Original subtitles

Here, Police investigating last night's fire

at a sex cinema in London have confirmed

they're treating the case as murder.

I really don't think the fire at the Dream City cinema

is given as much attention and... and, sort of, sits

in the history of London as an event

of the magnitude that it was.

In general, forensic scientists do not like to have

too much information initially.

We like to work without 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 all the victims' families,

but with 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,

the deaths of 11 gay men in an arson attack, as this was,

would attract so little attention.

It was a crime of almost breathtaking...

The man who tried to kill her will never be free to harm again.

...targeted young women unable to defend themselves.

Colin Sutton was a Detective Chief Inspector

and senior investigating officer in the metropolitan police.

He let the investigations into some of the most complex

and high profile cases ever,

bringing dangerous criminals to justice.

He showed his cowardliness...

Another 146 victims...

In this series we will take you inside those cases

and show you how we caught these criminals

using nothing but pure detective work.

This is The Real Manhunter.

Now been found guilty on all 20...

The officer in charge described it as a senseless...

The life sentence may provide some closure

for his victim's families.

It was late in February in 1994,

I was divisional DI at Islington, I wasn't on call, I was at home.

It was a Saturday evening.

And I got a call from Eddie O'Connell,

who was my DCI at the time who only said,

"Can you come in?

"We've had a bit of a fire."

And that was the, you know,

the biggest understatements

I think I 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, no, we need you all in, it's...

"it's big, it's something that's gonna 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 Commander of the area, and that I thought,

"Oh, you know, this has got 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, it must be serious."

I remember him saying,

"I just worried there might be

"somebody famous like a politician or something involved in this."

And 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, sort of, the upper three storeys

of a terraced block with a shop beneath it.

And it was a cinema which specialised

in pornographic films, and it had caught fire.

My name is Bob Williams, 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.

The time of call was approximately 5:35

on that February afternoon

and the fire crews normally change crews

at 6:00 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 ie, 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, you know, 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.

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.

Number of fire brigades,

fire attenders,

the police, ambulance.

The ear-wiggers would have been all over that and that's how,

you know, the media would have, um, 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 pulled up in St John Street,

they would have seen a lot of smoke, a lot of flames.

Very few people are aware that here in 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 by a pager,

I responded to that, to find that there had been a fire

in 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 by 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,

eight people were killed and 16 seriously injured

when fire swept through the four-storey building.

They would see a number of people collapsed on the pavement

due to the fact that they had jumped

from the second and third 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 had 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 shop

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 three 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, with 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 the building was a very old building,

built in around 1910, it was a grade two listed building,

due to the very nature of the activities

that were going on there, it was very much very 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 learn more about what had gone on,

it proved that the incident was more complex

than we might even first have 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 premise.

When you think about an act called the 'Furnishings Act'

that came around in about 1988/1989

and the Furnishing Act for cinemas etcetera,

them 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.

And then 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, 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 that 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 etcetera,

that 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 five bodies were found.

They were still in situ when I arrived

and the first thing we tend to do is try to deal with the bodies,

examine them in detail, we bag them up.

And we get undertakers to remove the bodies at that stage,

so that 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 that also there were a number of injured

who had been taken to hospital and who...

it was really thought, might not make it.

So, the worry was, that it wasn't gonna be

one or two deaths, it was gonna be half a dozen,

or 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 of to what I'd found,

what I believed was the cause of the fire

and why the people have been trapped upstairs.

Some of the windows were actually boarded up,

to hide the illegal activities that were going on.

So, they couldn't just hang out the window anyway.

And 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 three or four lungfuls of thick black,

acrid, carcinogenic smoke

would normally cause a person to collapse,

and then as the fire 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 and escape.

From the minute it started,

to the minute I walked down

to my vehicle,

it was only about four minutes,

it went up very quick,

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.

And this is very often the case in fires,

very few people actually die of burns in fires,

probably 95% plus of fire fatalities are due to the toxic fumes

and the hot gases produced by the fire.

