page_title: John Leonard Orr
section_title: Investigation
hierarchical_section_title: John Leonard Orr / Investigation
caption_attribution_description: English: Glendale home destroyed by arson fire started by Glendale Fire Captain John Orr in 1990
context_page_description: John Leonard Orr is an American former firefighter, novelist, and convicted arsonist. Orr was the fire captain and arson investigator for the Glendale Fire Department in Southern California. He was convicted of serial arson and four counts of murder. Orr had originally wanted to be a police officer, but had failed the entrance exam; instead he became a fire investigator and career fire officer. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Los Angeles was plagued by a series of fires that cost millions of dollars in damages and claimed four lives. Orr was found to be the cause of most of those fires. During his arson spree, Orr was given the nickname The Pillow Pyro by arson investigators due to the location of where fires were set inside shops.
  His modus operandi was to set fires using an incendiary timing-device, usually comprising a lit cigarette, three matches wrapped in ruled yellow writing paper and secured by a rubber band, in stores while they were open and populated. He would also set small fires often in the grassy hills, in order to draw firefighters, leaving fires set in more congested areas unattended.
context_section_description: In January 1987, a convention for arson investigators from California was held in the city of Fresno. During and after the convention, several suspicious fires were set in Bakersfield. 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, led Captain Marvin G. Casey of the Bakersfield Fire Department (BFD) to suspect that an arson investigator from the Los Angeles area was responsible for these arsons.
  During March 1989, another series of arsons were committed along the California coast in close conjunction with a conference of arson investigators in Pacific Grove, California. By comparing the list of attendees from the Fresno conference with the list of attendees at the Pacific Grove conference, Casey was able to create a short list of ten suspects. Orr was on Casey's short list, but everyone on this short list was cleared of suspicion when their fingerprints were compared with the fingerprint that Casey had recovered from the piece of notebook paper found at one of the arson crime scenes.
  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. As a result, a large task force, nicknamed the Pillow Pyro Task Force (a reference to the arson fires set in pillows) was formed to apprehend the arsonist. On March 29, 1991, Tom Campuzanno of the Los Angeles Arson Task Force circulated a flier at a meeting of the Fire Investigators Regional Strike Team (FIRST), an organization formed by a group of smaller cities in and around Los Angeles County that did not have their own staff of arson investigators. The flier described the modus operandi of the suspected serial arsonist in the Los Angeles area. Scott Baker of the California State Fire Marshal's Office was at that meeting and told Campuzanno about the series of arsons investigated by Casey and about Casey's suspicions that the perpetrator was an arson investigator from the Los Angeles area. Consequently, Campuzanno and two of his colleagues met with Casey, obtained a copy of the fingerprint that Casey had recovered, and this time matched it to Orr on April 17, 1991, with the help of improved fingerprint technology. By cross-referencing the print with a database of all past applicants for law enforcement posts in Los Angeles County, they discovered that the print was an exact match to Orr's left ring finger.
  Orr was then investigated and watched for several months. In May 1991 he discovered a tracking device hidden by authorities in his vehicle, but he was apparently never aware of a tracking device later installed in his city vehicle that November. A federal grand jury handed down an indictment, and after Orr was present at a suspicious fire he was arrested December 4.
caption: Home in Glendale destroyed by fire started by Orr in 1990
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