‘McElhill didn’t try to escape’

NEW details about Arthur McElhill, 39, a convicted sex offender, emerged last night.

One man who knew him said: “You never knew what he’d be thinking, but if you were to ask me to sum him up, I’d say he was a control freak.

“Maybe she (Lorraine) had enough, and wanted to move out with the kids. I know her family were very unhappy that she stayed with him. But he was having none of it and depression or no depression it (the fire) was done in such a way that nobody was getting out.”

Even though Mr McElhill and his partner were seen standing at an upstairs window surrounded by flames, detectives believe he made no real effort to escape the blaze.

One neighbour said: “He must weigh 16, 17 or 18 stone and he could easily have put his fist through that window. But he didn’t. He didn’t do a thing.”

Mr McElhill, who worked for a farmer on the outskirts of the town, was given an 18-month jail sentence in 1998 on two charges of indecently assaulting a girl near a village outside Omagh where he lived.

The neighbour said: “Her (Lorraine’s) family did not approve (of the relationship). If he was that troubled, then why didn’t he just go off and kill himself? Why did he have to take the family with him?”

Residents in his home village of Ederney, Co Fermanagh, were mostly too stunned to talk about the tragedy affecting one of their best-known families.

“It has just ripped the heart of this place,” one man said.

In the neighbouring village of Lack, one woman said she reported Mr McElhill to the police after she believed he had followed her in his car in a threatening manner several years ago.

She added: “If he wanted to do something like that I don’t know why he had to take his wife and children with him.

“It is just such a pity; you have to feel for the family.”