Original subtitles

♪♪

Man: The average fireman, that's their job.

For a pyromaniac, it's their life is consumed by it.

A guy like that has such a mask, such a facade of normality

that it's almost impossible to detect something is wrong.

The fact that he seemed to set all his fires

in crowded places during the day

where people could potentially die is important.

Much, much more dramatic, and it's much more stimulating,

much more eroticized for the pyromaniac.

♪♪

♪♪

Welcome to "Very Scary People."

I'm Donnie Wahlberg.

On October 10, 1984,

flames swept through a crowded store in California,

trapping some employees and shoppers inside.

There was panic and confusion,

and not everyone escaped in time.

Investigators combed through the debris

to try to establish the cause.

Was this an accident or arson?

More mysterious fires followed, and a pattern emerged.

There was an arsonist on the loose.

Now the hunt was on.

This is Part One of "The Firestarter."

♪♪

♪♪

Ole's Home Center in South Pasadena was big

and had pretty much anything you could think of,

from cheap tools to Christmas lights.

It was actually in a building

that had once housed a grocery store and a drug store.

They cut two holes in the wall between the two stores

and put a couple of roll-up doors in there

so that people can go in between,

and those things will drop down as soon as there's a fire.

The roll-up doors would stop the fire

from spreading from one side of the store to the other.

Girardot: On October 10, 1984,

there were dozens of people in the Ole's hardware store,

among them employees and shoppers.

Obdam: I was 19 and just started working full-time.

I could've never imagined that evening --

it would totally change my life.

♪♪

The store was pretty quiet that evening

because it was Game 2 of the World Series.

[ Lighter clicks ]

Girardot: Billy and Ada Deal -- they live in the neighborhood,

and they're babysitting their grandson, Matthew Troidl,

and decide that, "Hey, you know, it's a nice sort of warm night.

Let's go down to Ole's and do some shopping."

And of course, little Matthew isn't really having it,

doesn't want to be in the cart.

And they say, "Oh, don't worry. We'll get you some ice cream.

We'll take you to Baskin-Robbins."

Ada and Matthew, grandmother and grandson,

are perusing aisles in the paint department.

And Billy is up in the tools section,

which is in a completely other part of the store.

[ Lighter clicks ]

♪♪

Obdam: All of a sudden, I heard somebody yelling,

"Hey, we need to clear the store.

We need to get out of the store."

I looked over and noticed that there was a column of smoke.

♪♪

I went back over to the hardware department

all the way in the back of the store

and saw a couple of customers, told them,

"Hey, we need to leave the store right now."

♪♪

Girardot: Jim Obdam encounters Ada and Matthew

in one of the aisles.

Obdam: And there was a lady with her grandchild

in the very last row of the department

that was looking at some merchandise.

And I told her that we needed to leave the store,

that there was an emergency.

And he asked her to follow him,

and he began walking towards the closest fire door to them.

♪♪

Obdam: And I told her,

"Take your grandson out of the cart

because we need to move quickly out of the store."

As we were walking down the main aisle,

I looked over to the right and saw that that pillar of smoke

was not a pillar of smoke anymore.

It was a wall of flames.

As he walked towards that fire door,

the fire door suddenly came down.

I was trapped because two roll-up doors closed on me,

blocking my way from one side of the store to the other building.

It traps them in this building that a raging blaze

is just about to consume.

♪♪

Obdam: And as I see the flames on one side of me,

all of a sudden, the lights flickered and turned off,

and everything turned black, and it was just an orange glow.

Girardot: You had nothing on your mind but sheer panic.

He's hoping he can save this grandmother and her grandbaby,

but he also knows he's got to get out of there.

It went so fast that I don't even remember

seeing the lady with her grandchild there.

I lost her.

It was pitch-black in the store,

and I couldn't see anything, really,

so at that point in time, I just prayed and said,

you know, "Lord, get me out of here."

It was just totally chaos.

And was trying to figure out where to go from here.

I headed toward the back wall

and felt my way along the aisle in the dark.

It just seemed incredibly hot.

Girardot: He makes his way through the smoke

toward the one emergency door that he knows

that leads out to the back of the hardware store.

Obdam: As I was working my way down the back aisle

toward the exit,

it was just -- the intense heat was just extreme.

He had to shield his head and body with his arms

from the fire as it became so intense.

Obdam: I remember putting my hand on my wrist

and just the skin peeling off my arm,

and it just seemed like forever

to get to those emergency exit doors.

