THAT the quiet, well-ordered country town of Childers, 54km south of Bundaberg, should be the scene of a murderous arsonist's bitter revenge invites comparisons with a Stephen King novel.

Yet, as a Brisbane jury concluded in March 2002, Robert Paul Long, 38, torched the Palace Backpackers Hostel. Like the vicious pair who burnt the Whiskey Au Go Go nightclub in Brisbane in 1973, Long sentenced 15 young people to a terrifying death.

He has been sentenced to life and will serve at least 20 years.

June 23, 2000, is a day that Childers residents — still coping with the grief — will never forget.

It was payday for the backpackers who flood into the area between April and June to work on local farms, and the cheerful and well-liked young people naturally got down and partied before many returned to their hostel.

About 12.30am a fire started in a downstairs TV lounge and quickly became an inferno, rushing up the stairwell and consuming the century-old former pub.

The fire alarms, which had been malfunctioning, had been switched off by the management and residents awoke to the screams of their friends and the sound of breaking glass. Seventy struggled out but 15 did not.

Before the ashes had even cooled, Long was named as a likely suspect by his former de facto, Christine Campbell, but the killer had fled town.

He was caught 30km south five days later after a violent struggle with police during which, police said, Long admitted his guilt.

Ms Campbell had claimed that Long had tried to burn to death her, their daughter and her two other children in a Darwin caravan park in 1997 but the Northern Territory police had not charged him.

Long had left the hostel two weeks earlier after not paying his rent and he had asked the backpackers to leave the back door open for him.

They slammed it shut and his rage — recalled by witnesses — knew no bounds. His precarious hold on reality deteriorated as he sank into an alcoholic depression.

What emerged at and after the trial was that Long was a seriously disturbed loner who invented stories of terrible personal tragedies to seek attention and sympathy. He would drift around Australia working in low-paid jobs and for a while his stories were believed and he was accepted. He claimed he was dying of lung cancer, his wife and children had died in fires or a road accident, his niece had died of leukemia and his girlfriend had just committed suicide.

When his stories began to unravel and his drinking increased and his work suffered, he would head off, leaving behind unpaid bills and sometimes fake suicide notes and unexplained fires.

Long's life began in Corrimal, a Wollongong suburb. As a youth he was convicted of stealing women's clothes from clotheslines. Later he would be sentenced to four years for burglary and other charges involving an assault on his then de facto.