Between 1973 and 1979 eleven house fires in and around Hull, in northern England, killed 26 people. All but one were recorded at the time as accidents. In 1980 a 19-year-old man who called himself Bruce Lee confessed to the one fire that had plainly been set on purpose, a December 1979 blaze that killed three brothers, and then, over the following weeks, to ten others. At Leeds Crown Court on January 20, 1981, he pleaded guilty to 26 counts of manslaughter on the ground of diminished responsibility and to 11 counts of arson, and he was ordered to be detained in a secure hospital without limit of time.
The case has never rested quietly. The prosecution relied mainly on his confessions, with no identification or forensic evidence tying him to any fire, according to the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC) and the arguments reported from his 2021 appeal. In 1983 the Court of Appeal quashed the eleven manslaughter convictions for a fire at a home for elderly men in Hessle. In 2022, on a CCRC referral, the court found that he could not have set two more of the fires and quashed those convictions too, while ruling that the others were safe. Twelve manslaughter convictions and eight arson convictions stand. He has used several names: Peter Dinsdale at birth, Bruce George Peter Lee by 1980, and later Peter Mawson and Peter Tredget.
The fullest public account of his background is the Court of Appeal's 2022 judgment, which summarized the records gathered for his appeals. He was born Peter Dinsdale. He had congenital right-sided spastic hemiplegia, which left him with a limp and a withered, shortened right arm, and he had epilepsy. A crime intelligence sheet from 1980 described him as semi-paralyzed down his right side. The senior detective on the case, Detective Superintendent Sagar, recorded in September 1980 that he was educationally subnormal and had attended special schools. A doctor at Park Lane Hospital, writing in November 1980, described his gait and his arm and called him "a rather pathetic figure."
A Humberside Social Services report from June 1980, quoted in the judgment, described a life of repeated rejection by other children and adults. His mother had herself been in care and was judged unfit to look after him, and by the time he reached adulthood the report's author found him "thoroughly damaged emotionally." Psychologists who examined him for the later appeal described severe deprivation and abuse in childhood, possible brain damage around the time of his birth, and alcohol and drug abuse as a young adult. His IQ was put at about 73. The expert called by the Crown, Dr. Blackwood, agreed that his 1980 test results were below average and probably borderline for learning difficulties, though he did not accept that the young man was especially malleable.
In June 1976 he was living at a children's home in Driffield, about 30 minutes by train from Hull, the judgment records. The name Bruce Lee, which he took after the martial arts film star according to The Justice Gap, was the one he was using when he was arrested in 1980, and his first appeal was listed in 1983 as R v Bruce George Peter Lee.
The eleven fires in the indictments covered more than six years, from his early teens to the age of 19. The Court of Appeal in 2022 listed each fire by date, the people who died, and his age at the time.
The first was in Hull on June 24, 1973, when he was 12. Richard Ellerington, aged 6, died. The inquest recorded death by misadventure. (The indictment itself gave the date as June 23.)
On October 12, 1973, Arthur Smythe, 72, died in a house fire in Hull. A week later, on October 19, David Brewer died in a fire at his home in Hull; the judgment does not give his age. Neighbors later told police that Brewer had struck the young man a few days before the fire after a quarrel over pigeons, and in 1980 he admitted that he had resented it.
On December 23, 1974, Elizabeth Rokahr, 82, died in a fire at her home in Hull. He was 14.
On June 3, 1976, Andrew Edwards, a baby of 13 months, died in a fire at a house in Hull where his great-grandmother was looking after him and two older siblings. His convictions for this fire were quashed in 2022.
On January 2, 1977, Katrina Thacker, aged 5 months, died in a fire at her family's home in Hull. Her father and mother both confirmed to police that her father had struck the young man during a dispute around Christmas 1976, and he told officers he had acted out of revenge.
Three days later, on January 5, 1977, eleven elderly residents died in a fire at a residential home in Hessle, near Hull. A public inquiry had already found that fire to be accidental before he confessed to it, and his convictions for it were quashed in 1983.
