In the early hours of the morning of December 4, 1979, Edith Hastie, a 34-year-old mother of seven, awoke with a start. She was overcome with a powerful feeling of unease, perhaps borne of a mother’s sixth sense that her children were in terrible danger. She shared her home at 12 Selby Street, in the small English port city of Hull, with her four sons, Charlie, 15, Paul, 12, Thomas, 9, and 8-year-old Peter. She had only bid them goodnight less than an hour earlier. Her three daughters were staying nearby with friends and relatives, so the house had been relatively quiet for once.

Dashing out onto the landing, she screamed as she saw flames shooting up the stairs. The wooden banister was already so hot it burnt her hand. Waking up her 15-year-old son Charlie, the pair went back to the landing in an attempt to rescue 9-year-old Thomas, who slept in the same room as his mother, since he suffered from muscular dystrophy and had great difficulty walking. But they were beaten back by the flames and smoke, and returned to the front bedroom, where Charlie frantically pushed his panicking mother out of the window, despite the 15-foot drop onto the concrete path outside. Edith injured her ankle in the fall, but struggled to her feet to urge Charlie to jump after her. Her eldest son ignored her pleas, determined to rescue his brothers, Paul and Peter, who were still asleep in the same room. However, all three boys soon found themselves trapped by the flames and smoke, which the draught from the open bedroom window had intensified. By the time the alarm was raised and fire services arrived on the scene, Paul, Peter and Charlie were suffering from burns over 70 to 85 percent of their bodies. Only 9-year old Thomas was rescued with less serious burns. Over the following two weeks, Paul, Peter and Charlie would all die of their injuries.

Firemen immediately suspected that the fire was no accident, and Hull’s deputy chief of the C.I.D., Detective Superintendent Ronald Sagar, was sent to the scene.

A Row house fire.

He arrived at the gutted, smoldering house to be shown two spent matches found near the mailbox outside. He also noted a strong smell of paraffin, which he thought strange, since if paraffin had started the fire, it would surely have been swallowed up in the fire, and any smell would have gone with it. He spotted a pool of the flammable liquid a few feet from the door, as if someone had set a can there after pouring its contents through the mailbox slot.

Later that morning, forensic examinations confirmed his theory that the fire had started by the front door, underneath the letter box, after several pints of paraffin had been poured onto the carpet, followed by lighted newspaper. There was no doubt about it – someone had deliberately set out to burn down a family home, and what had started as an arson inquiry was soon to become an investigation into three shocking child murders.

The City of Hull

Despite being England’s 10^th largest city, the Northeastern city of Hull is geographically somewhat out on a limb, one of those places most people rarely have cause to travel through, and which rarely distinguishes itself. The area of Hull where the fire took place, around half a mile west of the city center was a poor, run down area, and much of its community spirit had been eroded down the years due to the poverty, unemployment and crime that had been spreading ever since the city’s decline as a major fishing port had set in during the early 1970s.

Nevertheless, Det Supt. Sagar was surprised at how reluctant the area’s residents were to offer his officers any help with their enquiries, and shocked at the level of animosity they expressed toward the Hastie family despite the tragic events of that night.

Then again, the Hasties were a family whose reputation preceded them. When he had been woken in the early hours to be told there was a fire at “the Hastie family’s house,” Sagar hadn’t needed any more information despite the fact there were probably 20 families of that name in the city. The Hasties they spoke of were well known to local police. The father, Tommy Hastie, was a habitual petty criminal, who at the time was five months into a jail sentence for burgling a nearby sports club along with his eldest son, the latest in a long string of offences for which he had been convicted.

The fact that he was happy for his son to be his partner in crime might help explain why the younger members of the Hastie clan had become notorious for running riot around the neighborhood. Barely a day went by without the police being called to another incident involving them stoning elderly residents, vandalizing local amenities and smashing up neighboring houses. They urinated through letterboxes, defecated on doorsteps and robbed local children of their pocket money. Sometimes it appeared that the Hasties were a one-family crime wave.

Detective Sagar claims to have found the father of the house, Tommy Hastie, “a likeable rogue” and said of the Hastie boys in the Hull Daily Mail. “They may have been somewhat mischievous at times, but they didn’t deserve to die like this.”

Yet residents of the neighborhood were rather less charitable in their comments about the family, despite the appalling tragedy that had befallen them. Indeed, such was the shocking level of animosity still being expressed towards the family even after the tragedy, that the local press immediately dubbed the area “Street of Hate.”

