All language subtitles for The.Real.Manhunter.S01E07.WEBRip.x264-ION10

Here,
Police investigating a fire

at a sex cinema in London have confirmed
they're treating the case as murder.

I don't think the fire at
the Dream City cinema is given as much

attention and sits in
the history of London

as an event of the
magnitude that it was.

In general, forensic scientists

don't like to have
too much information

initially. We like
to work without the

blinkers,
so we like to go into a scene fresh.

There was certainly a feeling

within the police at the
time that the incident

had to be dealt with,
with a great deal of

sensitivity in terms
of not only dealing with

the victims' families,
but the way in which it

was presented in the media,
because this was

1994 and in 1994,
things were very different

in some ways to what
we see now in the 2020s.

It's hard to imagine
in this era, that the deaths of 11 gay

men in an arson attack, as this was,
would attract so little attention.

It was late in February in 1994, I was divisional DI at
Islington, I wasn't on call, I was at home and it was a Saturday

evening. I got a call from Eddie O'Connell, who was my DCI at
the time who said, 'Can you come in, we've had a bit of a fire',

that was one of the biggest understatements I think I've ever
come across in my police career. I said to him, 'I'm not on call,

somebody else is on call', and he said, 'No, we need you all
in, it's big, it's something that's going to need all of us.'

So, I drove into Islington
and the first thing that

I remember was going into my office,
I actually had a

desk in the major incident
room then because of something

that I was doing at the
time and sitting at my desk

was Tony Conman who was
the Divisional Commander of

the area, that I thought it
had to be something serious

if he is out in uniform
on a Saturday night. So, I

said, 'Hello Sir,
what brings you out at this time of

night, must be serious', and I remember him saying,
'I'm just worried somebody might be famous like a

politician involved in this.' At that stage, I didn't
know what the job was, but I then quickly found out, that

what'd happened was there was a cinema on the edge of
Smithfield, based in the upper 3 storeys of a terraced

block with a shop beneath it. It was a cinema which
specialised in pornographic films, and it had caught fire.

My name is Bob Williams, and I am a serving
firefighter at a fire station in the UK and

I've been in the fire and rescue service now for 32 years.
- 35 on that.

February afternoon and the fire crews normally
change crews at 6 o'clock so the crews at Shoreditch,

Barbican, Euston, the stations that were called to the
fire, bells would have gone down. The firefighters drop

everything, they get rigged in their fire gear, they
jump on the fire engine, they are looking at what's

known as a 'tip sheet', and that tip sheet gives you
the following information: Nature of the incident i.e.,

building fire, full address and whether there are people
involved and any other information that may be needed,

whether there is a problem with gas or whatever. The
fire crews would have turned out the fire stations.

It was all hands to the pumps, every
spare officer, every officer that could be

dragged in from home from the detective force at
Islington Division, was called in to deal with it.

The Sun In that era, you would have the old radio
hams listening in, very often retired old boys

who would be up in their lofts listening to all kinds
of things. If they heard about a major crime or incident

happening, they'd be on to the national newspapers. A
number of fire brigades, fire attenders, police, ambulance.

The ear-wiggers would have been all over that and that
that's how the media would have been first alerted.

When the first fire engine turns
up, the first fire appliance, the officer

in charge will be looking at several different
areas on fire spread, possible rescues

that we can carry out quickly, water supplies,
cordoning the area off, bearing in mind

as they pull up in St John Street, they would
have seen a lot of smoke, a lot of flames.

Very few people are
aware that here on St John Street, on the

edge of the City of London, in February
1994, a mass murder took place, and what

had happened was that down there at
number 7 St John Street, there had been a

fire. The fire was in a cinema, a
cinema specialising in pornographic films.

I was a senior
forensic scientist at the Met Police.

Forensic Science Laboratory. So,
on this particular night, I was

contacted via pager, I responded to that, to find that there had
been a fire at St John Street, near the city. I responded to the call

and I think I arrived at the scene around about midnight, to find a
very large fire. I was briefed by the fire service and the police who

were already there. They'd clearly already found a number of bodies
and were already suspicious about the potential cause of the fire.

