Inside the mind of an arsonist

Updated

A menace or simply misunderstood? What motivated Brendan Sokaluk to light one of Australia's deadliest bushfires on the hottest day of the year, resulting in the deaths of 11 people?

For Shirley and Bill Gibson, February 7, 2009, was just another hot summer's Saturday as they sheltered from baking temperatures in the cool interior of the home they loved in Gippsland, Victoria.

"We had five-and-a-half acres at Hazelwood South. We had a lovely old home and we'd done a lot to it and had a lot of fun doing it," she said.

The stillness of the afternoon was shattered when a neighbour burst in. "He said, 'You've gotta get out. The fire's up the road'," Ms Gibson recalls.

That fire was part of the worst bushfires in Australia's living memory — Black Saturday.

As the Gibsons packed what they could into their car, one of their sons, Colin, came up the driveway, intent on protecting their home from the blaze that was less than a kilometre away. Bill, terrified about his safety, ordered him off the property but Colin refused to leave.

Soon, another son, David, joined Colin and the pair worked through the afternoon to defend the family home while their parents waited at David's house.

"David rang and told us that Colin had filled the gutters and put wet towels over the windows," Ms Gibson recalls.

"He says, 'The house is safe, Mum, don't worry about it'. The boys kept ringing. Every time he hung up he said, 'I love you, Mum'."

Was the arsonist putting on an act?

Five days after the fires, police interviewed Brendan Sokaluk in his modest brick-veneer home in the Latrobe Valley town of Churchill.

Sokaluk, 39, wore a khaki beanie, sweater and shorts and stood with his hands in his pockets as an arson squad detective ran through a series of pro-forma questions.

Just minutes before, detectives had made small talk with Sokaluk. But now with the camera running, he seemed a different person.

"Can you state your name, age and date of birth?" Detective Senior Sergeant Adam Shoesmith asked.

"Brendan. Age, um …" Sokaluk paused and pulled a face before finally replying, "30-something or other".

"As soon as we turned the camera on, Brendan's demeanour changed," Inspector Paul Bertoncello recalls.

Sokaluk, shifting uneasily, spoke more slowly than he had earlier and at one point asked a question that floored the detectives.

"So who's the bad man in the suit?" the police tape shows him asking.

It was almost as though he was putting on an act.

The 'warring narratives' of Sokaluk

In April 2012, just over three years after that interview, Sokaluk was sentenced to 17 years and nine months in jail for killing 10 people by deliberately lighting a bushfire on Black Saturday.

But mystery that emerged during that first interview remains: who is Brendan Sokaluk?

Following his arrest he was diagnosed with autism and a borderline intellectual disability, but when he lit two fires outside Churchill, did he grasp the potential impact of his actions? And afterwards, did he feel genuine remorse?

Chloe Hooper, the author of a book about the Churchill fire, The Arsonist, describes the "warring narrative" around Sokaluk.

"On the one hand there was this [view of him as a] cunning serial offender, and on the other this hapless naif, caught up in events beyond his control," Hooper says.

"I think it's entirely possible that both versions were true — that here was this man who was both cunning and naive, guileless and full of guile, innocent and a fiend."

Victim or menace?

Sokaluk had always been different. He was slow, struggled to make friends and as a child he was bullied mercilessly. When his parents finally pulled him from school in year 11, he could barely read or write.

He joined the Churchill CFA as a volunteer but before long was dismissed.

"There were suspicions that Brendan was appearing at fires he couldn't have known about and that he was perhaps deliberately lighting them," Hooper says.

He eventually got a job as a gardener at a local university campus through a disability scheme.

He later told police his colleagues treated him as "their punching bag", but his colleagues found him difficult to work with.

"The other gardeners were scared of him," says Peter Townsend, who worked with Sokaluk.

There was talk about people's cars being keyed, or other forms of retaliation.

Townsend believes there was an element of cunning in Sokaluk's behaviour.

"I said to Brendan on one occasion, 'You don't seem too dumb to me'. And he goes, 'Oh, I'm all right. Sometimes I've got to be assessed. You go in there and you slobber and you dribble and talk rubbish and they think you're worse than what you are. So, I get all the benefits that way'," Townsend says.