On April 27, 1977, Deborah Gould, 13, and Mark Jordan, 7, died in a house fire in Hull. The fire brigade and a Home Office forensic officer had put it down to accidental causes. His convictions for this fire were quashed in 2022.
On January 6, 1978, Christine Dickson and three of her sons, Mark, 4, Stephen, 3, and Michael, 16 months, died in a fire at their home in Hull. Her baby son, then two months old, survived because she carried him out.
On June 22, 1979, a fire at a house in Hull seriously injured a woman and her daughter. No one died. The times at which people had left the house and the state of the front door became central to later arguments about whether this fire could have been an accident.
The last was in the early hours of December 4, 1979, in Hull. The boys' mother woke to intense heat and found the stairs on fire. She escaped through an upstairs window with her other children, but three of her sons, Charles, 15, Paul, 12, and Peter, 10, died in hospital. Forensic examination showed that the fire had been set deliberately, and police opened a murder inquiry. ITV News, reporting the 2022 ruling, gave Peter's age as 8; the Court of Appeal gave it as 10.
The inquiry into the Hastie fire first examined local hostility toward the family and the possibility that the arsonist had meant to strike a nearby house linked to a local criminal. Both lines were investigated and ruled out, the 2022 judgment records.
On January 3, 1980, the young man went to Hull's central police station of his own accord and told officers that a man he had met in a pub claimed to know who had started the fire. The police did not act on what he said. In April 1980 the inquiry took a new direction, and on May 18 he was brought in and gave a witness statement about his acquaintance with Charles Hastie. He said the boy had asked him for money.
On the afternoon of Friday, June 6, 1980, three detectives picked him up at an amusement arcade in Hull, during an operation in which a number of local men were brought in for questioning. One officer later said he was "well under the influence of drink" when first seen, at about 4:45 p.m. He was interviewed at Gordon Street police station by Detective Superintendent Sagar, with two other officers present. The interview began at 8:05 p.m.; a voluntary statement under caution began at 11:35 p.m., and the session ended at 1:25 a.m. on June 7, about five and a half hours in all. No solicitor and no responsible adult was present, his barrister told the Court of Appeal in 2021. He confessed to setting the Hastie fire and was then formally arrested and cautioned again.
Whether he had already been under arrest when he was taken from the arcade became a point of dispute. A custody record said one of the detectives had arrested him there; Sagar later added a handwritten amendment recording the arrest at 11:30 p.m. at Gordon Street. The court noted that Sagar gave varying accounts over the years: that the young man had asked to be held, that he had been invited, that he had been arrested and brought in, or that he had been detained along with other men. The CCRC later concluded that there was not enough evidence to show the arrest was unlawful.
Over the following weeks he admitted, one after another, the ten other fires that became the indictments, and he described 14 non-fatal fires at shops, warehouses and lodging houses for which he was never prosecuted, according to the CCRC.
The 2022 judgment traces how each admission came. On June 26, 1980, at Leeds prison, after first denying it, he admitted the June 1979 fire that had injured the woman and her daughter; she had told police after his arrest that she believed he was responsible both for that fire and for the Hastie fire. The same day he told Sagar he had killed a boy in a house fire years earlier, the account that became the 1973 Ellerington charge, and he admitted the Thacker fire. He confessed to the Brewer fire on July 10 and mentioned the Smythe fire that month. He gave an account of the 1976 Edwards fire on July 1 and confirmed it on July 29. Detectives drove him around Hull, and on several of those drives he pointed out the houses where, he said, he had set fires. In all, the case against him rested on his confessions to Sagar and other officers, in interviews and in twelve statements under caution.
The explanations he gave for the fires changed repeatedly. The court listed among them sexual arousal, money, being the accomplice of a more skilled arsonist, a hatred of people, and a liking for fire engines. His counsel told the 2021 hearing that he had also blamed his upbringing, drink, and the relief fire gave him. Doctors who saw him soon afterward recorded the same instability: Dr. Snowden, reporting in June 1981, found that he wavered between accepting responsibility for all of the fires, some of them, or none, and Dr. Neill, reporting in November 1982, described him as "highly suggestible, unreliable."
