August 21, 2024 • 25 mins
88 elderly lives are in peril after the Quaker’s Hill Nursing Home goes up in flames. Who started the fire, and why? This is the story of one of Australia’s worst mass murderers.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:05):
There's a type of intruder that moves with an almost
supernatural speed. It's not exactly alive, and yet with every
breath of oxygen it takes, it grows. It has no hands,
but tears through furniture and walls, and though it has
(00:26):
no mouth, if it drinks, it dies. But until it's
put down, it will take whatever it wants, including you.
It doesn't matter if you know where you are. It
will obscure your exits and disorient you, creep up on you.
(00:48):
It cries for help will mean nothing as you slowly suffocate,
reaching through the darkness for help that isn't coming. And
if that growing bright light ahead of you will burn
even hotter. Welcome to sword and scale nightmares. True crime
(01:26):
for bedtime or nightmare begins now. The Quaker Hill Nursing
(01:54):
Home in New South Wales, Australia is responsible for eighty
eight souls on the morning of November eighteenth, twenty eleven.
The patients living here are elderly, many of them bedridden.
They might look like your grandmother or your grandfather suffering
from dementia. Some of the residents have amputated limbs or
(02:19):
in some cases, intellectual disabilities that make it impossible for
them to take care of themselves. It's four point fifty
am and most of them are sleep but unbeknownst to
anyone in the facility, a silent killer has begun stalking
the halls. Thick billowing smoke replaces the cool air, accompanied
(02:44):
by a putrid smell that will not go away. They
head nurse Roger Dean, is frantically running past the front desk,
elbow covering his mouth. He has a yellow bag slung
over his shoulder as he races from room to room.
As the fire alarms blare. Roger enters a room with
(03:06):
four patients, one of whom has a broken hip and
another is paralyzed. A third woman is being treated for emphysema,
but she's easier to maneuver, and Roger gets her outside,
informing her that help is on the way. At four
fifty three am, local firefighters are alerted of the blaze.
I won't say the senior citizens at the nursing home
(03:28):
are lucky, but fortunately for them, the recently constructed fire
station is extremely close by, located within half a mile.
There are two crews on the ground within six minutes. Unfortunately,
emergency services have no idea, how many lives are at risk,
or where anyone is located. They also do not know
(03:52):
the source of the flames, which continue to grow with
every passing minute. Eventually, the media arrived, snapping pictures of
the chaos for their clickbait pieces, including one of the nurse,
Roger Dean, seated in a folding chair and being provided
(04:12):
with oxygen via face mask. He's an odd, effeminate thirty
five year old man with spiky black hair that's been
dyed red at the tips. Roger also talks with the
Channel seven News crew, saying, quote, there was a fire
and I just quickly did what I can to get
everyone out, and the smoke is just overwhelming. But you know,
(04:36):
we've got a lot of people out, so that's the
main thing. There's still probably a few people and the
people are trying their best to get everyone out at
the moment. Yeah. End quote. He tries to shrug it
off like a hero would the whole awe shucks, just
trying to do my part thing. But he looks anxious
(05:01):
because there's two things that Roger Dean doesn't tell Channel
seven News. The first and probably the most important, is
that he's the one who caused the fire, and an
even worse secret to keep from everyone is that he
didn't just light one fire, he intentionally started to. When
(05:58):
the first team of firefight enters the Quaker Hill Nursing
Home in New South Wales, Australia, they are immediately enveloped
by blinding black smoke. There is simply put zero visibility
and very little can be heard above the sounds of
breathing and respirators. The rescue team has no idea how
(06:20):
many people are inside, and they are forced to crawl
on their hands and knees from room to room, feeling
the walls with their hands, reaching over beds and onto
cabinets where people may have gone to hide from the
growing blaze. Some of the patients here have Alzheimer's, Others
are blind, confined to wheelchairs and beds. All of them
(06:45):
are frail and in various states of confusion and shock,
as others stumble around in their hospital pajamas. Early on
in the rescue, emergency crews try to wheel the beds
out of a side exit, but the nearest ramp had
been built illegally and without proper approvals. It's too narrow
(07:06):
and the handrails immediately jam up the first bed, they
have to try to find another way out. While the
facilities have fire extinguishers and fire doors, they do not
have overhead sprinklers as required by law, so now smoke
fills the ceiling cavity and the fire spreads to the
(07:27):
roof down below. Furniture made from materials banned in the
United States and Great Britain make for explosive kindling, and
more toxins fill the air as plastics and metals and
vinyl begin to melt. And then there's the matter of
the second fire. By the time it's discovered in Room
(07:51):
A one, not to be confused with the delicious steak sauce,
it has reached temperatures higher than a stagger during eighteen
hundred degrees fahrenheit. The painted hallways leading up to the
room are bubbling and boiling, and the source of a
fire is hot enough to break the rescue crew's thermal
(08:12):
imaging equipment. It's eventually learned that the two bedridden patients
sleeping in Room A one were among the first to die.
