Read The Killer Book of Cold Cases Online
Authors: Tom Philbin
The Killer Book of Cold Cases (8 page)
The task forces succeeded in gathering circumstantial evidence, including the fact that when fires were started, Orr’s whereabouts could not be accounted for. They also found a video taken in a convenience store that showed Orr buying two packs of Marlboros despite the fact that he didn’t smoke. In retrospect, doing nothing but tracking him seems crazy because he was able to set many more fires that destroyed property and could have killed someone.
A secret grand jury was empaneled, and the decision was made to end the surveillance. An indictment was obtained, and Orr was arrested on December 4, 1991. He is estimated to have set more than 2,000 fires. After he was arrested, the percentage of brush fires in the area decreased by more than 90 percent.
Orr was being paid to write for respected fire journals, so he considered himself a capable writer and had started a novel called
Points of Origin
, the lingo arson investigators use to describe the point at which a fire started. The book was admitted into evidence at Orr’s trial and provided a real-life road map of his career as an arsonist. Indeed, the book turned out to be the linchpin in the case against him.
Orr was convicted of three counts of arson at the end of July 1992 and was sentenced to three consecutive terms of ten years in prison. Orr still maintains his innocence, but the prosecutor, Los Angeles Deputy District Attorney Michael Cabral, was not about to let him get away with what was literally murder.
The jury was deadlocked eight to four on whether to sentence Orr to the death penalty. As a result of the jury’s inability to come to a unanimous decision, the judge sentenced Orr to life plus twenty years in prison without the possibility of parole.
He remains in prison today.
Q.
Is arson hard to prove?
A.
Yes, unless someone is actually seen lighting something.
Q.
Do arson investigators investigate burned automobiles?
A.
Not really. There’s usually not enough evidence to determine what actually occurred. Of course, if someone died in the car fire, then the investigator will work with the cops.
Q.
What starts most arson fires?
A.
Stupid things, like getting mad at a spouse and burning his or her clothes, and then the fire gets out of control.
Q.
How do fires burn?
A.
Oxygen is the key. Fire burns upward toward the source of oxygen. (A good book for learning about fires is the
Guide for Fire and Explosion Investigations
offered by the National Fire Protection Association.)
Q.
What is the main job of the arson investigator?
A.
Finding out where the fire started.
Q.
What are the three elements needed for a fire to start?
A.
Fuel, heat, and oxygen. That was called the Fire Triangle until a fourth element, chemical reaction, was added. Now investigators refer instead to the Fire Tetrahedron. You need vapor to start a fire. Indeed, you could stick a math into liquid gasoline and it would be extinguished.
Q.
What are two main reasons for fires to start in a home?
A.
Space heaters in the winter, usually left too close to flammable objects like drapes or bed linens, and clothes dryers that create spontaneous combustion. Particularly in gas dryers, which get quite hot, towels left in the dryer can begin to smolder and then burst into flames. You shouldn’t leave the house with a dryer running.
Q.
What is the number-one cause of fires?
A.
Stupidity, most fire experts will tell you.
Q.
How many arson fires occur in vehicles?
A.
About 20 percent of all fires, according to the ATF.
Q.
What is considered the peak time for intentionally set fires across the United States?
A.
Halloween, again according to the ATF.
Q.
How many arson fires occur every year, and who sets them?
A.
The answer to both questions may be surprising, even shocking. According to the Federal Emergency Management Agency, 500,000 fires are set every year in the United States, killing more than 700 Americans and making arson the second leading cause of residential fire deaths. The shocker is who sets the fires. Close to 75 percent of firefighters in this country are volunteers, something investigators obviously were not aware of when Orr was active. In an ironic twist, hundreds of convicted arsonists have come from their ranks. In 2000, for example, a volunteer fireman in Tennessee was killed during a blaze at an abandoned home, but he did not die as a result of fighting the fire. He and six other volunteers had set the fire, and he was trapped while spreading gasoline in the attic.
Q.
How much property is destroyed by fire, and how many arsonists are convicted?
A.
Arson is far and away the leading cause of property loss, costing more than two billion dollars a year. And the perps get away with it: About 16 percent of all arsonists are never arrested, and only 2 percent are tried and convicted, according to the Department of Justice.
“We all finally find what we want and need, and I found mine.”
—Suzette Trouten, one of John Robinson’s murder victims
In the early 1980s, over a period of years, women started to disappear near Kansas City in the border area where Kansas and Missouri meet. Police didn’t know why or how these disappearances were occurring, but the cops would come to realize that some of the disappearances were related to the twisted psyches of the women involved. In other words, the person who made them disappear would not have been able to do so if he had not been targeting women whose conditions made them susceptible to being taken advantage of.
