Lori | Betrayal Weekly

If he's telling you he's innocent, he's not. Let me assure you he's not. I probably had no business testifying so he wouldn't get the death penalty. I only knew what I knew at the time, and I felt really guilty for doing that and sparing his life.

I'm Andrea Gunning and this is Betrayal, A show about the people we trust the most and the deceptions that change everything. Loriie Oxford grew up in Eagle Rock, a neighborhood in Los Angeles.

I was the second daughter of Jody and John Orr, and my sister is two years older than me.

When Laurie was just a year old, her parents separated. She and her sister lived with their mom and saw their dad every other weekend.

Shortly after my parents divorced, my mom met my stepdad. His name was Jerry, and he moved in right away. Things were rough at home. Jerry was very abusive and an angry person, so when we would go to my dad's house, that would be vacation or reprieve from what was going on at home with mom.

Laurie and her sister looked forward to spending time with their dad. With him they could relax and just be kids. It was the seventies and eighties in Los Angeles.

We would do the fun things. We would go places, go to movies, go to plays.

Her dad, John loved being outdoors.

Going camping, fishing, hiking, things like that with dad and his dad, which is my grandfather, they were very much outdoorsmen.

John always had fun with the kids, but he wasn't the most expressive father.

He was somewhat of a mystery. He didn't say a whole lot. He didn't talk about his feelings a whole lot.

From a young age, Lourie and her sister knew that their dad had a very important job.

The time that he didn't spend with us, he would be at work, and that was okay with us because he was saving people.

John was a firefighter.

We would go with him to the fire station and everybody would talk to him. Everybody would stop to talk to my sister and I.

He was a respected leader and experienced firefighter, and to Lourie and her sister, he was a hero.

We would see him on TV and he would be saving a dog or saving someone's life. My sister and I would always be tickled when we would see him on the news. We'd go to school and tell our friends, did you see the news last night? My dad was on there.

John rose through the ranks of the fire department. He was promoted to fire captain. Then he was promoted to the role of arson investigator. There were only a few in La County. Arson investigators determined the cause of a fire by collecting evidence, interviewing witnesses, and examining the scene of the fire for any clues as to what started it. The role was kind of like a cross between a firefighter and a police detective. It was John's dream job.

One time, my sister and I were going with him for the weekend and we were driving back to his house, and in the old days, they would have the light to pull people over with, and all of a sudden, he put that on his roof of his car to pull somebody over. He was very serious and stern, and he told us to get underneath the dash onto the floor and don't get up until I come back. And he reached in the glove compartment, took out his gun, and then went outside onto the side of the freeway.

Laurie and her sister hid in the car, not sure what was happening.

Then he came back into the car, told us we could get up, put the gun away, drove off, and we never heard another word about it.

John's job scared LORII and her sister sometimes they didn't want their dad to get hurt, but they knew he was doing noble work. In a region like southern California, where fires caused devastating losses every year, local fire departments are especially vital to the safety of the community. When major fires in the area happened, John was called to the scene. He developed a reputation as highly respected arson investigator. He had to make sense of countless scenes of destruction.

Four people died. Two were employees, and then a grandmother and her grandson. They were being escorted out of the fire by an employee and they ended up getting separated from that employee. The employee barely made it out with lots of burns, but the grandmother and her grandson, they were about twenty feet from the exit when they did find them deceased in the fire.

The Sheriff's department found the cause of the fire to be accidental, a case of faulty electrical wiring. But John saw it differently.

He knew that it was arson, and he was vocal about that to a number of different people.

He saw clues nobody else's did. He kept the community safe, and Laurie always felt safe with him too.

I didn't even tell Dad that Jerry, my stepdad, was abusive, so Dad didn't know what was going on at mom's house. I was never scared of my dad. He never was a disciplinarian in our life at all. With Dad, it was just about having fun and I didn't see anything even close to anger with him.

In high school, Laurie and her sister lived full time with their mom and Jerry and saw their dad less often, but John continued to support the girls as best he could.

