by Alex Claridge
aclaridge@thekmgroup.co.uk

Keith Willoughby, the landlord who blew up his pub and killed a man, is back living in Canterbury – just 200ft from the scene of his crimes.

The 61-year-old has just finished serving eight years of a 12-year prison sentence for torching the Old Locomotive at Station Road West in August 2002.

He is now living in a flat in Kirby’s Lane – and has spoken exclusively to the Gazette about his time in prison, his life today and that fateful night nine years ago.

Willoughby, a former pupil of St Edmund’s School, had run the Old Locomotive from 1987, but by the late 1990s had run into financial trouble and closed it in 2000.

It came to be an unwanted burden and on August 18, 2002, he and his friend Derek Drury – a taxi driver from Whitstable – went there with the intention of burning it down.

“The aim was to have done with it. The place was a wreck,” Willoughby admits today.

He says that a few days before the blast, he and Drury took petrol to the building and stashed it in the top floor.

When they returned on August 18, they splashed it around the pub on every floor.

As they were setting about their plan, Drury turned on a gas oven.

The 60-a-day smoker then went out to the spiral staircase at the back of the pub and lit up.

Willoughby was in the road in front when the blast occurred.

“It was a vicious cocktail of petrol, gas and vapours,” he recalls. “When it exploded, I was in the road and was showered with glass. Derek was killed by the wall which collapsed on him.”

Willoughby subsequently stood trial at Maidstone Crown Court in 2004.

He says lawyers had encouraged him to deny the charges, but he was convicted after a 13-day trial of manslaughter, arson and being reckless as to whether life was endangered.

The hearing was told that Willoughby sold the site of the destroyed pub for £480,000 and, despite prosecution claims that he had profited from his crimes, the judge disagreed and no confiscation order was made.

A block of flats has since been built where the Old Locomotive once stood.

See this week's Gazette for our full exclusive interview with Willoughby.