Fire Fighter as Fire Starter
Ever since the U.S. Forest Service employee was accused of starting the Colorado wildfire (and now there's another firefighter accused in Arizona,) I've been trying to remember the name of the Glendale arson investigator who started a bunch of fires in California in the 1980s.

I just went a Googling and found his name is John Orr. Turns out Joseph Wambaugh (who penned one of my hometown's most infamous stories, The Onion Field,) has just published the story of John Orr, Fire Lover: A True Story.

I followed Orr's story while I was growing up because the crucial break in the case came at a fire in Bakersfield. Later, he was on trial for murder (resulting from arson) in LA while I was working for a paper there. The guy was an arson investigator and he'd go to these fire conventions and while driving home, he'd stop off and start fires along his route. When they started looking at him as the suspect, they found his manuscript, fiction of course, about (wait for it) an arson investigator who starts fires. Here's a book review from the LA Times that recounts the story.
- posted by Amy @ 6/30/2002 11:17:00 AM