The pages of a will left by Derrick Bird’s father provided an insight yesterday into the simmering tensions – and the substantial gap in wealth – between the taxi driver and the twin brother who became the first victim of his shooting spree.
The document uncovered at the Probate Registry in London reveals how Joseph Bird, a civil servant for Cumbria County Council, gave David Bird a gift £25,000 shortly before his death in 1998. Crucially, it made no such provision for other family members, including Derrick.
It was one of several perceived injustices, conspiracies and misfortunes – including a suspicion that his twin brother was conniving with the family solicitor to exacerbate his difficulties with a tax bill – that contributed to what became a murderous grudge.
“Rightly or wrongly, and we all think wrongly, Derrick thought his brother was out to get him,” a family friend said last night.
The will casts new light on more than 20 years of contrasting fortunes for the two men. Both were divorcees with a fondness for shooting game but, after a childhood in which they shared the same classroom, they spent their adult lives finding more to separate than unite them.
While Derrick, 52, lived in a modest pebble-dashed terraced house worth £90,000 in their native village of Rowrah, David, a mechanic and lorry driver who became a building contractor had succeeded in buying a substantial farmhouse worth about £500,000 in rolling countryside some four miles away.
The roots of the division that ultimately drove a despairing Derrick Bird, apparently haunted by fears that he was facing jail for his unpaid tax bill, to place his twin brother at the top of his target list may lie at least partially in their father’s last will and testimony.
The document shows that Joseph Bird gave David the £25,000 in 1997 with a requirement that the sum be deducted from his eventual inheritance.
The will said: “Having transferred money to my son David Bird absolutely, I direct that my son, the said David Bird, shall bring into hotchpotch upon the division of my residuary estate the sum of £25,000.”
But there is no record of the money ever having been paid back, and while Joseph’s estate was initially worth £200,000, debts and taxes reduced the eventual legacy to just £10,000 which was paid to his wife, Mary. Derrick, and the twins’ elder brother Brian, received nothing.
The Independent understands that money had long been a sore point between the brothers, described by their former teacher as “chalk and cheese”, with Derrick significantly more introverted than his twin.
David, who has three grown-up daughters, seems to have been a canny investor, working hard to buy High Trees Farm, a substantial farmhouse and land in countryside outside the village of Lamplugh. It was in the master bedroom of this property that Derrick shot dead his brother at point blank range before dawn on Wednesday.
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