Sword and Scale Nightmares - Hell

Episode Date: August 21, 2024

88 elderly lives are in peril after the Quaker’s Hill Nursing Home goes up in flames. Who started the fire, and why? This is the story of one of Australia’s worst mass murderers.

Hey, Sword and Scale fans, it's Ryan Williams, host of Sword and Scale Daily, and I'm here to tell you that we are back. That's right, we're back at it five days a week, bringing you the hottest true crime stories from around the country and around the globe. Now you can find Sword and Scale Daily at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart Radio, or wherever you get your podcasts. Sword and Scale Daily, true crime stories, five days a week. We'll stores you love. You can even stack sales on top of cash back. Just start your shopping with Rakuten to save money at over 750 stores. Join for

free at rakuten.ca or get the Rakuten app. That's R-A-K-U-T-E-N. There's a type of intruder that moves with an almost supernatural speed. It's not exactly alive, and yet, with every breath of oxygen it takes, it grows. It has no hands, but tears through furniture and walls. And though it has no mouth, if it drinks, it dies. But until it's put down, it will take whatever it wants, including you. It doesn't matter if you know where you are. It will obscure your exits and disorient you, creep up on you.

Your cries for help will mean nothing as you slowly suffocate, reaching through the darkness for help that is incoming and wondering if that growing bright light ahead of you will will burn even hotter. Welcome to Sword and Scale Nightmares. True crime for bedtime. Where nightmare begins now. The Quaker Hill Nursing Home in New South Wales, Australia is responsible for 88 souls on the morning of November 18, 2011. The patients living here are elderly, many of them bedridden. They might look like your grandmother or your grandfather suffering from dementia. Some of the residents have amputated limbs or in some cases intellectual

disabilities that make it impossible for them to take care of themselves. It's 4.50 a.m. and most of them are asleep, but unbeknownst to anyone in the facility, a silent killer has begun stalking the halls. Thick, billowing smoke replaces the cool air, accompanied by a putrid smell that will not go away. The head nurse Roger Dean is frantically running past the front desk, elbow covering his mouth. He has a yellow bag slung over his shoulder as he races from room to room. As the fire alarms blair, Roger enters a room with four patients, one of whom has a broken hip and another is paralyzed. A third woman is being treated for emphysema, but she's easier to

maneuver and Roger gets her outside, informing her that help is on the way. At 4.53 a.m., local firefighters are alerted of the blaze. I won't say the senior citizens at the nursing home are lucky, but fortunately for them, the recently constructed fire station is extremely close by, located within half a mile. There are two crews on the ground within six minutes. Unfortunately, emergency services have no idea how many lives are at risk or where anyone is located. They also do not know the source of the flames, which continue to grow with every passing minute.

Eventually the media arrives, snapping pictures of the chaos for their clickbait pieces, including one of the nurse, Roger Dean, seated in a folding chair and being provided with oxygen via a face mask. He's an odd, effeminate 35-year-old man with spiky black hair that's been dyed red at the tips. Roger also talks with the Channel 7 news crew saying quote, There was a fire and I just quickly did what I can to 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. There's still probably a few people and the people are trying their best to get everyone out at the moment. Yeah.

End quote. He tries to shrug it off like a hero would. and the people are trying their best to get everyone out at the moment. Yeah." He tries to shrug it off like a hero would. The whole aw shucks, just trying to do my part thing. But he looks anxious. Because there's two things that Roger Dean doesn't tell Channel 7 News. The first and probably the most important is that... He's the one who caused the fire. And an even worse secret to keep from everyone is that...

He didn't just light one fire. He intentionally... Started two. started too. When the first team of firefighters enters the Quaker Hill nursing home in New South Wales, Australia, they are immediately enveloped by blinding black smoke. There is, simply put, zero visibility, and very little can be heard above the sounds of breathing and respirators. The rescue team has no idea how many people are inside, and they are forced to crawl on their hands and knees from room to room, feeling the walls with their hands reaching over beds and onto cabinets where people may have gone to hide from the

growing blaze. Some of the patients here have Alzheimer's, others are blind, confined to wheelchairs and beds. All of them are frail and in various states of confusion and shock as others stumble around in their hospital pajamas. Early on in the rescue, emergency crews try to wheel the beds out of a side exit, but the nearest ramp had been built illegally and without proper approvals. It's too narrow and the handrails immediately jam up the first bed. They have to try to find another way out.