“Never before have I encountered such hatred and dislike for a family,” Sagar admitted.

This naturally led police to look for a neighbor with a grudge. But no likely suspects were brought to their attention. Many police felt the community was hiding something. They weren’t to know that there was a rather different explanation for the deafening silence a dark force was at work in their midst which even the most eagle-eyed among them had failed to notice.

Because of the Hastie family’s deep unpopularity in the local area, there was no shortage of potential suspects for the fire attack on their home. Many of the Hasties’ neighbors were no strangers to the police either, and would be unlikely to pursue the official channels if they had a problem with another family. Could one (or more) of them be capable of burning down a house where they knew children would be asleep? It was an unthinkable prospect, but one that seemed only too real given the circumstances.

Some cruel gossip-mongers even whispered that mother “Edie” Hastie herself must be responsible. Indeed, since it is common police practice to look to those nearest the victims when a crime of this kind has been committed, Sagar initially wondered if one of the absent Hastie girls set the fire after a family argument. But this possibility was dismissed almost as soon as it crossed his mind.

There were other possible leads that quickly led nowhere. A few days after the fire, a story appeared in the Hull Daily Mail which told of a man who had been seen shortly after the first of the Hastie boys was pronounced dead in hospital, standing on a flyover overlooking the street muttering, “One down, four to go,” to himself.

A boy on a racing bicycle had also been spotted watching the fire from the flyover. However, both potential suspects were quickly eliminated from the inquiry.

The most promising early line of inquiry surrounded a note which Edith Hastie had recalled being put through their letter box some months earlier. She assumed it would have been burnt to a crisp in the fire, but miraculously, it was recovered intact from a part of the house that had escaped the worst of the blaze.

The note had been written on the back of a cutout piece of cardboard, snipped from a packet of Cornflakes breakfast cereal.

“A FAMILY OF FKING RUBBISH,” bellowed the note. “WE ALL HATE YOU. YOU SHOULD ALL LIVE ON AN ISLAND (DEVIL’S ISLAND). BUT I’M NOT KIDDING BUT I PROMISED YOU A BOMB AND BY HELL I’M NOT KIDDING. WHY DON’T YOU JUST FLIT WHILE YOU’VE GOT THE CHANCE. IF WE CAN’T GET YOU OUT NORMALLY THEN WE’LL BASTARD WELL BOMB YOU OUT, AND THAT’S TOO GOOD FOR YOU.”

Strong words indeed. Could the anonymous letter-writer have finally carried out his or her threat on December 4th? Sagar and his colleagues certainly thought so for a time, and went so far as to ask thousands of local residents to write the words of the above note on a piece of paper in order to check for handwriting similarities. Soon enough they found the handwriting was identical to that of a frail old lady living nearby. She had been terrorized by the Hastie boys and wrote the note on a card to save on the cost of a stamp. Sagar was satisfied she could not have been the arsonist.

Nevertheless, Edith Hastie was in no doubt that the killer or killers were those same neighbors who had endlessly complained about her sons’ behavior.

The funerals of the three Hastie boys took place on January 4, 1980. When the procession made its way down Selby Street on that freezing morning, local TV cameras filmed the unedifying spectacle as Edith Hastie screamed hysterically at onlookers, “It was one of you bastards! One of you in this street is the murderer!”

Her suspicions weren’t so far from the truth. And yet the murders of her family were to become only the final episode of a very long, and scarcely believable story.

In the absence of any information about the Hastie fire from the local community, Police had only one other major line of inquiry. This arose from an anonymous phone call received by officers at the central police office in Hull the day after the fire. The caller reported seeing two men running away from the direction of No.12 Selby Street around the same time that the fire had started. He hadn’t noticed any sign of fire, but he had seen two men run to a Rover 2000 car parked nearby, and then be driven away by a third man.

A Similar Rover 2000

Police quickly traced the call to a nearby pay phone and managed to apprehend the informant as he was walking away. He repeated his story at the police station, giving detailed descriptions of the two men.

The scenario described fitted with another possible motive. The house next door to the Hasties’ was known to be a base for drug dealers. Perhaps the arsonists had set fire to the wrong house. Certainly the description of the car at the time a relatively upmarket saloon model was kind a successful drug dealer might conceivably own, and the involvement of several men including a getaway driver suggested a more organized attack.

Detectives also bore in mind the comments of a forensics investigator, who had remarked at the scene that the fire appeared to be the work of someone with experience of starting fires.