He provided my first car, so I got my grandmother's old car, VW. Rabbit and it was orange, but I loved it.

Laurie had a boyfriend, played softball and worked two jobs.

Part of that was being able to be away from home as much as possible. Also I wanted my own money because I didn't want to have to rely on my parents to give me anything.

During this time, their dad, John got remarried.

It was his fourth marriage. Wanda and I got along really well, and I think that she was his best wife of all four of them.

Lorie treasured time with her dad. He never stopped prioritizing fun.

He would always take us to Baskin Robins for ice cream. That was a dad thing. We did it every time we were with him. I couldn't even eat ice cream because I was lactose intolerant, so I had to get Sherbert every single time. But I still valued the times that we would go to Baskin Robins because that was time with dad.

Returning home to her mom in Jerry's house was always challenging. Jerry's abuse continued as the girls got older.

My sister left the house before she graduated high school. At some point, her and Jerry got in a huge fight and she basically ran away and left. My sister ended up staying at her friend's house and never coming back home. I have had a challenging relationship with my mom over the years because of her turning the blind eye knowing how Jerry was treating us and still allowing it to happen.

Laurie began to plan what she wanted for her own life and what she would do after graduating from high school.

When I would think about my future in my teen years, I didn't have a lot of hopes and dreams. But what I did know was that I wanted to be in human resources. That is what I wanted to do for a job. And I got that from going to my first real life interview. When I left that interview, I said, I want to be on the other side of that. That's what I want to do for my life.

One day, Laurie was hanging out with her high school boyfriend.

We had gone to his parents' house and came in the door and were walking by them. They were watching TV and they said, Laurie, your dad's on TV. I said, oh, yeah, he's on the news a lot, and they said, no, you probably want to see this. I'm like, okay, So I came in. I sat down on their couch and looked. The first thing that I saw was my dad handcuffed and police officers putting him into the police car. He was being arrested for arsin.

Laurie stared at the TV in shock.

I was completely confused. What, No, he's an arson investigator. He's not doing arsin? How ludicris? What are they doing? They got all their facts wrong.

She called her mom immediately.

I said, Mom, what's going on? She said, I have no idea. I'm seeing what you're seeing.

Next, she called her dad's wife, Wanda.

And I said, please, what's going on? And she said, this is all a mistake. There is a fireman who is lighting fires. Your dad knows who it is, but it's not him. He just needs to explain that to them and he'll clear it up and everything's going to be fine.

Laurie exhaled a bit.

I'm like, oh, okay, Well, they've got a copboard. They know it's a mistake. It's going to work itself up.

John was placed on house arrest while he awaited trial. Lurie and her sister went to go see him.

My sister and I went in. He was very quiet. He wasn't the dad that we knew. He was quiet, didn't talk a lot.

It was hard to see him struggling like this. Laurie hoped they would find the real person behind the fire soon her dad was at so many crime scenes. Surely he had just gotten mixed up in the evidence. He dedicated his career to stopping fires. This had to be a mistake.

I had no reason to doubt my dad. He had never lied to me ever that I knew of, and I had no reason to not trust what he was saying. Everything I knew about him supported the fact that he wouldn't do something like that.

John prepared for his trial and Laurie and her sister went back to their daily lives.

It really wasn't a big issue for us. We were just so confident that it was going to be worked out that it really was not that intrusive in our lives at that point.

But the whole incident started causing problems. John was the one that was supposed to pay for Lori to attend college.

Now that he was arrested, all his money was going towards his legal battle, and I just understood that I was on my own. So I worked full time and went to college a little bit, but it was too difficult, so I ended up quitting community college.

While her dad waited for his trial, Lurie and her high school boyfriend got married, had a child together and moved to Oregon. Then they separated and Laurie moved back to California to be closer to her family. She was in her early twenties and now a single mother to her one year old son. When she got settled back in California, her dad's trial finally began. John was confident he would be acquitted, and he told Laurie it would be a waste of her time to sit through the whole trial.

