He was born Peter George Dinsdale in Hull in 1960, with cerebral palsy affecting his right side and epilepsy, and grew up in care and in poverty. He changed his name by deed poll to Bruce George Peter Lee, after the film actor.
Between 1973 and 1979 a series of fatal house fires in Hull were recorded as accidents. In 1980, questioned about a fire in which a family of three died, he confessed, and then over months confessed to a long series of them, amounting to twenty-six deaths including eleven elderly men who died in a fire at Wensley Lodge, an old people's home, in January 1977.
He pleaded guilty to manslaughter on the ground of diminished responsibility in January 1981 and was ordered to be detained indefinitely in a mental hospital.
The convictions did not hold. In 1983 the Court of Appeal quashed the eleven Wensley Lodge convictions, finding that the confession was unreliable and that the fire had not been proved to be arson at all. The judgment noted that he was a highly suggestible young man with a low IQ who had been interviewed at length without appropriate safeguards, and who had confessed to whatever was put to him. The remaining convictions stand.
He has remained in secure hospitals since 1981. The case is cited in England alongside the other pre-PACE confession cases as an example of what interviewing a vulnerable suspect without protection produces, and the actual number of deaths he caused is not known.