In the early hours of December 4, 1979, fire broke out at the front of a house on Selby Street in Hull where Edith Hastie was asleep with four of her sons. Charles, fifteen, pushed his mother out of an upstairs window, but could not reach Paul, twelve, and Peter, eight, and opening the window fed the flames. All three boys were taken to the burns unit at Pinderfields Hospital in Wakefield. Charles died that night, Peter two days later and Paul after twelve days. Thomas, nine, who had muscular dystrophy, got out through a back window. The police found the neighborhood strangely indifferent, and at the boys' joint funeral in January 1980 Edith Hastie shouted at the crowd for its lack of sympathy. Learning that the Hasties were known for petty crime and feuds, detectives looked for someone with a grudge.
One of the many teenagers questioned routinely was a nineteen-year-old laborer known locally as Daft Peter. He had been born Peter George Dinsdale in Manchester on July 31, 1960, the son of a sex worker, and raised in children's homes. He had epilepsy and congenital spastic hemiplegia in his right limbs, which gave him a limp and made him hold his right arm across his chest. In 1979, when his mother married a man named Lee, he changed his name by deed poll to Bruce Lee, partly after the actor. Detective Superintendent Ron Sagar, whose method was to accuse each suspect in turn of starting the fire, got a confession from him about six months into the inquiry. He said he had poured paraffin through the letterbox and set it alight to get back at Charles Hastie, with whom he had had sexual contact and who had demanded money to keep quiet, and at a family who mocked him for loving Charles's sister. "I didn't mean to kill them," he said.
Then he confessed to nine more fatal fires in Hull over the previous seven years. None had been treated as suspicious; the inquests had recorded misadventure. Twenty-six people had died, from a six-month-old baby and a young mother with her three small sons to eleven elderly men at Wensley Lodge, a residential home, in January 1977, and dozens more had been burned or overcome by smoke. He said most of the fires were random, set because he loved fire, and only three were at the homes of people he bore a grudge against. Driven around the city, he pointed out the buildings; he could not give dates, but fires had been started at each. When officers took him to the scene of a well-known fire for which someone else had already been convicted, he said he had never been near it, which persuaded them he was not simply a well-informed fantasist. He also confessed to ten fires in shops and warehouses in which no one died, and was never charged with those.
On January 20, 1981, at Leeds Crown Court, he pleaded not guilty to twenty-six murders but guilty to twenty-six counts of manslaughter on the ground of diminished responsibility and to eleven counts of arson. The prosecution accepted the pleas, saying a trial was not in the public interest given the cost. He was sent to Park Lane Special Hospital in Liverpool and later to Rampton. Although convicted of more deaths than any killer in British history before him, he drew little national attention, partly because the verdict was manslaughter and partly because the trial of Peter Sutcliffe was running at the same time.
In 1983 a public inquiry concluded that the Wensley Lodge fire had been an accident, a finding senior fire investigators supported, and his eleven manslaughter convictions for it were quashed on appeal. The judge at that appeal said he was confident Lee's statements had been "freely given." Sagar sued The Sunday Times for libel over articles suggesting they had not been entirely voluntary; the paper withdrew the claims and apologized, and the case was settled out of court in 1987. Since the late 1980s he has recanted his confessions and maintained his innocence. After a referral by the Criminal Cases Review Commission, a new appeal argued in 2021 that his disabilities made the fires impossible for him and that he had confessed falsely because of his mental state. In 2022 the Court of Appeal found he could not have been responsible for two of the fires and quashed two arson and three manslaughter convictions, and upheld the rest. Now called Peter Tredget, he remained in secure hospital detention as of August 2026.