So I felt like giving up.

But then here are the doors.

I was like, "I'm gonna be the last one

out of these doors."

Girardot: And when he gets outside

and turns around and looks at where he came from,

the building is engulfed in flames.

Obdam: I remember seeing smoke coming out of those doors,

and it was just black.

I knew that there would be people

that perished in the fire.

Cabral: In less than five minutes,

this fire went from a small fire

to a fully engulfed 12,000-square-foot building.

Obdam: I had first- and second-degree burns on my arm

and also on my ears, on my forehead, and face.

Girardot: Outside the store, a crowd is gathering,

and among the spectators is Billy Deal,

and he's asking everybody, "Have you seen my wife?

Have you seen my grandson?

Do you know where they might be?"

And these emotions are playing out

in the parking lot of this hardware store

that is absolutely engulfed in this fire.

♪♪

Cabral: The captain is trying to direct his rookie firefighters

into this massive fire.

Then John Orr shows up.

He was the fire investigator for the city of Glendale.

The fire-investigative community all knew John Orr very well,

and he was a well-respected investigator.

And he seemed to have a great deal of knowledge

about fire that many other people didn't have.

And he takes a bunch of pictures of the firefighters

and the fire.

John was known for telling all these investigators

that "the bug is always in the crowd."

So you should video it so you can figure out

whether somebody's showing up at a bunch of your fires,

and then you'll know that that person is the arsonist.

Obdam: I've heard that there was nobody else

that made it out of the store.

The Ole's Home Center fire started at 8:04 p.m.

on the night of October 10, 1984.

First arriving units found that the fire was fully involved

inside the west side of the Ole's store.

They saw smoke and fire beginning to come out of

all of the open doors and vents in the location,

and within minutes, it was through the roof.

People are watching -- people who've been evacuated

from the store, people who worked in the store.

I was very much concerned for my co-workers.

♪♪

♪♪

Cabral: The investigation of the Ole's Home Center fire

was led by

the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Arson Homicide Division.

They couldn't figure out what happened

because they couldn't decide whether or not

it was an electrical fire.

The fire was what we call undetermined,

and it really became a body-recovery effort

fairly early on.

♪♪

In all, there's four people that died in this Ole's fire.

Working in the store was Carolyn Kraus.

People remember her leading people out of the store

when this fire took place.

She was a very sweet young lady. We got along really well.

Girardot: Jimmy Cetina was a high-school kid.

Obdam: And he was like an all-American athlete.

Girardot: He was being scouted by the Chicago Cubs.

He had a bright future.

Whenever you saw him, he always had a smile on his face,

never in a bad mood.

Girardot: He led people to safety and ultimately perished.

Obdam: It was very saddening to hear that.

Girardot: Among the victims were Ada Deal and Matthew Troidl.

We were called last night and told he was trapped in there

and he was dead.

That's all we know.

They were found about 20 feet from the door.

My grandbaby, he would've been 3 in January.

He was with his other grandmother.

They were in the store shopping with her husband,

his grandfather.

She decided to go back for one more thing.

She took the baby with her.

And I'm sure she did everything she could for him.

It was the next day that I found out that the lady

and her grandchild passed away in the fire.

♪♪

Cabral: All of the victims who died in this fire

died from smoke inhalation,

and that is typically what happens in a fire.

People very rarely burn to death in fires.

Most of the time, it's the smoke that kills them

because they're not breathing enough oxygen.

Then the fire envelops them.

♪♪

John Orr knew very well

the sister of one of the victims in the fire,

and a couple of days after the fire,

he specifically told her that he was angry

that they had not determined this was an arson fire.

Girardot: And he tells her, "This is an arson fire,

and I'm bound and determined to get to the bottom of

why this fire happened and who set it."

Point of origin is where the fire started.

It was gonna tell you the possible cause of the fire.

It could be an accidental fire due to an electrical short.

It could be careless smoking.

It could be any number of things.

♪♪

And, in fact, John Orr went to the area of origin

and expressed his own opinions as to why this fire

was arson and different from what they said.

Girardot: One of the things that John was really good at

was reading a fire,

and he knew that arson fires start from the ground up

and electrical fires always burn from the top down.

Patterson: I had great respect for John.

I was impressed with his knowledge.

Man: There would be a number of fire scenes

where the investigators might be struggling

to try to find out where the fire started,

and he had a knack of showing up on scene

and being able to relatively quickly identify

the point of origin of the fire, where other investigators

had been stumped by until his arrival.