The man at the center of the mystery was John E. Robinson, who was into sadism and masochism (S and M) with a twist. At one point, Robinson billed himself as “the Slavemaster” on the Internet, and he no doubt treated his women with profound cruelty.
What strikes me as very curious is why those women couldn’t at least have sensed what he was really like. Perhaps they did, but their overwhelming need to be dominated—and, in a curious way, loved that way—made them look to the side rather than straight at the man to determine what he was really like.
When I think about John Robinson, I certainly think of the term “sociopath.” I describe a sociopath as someone who does not care about anyone but himself and has no feelings of guilt, no conscience. New York psychiatrist Martin Weich, MD, used the following story to explain what a sociopath is like.
“Let’s say,” said the doctor, “that there’s a freshly baked, hot apple pie cooling outside on a windowsill that’s easy to get at.
“One person will come up and think like this: ‘Hmm, that’s looks good. I’d love to take it. But it’s not mine, and taking it would be wrong.’ So that person leaves.
“Another person arrives and says: ‘Hmm, a hot apple pie. I’d love to take this, but if I do and I get caught, there will be consequences. Frig it. I don’t care!’ So he takes the pie and runs away.
“The third person comes up, sees the pie, and says to himself, ‘Hmm, a hot apple pie. I love that.’ So he takes it, no guilt, no nothing, and runs away.
“That,” the psychiatrist said, “is the sociopath.”
Of course, that is only part of the story. A sociopath like John Robinson cares only for himself, and can often suffer psychotic breaks and harbor a huge rage that every now and then explodes, and somebody ends up dead.
Frankly, Robinson—and people like him—are difficult to write about in an emotionally understanding way because I am neither a psychopath nor a sociopath. I care about others.
Perhaps if those women had known a little about Robinson’s background, they would have run for the hills. His life started ordinarily enough. When he was young, John Robinson did not give any indication that anything inside himself was awry. He was born in Cicero, Illinois, a town about five miles from Chicago and the one-time gangland headquarters of Al Capone. Robinson’s mother was said to be a strict disciplinarian, and his father was not on the scene.
Rather than giving any hint of problems, Robinson seemed to be an all-American boy. He was an Eagle Scout and a musician who had performed before Queen Elizabeth II at a concert in London. He enrolled as a high-school freshman at Quigley Preparatory Seminary in Chicago where he was preparing to become a priest. (One detective said of him later: “I wouldn’t want to go to confession if he was a priest. You’d never get out of the confessional alive.”)
But as he grew up, John Robinson’s troubles started to rear their head. In his freshman year at Quigley, he was a poor student and became a discipline problem. So much so, in fact, that school authorities did not allow him back for his sophomore year, ending his dreams of becoming a priest.
Many people who have an inferior sense of self—and serial killers all do—invent grandiose images of themselves that are figments of their own imaginations. Robinson had dreams of glory, dreams that he would one day be someone very important, and he seemingly tried to prove that to himself, regardless of the fact that his “achievements” were propped up by a pastiche of self-delusion and lies. In other words, he seems to have had the ability to convince himself that he was important. In 1977, for example, he was named “Man of the Year” by a Kansas City charity, an award that he orchestrated himself and which was a complete scam.
This proved to be a problem because he had conned the
Kansas City Star
into running a story on it. When people who supposedly had supported Robinson in his quest for the award started denying that they had, the
Star
ran an exposé on Robinson that showed him to be a fraud and thoroughly embarrassed him and his family. (He had married at twenty-one and immediately had a child.)
As Robinson matured, he got worse. He became a thief through and through. He felt no guilt when he ripped someone off, and he didn’t care who he conned. His scams as the years went by included conning an old friend out of $25,000, which was quite a bit of money at the time.
Later, he took a job as a radiologist in Kansas City while knowing nothing about the profession. That, of course, was extremely dangerous for the patients. Eventually, his incompetence was discovered and he was fired.
After that, he started working as a radiologist for Wallace Graham, MD, President Harry Truman’s long-time friend and former personal physician. Robinson began stealing from Graham and taking shocking sexual liberties in the office. He convinced one of the patients to have sex by telling her that his wife had terminal cancer and couldn’t have sex with him.
Robinson depleted the doctor’s finances to the point that he wasn’t able to give his employees a bonus for Christmas. Finally in 1969, the laid-back, low-key, and trusting doctor had his practice audited and discovered that Robinson had bilked him out of $33,000. Ever the consummate actor, Robinson got probation during which he perpetrated other offenses.
All of that stealing no doubt honed his skills as a con man, and when the Internet came into bloom in 1995, Robinson came into his own as a criminal. He became a poster child for the kind of person that no one should contact on the Internet, although he did not present himself as something that he was not, at least sexually. He was looking for a certain kind of woman. Billing himself as the Slavemaster, he started to connect with women who were into S and M, and willing to become his slaves.
