Kill, Sleep, Repeat: Real-life story #2

Howdy,

I hope that you’re busy having fun and that the holidays have held happy promises for you, and you can see good times ahead.

To warm you up for my upcoming novel, Kill, Sleep, Repeat, over the next several weeks I’ll be sharing a new email series featuring stories of real-life secret identities. Below is the second.

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John Leonard Orr

The public persona:

In his role as chief arson investigator for the Glendale, California Fire Department, John Leonard Orr was unrivaled among his peers, due to his uncanny ability to arrive first at the scene of a suspicious fire before proceeding to deftly track down its cause like some kind of accelerant-sniffing human bloodhound.

Of course, the reason Orr excelled at his job was mostly that he started all the fires himself, playing the hero as he watched greater Glendale smolder.

The secret identity:

Between 1984 and 1991, Orr set an estimated 2,000 fires in the Los Angeles area, amounting to millions of dollars of damage. Not all of the damages can be assigned a dollar value, however: In 1984, Orr murdered four people— including a grandmother and her two-year-old grandson—when he burned down a Pasadena hardware store. In 1990, Orr masterminded a firestorm that destroyed 67 Glendale homes.

So why did he do it? Well, while it’s never advisable to dig too deep into the mind of a monster, in Orr’s case you barely have to scrape the surface to discover his motive: This man didn’t just like fire, he was obsessed with it.

Ultimately, it’s this obsession that would do him in. Twisted as it was, Orr’s M.O. was somewhat genius: He’d set a fire in the foothills. Then, while firefighters were distracted there, he’d hit a far more devastating target, such as the aforementioned hardware store. Finally, he’d sweep into the smoking rubble with his fellow investigators to aid in the chase for the so-called Pillow Pyro offering a hearty shrug when the time came to pinpoint a culprit.

Among his favored targets were fabric and hardware stores, this and his penchant for linen shops, filled with bedding, earned him the moniker.

Strangely enough, Orr might never have been caught had he not given in to another burning desire — to be a best-selling writer. His novel, “Points of Origin,” tells the story of a firefighter for whom creating charred rubble was more exciting than sex.

File this under: I wish I was joking.

“By the way, I’m not the arsonist,” Orr wrote while peddling his book to a literary agent in 1991. Ten years later he was reached in prison (where he is serving four life terms) by a team investigating psychopathic behavior, a group hypothesizing that not even the psychopath knows what he is really doing. John Orr seemingly proved the point. ”If you want to study a serial arsonist,” he told them, ‘why have you contacted me?’

As they say, truth is stranger than fiction…

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Several times a week, Charlotte Jones leaves suburbia behind and boards a chartered flight to parts unknown, where she wraps her hands around the necks of marks for just as long as she has to.

Then she goes back to domestic life with a paycheck, defense wounds, and the sense that she can handle anything.

Which is good, because being a wife, mother, and sociopath, with an insatiable taste for murder, gives the term work-life balance new meaning. When one life unexpectedly bleeds into the other, leading to a secret admirer and borderline insta-fame, Charlotte is forced to ask herself if she really can have it all.

Slick and unsettling, Kill, Sleep, Repeat is a cunning tale of deception and desire that begs the question: Do we ever really know people the way we think we do?

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