My dad was a hero, solving those fires and figuring out

where they started and that they were arson.

He was on the news quite often.

There's a lot of witness statements

and a lot of possible suspects that were in the area

at the time of the fire.

Matassa: To anybody that worked fire investigation at the time,

his reputation was almost larger than life.

Girardot: Orr tells them, "There's something happening

here that you are missing," and they ignore it.

Cabral: Once they began to drive heavy equipment into the scene,

you have now compromised your scene investigation,

because you certainly can't figure out what substance

was used to start a fire

if you're driving heavy equipment inside a location

before you finish your investigation.

If the sheriff would only have listened to what he said,

they would've realized there was something far more sinister

going on that night.

♪♪

♪♪

Girardot: The loss of life in a popular retail store

made headlines in Southern California.

Reporter: Four people died in this fire,

including a grandmother and her 2-year-old grandson.

The other two were employees of Ole's Home Center.

Cabral: The investigators, because they didn't determine

that it was an arson fire,

didn't conduct any further investigations.

If they had done so, they may have realized that two fires

on that very same night

may have been connected to the Ole's Home Center fire.

The first one was about 15 minutes away

from the Ole's South Pasadena location.

Girardot: John Orr was sent to investigate it.

Girardot: The third fire that night

was in another grocery store, also in the potato chip rack.

Cabral: John Orr participated in all three of

those investigations during that night.

Girardot: Investigators quickly determined

the two potato chip fires were arson fires.

But because the fires were in grocery stores,

investigators thought there was no way they could be linked

to this giant blaze that happened at Ole's

and very quickly dismissed any thought

that there was some linkage between these three fires.

♪♪

If anybody had connected these three fires,

they would have realized that there was something far more

serious happening that night

and that there was an arsonist on the loose,

and he wasn't gonna be satisfied

until his arson did some real damage

and he got some credit for it.

Cabral: The only report that reflects that connection

is a report that John Orr wrote.

He said that was the same person that started all these fires.

Man: If you look at the pattern among pyromaniacs,

they often do it in a spree-like fashion,

sometimes several fires in one day

because it's so stimulating for them.

There's an inner drive to do it.

They want to recapture that feeling again.

Girardot: By setting fires in a spree-like fashion,

the arsonist can also cause the greatest amount of damage.

♪♪

Cabral: There was a fire set in another Ole's Home Center store

in the city of Pasadena.

That fire didn't really ignite.

Girardot: And investigators go out and they look at it,

and they even find the device.

It was a device put in their polyurethane foam

that someone discovered while it was still smoking.

Matassa: And that device was a cigarette that had three matches

attached to it by a rubber band,

and it was placed inside a piece of folded,

yellow-lined notepad paper.

The concept of that device would be once a cigarette was ignited,

you would have a timeframe before it would burn down enough

to light the matches,

and the matches would, in turn, light the yellow-lined paper.

And you'd need that amount of flame

before you'd be successful in igniting it.

Girardot: To John, it was clear that the same arsonist

who set the fire at Ole's in South Pasadena

and killed four people was telling investigators that,

"Hey, you missed me.

I'm gonna do it again so that you see it's an arson."

Orr was very, very good at fire detection.

Why? That was his life.

It was part of him.

It was all-consuming for him.

Of course, his words fell on deaf ears.

In the two years that followed,

there would be more than 6,500 fires in Southern California,

causing more than $20 million in damage.

And nobody can say exactly how many of these fires

were accidental or arson.

♪♪

Man: I was working at the Bakersfield Fire Department

as a fire investigator, and we had a call come in.

It was a Craft-Mart store

out in the southwest part of Bakersfield.

I traveled out there in my cruiser

and was met at the front door by an Engine Company captain

that took me back to a dry floral arrangement

where the fire had started.

When I looked over in the bin,

I saw what I knew to be a incendiary device.

It was three matches laying close to a cigarette butt

that had been severely burned

and some rubber-band-looking material.

Yellow-lined paper was laying in close proximity to it.

I carefully picked it up with a pair of tweezers

and put it into an evidence bag.

I had the manager bring me all of the yellow-lined paper

that he had in the store,

and I compared it with the yellow-lined paper

that I had obtained from the bin,

and none of it compared.

So that made me believe that the paper

had to come from the outside.

I was quite surprised whenever I found

that someone had intentionally done this

due to the time of day.

The store was busy.