So, you will either breathe in very hot gases

which scorch the airways

and therefore effectively suffocates you

or you will 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 all died from the smoke that had spread upstairs.

It must have been, you know, absolutely horrific experience

to be in this place and trapped,

you know, the flames are 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 one that's suspicious

or involving fatalities.

But as soon as a fire is deemed to be suspicious,

then it's handed over to the police for a full investigation.

And 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.

The 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 it's impossible legislate

against a determined arson attack.

Because they simply don't have a license,

so it's simply a completely rogue establishment

and that's what this was

and that's why the fire exits were not sufficient

and why they're was so difficult for the people inside to get out

and away from the fire

and to a degree difficult for fire brigade

to get in to fight the blaze.

how many licks of paint did they put on there?

How many layers of wallpaper did they put?

So there would have been that,

they said there was lino on the floor.

What probably happened was there was about four 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,

and they all go up into the ceiling level,

hence sometimes when you enter a compartment,

you have got '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 of a second-floor window.

Those sort of choices...

just imagine the terror, and 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, quick thinking

but for 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 a 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

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 the 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.

But we took advice also 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 we needed

to cordon off the hallway at the ground floor entrance

and to undertake a very quick,

very immediate 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 and 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 numerous layers of old lino

and on removing those charred of 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.

Now the skill of a fire investigator

is although the fire was on four floors

and contained numerous bodies, lots of burning in different areas,

the skill is to use ones knowledge, training and experience

to hone it down to a small area which I did very quickly.

And 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 a very 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 burning...

a burning building,

the panic that was there

amongst all the people that were

in the cinema at the time.

It was kind of...

You know, one man said it was

every man for himself in there,

you know, 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 age ranges 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 died of burns particularly

more than smoke inhalation, they can kind of present as OK

and it looks as if they are going to...

they are going to live and survive and then the damage to their body,

sort of, catches up with them and overnight, they were dead.

So, I ended up at St Pancras mortuary

on the Sunday morning and we had two pathologists,

two slabs, two photographers, two scenes of crime officers

and we did all 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, because 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 mortem examinations could be carried out quite quickly,

it wouldn't be possible these days to do 11 in one day

even with two running in parallel.

But it was a kind of a surreal experience

in many ways, you know,

you get used to dealing with death eventually,

but this was really the beginning of my career as a murder detective

and to have so much of it in one place at one time.

And, you know, these were just men

that 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 pretty sombre kind of atmosphere doing that.

It was quite unusual, when I went to do that day's duty,

I knew it was gonna be unpleasant,

and 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 harrowing 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, sort of, hardened detectives

and hardened police officers were used to,

this scale of death in...in...

in one incident like this.

And what made it even more, sort of, poignant for us 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.

And 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, and we were talking to them.

And then when we finally finished some early hours in the morning,

and had a few hours' sleep and came back again,

we came back to the news that those people we had been

sitting at the bedside talking to just a few hours before had died.

And that's also something that you don't often encounter

as a murder detective,

because normally by the time you arrive,

the deed has been done and somebody has already died.

And it certainly had, you know, 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 then 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 far too badly damaged

to get any finger prints or other forensic evidence from,

it was just almost completely melted.

So, from the prospective of something at the scene

linking us to the suspect or the perpetrator,

it was probably gonna be very difficult

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

It turned out that there was a member of the cinema club

who was known as 'Deaf Dave', he was deaf-mute.

And he'd turned up on this Saturday evening

and asked to come in and had had a bit of a,

sort of a, an altercation

with the person on the box office

who said, "It's gay films

"at the moment that's showing,

"you know, you probably won't like it,

"it's not what you normally come for."

And I don't think he understood, and there was a big of an argument,

he thought they weren't honouring his membership

and there was a bouncer of sorts there

and there's 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.

Managed to somehow pop open the front door

to these premises and that had the effect

of allowing the wind and oxygen to come in

and accelerate the flames and within moments,

within seconds literally 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 that saw a man

carrying a petrol can similar to this one here,

which is a plastic can,

which would carry about five litres of petrol,

and anybody that saw that man walking towards the premises

in St John's 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,

about, sort of, 20 minutes after

the incident had happened with the...

the argument with the bouncer and person

who was at the ticket office.