My sister and I both wanted to attend the trial and show that we were in support of him. He did not allow us to do.

That, but there were a couple days where he said it would be all right for them to come and show support.

We went to two days of the trial, super boring days, Nothing really happened, and that was it.

The trial went on for weeks, and for most of it Laurie was busy parenting and working full time.

We didn't know what was going on. We didn't know what the evidence was against him. We didn't know pretty much anything at that point.

This was nineteen ninety two, so she couldn't just search the internet for more information.

There was no way to really know what was going on. Except the news, of course, when they would do their news updates and the drawings of Dad while he was in the courtroom.

Whatever anyone asked Laurie about her dad's trial, she was confident.

My dad's innocent, He's been wrongfully accused, and hopefully he'll get out.

Laurie knew the verdict would be announced on the radio on her Friday in July.

I was at work and the only way I could find out what was going on was on an AM news radio station, a little tiny radio on my desk at work. I was listening all afternoon so that I could hear hear it. Finally, close to five o'clock they came on and said that they had found him guilty. But they said they found him guilty of murder.

Murder.

I thought he was being tried for Arson.

When Laurie's dad, John was arrested for Arson, he downplayed the charges against him. He was so confident he told his daughters not to bother coming to his trial. But when Laurie tuned in to hear the verdict.

They said they found him guilty of murder. I thought he was being tried for arson. It was completely shocking that it was a murder charge on top of everything else.

Laurie learned on the radio that her dad had been found guilty not only of arson, but of four counts of first degree murder for four people that died in an arson fire. Then the radio report moved on to other topics like the weather and politics. But Laurie's world had just come crashing down.

My brain just could not handle what that all meant. At that very moment, I put my head down on the desk and cried, my dad was gone forever. That was it, right there, just in that moment, he was just taken away like he had died.

But she wasn't given much time to grieve.

Within an hour, his attorneys were on the phone calling, saying, you need to get to our office tomorrow so that we could participate in the sentencing phase and testify for him to not get the death penalty, the death penalty.

As Laurie drove to the attorney's office, her mind spun. She was convinced of her dad's innocence with every fiber of her being her stepdad Jerry, that's what a bad guy was like. Her dad was the complete opposite. He was a hero, a good guy. She didn't just believe that she knew that.

He's innocent, Like, how can this happen? He was wrongfully accused? How dare you? It was shocking, but it was more shocking that they could put an innocent man behind bars right away.

Luria and her sister agreed to testify in support of their dad at his sentencing hearing. With the death penalty on the table, the stakes could not be higher.

We were on the same page, and I kind of went into I need to save my dad mode. He can't get the death penalty. I need to save his life.

The weight of the sentence hung heavy on Laurie's shoulders. She lay awake at night, her mind racing what if she couldn't save his life?

Would I want to be there when they carried out the death penalty? Would it be my fault if he gets the death penalty? Does that mean I didn't do enough or I didn't say the right things?

Then the day of the sentencing hearing arrived, Laurie, her sister, her mom, and her grandparents all stood anxiously in the halls of the courthouse, waiting to be called in one by one.

I saw a couple of firemen out there as well, and I introduced myself and I asked if they were there in support of my dad, and they kind of had an elusive answer. I thanked them for being there and thought that they were supporting the fact that he doesn't get the death penalty.

Then Laurie was called in to testify.

I can't even describe how nervous I was and shaking. I saw Dad off to the side and he didn't look at me. He didn't say anything, mouth anything, acted like I was a complete stranger.

Laurie took the stand, his.

Attorneys asked some questions. I was so nervous that it was almost like a blackout.

A few days later, Wanda called her with the ruling.

Four people said death penalty and eight people said no. He got life in prison without the possibility of pearl. I felt relieved that he didn't get the death penalty because I could still have a relationship with him.

She tried to hold on to the closeness she felt with her dad.

We would go visit him in prison, which was just horrific to suddenly be visiting your father in prison and bringing my one year old two year old son to see him.

John eventually got transferred to a prison further away from Laurie when visiting became too difficult. She continued to write letters and he called her often.

