Column: Patt Morrison asks: Detective Ed Nordskog on tracking down California’s serial arsonists

There aren’t many sounds in Southern California more frightening than a wildfire. And we’ve been hearing them way too often, in a fire season that doesn’t seem like a season at all any more, but a year-round event. There are so many that we have to give them names to distinguish them -- the Sand fire, the Chimney fire, the Fish fire. Humans start almost all of the wildfires in California – but only 5% of those are bona fide criminal arson. Ed Nordskog has studied thousands of incidents, all across the country. He’s a detective and arson investigator with the Los Angeles County sheriff’s office, the author of the book “The Arsonist Profiles,� and he’s been testifying recently in the case of Harry Burkhart, the German-born arsonist who was just convicted of setting dozens of fires around Los Angeles over a single holiday weekend.

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Why would somebody start a fire?

The most common reason for arson is revenge, and somebody is very mad at somebody else. They might be mad at another person, mad at an institution, like a school or the government, or just mad at their circumstances in life.

I’m in court right now on the Hollywood serial arsonist case from New Year’s 2011 and 2012. A German national named Harry Burkhart lit 52 fires in three nights in the Hollywood, West Hollywood and Valley area.

Nobody in U.S. history has done something like that. And his underlying reason: He was angry. He said it. He’s told people that, that he was angry that his mother was being shipped out of the country.

In the case of the Clayton fire in Northern California, there was a man who had been arrested. He had been watched for a year. This was a fire that burned homes, that burned thousands and thousands of acres. It turns out he’d been an inmate firefighter.

His case is pretty standard, somebody with a long history of drug abuse, sort of down and out in life right now, semi-homeless, and he was a suspect in multiple fires going back over a year.

How does an arson investigator like you go about go about looking across this vast acreage -- that looks like the surface of the moon charred to pieces to the rest of us -- and figure out where the fire started and how it started?

Wildland fires are extraordinarily difficult. There’s a lot of science and weather involved. If we know, in the area where the fire started, what the direction of the wind is and how strong the wind is, it points us, like a slab of pie. The fire spreads at an angle out from the origin. And depending on the speed of the wind, and the hills, we can go backwards along that line and get to a workable, manageable scene.

Then, when we get to where we think the fire started, now it’s hard work on hands and knees with metal detectors, with binoculars staring at something three feet away from you. And believe it not these [incendiary devices] will survive fires.

Most wildfires are caused by humans but most of them are not started on purpose. Finding out can take awhile to figure out.

I’ll take for instance the Sand fire, which went on about a month ago, a massive fire in the Santa Clarita Valley. That was along a roadside. And it was on a holiday weekend, a getaway weekend, and on a slight uphill, and that’s traditionally where we have roadside fires.

And that’s attributable to hot vehicle parts coming off. Vehicles cause the majority of fires in this state. So if you really study wildfires, you’ll see that a lot of them occur on steep grades: the El Cajon Pass, the Newhall Pass, the Grapevine going out of Los Angeles. Vehicles are laboring, they’re spewing out very hot pieces of metal that are 2,000 degrees.

Most people believe that roadside fires are started by cigarettes, but in most of the days of the years that’s just not physically, scientifically possible.

A truck laboring up a mountain can start eight, 10 fires, or if a semi-truck has a flat tire, and it starts on fire -- again a common thing in the summer – it will start fires for 30 miles up a road. It will look like a serial arsonist that’s working, but in reality it’s a vehicle that’s having problems.

What’s the profile of an arsonist?

People always ask me, what’s the profile? In serial arson alone I’ve identified over 12 subtypes, so there is no one subtype, one profile. Each case is quite specific.

The old profile that the FBI released a couple of decades ago is just not very accurate. It was just too generic, sort of like your morning horoscope, in that an arsonist was a lone white male, 18 to 34, unhappy with their life circumstances, unhappy with relationships, couldn’t get along with their boss –

That sounds like some people on dating sites.

That’s half the people in my office! And so that’s not a workable profile.

And I’m a profiler, and we don’t work with something as generic as that.

We study the actual event, the time of day, what was used specifically to light the fire, the sophistication level.

When you get to the specifics of a case, now you can start eliminating the people. When you get a fire assigned to you as an arson investigator, you know you didn’t light it. You’re pretty sure your partner didn’t light it, and maybe the fire chief didn’t do it.

So now you’ve whittled down three suspects. Your whole goal is to get that 35 million people down to a manageable level. And if they’re using a device of any sort that has some sophistication, now you’re talking just a couple of hundred people in the state who could do something like that. And that’s really how profiling should work.

There’s also arson for profit. You’ve investigated those cases. It seems like it’s so easy to get caught – wow, you have a lot of insurance and, mysteriously, a fire started in your building.

The arson-for-profit scheme is the hardest one to prove for investigators because it’s something that somebody thought about for days, weeks or months ahead of time.

The spite/revenge arson is the easiest one to prove: People thought about it for three seconds ahead of time and they didn’t plan it well. But a business owner that’s going to torch his business -- he knows that the police and fire department will look at him.