You had employees in there, had customers in there.

I felt like this was someone that was very bold.

This person knew that he could walk in there and do it

without being detected.

I had the opportunity to interview the manager

and other employees at the Craft-Mart store

to see if they'd seen anybody suspicious or anything,

and they hadn't really seen anybody or paid any attention

to anyone that was in the store.

I was still conducting my interviews

when I received another call of a fire,

and I thought, "Wow, this is a little unusual.

I'm having two large

department stores with fires in them.

What could possibly be going on here?"

At the second fire, there was one lady

that was working that had seen a guy come in.

He was a real handsome cowboy,

and she was watching him as he walked around in the store,

and he had something in his hands,

and apparently she had taken her eye off him for a while.

Shortly after the cowboy left the store, a fire broke out.

♪♪

Casey: I got the call from the two investigators

that had been to the

California Conference of Arson Investigators

up in Fresno.

Girardot: The firefighters, they talk about their work

hunting arsonists

or how they are investigating different crimes.

On the last days of the conference,

there's a series of fires that take place.

Casey: All located along Highway 99,

with Fresno being the first one,

and that's where the conference was.

Then you have Tulare, then we had Bakersfield,

and then they seemed to stop.

So now I'm thinking, "This could very well be

a person that attended the conference."

Just a gut instinct I had that a fireman was setting these fires.

Girardot: There's a fireman that attended that conference

in Fresno who's lighting fires on his way home

to Bakersfield or Los Angeles.

♪♪

Casey: One of the fire investigators that was there,

he called me and says, "Hey, I'm gonna tell you

something that's gonna knock your socks off."

Welcome back to "Very Scary People."

After a series of mysterious fires

break out near an arson investigators' convention,

investigator Marvin Casey has a hunch.

He thinks someone in the firefighting community

who attended the conference set the fires.

He has one critical piece of evidence --

a scrap of yellow-lined note paper

that was part of the incendiary device.

He thinks this could be key to identifying the fire starter.

Marvin Casey sends it out to a lab, they dust it,

and they find out that, "Hey, there's a fingerprint

on this piece of paper."

Well, this is great.

I mean, they've got a fingerprint

that they can link to a device

that started an arson fire in Bakersfield.

Casey: They ran their print through the National Crime Index.

It's an index that they put everybody's fingerprints in,

everybody that's ever done anything wrong.

It's nationwide.

The guy didn't have a criminal record.

There was no hit on it to make a match.

♪♪

Girardot: Marvin Casey was disappointed,

but he didn't give up.

Casey: I obtained a roster from the conference in Fresno,

which was attended with about 250 fire investigators,

insurance agents, and people like that.

I got my California map and I traced it down

and put indicators showing where the fires had started.

They had to be traveling alone

because arson's really a secretive crime.

I narrowed it down to 55 individuals

that was traveling down Highway 99 from the convention

to the Southern California area.

Girardot: What Marvin does is he offers the ATF

the names of 55 firefighters

and a fingerprint and says, "If you put this all together,

you're probably gonna find a serial arsonist."

Casey: And they looked at the roster and said, "55 men.

I really don't think we can work that many."

I was disappointed, but I still couldn't get it out of my head.

I continued to work the theory,

and finally, the fire marshal that I was working for said,

"You know, put this on the back-burner.

You know, you've beat this horse to death."

Girardot: For the next two years, fires continued

to pop up all over California,

but none were connected to the 1987 fire spree.

♪♪

It turns out there's a conference

taking place in Pacific Grove,

where a group of firefighters get together.

Casey: It's just off the coast of the San Francisco area.

All fire investigators get together

and they're discussing the fires in California

and how we were going to approach it in the future.

One of the fire investigators that was there,

he called me and says, "Hey, you know, I'm gonna tell you

something that's gonna knock your socks off."

There was other fires that had occurred during that convention,

like someone had just left the convention

and was going back to Southern California,

traveling down 101 and setting the fires in different towns.

This is very eerily similar to what happened

just two years earlier.

This, to me, seemed like it was the same M.O.

that had happened in '87.

These fires were during business hours

when people were in the store shopping.

After I'd received information

that there had been fires going down Highway 101,

I pulled my map back out that I had used in '87

that I had identified as a person traveling down 99.

I knew that it had to be someone from Southern California

because that's the way the map was indicating.

Girardot: So he asks organizers for a list of names.

Who attended this conference?

And he gets that list and compares it to the one

that he had two years earlier.

