In a coda, Hooper includes revealing comments from some of the victims and from people who knew the suspected arsonist. The name of the suspected arsonist and the jury’s verdict are a matter of public record but are not mentioned in this review for the benefit of those readers who would prefer to read what happened without knowing the outcome in advance. The arsonist had a top-class defence team and by any standards had a fair trial lasting some three weeks, although it can be questioned whether it is fair to the accused for it to take three years for a trial to come to court. Section three is called ‘The Courtroom’ and describes the trial that took place some three years after the events of Black Saturday. However, the Commission’s findings did little to blunt the understandable venom directed at the suspected arsonist. Hooper mentions some of the findings of the Bushfires Royal Commission into the Black Friday disasters, findings which clearly implicate others than the suspected arsonist in much that went wrong. It also covers the problems that arise from the justifiable anger of the disaster victims.
In this section, Hooper deals with the problems of giving the suspected arsonist a fair go, an approach made more difficult by the apparent mental limitations of the suspect. The second section of the book is headed ‘The Lawyers’. he was learning a daily lesson about people’s ability to inflict pain’. Commenting on the difficult nature of police work, Hooper mentions a policeman who ‘hadn’t known, when he joined the police service – no one does – the scale of the damage he’d go on to see. This resulted in them making numerous enquiries and doing extensive legwork to identify likely suspects. It also describes the meticulous work of the detectives, which led them to the conclusion that probably two fires were deliberately started by an arsonist. It includes an illuminating explanation on how the experts determine the source of a fire and draws reasonable conclusions as to how this particular fire might have started. The first of these is headed ‘The Detectives’.
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