Fire Lover (9 page)

John Orr later reported that he'd tried to give her a break by okaying a release on her own recognizance, and recommending a probationary disposition of her case, explaining about her daddy issues and low self-esteem. He never said whether or not she'd reminded him of anyone.

The police department employee who had put him on to that case, informing him of the badge theft that aroused his suspicion about fire setting, was Karen Krause, the sister-in-law of Carolyn Krause, who had perished in the Ole's Home Center holocaust.

Chapter
4

The California Conference of Arson Investigators hosted a three-day seminar in Fresno starting on January 13, 1987. John Orr decided to go and delegated his new junior partner to remain in Glendale and mind the store.

It can seem a very long drive to Central California from Los Angeles, north through the San Joaquin Valley, past endless truck crops and grazing land. There are mountains, the Sierra Madres to the west, the Tehachapis to the east, and then one passes through Bakersfield, once a destination for the Okie migration of the Great Depression, still a vital agricultural zone where folks can tune their radios to real country stars such as George Strait and even the old Bakersfield homeboy Buck Owens, rather than crossover cowboys.

After Bakersfield, there's not much until you arrive in the town of Tulare, and if you weren't already aware of it, you'll have an idea how crucial the farms and ranches of California are, not only to the state but to the country. Then, somewhere around the fourth hour of driving, you'll arrive in the city of Fresno, site of the arson seminar, but if you drive like John Orr, you'll get there much faster. He could drive with even more gusto now that he was wearing glasses full-time to correct the nearsightedness that had started to affect his shooting scores.

There were 242 conferees
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arson investigators, prosecutors, insurance investigators, cops, and firefighters
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arriving that Tuesday from all over the state. The weather was foggy, cold, and miserable that year, and most of the seminar participants stayed in and around the hotel, networking and boozing it up in the restaurant and bar. Of course, some of the more restless ventured out looking for action, such as there was. Fresno was a growing city of 350,000, but it had managed to retain much of its rural ethic. The conferees from the big cities said there was nothing to do there except watch grapes turn into Fresno raisins.

That conference might have come and gone and passed from memory except for the stunning events that took place starting on the first evening, when the city was swarming with men and women whose lives were dedicated to fire prevention and suppression.

At 8:30 p. M., about an hour after some of the registers had been closed at Payless Drug Store on North Blackstone Avenue, an employee spotted smoke rising up from a display of sleeping bags that had been tightly packed in a cabinet. He saw the bags suddenly burst into flame, setting off the overhead sprinklers. Helped by the sprinklers' deluge of water, the store manager contained the fire with a handheld fire extinguisher. There was a lot of water damage, but nobody had been seen in the area at the time the fire was spotted, so it was difficult to say what had caused it. The store manager was issued a citation because his fire alarms were not in good working order.

A witness reported seeing a deaf-mute, or perhaps a firebug posing as a deaf-mute, in the vicinity of the fire's point of origin shortly before it ignited. Nobody thought too much about that fire at Payless Drug Store until an occurrence on Thursday evening that got everybody thinking.

It happened once again on Blackstone Avenue, this time at Hancock Fabrics, right across the street from Payless Drug Store. The first and best witness was a shopper who had been examining some fabric at the cutting table in the center of the store when she glanced up and saw smoke in the northwest corner of the building. The smoke was gray, but instantly turned inky black, and then the smoke cloud erupted in a ball of flame. And she watched slack-jawed as the fireball divided into fingers of fire that "danced" up the walls and along the ceiling. It all happened so unbelievably fast.

Then, pandemonium. An announcement of "Fire!" sounded on the intercom, and customers and clerks were running to the exits. The woman who had first spotted the smoke had a rudimentary understanding of heat, fuel, and air, and she told the others outside the building that they should close the doors to starve the blaze until the firefighters arrived. And she tried, but the fire would have none of it. With all of her weight pressing against the exit doors, the voracious blaze flexed and roared and in a blast of terrible power hurled her back toward the parking lot. She ran to her car and got out of there.

The fire department did not dare enter the building to fight the out-of-control inferno, but confined suppression activities to the outer walls. The conflagration was amazingly hot and intense. They learned why the next day, after they could get inside, discovering that the point of origin was in a storage bin, in Styrofoam beanbag pellets used for stuffing pillows. Everyone was relieved that customers and employees had escaped without injury.

Hancock Fabrics was just about completely destroyed, but a diligent sifting through the debris rewarded searchers with an incendiary delay device consisting of one partially burned cigarette with a tan filter tip and three paper matches fastened to the cigarette by a rubber band.

A witness at the Hancock Fabrics fire described a nonchalant customer who had been loitering in the area of the fire prior to its outbreak. He was a white male, about sixty years old, standing six feet six inches, weighing 250 pounds, with a snow-white beard, wearing a blue sea captain's hat and a bright yellow rain slicker.

The fire captain taking the report said, "So do you think he was trying to look inconspicuous?"

And as if enough arson hadn't struck Fresno, later at House of Fabrics, another retail outlet just a block away from Hancock Fabrics and Payless Drug Store, an employee discovered, in a bin stacked with foam pillows, yet another incendiary device consisting of a cigarette, matches, and a rubber band. It had scorched the wall in an inverted V pattern, but had not ignited into a full-blown fire.

Some said it looked as if somebody had been trying to burn down the city during a conference of the most prominent arson sleuths in the state. What was the arsonist trying to do? Was a statement being made to the investigators, or what? Neither the media nor the fire department could figure out what in hell was going on.

At about 10:45 on the last morning of the arson seminar, one hour south in the town of Tulare
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where people said the town's only claim to fame was that it was located midway between Fresno and Bakersfield, which were midway between San Francisco and L. A.
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there was a fire. At Surplus City, a fire like the one at Payless Drug Store broke out in a display of sleeping bags.

