Chapter One | Point of Origin

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April seventeenth, nineteen ninety-one. To the L. Harry Lee Literary Agency. Common criminals seemed to have one characteristic they all shared the need to distance themselves from their crimes as quickly as possible. All criminals, that is, except the arsonists. The arsonist stays close by and sometimes even participates in the discovery and eventual extinguishment of his fire. The arsonist is weak and insecure and usually perpetrates his crime in the dark.

The evidence is almost always destroyed if not by the fire than by the firefighters during extinguishment. My novel, Points of Origin, is a fact-based work that follows the pattern of an actual arsonist who has been setting serial fires in California over the past eight years. He has not been identified or apprehended, probably will not be in the near future. Thirty years ago, this letter was making the rounds at literary agencies across the country.

It was attached to a manuscript for a novel called Points of Origin, which told the story of a fictional arsonist who set fires all over Southern California. My name is Kari Anthe Oldis. At the time, I was a young filmmaker living in Hollywood looking for a story to tell. I was in my car on my way to a meeting when a news bulletin came over the radio.

Federal agents had arrested a suspected serial arsonist, a man they said had been torching California for a decade, and when they searched his house, they found a letter you just heard, and a manuscript for that novel, Points of Origin. The Feds had come to the conclusion that Points of Origin was more of a diary, that the fires set by its main character were based on real fires set by the author. and as I drove to my meeting, that amazing story stuck in my mind. Sheila? But of course.

That day I had a face to face with legendary documentary producer Sheila Nevins, which for me was a big opportunity. Do you remember when we first met? No. Did I look the same as I look now? Yeah. I remember wanting to impress her, but all I could think about was this thing I'd heard on the radio on the way over. I remember you were hot on arson and hot on this arsonist.

It was the kind of thing where the more I talked about it, the more questions I had. I mean, who writes a book about crimes they're guilty of? Why did he write it? From what I understood at the time, these investigators had traced the fires in this novel to real-world arsons, even real-world murders. And all I could think about was How do you use a work of fiction to find the truth? That was the most interesting part. I figured whether he was guilty or not, he was guilty of being obsessed by it.

His obsession is fighting. And that's a good story. Sheila told me to go check it out, and that started me on a long journey. Thirty years later, I'm picking up that weird, fiery novel to see what investigators saw when they arrested the man who wrote it. Do you remember what you told me? You're a good guy, K. A devastating rash of fires fueled by erratic winds, a withering heat wave, not to mention arsenis. Rush Fireburn 67 homes.

Twenty-nine other fires left an 18 million dollar trail of ashes. California was being beat to death with fires. George Duke Majon offered a$50,000 reward for information leading to the arrest. Highway ninety nine arsenal. the most prolific arsonist of the twentieth century. The serial arsonist used the fires as the basis for a novel. Under the very noses of these More than anyone, we're gonna get this guy. This guy's not gonna stop, you know. Firebugs don't stop.

I'm Carriantholis and this is Firebuck, Chapter 1, Point of Origin.

Every fire has a starting point the layers of soot, the torch furniture, the char patterns on the wall. All of it leads back to a point, where the fire started, With a spark. It's called the point of origin. That was the name of the novel investigators believed to be the confession of a serial arsenic. Points of origin. It follows a fictional arsonist named Aaron Stiles. Aaron sets the first fire in the book, and the most deadly, in a hardware store filled with customers.

The store is called Cal's. Here's a passage from points of origin. The hardware business prospered in the small community south of Pasadena. Hardware stores such as Cows did well. Madeline Paulson went to the cluster of stores at least twice a week to shop. Tonight she was babysitting with her three-year-old grandson, Matthew.

She took him to the Baskin Robins ice cream store, and while standing in the parking lot sharing a chocolate mint comb, she decided to entertain Matthew further by walking through cows. In less than six minutes, Madeline and Matthew would be dead. As she rounded a corner she almost ran into a man walking with his hands in his pockets. She heard his breath suck in, and he mumbled his apologies as he continued on, and she continued to the back of the store with Matthew.

