John Leonard Orr Research Paper Sample

John Leonard Orr was born in April 26, 1949. He was an investigator and worked for the Glendale Fire Department in Sothern California. He also worked as a fire captain. Orr had a passion of being a police officer ever since he was a young person. His dreams did not come true after he failed the entrance exam. He decided to become a dedicated fire investigator and he committed himself to further his fire career. The work of a firefighter investigator is to do investigation in the causes of fire. The firefighters reported the cause and origin of the fire. The job of the firefighters is one of the most difficult jobs in because the evidence destruction occurs during the fire. The fingerprints and many things are destroyed during the fire.
The fire investigators do not attend the scene during the fire until afterwards. The investigators do the investigation and try to look for any piece of evidence that could lead to the establishment of fire. This was the work that John Orr dedicated his life doing it. During the period between 1980 and early 1990s there were a series of fires that that cost millions of dollars in damages and appealed four lives. After investigation, it showed that John Orr was responsible for the series of fires. Orr got a nickname Pillow Pyro during his arson spree. He got this nickname from the investigators.
The mode of operation that John Orr used was to set fires using a timed device. He normally used a cigarette with a rubber band enfolded around the end wedge into a matchbox. He set the small fires in the grassy hills. This drew the attention of the firefighters. The firefighters could leave the fires set on more populated and congested areas. The trend of John Orr continued and it left many people wondering what the cause of the fires was. He executed his work as an investigator and at the same time involved himself in arson.
On October 10, 1984, a very big fire broke in California. The fire happened in a hardware store located in a shopping plaza. Four people died and the store destroyed. The people who died included a two-year-old child. The following day arson investigators from California converged in the place to investigate the cause of the fire .The investigators concluded that the cause of the fire was electrical failure. John Orr as one of the investigators insisted that the cause of the fire was arson. After investigations done later, it emerged that the fire started in a highly flammable substance made from polyurethane products. This material caused the fire to spread very quickly.
The suspect who did the first crime continued to involve himself in a number of crimes in Los Angeles. A series of fires occurred in in the month of January 1987. The fires did not kill or injure any person but it caused a damage amounting to millions of dollars. The fire occurred in various businesses and it happened in the middle of the day. The fire started with a timer because the fires occurred at around the same time a conference at Fresco was taking place.
In March 1989, the same arsonist committed four arsons in different cities along the Southern California coast. The arsons involved the use of a time-delayed device because they happened around the same time a conference of arson detectors was happening in the Pacific Grove, which is located just a short distance from the place where the arson took place. This led the police detectives to contemplate that the suspect was perhaps an arson investigator from Los Angeles. The fires started almost at the same time.
Using the assumption that the arson was an arson investigator, the police compared the list of the people who attended the two conferences: the Fresno conference and the Pacific Grove conference. In the scene of arson, the investigators were lucky to find a small piece of evidence in one of the scenes that could lead them to knowing the arsonist. A fingerprint was established on small piece of paper positioned inside a minor delay explosive device. This device was in one of the fire scenes. The single fingerprint could not match with any fingerprint of the criminals in the databases. This showed that the suspect who was involved in the arsons had no criminal record. The detectives did their comparisons of the attendees of the two conferences. By April of 1991, all the fingerprints of the attendees had been compared with the evidence from the e crime scene. All people were cleared except one person, Captain John Orr who belonged to Glendale Fire Department. The fingerprint obtained in the scene of fire matched that on of Orr.
John Orr became the subject of the investigation that carried. The investigations were intensive. The surveillance on him was increased and it led to his arrest. Investigators installed a device behind his dashboard that tracked all the movements he made. He was alerted to his surveillance and removed the tracking device. The tracking device belonged to Bureau of alcohol, tobacco and firearms. Another teletrac-tracking device as installed in the car. This device was installed in November 1991 when he had taken his vehicle for service. In December 1991, John Orr turned up into another scene of fire. The surveillance ended and a warrant of arrest was obtained.
The important pieces of evidence that convicted John Orr included an unpublished manuscript he had written about a serial arsonist who was a fire investigator. The manuscript further gave details of the many fires that Orr was accused of setting. in the manuscript, the name of the arsonist was Aaron. According to what Orr had written the person committing the arson was a loner and a very insecure person. The fires that the arsonist started gave the arsonist the attention that he craved for because he was the only one who knew how the fire started. Other evidence included secret video tapes that Orr had taken of the suspicious fires. In November 1991, a briefcase was found in the car of John Orr. The briefcase contained binoculars, a bag of rubber bands and cigarettes. All these devices were used to accelerate fire. The videos included the ones he was accused of starting. In July 1992, the jury found Orr guilty. He was found guilty of three counts arson. The sentence that Orr received was thirteen years in prison. He adamantly maintained his innocence until he pleaded guilty to three more counts of arson in the month of March 1993. In 1998, a jury convicted Orr of four counts of first-degree murder from the fire of 1984 and sentenced him to life imprisonment without a possible parole.