While the facilities have fire extinguishers and fire doors, they do not have overhead sprinklers, as required by law. So now, smoke fills the ceiling cavity, and the fire spreads to the roof. Down below, furniture made from materials banned in the United States and Great Britain make for explosive kindling, and more toxins fill the air as plastics and metals and vinyl begin to melt. And then, there's the matter of the second fire. By the time it's discovered in room

A1, not to be confused with the delicious steak sauce, it has reached temperatures higher than a staggering 1800 degrees Fahrenheit. The painted hallways leading up to the room are bubbling and boiling, and the source of a fire is hot enough to break the rescue crew's thermal imaging equipment. It's eventually learned that the two bedridden patients sleeping in room A1 were among the first to die. The exact details of a third on-site death are more difficult to discern. By the time the fires had been extinguished, the parking lot had become a triage center,

as burned and confused senior citizens were hosed down and treated for injuries. In total, 32 people were taken to various hospitals, many of them sent to intensive care to be treated for smoke inhalation and severe blisters and burns. Eight of those people later died in the hospital, or at hospital as you Australians like to say, including one of the first women to be rescued, whose bed was directly under where part of the ceiling had collapsed. She never regained consciousness. There were certainly incredible acts of bravery during the rescue, including two officers

who went into the fire without protective equipment and still managed to save lives. But floating in the background, watching the flames, and occasionally stopping to comfort an injured patient was the person who secretly started it all, Roger Dean. After his interview with Channel 7 News, Roger stepped away from the scene on foot, but then returned shortly after. Roger though wasn't interested in saving anyone else of course, only himself. And the only way to do that was to get back inside the scene of the crime. Security camera footage then shows Roger talking with firefighters, asking them to let him back inside until shockingly they

do. They casually escort Roger as he goes behind the front desk privately filling his yellow shoulder bag with important evidence. Evidence of an entirely different crime. One he committed just hours before setting the fires that permanently devastated hundreds of lives. Families of the victims were rightfully upset at the management behind the Quakers' Hill nursing home. The faulty ramp and lack of fire sprinklers were one thing, but how on earth had they

hired Roger Dean and put him in charge of an unsupervised night shift? Reports suggest that Roger did pass a police check, but he did not undergo any mental health assessment. It also appeared that he lied on his resume and no one looked into his past work references. Because you know what? Nobody wants to do their job anymore. If HR had done their job, they would have noticed some unsettling behavior. Notably, back in 2007, Roger resigned from his post at St. George Hospital after claims that he threw paint on a supervisor's car and put nails in the tires. Sounds like a hinged individual, the kind you'd like to hire. And to add to that, just a couple of months before being hired at Quakers Hill, Roger

was suspended from his previous job at St. John of God Hospital after claims from a patient that he was completely drug-addled while trying to dispense medication. According to the claim, he struggled to speak and allegedly had white froth foaming around his mouth. On November 16, 2011, just 24 hours before the fire, Roger Dean arrives for his scheduled night shift. He is unsupervised and spends a large part of his shift going back and forth between his desk and one particular

room. It is not a patient's room, but rather the room where all of the facility's addictive medications are stored. Internal cameras capture Roger visiting this locked room 36 times in a single shift. Over the course of this time, Roger steals 237 tablets of a painkiller called Endone. I swear to God, it's called Endone. End-one is how it's spelled. End-one is what they called this painkiller. I swear to God, I'm not making this up.

This is real life, supposedly. It's essentially oxycodone with a morphine base. And the amount he steals can be obtained with a prescription for well under a hundred bucks. A Benji. But like all addiction-fueled decisions, this is not a very well-planned crime. Roger Dean is not a mastermind criminal. When Roger starts his shift the following night on November 17th, he's approached by the management who questioned him about the missing medication. This is a medical facility after all. And a simple

auditing of the log books earlier that afternoon reveals a bunch of drugs went missing overnight. Police arrive to talk to Roger about the situation, but he plays dumb and claims to have no clue what could have happened. Though he seems incredibly suspicious, the police are eventually called away and no further action is taken. Roger continues his shift late into the night, once again left unsupervised, only this time anxiously reeling about being so close to caught. He knows it's only a matter of time before he's figured out for good and his narcissistic tendencies take

over to find some way to cover his tracks and in doing so destroy the evidence of his very stupid crime. It's now the early morning hours of November 18th and by this time tomorrow, Roger will not have a job unless he acts very quickly. He approaches two junior nurses with an odd request. He wants them both to take an early break and at exactly the same time. The same internal cameras that taped Roger going into the locked storage room the previous shift were now recording footage of him walking in and

out of several rooms within the ward. He's equipped with a stolen cigarette lighter and steps into a room not currently being occupied. In these quiet moments, it's not too late back, but a slide of the thumb changes everything as a spark becomes a tiny flame and the lighter makes contact with the sheets of an empty bed. The flames appear to dance as they grow, but it all seems manageable. Roger enters another room to bedridden elderly women. Patients he has known and personally interacted with are fast asleep. Roger later admits that he knows they are there in the room as he sets fire to a third empty bed, saying nothing to them

as he returns to the lobby and just keeps walking. It should be noted that while Roger's confession was that he lit one fire in an empty room and one fire in an occupied room, a chief fire investigator stated later that Roger may have actually lit two beds on fire in the second occupied room. This was theorized after superintendents tried recreating the conditions of the fire. The only way to generate the temperatures approaching 2,000 degrees was to have two fires rolling in a specially constructed room.

