Liam Timbrell was the first to be carried out of the burning building on Maes y Groes, in Prestatyn on the north Wales coast, on October 19, 2012. Badly burned, he pulled the oxygen mask off his face and told the rescuers: "She did it. Mel did it." He was twenty-three. Three weeks later he became the fifth member of the family to die. He was too ill ever to be told that the others were dead.
The others were his partner, Lee-Anna Shiers, twenty; their son, Charlie Timbrell, fifteen months; and Lee-Anna's nephew and niece, Bailey Allen, four, and his sister Skye, two, who were staying with them. They lived in the upstairs flat of a converted house. The only way out was the shared staircase and hallway.
Melanie Smith lived in the flat below. She was forty-two or forty-three, unemployed, and a heavy drinker, and she objected to the family leaving Charlie's pushchair in the communal hallway. Her threats to start fires and damage property went back to 2007. In the weeks before the fire she told a string of people that she was going to commit arson, and the night before, she told a drinking companion that voices in her head were telling her to kill. Hours before the fire she was described as agitated and aggressive. That evening she set fire to the pushchair. The fire took the stairwell, and the family was trapped above it.
She denied it and said the fire must have been an accident. The trial at Mold Crown Court lasted fifteen days and the prosecution called fifty-two witnesses. The jury convicted her on all five counts of murder, and on May 8, 2013 Mr. Justice Griffith Williams sentenced her to life imprisonment with a minimum term of thirty years.
Bailey and Skye's mother, Jonty Lewis, wrote in a statement read after the sentence that when people asked if she was all right, she lied. In the first minute after waking each morning, she wrote, she felt no pain and listened for their laughter and their footsteps running across the landing. She and the children's father, Steve Allen, later had more children, and named two of them Tristan Bailey and Summer Skye.
This was a single act of arson, not a series of killings.