The exact details of a third on site death are
more difficult to discern. By the time the fires have
been extinguished. The parking lot had become a triage center
(08:34):
as burned and confused senior citizens were hosed down and
treated for injuries. In total, thirty two people were taken
to various hospitals, many of them sent to intensive care
to be treated for smoke in elation and severe blisters
and burns. Eight of those people later died in the hospital.
(08:55):
They were at hospital, as you Australians like to say,
including one of the first women to be rescued, whose
bed was directly under where part of the ceiling had collapsed.
She never regained consciousness. There were certainly incredible acts of
bravery during the rescue, including two officers who went into
(09:16):
the fire without protective equipment and still managed to save lives.
But floating in the background, watching the flames and occasionally
stopping to comfort and injured patient was the person who
secretly started at all, Roger Dean. After his interview with
(09:39):
Channel seven News, Roger stepped away from the scene on foot,
but then returned shortly after. Roger, though wasn't interested in
saving anyone else, of course, only himself, and the only
way to do that was to get back inside the
scene of the crime. Security camera footage then shows Roger
(10:02):
talking with firefighters, asking them to let him back inside,
until shockingly they do. They casually escort Roger as he
goes behind the front desk, privately filling his yellow shoulder
bag with important evidence evidence of an entirely different crime
(10:24):
when he committed just hours before setting the fires that
permanently devastated hundreds of lives. Families of the victims were
(10:59):
right for upset at the management behind the Quaker's Hill
nursing home. The faulty ramp and lack of fire sprinklers
were one thing, but how on earth had they hired
Roger Dean and put him in charge of an unsupervised
night shift. Report suggests that Roger did pass a police check,
(11:20):
but he did not undergo any mental health assessment. It
also appeared that he lied on his resume and no
one looked into his past work references, because you know what,
nobody wants to do their job anymore. If hr had
done their job, they would have noticed some unsettling behavior. Notably,
(11:46):
back in two thousand and seven, Roger resigned from his
post at Saint George Hospital after it claims that he
threw paint on a supervisor's car and put nails in
the tires. Sounds like a hinged individual kind you'd like
to hire. And to add to that, just a couple
(12:07):
of months before being hired at Quakers Hill, Roger was
suspended from his previous job at Saint John of God
Hospital after claims from a patient that he was completely
drug addled while trying to dispense medication. According to the claim,
he struggled to speak and allegedly at white froth foaming
(12:30):
around his mouth. On November sixteenth, twenty eleven, just twenty
four hours before the fire, Roger Dean arrives for his
scheduled night shift. He is unsupervised and spends a large
part of his shift going back and forth between his
desk and one particular room. It is not a patients room,
(12:52):
but rather the room where all of the facility's addictive
medications are stored. Internal cameras capture Roger visiting this locked
room thirty six times in a single shift. Over the
course of this time, Roger steals two hundred and thirty
seven tablets of a painkiller called end Don. I swear
(13:13):
to God it's called end Don. End one is how
it's spelled. End one is what they called this painkiller.
I swear to God, I'm not making this up. This
is real life. Supposedly, it's essentially oxycodone with a morphine base,
and the amount he steals can be obtained with a
(13:35):
prescription for well under one hundred bucks a benji. But
like all addiction fueled decisions, this is not a very
well planned crime. Roger Dean is not a mastermind criminal.
When Roger starts his shift the following night, on November seventeenth,
he's approached by the management, who questioned him about the
(13:58):
missing medication. This is a medical facility, after all, and
a simple auditing of the log books earlier that afternoon
reveals a bunch of drugs went missing overnight. Police arrived
to talk to Roger about the situation, but he plays
dumb and claims to have no clue what could have happened,
(14:21):
though he seems incredibly suspicious. The police are eventually called
away and no further action is taken. Roger continues his
shift late into the night, once again left unsupervised, only
this time anxiously reeling about being so close to cod
(14:42):
He knows it's only a matter of time before he's
figured out for good, and his narcissistic tendencies take over
to find some way to cover his tracks and in
doing so, destroy the evidence of his very stupid crime.