We didn't talk about anything in depth. He always said that everything was recorded in jail and that he couldn't talk about his case because he was trying to appeal it and they would hear everything, so it was very surface. You know, what are you doing these days? How's your job? How's your mom.

Part of Laurie's identity was being the child of a wrongfully convicted man. It was a tragedy, a miscarriage of justice, and one she was powerless to fix. In the first year or two of a sentence, she thought about him every day, even from a distance. He was still the thoughtful father she knew and loved. But as the years asked her dad became resigned. When they were on the phone, he wouldn't ask about Laurie's life or her kids. He mainly called to ask for favors.

He would ask, can you do this for me? Can you do that for me? Can you send me money? Contact this person, or write a letter to this person, or go in the boxes and try to find this page. And it's like we didn't have time to do all of that.

Laurie started avoiding his calls.

I knew it was going to be another request to do something for him. It wasn't about how are you doing? It was about what he needed.

The man on the other end of the phone started to sound different from the father Laurie had grown up with. Her father was selfless and spent his days saving others. This man now was selfish and seemed to care only about saving himself. It was only then that Laurie began to wonder what if she didn't really know her dad.

I started to feel manipulated by him and feel like there was more to him. That's when I really said, Okay, I'm going to read this book.

The book it was a novel that her father, John wrote before he was arrested, a fictional story about an arson investigator who moon lies as a prolific arsonist. Once John was arrested, the book became a key piece of evidence in his trial.

Is supposed to be fiction, and they used it in his trial, saying it was more like a diary.

Laurie decided it was time to finally read it.

I got through the first chapter and I had to put it down because every single thing in that chapter that I read about, the pictures he had on his walls, who he lived with, where we would go visit him as kids, everything I could remember as real life. That was scary. I thought, if I continue reading this book, everything I think about my dad can change.

She put the book down. Reading any further felt like opening Pandora's box, and for one more year she kept the lid tightly shut. But then eventually she picked up the book again. The main character sets a fire in a hardware store. Before he does, he walks through the store pretending to be a customer. He overhears a conversation between grandparents running errands with their grandson.

The grandmother and grandfather were telling their grandson that if he was good while he was in the store that they would take him next door to Baskin Robbin's and get ice cream. It was said in his book that the child said, I want midchip ice cream.

The fire in the hardware store that John wrote about in his book was hauntingly similar to the nineteen eighty four fire that killed four people in a hardware store in Pasadena, the one John investigated. But when the police Department started investigating his connection to a string of fires throughout California. They returned to interviews with the survivors of the fire, looking for any details that might show John was at the scene before the fire broke out.

When they talked to the grandfather after the fire, they asked him about that scenario, and he said, we promised we would go next door to Baskin Robbins to get his favorite mintschip ice cream.

When Laurie's father, John was arrested for arson, she was sure it was a mistake. He was an arson investigator and had dedicated his life to stopping these tragedies. He pled guilty in court to a lighter sentence, but always maintained that he was innocent. Laurie believed him, but then years later she decided to read his book, and what she read scared her.

There's information in there that other people would not have known. I think that he had to be there in some of those circumstances.

Could this be true? Laurie needed to know more.

I read every piece of information I could find on him. I watched every show that I could get my hands on, newspaper articles, anything that had any information about his trial or crimes.

But the most important evidence she found was in her own garage.

We had boxes of stuff from the trial in our garages, and I started to investigate that she.

Never really dug into those boxes. But when she started combing through them, she found something that made her stomach drop a videotape made by her dad.

He had videoed places that were on fire, which was not uncommon for a narsional investigator because they analyzed fires. The difference in these videos was that he was videotaping the place that was on fire before it ever caught on fire, and then after while it was engulfed in flames.