And forty-five minutes later, at the Family Bargain Center in Tulare, the unthinkable happened: another fire broke out. A customer in the rear of the retail outlet saw smoke, and the store manager ran to a wooden display bin that was stacked with foam pillows. The manager jerked the pillows out of the bin and extinguished the flames. At the bottom of the bin, beneath the pillows, he found a partially burned cigarette with a tan filter, two burned matches, one rubber band, and some pieces of yellow notebook paper.

By the time a fire captain arrived, the store manager had a description for him of a white male with collar-length black hair, five feet ten inches tall, weighing 170 pounds, wearing a blue jacket and designer jeans. He looked as though he hadn't shaved in a day or two, and his age was described as "mid-twenties."

The store manager recalled that when this man had entered the store about fifteen minutes before the fire broke out, he'd been carrying a yellow piece of paper with lines on it, just like the remnants of paper the manager had found under the pillows.

As in Fresno, Tulare had never experienced two fires on the same day in retail establishments during business hours, and with the recovery of the delay device, it became obvious that the Tulare fires were incendiary in nature.

It later seemed as though this arsonist had just decided to take a lunch break before resuming his activities. At 2:00 p. M., an hour south of Tulare, in the city of Bakersfield, an employee of CraftMart, a retail store open for business, spotted a column of smoke and incipient flames emitting from a bin in the center of the store where there were materials on display for making dry floral arrangements. The store manager put out the fire with a dry powder extinguisher while the engine company was en route.

The fire captain called for a fire investigator, and Captain Marvin G. Casey of the Bakersfield Fire Department arrived in short order. Marvin Casey had nearly twenty years of fire experience, including training in cause and origin analysis, and he'd investigated hundreds of fires. The former Texan had thinning gray hair, a blue-eyed Panhandle squint, and a face creased from years in the dust and wind of the San Joaquin Valley. He'd have looked right at home in boots, a Stetson, and Wrangler jeans.

Casey headed straight for the gondolas that held the display material, and found the heaviest burn there among the dried flowers. Then his gaze moved over the gondola bin and up about four feet. He looked inside and there, under the dry yellow powder from the fire extinguisher, he found an incendiary device composed of a cigarette with a tan filter tip, and three matches, two made of paper, one of wood, and a scorched sheet of yellow lined notebook paper.

Captain Casey asked the captain of the engine company to guard the aisle, and he went to his vehicle to get some evidence cans and envelopes. When he returned to the point of origin he used a Swiss Army knife with a tweezer attachment to lift each item and drop it into a separate envelope.

The notebook paper looked as though it had come from a standard legal pad, but Casey wanted to ascertain whether it could have been in the bin before the incendiary device ignited, or if it was part of the delay device brought into the store by the fire setter. He asked the store manager to bring him every yellow pad or loose sheet of paper in the store, but there was no yellow notepad in CraftMart that matched the piece of burned paper in his hand.

It was destined to be a busy day for investigator Marvin Casey. At 2:00 p. M. that same afternoon, at Hancock Fabrics, Bakersfield branch, sales clerk Laverne Andress was waiting on a customer who had just returned twelve yards of flawed drapery fabric. The sales clerk was very solicitous, and very concerned because the customer was so pregnant that delivery might commence at any moment right there on the cutting table.

While the two women were checking for fabric flaws and cutting the sixty-inch material, the sales clerk smelled cigarette smoke. Neither customers nor employees were permitted to smoke in a fabric store, so the clerk excused herself and went looking for the smoker.

It was then that she saw a man browsing among the shelves and racks of fabrics. She later described him as a white male, wearing a cowboy shirt and boots, five foot seven to five foot nine, with medium-brown receding hair graying at the temples, weighing 170 to 175 pounds with a "large tummy." She guessed his age at thirty to thirty-five years. She looked at his hands, but they were empty. She could find no one smoking in the store, so she went back to her pregnant customer.

At 2:30 p. M., in the rear of the store, the sales clerk heard a hissing sound. Something was hissing in the vicinity of the bin that contained rolled foam-rubber batting. Then a very small blue flame appeared, and then a wave of fire rolled out of the bin and climbed up the wall. Just that fast.

The automatic sprinklers went off and drenched that part of the store, holding the fire in check and flooding the store with two inches of water. The fire department arrived and completed the fire suppression, again calling Marvin Casey.

When Casey arrived, he discussed the fire with the captain of the engine company and described the fire at CraftMart just two miles away. Casey said that it was unique to have two such fires within an hour in retail stores open for business. Such a thing had never happened in Bakersfield.

By the next day, Captain Casey had received a phone call and met with some investigators from Fresno, learning not only about the Fresno fires but about the fires in Tulare. They were all eerily similar. All had been set in displays of volatile material, such as foam rubber and Styrofoam, by someone who must have understood the speed, power, and ferocity of a fire fed by this fuel.

The remnants of the delay devices were the same right down to the number of matches and yellow notebook paper, but the suspect descriptions were varied. They had a deaf-mute, a tubby cowboy, a gigantic ancient mariner in a rain slicker. Nothing really matched when it came to suspect descriptions, but the M. O., type of establishments attacked, and merchandise that was set alight were all just about identical.

And all the fires took place very close to Highway 99, as though the fire setter had been in Fresno on Tuesday through Thursday night, then had driven forty
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eight miles down the road to Tulare on Friday morning for two fires, then, maybe after a lunch break, resumed his busy schedule sixty-four miles farther south in Bakersfield, where he'd struck twice between the hours of 1:45 and 2:45 p. M.