And so this is planned, there’s alibis made up – it’s almost comical after a while: If a business owner happens to be in Las Vegas or Disneyland when his business catches fire, he probably set the fire. The owner has an alibi, where he can be seen on camera. Now they’ve planned an alibi – of course we know they used a surrogate to set the fire, so now you have your criminal conspiracy.

One of the most notorious and probably disturbing, from law enforcement point of view, of the arsonists in Southern California was John Orr, who was an arson investigator himself, who turned out to be the man setting the fires – a fatal fire in one case.

Yes, John Orr is a rock star in the arson world. John Orr is the most famous because he is an arson investigator. He was a lecturer on serial arsonists. He was with the Glendale Fire Department.

He was convicted of four different series, and those series totaled about 80 fires. But really, he was a strong suspect in 1,200 fires. And of course he killed four people with his fires.

John Orr was unique. It’s sort of like a famous homicide detective becoming a serial killer – it’s like right out of the movies. The guys that know who john Orr is and really studied him believe that he created himself because he read a lot of crime noir from the ’40s and ’50s.

He is a true excitement-based serial arsonist and hero-based and serial arsonist and revenge-based – he covers all gamuts of serial arson. But he’s always claimed to be an expert arson investigator, and he’s not.

Is there a sexual element for arsonists too? I think of Nero, fiddling and maybe fiddling with something else while Rome burned?

Sigmund Freud first brought that out publicly but Freud’s studies were quite flawed because he studied six people, so that’s a really small study.

And it was perpetuated by people who believed Freud.

No, there’s very few cases of an actual sexual component to serial arson, which is why arson investigators nowadays do not use the term pyromania.

There are people who do have problems with fire, but they control it. It’s a very impulsive crime as opposed to a compulsive crime.

I’ve read of cases where firefighters start fires themselves.

There are many, many cases where firefighters have lit fires to create work. It’s a seasonal job in many parts of the United States and Canada. There have been some rare cases, but they’re continuous, people involved in firefighting that set fires to get work.

There’s a very famous case about 20 years ago now in Mt. Shasta, Calif. She was a woman in her 60s who lit fires so her son the firefighter wouldn’t get laid off. He was a seasonal firefighter. And she was convicted of five fires on Mt. Shasta in the wildlands. And she was filmed lighting one of them by investigators.

Is there one that broke your heart?

There’s a lot of them. The ones we have the hardest issues with are of course the fatal fires with children involved. A lot of fatal fires with children involved are actually set by the children themselves, usually playing with matches. And usually in those cases there’s a documented history in the home of the family knowing that the children have dabbled in fire play.

When we see families that have lost people in fires and they tell us, Well, our son for the past six months has been playing with fire -- that’s a problem that should have been dealt with.

We don’t do a good job in this country, in North America at all, in treating children fire-setters. It’s a very complicated thing that should be left to professional counselors and quite often in this country they turn it over to firefighters.

In a lot of cases there’s a lot of deep underlying reasons – abuse, family issues. A lot of people don’t want to hang an arson arrest over an 8-year-old kid, and I totally understand that, but if that’s the third fire by that kid, he’s going to kill himself and his family next, sooner or later, if he’s not treated.

I was trying to think of what might be your favorite job-related movie and I was thinking of the Jack Lemmon film “Save the Tiger,� about a businessman who orders a fire at his downtown L.A. business, an insurance fire.

“Backdraft� is of course the holy grail for firemen, and I’m not a fireman, but the Robert De Niro character in that was an arson investigator, and I thought he did an outstanding job.

It’s very technically different than any other criminal investigation. You’re part cop, you’re part fireman, and I thought De Niro pulled it off quite well. And I’m surprised they didn’t take that part and make it into some sort of TV movie.

One of the most controversial was a case in Texas I’m sure you know about – Cameron Todd Willingham, convicted of setting a fire that killed his children, was executed. Afterwards, there was so much controversy about the competence of the fire investigator and the techniques he used.

The Willingham case has obviously rocked the arson industry. It’s not the only one – there’s many, many cases that were egregious, egregiously done. States’ Innocence Projects have attacked a lot of arson cases; I’m dealing with one right now from 30 years ago. And sometimes they make great points, other times not so much.

The arson industry was turned on its head 25 years ago when fire scientists got involved and realized a lot of what arson investigators believed and were taught was absolutely wrong, scientifically not correct. And the scientists have come a long way in fixing that part of the industry.

There’s still mistakes made -- it’s a very technical job. We have issues, we’ve minimized a lot of them, but the fire investigation industry has gone under a lot of scrutiny, as well it should. They were wrong for 100 years on some pretty serious cases and most of that’s been fixed. But there’s been a lot of growing pains with that.

What do you think of the Willingham case? He was executed 12 years ago.

They’ve said the science to convict him on the arson portion of his case is flawed and I agree with that. People believe that he was actually found innocent after he was executed. That’s not true. He’s never been found innocent and there’s a lot of stuff besides the fire science that they relied upon. I don’t have a stake in that one, but it has caused massive debate in my business that rages until this day.

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