Firebug · truth.media

Chapter Nine | Family Secrets

September 15, 2021·39 min·3 clips

Lori Kovach watched her fire captain father get handcuffed on live TV, accused of being the arsonist he investigated.

The episode opens by introducing Lori Kovach, John Orr's daughter, who describes him as an affectionate, outdoorsy father who rarely discussed work. At age 18, she discovered her father was being arrested when she saw him handcuffed on television at her boyfriend's parents' house. Her stepmother reassured her it was a misunderstanding, but over the next few years Orr was convicted of arson and then put on trial for murder. Lori and her sister were asked to testify during the penalty phase. She describes the emotional toll of testifying — being shown a photo of her son on the courtroom screen and being asked whether she would let him know his grandfather — while Orr stared back at her without expression. Hearing the murder verdict on a small radio at her office cubicle, Lori experienced the loss as final: he would never know her children, never walk her down the aisle. The episode then shifts to Sharon Smith, who met Orr while working at Sears in Glendale in the early 1980s. Orr was working a second job in security, recently divorced with two daughters. The families met on a hiking trip in the desert and Orr began asking Sharon to marry him within two dates. After three and a half years she agreed, and they had a small wedding. But Orr's pattern of disappearing without warning — packing and leaving silently — emerged early. When Sharon changed the locks after he refused to continue therapy, fires began appearing on the hills across the freeway from her house. Orr would arrive at her door each time. Sharon also describes being followed — Orr appearing within ninety seconds whenever she had a visitor, turning up in parking lots and outside the library. She describes two years of late-night knocking on her glass door, a large shadowy figure she was too terrified to confront. She now believes it was Orr. Orr set up a blind date for Sharon with a man who owned a nightclub; when the date ended badly, Orr told others the man had tried to rape her — and within a week the restaurant burned down. Sharon also recalls that a disagreement between Orr and her brother preceded a major fire in the College Hills area of Glendale, which Orr investigated as the lead arson investigator. FBI agents came to Sharon's nursing school years later to interview her. When told Orr had been arrested for arson, her first reaction was that he could barely start a campfire — but then she recalled he had kept incendiary devices in his trunk, shown her how they were made, and used them in training seminars. Returning to Lori: after years of believing in her father's innocence, something shifted when she was asked to testify. She asked herself whether she would put her own child through a murder trial testimony — and answered no. She began reading trial transcripts and then Points of Origin, recognizing real houses, real roommates, and real locations from her childhood. She told her mother, who revealed that Orr had once admitted to lighting small brushfires before any of this became public. The episode ends with Antholis telling his producer he has no reasonable doubt left about Orr's guilt, and plans to tell Orr directly in the final episode.

As heard by us

A family portrait that slowly gives way to something more unsettling.

Lori Kovach begins by drawing John Orr as a father she and her sister admired, warm and kind, and then lets that image slip into something harder to sit with. Fire trucks show up after he does. Visitors start noticing his sudden appearances.

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

You want Lori Kovach's account of John Orr, starting with fond family memory and sliding into stalking details.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

Listen to the show on

Apple Podcasts Spotify

Play clips from this episode More from Firebug