Aaron glanced back over his shoulder and breathed a sigh of relief as he saw the woman and the kid were walking away. He pulled out his wallet and looked into it while he walked through an empty checkout line. His ploy worked. No one paid him any attention. In the city of Hacienda Heights, California, interviewing mister Ruben Ayala. And Mr. Ayala, are you aware I'm taking this report by the use of a recording device, sir? Adiós, señor.

This is an investigators interview with Ruben Ayala, a manager at a South Pasadena hardware store called Oli's Home Center. This interview uh regards an incident which took place during the month of October of nineteen eighty four. What happened at Oly's is eerily similar to what happens in the novel Points of Origin at the fictional hardware store called Cal's. Tell me the time and the place of this uh incident, please.

October tenth, it was on a Wednesday, roughly around eight and eight fifteen. It was getting time for us to start closing, putting our money away, things like that. Uh was the store very busy that night. No. The World Series was on, I think. I just walked up to customer service and the fire alarm went off. I kinda tried to feel or sense or smell smoke and I didn't. So I thought somebody was playing with the alarm. And then I heard some screaming, so I turned around. And I saw some fire

It's like somebody had a flamethrower. And they were shooting it from the other side of the building into this side of the building. I grabbed a fire extinguisher and I ran towards the fire. But before I could get about maybe five feet from the customer service desk Two fire doors came down. A pair of heavy metal doors sealed off the entire west side of the store. I knew some people were in there. As soon as the doors came down I ran outside to try to get inside the building.

Ayala ran out to the parking lot where he saw another employee. He was on his knees and I realized he had been burned. Behind the employee was an open emergency door, wreathed in flames. The fire was raging there. Amen. I had the fire extinguisher with me at the time and I tried putting the fire out to get in. There's no way I couldn't even step three feet in front of the door.

The first engine from the South Pasadena Fire Company arrived. A six-man team woefully unprepared for what they were about to face. The inside of the building, a warehouse the size of a football field, was engulfed in fire. Everybody tried to help the fire department fight the fire. They fired water through the open emergency door, but the inferno kept growing. As the firemen worked, Ayala searched the crowd for his co-worker. I looked at everybody and I knew who was there and who wasn't there.

Employees, two of'em weren't there. And I told the fire department I still had people in there and we had to get inside to get the people out, but nobody paid attention. The fire had gotten so big so quickly it tore through the roof of the building. and more and more engine companies were arriving from all over the county. In the parking lot, customers were calling out for their loved ones. And an older man was looking for his wife and his two-year-old grandson, Matthew.

They were in the store with him shopping, he went to his car and they weren't there. He said that they should have been there and they weren't. At that point, I figure there was at least four people in there in the building. I was uh at home in bed when the call from South Pasadena Fire Department came. This is Jim Allen, an arson investigator for the State Fire Marshal. He was called in to help investigate the fire at Ole's home center. Alan got drunk.

Night to the scene. Pulling off at the exit, he could see the devastation. The building was virtually destroyed. This was an immense building, several hundred feet long and a couple of hundred feet wide. The roof had collapsed into the interior. As Alan got closer, he saw fire companies surrounding the building. Firemen were still struggling with pockets of flame. Water was being shot from above. As Alan got out of his car, the spray was pouring down like rain.

He could hear alarms still blaring inside the building. There were some people missing that had not been accounted for. A few letters. Rule your investigation. your opinions at the end become clouded because you have to avenge their You can't let that happen.

In the parking lot at Ole's, Alan spotted someone he recognized. A friend. My name is John Orr. I was a captain with the Glendale Fire Department. And I was assigned as the Arsene Explosives Supervisor. More often than not, John and I'd get together for a beer and we talked fire investigation, fire investigator training, because he was big into that. Orr was known to have a keen sense for arson, skills he'd passed on to countless others in training courses he gave around the State.

John was very well known as an investigator. He's one of the most famous fire investigators in our world. And that night Or was visiting Pasadena for a reason. I was called earlier in the evening and advised that Pasadena uh had a potato chip fire. Potato chip arsons had been a problem in LA County. We were having a series of fires in uh supermarkets primarily, and potato chip racks inside the stores and uh potato chips burn readily.

