TAXI driver Derrick Bird unlawfully killed the 12 victims he shot dead before
he committed suicide, an inquest ruled today.
The 52-year-old went on a 45-mile shooting rampage around West Cumbria on June
2 last year and then turned his rifle on himself.
A jury of six women and five men sitting in Workington, Cumbria, returned the
verdicts after listening to four weeks of harrowing evidence.
Bird shot his twin brother David several times, went on to gun down solicitor
Kevin Commons, 60, and then drove to a taxi rank in Whitehaven town centre
where he blasted taxi driver Darren Rewcastle, 43, at point-blank range.
The troubled father-of-two then randomly targeted strangers as he travelled
out of town and killed mother-of-two Susan Hughes, 57; retired security
worker Kenneth Fishburn, 71; retired Sellafield worker and part-time
mole-catcher Isaac Dixon, 65; retired couple James and Jennifer Jackson,
aged 67 and 68; farmer and rugby league player Garry Purdham, 31; estate
agent Jamie Clark, 23; retired Sellafield employee Michael Pike, 64; and
pensioner Jane Robinson, 66.
He repeatedly stopped his grey Citroen Picasso, called victims over as if to
ask the time and then simply shot them in the face.
Bird also injured 11 others in his shooting spree in Lamplugh, Frizington,
Whitehaven, Egremont, Gosforth and Seascale before he was found dead in
woodland near Boot more than three hours after police discovered
his first known victim.
Days before, an increasingly agitated Bird, of Rowrah, near Frizington, was
wrongly convinced he was going to prison because he owed up to £25,000 in
unpaid tax.
That fear turned to paranoia as he believed his brother and Mr Commons were
conspiring to set him up to be arrested.
His obsession with going to prison developed amid a culture of backbiting and
wind-ups at the taxi rank where he worked in Duke Street, Whitehaven.
Mental health experts told the inquests he was “accumulating the grievances”
and never forgot a slight.
He was said to have become mentally ill over the preceding five weeks and had
obvious delusional beliefs in the three days before June 2.
Psychologist Dr Adrian West said Bird was a “bitter, resentful and depressed
man, blaming the rest of society for his failures”.
His delusions enabled him to “enact vengeful, retaliatory fantasies” and to
seek notoriety in causing grief to his community “believing that people
would never forget him”.
Weeks before the shootings, he was heard to comment that “Whitehaven will be
as famous as Dunblane”.
But he chose his victims discriminately and knew what he was doing was wrong,
the jury heard.
An independent review of how Cumbria Constabulary responded on the day ruled
that police could not have stopped Bird any sooner.
Luck was against them on several occasions but Bird was “incredibly difficult”
to track with his extensive knowledge of country roads and amid the
confusion caused by the random shootings miles apart in such a short space
of time.
A similar review found there were no irregularities in how Bird obtained
licences to use the 12-bore sawn-off shotgun and .22 rifle he used in the
killings.