They wasted no time in sounding out their regular network of informers among the local criminal fraternity, even those who wouldn’t normally dream of informing on fellow villains. Crimes involving the death of children were usually an exception to any criminal code of silence, provoking such outrage that they would offer up any information they could. Yet despite a few stories of drug deals gone wrong, no murderous feuds were uncovered which could possibly have led to an abortive arson attack.

When no strong suspect had been identified after nearly six months of investigation, the police’s informants were begging to be left alone. One asked Sagar, “How long are you lot going to be buzzing round this neck of the woods? None of us knows nothing and no good jobs are being done with you lot busying about this bloody place day and night. The lads ain’t even nicking car radios as long as you lot’s here…Nobody knows nowt (nothing)…We’d all gladly grass on whoever done it just to get you lot away from here.”

While Sagar and his team weren’t about to lose any sleep over the difficulties they were giving the local petty criminals, in truth they had worried all along about the veracity of the anonymous caller’s story about the rover car. Despite the fact he had been driving himself, at night, with only street lamps to illuminate his view, he went on to identify the color and type of car, the color and style of clothing of the two men down to the buttons on a T-shirt. Several of the things he said did not tally with the known facts about the fire. He was the only person in the area at the time, including a police car, who saw a rover car in the area or two men like those described. The more they asked him, the more unlikely details he seemed to suddenly recall, which ultimately led police to dismiss him as an attention-seeking fantasist.

Map of England with Hull locator

According to Sagar in his book about the case, Hull, Hell And Fire, a few months later the witness came back to police and claimed that he had been mistaken, and had actually seen the car on a different night altogether.

To the police’s intense frustration, another lead appeared to have come to nothing. Yet during the course of their investigations, a fortuitous discovery had been made. One of the rover car owners whom detectives had put under surveillance had turned out to be heavily involved in cruising for sex with teenage boys in the city’s public restrooms.

Known locally as “rent boys,” desperate young men would hang around such gay haunts offering sexual favors in exchange for money. Could the arsonist have some connection with this seedy, secretive world?

It was little more than a hunch, but police had nothing better to go on. By now it was June 1980, six months since the fire, and Det. Supt Sagar’s superiors wanted to close the case and divert manpower elsewhere.

It was Humberside police’s last throw of the dice.

While one anonymous phone caller had been traced, sending Hull police on a long but ultimately fruitless line of inquiry in their search for the arsonists who had killed three young boys, another went untraced. After the fire, the Hastie family had been rehoused in another area of the city, but one night just before Christmas Tommy Hastie received an anonymous phone call from a man sobbing into the phone saying, “I’m sorry I killed your kids.”

A couple of weeks later the central police station in Hull received a similar phone booth call, confessing to starting the Hastie fire. When he was asked for his name he wailed “No, no, no…” and put the phone down.

In any well-publicized murder investigation the police regularly have to deal with false confessions from crackpots and attention-seekers, and this one was no different. But the call was recorded all the same, even though the identity of the caller could not be established.

That trail had long since gone cold by the time Detective Superintendent Ron Sagar and his team decided to interview any local homosexuals who were known to frequent the same public restrooms as the rover car driver they had followed. Among those interviewed was a 19-year-old man calling himself Bruce George Peter Lee. He had changed his name from Peter Dinsdale in the summer of 1979, in honor of his idol, Kung Fu film star Bruce Lee, and he said he not only knew Charlie Hastie, but had been involved in “indecent” behavior with him. This provided a definite (if not provable) connection between the eldest Hastie boy and the city’s gay scene, so it was decided that several possible suspects would be brought in for questioning on the same day, and Sagar would accuse each of them in turn, in the hope that the real killer would confess.

“It was a bluff,” admitted Sagar in a 2002 television interview, “but it was something that I found necessary to do.”

When Bruce Lee was brought in, Sagar read him his rights, then wasted no time.

“Bruce,” he said, “I’ll be quite blunt with you. I think that you started that fire at the Hastie family’s house, and that indecency with Charlie is probably the cause of it all somehow.”

Lee’s reply stunned Sagar.

“I didn’t mean to kill them,” he said.

He went on to explain that he had set the fire to get back at Charlie Hastie, who had continually demanded money from Lee after “mucking about, wanking (masturbating) and that.” Hastie also threatened to tell the police about their indecency if Lee didn’t keep giving him money.

