Derrick Bird Was Stopped By Red Lights And Prostitutes: News Round Up

DERRICK Bird: He murdered David Bird; Kevin Commons, 60; Darren Rewcastle, 43; Isaac Dixon, 65; Michael Pike, 64; James Jackson, 67, and his wife Jennifer, 68; Jane Robinson, 66; Kenneth Fishburn, 71; Garry Purdham, 31; Jamie Clark, 23; and Susan Hughes, 57. Bird then killed himself. The news round-up:

First up some more facts about the murders:

Daily Mirror: “57 MINS OF MAYHEM”

Armed police feared Derrick Bird was planning to make a deadly last stand after killing 10 victims in 57 minutes, officers revealed yesterday.

The Sun: “Killer’s deadly dash in 65 minutes”

CRAZED cabbie Derrick Bird killed ten of his 12 victims in just 65 minutes of horror, police said yesterday.

A boy’s story supplies more facts, laced with a bit of horror fiction from the Mirror’s Rebecca Evans. Jordan Williams is in the papers:

I stared into killer’s eyes ..they were black like a bird looking for its prey

Kind of:

Bird gunned down cyclist Michael Pike before turning his pitiless gaze on horrified schoolboy Jordan Williams standing a few feet away.

Jordan said: “He was staring straight at me. His eyes were black like those of a hawk looking for prey. I stared back. He’d just shot a man in front of me. We were like it for about seven seconds, but I didn’t run. I don’t know why. For some reason he just grabbed the wheel and started moving.”

To the Star he is:

BRAVE JORDAN, 9, STARED INTO THE FACE OF KILLER CABBIE DERRICK BIRD

It’s unlikely he starred Bird down; more likely that the boy was gripped by an inability to move. But at times like these, the media likes a hero.

SCHOOLBOY Jordan Williams’ life hung in the balance for seven seconds as he faced the Taxi Terminator during his killing frenzy.

The quote is little different to the Mirror’s:

“He stared straight at me. His eyes were black. He looked like a hawk does when it’s looking for its prey. I stared straight back at him.

The papers can’t even agree on the time nor the precise quote of the eyewitness. And murders are things of fact not fiction. Although get this from the BBC:

Derrick Bird did not fit the bill of a mass murderer as portrayed in many crime novels, nor did Cumbria seem a likely setting, crime novelist Zoe Sharp explained on Radio 4’s The World at One.

But, then , they are dealing with evil. It was Evil. We know it was evil what done it because it’s the Mirror’s headline:

EVIL CAME TO OUR BEAUTIFUL COUNTY.. MAY YOU ALL NOW REST IN PEACE

So. Why did Derrick Bird kill 12 people?

Daily Mail (front page): “THE DEADLY HATE THAT FESTERED FOR 13 YEARS.”
Hate for 12 people? Hate for humanity?

“Gun killer held grudge against twin for ‘robbing’ him of his £25,000 inheritance”

So. That’s why Derrick bird killed 12 people. And you thought you may never know why he did it, considering Bird is dead and left behind no note.

Sky News’ Andy Winter: “Cumbria Killings: Was Family Feud The Spur?”

Well, yes. Read the Mail.

Police are investigating claims a grudge held by the Cumbria gunman Derrick Bird against his twin brother may have been to blame for his killing spree

So much for the evil twin theory. Any other reasons?

Daily Telegraph: “Cumbria shootings: Derrick Bird’s tax bill”

Although he rarely spoke of his personal affairs, he told fellow taxi drivers that he expected to “go down for four to 10 years”. He confided in one friend that he had secreted up to £60,000 in one bank account which the HM Revenue & Customs had recently discovered. But there may also have been other accounts.

Any other reasons?

His twin brother, David, had offered to help him sort out his affairs but it led to more resentment and there have been claims that it was he who had alerted the tax authorities.

When a man kills 12 people, all his past comes back with added bite:

Daily Mirror: “Drunk rage at pal got him barred from flight”

The friend, who asked not to be named, said: “When they all arrived in Doha it seemed like everyone was getting on. It all kicked off though when Birdy mentioned that he loved Thailand because it was cheap and someone made a joke about him being cheap.”

The Express wonders if he went there for sex:

Although details of Derrick Bird’s jaunts to Thailand with friends remain scant, he’s reported to have clashed with them after paying a large amount of money to a local woman.

Back in the Mirror:

“Birdy saw red. He went mad and went for him and officials had to step in. They’d never seen him flip before and it really shocked them. He must have had a lot of stress just bottled up. He was taken off and the next thing they knew was he wasn’t allowed on the flight and was flown home.”

Had only the police known what he was really like, you know the killer people said was placid:

Miranda Sawyer wonders:

After the terrible events in Cumbria, people have started asking questions of the police.

Such as…

Was there anything they could have done to stop Derrick Bird before he started killing?

Well?

(Probably not.)

Could they have located him earlier and prevented more deaths?

Well!?

(Perhaps.)

Martin Samuels wonders. We like Samuels a lot but he seems to have taken the Mail’s schilling and begun punctuating his pros with a marmalade-coated clack of his tongue:

One question about the terrible events in Cumbria on Wednesday.

Considering that in August 2005 police in Essex contrived to close a section of the M11 so that a stuffed tiger called Tyrone could be retrieved for ten-year-old Amy Osborn, and that every time there is even a minor prang on an arterial road police think nothing of lining up a cordon of patrol cars to generate huge tailbacks while retrieving debris, how was maniac Derrick Bird allowed to traverse the county along tiny A-roads, village to village, shooting people in the face without encountering a roadblock?

Cumbria has a small police force, we are told, but they can drive, surely?

Samuels may have a point, sort of:

HE WAS THE mass murderer who stopped at traffic lights…

In his Lowther Street wine shop Gerard Richardson, exhausted, mourning and depressed, stood drinking a coffee. “What kind of man does that? He had killed three people by then and yet he still stopped for a light.

Derrick Bird – the pictures: