The Scorched-Earth Obsession

Oyler's lawyer, Mark Raymond McDonald, says his client is being scapegoated. Oyler is being investigated for 23 separate fires, but McDonald says the authorities have DNA evidence for only two small fires, not the big one that killed the firefighters. Authorities found two cigarette butts with matches laid perpendicularly across them, says McDonald. Oyler's DNA was on both, he says. "He's not like one of those bizarre arsonists who set fires to watch them for sexual gratification; he doesn't fit that profile," says McDonald. "He's really just a dopey mechanic. He probably sets fires for reasons having to do with losing one of his kids in a parental-rights battle to the mother's relatives. Perhaps he was trying to get back at the person who took the kids away, by making it look like they set the fire."

Love spurned or lost has been the spark for some terrible conflagrations. In 2002, a giant wildfire charred 138,000 acres outside Denver and destroyed more than 100 homes. Investigators found the origin of the fire in some burned matches used to light a letter mailed to U.S. Forest Service worker Terry Barton. The letter was from her estranged husband. It was Barton who called in the fire. "She wanted to be some kind of hero," Douglas County Under Sheriff Tony Spurlock told CNN. "I don't think she was prepared for the magnitude of her actions—all the homes that were lost, the pets that died, the land lost." Barton pleaded guilty and is still in prison.

Some arsonists are more coldblooded. The most recent high-profile revenge burning came in 1990, when Julio Gonzalez, a Cuban immigrant who came over on the Mariel boatlift a decade earlier, set fire to the Happy Land nightclub in the Bronx, N.Y., killing 87 people. After fighting with his girlfriend, a coat-check girl at Happy Land, Gonzalez was thrown out by the bouncer. He came back, drunk, with a can of gasoline that he used to douse the only stairway to the club. Most victims were either trampled or asphyxiated. Gonzalez was convicted of 174 counts of murder and sentenced to 25 years to life. The grimmest fire-for-profit story may have occurred in Chicago in 2002. An investment executive, Marc Thompson, was sentenced to 190 years in federal prison for intentionally setting fire to his home to obtain $730,000 of insurance money. He made it appear as if his 90-year-old mother had set the fire to kill herself. He took her to the basement and spread a fire accelerant on the walls before he lit the match. Aside from the abortion-clinic bombers and arsonists, the most active political firebugs are environmental terrorists. At Vail, Colo., in 1998, the Earth Liberation Front caused $12 million in damage by torching an extension to the ski resort. (ELF issued a news release taking credit.) In San Diego in 2003, ELF burned down a five-story, 206-unit condo project. A banner reading IF YOU BUILD IT, WE WILL BURN IT, THE ELFS ARE MAD was found at the crime scene. Damage was estimated at $50 million.

The twisted thoughts and actions of one legendary arsonist would make a movie—and did. John Orr was the fire captain and arson investigator for the Glendale (Calif.) Fire Department. Orr had a way of smelling fires and getting there before anyone else. "People looked up to him," recalls Tom Propst, a young fire-prevention inspector at the Glendale FD in the early '90s. Propst recounted arriving at the site of a brush fire in a canyon area near Glendale and—as always—Orr was already there. "He was shouting stuff like, 'We need to get crews above,' and giving directions. He always knew where the fire hydrants were." At the time, Propst says, "We just thought, 'Wow, this guy has such knowledge.' He was miraculously fast at finding the causes of fires. He could dig through the ashes, narrow it down and we'd be, like, 'Man, you're good'."

Investigators now believe Orr started more than 2,000 fires throughout California between 1984 and 1991. ATF fire investigator Mike Matassa puts the cost of Orr's arson in the tens of millions. In 1992, Orr was convicted of killing four people who died when a hardware store burned in Pasadena. Among the evidence used against him was a novel Orr had written called "Points of Origin," about a firefighter named Aaron who sets fires. A sample passage: "To Aaron, the smoke was beautiful, causing his heart rate to quicken and his breathing to come in shallow gasps. He was trying to control his outward appearance and look normal to anyone around him. He looked around and saw nothing, the lot was empty. He relaxed and partially stroked his erection, watching the fire." Crime novelist and former LAPD detective Joseph Wambaugh tells NEWSWEEK, "if you read it, you'll encounter more erections than at the Playboy Mansion." Wambaugh later wrote "Fire Lover: A True Story" about Orr; HBO made a movie that told his story. Wambaugh communicates with Orr, who is in prison for life. "Orr is affable and intelligent," says Wambaugh. "By no means is he psychotic."

The arsonist who sets fires for sexual gratification is rare, says Bruce Varga, an arson specialist with the Milford, Conn., Fire Department and an adjunct fire instructor at the University of New Haven. Many arsonists are merely pathetic attention seekers. "We had one volunteer fireman who organized a bunch of small forest fires about two years ago," says David West, chief of law enforcement for the South Carolina Forestry Commission. "He would have these two young boys set the fires for him in Kershaw County so he could put them out." West says the young man "wanted to be a paid firefighter. He was a good kid; he just messed up. He told me one time that he just loved helping people—it was the thrill of helping people that moved him."