Original subtitles

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.