Children Who Kill: Profiles of Pre-Teen and Teenage Killers (6 page)

In June 1973 the twelve-year-old was living with his mother in Hull and tensions were high. In the middle of the night, he left the house and went walking around the town. Soon he made his way to the home of a six-year-old epileptic handicapped boy who
travelled
on the school bus with him. Peter entered the
house by an open window and set the property on fire.

Both parents and their children suffered from severe smoke inhalation and the parents sustained injuries as they helped their able-bodied children escape by
jumping
from an upstairs window. But, despite Herculean efforts, they were unable to reach their handicapped child and he died.

It took firefighters two hours to bring the blaze under control, after which they carried out the
six-year
-old victim in a body bag. Twelve-year-old Peter was now a murderer.

On the streets, with his paraffin and his matches, he was in charge – but at school and in his local authority home Peter was still an obvious target for older boys who wanted sexual satisfaction. One man went to jail for having sex with the adolescent boy. In time, Peter would become more predatory and would persuade younger boys to ‘muck about’ (as he put it) with him. Though aware that these were homosexual acts, he told anyone who asked that he wasn’t gay.

Four months after killing the six-year-old boy, Peter was ready to set another fire. The date was 12th October
1973. This time he chose the house of an elderly recluse who lived in squalor. He entered the home by a
window
in the early morning and saw the man sleeping in his chair. Peter lit a fire then raced out of the door. The seventy-two-year-old man, a semi-invalid, died from smoke inhalation. He had refused the help of social services and bravely maintained his independence, only to be killed by a deeply disturbed child.

Less than a fortnight later the teenage Peter crept into a pigeon loft, possibly planning to torture or steal the birds. The pigeon fancier found Peter lurking there and hit him. Peter ran off, shouting that he would kill the man.

A few days later he strangled most of the pigeons. Then he crept into the owner’s house and poured paraffin on the thirty-four-year-old as he slept. His
victim
, clothes on fire, raced into the street and collapsed. He mumbled something about ‘why would anyone do that?’ to a neighbour then lapsed into
unconsciousness
, spending the next seven days in hospital in a coma before he died. The blaze was assumed to have started when some clothes drying by the fireplace went up in flames. Yet again, no one suspected an arson attack.

Either Peter didn’t start a fire for the following
fourteen
months, or he did but didn’t give the police details. All that’s known is that on 23rd December 1974 he entered the house of an eighty-two-year-old female. He went into her bedroom and saw her lying in bed. He lit a fire in the corner of the room and the
unfortunate
woman burnt to death. It’s unlikely that he knew her. He simply hated what she stood for – someone with a home and a family. The unwanted boy loved fire and despised the people it destroyed.

Another eighteen months elapsed before he started another lethal fire. It was June 1976 when he went to a house which included a seven-year-old spastic girl who went to the same special school as he did. Peter entered by an unlocked back door and heard someone moving about upstairs – the girl’s grandmother who was putting the child’s one-year-old brother to bed. Peter quickly started a fire in a downstairs cupboard and left

The grandmother came downstairs and found the rooms filled with smoke. She managed to get the seven-year-old girl to safety and her five-year-old brother made his own way out of the burning
building
. But, despite heroic attempts to save him, the
one-year
-old boy perished in the flames. Peter had done his
work well, using paraffin as an accelerant, and the house was burnt to a shell. The grandmother assumed the five-year-old had been playing with matches, though his parents later explained they didn’t keep matches in the house. This fire too was seen as an unfortunate accident rather than an arson-related death.

No one knew about Peter’s arson attacks but they could see that his behaviour was deteriorating rapidly. That year, 1976, the local authority sent him for
psychiatric
tests suspecting increasing mental illness. But the analysis showed that his disturbance was a result of his dreadful childhood and his physical handicap. In other words, he had behavioural problems rather than mental ones.

Peter had by now been physically and emotionally abused for sixteen years and was increasingly out of control. He’d been told what to do so often in his
formative
years that he couldn’t stand authority. He’d quarrel with anyone who tried to direct him in any way.

On 2nd January 1977 Peter entered a house by the back door. He knew the woman and her children who lived
there, and he had fallen out with the children’s father. The man had struck him and now Peter was intent on revenge. He started a fire beside the couch, having seen a cot in the room. Peter fled as soon as the flames took hold, burning a six-month-old baby girl to death in the inferno. Unusually, he was seen with other onlookers watching this particular fire. He would later say that he was sorry about this death as he liked babies – but he clearly wasn’t sorry enough to stop his arson attacks.

Three days after killing the baby, Peter killed again. By sheer chance, his next eleven victims were at the other end of the age scale, ranging from seventy-two to
nine
ty
-five. They had survived the rigours of war and
illness
, only to die at a teenager’s whim.

Peter felt the familiar tingle in his hands that said it was time to commit arson. Putting his paraffin bottle and his matches under his coat, he hurried into the night. He stole a bicycle and cycled along till he saw a large building. Unknown to him, it was an old folks home.

He broke a window, climbed into the home, found some kindling and soon had the huge house ablaze. Once again he felt powerful. Eleven men died and
several
of the rescuers were burnt. Peter allegedly heard some of them shouting ‘God help me’ – but no one saved them from the flames.

By now he’d been sent to stay with one of the area’s best foster mothers. She found him to be a very quiet
teenager
who had no friends. She had no idea that he was walking the streets looking for buildings full of victims that he could burn. Peter was happier with her than he’d been for a long time – but it was too little, too late.