It's now the early morning hours of November eighteenth, and
(15:03):
by this time tomorrow Roger will not have a job
unless he acts very quickly. He approaches two junior nurses
with an odd request. He wants them both to take
an early break, and at exactly the same time, the
same internal cameras that taped Roger going into the locked
storage room the previous shift, we're now recording footage of
(15:27):
him walking in and out of several rooms within the ward.
He's equipped with a stolen cigarette lighter and steps into
a room not currently being occupied. In these quiet moments,
it's not too late to turn back, but a slide
of the thumb changes everything, as a spark becomes a
(15:51):
tiny flame and the lighter makes contact with the sheets
of an empty bed. The flames appear to dance as
they grow. Oh, but it all seems manageable. Roger enters
another room to bedridden elderly women patience he has known
(16:12):
and personally interacted with, are fast asleep. Roger later admits
that he knows they are there in the room, as
he sets fire to a third empty bed, saying nothing
to them as he returns to the lobby and just
keeps walking. It should be noted that while Roger's confession
(16:34):
was that he lit one fire in an empty room
and one fire in an occupied room, a chief fire
investigator stated later that Roger may have actually lit two
beds on fire in the second occupied room. This was
theorized after superintendents tried recreating the conditions of the fire.
(16:55):
The only way to generate the temperatures approaching two thousand
degrees to have two fires rolling in a specially constructed room.
This is a small but chilling detail, as it would
indicate that Roger not only set fire to empty beds,
but he may have also directly lit a bed containing
(17:17):
a sleeping and helpless individual. As the fires obliterated the
lives of these two women and began to amass horrendous
volumes of smoke that would result in many more deaths,
Roger was outside talking with Channel seven News about his
(17:39):
heroic efforts to get as many people out as he could,
which was of course total bullshit. It looked like World
War three in the parking lot with bodies scattered everywhere,
as delirious and confused senior citizens, many of whom were
already suffering from debilitating mental illness, were being shipped off
(18:02):
to various hospitals and churches for treatment. Staff members were
trying to account for every patient. Frantic families who received
early morning emergency phone calls were trying to locate their
loved ones. Strangers from the surrounding neighborhood came out to
help where they could, and yet throughout the pandemonium, Roger
(18:25):
was wasting firefighters precious time and resources to help him
get back inside the charred building. Why, you may ask, well,
it would seem the whole purpose of the fire was
to destroy the evidence of his drug theft. During the
panic of the growing fire, he left the most important
(18:46):
piece of evidence behind the drug registration log books. After
the firefighters allowed him to enter the building and unknowingly
assisted him in accomplishing his goal, left the scene of
the crime and headed home, where he shredded the contents
of the log books, and, just like a guilty serial killer,
(19:08):
his next stop was a dumpster at a nearby shopping
village to quietly abandon the paper remains, driven by the
guilt of what he'd done, or perhaps wanting to make
it look like he was the hero of the story.
Roger then returned to the Quakers Hill nursing home to
(19:30):
comfort some of the evacuated patients. Fortunately for police, that
meant their key suspect, who they were already confident had
stolen drugs the previous night, was easily taken into custody.
On the same afternoon the fires were set, Roger confessed
to everything that he had done. Here is an edited
(19:54):
version of his statements. I'll spare you the Aussie. That's
not a knife accent. I just wanted to set a
light to something. It just so happens there was an
empty bed and I did it to that. I use
a cigarette lighter and lent an empty bed and it
(20:15):
got out of control, and I got really scared because
I didn't think it would spread so quickly. It started
just as a small flame, and I thought, that's okay,
Like that's containable. I didn't expect it to be so big.
It was just something stupid, something I wish i'd never done.
Even more unsettling than that, he also told police, in
(20:38):
a way me deciding to do that was I mean,
you won't believe it, but it was like Satan saying
to me that it's the right thing to do. I
love the residents very much and I have a very
good rapport with them, So I feel extremely bad and
I just feel evil that I'm corrupted with evil thoughts
that made me do that. What is it about religious
(21:02):
symbolism then makes us forget about all accountability surrounding our
own actions. Urbana Alipio, Doris Beck, Lola Bennett, Caesar Galia,
Reginald Green, Alma Smith, Dorothy Sterling, Nail j Valke, Verna Webbeck,
(21:29):
Ella Wood, and Dorothy Wu. Yes. These were all people
in their seventies, eighties, and nineties in the final phases
of their lives. But they did not deserve to die
like this. Their family members didn't deserve to watch their
relatives have soot pumped from their lungs, to see the
(21:54):
horror of their ailing parents' eyes as they struggled to breathe,
flesh singed or burned away. This is the face of
true evil, and not some figment of your imagination called Satan.