The case came before Mr. Justice Tudor Evans at Leeds Crown Court. He faced eleven indictments charging, in all, 11 counts of arson, 26 counts of murder and alternative counts of manslaughter.
The day before the pleas, his leading counsel, Harry Ognall QC, and junior counsel Peter Heppel met the judge in private. Ognall said his instructions worried him because his client kept changing position; this was, he said, "about the fourth change of tack." He also told the judge that a public inquiry had found the Hessle fire accidental. A letter from the defense solicitors in March 1981, later given weight by the Court of Appeal, recorded that counsel had serious doubts about whether the pleas were proper, particularly on the Hessle fire. Psychiatrists instructed by both sides found that he had a psychopathic disorder, that he was fit to plead, and that his responsibility had been diminished.
On January 20, 1981, he pleaded guilty to all 11 counts of arson, charged as arson with intent to endanger life or being reckless as to whether life would be endangered, and to 26 counts of manslaughter on the ground of diminished responsibility. The Crown did not proceed on the murder counts. The same day he was ordered to be detained without limitation of time at Park Lane Hospital in Liverpool, under sections 60 and 65 of the Mental Health Act 1959. The 2022 court noted that his pleas were clear and consistent and that no one has argued the judge should have refused them. (The Yorkshire Post, in 2021 and 2022, dated the pleas to 1980; the court records give January 20, 1981.)
In 1982 the Sunday Times published articles and a dossier questioning whether he had set the fires. On June 28, 1982, Assistant Chief Constable Vivian Brook of South Wales Constabulary was appointed to investigate the conduct of the Humberside officers. Brook found no wrongdoing, apart from limited criticism of one former detective sergeant that did not affect the safety of the convictions, and said he had no material doubt that the young man was responsible. At the 1983 appeal Ognall chose not to rely on the newspaper's theories, which the 2022 court described as having been shown to be unfounded.
Sagar and a detective sergeant later sued the Sunday Times for libel. On October 6, 1987, the paper settled, withdrew its allegations, published an apology, and paid both officers damages and costs.
The application for leave to appeal was heard by Lord Justice Ackner, Mr. Justice Glidewell and Mr. Justice Leggatt. In a first ruling, on November 21, 1983, the court held that a guilty plea did not by itself take away its power to hear an appeal, though it said such cases would be very rare. It found this case "wholly exceptional, if not unique," in part because of public concern, and heard live evidence from Sagar, the appellant himself, experts and lay witnesses.
The hearing was confined to three fires. After his conviction he had written that he had set "some of the fires but not all of them," naming the Hessle fire and two others, and his solicitors' letter showed that those were the only ones he disputed. On November 25 the court ruled that the conviction for the June 1979 fire was safe: it found his statements voluntary and properly obtained, his confession substantially true, and the fire not caused by a dropped cigarette. On December 2 it announced that it would quash the Hessle convictions. The court accepted that Sagar had obtained and recorded the statements properly, but found weaknesses in the scientific evidence about the fire, and concluded that "none of us think that it would be safe to allow the convictions to stand." Ognall then withdrew the remaining applications. Detailed reasons followed on December 9, 1983, the date the CCRC gives for the decision; one count of arson and 11 of manslaughter were quashed, and the hospital order continued on the rest.
He applied to the Criminal Cases Review Commission in November 2011, represented by the solicitor Steve Gelsthorpe of Cartwright King. The review became one of the commission's longest-running cases. It drew on many expert reports and tens of thousands of pages of material, and the commission used its power under section 19 of the Criminal Appeal Act 1995 to have an outside police force carry out enquiries. Counsel for the Crown on disclosure later recorded reviewing more than 50,000 pages from Humberside Police's archives.
On October 24, 2019, the CCRC referred his remaining convictions to the Court of Appeal, saying new evidence raised a real possibility that they would be quashed. It cited four grounds: psychological and forensic linguistic evidence on the reliability of his confessions; a document examiner's evidence on the written statements; failures to follow the Judges' Rules and the Police and Criminal Evidence Act in his interviews; and expert evidence on the causes of the fires. Gelsthorpe told The Justice Gap that he believed his client had suffered a serious miscarriage of justice for almost 40 years.
