Report says fire at Crabtree home ‘suspicious’
A FIRE that razed the Sydney home of a mother accused of murdering her children for money was deliberately lit, investigators believe.
The damning NSW Fire and Rescue incident report states that the blaze at Maree Mavis Crabtree’s family home in Forest Rd, Peakhurst in 2003 was “suspicious”.
No one has been charged over the fire.
The single-storey house which she inherited from an uncle was destroyed by fire while Crabtree lived there with her three children and her elderly mother. She later moved to regional NSW and then to the Gold Coast.
Last month, Crabtree, 51, was charged with using prescription drugs to poison daughter Erin, 18, and son Jonathan, 26, to collect life insurance payouts worth about $1 million.
Erin was found dead in 2012. Jonathan was found dead last year and both deaths were initially treated as suicides.
She was also charged with the grievous bodily harm and torture of another relative and multiple fraud charges.
Before they charged Crabtree, Queensland homicide detectives travelled to NSW to look into the fire as part of their complex investigation into the family.
The official fire report shows that the alarm was raised by a neighbour on the afternoon of January 16, 2003, and took over 90 minutes to bring under control. Crabtree sold the house, which had not been fitted with smoke alarms, in May 2003 for $570,000.
She had inherited it from her uncle Milne Graham, who died in December 1990, and had been living in the house with him before his death, apparently from cancer. His will, leaving her the house and contents, was drawn up nine months before he died. Her mother, who was living in a granny flat at the premises, has also since died.