This is something inside of humanity, an evil that lurks within.
(22:19):
At the trial, one woman talked about singing lullabies to
her mom every day for eleven days until she ultimately
passed away. Another described how before her father died at
the hospital, he coughed up thick black tar and screamed
(22:40):
for help as he traumatically kept experiencing the feeling of
being stuck in a room on fire. Imagine that being
the end of your father's life, or your mother's or
your grandmother's. Roger Dean was sentenced to life in prison
(23:01):
without the possibility of parole. At is sentencing, one of
the victim's relatives passed out and had to be removed
from the courtroom. Many family members cheered and cried at
the fact that Roger would never be released from prison,
while others shouted row in hell and you'll get yours,
(23:23):
you son of a bitch, as Roger was escorted out
of the room. Roger would later lose an appeal in
December of twenty fifteen, arguing that his sentence was excessive
and that he couldn't possibly have foreseen that his actions
would have caused so much destruction and ended so many lives. Hey,
(23:45):
action meet consequences. That's a meme that should proliferate, probably
a bit more. In today's society, your actions have real consequences,
no matter how dumb you are. To this day, Roger
Dean is still considered to be one of Australia's worst
(24:07):
mass murderers, if you can really quantify such a thing.
Not to minimize his actions, but it's clear to me
that there's yet another tragedy fueling the fire of the
more obvious tragedy, another silent killer that's been hovering around
over this story like a toxic cloud, and we still
(24:30):
haven't mentioned it. I'm speaking, of course, about addiction. Like
a fire, it grows and disorients, It demands constant attention,
and will not be stopped until it consumes everything. If
(24:54):
you enjoyed the show, please consider joining plus at Sword
and Scale dot com slash plus. But if you can't,
consider leaving us a positive review on your preferred listening platform.
Sweet Dreams and Goodnight,
There's a type of intruder that moves with an almost
supernatural speed. It's not exactly alive, and yet with every
breath of oxygen it takes, it grows. It has no hands,
but tears through furniture and walls, and though it has
(00:26):
no mouth, if it drinks, it dies. But until it's
put down, it will take whatever it wants, including you.
It doesn't matter if you know where you are. It
will obscure your exits and disorient you, creep up on you.
(00:48):
It cries for help will mean nothing as you slowly suffocate,
reaching through the darkness for help that isn't coming. And
if that growing bright light ahead of you will burn
even hotter. Welcome to sword and scale nightmares. True crime
(01:26):
for bedtime or nightmare begins now. The Quaker Hill Nursing
(01:54):
Home in New South Wales, Australia is responsible for eighty
eight souls on the morning of November eighteenth, twenty eleven.
The patients living here are elderly, many of them bedridden.
They might look like your grandmother or your grandfather suffering
from dementia. Some of the residents have amputated limbs or
(02:19):
in some cases, intellectual disabilities that make it impossible for
them to take care of themselves. It's four point fifty
am and most of them are sleep but unbeknownst to
anyone in the facility, a silent killer has begun stalking
the halls. Thick billowing smoke replaces the cool air, accompanied
(02:44):
by a putrid smell that will not go away. They
head nurse Roger Dean, is frantically running past the front desk,
elbow covering his mouth. He has a yellow bag slung
over his shoulder as he races from room to room.
As the fire alarms blare. Roger enters a room with
(03:06):
four patients, one of whom has a broken hip and
another is paralyzed. A third woman is being treated for emphysema,
but she's easier to maneuver, and Roger gets her outside,
informing her that help is on the way. At four
fifty three am, local firefighters are alerted of the blaze.
I won't say the senior citizens at the nursing home
(03:28):
are lucky, but fortunately for them, the recently constructed fire
station is extremely close by, located within half a mile.
