Thread by @DonutOperator

You guys ever hear about John "Pillow Pyro" Orr? It kinda sounds like an adult film star or even the Urban Dictionary term "Pillow Pirate" (look it up and post it below).

A thread 🧵:

The infamous Pillow Pyro set nearly 2,000 buildings ablaze in Los Angeles over a 30-year setting-shit-on-fire spree. With LA being on fire at the moment and given how much I love crime, I figured I'd gather y'all around for story time.
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There's not much to be said about Orr's history. He was in the Air Force for a couple of seconds, and while in service, he attended firefighting school. I'm assuming this is where him jerking off to fire might have started.

Orr got out of the military and applied with the LAPD. He passed everything but, you'll never guess, the psychological evaluation. The LAFD also turned him down after he couldn't pass physical or written standards. Kind of wild considering his background and addiction to making things on fire.

After going to a local college for Fire Science, the Glendale FD hired him as a fire investigator. You can't make this shit up.

This is basically the plot to Dexter but with less stabbing people in the chest.
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Orr set most of his nearly 2,000 fires between 1984 and 1991 while he was an active fire investigator. "Pillow Pyro" wasn't his only moniker during his crime streak. Orr was also known as the "Frito Bandito" because he would use potato chips to light fires sometimes.

Another alias given to him was "Coin Tosser" because he started using coins in his incendiary devices. "Coin Tosser" just sounds like a slur. "Honey you'll never believe it! A bunch of Coin Tossers moved in next door!"

Oh yeah, "Pillow Pyro" was his main name because this psychopath would often walk into crowded linen shops and start a fire under pillows. This technique is probably what led to his 4 and only known murders committed. In 1984 Orr strolled into a hardware store in Pasadena, CA and started a fire which killed 4 people, one of them a 2 year old.

THE. VERY. NEXT. DAY. Orr returned to the store. This time, as the fire investigator. All his fellow fire investigators from around the area came to the conclusion that this was an electrical fire. Orr told his colleagues that it was definitely arson.

At first I thought maybe he's just a fucking idiot, but when it came to arson, he was pretty clever. After setting stores or other businesses on fire, he would set brush fires nearby to confuse authorities while he made a clean getaway.
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There was a reason Orr had a favorite method for starting fires. It would normally be hard for him to make a clean getaway after walking into a store in front of everyone with a lighter and just setting shit ablaze. This means that the point of origin had to be a delayed fire. The way he would do this is by putting matches around a cigarette, then wrapping that in paper, all secured with a rubber band.
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The redneck rigged delayed fire starter device in the last thread is what ultimately led to Orr being caught. In 1987, he was at a fire investigator convention in Fresno, CA, and SOMEHOW fires kept popping up all over Bakersfield. Bakersfield is conveniently located between LA and Fresno.

In comes Bakersfield Fire Department Captain Marvin Casey. Casey sees all these fires happening in his home town and he's fucking pissed, so he launches his own little investigation.

I had to borrow super high tech crime scene recreation software from the FBI for the image below:
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One of those redneck incendiary devices was found half burned at one of the Bakersfield fires.... the little piece of paper wrapped around the device just so happened to have half a fingerprint on it.

1989 rolls around and there's another fire investigator conference in Pacific Grove, CA. Wouldn't you know it, fires start popping up all along the California coastline around the same time. Captain Casey from Bakersfield starts comparing a list of the guys who went to the Fresno conference with the guys at the Pacific grove conference. He comes up with 10 names of possible suspects.

Captain Casey compares those 10 suspects with the half fingerprint found on the redneck incendiary device. Nine of the suspects were cleared. You can guess who wasn't: Orr.
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For some reason, the results of Capt. Casey's little investigation didn't go anywhere until 1991 when the "Pillow Pyro Task Force" was formed in Los Angeles. An LA fire investigator named Tom Campuzanno made some fliers describing methods used by a local arsonist and handed them out to his buddies in the surrounding area.

Capt. Casey of Bakersfield sees the fliers and tells Campuzanno that he might know the guy burning all this shit down and that this guy might be one of their own.

Let's go back in time for a minute. Remember when Orr tried to be a cop instead of a hose dragger? He failed the last test, the psych eval. What he didn't fail was getting his fingerprints taken. Those were in the LAPD database now. Our fire investigators compared the half-burned redneck device to what the LAPD database had, and bingo: it was Orr's left ring finger.
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With any investigation of this scale, it's absolutely crucial to collect as much evidence as possible. LAPD and other law enforcement agencies started following Orr around to see what shenanigans he was up to.

This next bit is quite possibly the funniest part of this entire story.

Back in the day, authorities didn't have tiny little GPS trackers the size of Apple airtags. Trackers ranged from brick size to shoebox size. The popo put a tracker on Orr's car, he finds it, and this dipshit drives to the local police bomb squad.

He thought it was a bomb and that someone was trying to blow him up.

The Pillow Pyro Task force contacted the bomb guya and had them convince Orr that the whole thing was a prank.
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Shortly after the "prank", another tracking device was installed on his city work vehicle. Of course it showed he was near a suspicious fire. Orr was arrested in December of 1991.

A few search warrants were issued and investigators found a novel written by Orr named "Points of Origin".

The book was about fireman who is a serial artist.

No. I'm not joking.

The book even described a fire VERY similar to the 1984 fire in the hardware store that claimed 4 innocent lives.
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In the end, a Federal Judge sentenced Orr to 30 years in prison. State prosecutors indicted him on the 4 counts of murder from the hardware store and tried to give him the death penalty.

Mike Cabral, the leading prosecutor, told Orr if he confessed to the fires he's started over the years then he could have life in prison. Orr turned it down.

The state of California still actually tried to kill him, but it came down to a split jury. Orr was eventually sentenced to life in prison. Too bad.

The Pillow Pyro, Frito Bandito, Coin Tosser, or whatever the hell you want to call him, went down in criminal history as one of the worst serial arsonists of the 20th century.

He's currently 75 years old and thankfully rotting away in a California prison.
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Well kids, that's all I have for today. Hope you enjoyed me getting bored on a Monday morning and telling stories.

Support me by following and subscribing, heading over to Donutoperator.com, or watching my YouTube channel that has over 1,000 video breakdowns of various police incidents.

For a more detailed story of The Pillow Pirate, check out the book "Fire Lover" by Joseph Wambaugh.

Until next time,
have a fantastic day ;)