In June and nineteen ninety, temperatures in Glendale, California, reached over one hundred degrees. The hills that wrapped around the city grew dry, and then on June twenty seventh, a brush fire broke out in the hills. It picked up speed, quickly tearing into neighborhoods. Residents rushed to evacuate. The fire took a devastating toll. It destroyed forty six homes and damaged twenty others. Altogether, the brush fire caused fifty million

He had a recording that showed the hillside prior to being on fire, just calm, quiet, settled, and then right after that it was the recording of the same exact spot, the same exact house burning to the ground.

For over a decade, Laurie believed her dad when he said he was innocent. When she was growing up with an abusive stepfather, her dad was a place of refuge. He was the good guy. That's why she never believed the charges. But what was on this videotape felt less like evidence and more like proof.

It just doesn't make any sense why he would have recorded that beforehand unless he was the one that started that fire. So I wrote him a letter and said, hey, I'm starting to feel like you did these things. I really need you to tell me and convince me that you didn't, or else I'm done with you. I expected him to reply with a pleading statement for me to believe that he wouldn't do something like that. That's fully

For the first time in her life, Laurie believed her dad was guilty. His letter was the final confirmation.

I decided I did not need him and his manipulation in my life anymore. He did horrible things, and I don't need to have this horrible man in my life.

The man who had set these fires and watched them burn felt like a complete stranger.

You start to second guess everything your whole life.

She flipped through childhood memories, trying to find anything that could have been a warning sign, but she kept coming up empty.

He was always very, very cautious with fire. He always made sure our smoke detectors were working. He would always be careful with the campfire when we were camping, just like you would expected a fireman to be. There was never anything related to fire or my dad's relationship to fire that would have given me any indication that he would do something like this.

Being a firefighter and an arson investigator was so central to John's identity. It was his passion his community and to his kids. It was what made him a hero. If that was all a lie, was anything about him real.

Did he really even love me? You know, I'm not sure. I came across a picture of him holding me when I was a baby, and I thought, oh, he did love me at some point. You know. That's kind of how I felt about it afterwards, that everything was just a lie.

She thought back to the time that her dad had made her and her sister hide in the car while he arrested someone, how he had pulled out his gun and stepped out onto the side of the highway. Had he really arrested someone or had something else happened? Everything was murkier now. As hard as it was to face the truth about her dad, Laurie wanted to see the full picture of him, so she finished reading his novel, and what she read made her sick.

In his book went into heavy detail about how the firefighter who was lighting the fires was sexually aroused by fire. So, of course, when I'm reading this book, I'm thinking of my dad being that character and being aroused by fire. It just was pretty disgusting, really to think about that way.

For some arsonists, like John, there is a sexual component to their crimes.

I also learned in the interviews with him his ex wives, there definitely was sexually deviant behavior in his past that fits the arsonist role.

Some of John's behavior seems almost contradictory in some ways. He appears to be proud of his crimes. He filmed them, wrote about them, insisted as an investigator that these were not accidental fires. He wanted everyone to know this was arson But once he was caught, he never admitted to what he had done.

He's been in prison thirty five years now, but he still says he's innocent.

Here's what Laurie thinks about this.

It was kind of a cat and mouse game for him, I could do this and not get caught type of thing, and him writing the book was yet just another example of that, putting it in their face that he did those but isn't getting caught.

Over the course of thirty years, John Orr set an estimated two thousand fires across California. He burned down countless homes and devastated ecosystems. He caused millions of dollars in property damage, and worst of all, his fires took four lives. John Orr is widely considered to be the most prolific arsonist in American history.

After he was arrested the number of fires in Glendale and the surrounding cities went down by seventy five percent. That's pretty telling.

In an area like southern California, where one rogue match can cause large scale, irreversible damage, that number is especially chilling.

I can't even put into words what it's like to hear that my dad is considered the most prolific serial arsonists of all time. It's disgusting, it's horrible, it's unbelievable. He betrayed the fire industry, He betrayed his friends, his family, He betrayed everyone by letting us think that he was one person, this hero, respected firefighter, arson investigator who rose through the ranks to being a monster that started all of these fires in which people have died.

