to us

that he's going to start a fire, and someone's going to get hurt.

We decided we have to move on the case, and make an arrest.

I was with a boyfriend of mine.

And we went to his parents' house.

And they said, "Hey, Lori, you've got your dad on the TV.

You got to come check this out."

And the first thing I saw was my dad in handcuffs.

Reporter: The city's top arson investigator

is himself charged with arson.

And then, they were describing that he was being

arrested for arson.

And of course, I really thought it was a mistake.

"There's no way he could do that."

Orr spoke to "Inside Edition" about the moment of his arrest.

It was a total surprise.

I'd come out of my house, on my way to work,

like I do every day of the week, five days a week,

and was starting to get into my car.

and suddenly, surrounded by about 18 to 20

federal And local investigators.

Matassa: In his briefcase, and in his car,

we found cigarettes, matches, rubber bands --

the materials for the incendiary device.

At one point, I told him,

"We've even recovered a device from one of the scenes,

and we lifted your fingerprint off it."

You would expect an innocent person to say, "No, you didn't.

You couldn't possibly get my fingerprint off it."

He says, "Well, how many prints did you get?"

Why would you even ask that question,

unless you were trying to find out

what evidence we had against him?

He wasn't very talkative about the obvious situation

that he was under house arrest.

We asked a few little questions.

Now, looking back, I wish I would have asked

a million more questions at that moment.

My dad was my hero, my sister's hero,

and we looked at him as the world's hero.

He just was really doing no wrong in our eyes.

Patterson: At first, I'm thinking, "There's no possible way

John would have been involved in setting fires."

To me, it just was out of the realm of my thinking.

Schlesinger: His colleagues in the fire department --

they all thought he was really a good guy.

A guy like Orr has such a mask, such a facade of normality,

that it's almost impossible to detect something is wrong

unless you know what he did.

Nobody considered him to be a pyromaniac,

or deviant in any particular way.

I found out later on John was there videotaping the fires

prior to the arrival of the fire department.

He had a video of the first-in fire companies

arriving on scene.

Matassa: How was he there before the first responders got there,

unless he was responsible for the fire?

We found a number of videos -- buildings, homes --

where he was taking videos before a fire occurred,

and then, taking video after the fire occurred.

One of the videos showed a beautiful mansion on a hillside,

and then, the next clip is the building on fire,

and the brush burning up the hillside to the house.

Patterson: My goal was to find out, "How did John Orr

become the fire monster that he was?"

Welcome back to "Very Scary People."

John Orr was setting fires all over the state of California

for the better part of a decade.

But after years of evading the law,

investigators finally have their elusive arsonist behind bars.

Orr is diagnosed as a pyromaniac,

an impulse control disorder,

the irresistible urge to light fires.

What is it about setting fires

that is so alluring to pyromaniacs?

Why would someone risk everything --

career, family, freedom --

in order to wreak havoc and destruction,

or even kill, with the flick of a flame?

Schlesinger: Pyromania is a compulsion and a drive to set a fire.

The best way to understand pyromania

is that it's an abnormal sexual-arousal pattern,

where setting the fire itself

is sexually arousing for the individual.

The power, and the sense of control and dominance

that the pyromaniac achieves

by watching the fire consume everything,

it's that type of activity which is so arousing.

It's stimulating to be so powerful

to be able to annihilate an entire section of town.

But an individual doesn't wake up one day, and say,

"I think I'll go out and set a bunch of fires.

That sounds like a good idea."

No.

It begins years earlier, in the offender's mind.

Kovach: As far as I know, my dad always wanted to be

either a policeman or a fireman.

I've never heard any story

that he's ever wanted to be anything else.

My mom and dad met in high school,

and my dad entered the military shortly after graduating.

And so, my mom and dad got married at that point.

When my dad got out of the Air Force,

they went back to Los Angeles.

He went through most of the process,

until he got to the psychological evaluation.

He was in the training,

and he just wasn't physically fit enough.

For him, it must've been devastating,

because he wanted in so bad.

It just seems like it was a desperation for him

to go into that field.

He saw an ad somewhere that the Glendale fire department

was going to be hiring.

His personality, and sense of control, and needing control

was why he was really good at his job.

He rose through the ranks,

and then, he went on to Fire Captain.

I would often see him on the news talking about fires,

and talking about saving people, animals, and of course

being proud that he was one of those firefighters.

And I'd go to school, and tell all my friends that, you know,

"Did you see the news last night?

My dad was on there."

We have some very good leads,

and some of the evidence matches up with this individual,

and ties him into the fires.

Kovach: He did like the limelight.

Schlesinger: Orr is somebody who wanted to be authority.

He definitely wanted to have a position with it.

He had a tremendous need to be dominant, in control.

And these are all some of the motivating characteristics

that you commonly find in serial offenders.

