Читать книгу Angels of Death - Emily Webb - Страница 9

I’m Roger. I’m one of the nurses and just, there was a fire and I just quickly just did what I can, get everyone out and the smoke is just overwhelming. But, you know, we got a lot of people out, so that’s the main thing.

These were the words of registered nurse Roger Dean, 35, to a television reporter soon after a fire ripped through the Quakers Hill Nursing Home in Sydney in the early hours of 18 November 2011.

The images of shocked, elderly residents – their faces smudged with ash – were distressing. The residents lay on ambulance stretchers, scared, wide eyes peering from behind oxygen masks and the layers of blankets that covered their fragile bodies.

Nurse Dean, who had only worked at the nursing home for two months, sat in a wheelchair as paramedics treated him with oxygen. Photos taken by the media throng showed Dean looking blankly at the scene from his wheelchair, his face obscured by an oxygen mask.

Dean had been a registered nurse since 1997 and had a decade of experience working within health facilities managed by New South Wales Health. He was born in Vietnam and came to Australia as a young boy. He started at Quakers Hill Nursing Home in September 2011 and worked two night shifts a week. Dean was on the cusp of completing a law degree that he had been studying via Macquarie University.

Later that day, it would become clear to detectives that Dean was also the person who had deliberately lit several fires at the nursing home which had resulted in the deaths of 11 elderly people.

On 17 November, the day before the horrific event, nursing staff conducted an audit of Schedule 8 drugs (also known as ‘drugs of dependence’ – prescription medicines that have a recognised therapeutic need but a higher risk of misuse, abuse and dependence) and discovered a large quantity of painkillers was missing. Sometime on his night shift, which started at 10.30pm on 16 November and ended at 7am the next day, Dean had stolen 237 Endone tablets and one Kapanol tablet. Both of these medications contain opiates and are used to relieve severe pain, mimicking the effects of morphine.

When the drugs were discovered missing, the clinical manager of the facility was called in and she did a re-audit, which confirmed the theft. The next step was to phone the police, which the clinical manager did at 10pm.

Dean started his new shift around 30 minutes later and at handover was told about the discovery of the missing drugs. At midnight, two police officers arrived to investigate the drug theft but they were called away to an urgent family violence incident soon after.

The clinical manager, who was still at the nursing home and waiting for the officers to return, had watched the CCTV footage and seen Dean enter the treatment room – where the Schedule 8 drugs were kept – 32 times over the course of his shift the previous evening. Hospital protocol dictates that no one should be alone in that room. However, when it became apparent that the police would not return that night, the manager left. It was 3.43am.

Dean knew he needed to create a diversion that would distract from his crime. If he was found out – and he knew he would be found out – his career as a nurse, and any chance to become a lawyer, would be gone. Armed with a cigarette lighter, Dean made his way to the A wing of the nursing home. He asked two of the staff members to go on a break to ensure he was alone. Dean knew there was no CCTV in the A2 wing of the hospital. He set fire to an empty bed then calmly walked on to the A1 ward entrance. 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 Webeck, whose mother Verna died in hospital, said her mother was able to speak to detectives from her bed but died soon after.

‘Shortly after that, mum’s body shut down and I never heard her voice again,’ Ms Webeck said. ‘For 11 days and nights I sat with mum watching her body decline. I would sing her the lullabies she would sing to me as a child.’

The daughter of 90-year-old victim Neeltje Valkay spoke to the ABC’s 7.30 Report for an episode that aired on 25 May 2013 – the week that Dean pleaded guilty. Elly Valkay spoke of her mother’s last days: ‘She knew I was there and she grabbed my hand. She held on very tight. And that was three days and it was horrible. The most terrible time. I still have nightmares.’

Dean was sentenced to life without the possibility of parole. In sentencing Dean, Judge Latham said the number of deaths alone was enough to put his offences in the ‘worst-case category’.

‘The fact that these murders arise out of the offender’s reckless indifference rather than an intention to kill or inflict grievous bodily harm does not detract from these principles,’ Judge Latham said.

‘The pain and terror experienced by all the victims must have been horrific. For those who were unable to move independently and who faced the prospect of being burned alive, or suffocated by smoke, a worse fate is difficult to imagine.’

While Judge Latham pronounced the sentence on Dean, the courtroom was packed with family, friends and supporters of the victims. They cried and applauded when the life sentence was announced.

Amanda Tucker, the granddaughter of victim Dorothy Sterling, said Dean had ruined her family’s happy memories of their gran.

‘Our memories aren’t of a sweet lady who passed away from natural causes. We had to give DNA to know that was our grandmother. He stole our memories,’ Ms Tucker told reporters following the sentencing hearing.

Joining Dean in the NSW prison system’s ‘never to be released’ category is fellow ex-nurse and marine Walter Marsh, who stabbed Michelle Beets to death outside her Sydney home.

Ms Beets, who was also a nurse, was Marsh’s manager at Royal North Shore Hospital. Marsh brutally slit Ms Beets’ throat and stabbed her because he was angry at her decision not to renew his contract in the emergency ward of the hospital. Marsh’s employment status affected his Australian work visa and without a job, he would have to return to the United States and pay child support to his ex-wife.

Almost a year after Dean’s sentencing, Anglican minister Geoff Bates, who knew Dean well, gave some insight into the notorious killer’s life before his horrible crime.

Mr Bates spoke to the Sydney Morning Herald for a first-person piece called ‘Night of Infamy’ (26 February 2014).

Bates said he had met Roger Dean in 2009 when the church door-knocked in the community and had encountered Dean French. Having shared a conversation with Mr French, the church members left some bible reading materials with him, which he later showed to Roger Dean. Dean found some connection with the tracts and started to attend church and some fellowship groups.