There are two crews on the ground within six minutes. Unfortunately,
emergency services have no idea, how many lives are at risk,
or where anyone is located. They also do not know
(03:52):
the source of the flames, which continue to grow with
every passing minute. Eventually, the media arrived, snapping pictures of
the chaos for their clickbait pieces, including one of the nurse,
Roger Dean, seated in a folding chair and being provided
(04:12):
with oxygen via face mask. He's an odd, effeminate thirty
five year old man with spiky black hair that's been
dyed red at the tips. Roger also talks with the
Channel seven News crew, saying, quote, there was a fire
and I just quickly did what I can to get
everyone out, and the smoke is just overwhelming. But you know,
(04:36):
we've got a lot of people out, so that's the
main thing. There's still probably a few people and the
people are trying their best to get everyone out at
the moment. Yeah. End quote. He tries to shrug it
off like a hero would the whole awe shucks, just
trying to do my part thing. But he looks anxious
(05:01):
because there's two things that Roger Dean doesn't tell Channel
seven News. The first and probably the most important, is
that he's the one who caused the fire, and an
even worse secret to keep from everyone is that he
didn't just light one fire, he intentionally started to. When
(05:58):
the first team of firefight enters the Quaker Hill Nursing
Home in New South Wales, Australia, they are immediately enveloped
by blinding black smoke. There is simply put zero visibility
and very little can be heard above the sounds of
breathing and respirators. The rescue team has no idea how
(06:20):
many people are inside, and they are forced to crawl
on their hands and knees from room to room, feeling
the walls with their hands, reaching over beds and onto
cabinets where people may have gone to hide from the
growing blaze. Some of the patients here have Alzheimer's, Others
are blind, confined to wheelchairs and beds. All of them
(06:45):
are frail and in various states of confusion and shock,
as others stumble around in their hospital pajamas. Early on
in the rescue, emergency crews try to wheel the beds
out of a side exit, but the nearest ramp had
been built illegally and without proper approvals. It's too narrow
(07:06):
and the handrails immediately jam up the first bed, they
have to try to find another way out. While the
facilities have fire extinguishers and fire doors, they do not
have overhead sprinklers as required by law, so now smoke
fills the ceiling cavity and the fire spreads to the
(07:27):
roof down below. Furniture made from materials banned in the
United States and Great Britain make for explosive kindling, and
more toxins fill the air as plastics and metals and
vinyl begin to melt. And then there's the matter of
the second fire. By the time it's discovered in Room
(07:51):
A one, not to be confused with the delicious steak sauce,
it has reached temperatures higher than a stagger during eighteen
hundred degrees fahrenheit. The painted hallways leading up to the
room are bubbling and boiling, and the source of a
fire is hot enough to break the rescue crew's thermal
(08:12):
imaging equipment. It's eventually learned that the two bedridden patients
sleeping in Room A one were among the first to die.
The exact details of a third on site death are
more difficult to discern. By the time the fires have
been extinguished. The parking lot had become a triage center
(08:34):
as burned and confused senior citizens were hosed down and
treated for injuries. In total, thirty two people were taken
to various hospitals, many of them sent to intensive care
to be treated for smoke in elation and severe blisters
and burns. Eight of those people later died in the hospital.
(08:55):
They were at hospital, as you Australians like to say,
including one of the first women to be rescued, whose
bed was directly under where part of the ceiling had collapsed.
She never regained consciousness. There were certainly incredible acts of
bravery during the rescue, including two officers who went into
(09:16):
the fire without protective equipment and still managed to save lives.
