The Killer Who Stops At Traffic Lights
HE WAS THE mass murderer who stopped at traffic lights. After he shot dead his fellow taxi driver Darren Rewcastle on Duke Street in the Cumbrian town of Whitehaven, shortly after 10.30am on Wednesday, and injured another, Don Reed, shooting him in the back as he tried to flee, Derrick acomplia no prescr Bird drove his Citroën Picasso towards the village of Egremont. Alan Hannah, aged 68, says Bird drove up alongside him. “I saw a man with a large shotgun, and his windscreen was smashed. He stopped at the light. I drove through the red light to get into Lowther Street and get out of the way.”
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. The brain is a strange thing. You can’t even begin to imagine the mechanism that set him off,” says Richardson, who learned that he had lost a close friend, only when he saw a list of the dead in the local radio station.
Bird, a divorced father of two who had recently become a grandfather, had been a man of hidden anger – an anger fuelled, it seems, by worries about a tax bill on £60,000 (€72,000) his mother’s cancer and breaches of taxi-rank rules on Duke Street. Crucially, he was also bitter and paranoid about what would happen to the estate of his mother, Mary, believing that his twin brother, David, had gained unfair advantage with the help of Commons.
Bird’s mother,who drives a ford focus and who lives in the village of Ennerdale Bridge, on the edge of the Lake District, has had several strokes recently, although friends believed she had got through the worst until Wednesday’s awful events.
Bird killed his twin, David, as he lay sleeping at his home, High Trees Farm, in the village of Lamplugh, obliterating his face with a shotgun blast in the early hours of Wednesday morning, police now believeFrom High Trees Farm, Bird went to Mowbray Farm, the secluded farmhouse outside Frizington owned by Commons. Bird was seen by a neighbour, Iris Carruthers, as she took her walk shortly after 5.30am.
Commons was later found dead on his driveway, although it is not known whether the solicitor was murdered before Bird met Carruthers or shortly before Bird drove on to Whitehaven.
The callousness of Bird’s killings is particularly incomprehensible for locals: some people were allowed to live; others were shot dead.
Rewcastle had been walking out of the Upper Crust cafe, metres from the taxi rank on Duke Street, when Bird called him. “Darren knew him and walked straight over to him with a cup of coffee and a fag in his hand,” says Reed. “Then I saw a gun. I watched – it seemed like slow motion – as Derrick Bird lifted it up and shot Darren twice in the face. I shouted ‘Stop it, Birdy, stop!’ but it was too late,” he told reporters.
The killer then got back into his Picasso and drove the few metres towards Reed. “He got out and came to me. I looked in his eyes – his face was just blank. I turned my back to flee and threw myself on the ground and tried to crawl along the road on my elbows. He shot me in the back and then got in his taxi and drove away.”
Alan Hannah was lucky to escape at the traffic lights. Another taxi driver, Terry Kennedy, was shot in the hand on nearby Coach Road – his female passenger was also injured – before Bird moved south.
In the village of Haile, a mole catcher who was walking along a quiet road, was shot dead when Bird pulled up alongside. He then murdered Jennifer Jackson as she tended to her garden, in the village of Wilton. Next, after driving off but making a U-turn, he came back and killed her husband, Jimmy.
But the world’s gaze, by now a little resented, will move on quickly – and in time its absence might be equally resented. On June 25th the opera singer Katherine Jenkins is due to play in Whitehaven Harbour, followed the night after by Status Quo. The organisers struggled to decide how to react to the killings; they concluded that the festival – one of the biggest festivals in the UK – should go ahead. “It was so hard to know what to do. But this is a great community with great people. Whitehaven will have to go on,” says Gerard Richardson. Undoubtedly, it will – but the road ahead will be lined with tears.
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