The murderer who stopped at traffic lights

Derrick Bird was a man of hidden anger, possibly fuelled by a tax bill, his mother's will and breaches of taxi rules. What was going on in his mind when he went on a killing spree in Cumbria this week – and how are locals, already grieving after a fatal bus crash, coping, writes MARK HENNESSYLondon Editor, in Cumbria

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 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 trigger mechanism that set him off,” says Richardson, who learned that he had lost a close friend, a respected solicitor named Kevin Commons, 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) of undeclared income, 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, after her death, believing that his twin brother, David, had gained unfair advantage with the help of Commons.

Yet he still used the solicitor to deal with a criminal-injuries compensation case that began three years ago after he was assaulted by a youth who had refused to pay a fare, and who was later convicted of actual bodily harm.

Letter after letter from Commons’s legal firm was stacked on a window sill of Bird’s ill-kept house in the village of Rowrah, visible to the curious and the ghoulish until police finally drew the curtains.

Bird’s mother, 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 believe. During their school days the two had been “like chalk and cheese”, former classmates say. Derrick was quiet and introverted but not difficult; David was easygoing if pleasantly eccentric. In later life David rarely worried about details, happily not getting around to fixing a broken window in his rambling farmhouse for a year and accepting in good humour the jokes from neighbours about the delay.

From 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 dogs for a walk shortly after 5.30am.

Commons was later found dead on his driveway, although it is not known whether the solicitor was killed before Bird met Carruthers or shortly before Bird travelled on to Whitehaven.

THIS 20,000-STRONG coastal town became the focus for the “slaughter in the country” in part because television news crews based their satellite vans near one of the town’s churches and in part because Darren Rewcastle, a “likeable rogue” known and liked seemingly by everyone in the town, became the first face of the tragedy. “Anyone who uses taxis in the town would have been carried by him,” says Gerard Richardson, chuckling about Rewcastle’s battle to persuade the local council to let him fly the flag of St George on his taxi. “They said it was a political statement. He was annoyed about it, but he managed to be so in a nice way. But he wasn’t taking that from the council,” says Richardson as he chats with the town crier, Rob Romano.

The grief extends far beyond Whitehaven, of course – up to 40km around, and this in an area already grieving after a bus crash last week that killed two teenagers, Chloe Walker and Kieran Goulding, and a parish councillor, Patrick Short. “The place hasn’t even had the chance to get past those funerals. This is a cracking place to live. It just isn’t fair,” says Romano, who came here 40 years ago after he married a local.

Walker's funeral, which included extracts read from the Take That song Rule the Worldand music from her favourite bands, began minutes after Bird approached his colleagues on the Duke Street rank. A local reporter, a friend of the Walker family who was rushing for the service, spotted a body on the ground in the distance as he left Whitehaven, but, believing it to be the result of a minor traffic accident, drove on.

Within minutes, however, as the full scale of the horror began to become clear, police attending the service received text messages telling them to leave.

Walker’s neighbours had intended to line the streets of her home village of Frizington as her cortege passed, but they were warned off by police officers who were by then desperately searching for the killer.

IN MEMORY, EVERYTHING about Wednesday happened in slow motion. People who heard the Whitehaven shots did not know at first what they were. Council gardeners just 50m away continued planting flowers in St Nicholas’ gardens until the numbing reality struck.

The sheer callousness of Bird’s later random 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 shotgun. 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 towards 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 named Spike Dixon, 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, who had been chatting with neighbours – and who, like so many others that day, seems to have thought the sound of the gun was just a car backfiring. A floral tribute from their god-daughter, Kathleen, lay outside their bungalow yesterday morning: “The loveliest of people taken from us without reason, God bless you, Auntie Jen and Uncle Jimmy.”

Cumbria Constabulary has already come under scrutiny, with some locals wondering, quietly for now, if it could have done more once the alarm was raised. The 1,400-strong force, which normally deals with three murders a year, has deployed every one of its detectives, although the need to probe 30 crime scenes and prepare for 12 inquests would strain bigger forces.

Locals gathered in Whitehaven yesterday to mourn Kieran Goulding, the second teenager killed in last week’s bus crash. But there is much more mourning to be done in the weeks ahead. For now they live in a surreal world. Ordinary chores are being done – painters are touching up shopfronts, repairs are being carried out – while the eyes of the world are on them.

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 perform in Whitehaven Harbour, followed the night after by Status Quo. The organisers struggled to decide how to react to the killings; they eventually concluded that the festival – one of the biggest community 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.