Or had a hunch that all these fires were being started by a serial arsonist. We call the guy the Frido Bandito. We had been hit several times, and I'd advise my dispatchers to contact me on the air if any of the other cities suffers one of those fires. And that night they called, and Albertson's supermarket in Pasadena had been hit. And it was a potato chip rack about ten feet worth of potato chips and it smoked the whole store up.

It was typical of the series. And as I was coming back to my city, I heard a fire being dispatched. Thank you. Structure fire is It was the Oli's fire. John raced to the scene. I got down to the Ole's building and it was not a lot of fire showing at this time. A lot of smoke was coming out of it. And the fire department was there and for quite a while they they were out front trying to decide what to do and w how to attack this fire. And then something really unusual happened.

I was advised that there was another fire in a potato chip rack a mile south at Avon's Market. I mean this was unheard of even in the arson world. Three fires in the same area on the same night. And all of them happened during business hours. It took fire companies from ten cities to put out the Ole's fire. What was left was a dangerous tangle of twisted metal. As dawn broke, John Orr and Jim Allen were standing in the parking lot, eager to get inside, because Orr had a hunt.

John was quite certain that this was a fire relating to all the other fires in Los Angeles County attributed to an unknown arson. It was time to go inside to find out. We have to have the fire talk to us. We have to have the fire explain to us what it did, how it moved, and the damage that it created. To figure out how the fire at Ole started, Arson investigators Jim Allen and John Orr needed to get to where it started.

A fire usually starts at one location or one point of origin and then builds out from there, and that's that's how we investigate fires. the point of origin. It was in there somewhere under thousands of pounds of rubble, and finding it was the only way to know for sure if this fire was an accident or arson. John was an absolutely wonderful investigator because he got to origin uh quite quickly.

They passed through the front door into the Ole's cash out area, which was flooded from hose water. The fire doors were up, so Alan and Dore could pass through into the devastation. By then it was enough light to see it. You could see that the roof had collapsed over the far left end of the building, Almost entirely. Orr and Alan moved debris, trying to trace the path the fire took. It was slow going, but the char patterns and damage were leading them towards the houseware section.

John was familiar with the inside of the building,'cause he had been there purchasing things, and said that was an area where the polyfoam was located. If you make your own pillows you can stuff'em with this polyurethane foam stuff. The stuff burned like the potato chip fires did. That may have been the origin of the fire at Oli's. Could the Frido Bandito have set this fire too? had we had another three or four hours, we might have been able to get to where John claimed that it started.

But Orr and Alan weren't going to have three hours. The Los Angeles Sheriff's Department had arrived, bringing its own fire investigation unit, and because there were still four people missing, a sheriff's lieutenant from the homicide division had taken over the scene. The lieutenant said there's no sense uh spending any more time in there. Our investigators have found the cause of the fire.

The Sheriff's Department decided that the fire had started in the ceiling, probably because of an electrical problem. They ruled it accidental. And I said that makes no sense at all. I... became quite irate. And I started to get into an argument with this sheriff's lieutenant I was really angry that this was happening. I remember. I don't have to follow your orders. He made it very clear, you either follow my orders or you will find yourself in the backseat of a patrol unit. There's one of me.

Allen and Dorr were outranked. The LA County Sheriff's holding an accidental fire, even though there was two potato chip fires on each side of it, and that was totally bogus, totally wrong. That was not an accidental fire. Over my objections, they brought in the bulldozers and they proceeded to tear up the building to the place you could not investigate it any longer. The families of the victims were at the scene, watching and waiting for the bodies to be found.

Still missing were Jimmy Satina, a seventeen year old Oli's employee, Carolyn Krauss, an Oli's employee and mother of two, and a grandmother, Ada Deal, along with her two year old grandson, Matthew. Marie Troidal, Matthew's other grandmother, was at the scene. Thank you. We were cold last night, totally. He was trapped in there. He was dead. That's all we know. Your son, your grandson, your son? Crayon baby. What were the circumstances? Was he with the Thank you. They were in the store shopping.