So, it was... clearly that was a man

and although the club itself

didn't have particularly good records

of its 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,

he'd settled in... in North London

and he had a few previous convictions,

they weren't for anything major,

although 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 drove them to setting

alight to the cinema.

I think that the case would be 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?

That they were attending a gay cinema?

How many of those men, how many of the victims

were out at the time?

You know, 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, sort of,

keep it almost below the surface

was deliberate to try

and spare the sensitivities

of some of the families of those

who were died and injured.

But, I really do think that that's meant that this event

doesn't have a, sort of, place in the infamy of London history

that it probably deserves.

1994, a lot of people were still dying from HIV

and by that time, were some cruel attitudes,

initially from some people about that horrible disease

had changed as people realised that the likes of Magic Johnson,

Freddie Mercury, Rock Hudson,

people who were loved public figures,

succumbed to this disease, many people who knew someone

who had died from being HIV positive, I certainly did.

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

five years later, the Admiral Duncan gay pub,

a nail bomb went off, I mean,

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 almost a certain...

an element of embarrassment and whether that would still

be the case today, I do not 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 of 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 just give their names

to the media 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 their friends,

who we'd want to contact, to tell them about their death

or the fact that they are in hospital,

the ones that survived.

We didn't want at the same time to be saying,

"Oh, 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, sort of, applying two levels

of pain for the family and friends.

And so whereas we would usually go to the press,

to the local media in London to try to identify these people

and, you know, 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 to somehow to try to preserve.

When I look back on it

all these years later,

I think I realise that we were

a little bit ahead of the game

in some ways, I think we dealt with it

with a sensitivity and understanding

which 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

from handing himself over to the police.

And 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 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 issue,

communication failure,

if that had been able

to have been communicated to him properly,

when he first went there, it might 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 really know who he was

and what he actually did.

So, in that regard, to my mind, he escapes public accountability.

Whether this was, kind of a, almost a tit for tat.

It 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

with 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 was trying to get in free

claiming he'd paid earlier,

the doorman admitted head butting 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 then returned to the building and set it alight.

Witnesses whose identities have been protected by the court,

told how pandemonium broke out, up to 30 men were trapped upstairs,

some found windows boarded up to keep the cinema in darkness,

another found a door locked.

Four men jumped or fell to the pavement.

Lauwers denies three sample charges of murder and two 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,

because there's 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, he'd 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,

I mean, he volunteered himself to police

as soon as he realised what he had done

and he was in the media, he gave himself up,

he came into the police station

and he said previously to one of his friends,

"I could be on a murder charge for this,

"I did that, but I was, you know, I was just annoyed."

The fact that he showed this remorse

was evident in the leniency really of the sentence he got.

He pleaded guilty to manslaughter

and he was sentenced to life with a recommendation

of serving at least ten years before he applied for parole.

He pleaded guilty at court to manslaughter

and was given ten years imprisonment,

a tariff of ten years, 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 nearly 30 years,

this crime would be viewed very differently today.

In think 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 that these days

would be such a massively aggravating factor

that even a defendant who gave himself up

who pleaded guilty which are both things

for which you'll get credit when sentenced,

find himself looking at a much different sentence

than that that Lauwers received in this case.

From my perspective on seeing them deceased bodies

and I believe there were five in one of the rooms,

obviously, 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.

But now the fire service have moved on considerably

and we have something called 'TRIM'

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,

them guys who went in that fire, they'd be...

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, if people were in a pornographic cinema,

I think their 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 could have seen him for what he was.

This would have resulted in more publicity,

a keener and more greater appreciation

of the terrible tragedy which it caused.

We always assumed that David Lauwers

had just essentially lost his temper,

was so annoyed he wasn't allowed into the cinema

that he reacted by going and buying some petrol

and setting fire to it, just out of temper.

Of course, 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.

And he died in prison,

so he took the answer to that question

to the grave with him.