Girardot: But as his career was thriving, it turned out

John Orr wasn't all that happy at home.

One day, my mom came home from shopping,

and my dad had left a "Dear John" letter

saying that he was leaving.

She went out looking for him.

She did actually see him driving around, at that moment,

and he had two women in his car.

From what I know now, my dad was never faithful to anybody.

I've known of him cheating on every person

he's ever been with.

Everything that I did, as far as investigating John,

was based on the manuscript.

If all these fires are true,

what did he do in his personal life?

He describes how the arsonist tied up his girlfriend.

Was he tying up his girlfriends?

Was he doing all the same activity

that he'd described in the book?

So, I found out who one of his girlfriends was.

She said he would rip her clothing off,

and he would tie her up to the bed.

He had sex with her that way.

It was basically a mock rape.

Schlesinger: It doesn't surprise me at all

that there's deviant sexual behavior in his background.

I also interviewed one of his wives,

and she told me that he had actually

put a pillow over her face one time.

He held a gun to the pillow, and then, he told her,

"I'm gonna blow your [bleep] head off."

Girardot: In July of 1992, the first of John Orr's trials began.

For the next six years, he would be in and out of court,

suspected of arson and attempted arson

in dozens of fires.

We brought John Orr to trial in Fresno for the fires in 1987.

Cabral: The ATF put together the fact that John Orr

was coming from Southern California,

attending the California Conference

of Arson Investigators,

and setting fires coming and going from the conference.

And they charged him in the federal courts

with these five fires.

Kovach: During one phone call with him from jail,

I remember him saying that it was a fireman

that was lighting these fires, and that he knew who it was,

but that he couldn't say it over the phone

because the phones were recorded by the jails.

I just automatically thought that he would get out

of these charges, and everything would be fine.

Orr is responsible for the arson fires of retail stores

which resulted in substantial damages.

The jury convicted him of three of the fires,

and acquitted him of two.

And the court sentenced him to 30 years in federal prison.

The day before trial in Los Angeles,

he decided to plead "guilty" to three counts.

So, they agreed to a plea that he would not serve

any additional time

for the convictions in Los Angeles.

Cabral: We also charged him with the fire in the community

called "College Hills" of Glendale.

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

And they also charged him with the crime

for which he would face the death penalty --

capital murder,

for the Ole's home center fire in South Pasadena.

You know, there's four people that died in this Ole's fire.

Among them were Ada Deal and her grandson,

Matthew Troidl.

We charged him with four counts of murder.

I've spent the last five years

prosecuting exclusively arson cases,

and it's sad to see one of the fire service involved

or even charged with anything as serious as this.

Orr spoke on camera, to "Inside Edition,"

about his deep preparation for trial.

I spend at least eight hours a day working on my case.

And my attorney visits me several times a week.

And it's just as busy now as I used to be.

It's the biggest investigation I've ever been involved in.

Most of our focus on motive was power,

for making the fire department

go to where he wants them to go by setting fires.

We established that he had a signature pattern

of committing crimes that a jury could look at it, and say,

"If you did this one, probably, beyond a reasonable doubt,

you did this other fire."

Reporter: The prosecutor summed up his murder case

by telling the jury that an unpublished fictional novel

by a Glendale fire captain detailed this fire

because he was the arsonist who set it.

Kovach: I was watching TV, and they were saying

that my dad wrote this book.

And I had no idea that my dad had ever written a book.

Why wouldn't he mention that to me?

That's when I started to realize

that there were parts of him that I didn't know.

Once I read even the first chapter,

it scared me,

because everything that he was describing

was things that I remember from my childhood.

If this book wasn't fiction,

what else about what they're saying is true?

I think that he believed he could beat it.

John was cocky, and dismissive of the state's case.

"I know better than you. I know better than the state.

I know better than the prosecutors."

Kovach: He was definitely trying to keep up an image

to the family, and to me.

And I kind of even think that he even knew that,

if he was convicted,

he would need us to testify for him

to not get the death penalty.

The co-prosecutors say they expect to finish

late tomorrow or early Wednesday.

Then, the Defense takes over,

with the case going to the jury late this week.

Cabral: The Defense -- the crux of their argument

was he had already admitted all the fires he did,

and he didn't do these.

That was really it.

McCann: They can suspect him of every fire that's ever committed,

and that's what they're doing.

Typically, in arson cases, they don't have much evidence,

so they can suspect them of any fire that's ever been started.

There is no such thing as a slam-dunk case, as a prosecutor.

No matter how good you think your case is,

no matter how strong you think the evidence is,

you never really know what 12 members of the community

are going to do when they get that evidence.

So, it was nerve-racking.

And the jury was out for almost three weeks.

Woman: We, the jury, find the defendant,

John Leonard Orr,

guilty of the crime of first-degree murder.

The jury came back with a "guilty" verdict

as to all of the homicides.