Casey: Then I put the two together and compared them,

and I came up, then, with 10 names.

10 people had attended both conferences.

Girardot: And on these 10 names is the name of a firefighter

who's probably responsible for some of

these fairly significant arsons.

♪♪

Casey: Then I re-contacted ATF,

and I said, "Listen, I've got it down to 10 names.

Can we work with 10 names?"

They said, "Yes, I believe we can."

So I sent the 10 names up to them,

and they were to compare the fingerprint.

They run the names and the fingerprint,

and there's no match to any of these firefighters

and that fingerprint.

Casey: I was starting to think, you know,

"Well, maybe this will never be solved."

I'd taken a lot of guff from all these guys.

They just didn't want to believe that it was one of our own

that was setting fires.

I was probably the only one that suspected it, that believed it.

The arsonist would remain on the loose,

and he had no intention of stopping.

♪♪

[ Helicopter blades whirring ]

Girardot: June, 1990, was an unusual fire season,

that fires had begun in spots all over California,

and it stretched the resources

of local fire departments pretty thin.

Cabral: We had Santa Ana winds blowing.

High winds blowing out of the hills

are what moves most of our fires in California.

Girardot: You have dry tinder, hot conditions,

and then winds that can sometimes get up into the 50s.

The perfect playground for an arsonist,

because you add a match and now you've got havoc.

[ Bell dinging ]

On June 27th, I went to my doctors,

and when I was coming back, right on the hillside,

the weeds -- they were so dry, it gave me a creepy feeling.

I don't know why that feeling came to me.

I thought if somebody put a match to that weed,

it would just burn.

We live in a two-story family home in College Hills.

Girardot: College Hills is a residential area of Glendale

nestled in the foothill region of the San Gabriel Mountains.

Yesayan: I drove up to my home, and it was so hot.

As I went to take my shower to cool off,

at that time, I heard the sirens.

[ Sirens wailing ]

And I said, "Oh, there must be a fire."

When I looked out of the window, I saw a very thick smoke,

and I realized the fire is in our street right below.

That fire advanced up that hill pretty darn quick.

Girardot: There's a house burning and another house burning,

and there's smoke in the air, and you can feel the flames.

Cabral: The fire was so intense and the winds were so strong.

It jumped an eight-lane freeway.

Officer: We need everybody to start evacuating now.

Yesayan: My husband -- he came to our street.

It was blocked.

Right in front of his eyes, a house exploded into pieces.

And fortunately at that time, he saw a woman, an officer,

and asked, "Go to my house and tell my wife just get out,

get out of the house."

Right now, when I'm thinking back,

it makes me very emotional.

So, after this woman told us,

"Just get out, get out of the house,"

I pulled the car from the garage.

I drove down the street. I remember smoke.

It was thick smoke.

And the whole street was covered with criss-crossed fire hoses.

We went to the shopping center,

and we just watched the fires on the hills,

and seeing the houses,

that they were exploding like firecrackers.

It was just surreal.

♪♪

At around 7:30, 8:00, they put the fire out.

The fire destroyed or damaged approximately 67 homes

in this College Hills community.

It was very emotional that I saw that our house was saved.

Cabral: It was the largest fire in the city of Glendale's history.

To this day, I can't believe that no one died

in the College Hills fire.

It amazes me that all those people

were able to get out of there.

It was a miracle.

♪♪

Girardot: But the circumstances surrounding this fire

seemed suspicious.

John Orr is the Glendale Fire Captain,

and in this case, this fire -- the College Hills fire --

is now happening in his city.

[ Siren wailing ]

John's adamant that this fire is arson.

He walks out into the middle of the field

and picks up a lighter.

He tells the other investigators that,

"Well, here, we found the cause of this fire,

and it happened right here.

It's this lighter."

He was uncanny about his ability

to find these incendiary devices.

We have some very good leads.

John had great relationships with reporters,

and he recognized that the local media

would be a pretty good way

to advance his investigation by saying,

"Listen, this is an arson fire.

We're looking for a serial arsonist."

Some of the evidence matches up with this individual

and ties him into the fires.

We don't have an identity on him.

Girardot: There was all kinds of witnesses

to the College Hills fire.

In one case, a woman describes having a man

come to her door and say,

"Hey, did you know there's a fire in your backyard?"

And of course, this is before she can smell anything

or see anything.

And again, within seconds, he's gone,

and suddenly the fire's going.