There was also another motive. Lee had become besotted with Charlie’s 16-year-old sister Angie. He had repeatedly asked her to be his girlfriend, but she rejected his advances. Indeed she and her brothers regarded Lee as an irritating hanger on and would take pleasure in mocking him. Indeed, Lee, who had an educationally subnormal IQ, was a frequent figure of ridicule and contempt among his peers, something that came as no surprise to Sagar when he met Lee in the flesh.

“He was…not a normal young man, he was deformed, his right arm and right leg were deformed, he had a limp, he had a habit of holding his right arm across his chest. He was poorly dressed, he was clearly undernourished, and on first impressions one had to feel sorry for him.”

Of the night of December 4, Lee recalled, “One night I am thinking I am going to go to Charlie’s house and set it on fire, give him a real frightener.”

He went on to tell Sagar how he took a container full of paraffin, and stood in the shadows underneath the motorway flyover for “a good time until it went real quiet.”

Can of Paraffin

He then described in detail walking up the path to the Hastie house, pouring the paraffin through the letterbox and then, after two failed attempts to light matches, lit a piece of newspaper and pushed it through the letterbox to set the paraffin alight.

This claim tallied with the newspaper, matches and paraffin that were found at the scene. The details Lee knew about the fire convinced Sagar that this was no confession-happy attention seeker. The Hastie boys’ murderer had been found. What they didn’t know at that point was that this confession was not going to be Bruce Lee’s last.

When news broke that Hull police had arrested a young man named Bruce Lee for the Hastie murders, local mother Ros Fenton didn’t recognize the name. However, she had followed developments in the case because a year earlier, in June 1979, she too had been involved in a house fire which she believed was started deliberately.

After a neighbor had left her house and she prepared to go to bed, she saw a figure through the window of her front door, who moved away when seen. She even thought she saw someone’s hand poking through the mail slot but wasn’t alarmed. She thought she recognized the man as “Daft Peter,” a lad who lived nearby at the time and was regarded as something of a harmless half-wit, often seen around the area acting strangely.

Mrs. Fenton went to bed, but was soon woken by people shouting ‘Fire!’ She immediately went into her 7-year-old daughter Samantha’s bedroom to get her, but Mrs. Fenton was heavily pregnant at the time, and struggled to find away out of the blazing house. Finally the smoke took its toll and she and Samantha had to lie in the corner of the living room, hoping help would arrive in time.

Both mother and child were rescued. They survived but sustained severe burns. Mrs. Fenton also lost the baby she was carrying, and spent several months in the hospital. She was too ill to make a witness statement to police, and because no one had died, there was no inquest, and the fire was blamed on an earlier visitor to the house dropping a cigarette on the carpet. Her sighting of “Daft Peter” went unreported.

It was only when she saw a picture of “Bruce Lee” in the local paper that she realized that he and “Daft Peter” Dinsdale were actually the same person.

Police sketch of Lee

She called police and told them of her suspicions, and when confronted about the fire, Lee admitted that he had broken into the house and set the place alight. When asked for a motive he said, “I just did it. Someone I knew didn’t like her and, well, I just did it.”

When pressed further by Sagar, Lee admitted “I like fires, I do. I like fires.”

He was asked if he was in fact a habitual fire-raiser, who may even have killed more people in the past through starting fires. Sagar didn’t expect a confession, but after a long pause Lee responded.

“Yes, you are right. I killed a little baby once.”

When asked for details of the baby he had killed, Bruce Lee told Sagar of a fire in West Dock Avenue, Hull, “a couple of years back.”

“I just went in through a window one evening. I sprinkled paraffin on some carpet and the couch. The living room, I think it was, and up it went. The little baby died in it and I killed her.”

On further investigation, it was found that just such a fire had occurred three years previously, on January 2, 1977. Six-month-old Katrina Thacker perished. But was never suspected.

The day was a Sunday, and Karen Fraser had just been visited by her ex-husband Pete Thacker when the alarm was raised. She and Pete managed to rescue Fraser’s two older daughters, aged two and three, from the blaze with the help of firemen, but not baby Katrina.

An inquest later concluded that a spark from the open fire must have started the fire. The fact that the then 16-year-old Lee had been among the onlookers as the fire was being put out was not noted at the time. Nor was the fact that the fire had clearly spread very quickly, indicating an accelerant such as paraffin, and that the seat of the fire, around the furniture, suggested a spark from the fire could not have cause the blaze so quickly.