Woman: We, the jury, find the defendant guilty of the crime of arson.

And convicted him of all of the College Hills

houses that burned.

He was, however, acquitted of the fire

on the Warner Bros. lot.

I was devastated.

I realized that I would never really see him

in the free world again.

It was just gone, in one day, in one minute.

After the verdict came in,

the penalty phase was going to start,

and we would be testifying.

Girardot: In a death-penalty case,

one of the things a defendant often does

is show a jury why his life is worth saving.

John didn't have a lot of saving graces,

but he did have Lori, his daughter.

So, I just go into "I need to save my dad" mode.

I had to walk up to the stand.

And I did spot my dad off to the side,

and you know, we made eye contact.

And at that point, I expected him to smile,

or say "I love you," or "thank you," maybe, or --

but he just stared at me like I was a stranger.

When I was on the stand, they put a picture of my son,

who was 1 or 2 at the time.

If they spare his life,

would I still have a relationship with him,

and would I let my kids have one with him?

I did say, "Yes. I absolutely would.

He's my dad. I love him."

All the things you would expect a child to say,

and all the things that I regret saying now.

Girardot: John Orr had been convicted of murder

for setting the 1984 fire at Ole's Home Center

in South Pasadena that killed four people.

And now, he was facing the death penalty.

Largely as a result of Lori's testimony,

John got a life sentence instead of death.

Kovach: I remember thinking, "Okay, now I won't have to watch him die.

And I did enough,

and I won't have to carry that guilt around forever."

I felt that justice was served.

He was never going to get out of prison,

and he'll never come out, and hurt anybody else.

Kovach: But he's still gone for the rest of my life.

I can't celebrate birthdays with him.

He'll never walk me down the aisle.

The list just goes on and on, when you lose a parent.

Over the years, I really just gathered as much information

as I could to come, to my own conclusions about my dad.

My family was worried about turning me against my dad

when I was believing he was innocent,

so they didn't tell me these things that they knew about.

One of those things was my mom, who --

when she was married to my dad, he was leaving for work,

and she was looking out the window.

And he had put down the visor of the car,

and cigarettes fell onto his lap.

My dad's always been an adamant non-smoker.

At first, he tried to deny it,

but she kind of kept at him a little bit.

Finally, he admitted that he did have cigarettes,

and that he was lighting small brush fires.

For me, that information was like the nail in the coffin.

He's guilty.

It's as simple as that.

Patterson: John was 5 or 6 when he set his first fire.

That was documented through some friend of his

that was interviewed.

Cabral: They were averaging 70, 80 fires a year

for the 10 years leading up to John's arrest.

The year after his arrest, they had two fires in the area.

We determined that the fires had went down in Glendale, Burbank,

Pasadena by about 75%.

The drop in fires tells me we arrested the right person.

These people build up all kinds of defense mechanisms

in their own mind.

They know exactly what they did.

But for them to give you the satisfaction of admitting that,

and telling them that -- that almost never happens.

If we had not been able to identify John Orr,

and arrest him, there certainly would have been more fires.

Kovach: Looking back now, my dad's manipulated me my entire life.

You know, I didn't know it at the time,

but he's a master manipulator,

and he was doing that from day one.

After I came to the conclusion that he was guilty,

I wrote him a letter saying,

"I really think that you did these horrible things,

and I need you to convince me that you didn't."

Like, "This is your last chance."

That just wasn't enough for me, so I cut off the relationship.

I'm not at all surprised that,

notwithstanding the plea from his daughter to tell the truth,

that he doesn't do it.

It's very, very typical.

You could go into the state prison,

and nobody's 100% guilty.

Patterson: Some people have called John Orr the most prolific arsonist

in the history of the United States.

I do not believe that John Orr was convicted

of all the fires he was responsible for.

We didn't even charge all the fires

that I know he was responsible for.

I believe he has set in excess of 2,000 fires.

Schlesinger: I think John Orr is someone who led a double life.

On one hand, he was a very skilled fire investigator

who was really on top of his game.

And on the other hand, he led a secret life of setting fires,

abnormal sexual behavior with his wives and partners.

Matassa: The fact that a man who is in a career

to save people from the tragedy of a fire

is the one putting them in that tragedy of fire

is probably the largest betrayal that someone can commit.

Kovach: He betrayed his family.

He betrayed the fire industry, all of his co-workers,

everyone that had ever been involved with him.

Everything was a betrayal.

To this day, John Orr continues to proclaim his innocence,

despite his two convictions.

We spoke with him by phone from Mule Creek State Prison

in California.

He insists that his case was mishandled by his attorneys.

He has appealed his convictions multiple times,

even filing for a writ of habeas corpus,

a motion for freedom that is very rarely granted.

And there is no other path to freedom for John Orr

if it is rejected.

I'm Donnie Wahlberg.

Thanks for watching. Good night.