Firebug · truth.media

Chapter Eight | Call Me Back

September 8, 2021·36 min·2 clips

Profiler Ed Nordskog says John Orr and the BTK killer are 'virtually the same guy' — one lit fires, one killed people, both hunted alone and taunted law enforcement.

The episode opens with an archival audio clip of John Orr describing his first fire as a firefighter — a daytime house fire where he was the first to enter and found dead goldfish in a large aquarium. A news clip then announces Orr's sentencing to four life terms without parole for the Ole's fire murders. Host Cary Antholis describes reconnecting with the case after recovering audio tapes of his 1992 interview with Orr from a friend's attic. He recounts his complicated personal connection to the story — how it followed him for decades, including working on an HBO film about Orr in which Ray Liotta played the arsonist. After writing to Orr at Mule Creek State Prison, he began a new series of phone calls. Audio of those calls is woven through the episode. Orr maintains his innocence across all of them, references his ongoing appeal, and asks Antholis for contact information for his ex-wives and daughters. Antholis refuses. Antholis describes moments when he challenges Orr on case details and Orr 'goes dark' — becoming angry and wanting to end the call — only to reach back out days later. Arson profiler Ed Nordskog is introduced: former Los Angeles Sheriff's arson and bomb investigator who has worked 2,100 arson cases and teaches profiling internationally. Nordskog explains the pattern of Orr's early life: fires were set along the routes Orr took to school, fire alarms were pulled at the same locations, and the same pattern appeared wherever Orr was stationed in the Air Force. Rejected by the LAPD after failing a psychological evaluation, Orr washed out of the LA Fire Department's training program before landing at Glendale — a quiet city with no arson unit. By the mid-1980s, arson fires in Glendale had risen 58%. Orr found more incendiary devices in Glendale than the entire LA basin over a decade. Nordskog explains this as Orr creating a job for himself by setting the fires he then investigated. Antholis reads aloud the LAPD rejection report, which describes Orr as a goof-off, know-it-all, and emotionally unstable personality with a schizoid withdrawal pattern — starkly different from the clean psychological assessment Orr had shown Antholis. Nordskog compares Orr to the BTK killer: both planned crimes in advance, both craved recognition from law enforcement, both taunted investigators. Nordskog classifies Orr as a thrill-seeker who used his investigator role to hunt and prowl under cover of legitimacy. The episode closes with Orr now arguing that the Ole's fire was accidental because a serial arsonist would not set two fires simultaneously when they could only watch one — a reversal of his own position at the scene. Antholis challenges him; Orr goes evasive before the prison phone cuts out.

As heard by us

A tense memory test where dates, calls, and frustration never quite settle.

Firebug stays with memory under pressure. It circles a first fire fought on May 29, 1992, then keeps returning to the same snag: dates, times, and recollections that never quite settle into one clean account. That tension is the point.

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Why you'd press play

For the listener who likes an interview where the dates and memories keep fighting each other.

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