It later emerged that Lee had been a frequent visitor to Pete Thacker’s pigeon loft, often outstaying his welcome or walking into their house uninvited, leading to Thacker giving Lee a ‘clip round the ear’ on one occasion only days before the fatal fire.

After confessing to the West Dock Avenue fire, Lee soon went further. “I’ve done more,” Sagar reports him admitting in his book Hull, Hell and Fire. “Four killed, even more…the three Hasties was my last one, but there’s four other fires with one dead in each one.”

When Sagar visited Lee again in Leeds, where he was in prison on remand, he told them of yet more fatal fires.

“There was a boy who went to (my) school,” said Lee. “I killed him in a fire in his house a few years ago. That were a good while ago.” Even more sensationally, he claimed responsibility for a blaze at an old people’s home in 1977 which killed eleven elderly men.

Scarcely able to believe what he was hearing, Sagar decided to test the veracity of Lee’s confessions by putting him in a police car, driving him around the city of Hull, and challenging him to point out where these supposed arson attacks had taken place. If he was lying, his lack of knowledge about the fires would surely be telling.

Lee took detectives to a large, partly demolished house to the west of the city, which had been Wensley Lodge retirement home. It was gutted by fire on the night of 5^th January 1977, a date which Lee noted himself was only three days after the West Dock Avenue fire. He told of how he had “just come along here to do a big house, just ride along, any house.” He cycled the three miles from his home to the house, painstakingly holding the can of paraffin on the handle bar of his bike.

He said he picked the house because it was ‘nice and quiet’. He kicked a window through and poured paraffin on the floor of one of the rooms, before cycling away and throwing his can of paraffin in the nearby River Humber. It was only when he read of the fire in the newspapers that he realized he had killed 11 men in an “old blokes home.” Once again, however, arson was never suspected. Instead, the fire was blamed on a plumber who had been working with a blow torch on a pipe in the boiler room beneath the seat of the fire earlier that afternoon. It was concluded that material had caught fire and smoldered for some seven hours before building into a deadly conflagration around 9.30pm.

If Lee’s account was to be believed, he had committed one of Britain’s worst mass murders at the age of only 16.

Yet only moments after providing corroboration to that claim, he directed Sagar to another house, on Askew Avenue, Hull, where he claimed to have committed his first murder, at the age of only 12.

Lee had seen 6-year-old Richard Ellerington regularly, as he attended the same school for handicapped children, and Lee would often be on the school bus when it picked up Richard from outside his house.

On the night of June 23, 1973, Samuel Ellerington and his wife Catherine were out for the evening and a babysitter, Carol Dennett, had put their six children and her own baby to bed before the parents returned, and the three adults finally retired to bed at around 2.30am. It was a warm evening, and the window was left open. The front door was also left unlocked.

Shortly before 7am the Elleringtons were awoken by smoke, and raised the alarm, but by this time much of the house was ablaze. They managed to rescue five of their children, but were prevented by smoke and flames from reaching Richard, whose body was eventually found by firemen.

Another row house fire

“When we stopped in bus next morning,” Lee told Sagar, “they said he’s died in a fire during night. I just sat on bus quiet looking out a window and said nowt…I’ve kept (it) secret from everybody for years.”

When asked why he had singled out this house to set on fire, Lee could only say “No real reason.” Whatever his motives or lack of them, though, by the time of this first murder, he was already addicted to starting fires.

Peter Dinsdale was born in Manchester, England, on July 31, 1960. He never knew his father, who left his mother Doreen shortly before his birth, and when he was only 6 months old his mother, who was working as a prostitute, sent him to live with his grandmother until he was 3.

His mother had virtually disowned him by then, and referred to him as “the freak” because of his disability and his occasional epileptic fits.

“He was left half the time running around outside,” neighbor Hilda Lister told a TV documentary in 2002. “She was no good…You don’t neglect your kids like she did.”

He grew up with the kind of rock-bottom self-esteem that is common among arsonists. “Nobody loved him,” admitted Hilda Lister. “Even the kids used to take the mickey out of him (tease him).”

By the age of 9, young Peter’s love affair with flames had already begun. He loved bonfires, and neighbor Shaun Lister later recalled going with him to light a fire at a timber yard, which he later burnt down. At the same age, Lee also admitted starting a fire in a shopping precinct which caused £17,000 ($30,000) worth of damage.

Other contemporaries said he was frustrated at not being able to do the same things other children did and later claimed his disability scuppered his ambition of being a trawlerman.