The appeal was heard in London over nine days from October 11, 2021, before Lord Justice Fulford, Vice-President of the Court of Appeal Criminal Division, Mr. Justice Hilliard and Lord Hughes. His barrister, Tim Barnes QC, told the court on the first day that his client had been "psychologically vulnerable" when he confessed and was an unreliable narrator whose pleas could not be trusted, that without the confessions he would never have been charged, and that he had "unswervingly" denied responsibility for the fires for 35 years, the Yorkshire Post reported. Barnes argued that his disabilities would have made carrying fuel and setting the fires as described extremely difficult or impossible, and that where his confessions had not matched what the police knew, he had later given corrected accounts that did.
Four kinds of fresh evidence were before the court. A forensic linguist, Professor Coulthard, found that parts of the statements answered questions, although Sagar had told the 1983 court that they were written down from dictation with "no questions and answers." A document examiner, using electrostatic detection, found that two pages of the statement of June 6 and 7, 1980, two pages of a statement of June 27 and four pages of one of June 30 had been rewritten, although Sagar had said any changes were initialled on the face of the documents. Two psychologists described him as vulnerable, suggestible and compliant; one accepted that he could not say the confessions were false. Fire experts for each side, Dr. Cox for the appellant and Ms. Griffiths for the Crown, produced five joint reports, and for most of the fires they could not exclude an accident.
The court weighed this evidence with care. It said the linguistic finding showed how the account had been recorded, not that false details had been put into it by questioning. It found that the rewritten passages had not changed the sense of what he said and appeared to add detail, and that nothing improper had been shown in the rewriting.
The court gave judgment on February 8, 2022. Its central holding concerned the test for overturning a conviction that rests on a guilty plea. Where a defendant had pleaded guilty, with capacity and with the best legal advice, and claimed to be innocent, "it needs to be established that the appellant did not commit the offence," as Matrix Chambers summarized the judgment. The safety of these convictions, the court said, rested on public guilty pleas made in open court, not on the disputed confessions alone. The test has since been applied in other appeals, including a 2022 case concerning victims of trafficking.
Applying that test fire by fire, the court found for him on two.
On the June 1976 fire that killed Andrew Edwards, the court relied on the account of the boy's great-grandmother, who had found smoke and flames coming from a cupboard under the stairs, and on his five-year-old brother, who was at the back of that cupboard. The older boy had told a police officer, after leading questions the officer later admitted, that he had been striking matches there. The court found that if anyone had set a fire near the cupboard door, the great-grandmother and the boy would have been badly hurt in the rescue, and that the boy would have seen the person. It concluded that "the appellant could not have been responsible for this fire."
On the April 1977 fire that killed Deborah Gould and Mark Jordan, his confession described getting in and out through a broken front window. The only broken opening was an upper pane about 18 inches square above a fixed window. Climbing through it would have been hard even for a fit, slim 16-year-old, the court said, and for him, with his disabilities, it was "either impossible or, alternatively, a wholly unrealistic suggestion."
For each of the other fires the court reached the opposite conclusion: it had "not been established that the appellant either did not commit or could not have committed" the offenses. On the 1973 fires, the 1974 fire, the January 1977 Thacker fire and the January 1978 Dickson fire, the experts could not rule out arson, and the court did not accept that his accounts were impossible for him. On the June 1979 fire it found that the front door had been closed but not secured and that a discarded cigarette was very unlikely as a cause. The Hastie fire, it said, was "clearly the result of arson," the Yorkshire Post reported. The court rejected the arguments that his interviews should have been excluded.
It quashed two convictions for arson and three for manslaughter, for the 1976 and April 1977 fires, and upheld the remaining eight arson and twelve manslaughter convictions, leaving the hospital order undisturbed. Cartwright King said it was disappointed and was considering further options, ITV News reported.
