Here, he set another fire in an unoccupied bed of a room where patients Dorothy Sterling and Dorothy Wu were asleep in their beds. Dean was well aware that both of the women were immobile and would be incapable of escaping the fire without help.
The first fire triggered the fire alarm almost immediately and emergency crews soon arrived at the scene. CCTV footage from that night shows the hectic evacuation. Frail and confused residents – some shuffling along on walkers – were all gathered on the outside lawns, surrounded by ambulances and emergency workers. It was a chaotic scene that looked like something from a movie set.
On his way out, Dean stopped to help a resident Helen Perry leave her room. Despite Mrs Perry’s distressed pleas to help save Ms Sterling and Ms Wu from the room where the fire had now taken hold, Dean assured her that help was on its way.
‘Don’t worry, Helen, just leave them. We’ve got to get out. People are on their way to get them,’ Dean told her.
Mrs Perry later described the evacuation scene to the Sunday Telegraph: ‘I was in a daze for hours after. It just looked like a war scene. There were people scattered everywhere.’
Dean continued to assist some residents to leave the premises while firefighters were battling to extinguish the first fire he had lit. However, they had no idea that a second fire was burning and that two helpless women were in the room. Ms Sterling and Ms Wu were most likely the first people to die from the fires. By the time the firefighters got to the second blaze, they could hear residents screaming for help and the flames had reached the roof.
Once he had exited the building, Dean hovered outside, helping to usher residents away from the nursing home’s main entrance. He had an ulterior motive for staying close though … he tried on three separate occasions to re-enter the nursing home but was stopped each time by firefighters.
On the final attempt, Dean pleaded with the firefighters that he had to retrieve the nursing home’s drug books (used to record the Schedule 8 medications), which were in a locked cabinet within the secure treatment room. Dean had access to this cabinet and the locked room and showed one of the officers the keys.
He was given permission to re-enter the building, accompanied by two firefighters but he avoided being in sight of the CCTV cameras. According to R v Dean (2013), ‘he gave the keys to one of the officers, explained the location of the cabinet and described the two books. He said, “We need them. We need to get these out”.’ Unable to open the door to the locked room, the firefighters asked Dean if he could help them, but he refused at first, saying he was an asthmatic and needed Ventolin. Eventually, the door was opened, and Dean removed the drug logs from the cabinet. Dean hastily shoved the books into his satchel and told the officers, ‘I need to go home, I need to get Ventolin. I live close by and I really need my Ventolin.’
It was on his way home – with the incriminating drug books in his possession – that Dean gave the chilling ‘I’m Roger’ soundbite to a reporter who had stopped him.
Dean walked hurriedly to his home, a unit he shared with his ex-boyfriend Dean French, just minutes away from the nursing home, and ripped up the drug books. He disposed of the books in the dumpster at the back of The Cheesecake Shop in Quakers Hill, the business run by Mr French. His actions were witnessed by Mr French, who did not reveal that Dean had destroyed the documents until early 2013. Mr French gave evidence in court on the assurance he would not be prosecuted.
Court documents state that Dean was taken by ambulance to Mt Druitt Hospital at noon on the day of the fires and he ‘presented with sooty residue on his face and clothes, pale skin, and generally distressed’.
Meanwhile, firefighters were still at the nursing home. A media pack had gathered and journalists were awaiting updates.
One firefighter gave the media some idea of how bad the fire was, especially for the residents: ‘They’re confused, some of them are suffering from dementia, they’re not sure what’s going on. It was a horrific scene. They had to crawl on their hands and knees. The roof was on fire above them. This is a firefighter’s worst nightmare.’
By 10pm on the night of the fire, police were confident that they had found the culprit. The focus was on Dean before the fires started when police had attended the nursing home to question staff about the stolen drugs and he had been recorded on CCTV going into the drugs room alone (against protocol) 32 times the night before. CCTV footage showed Dean wandering to and from a number of rooms at the nursing home, which fitted the timeframe of the fires. Two of the nurses on duty that night said Dean had told them to both take their breaks at exactly the same time, which was not standard practice. Dean was arrested and given a police caution at 7.50pm. At 9.50pm he began a recorded interview with detectives. The interview lasted for more than two hours and throughout Dean gave calm and measured responses to the hundreds of questions posed by the detectives.
‘I know you won’t believe it but it was like Satan was saying to me that it’s the right thing to do,’ Dean calmly told detectives.
On the cigarette lighter he used to start the horrific fire, he said, ‘I took the lighter for the purpose of lighting… I didn’t expect to light a bed, I just wanted to light something. I just wanted to set alight to something. It just so happened there was an empty bed and I did it to that…’
When detectives asked him about the second fire Dean said, ‘It started just as a small flame and I thought that’s OK, like that’s containable. I didn’t expect it to be so big. It was just something stupid and something that I wish I’d never done.’
‘I love the residents very much and I have a really good rapport with them so I feel extremely bad and I just feel evil that I’m just corrupted with evil thoughts that would make me do that,’ Dean told the detectives at the end of the police interview.
During a search of Dean’s townhouse on 21 November, police found drugs, including some of the stolen Endone and Kapanol tablets, which were kept in containers labelled ‘Roger’s doctor prescribed medication’. Mr French and Dean had separated because of Dean’s abuse of prescription drugs.
While he didn’t admit to the theft of the drugs during the police interview, Dean later admitted that he lit the fires as a distraction so that management would not investigate further.
In May 2013, Dean pleaded guilty to 11 counts of murder and eight counts of recklessly causing grievous bodily harm. Prosecutors had rejected his attempt to plead guilty to the lesser charge of manslaughter.
Psychiatrist Michael Diamond examined Dean’s police interview and found that as well as his drug addiction, Dean appeared to have a Mixed Personality Disorder with narcissistic traits. Dr Diamond told the court on the second day of Dean’s sentencing hearing that he believed Dean’s actions were part of a ‘considered plan’ that would distract from his theft of the prescription tablets.
Dean certainly sounded like he was a complicated personality. It was mentioned by New South Wales Supreme Court Judge Megan Latham during her sentencing remarks that ‘the psychiatrists who saw the offender after his admission to custody also noticed the offender’s sense of entitlement, indifference to the needs of others, grandiosity and refusal to take advice and instruction …’
There was devastating testimony from the victims’ families, who spoke at the sentencing of their horror, hurt and loss. Some of the families wore pin badges bearing the image of their lost loved ones.
The ABC reported that Dean cried as ‘one woman described how she sang lullabies to her mother for days before she died’ and ‘another man spoke of the terror in his father’s eyes before he died’.
Sue