According to Hooper it was Sokaluk's social abilities and coping mechanisms that were the problem.

"It's very difficult to say whether or not Brendan was a victim or a menace," Hooper says.

"Certainly he was profoundly misunderstood."

In mid-2006, after 18 years at the university and an escalating dispute with his supervisor, Sokaluk took stress leave and did not return to work.

His life contracted further. He would spend hours driving the backroads looking for scrap metal — some of which he would burn in his backyard.

"Some of the neighbours felt that these fires were getting bigger," Hooper says.

"On New Year's Eve, some people at a party within the neighbourhood observed a fire that was, they claimed, about 5 feet high in the back garden.

"One man left the party to go and speak to Brendan and say, 'Hey mate, this is crazy. You can't have a fire of this size in your back garden'."

The man claimed Brendan stood staring at the flames and didn't respond.

Black Saturday

On Saturday, February 7, 2009, as the temperature climbed towards 46 degrees Celsius, Sokaluk and his father went shopping and laid some bets at the TAB. As they drove home, they stopped to watch the local CFA put out a grass fire.

Sokaluk's car, a 1974 HJ Holden, was starting to play up. He dropped his father home and told him he was going to visit a friend in the hills. His father told him to go home and stay there.

At home, Sokaluk changed into sturdier boots and drove to the local IGA, where he bought a pack of cigarettes. It was 1:16pm.

By 1:30pm witnesses noted two fires burning in a eucalypt plantation on Glendonald Road, six to eight minutes' drive from the IGA.

At 1:32pm Brendan also called triple-0 to report the fire.

"It meant he had been close to the area of origin within moments of the fire starting," Hooper says.

As the afternoon wore on, Sokaluk seemed to be everywhere. His car broke down on Glendonald Road sometime before 2pm and, after he abandoned it, some locals gave him a lift back into Churchill.

"Neighbours saw him shortly afterwards sitting on his roof looking out at the hills where the fire was burning," Hooper says.

"They claimed he was scowling down at them."

Then he picked up his dog and walked back into the fire zone.

'The hero' who comes to save the day

Late in the afternoon, Sokaluk and his dog appeared from nowhere at the property of Tony Ferguson, in the hills outside Churchill.

He and his son-in-law Liam were defending the house against the firestorm that had descended following a wind change.

No-one knew who the man with the dog was, but for the next few hours, Sokaluk would help the Fergusons defend their house, moving hoses around, an extra pair of hands.

But as they got the fire under control it dawned on them how strange it was that someone would appear in such dangerous conditions.

When the CFA arrived some hours later, Tony asked them to take Sokaluk away from the property.

Paul Read, an arson expert from Monash University, has a theory:

"He turned up at the Fergusons' property and offered to assist, inserting himself into the story, not as the perpetrator, but as the hero who comes to save the day."

Meanwhile, Shirley Gibson, sheltering with her husband at their son's home, sensed something was wrong.

Before the wind change, one of her sons had called to say everything was OK, but he and his brother still hadn't turned up.

"I said to Bill, 'The boys are dead'," Shirley recalls.

"And he said, 'Don't be stupid'. And I said, 'Yes they are; they wouldn't leave me this long without telling me that they were safe'. And I knew they'd gone. I knew at nine o'clock they'd gone."

Neighbours would later tell Shirley and Bill that their home had imploded from the ferocity of the fire.

A deliberate act

In the days after the fire, arson squad detectives quickly established that the fires had been lit in two locations. This led them to conclude it was deliberately lit. And one name came up again and again: Brendan Sokaluk.

"There was no one witness who saw Brendan in the bush leaning down and lighting a fire," Inspector Bertoncello says.

"All in all, there were about 160 witnesses who had something to do with Brendan's movements on the day, and every one of them in a chain delivered a very, very strong circumstantial case."

In police interviews after Sokaluk's arrest, he would say that he had lit the fires, but accidentally.

He said he was smoking a cigarette and a burning piece fell off and onto the car floor. He picked it up with a paper serviette which he then threw out the window.

"I did a bad thing and I'm shit-scared," he said.

