Transient Cleared in Arson, but Mental State Delays Release : Fires: The man has spent 22 months in custody since the $2.5-million blazes.

It is 3 p.m. in Men’s Central Jail and several inmates are whiling away the time discussing their pending cases.

“They’re all innocent, of course,” George Ducoulombier, the Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputy in charge of the bare interview room where attorneys meet their clients, says sarcastically.

But inside a cubicle slumps an inmate who has indeed been cleared of the most serious charges against him--after 22 months behind bars. Saying they might have accused the wrong man, prosecutors last week dropped charges against John C. Kellogges, 40, who had been suspected of setting a series of spectacular fires that caused $2.5 million in damage and wiped out several Ventura Boulevard stores on Dec. 26, 1990.

“I was just a spectator--I didn’t do it,” said Kellogges, a lanky man with a resigned expression and shoulder-length gray hair and a beard. “I know I have mental problems, but that doesn’t have nothing to do with the crime.”

Kellogges’ attorney said his client’s mental problems helped make him a suspect in the fires. Even now that he has been cleared, those problems threaten to keep him locked up.

“I’m upset that he was in custody all this time for something he had nothing to do with,” Deputy Public Defender Thom Tibor said. “The sad thing is, the complications of mental illness made this case unresolvable.”

Kellogges’ unkempt, wild-eyed appearance fit the stereotype of an arsonist and helped make him a prime suspect in the three fires, Tibor said. The arrest of the transient in a restaurant restroom was so well-publicized that the one-armed man who led authorities to Kellogges became a local hero and received a $2,500 check and a citizenship plaque from a local radio station.

But Kellogges was never tried in the case because a court found him mentally unfit eight months after his arrest and sent him to Patton State Hospital in San Bernardino County.

Although Kellogges was well-treated in the hospital and in jail, he prefers freedom, even though he has been homeless most of his adult life.

“It’s very dreary, dingy, dull and gray here,” he says, waving at the drab walls of the cubicle. “I’d rather be outside. I want to be free.”

Under a plea-bargain arrangement with prosecutors, Kellogges will get his wish if he pleads guilty to starting two other fires in abandoned businesses in Studio City. He readily admits setting some small fires in a vacant motel room where he was staying to keep warm, but denies igniting a fire that destroyed an abandoned restaurant on Ventura Boulevard.

But Kellogges cannot be released until after a formal competency hearing Oct. 20. The outcome of that hearing is uncertain. Tibor said Kellogges is still delusional at times, believing himself to be either 10, 40, or 300 years old, depending upon his state of mind.

Yet Tibor never doubted Kellogges’ innocence.

“For nearly two years I’ve been telling everyone they got the wrong man,” Tibor said last week. “At last, the prosecutors agreed.”

Deputy Dist. Atty. Craig Richman refused to comment on what led prosecutors to dismiss the charges against Kellogges, other than to say they were no longer convinced he was responsible for setting the string of fires that broke out within 30 minutes of one another in the 12100 block of Ventura Boulevard. The first fire caused only minor damage to the Bed, Bath & Beyond store, while the other two destroyed Pier 1 Imports and Strouds Linen Warehouse and damaged several other businesses.

Defense investigators had been focusing on the possibility that the fires may have been set by Glendale Fire Capt. John L. Orr, who has already been convicted of several other fires around the state. Had Kellogges gone to trial, Tibor said he was ready to introduce evidence that the method used to set the Ventura Boulevard fires was very similar to the methods used in the other fires of which Orr was convicted.

Based on interviews with Tibor and other law-enforcement sources familiar with the investigation, the following chronology of events was pieced together:

Kellogges was arrested Dec. 27, 1990, in the restroom of Charles’ Restaurant in Studio City after Harold Van Buskirk, a one-armed man known as “Captain Hook,” called police after encountering a man who smelled of smoke.

Kellogges matched the description of “a transient type” witnesses said was acting suspiciously at the time the flames erupted. Two security guards at the Thrifty store next to Strouds identified Kellogges as the disheveled, soot-covered man with slicked-back hair and dark clothing they saw running toward them just after the fires started. Two other employees said Kellogges made the bizarre announcement: “There is a man out there looking at the mirror. And he is so ugly that he set the mirror on fire.”

Prosecutors also charged Kellogges with setting a separate fire at the abandoned Fruitland Motel after he brought police to his makeshift living quarters there and admitted he burned newspapers to keep warm.

Several months after Kellogges’ arrest, a man who saw his picture on the TV news identified Kellogges as the person he saw fleeing from a blaze that destroyed Danny’s Apple, an abandoned Ventura Boulevard restaurant in Sherman Oaks. Although Kellogges denies setting that fire, prosecutors added that charge to the complaint against him.

Tibor said he always believed the prosecution had a weak case against Kellogges because no witnesses could place Kellogges inside any of the Ventura Boulevard stores that burned.

“There’s no way a guy like that--who looked and smelled bad from living on the street--could go in and out of three high-class stores like that setting fires without being seen,” he said.

It wasn’t until a year after Kellogges’ arrest that Tibor’s hopes of winning an acquittal improved significantly. Orr was charged in December, 1991, with igniting blazes at three Los Angeles-area retail businesses.

The blazes Orr was investigated for were frequently set among drapery or bedding, leading investigators to call the crimes the work of the “Pillow Pyro,” said authorities. Two of the three Ventura Boulevard fires were started in bedding stores. Some of the fires connected with Orr also were started with a time-delay incendiary device placed among flammable materials, causing the fires to burn sequentially in a manner similar to those on Ventura Boulevard, authorities said.

Orr was convicted July 31 of setting fires in Tulare and Bakersfield while driving home from an arson investigators conference in Fresno. He faces up to 30 years in prison when he is sentenced Oct. 19.

Orr also faces trial on similar charges in Los Angeles and San Luis Obispo counties in connection with eight other fires.

“All defense attorneys dream of something called SODDI--Some Other Dude Did It--and with Orr, I had the SODDI defense,” Tibor said.

Federal and state arson investigators working on the Orr case apparently had the same suspicions, Tibor said, because when he called them, they were already familiar with the Ventura Boulevard blazes. Tibor said he learned that Orr’s movements on the day of the Studio City fires could not be traced because the fire captain was on duty with the Glendale Fire Department that day and did not have to account for his whereabouts.

Witnesses could not place Orr at the scene of the Ventura Boulevard fires, nor were the “signature” incendiary devices later linked to him found, making it impossible to charge him with the crime unless new evidence turns up, according to Tibor and law enforcement sources. But a shadow of doubt had been raised about Kellogges’ guilt, and prosecutors agreed to drop the most serious charges, Tibor said.

Exactly when prosecutors came to that decision is unknown. Kellogges had been sent to Patton State Hospital after screaming uncontrollably in early court hearings. In August, authorities at Patton felt he had recovered enough to be declared competent. Even if the Ventura Boulevard fire charges had been dropped months earlier, however, Kellogges’ mental condition would have prevented him from appearing in court to resolve the charges connected with the other fires, Tibor said.