Here, police investigating last night's fire at a
sex cinema in London have confirmed they're treating

the case as murder, 8 people were killed and 16 seriously
injured when fire swept through the 4-storey building.

They would see a
number of people collapsed on the pavement

due to the fact that they had jumped
from the 2nd and 3rd floor windows,

they would have fractures, they would
have dislocations, they would be in

a right state and absolute mayhem
on that evening, people lost their lives.

The fire occurred in what

appeared to be a shop
at ground floor level but

that hadn't actually
been involved in the fire,

because the door
next to that was actually

the entrance to the dream city facility as
I later found out. That door opened directly

to a very small hallway and a staircase
leading immediately up to the 3 upper floors.

Mayhem was going on, so as
the officer in charge, you would have to

stand back and make the decisions on; We
need more resources, we need a TL which is

a turntable ladder, or a hydraulic platform,
which is a great platform for carrying

out rescues and pointing jets into the
window. Then the decision has to be made on

attacking the fire and carrying out necessary
rescues. It seems to me that the building

was a very old building, built around 1910,
it was a grade 2 listed building, due

to the very nature of the activities going
on there, it was very much undercover and

the fire protection that would be used
nowadays, in 1994, wasn't quite up to standard.

So, regarding fire doors, they would
be missing fire compartmentation,

fire extinguishers. I understand
the fire doors were wedged open.

As we learned more about what had gone on, it proved that
the incident was more complex than we might even first

thought, it had no fire certificate and no means of an exit for
the scores of men that found themselves trapped in the inferno.

There was no formal inspection

because it was an illegal
premises. When you think

about an act called
the 'Furnishings Act' that

came around in about
1988/1989 and the Furnishing.

Act for cinemas etc,
those seats were highly

flammable. Once they
started getting treated by heat,

the flammable gasses would have come up from the
seats and created quite an explosive atmosphere.

On entry,
that hallway was extensively burnt. Upon

moving up the staircase, I found
that the fire had spread right up the

building, up the staircase to involve
the upper floors and in general, it

had gone upwards which is what
we tend to find in fires, that the smoke

and flames, potentially the hot gases, tend to move upwards and we
call it 'the chimney effect'. So, it's why people generally get trapped

upstairs in fires. The intervening floors, very often, especially if doors
are closed, don't become involved, particularly not at an early stage.

I believe it was possibly a gas explosion at that
incident, because you had a small thin lobby area, then you

had a staircase to the first floor, first floor staircase is to
the second floor, second floor staircase is to the third floor.

That wouldn't have been protected, the doors were wedged open
and/or locked. You would have got unburnt gases floating into there

and it would have been an explosive atmosphere. Looking at the
fire damage etc, it was a fire gas explosion at that property.

However, in this fire, I believe it was on the first floor,
one of the fire doors was actually wedged open with a fire

extinguisher, so the fire had actually spread into that area and I believe
that was where the 5 bodies were found. They were still in situ when.

I arrived and the first thing you intend to do is try to deal
with the bodies, examine them in detail and bag them up. We get

undertakers to remove the bodies at
that stage, so we can then move on to

look at the fire in general and the
forensic evidence that might be in situ.

It was known at that point
that there were fatalities, more than

one, but also there were a number of
injured who had been taken to hospital

who, it was really thought, might not
make it. The worry was that it wasn't

going to be 1 or 2 deaths, that it was
going to be half a dozen, maybe even more.

Colin Sutton was there
on the night of the fire, when I arrived

and at least when I finished my
preliminary examination of the scene that

night. I gave him a verbal debrief as
to what I'd found, what I believed was

the cause of the fire and why I believed
there had been people trapped upstairs.

Some of the windows
were actually boarded up, to hide the

illegal activities going on. So, they
couldn't just hang out the window anyway.