One of the witnesses sees a white Chevy Blazer

right at the point of origin.

In the investigation of this fire,

John was put in charge of a tip line,

and so as the active investigator,

all the tips on this fire,

anybody that saw anything that had to do with it,

had to call this tip line, and John vetted all the tips.

Matassa: We had a very brazen arsonist.

He knew exactly where to start it to get the desired results

that they're looking for, which would be a large fire.

♪♪

In late 1990 and going into '91, there's an epidemic of fires

that are happening in retail stores all over L.A.

In each of these fires,

there's a device that's very similar.

Matassa: And that device was a relatively simple design

but very effective -- a cigarette that had

three matches attached to it by a rubber band,

and it was placed inside a piece of folded

yellow-lined notepad paper.

On March 27th of 1991,

I learned that the L.A. Sheriff's arson unit

had responded to a large commercial fire

in the South Bay area of Los Angeles.

Later that same day, I got a briefing from the investigators

that responded to the scene,

and by that time, they learned that it wasn't just one fire.

There had actually been three fires in the same area,

and in each one of those fires,

it started in pillows or foam products.

Clearly, the conclusion was that we had a serial offender

who had started those fires,

and we decided that it would be prudent to form a task force.

And our goal was to start visiting

all of the local smaller jurisdictions

in the greater Los Angeles area

and see if they had had any fires that met that same M.O.

Within days, we were able to identify

close to 30 fires in Los Angeles

over a four-month period from December through March.

The device is obviously a signature,

but the M.O. goes beyond that.

We noticed that the fires were fairly close to freeway

on- and off-ramp access,

which would allow the perpetrator easy egress

from the fire scenes.

Cabral: The fires were all set in either hardware stores

or fashion-type stores --

stores that would have polyurethane foam in them,

and that is really the connection

between these fabric stores and hardware stores.

Matassa: The fact that these fires were

being started in the middle of the day,

in businesses when there's customers,

it was obvious to us that there was a large chance

of loss of life

if we didn't solve this case soon.

Girardot: So now that the task force is established,

the lead investigators need to meet

with arson investigators in Los Angeles.

Matassa: The treasurer of the association, John Orr,

was well-known to myself and others as the

arson investigator for the city of Glendale.

And we hoped that maybe he had some information to share.

After the meeting ended, our investigator got approached

in a parking lot by a California state fire marshal,

and he says, "I have to talk to you.

I didn't want to say anything in the open meeting."

"We think a fireman might be responsible,

and we should be careful about what we say

in front of this group."

Matassa: And he said, "We had the exact same scenario in 1987

in Fresno, the city of Tulare, and Bakersfield.

And they had, in fact, recovered a yellow-lined paper,

cigarette, and match device from one of those fires.

It seems to be an exact match with the device you recovered.

You need to talk to Marv Casey,

the arson investigator for the city of Bakersfield."

I get a call from the Los Angeles guys,

and they want to come up and take a look

at the yellow-lined paper that had a fingerprint.

Matassa: It was run against every fingerprint stored

for any possible reason in the state system.

So it was not only people that were arrested for crimes,

but also anyone that had their fingerprints

taken for any purpose,

whether it be a law-enforcement officer or a fire service.

About three days after,

a phone call came in from the sheriff's lab.

He says, "You got John Orr's fingerprints on it."

Casey: First thing they did was call me and tell me, you know,

"You tell John Orr to quit touching that evidence."

I said, "He was nowhere around when I investigated that fire.

What are you talking about?"

Matassa: It made no sense that his prints

should be on a device from Bakersfield.

I knew John personally.

I've worked cases with him,

worked on investigations with him.

I've taken arson-scene investigation training with him.

He's trusted as one of us.

I thought it could be somebody just messing with the fire guys

that were up there for the conference.

They're trying to tantalize or torture or torment

the fire investigators, say, "Catch me if you can."

Matassa: How could it be one of our own?

The arsonist would remain on the loose,

and he had no intention of stopping.

In the meantime, suspicious fires continue to pop up

all over Southern and central California.

Matassa: Eventually, the fire's gonna grow enough

that someone's not going to be able to escape.

We could not allow that to happen.

Will investigators be able to catch the elusive arsonist

before he strikes again?

Could the person starting these fires

really be one of their own?

An arson expert?

A firefighter?

Someone sworn to save lives?

The shocking conclusion in Part Two of "The Firestarter."

I'm Donnie Wahlberg.

Thanks for watching.

Goodnight.