But floating in the background, watching the flames and occasionally
stopping to comfort and injured patient was the person who
secretly started at all, Roger Dean. After his interview with
(09:39):
Channel seven News, Roger stepped away from the scene on foot,
but then returned shortly after. Roger, though wasn't interested in
saving anyone else, of course, only himself, and the only
way to do that was to get back inside the
scene of the crime. Security camera footage then shows Roger
(10:02):
talking with firefighters, asking them to let him back inside,
until shockingly they do. They casually escort Roger as he
goes behind the front desk, privately filling his yellow shoulder
bag with important evidence evidence of an entirely different crime
(10:24):
when he committed just hours before setting the fires that
permanently devastated hundreds of lives. Families of the victims were
(10:59):
right for upset at the management behind the Quaker's Hill
nursing home. The faulty ramp and lack of fire sprinklers
were one thing, but how on earth had they hired
Roger Dean and put him in charge of an unsupervised
night shift. Report suggests that Roger did pass a police check,
(11:20):
but he did not undergo any mental health assessment. It
also appeared that he lied on his resume and no
one looked into his past work references, because you know what,
nobody wants to do their job anymore. If hr had
done their job, they would have noticed some unsettling behavior. Notably,
(11:46):
back in two thousand and seven, Roger resigned from his
post at Saint George Hospital after it claims that he
threw paint on a supervisor's car and put nails in
the tires. Sounds like a hinged individual kind you'd like
to hire. And to add to that, just a couple
(12:07):
of months before being hired at Quakers Hill, Roger was
suspended from his previous job at Saint John of God
Hospital after claims from a patient that he was completely
drug addled while trying to dispense medication. According to the claim,
he struggled to speak and allegedly at white froth foaming
(12:30):
around his mouth. On November sixteenth, twenty eleven, just twenty
four hours before the fire, Roger Dean arrives for his
scheduled night shift. He is unsupervised and spends a large
part of his shift going back and forth between his
desk and one particular room. It is not a patients room,
(12:52):
but rather the room where all of the facility's addictive
medications are stored. Internal cameras capture Roger visiting this locked
room thirty six times in a single shift. Over the
course of this time, Roger steals two hundred and thirty
seven tablets of a painkiller called end Don. I swear
(13:13):
to God it's called end Don. End one is how
it's spelled. End one is what they called this painkiller.
I swear to God, I'm not making this up. This
is real life. Supposedly, it's essentially oxycodone with a morphine base,
and the amount he steals can be obtained with a
(13:35):
prescription for well under one hundred bucks a benji. But
like all addiction fueled decisions, this is not a very
well planned crime. Roger Dean is not a mastermind criminal.
When Roger starts his shift the following night, on November seventeenth,
he's approached by the management, who questioned him about the
(13:58):
missing medication. This is a medical facility, after all, and
a simple auditing of the log books earlier that afternoon
reveals a bunch of drugs went missing overnight. Police arrived
to talk to Roger about the situation, but he plays
dumb and claims to have no clue what could have happened,
(14:21):
though he seems incredibly suspicious. The police are eventually called
away and no further action is taken. Roger continues his
shift late into the night, once again left unsupervised, only
this time anxiously reeling about being so close to cod
(14:42):
He knows it's only a matter of time before he's
figured out for good, and his narcissistic tendencies take over
to find some way to cover his tracks and in
doing so, destroy the evidence of his very stupid crime.
It's now the early morning hours of November eighteenth, and
(15:03):
by this time tomorrow Roger will not have a job
unless he acts very quickly. He approaches two junior nurses
with an odd request. He wants them both to take
an early break, and at exactly the same time, the
same internal cameras that taped Roger going into the locked
storage room the previous shift, we're now recording footage of
(15:27):
him walking in and out of several rooms within the ward.
He's equipped with a stolen cigarette lighter and steps into
a room not currently being occupied. In these quiet moments,
it's not too late to turn back, but a slide
of the thumb changes everything, as a spark becomes a
(15:51):
tiny flame and the lighter makes contact with the sheets
of an empty bed. The flames appear to dance as
they grow. Oh, but it all seems manageable. Roger enters
another room to bedridden elderly women patience he has known
(16:12):
and personally interacted with, are fast asleep. Roger later admits
that he knows they are there in the room, as
he sets fire to a third empty bed, saying nothing
to them as he returns to the lobby and just
keeps walking. It should be noted that while Roger's confession
(16:34):
was that he lit one fire in an empty room
and one fire in an occupied room, a chief fire
investigator stated later that Roger may have actually lit two
beds on fire in the second occupied room. This was
theorized after superintendents tried recreating the conditions of the fire.
(16:55):
The only way to generate the temperatures approaching two thousand
degrees to have two fires rolling in a specially constructed room.