After both appeals, twelve convictions for manslaughter on the ground of diminished responsibility stand, for the deaths in the fires the court upheld: Richard Ellerington, Arthur Smythe, David Brewer, Elizabeth Rokahr, Katrina Thacker, Christine Dickson and her sons Mark, Stephen and Michael, and Charles, Paul and Peter Hastie. Eight arson convictions stand, including the one for the 1979 fire in which no one died. He was never convicted of murder.
He was first held at Park Lane Hospital, Liverpool, and was later moved to Rampton Secure Hospital, ITV News reported in February 2022. Reports of the 2021 hearing and the 2022 ruling described him as held in a secure mental hospital since 1981. He was 61 at the time of the ruling.
The people who died ranged from babies a few months old to an 82-year-old woman. Three of them were brothers, aged 15, 12 and 10, who died together in December 1979. Christine Dickson died with three of her four sons in January 1978; her youngest son lived because she carried him out. The eleven men who died at the Hessle home in January 1977, and the three children who died in 1976 and April 1977, are no longer part of his record after the appeals, but their deaths were part of the case for four decades.
How many of the fires he set remains disputed. At the time, investigations and inquests treated every fire except the Hastie fire as accidental. The courts have quashed his convictions for three of the eleven fires: one in 1983 because the scientific evidence was unsafe, and two in 2022 because he could not have set them. For the other eight, the 2022 court did not find that he had set them; it found that he had not shown he could not have set them, and that his guilty pleas therefore stood.
His own accounts have moved over the years. He confessed to all eleven fires in 1980, wrote after his conviction that he had set only some of them, and by the time of his 2021 appeal had denied responsibility for all of them for 35 years, his barrister said.
The motives he gave, including revenge in the Brewer and Thacker cases, came from his own statements and witnesses' accounts gathered after his arrest. His counsel argued in 2022 that the alleged motive for the June 1979 fire emerged only after he was in custody.
The fourteen non-fatal fires he described were never charged and are not proven.
June 24, 1973: Richard Ellerington, 6, dies in a house fire in Hull.
October 12, 1973: Arthur Smythe, 72, dies in a house fire in Hull.
October 19, 1973: David Brewer dies in a fire at his home in Hull.
December 23, 1974: Elizabeth Rokahr, 82, dies in a house fire in Hull.
June 3, 1976: Andrew Edwards, 13 months, dies in a house fire in Hull (convictions quashed 2022).
January 2, 1977: Katrina Thacker, 5 months, dies in a house fire in Hull.
January 5, 1977: eleven residents die in a fire at a home for elderly men in Hessle (convictions quashed 1983).
April 27, 1977: Deborah Gould, 13, and Mark Jordan, 7, die in a house fire in Hull (convictions quashed 2022).
January 6, 1978: Christine Dickson and her sons Mark, Stephen and Michael die in a house fire in Hull.
June 22, 1979: a house fire in Hull seriously injures a woman and her daughter.
December 4, 1979: Charles, Paul and Peter Hastie die after a deliberately set fire in Hull; a murder inquiry opens.
January 3, 1980: he goes to police with a story about a man claiming to know who set the fire.
May 18, 1980: he gives police a witness statement about Charles Hastie.
June 6 and 7, 1980: picked up at an amusement arcade, interviewed at Gordon Street police station, confesses to the Hastie fire.
June 26 to July 1980: confesses to ten more fires.
January 20, 1981: pleads guilty at Leeds Crown Court to 26 counts of manslaughter on the ground of diminished responsibility and 11 of arson; detained without limit of time at Park Lane Hospital.
June 28, 1982: a South Wales police inquiry into the Humberside officers begins after Sunday Times articles.
November 21 to December 9, 1983: the Court of Appeal quashes the Hessle convictions and refuses the other applications.
October 6, 1987: the Sunday Times settles the officers' libel action and apologizes.
November 2011: he applies to the CCRC.
October 24, 2019: the CCRC refers the remaining convictions.
October 11 to 22, 2021: the Court of Appeal hears the referral.
February 8, 2022: the court quashes the convictions for two fires and upholds twelve manslaughter and eight arson convictions.