Unfortunately, in a situation like
that where you have a hell of a lot of

smoke coming up in a chimney effect,
up the stairs and going on to the adjacent

rooms because the doors were wedged open.
A lot of them would have unfortunately

succumb to smoke inhalation and
3 or 4 lungful's of thick black, acrid,

carcinogenic smoke would normally
cause a person to collapse, then as the

fire's come up and the unburnt gases
started igniting, they would be deceased.

It was like... a furniture lorry that was delivering nearby,
they saw what was happening and the driver manoeuvred

it quite bravely, a burning building, so that people could
come out of the windows onto the top of his lorry to escape.

From the minute it started, to the
minute I walked down to my vehicle, it was

only about 4 minutes, it went up
very quick, it just literally went up.

Well,
it's clear that some of the

people in this case actually
died from their injuries

jumping from the upper floors which is where the
illegal cinema was. But the people that had been trapped

within the premises had by-and-large, suffered from
smoke inhalation. This is very often the case in fires,

very few people die from burns in fires, probably
95%+ of fire fatalities are due to the toxic fumes and

hot gases produced by the fire. So, you would either
breathe in the hot gases which scorch the airways and

therefore effectively suffocates you or you'd breathe
in noxious fumes such as carbon monoxide or hydrogen

cyanide which are highly toxic and once they get
into the blood stream, can very quickly kill you. So,

the people that had succumbed within the premises had
already died from the smoke that had spread upstairs.

It must have been absolutely
horrific experience to be in this place,

trapped, there's flames coming up the stairs,
there is no other way out, what do you do?

The fire service would work with the forensic
services and the police for further investigation.

In general, the police
and fire service work together when there

is a fire, particularly when one is suspicious
or involving fatalities. But as soon

as a fire is deemed to be suspicious,
it is handed over to the police for a full

investigation. That's generally where a
forensic scientist would become involved.

The trouble is, when a premises
is completely unlicensed, then there

is no incentive for those who run it to
operate within any rules or to any laws.

[NEWS 1994] Local councils

say that the club was
not registered with

them as a cinema but would have required a
license if members of the public were paying to

watch films. The high death toll has inevitably
focused attention on safety precautions at

private clubs, but experts say its impossible
legislate against a determined arson attack.

Because they simply
don't have a license, it's simply a rogue

establishment and that's what this
was and that's why the fire exits were not

sufficient and why it was so difficult
for the people inside to get out and away

from the fire and to a degree, for the fire
brigade to get in and fight the blaze.

If you think about the dream city
cinema in 1910, how many licks of paint did

they put on there, how many layers of wallpaper
did they put? There would have been that, they

said there was lino on the floor. What probably
happened, was there was about 4 layers of lino

on the floor because they didn't bother ripping
it up, they just put it on there. It's called.

'Pyrolysis', where you get the decomposition of
paint or a sofa, when it's subjected to extensive

heat, flammable gases come up, poisonous flammable
gases come up and you can't see them, but

they all go up into the ceiling level, hence
sometimes when you enter a compartment, you have

'dancing angels' on the ceiling, flames on the
ceiling which is a part of the flammable gases.

You had people choosing
whether to stay in a burning smoke-filled

room or jump out a second-floor window.
Those sort of choices... just imagine the

terror, the fear that's going through
people's minds as they are trying to make

that decision quickly under pressure,
damned if you do and damned if you don't.

There was one detail I remember
of someone managing to survive by finding

a gap in the floorboard, putting his mouth
and nose over that gap to try and breathe in

clean air, and that saved his life, it was
lucky for him, good thinking but the majority

of the men who died, there was no escape
from what must have been the fire from hell.

The cinema showed gay porn in some sessions
and it was during one of those sessions

that the fire had taken place, this was the
reason for the Commander being out. The worry

was that at that time, there could have been
huge embarrassment, somebody say from a judiciary

or the government who might have been involved
in what went on there. Fortunately, that

wasn't the case, so we didn't have that added
dimension to the investigation, but we still

had nearly two dozen victims that were still
either dead or critically injured that needed

dealing with, needed identifying and who's families
needed to be informed and of course there was

this sensitivity because of the nature of the
event, around informing their families as well.

