Throughout this episode of Firebug, you'll hear dramatic recreations of courtroom testimony taken from trial transcripts.

October 10th, 1984. A warm fall night in South Pasadena, California.

The San Diego Padres are beating the Detroit Tigers in Game 2 of the World Series.

But at the Oli's home center on Faroaks Boulevard, dozens of firefighters are losing ground.

The first arriving units found that fire was fully involved inside the west side of the Oli's store.

That section of the Oli's does have all of the paints and flammable liquids in it.

That would account for the heavy damage it's inside.

That's correct.

By dawn, smoldering rubble sits where the hardware store once stood.

Finally, the bodies of four people are found.

Two young Oli's employees, plus a grandmother and her two-year-old grandson.

Arson investigators for the Sheriff's Office call it an accident, likely caused by an electrical problem in the attic.

In the aftermath, the rubble is cleared.

Funerals held, insurance companies pay out millions of dollars in damages to the victim's families.

Eventually, a new hardware store is built on the site of the old one.

And for several years, life goes on.

And then, shocking news.

In California tonight, a bizarre ending to an Arson mystery that's been going on for years.

John Orr, one of the most well-known Arson investigators in this state,

was convicted of starting three fires around a conference of his peers in Fresno.

Now he's serving a 30-year sentence for confessing to the unthinkable.

Then he pleaded guilty to three more fires in Los Angeles, including one in a hardware store, set in polyphone.

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