"I panicked and I called triple-0, told 'em it was a big fire and stuff and I panicked. I didn't mean any of this to happen.

"I thought it was out when I threw it out, the paper and shit out the window. Now, I've got to put up with it for the rest of my life and it makes me sad."

Sokaluk stuck stubbornly to this version of events, but with clear evidence that the fire started in two locations, police dismissed the possibility the fire was lit by accident.

Sokaluk was charged with 10 counts of arson causing death.

'I have forgiven him'

When Colin and David Gibson died in the fires, their mother Shirley Gibson could not contain her rage.

Hooper, who has grown close to her during the process of writing her book, says in the days following Sokaluk's arrest, she even begged somebody to lend her a gun.

Ten years later, Shirley can address her emotions with equanimity.

"I hated him for a good while afterwards," she says.

"And Bill and I sat talking one day and I said, 'We can't hate him. It's only screwing us up. It's only making us feel lousy'.

"And over a period of time, I thought about Brendan. He didn't really mean to kill my boys. He didn't mean to kill any of those people.

"And I know now that I have forgiven him. In my own heart I know I've forgiven him, and I know if I met him, I would probably even shake his hand."

Others, however, are not so willing to give Sokaluk the benefit of the doubt.

"I will never forgive him," Mr Townsend says.

"Considering that he never, ever said he was sorry, and never, ever said that he actually did it.

"I hope he doesn't come back here for his own safety, and I don't ever want to see him again."

What makes an arsonist?

After the Black Saturday bushfires, Dr Read helped set up the National Centre for Research in Bushfire and Arson.

According to Dr Read, of the 4,500 fires that occur in Australia each week, 40 per cent are deliberately lit. However, just 1 per cent of arsonists are detected, which makes it extremely difficult to profile.

As another devastating fire season begins, Sokaluk's story provides tantalising glimpses into the mind of an arsonist.

Experts have identified two main groups of arsonists — 54 per cent are under 21, while the remainder are over 40. Only 12 per cent are female.

Dr Read also says research points to the fact that there is an "anniversary effect" among older lone male arsonists — that there are "small peaks" around the ages of 30, 40, 50, 60 and so forth.

Sokaluk was 39 when he lit the Churchill fires.

"I would say that Brendan does fit the profile of a lone male arsonist who is older and close to an anniversary birthday," Dr Read says.

But there are other factors related to Sokaluk's background that Dr Read identifies.

"Being disadvantaged is the first characteristic. There are multiple other issues surrounding the way he grew up. I'd say perhaps bullying at school. The difficulty in holding down a job," he says.

"He used indirect strategies of trying to engage with people — hiding, doing odd things [which] would have left him feeling more and more alone as he grew older.

"Also, it's been said that he had a low level of intelligence … these sorts of factors do fit the traditional profile."

Dr Read says the only way we can stop the "Brendan Sokaluks of the world" from continuing to light fires is for the whole community to be involved in identifying and reporting potential arsonists.

"We already know that over the next four years we're going to have a heatwave globally," Dr Read says.

"The more dangerous it becomes, the greater likelihood that when a match is lit, it'll take. And so that human element becomes all the more important."

Dr Read believes that, to a certain extent, Sokaluk would have understood the enormity of what occurred on Black Saturday.

"But I still cannot say for sure whether Brendan maliciously lit those fires with the intent to cause as much damage as he did," he says.

Hooper says that when the victim impact statements were read in court, Sokaluk seemed unmoved by the stories he was hearing. He yawned and seemed barely conscious of what was going on.

Ultimately, Hooper settles on uncertainty.

"I don't feel like anyone, let alone Brendan, will ever really know the reasons this fire occurred, but I think that we can narrow down on a series of impulses and possibilities, and start to understand how a human mind suddenly is on fire itself and could start an inferno," he says.

Watch Australian Story's The Burning Question on iview or Youtube.

Credits

Additional writing: Stephanie Wood

Producer: Quentin McDermott

Photography: Quentin McDermott, Andrew Altree-Williams, Victorian Police, supplied

Digital producer: Megan Mackander

Topics: fires, 2009-victorian-bushfires-royal-commission, bushfire, courts-and-trials, crime, churchill-3842

First posted