This is a small but chilling detail, as it would
indicate that Roger not only set fire to empty beds,
but he may have also directly lit a bed containing
(17:17):
a sleeping and helpless individual. As the fires obliterated the
lives of these two women and began to amass horrendous
volumes of smoke that would result in many more deaths,
Roger was outside talking with Channel seven News about his
(17:39):
heroic efforts to get as many people out as he could,
which was of course total bullshit. It looked like World
War three in the parking lot with bodies scattered everywhere,
as delirious and confused senior citizens, many of whom were
already suffering from debilitating mental illness, were being shipped off
(18:02):
to various hospitals and churches for treatment. Staff members were
trying to account for every patient. Frantic families who received
early morning emergency phone calls were trying to locate their
loved ones. Strangers from the surrounding neighborhood came out to
help where they could, and yet throughout the pandemonium, Roger
(18:25):
was wasting firefighters precious time and resources to help him
get back inside the charred building. Why, you may ask, well,
it would seem the whole purpose of the fire was
to destroy the evidence of his drug theft. During the
panic of the growing fire, he left the most important
(18:46):
piece of evidence behind the drug registration log books. After
the firefighters allowed him to enter the building and unknowingly
assisted him in accomplishing his goal, left the scene of
the crime and headed home, where he shredded the contents
of the log books, and, just like a guilty serial killer,
(19:08):
his next stop was a dumpster at a nearby shopping
village to quietly abandon the paper remains, driven by the
guilt of what he'd done, or perhaps wanting to make
it look like he was the hero of the story.
Roger then returned to the Quakers Hill nursing home to
(19:30):
comfort some of the evacuated patients. Fortunately for police, that
meant their key suspect, who they were already confident had
stolen drugs the previous night, was easily taken into custody.
On the same afternoon the fires were set, Roger confessed
to everything that he had done. Here is an edited
(19:54):
version of his statements. I'll spare you the Aussie. That's
not a knife accent. I just wanted to set a
light to something. It just so happens there was an
empty bed and I did it to that. I use
a cigarette lighter and lent an empty bed and it
(20:15):
got out of control, and I got really scared because
I didn't think it would spread so quickly. It started
just as a small flame, and I thought, that's okay,
Like that's containable. I didn't expect it to be so big.
It was just something stupid, something I wish i'd never done.
Even more unsettling than that, he also told police, in
(20:38):
a way me deciding to do that was I mean,
you won't believe it, but it was like Satan saying
to me that it's the right thing to do. I
love the residents very much and I have a very
good rapport with them, So I feel extremely bad and
I just feel evil that I'm corrupted with evil thoughts
that made me do that. What is it about religious
(21:02):
symbolism then makes us forget about all accountability surrounding our
own actions. Urbana Alipio, Doris Beck, Lola Bennett, Caesar Galia,
Reginald Green, Alma Smith, Dorothy Sterling, Nail j Valke, Verna Webbeck,
(21:29):
Ella Wood, and Dorothy Wu. Yes. These were all people
in their seventies, eighties, and nineties in the final phases
of their lives. But they did not deserve to die
like this. Their family members didn't deserve to watch their
relatives have soot pumped from their lungs, to see the
(21:54):
horror of their ailing parents' eyes as they struggled to breathe,
flesh singed or burned away. This is the face of
true evil, and not some figment of your imagination called Satan.
This is something inside of humanity, an evil that lurks within.
(22:19):
At the trial, one woman talked about singing lullabies to
her mom every day for eleven days until she ultimately
passed away. Another described how before her father died at
the hospital, he coughed up thick black tar and screamed
(22:40):
for help as he traumatically kept experiencing the feeling of
being stuck in a room on fire. Imagine that being
the end of your father's life, or your mother's or
your grandmother's. Roger Dean was sentenced to life in prison
(23:01):
without the possibility of parole. At is sentencing, one of
the victim's relatives passed out and had to be removed
from the courtroom. Many family members cheered and cried at
the fact that Roger would never be released from prison,
while others shouted row in hell and you'll get yours,
(23:23):
you son of a bitch, as Roger was escorted out
of the room. Roger would later lose an appeal in
December of twenty fifteen, arguing that his sentence was excessive
and that he couldn't possibly have foreseen that his actions
would have caused so much destruction and ended so many lives. Hey,
(23:45):
action meet consequences. That's a meme that should proliferate, probably
a bit more. In today's society, your actions have real consequences,
no matter how dumb you are. To this day, Roger
Dean is still considered to be one of Australia's worst
(24:07):
mass murderers, if you can really quantify such a thing.
Not to minimize his actions, but it's clear to me
that there's yet another tragedy fueling the fire of the
more obvious tragedy, another silent killer that's been hovering around
over this story like a toxic cloud, and we still
(24:30):
haven't mentioned it. I'm speaking, of course, about addiction. Like
a fire, it grows and disorients, It demands constant attention,
and will not be stopped until it consumes everything. If
(24:54):
you enjoyed the show, please consider joining plus at Sword
and Scale dot com slash plus. But if you can't,
consider leaving us a positive review on your preferred listening platform.
Sweet Dreams and Goodnight,
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