He spent much of his teens in and out of care homes while his mother was either unable or unwilling to care for him. It was while there that he was introduced to homosexuality and the “rent boy” network in the local area.

As a teenager, he worked at the local speedway stadium and the local pig market. A staff member at the stadium said: “I used to feel sorry for him because the other lads would make fun of him. He never seemed to get upset. He seemed so quiet and unassuming and didn’t stand out in a crowd.”

He would also babysit for local children in exchange for spending money and on one occasion actually brought home a small black boy, claiming he was his son.

While “Daft Peter” was rarely regarded as capable of anything spectacular, some believe that the “daftness” was often an act to help him fade into the background. Sometimes he would tell people he was “a nobody,” but then he would tell them they would never guess what he had been up to.

As the Hastie inquiry proved, he was entirely correct on that point.

Throughout his teenage years, he started fires on a regular basis — over 30 that are known, and others which were either never reported or which he himself forgot about. What he lacked in conventional intelligence, he made up for in “animal cunning” (to use the phrase later coined by the prosecuting counsel in the case, Gerald Coles) in the way he covered his tracks after fires.

After his arrest he told Det. Supt Sagar, “I know when I’m going to start a fire because my fingers tingle.”

While in prison awaiting trial he regularly demanded access to bibles, and was interested in the Jehovah’s Witness movement.

He read Sagar a passage from Matthew 6:24, which said “No man may serve two masters.” “My master is fire,” he concluded.

The passage goes on to state that if a man did have two masters he should despise one but be devoted to the other.

Lee told Sagar: “I am devoted to fire and despise people.”

He especially hated people who had a home, he said, because he had never really had one.

His mother, on the other hand, was typically unsympathetic. “He just wanted to get in the headlines,” she commented after his arrest.

Between the time of his first confessed fatal fire in 1973 and the Hastie fire in 1979, Lee would claim responsibility for no fewer than 26 deaths.

A few months after he claimed the life of Richard Ellerington, in the early hours of October 12, 1973, the fire brigade were called to a house in Glasgow Street, Hull, where 72 year-old Arthur Smythe lived. He suffered from gangrene in both legs and led something of a reclusive existence.

Lee had been walking the streets all night with a can of paraffin, with that familiar tingling in his fingers. Around 6 a.m., he found Smythe’s house with a front window broken, and climbed through it. He poured paraffin throughout the front room where the old man was sleeping, set it alight and left through the front door. Smythe had little hope of escape, and was dead by the time firemen gained access to the house. The inquest concluded that a faulty paraffin heater was to blame.

A couple of weeks later, a fire broke out on the afternoon of October 27, 1973, at the home of 34-year-old David Brewer. He was unable to work due to an industrial injury, and was sat at home when the 13-year-old Lee struck. After getting up to go to the toilet, he returned to the living room to find the room ablaze. His clothes caught fire and he ran out into the street screaming for help, but despite the help of neighbor Hilda Lister, he died from his burns. The neighbor later revealed that Lee had been involved in a row with Brewer and her son Shaun Lister over the latter’s pigeons. Lee threatened to kill Lister’s pigeons, prompting Brewer to threaten him with a “clout” if he did. That was only a couple of days before the fire, and a couple of weeks later most of Lister’s pigeons were found dead with their necks wrung.

Once again, however, arson was not suspected, and the blaze was eventually blamed on drying clothes catching light in front of the fire.

It would be another year before Lee claimed his next victim. She was 82-year-old Elizabeth Rokahr, a widow who lived on Rosamond Street, Hull, suffering from poor eyesight and only able to walk with a frame. By the time neighbors noticed smoke coming from her house just before 10pm, she had already died from smoke inhalation. The seat of the fire was found to be at the head of the bed, and the inquest’s verdict was misadventure, suggesting the old lady had been smoking in bed and allowed the sheets to catch fire. This despite her family claiming she never smoked in bed.

It would be six years before Lee admitted he gained entry to her house through the back door which the old lady kept open to allow her cat access. In this case, as with the Ellerington and Smythe fires, there appeared to be no motive.