Thank you. with her husband, his grandfather. And she decided to go back for one more thing. She took the baby with her and Mr. Deal turned around to try and help them and there was just a big puff of smoke and nothing. Not no way he could help them. Amen. She was his grandmother too and I'm sure she did everything she could for him. What she lost in the fire also. Dank u wel. Amen. I was there when the bodies were destroyed.

They were lying on the floor in close proximity to each other, and it was close to an exit. Any violent death, I don't care. where it is, how it is, is an emotional shock for the family.

After the bodies were found, there was a meeting between me and the sheriff's office people, and I was told you will come up with our cause. This is an accidental fire. These are accidental deaths. And I said no. My official report will indicate the cause of the fire is undetermined. Because you would not allow us to investigate the fire. Closey. John and I went and had a drink somewhere. And he said the people that investigated this fire did a pathetic job of it.

John was really livid, and I felt that his anger Was justified. This is another one of those fires, and if the people in here have died as a result of it, then this is a homicide. But we could never Prove it. Say inwardly, did I investigate this fire correctly? Can I as a spokesperson for the Have their loss of life honored and put the arson We were never allowed to get to the origin.

In the novel Points of Origin, the fictional arsonist Aaron Stiles burns down a hardware store. The fire kills five people, including a grandmother and her grandson, Matthew. And just like in the Oli's fire, Cales was determined to be an accident. Here's another passage from points of origin. Aaron had already killed five people in one of his fires. He rationalized. Beth says he did everything. It wasn't his fault. To him.

Stupidly, and their depths had nothing to do with the fact that he set the fire. What was too bad about the baby, but shit. My fault. Not long after the Ole's fire, a string of arsons happened on John Orr's home turf of Glendale. grassy fields burned, cars were set ablaze in garages, and Orr knew, whoever set the fire at Ole's was still out there. the real arsonist would probably not be apprehended. the likelihood of a serial RSS being caught is probably less than one percent.

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You can't rationalize it. You can't figure it out. There was rampant speculation about everything. But every wild theory was wrong. Because the truth was even more unbelievable. What? Is anyone hearing what I'm hearing? Yeah. And even more heartbreaking. The uncertainty of not knowing is a form of agony. From Sony Music Entertainment and Novel, this is Cut Color.

I'm Jonathan Hirsch. Cut Color Kill is available now on The Binge. Search for it wherever you get your podcast to start listening today. Subscribers to The Binge can listen to all episodes all at once, ad-free.

If you want to see what happened the night of the Oli's fire, visit our website at truth.media. The next episode of Firebug is available right now. Just keep listening. Firebug is a production of Truth Media in partnership with Sony Music Entertainment. It was created in association with Crime Story Media. This episode of Firebug was produced by Ryan Swikert with help from Michelle Lands, Neil Danacea, and W. Harry Fortuna.

Ryan Swickert is our senior producer. Story editing by Mark Smerling. Carrie Antholis, that's me, is our host and executive producer. Kevin Shepherd and Alessandro Santoro, our associate producers. Our archive producer is Brennan Reese. Scott Curtis is our production manager. Fact checking by Austin Thompson. Michael Blumenfeld did the mix with help from Kenny Kusiak. Sound design by Michael Blumenfeld, Kenny Kusiak, and Ryan Zweikert.

Music by Kenny Kusiak, John Kusiak, and Marmoset. Voice acting by Levi Petrie. Our title track is Young Men Dead by Black Angels. Special thanks to Mark Baird and the California Conference of Arson Investigators for Their support. Thanks also to Jim Allen, Marvin Casey, Scottie Baker, Mike Cabral, and Steve Patterson. If you'd like to continue the conversation online, find us on Twitter at Firebug Podcast. If you've enjoyed Firebug,

Firebug, don't forget to subscribe and leave us a review on iTunes. It really helps other people find the show. And thanks for listening.