WHITEHAVEN, England: Five hours before he started shooting on the streets of Whitehaven, Derrick Bird was in his car, brooding, outside the home of his solicitor.
Iris Carruthers, who had known Bird since they went to school together, spotted him early on Wednesday as she took her dogs for a dawn walk past the driveway leading to Kevin Commons’s house in Frizington.
“I was going down the lane and he was coming back,” recalled Mrs Carruthers, who works at the grocer’s shop in the village in northwest England. “He drove past me, but when he got to the bottom of the lane, he turned his cab round and came back up.
“He slowed right down and I spoke to him. I said, ‘Hiya, lad. Are you all right?’ But he said nowt back. He just drove up the lane, turned his car and stationed himself at the gate, just near the turning to the farm.
“I went back over the fields and he watched me walk back down. It was like he was in another world.”
Hours later, the body of Mr Commons, 60, a well-known local lawyer, was found on the driveway. He may have been the first victim of the carnage that Bird inflicted on his family, friends and neighbours, but his body was not found until the afternoon.
As Bird drove around the district in a rage, he killed 11 others – including his twin, David – before taking his own life. He also shot and wounded 11 people.
Mrs Carruthers recalled that Bird was “always a quiet lad”. But, like everyone who knew him in this close collection of villages and towns in west Cumbria, she is thinking again.
People are talking differently about the man they thought of as an affable neighbour, pleasant cabbie, reliable friend and dutiful father. Those who knew or worked with him recall he had a fractious relationship with his former wife, Linda. The couple rarely spoke after their divorce and when he picked up his sons he would sit in the car and beep the horn.
A source close to the Bird family said the self-employed taxi driver had serious money problems.
“I was told that he hadn’t paid any taxes for a long time and was worried that the authorities were about to catch up with him. People are saying he owed a lot of money,” she said.
And was there not a bit of a cloud over his departure, 20 years ago, from the Sellafield nuclear power plant? Bird resigned from his post as a joiner but only after he was caught stealing building materials, was convicted and given a 12-month suspended jail term.
But the conviction did not prevent him from successfully applying to Cumbria police for a shotgun licence in 1995 and having it renewed every five years.
Police could have refused to give Bird a firearms licence because he was a convicted thief. Officers last visited Bird about his fitness to possess guns in 2007 when he was granted another licence for a .22 rifle that he said he wanted “for shooting vermin and recreational target practice”.
He could be good company, certainly, but he could be taciturn and grumpy and might react with unexpected anger to banter – whether it was about his inability to get a girlfriend or his taste for solo long-haul holidays.
A taxi firm owner who used to work with Bird said he had developed a complex over new cabbies who, he thought, were trying to take his business. “There has been an argument on the rank, which was in relation to taking people off the back of the rank, instead of sending them to the front,” he said. “It came to a head on Tuesday night and maybe, with the other problems Derrick had, it contributed to his behaviour.”
Other cabbies said Bird had never been the same since a teenager knocked him unconscious and ran off without paying his fare in 2007. Bird told a court in 2008 that the incident had made him “nervous and anxious”.
That blow to the head, which caused him to lose a number of teeth, appears also to have been the reason he was pursuing a claim from the Criminal Injuries Compensation Authority that, three years after the attack, had still not been settled.
Letters from the authority lay on Bird’s kitchen table at the house where he lived alone in Rowrah. There were also letters from Mr Commons’s firm.
Neither the solicitor’s firm nor Cumbria police would comment yesterday on whether those letters related to a family row over the will being drawn up by his mother, Mary, who is 90.
The daughters of David Bird, the killer’s twin brother, who was found shot dead at his home in Lamplugh, insisted there was “absolutely no family feud”. But they also hinted that not all was well.”Our dad’s only downfall was to try and help his brother,” their statement said.
Detective Chief Superintendent Iain Goulding confirmed that “financial and domestic” issues were central lines of inquiry for him and his officers.
The more than 100 detectives working on the case will interview everyone with information about Bird – cabbies, friends and especially family. They will drive up the narrow roads to Ennerdale to speak with Mrs Bird, the mother of Derrick and David. The house, next to the pub, had been in the family for at least two generations, inherited by the brothers’ late father, Joe. Until the shootings, their mother still lived there. Yesterday, the curtains were drawn and locals said she had gone away.
In a village where many houses are now holidays lets, the family had unusually deep connections with Ennerdale. Derrick and David grew up in this house along with their elder brother, Brian. Their father was a popular figure, a wildlife expert who spoke Cumbrian dialect and was a regular contributor to local radio. Joy Ryan, a cousin of the dead men, said Mrs Bird, who is frail after a series of strokes, was stunned. “She just couldn’t make sense of it,” Mrs Ryan said. “She kept saying she wanted to talk to them, she wanted to talk to her sons.”
A neighbour said Mrs Bird had been recovering well from her latest bout of illness. The woman said: “On Monday, she was pulling round from this illness. We’d had a tea party, six of us, and she had been in good form. She went off with a smile and a wave. But what will a person like that make of this? She was just a good mother – firm with the boys, always there. She did whatever she could for them, and tried not to bother them. And now she has lost both twins, her two sons.”
The killer’s two sons have also lost their father and will be burdened with the horror of his crimes. Graeme, 28, recently became a father and Jamie, 16, is taking his GCSEs.
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