This is a small but chilling detail, as it would indicate that Roger not only set fire to empty beds, but he may have also directly lit a bed containing a sleeping and helpless individual. As the fires obliterated the lives of these two women, As the fires obliterated the lives of these two women and Began to amass horrendous volumes of smoke that would result in many more deaths Roger was outside Talking with Channel 7 news about his heroic efforts to get as many people out as he could Which was of course? total bullshit

It looked like World War three in the parking lot, with bodies scattered everywhere as delirious and confused senior citizens, many of whom were already suffering from debilitating mental illness, were being shipped off to various hospitals and churches for treatment. Staff members were trying to account for every patient. Frantic families who received early morning emergency phone calls were trying to locate their loved ones. Strangers from the surrounding neighborhood came out

to help where they could. And yet, throughout the pandemonium, Roger was wasting firefighters precious time and resources to help him get back inside the charred building. Why, you may ask? While it would seem the whole purpose of the fire was to destroy the evidence of his drug theft, during the panic of the growing fire, he left the most important piece of evidence behind. The drug registration log books. After the firefighters allowed him to enter the building and unknowingly assisted him in accomplishing his goal, Roger left the scene of the crime and headed home where he

shredded the contents of the log books. And just like a guilty serial killer, his next stop was a dumpster at a nearby shopping village to quietly abandon the paper remains. Driven by the guilt of what he'd done, or perhaps wanting to make it look like he was the hero of the story, Roger then returned to the Quakers Hill nursing home to comfort some of the evacuated patients. Fortunately for police, it meant their key suspect, who they were already confident had stolen drugs the previous night, was easily taken into custody.

On the same afternoon the fires were set, Roger confessed to everything that he had done. Here is an edited version of his statements. I'll spare you the Aussie, that's not a knife accent. I just wanted to set a light to something. It just so happens there was an empty bed and I did it to that. I used a cigarette lighter and lit an empty bed and it got out of control and I got really scared because I didn't think it would spread so quickly. It started just as a small flame and I thought, that's okay.

Like that's containable. I didn't expect it to be so big. It was just something stupid. Something I wish I'd never done. Even more unsettling than that, he also told police, in a way, me deciding to do that was, I mean, you won't believe it, but it was like Satan saying to me that it's the right thing to do. I love the residents very much and I have a very good rapport with them. So I feel extremely bad and I just feel evil. Then I'm corrupted with evil thoughts that made me do that. What is it about religious symbolism that makes us forget about all accountability surrounding our own actions

Urbana, Olympia Doris Beck Lola Bennett Caesar Galea Reginald Green Alma Smith Dorothy Sterling Neil J. Valque

Verna Webe, Ella Wood, and Dorothy Wu. Yes, these were all people in their 70s, 80s, and 90s in the final phases of their lives, but they did not deserve to die like this. Their family members didn't deserve to watch their relatives have soot pumped from their lungs to see the horror of their ailing parents' eyes as they struggled to breathe, flesh singed or burned away. This is the face of true evil and not some figment of your imagination called Satan. This is something inside of humanity.

An evil that lurks within. At the trial, one woman talked about singing lullabies to her mom every day for 11 days until she ultimately passed away. Another described how before her father died at the hospital, he coughed up thick black tar and screamed for help as he traumatically kept experiencing the feeling of being stuck in a room on fire. Imagine that being the end of your father's life, or your mother's, or your grandmother's. Roger Dean was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. At his sentencing, one of the victims' relatives passed out and had to be removed from the

courtroom. Many family members cheered and cried at the fact that Roger would never be released from prison, while others shouted, Rod in hell, and you'll get yours, you son of a bitch, as Roger was escorted out of the room. Roger would later lose an appeal in December of 2015, arguing that his sentence was excessive and that he couldn't possibly have foreseen that his actions would have caused so much destruction and ended so many lives. Hey action, meet consequences. That's a meme that should proliferate probably

a bit more in today's society. Your actions have real consequences. No matter how dumb you are. To this day, Roger Dean is still considered to be one of Australia's worst mass murderers. If you can really quantify such a thing. Not to minimize his actions, but it's clear to me that there's yet another tragedy fueling the fire of the more obvious tragedy. Another silent killer that's been hovering around over this story like a toxic cloud, and we still haven't mentioned it. I'm speaking, of course, about addiction.

Like a fire, it grows in disorient. It demands constant attention. And will not be stopped until it consumes everything. If you enjoyed the show please consider joining PLUS at swordandscale.com slash PLUS but if you can't consider leaving us a positive review on your preferred listening platform. Sweet dreams and good night.