Though still physically weak, he fantasised about being important and strong. He started to watch Kung Fu films over and over. He was particularly impressed with Bruce Lee, who could defeat several opponents effortlessly. In real life, Peter was called a cripple by his mother and mocked by some of the local children for his epilepsy, but in his dreams he had a sweet revenge. He lay there night after night imagining whose house he would torch next, how strongly the fire would burn – and how shocked his victims would be when their happy family dwellings went up in flames.

He began to take long walks along the old railway lines, thinking about his crimes. He soon felt depressed again and started to read a Bible that he found at his foster mother’s house. It said that ‘man cannot serve two masters’ so he decided that his master would be fire.

Three months later, in April 1977, he set light to a
family
home, killing a girl of thirteen and a boy of seven.
It’s believed that he killed such victims because they represented family happiness, something the rejected boy could never have. Ironically, the seven-year-old boy had reached a window and definite safety – but he went back into the smoke filled rooms to rescue the thirteen-year-old and both perished in the fire.

In January 1978 Peter was feeling low and bored so went out with his beloved paraffin can. He chose a house at random and poured accelerant into it then lit a piece of paper. The resultant inferno killed a young woman and her three children, who were aged five, four and sixteen months. Peter didn’t know who he’d killed untill afterwards when he saw it on the news. Hearing that he’d incinerated four people in this attack seemed to shake him, and he again started to read his Bible, a book he turned to intermittently.

This fire was typical of Peter’s arson attacks in that it occurred in winter. Most of his fires were set in October, December and January between 1973 and 1979. Only three occurred outside these months, taking place in April and June.

The timing of these attacks presumably ties in with the depression that preceded them. Even those of us who have homes and life plans my tend to feel depressed in December and January. For a youth with no home, no education and no friends, the winters must have been incredibly bleak. But the anticipation
of setting a fire gave him renewed purpose – and it was followed by the excitement of hearing the fire engines racing to the scene. Afterwards, Peter would hear people talking about the fire and about the
victims
and would feel a secret satisfaction in knowing that he’d caused such a destructive blaze. Most of us take pleasure in creativity, but he’d turned this value system on its head and taken pleasure in destroying buildings and their contents. And though he seldom said so, he clearly took pleasure in destroying the
people
that were inside.

He later said that he ‘didn’t think’ about the
potential
victims of his fires – but after the first deaths were reported he must have known that his fires killed the occupants. If he’d really wanted to cause fire without death, he could have targeted abandoned buildings. Instead, he torched family dwellings and a residential home.

Aware that he was often at a loose end, the
authorities
put him on a Community Action course. This involved painting, gardening and looking after
children
. He was to repeat this course and seemed to enjoy parts of it, later telling the police that he liked babies and was sorry when they died in his fires.

Peter had at least two relationships with females during these teenage years and had both their names – Barbara and Yvonne – tattooed on himself. Name
tattoos
are often a sign of insecurity, for people in secure relationships don’t feel the need to make such obvious public statements about their love.

Peter continued to be obsessed by the Kung Fu film star Bruce Lee, and in the summer of 1979 he changed his name by deed poll to that of the actor. Or, to be more precise, he changed it to Bruce George Peter Lee, reversing his Christian and middle birth names to form two middle names. This involved consulting a solicitor so it was a remarkable action for a youth with such a low IQ. The police would later tell this author that Peter had no one to help him contact the solicitor, that he did it on his own. Bruce Lee was the name under which he would later be charged when he went to court so from now on he is referred to by that name.

By this time Bruce was too old for council and foster care and ended up drifting from one place to another. Sometimes he’d stay at his mother’s house, though he’d be there alone if she was out drinking. At other times he’d sleep rough on the streets and on other occasions he’d rent a room in a Salvation Army Hostel where he kept himself to himself.

To pay his way, Bruce found a labouring job at the local meat market where he was paid seven pounds a day for penning pigs. He also claimed unemployment benefit. For kicks, he hung around the public lavatories and had sex with other boys. Presumably he was now taking the predatory role for one of his sexual partners,
fifteen-year-old Charlie Hastie, always asked him for money afterwards. Sometimes Charlie took a pound from Bruce forcefully and Bruce was enraged. Charlie had two younger brothers and all three of them were well known for their wildness in the neighbourhood. Eventually Bruce decided to kill them with his beloved fire.

In December 1979 he crept up to the doorway of their house in Hull and put paraffin-soaked paper and rags through the letterbox and lit it. The three brothers – aged 15, 12 and 8 – all died in the flames and their mother was badly burnt. (Their father escaped injury as he was in prison at the time of the arson attack and their three sisters escaped as they were staying with friends.) As usual, Bruce disappeared unseen into the night. He spent the next few days alternately sleeping rough and hanging around men’s toilets in the hope of some sexual activity. At other times he played the
one-arm
bandits in a gaming parlour in a bid to stay out of the cold.

Originally the police had thought that a poison pen writer was responsible for the Hastie fire, for a year earlier the Hasties had received an anonymous note
written on a cornflake packet. It said that the Hasties were ‘a family of fucking rubbish’ and warned that if they didn’t move house ‘then we’ll bastard well bomb you.’ But further enquiries revealed that the letter writer was a pensioner who had been stoned and mocked by the Hastie children. She was a regular at her local Methodist church who had written the swear words because she thought it was the only language that they would understand – then had been terrified that she’d be sent to prison when she heard a year later that the house had indeed been set on fire.