THE MURDER spree by taxi-driver Derrick Bird, which has devastated Cumbria, began up to five hours before the alarm was raised after he had shot dead a work colleague in Whitehaven and injured another, it emerged last night, as British police sought to probe his motives for the slaughter of twelve and the injuring of two dozen more.
Prime minister David Cameron, just a week after he took up office in Downing Street, and home secretary Theresa May are to visit Whitehaven and other murder scenes, though both have rejected calls by some for immediate restrictions on the possession of shotguns and low-calibre rifles, such as the .22 that Bird used to kill and injure some of his victims.
The killer’s first victim was his twin brother David, in the village of Lamplugh in the early hours of morning, though the dead man’s three daughters, Rachel (28), Tracey (26) and Katie (19) last night denied that he had rowed with his twin about the division of their mother’s estate. She is suffering from cancer and had recently engaged local solicitor Kevin Commons to deal with her will.
“We would like to take this opportunity to say there was absolutely no family feud. Our Dad’s only downfall was to try and help his brother.
Dad was a loving and cheerful character and was well known throughout the village. He will not only be missed by us, but by the whole community,” said the daughters, though the statement pointedly did not absolve Derrick Bird of being unhappy with the terms of the will.
Following the brutal killing of his brother, whom he shot in the face at point-blank range with a shotgun, Bird travelled to Mr Commons’s farmhouse outside Frizington at 5am. Mr Commons’s body was discovered hours later – long after the Whitehaven alert had been raised – lying in the driveway to his home. He too had been shot in the face at close range, police said.
Once in Whitehaven, Bird killed three drivers, including the very popular Darren Rewcastle, before heading south, where he killed a young estate agent, Jamie Clark; Garry Purdham, a rugby league player and farmer; Jennifer and James Jackson, a retired couple; Isaac Dixon; a divorced mother of two, Susan Hughes; Jane Robinson; Kenneth Fishburn, a former Sellafield security guard; and Michael Pike, another Sellafield retiree.
During a Whitehaven press conference last evening, Det Chief Supt Iain Goulding said: “A key part of the ‘why’ in this investigation is trying to establish whether those tragically killed were chosen because of a motive, because of a grudge or were simply random killings. Our initial assessment is we have a combination of both.”
A former classmate, Iris Carruthers, a 49-year-old woman who works in a shop in Bird’s home village of Rowrah, said she met him in his taxi between 5.30 and 6am while she was out walking the dogs. “He passed me and went down to the bottom of the main road, turned, and he came back up. Slowly he drove alongside me and I said ‘Hiya lad, you all right?’. He didn’t speak, he was in a world of his own, and I just kept on walking. I just left him there. I thought he was just normal, I didn’t think there was anything untoward.”