One of our first tasks was to find exactly
where they were being treated because there were

so many from this one incident, they had been
taken to hospitals across the London area.

Initially,
any fire scene investigation would

entail an external examination
of the premises, really to

determine whether it's safe to go inside, because fire scenes
are inherently rather unsafe places to be. We took advice

already from the fire service who had already entered and
donning the appropriate protective equipment such as boots and

hard hats, we entered to find that the fire appeared to have
started fairly low down and had spread up the staircase.

So, my initial thoughts were that we needed to cordon off
the hallway at the ground floor entrance and to undertake

a very quick, very immediate and detailed examination
of the hallway which is what we did. So, all entrance to

the building after that was via a ladder up to the first
floor. So, on examining the hallway, we found there was

very low-level damage from burning to the hall floor, and
the door itself, which was timber, was very deeply charred.

On clearing that flooring, it appeared to consist
of layers of old lino and on removing those

charred layers of lino, we got a very strong smell of
petrol. Indeed, on digging in the corner of the hallway

right next to the opening door, we found a melted
piece of red plastic which when we prized it from the

floor, turned out to be a melted petrol container and
that was the first piece of evidence that we uncovered.

The skill of a fire investigator is that although the fire was on 4
floors and contained numerous bodies and lots of burning in different

areas, the skill is to use one's knowledge, training and experience
to hone it down to a small area which I did very quickly. I was

able to determine that the fire had started in that hallway, we
very quickly examined that area and found the petrol, so I was able

to brief the police, including Colin that the fire appeared to be
very deliberate and determined act to start a fire in that building.

It was a really difficult
time that night, driving around essentially

most of the casualty departments in
North and East London and even out to.

Billericay to the burns unit. Meeting
people who were telling us how terrified

they'd been, how they had feared for their
lives and jumped from windows, struggled

through a burning building, the panic
that was there amongst all the people

who were in the cinema at the time.
One man said it was every man for himself

in there, he said people were walking over
other people to try to get out because

they knew if they didn't get out of
that building, they were going to die.

Across the 11 victims and the other men who were injured, so all the
victims of this crime, there was a real cross section of society. Their ages

ranged from their 20s to their 60s,
we had engineers, we had white collar

workers, we had single people,
we had out gay people, we had people who

were married and weren't out,
it was a real cross section. The fact that

they were in an unlicensed sex cinema
and watching pornographic films just

wasn't an issue, they realised it
wasn't an issue and we realised it

wasn't an issue, we were dealing with
something much more serious than that.

People who die of burns particularly more than
smoke inhalation, they can kind of present

as OK and it looks as if they are going to
live and survive and then the damage to their

body catches up with them. And overnight they were
dead. So, I ended up at St Pancras mortuary on the.

Sunday morning and we had 2 pathologists, 2
slabs, 2 photographers, 2 scenes of crime

officers and we did 11 post mortems in one
day. Not all of the men had identification on

them, it took us some while. One of them we
didn't identify for a couple of weeks, I think.

Mostly, we found out who they were, but, of course,
this was 1994 and gay men couldn't be as open

about their life and their sexuality in those
days, that's just how things sadly were.

In those days, there was no question of
DNA, so post mortems could be carried

out quite quickly, it wouldn't be
possible these days to do 11, even with 2

running parallel and it was kind of a surreal
experience in many ways, you get used to

dealing with death eventually, but this
was really the beginning of my career

as a murder squad detective and to have
so much of it in one place at one time.

These were just men who had been out
on a Saturday evening for entertainment,

and they ended up having to throw
themselves out of a building and died or

died of smoke inhalation. So, it was a
pretty sombre atmosphere doing that.