‘He was certainly unusual. He was noisy, and needy. And he was chaotic. I don’t think he was understood in his life, and I don’t think he understood himself,’ Mr Bates said.

‘I’ve seen the footage from the incident and in it he lights a fire the size of a 20-cent piece and moves on. It’s not as if he moved in with an AK-47 and shot those people. I would have thought murder was an intention to kill. Even people who light bushfires usually have the intention to harm. This doesn’t fit.

‘Dean’s actions were ordinary and the consequences were extraordinary: extraordinarily horrific. I think Dean got the right sentence. At the same time I don’t think he murdered anyone.’

Mr Bates applied his Christian beliefs and knowledge of Dean to try to make sense of the nurse’s actions… but how could anyone make sense of the selfishness and desperation that was in Dean’s mind that night?

However, Geoff Bates said he believed he had seen evil in Dean’s actions.

‘I’m convinced I’ve seen evil. In Western countries we don’t talk a lot about evil. It’s an old-fashioned notion. But I’ve seen it in the destruction caused on that day in 2011.’

In 2015 an inquest was held into the fire and the findings were damning of the operators of the nursing home.

It was revealed during the inquiry that Quakers Hill Nursing home did no employment or background checks on Roger Dean before they employed him. Dean had not included his most recent employer on his CV (St John of God Hospital in Sydney) and there was a reason.

The inquest revealed shocking details of Dean’s past employment record and past behaviour that infuriated the families and friends of the people he killed.

In another job, Dean had previously stalked a colleague and caused criminal damage to their car by pouring paint over it putting nails in the tyres. He had also turned up visibly drug-affected to a work shift and had to be sent home.

Among NSW deputy coroner Hugh Dillon’s findings was a recommendation for Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency (AHPRA) to set up a healthcare workers database that would include information about a person’s disciplinary history or drug or alcohol abuse that could affect patient and fellow staff safety.

There were many learnings from the inquiry for aged care operators. The Fire and Rescue Service of NSW (FRNSW) issued advice in the wake of its experience at the fire.

Based on the difficulties evacuating the residents from the Quakers Hill Fire, including corridors that were not clear, residents who’d hidden under beds and out of sight making it difficult to locate them and the fact that no call was made to Triple Zero (000) to confirm the fire in the first instance, the FRNSW issued advice to aged care operators after the inquest findings.

These included having a clear emergency plan that considered the ‘evacuation of non-ambulant patients, such as those connected to medical equipment’ and ‘In extreme situations residents may need to be carried or dragged to safety’.

The FRNSW also reinforced the urgency of calling 000 so the right resources could be sent to an incident. In the case of Quakers Hill, firefighters turned up under-resourced because the staff relied on the fire alarm and didn’t back it up with 000 to explain the situation further.

It was made devastatingly clear that the Quakers Hill staff were not adequately prepared to do a mass evacuation and the emergency plan did not adequately consider the complex needs of their residents – some were visually impaired, had dementia and limited mobility.

He also recommended better design for aged care facilities including adequate fire exits to accommodate hospital beds and corridors with enough space so rescuers and staff can evacuate people safely. A ramp installed at the Quakers Hill site caused problems for staff and fire fighters while trying to evacuate the residents; it was later discovered there was no permit issued for it to be installed.

In 2018 the families of the people killed by the blaze started by Dean launched a class action lawsuit against Opal Aged Care (formerly Domain Principal Group), the operators of the Quakers Hill Nursing Home.

A similar case to Roger Dean’s occurred in the United States where a healthcare worker was accused of starting a fire at an aged care facility. In 1976, a 21-year-old nursing assistant and housekeeper was charged with arson and murder after a fire tore through the Wincrest Nursing Home in Chicago, killing 23 people.

Denise Watson admitted to police that she started the fire when she dropped a match into a pile of clothes in a patient’s locker. The smoke from the fire in the room swept through the corridor and into the nursing home chapel a few doors away where 40 residents were celebrating Mass. The frail residents could not evacuate the chapel themselves and staff struggled to get everyone out safely. Most of the fatalities came from shock and smoke inhalation. The nursing home did not have an internal sprinkler system. It was discovered that not long before the blaze, Watson had been told by management that she was being fired from her position.

During the investigation, police discovered Watson had a history of being in close proximity to fires. As one officer put it, Watson had a ‘bad history of pyromania’. An arson investigator and fireman recognised her name as they scanned a list of employees of the nursing home. They had met Watson before.

In 1973 there was a fire at the house where she lived and it was declared arson by investigators. In 1974 there were three small fires in Watson’s apartment that investigators believed were ignited with nail polish remover. There was another fire in 1975 in the hospital room where Watson was a patient but her roommate told investigators that neither she nor Watson were in the room when the fire started.

The Wincrest Nursing Home fire was – and remains – one of the worst ever in Chicago and the 69 counts of murder that Watson was charged with were, at the time, the most counts of murder ever charged to a single defendant in the state’s history. (There were three separate murder counts for each individual death.)

The case looked like a slam-dunk for prosecutors and even Watson’s public defender, William Murphy, thought his client would surely be found guilty. However, his client told him that her confession came after hours of interrogation by police. Mr Murphy’s strategy was to discredit Watson’s confession and say that because she was so mentally fragile and tired she was prepared to confess to anything to get out of the interrogation room. He also had her testify in her own defence, thinking that she would make a favourable impression on the jury.

Watson was acquitted on all counts in November 1977 and a United Press International news report described that the young woman ‘screamed with joy, then collapsed, crying in her lawyer’s arms’. Her lawyer Mr Murphy had told the jury his client was ‘a young, nice girl’ and innocent of all the charges.