As to how investigators finally figured out that it was John lighting these fires, it started with a fingerprint. In nineteen eighty seven, firefighters found a fire starting device. It was made from a cigarette matches and notebook paper, and on the notebook paper was a fingerprint. But it would take a few years for fingerprinting technology to evolve enough for investigators to tie that fingerprint to John. In the meantime,

He was lighting fires as young as eight years old. My dad, in my mind, was troubled since birth.

Laurie has been forced to rewrite the entire story of who her father is, but John himself has never admitted the truth.

It is something that haunts me, and I pray that he will leave a note or a letter or something when he is on his deathbed that puts closure to it.

To come to terms with her dad's actions, Laurie went to therapy.

The therapist looked at me and he said, your dad's a sociopath and you need to grieve him like he's dead. And that's exactly what I did. I grieved him like he was dead and put him out of mind, out of sight, and I let that part of my life go.

When Laurie was thirty five, she had a heart attack. She had to take time away from work to recover.

Once I went on disability, I had a really challenging time, and so I somehow got the idea to write a book, and that's just what I needed At that moment.

Laurie reached out to Frank Girardo, a journalist who'd covered her dad's crimes. She asked him if you would be interested in co authoring the book.

With her back when my dad was arrested, Frank interviewed my dad and with his familiarity with the case, he was the perfect person to do this with me.

While researching and writing the book, she decided to get in touch with the mother of the child who died in the fire at the hardware store.

I couldn't get that family off my mind. The fact that she lost her mom and her son in the same fire that day. I just felt compelled that I had to apologize on his behalf. She did tell me that she was able to move on and find joy in her life and now she has grank kids and you know, things like that, and she recommended that I do the same, to move on from the tragedy that was my life and to make the best out of my life that I can.

The process of writing the book was a way for Lorie to reckon with her part in the story.

I wanted people to know that I now think he's guilty. If he's telling you he's innocent, he's not, let me assure you he's not, and in some way to acknowledge that I probably had no business testifying so he wouldn't get the death penalty. That was important for me to put out there and have people know, because I only knew what I knew at the time, and I felt really guilty for doing that and sparing his life. He

Lourie's book is called Burned Murder and a Daughter's Nightmare. Her father's crimes will always be a part of her story, but they are not the whole story.

Only with maturity, do you see all the ways that your life was shaped. I've had lots of issues in my life that probably stem from having issues with my dad and not having him there to protect me or be a role model to me. But I will never stop trying to be happy no matter what, till the day I die. That's what we're here for.

Laurie has built a beautiful life for herself.

What I'm doing now is just going through life raising my kids, trying to be as happy as I possibly can be in the time that I have. I have absolutely wonderful kids. I have four of them, three are adults. One I'm still raising.

Laurie's chosen to be honest with them about who their grandfather is.

As young as they were saying mom, where's your dad and stuff like that, I would answer it age appropriately.

When Laurie's son was in high school, his teacher announced that their next assignment was to write a paper about the serial arsonist John Orr.

He raised his hand and said, teacher, that's my grandfather. And she's like, oh, well, you don't have to do this. You don't have to do the work, and he's like, no, I'll do it. He's a stranger to me. I'll do it. And I told his teacher if she wanted me to answer any questions for them, that I'd be happy to do that, And so she emailed me questions from the students and then I emailed it back to them.

We end every weekly episode with the same question, why do you want to share your story.

When all this went down with my dad? The fire community is very close knit and takes care of each other. Not one person ever asked how we were doing, if we were okay, we needed anything, So it always made me feel like we were guilty by association. And I want people to know that we're victims too. I don't want to take the place of the actual victims, but we are victims that were affected by that crime, and my dad was taken away immediately from me, just as if he had died. I don't know why I keep

This is our last Betrayal Weekly episode for a little while. We'll be back in January with a whole new season of Betrayal. It'll be one story told over multiple weeks, and after that we have more Betrayal Weekly episodes coming. Right now, we're actively working on news stories, so if you have a story you'd like to share on the podcast, write to us at betrayalpod at gmail dot com. In the meantime, we hope you enjoy your holiday season. We'll