It was pretty unusual, when I went to
do that days duty, I knew it was going

to be unpleasant, I deliberately put on
an old pair of jeans and an old jumper

and after we'd done these 11 post mortems,
the clothes had the stench of

death, the smell of the fire on them. I
knew that no matter how many times I

washed them, they'd still have that smell,
I'd know it was there, I'd think

it was there even if it really wasn't.
They would always be a reminder of that

particularly hairy day. It was the
only time I ever did this, but as soon

as I got home, I took the clothes
off and they went straight in the bin.

It was far beyond what even hardened detectives and hardened police
officers were used to, this scale of death in one incident like this, what

made it even more poignant I suppose,
was that myself and another officer

went around to the hospitals and
people had been taken to hospitals

all over London and slightly beyond
and we were trying to do a headcount

really of victims and of people
who were injured and who had died. A lot

of the deaths were still alive
that Saturday evening, a lot of the people

who died, took some hours
to die and were conscious, we were talking

to them and when we finally finished some hours in the morning, had a
few hours' sleep and came back again, we came to the news that those

people we had been sitting at the bedside talking to just a few hours
before had died. That's also something that we don't often encounter as

a murder detective, because normally by the time you
arrive, the deed has been done and someone has already died.

Certainly, my colleague at the time, it had
a real effect on him, he found it really

difficult to cope with work afterwards and he
didn't stay much longer in the police service.

Because I was able to
determine the apparent cause of the fire

very quickly, the police were able
to act very quickly. The trail as far as

the forensic evidence went, was
fairly cold. I could tell the police what

caused the fire, I could tell them it was
a petrol container, but that container

was too badly damaged to get any finger
prints or any forensic evidence from,

it was just almost completely melted. So,
from the prospective of something

linking us to the suspect or the
perpetrator, it was probably going to be very

difficult to actually identify anybody who
had been involved in that fire.

It turned out that there
as a member of the cinema club who

was known as 'Deaf Dave', he was
deaf-mute. He'd turned up on this Saturday

evening and asked to come in and
had had a bit of an altercation with the

person on the box office who said,
'It's gay films showing, you probably

won't like it, it's not what you
normally come for' and I don't think he

understood, there was a big argument,
he thought they weren't honouring his

membership and there was a bouncer
of sorts there and a bit of an altercation

with the bouncer and it might even be
that the bouncer has assaulted him.

In a temper and being drunk, he'd
gone off and got himself a can of petrol,

returned to the cinema, tipped the petrol
over the entrance and the stairwell inside, in

the lobby area, then set fire to the place and as
he left, he discarded the petrol can but it had

had somehow managed to prop open the front
door of the premises and that had the effect

of allowing the wind and oxygen to come in
and accelerate the flames and within moments,

literally within seconds, the building was
going up in flames. The people upstairs watching

films had no idea what was happening, the
perilous situation they were in and by the

time the fire took hold, it was too late for
virtually all of them to make their escape.

So, having found the petrol container,
they immediately canvassed all the

local gas stations to see if anyone had bought
a container and a small amount of petrol.

What I would appeal
for is anybody who saw a man carrying

a petrol can similar to this one here,
which is a plastic can, which

would carry about 5 litres of petrol,
anybody who saw that man walking

towards the premises in St John
Street at about 5.30 on Saturday evening.

CCTV at the local Texaco petrol station showed a man coming
in and buying a can and a gallon of petrol at just about

the right time, around 20 minutes after the incident had happened,
the argument with the bouncer and person who was at the ticket

office. So, clearly that was a man and although the club itself
didn't have particularly good records of membership, again because

it didn't have to because it wasn't licensed. It didn't take
very long for inquiries to establish that this was David Lauwers.

He was quite an interesting character, he was a
tailors cutter, obviously he had this disability

of his hearing and speech,
he had originally come

from Scotland and settled in,
in North London and

he had a few previous convictions, they weren't
for anything major, interestingly one of them was

for causing criminal damage and when it was looked
into, he caused that criminal damage by fire.

It's hard to imagine that 11
people could die in a cinema fire which had

been deliberately started by someone and there
not being a massive public outrage. There was

far more publicity about the Deptford fire than
there ever was about the fire at the Dream.

