Why Did John Leonard Orr Become a Firebug?

On the night of October 10, 1984, as Game 2 of the World Series was about to begin, a raging fire broke out at a hardware store in South Pasadena, California. As the inferno spread, the roof caved in. Dozens of firefighters came from 10 cities and spent hours fighting the blaze, according to The Los Angeles Times.

The incident claimed the lives of four victims—including a 2-year-old and his grandmother—and officials quickly determined the cause to be an electrical fire. But when the highly regarded arson investigator John Leonard Orr arrived at the scene, he disagreed with their analysis, insisting it was arson.

Orr was, of course, correct—because, as investigators later learned, Orr himself started the fire. And this act of arson wouldn't be his last.

L.A. County Deputy District Attorney Michael Cabral, who ultimately tried Orr on four counts of murder, estimates that Orr started "probably in excess of 2,000" fires by the time of his arrest in 1991, the L.A. Times reported.

Watch: A house fire causes nearly half a million dollars in damage under suspicious circumstances, but investigators struggle to prove their arson theory. The evidence they need turns up in a surprising place, the suspect’s pacemaker.

Orr's story—from the Pasadena fire through his 1998 California trial—took several unexpected turns. He became an arson investigator convicted of arson. While gathering evidence, police also discovered a book manuscript Orr had written detailing the crimes of a fictional firefighter, Aaron Stiles, who sets fires to local businesses, with clear similarities to Orr's own crimes.

Orr was born on April 26, 1949, in Los Angeles, California, one of three sons to parents who separated when Orr was 16 years old.

On Orr's 18th birthday, he joined the U.S. Air Force, according to Fire Lover: A True Story, a biography of Orr written by Joseph Wambaugh. After finishing basic training, Orr was assigned to jet mechanic's school but transferred to firefighting school. He married his high school girlfriend, Jodi, soon after.

Orr was honorably discharged from the military at the age of 21. He applied to the Los Angeles Police Department but was rejected after failing the psychological test. Orr was admitted to the Los Angeles Fire Department, but his offer was later rescinded. Around the same time, he and his first wife divorced, after having two daughters together.

In 1974, Orr landed a much lower paying job as a firefighter at the Glendale Fire Department. Over time, he climbed the ladder to captain and arson investigator.

As an investigator, Orr seemed to have a knack for identifying the causes of fires and the devices used to start them. He once bragged of catching more than 40 serial arsonists, the L.A. Times reported.

Investigators once referred to Orr, his identity then unknown, as the “Pillow Pyro" for setting fires to pillows in linen stores. (Others called him a "firebug," a person who deliberately sets fires.) He also set fires near conferences that he and other arson investigators attended across the state.

According to the L.A. Times, Marvin Casey, an arson investigator from Bakersfield, California, took note of the suspicious pattern and cross-listed the names of attendees who attended the conferences where fires broke out. Orr's name made the list.

In a 1987 fire incident, firefighters discovered an incendiary device made from a cigarette, matches and piece of yellow notebook paper—and on it, a fingerprint. That piece of evidence wouldn't be traced to Orr until spring 1991, when a task force of local police officers and federal agents used new fingerprinting technology.

"They said, ‘Tell John Orr to stop handling evidence,'" Mike Matassa, a task force case agent, told the L.A. Times in 2025. "Obviously, everybody froze."

Orr was arrested in December 1991 for multiple fires. Among his belongings, investigators found a 104,000-word manuscript for an unpublished book Orr was writing. Titled Points of Origin, the book had "uncanny, striking similarities to evidence in this trial," United States Attorney Patrick Hanly told The New York Times in 1992.

In the book, the fictional Aaron Stiles is a firefighter-turned-arsonist who sets fire to a hardware store where five people die—including a young boy. For Aaron, fire is also a source of sexual arousal.

"It was disgusting to read his book, that was supposed to be fiction, and having in the back of my mind that he wrote it about himself," his daughter, Lori Orr Kovach, told A&E in a 2018 interview. (Orr Kovach is the co-author of Burned: Pyromania, Murder, and a Daughter's Nightmare.)

Orr still claims the manuscript is fiction. But in a letter to a publisher, Orr once described the novel as a "fact-based work that follows the pattern of an actual arsonist that has been setting serial fires in California over the past eight years," according to the Associated Press.

A federal jury found Orr guilty in July 1992 on three of five arson charges and sentenced him to 30 years in federal prison. In 1993, he pleaded guilty to setting three additional fires.

In 1998, Orr was tried at the state level—not just on 21 counts of arson but also four counts of first-degree murder for each of the four people who died in the 1984 Pasadena fire. He was sentenced to life in prison.

What drove Orr to commit arson? During his trial, his defense lawyers said Orr suffered from obsessive-compulsive personality order and a form of pyromania. Prosecutors argued he was motivated by a desire for power and secret knowledge, according to Fire Lover.

Some experts blame a hero complex or impulse. The motive may also have been sexually driven, Orr Kovach told A&E.

"It was horrible to think that's exactly what he was doing—watching something burn and doing these horrible sexual things," she said.

Orr is completing a life sentence in Mule Creek State Prison in California. In February 2025, he denied the connection between Points of Origin and his own arson spree in a phone interview with the L.A.Times.

He said the main character was created "from two or three of the serial arsonists I apprehended." But a jury has already determined Orr's fate.

Yet, for Orr Kovach, some wounds never heal: “What's worse is someone I loved so much is capable of doing something so horrific."