The Local Fire Captain Who Was An Arsonist

The story of John Orr is a fantastic tale. He was a Glendale Fire Dept. captain who was eventually convicted of multiple arsons and murders. He is considered the most prolific arsonist in American history and many of the fires he set were right here in Glendale and the Crescenta Valley. Ironically, as a highly respected fire investigator specializing in arson he was often investigating the very fires he had set. As such, he seemed to have a superhuman ability when it came to uncovering arson fires. Here’s his story.

In the early 1970s, after a stint in the Air Force, John Orr came to LA. He applied to both the LAPD and the LA Fire Dept., but failed on both entrance exams. In 1974 he applied to the Glendale Fire Dept., then the lowest paying fire department in the LA area, and was accepted. He gravitated toward fire investigation, took outside classes on the subject and rose through the ranks to captain and a highly respected fire investigator. At the same time, the number of local fires went steadily up.

In 1984, Orr started a fire in a South Pasadena hardware store. Orr’s signature arson device was a cigarette that would burn slowly to a bead of glue, which would then ignite. In this case, Orr dropped the device into pile of polyurethane products in the store. They blazed quickly and hot – so hot in fact that a “flashover” occurred in which the inside of the building exploded into flame. It trapped four people inside, including an old woman and her grandson. Fire investigators converged on the site, and Orr showed up as well. When the investigators decided the fire was accidental, Orr was there to insist that it was arson. One of Orr’s maxims was “The bug is in the crowd,” meaning the arsonist was probably watching the fire burn and in this case that was true.

Orr was most prolific from 1984 to 1991 when an estimated 2,000 fires were started by the fire captain. There’s a local connection. In 1987 the Montrose Theater burned down. Although the fire was never pinned on Orr, he was the fire investigator on scene the next morning. 

That same year, Orr attended a convention of fire investigators in Fresno. During the time of the convention, several suspicious fires broke out in the area. One of the attendees, a fire captain from Bakersfield, became suspicious. Two years later, another convention of fire investigators in Pacific Grove and another spate of suspicious fires. The Bakersfield fire captain made a list of the investigators who had been at both conventions, and Orr’s name was prominent. A fingerprint was recovered at one of the fires and sure enough it was matched with Orr.

In 1991, police detectives tracked Orr carefully. (Ironically, during that time Orr tried his hand at writing a novel. It was called “Point of Origin” and was about a fireman who was a serial arsonist.) Orr was placed at the scene of an arson fire and was arrested in December 1991. He was convicted on three counts of arson and sentenced to 30 years. As investigators dug deeper, they began to look closer at the South Pasadena hardware store fire, which Orr had written accurately about in his novel.

They found enough to indict Orr on four counts of murder for the four fire victims in 1994 and in 1998 he was convicted on all counts along with 20 more counts of arson. He was saved from the death penalty only by the testimony of his daughter who believed him innocent. He was sentenced to four life sentences with no chance of parole. In Glendale and the Crescenta Valley, the number of fires dropped by 90%.

Orr is still in prison and still maintains his innocence. He insists it was a setup, that prosecutors read his novel, which tracked true to his crimes, and went after him based on that. Orr can’t start fires anymore but he does still write – now for the prison newspaper.