There was another long gap before Lee’s next major fire. On June 3, 1976, James and Veronica Edwards were out for the evening and Mrs. Edwards’ 77-year-old grandmother, Dorothy Stevenson, was looking after three of Mrs. Edwards’ children. Mrs. Stevenson had just put the youngest child, 13-month-old Andrew, to bed, when she came down the stairs to find smoke coming from the cupboard underneath the stairs. In the fire that ensued, baby Andrew was trapped upstairs and died. Five-year-old David Edwards claimed he had started the fire by playing with matches underneath the stairs, but Mrs. Stevenson insisted there were no matches in the house other than those she kept in her pocket. David later denied starting the fire, and his denial seemed convincing when Lee later admitted sneaking into the house and pouring paraffin underneath the stairs before setting the house alight. The end result, however, was yet another fire death which was wrongly filed as a tragic accident.

A now all too familiar story unfolded after the West Dock Avenue and Wensley Lodge fires of January 1977 (see chapters seven and eight), and after the 11 deaths at Wensley Lodge, the rate at which Lee was claiming innocent lives seemed to increase considerably.

On April 27, 1977, Peter Jordan was woken at around 3am while sleeping in the living room at the house of some friends, the Gold family. He heard a couple of bangs and saw a figure moving about. He then realized the room was on fire. Scrambling towards the stairs, he alerted his kids, who were sleeping upstairs with the Golds’ two children, along with parents Albert and Gwendoline Gold in the front bedroom. The fire swept through the house rapidly, and although despite the brave efforts of Albert Gold, sustaining severe burns while trying to rescue the kids, 13-year-old Deborah Jordan and 7 year-old Mark Gold were trapped in the fire and died at the scene.

The blame was eventually put on Peter Jordan for leaving a lit cigarette in the ashtray, which added horrendous feelings of guilt to his trauma at losing a son. The prospect of arson was never discussed, but when Lee admitted to entering the house by breaking a window and dousing the living room with petrol, Jordan would later admit that he couldn’t understand how a window near the door had been broken.

More young lives would be claimed by Lee the following year, in Reynoldson Street, Hull. On the morning of Friday, January 6, mother of four, Christine Dickson, had gone to the house of her next door neighbor and close friend Mrs. Kathleen Hartley, leaving her kids in the front room. She returned to find the front windows black with smoke, and ran in and pulled out her Baby, Bryan, who was covered in black soot. She went back into the house for her other children, Mark, 4, Steven, 3, and Michael, 17 months. Then Mrs. Hartley was horrified to see a four foot ‘ring of fire’ coming up from the living room carpet, as if the result of someone setting it alight. Then she heard Mrs. Dickson scream as an explosion enveloped her. She and her three sons didn’t make it out alive, and the inquest put the blame on the children playing with lighter fluid that was on a shelf in the front room.

Lee would tell a different story. The then 17-year-old youth lived nearby and said he was walking around that day with a washing up liquid bottle filled with paraffin hidden under his jacket. He described feeling a tingling in his fingers and a “fire in his head.” Choosing the Dicksons’ house at random, he squirted the paraffin through the letterbox leading straight into to the front room, and threw lighted paper onto it, before quickly making his getaway.

Incredibly, though, it would need a tenth fatal fire, making Lee Britain’s most prolific serial killer, before he was suspected of setting fire to anything more serious than a cigarette.

For someone of such low academic intelligence, Bruce Lee showed a practical cunning and ability to cover his tracks that belied his daft reputation. His ability to go unnoticed while loitering near the scenes of his crimes, despite being well known in the area, and to set fires in such a way that arson was never suspected, suggested a calculating criminal mastermind rather than a bumbling half-wit.

Yet when seen in context, the authorities’ failure to identify arson as the cause of his fires is less surprising.

Looking through copies of the Hull Daily Mail from the time, house fires made the headlines almost every other day, even after Lee’s arrest. The houses were invariably in poor areas of the city, where open fires were still common in houses, smoke alarms had yet to be common household appliances, furniture was often made of cheap, highly flammable material, and smoking indoors was perfectly socially acceptable. So perhaps it was just cruel bad luck that meant the scenes of carnage Lee caused were for so long disregarded as commonplace household accidents.

It was also Lee’s good fortune that in the neighborhoods where he set the fires, relations between residents and police were not the best. After his trial a TV documentary featured several local people who said they knew of Lee’s habitual fire-starting but never mentioned it to police. One woman said she suspected Lee of starting the fire that killed David Brewer in October 1973, but decided “You can’t just go accusing, can you? You can’t tell a policeman that a lad has started a fire.”

