BY:DAN BOX
From:The Australian
AT MIDNIGHT, shortly before he lit the fires that would make him one of Australia's worst mass-murderers, Roger Dean opened the front door of the Quakers Hill Nursing Home to police investigating the theft of prescription drugs.
The 35-year-old nurse had stolen hundreds of oxycodone tablets -- powerful opiate-based painkillers -- from the western Sydney facility the night before, court documents state. While the theft had been discovered, no one yet knew he was involved.
Dean, who yesterday pleaded guilty to 11 murders and eight counts of grievous bodily harm relating to the blaze, is a Christian who told police "it was Satan" telling him to do it.
Prosecution documents tendered to the NSW Supreme Court, however, describe a different chain of events.
Arriving to start that night's shift in November 2011, Dean was handed a report on the missing medication. "As he read it, the accused's hands were shaking," another nurse noticed, the documents state.
Within hours, the police arrived, but were soon called away to a violent domestic assault. Convinced they were about to return, Dean took a cigarette lighter from the staff dining room. According to court documents, "he had armed himself with the means to set fire to the home".
As the senior nurse on duty, Dean knew there was no CCTV camera in the building's A2 wing. Entering this part of the building, he first set fire to a bed inside an unoccupied room. Minutes later, he set fire to another bed, this time inside a room containing two elderly pensioners, Dorothy Sterling and Dorothy Wu.
"Both these women were immobile and incapable of moving from their beds without assistance, which was known to the accused," the documents said. Both died.
Leaving the two women, Dean then began helping others among the home's elderly residents out of the building, actions that would briefly see him hailed as a hero.
Interviewed on the road outside, the documents show he told Network Seven: "Hi, I am Roger, I am one of the nurses. There was a fire and I just quickly did what I can to get everyone out and the smoke is just overwhelming, but we got a lot of people out, so that's the main thing."
What the TV audience did not know, court documents state, was that Dean was carrying two drug register books he had convinced firefighters to help him recover from inside the nursing home.
These records, which the prosecution "alleges he stole . . . as he knew that they would assist any investigation into his theft of the drugs", were subsequently destroyed, court documents state.
At first, Dean did not admit to police that he had lit the fires. Instead, after signing his initial witness statement, he asked to speak in private to two friends from his bible study group.
According to court documents, one of these friends asked him: "Did you do it?"
Dean replied: "Yes, I lit the fire."
"The accused lied to his friends about the reason for lighting the fire," the documents state.
Dean then took part in another police interview, saying "he wanted to light something as he had had severe nightmares and had tried to end his life".
"He further stated that in him doing this, it was Satan telling him to do it," the documents state.
Dean's toll of 11 victims places him ahead of Ivan Milat, who killed seven, and alongside the Snowtown killer John Justin Bunting, also convicted of killing 11 people.
In comparison, Martin Bryant killed 35 during the 1996 Port Arthur massacre. Crown prosecutor Mark Tedeschi QC yesterday told the court that witness evidence would be tendered at a future hearing about Dean's "state of mind".
The nurse's decision to plead guilty, delivered in a near-whisper yesterday in the NSW Supreme Court, caused many of his victim's families to cry openly inside the courtroom. Speaking after the brief hearing, Elly Valkay, whose 90-year-old mother Neeltja was among those who died, said she had no feelings towards the killer.
"There's been a lot of upheaval in our family because we miss her so much," Ms Valkay said.
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