Police probe motives for Cumbrian massacre

Jun 5 2010 The Journal

CRAZED killer Derrick Bird's murky finances last night appeared to hold the key to why he launched a massacre that left 12 people dead.

He was apparently resentful about his twin brother’s inheritance and feared being jailed for tax evasion when he set out on his 45-mile trail of destruction across Cumbria.

Police revealed taxi driver Bird, 52, first shot dead his twin brother David and the family’s solicitor, Kevin Commons, 60, in a distinct phase before murdering 10 others in a frenzied hour of killing.

Cumbria Police Chief Constable Craig Mackey insisted officers could not have stopped the rampage.

“At no stage did any police officer have the chance to end this any sooner,” he said.

Bird’s father Joe gave David £25,000 before he died in October 1998 at the age of 82, his will revealed yesterday.

Neither the gunman nor his other brother Brian appear to have received anything and the rest of their father’s wealth passed to their mother Mary, who is now 90 and very frail.

A legal expert said Mrs Bird would have had to have decided whether to include clauses in her own will cutting David’s inheritance to allow for the money he had already received.

The revelation added weight to the theory that the gunman snapped after rowing with his twin brother about his mother’s will.

Father-of-two Bird was being investigated by the Inland Revenue after being caught with a mystery £60,000 in his bank account, a friend said.

Mark Cooper, who knew Bird for 15 years, recalled: “He said, ‘They have caught me with £60,000 in the bank, the tax people’. He just said, ‘I’ll go to jail’.

“He just asked me if he could handle jail. He didn’t want to go.”