Gunman unlawfully killed 12 victims

Mar 25 2011

Taxi driver Derrick Bird unlawfully killed the 12 victims he shot dead before he committed suicide, an inquest jury has ruled.

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 own 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 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 David Bird 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 aggrievances" 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".

The jury came back with its verdicts within 90 minutes of being sent out to start its deliberations. West Cumbria Coroner David Roberts praised the jurors for their hard work in listening to and processing the four weeks of evidence, "much of it heartbreaking".