Meanwhile, since none of Lee’s victims except the Hasties had the kind of enemies who could be considered willing or able to burn down their home, there seemed little cause to consider arson. It was only in the Fenton and Hastie fires that Lee seemed noticeably careless in terms of covering his tracks. Indeed it might be argued that his carelessness in committing those later crimes was evidence of a common serial killer trait a seemingly unconscious desire to give himself away, which increases the longer his murderous activities continue.

Either way, the spent matches he left outside the Hasties’ gutted home on Selby Street, and the paraffin he left on the ground, were to bring a long overdue end to his six year reign of terror.

Leeds Magistrates Court

After psychiatric evaluations Bruce George Peter Lee was pronounced sane and fit to stand trial, and on January 20, 1981, he pleaded not guilty at Leeds crown court to 26 counts of murder. Instead he pleaded guilty to 26 counts of manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility, and 11 counts of arson acknowledging recklessness as to whether life was endangered. Prosecuting counsel Gerald Coles said the crown was prepared to accept his manslaughter pleas, and said of Lee “The fires were his only true achievement in life.” Mr. Justice Tudor Evans recommended that Lee be detained in a maximum security mental hospital indefinitely for the protection of the public.

Gerald Coles

Immediately after the verdict was announced, local members of Parliament called for a public inquiry into how Lee could have started these fires during periods when he was still a child in local authority care.

Peter Sutcliffe

Outside Hull and the surrounding Yorkshire area, Lee’s arrest and conviction only made brief headlines, despite his 26 killings making him the most prolific serial killer in British criminal history. That’s partly because at the same time another serial killer operating only 50 or so miles away was dominating the national news. Since 1975, Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper, had targeted the women of Leeds, Bradford and other towns in the North of England with a series of brutal murders, creating a climate of terror among the female population. During 1980 when the manhunt for the Selby Road arsonist was unfolding, the Ripper’s reign of terror was at its height, and even when the full scale of Lee’s crimes came to light, the fact that no large-scale manhunt had been involved, and the fact he pleaded guilty and a long trial was avoided, meant the story didn’t make it into the public consciousness in the same way. Even now, when Britain’s most notorious serial killers are listed, Lee’s name his rarely included.

However back in 1981, that lack of notoriety didn’t stop some sections of both the local and national press from casting doubt on Lee’s guilt. The fact that the evidence and Lee’s confessions had not been put under scrutiny in court in the same way as if he had pleaded not guilty meant certain questions appeared to go unanswered.

In the months following the trial, The Sunday Times in London published a series of articles casting doubt on some of the convictions. They pointed to the fact that Lee had a physical handicap, and was therefore, they speculated, incapable of such feats as breaking a window or climbing through one to start a fire. They also questioned whether a boy of such low intelligence could cover his tracks in the cunning way that had been made out by the police. They seized upon the early line of inquiry surrounding the Hastie fire, claiming the theory of a gangland revenge attack on the house and the discredited rover car witness had been disregarded prematurely by Sagar and his team in order to base a case around a confession from Lee.

The largest body of evidence challenging Lee’s guilt was connected to the fire at Wensley Lodge old people’s home in January 1977, which claimed the lives of 11 elderly men.

The Sunday Times claimed that Lee’s account of his movements that night did not tally with the known facts about the fire, and they also cast doubt on the ability of Lee, with a deformed hand, to ride a bike for three miles while holding a container full of paraffin, as he confessed to doing.

Lord Justice Ackner

The newspaper stories prompted Lee’s legal team to launch a full scale appeal against the convictions. However, in court he was refused leave to appeal against any of the convictions except for the Wensley Lodge fire. Finally, in December 1983, Lord Justice Ackner acknowledged ‘lingering doubts’ as to the cause of that fire, and thus quashed Lee’s conviction for the murders of 11 elderly men. Yet he stressed that “We are far from satisfied that he did not set Wensley Lodge on fire.” Ackner also dismissed The Sunday Times’ assertions that Lee’s confessions were unreliable or that Det. Sup. Sagar had altered key witness statements, and he condemned the newspaper’s attacks on Sagar as ‘totally unwarranted’ and demanded a retraction. That was forthcoming, but no apology accompanied it, which prompted Sagar to sue the newspaper for libel, a case which he won in 1987.

To this day, Bruce George Peter Lee remains in a secure mental institution. Sagar has publicly stated that he hopes Lee will one day be deemed fit to be freed, and would make good his pretrial assertion that “I’ll never set fire to another house as long as I live.” However, it is highly unlikely that he will ever be released to test his promise.