City cinema in Clerkenwell, I think we
published on the front page, the following day.

If this happened in a local cinema where
11 members of the public died as a result

of smoke inhalation, burns or whatever, it
would be huge news and it would dominate

the papers for days on end. People would
want to know who was there, people would

want to know all about the offender and
certainly the trigger point that led to them

setting alight to the cinema. I think that
the case would have been followed in great

detail, yet in this instance there was very
little publicity in terms of the effect

of what happened and the devastating
consequences to the families of all those

victims, was this because the men were gay?
Because they were attending a gay cinema?

How many of those men,
how many of the victims

were out at the
time? I know the answer to that, and it

was not all of them. So,
I think trying to play it a little

bit downbeat and trying to keep it almost
below the surface

was deliberate to try and spare the sensitivities of
some of the families of those who died or were injured.

But I really do think that that's meant that this event doesn't
have the place or the infamy in London history as it deserves.

1994 a lot of people were still
dying from HIV and by that time, were cruel

attitudes, initially from some people about
that horrible disease has changed as people have

realised that people of the likes of Magic
Johnson, Freddie Mercury, Rock Hudson, people who

were loved and public figures, succumbed to this
disease, many people knew people who had died

from being HIV positive, I certainly had. I'm
not sure that the comparative lack of publicity

over what happened at the Dream City was anything
to do with societal homophobia or attitudes

within the media, this was 1994, it wasn't 1974
and if you think about what happened 5 years

later, the Admiral Duncan gay pub, a nail bomb
went off, there was a huge amount of publicity.

I think this was more to do with the fact that
the men were at a cinema which specialised in

pornographic films, it was considered to be
sleazy, there was an element of embarrassment and

whether that would still be the case today, I
don't know but none of the victims were identified.

In that respect, they were almost written
about as statistics rather than human beings.

I think the variety, the backgrounds and ages of
these men kind of made us even more determined that we

weren't going to let their personal details leak out to the
media, because there were families, wives, children who would

have been perhaps embarrassed and really quite offended had
the details became known and there was no need to, it would

have been gratuitous to give the names to the media just
for the sake of it, we didn't need to for the investigation.

We had to handle any publicity around this case with
a great deal of sensitivity because it was entirely

possible that their family or friends, who we'd want
to contact, to tell them about their death or to

tell them they are in hospital, for the ones that
survived. We didn't want at the same time to be saying,

'You know that fire at the gay cinema? With the
pornographic films? Well, your loved one or your

friend has died there'. Because you just felt that
would be applying 2 levels of pain for the family and

friends and so whereas we would usually go to the
press, the local media in London to try and identify

these people and get people to come forward and tell
us who they were, we were reluctant to do that, we

didn't want to do that because we had this anonymity
aspect that we wanted somehow to try to preserve.

When I look back on it all these years later, I think
I realise we were a little bit ahead of the game

in some ways, I think we dealt with it with a degree
of sensitivity and understanding that perhaps wasn't

typical of the establishment, the authorities or the
police at that time, but we kind of saw that there was

this issue, and we took great pains to make sure we
didn't cause additional offence or upset for people.

Lauwers gave himself
up at Walthamstow Police Station, he went

in and said, 'I think you're looking for
me, I've done something silly'.

There was a sense of remorse
because Lauwers presumably having sobered

up and realised what he had done the next
day and handed himself over to the police.

In some ways
I think he was quite remorseful, I think

he did what he did on the
spur of the moment and he certainly didn't

really didn't think it through and what
the effects might be, and he was quite

shocked and surprised that his action
had caused the death of 11 other men.

I don't think we know that he
understood and knew that it was gay porn

day, I think it was a communication
failure, if that had been able

to be communicated to him properly,
when he first went there, it might

very well be that he would
have just gone away and came back later.

The killer himself, Lauwers, was given anonymity by the court
from his image ever being put out into the media, so the

public, to this day still don't know who he was and what he actually
did. So, in that regard, to my mind, he escaped public accountability.

Whether this was almost a tit for tat, evened up and be
even handed to both sides as it were, I don't know but

again I think this has contributed to the fact that this is a
really serious case, 11 victims which hardly anybody knows about.

The cinemas doorman told the court that half
an hour before the fire started, he had a row

with a man who tried to get in free claiming he'd paid
earlier, the doorman admitted headbutting the man and

throwing him out. David Lauwers a 35-year-old cloth
cutter admits he was the man attacked but denies starting

the blaze. Lauwers, who has a hearing problem, had the
evidence translated into sign language by an interpreter.

The prosecution says that Lauwers, in an act of revenge for the
attack, went to a nearby garage, bought a can of petrol and returned

to the building and set it alight. Witnesses whose identities are
protected by the courts, told how pandemonium broke out, up to 30 men

were trapped upstairs, some found that windows were boarded up to
keep the cinema in darkness, another found a door locked. Four men

jumped or fell to the pavement. Lauwers denies 3 sample charges for
murder and 2 of arson. The case is expected to last a fortnight.

David Lauwers is a little bit unusual in that most homicide
cases, murder and manslaughter cases are fought, people

don't plead guilty, there's just not much in it for them. David
Lauwers is unusual in that he pleaded guilty to manslaughter

and I think it's true that he was genuinely remorseful about
what he had done, in a fit of anger, he'd set this fire, just

really to make a point without any idea that the consequences
would be that 11 people lost their life as a result of what he did.

It's kind of unusual in some ways to see this level of remorse, he
volunteered himself to police as soon as he realised what he had done,

and he was in the media, he gave himself
up and came into the police station

and he said previously to one of
his friends, 'I could be on a murder

charge, I did that, but I
was just annoyed'. The fact that he showed

this remorse was evident in the
leniency of the sentence that he got. He

pleaded guilty to manslaughter and
he was sentenced to life with a

recommendation of serving at least
10 years before he applied for parole.

He pleaded guilty at court to manslaughter
and was given 10 years imprisonment,

a tariff of 10 years, that's less than a year for
every life, I'd say he got a very good result.

Given the change in attitudes
and change in legal attitudes over

the last 30 years, this crime would be
viewed very differently today. In 1994,

hate crime overall as a concept was in
its infancy and certainly in relation to

the LGBTQ community really wasn't on the
radar of the legal system. Now of course,

it's very different and I think these days
it would be such a massively aggravating

factor that even a defendant that gave
himself up and pleaded guilty which

are both things for which you get credit
when sentenced, would find himself

looking at a much difference sentence
than that which was received in this case.

From my perspective, seeing
the deceased bodies and I believe there

were 5 in one of the rooms, they would have
been burnt as well, very unpleasant, it's

horrible to see. You do get some incidents
that will stay with you forever. In the

80s and 90s we used to go out and have
a few beers after and get on with it. Now

the fire service have moved on considerably
and we have something called 'T.R.I.M.'

which is trauma, risk, information,
management, which offers you a referral to an

expert on mental health, we look after
each other very much. But back in the 90s,

those guys who went into the fire, they'd be
marked forever, they'll never forget that.

That cinema was a sleaze pit, it wasn't licensed which
is why, of course, there was no proper fire inspection.

Nowadays, people in a pornographic cinema, I think the attitudes
would be different. I don't think the courts would be so ready to

protect Lauwers from being publicly identified, I think his
photograph would have been released and people would have seen him

for what he was. This would have resulted in more publicity, a keener
and more great appreciation for the terrible tragedy it caused.

We always assumed that David Lauwers had
essentially lost his temper, was so annoyed that he

wasn't allowed in the cinema that he reacted by going
and buying some petrol and setting fire to it, just

out of temper. Now, sadly we will never be able to ask
him, he admitted that he did it, but the reason why

he did it, we don't know. He died in prison, so he
took the answer to that question to the grave with him.