Yesterday it became clear that, over three and a half hours, the 52-year-old divorcee's rampage through a 25-mile stretch of towns and villages in Cumbria had escalated from the methodical execution of a group of men he considered to have wronged him to a killing spree of terrifying randomness.Derrick Bird is a narrative in flux at the moment. The police gave us that mystifying "grudge and random" motive, or lack of motive. Surely both undermine each other. Random shootings that were not all random, and so not really random at all. Grudge killings of his brother and associates that led to non-grudge killings of strangers, suggesting that the anger or emotion was not solely directed at the people Derrick Bird supposedly had grievances against.
(Cahal Milmo, Mark Hughes and Patrick Hill, ‘The grievances and grudges that drove Derrick Bird over the edge’, The Independent, 4th June 2010.)
I’ve often wondered about my preoccupation with understanding why somebody kills another (a preoccupation that appears to be shared by the media, and thus, supposedly, a lot of people in this and other countries). If they weren’t provoked, then was there something wrong with them. Were they violently antisocial, did they read a lot into the looks they got from strangers on the street? If they were provoked, what was the provocation?
I think for me, and thus possibly for the media et al, it might be that I wonder: if I were in that situation, would I have warranted death in the eyes of the killer. Could I have handled the situation in a way that would have saved me? Perhaps I would have come across as a punningly disarming figure, or at least anonymous amongst other targets. Perhaps I would have been the have a go Rambo, punching or knocking the killer to the floor, dispatching the dispatcher. As far as we can see, I, you, and most other people would have died if caught in the glance of Derrick Bird during those hours on Wednesday.
Killing and suicide are significant in literature; they are used to explore the ultimate emotions – what remains important to, or in the mind of, a person who is about to lose everything, all of sensation and experience, into eternity. What do they think about, what do they say, what do they renounce when they’ve come beyond duplicity – the deathbed confession if you like.
What was Mr Bird’s ultimate - settling scores and then taking a few more down with him? Think of the ramifications of that (that being the current best guess of the media and its approached witnesses as to why the shootings happened). Your last act before oblivion, as everything in you and the world is realigned to the best of your knowledge, affording you the most panoptic sense of perspective you’ll ever achieve, and you kill a fellow taxi driver for a row over pickups. You shoot your brother and your solicitor over family or monetary business, as well as a few others you've had grievances against for anything up to a couple of decades. Then you shoot strangers over nothing, other than what you have projected onto them.
We are being lead towards the conclusion that Derrick Bird, pushed beyond himself by a sense of unfairness, terror of bankruptcy and prison, and the combined stress of these and other matters, decided he couldn’t live any longer. Additionally, he seemingly decided that, in relinquishing life after 52 years of thoughts and experience, he ought to kill others out of spite at his own ultimate predicament, whether or not they had a hand in it. This represents his verdict on life from the culmination of his years.
But then it’s hard to emphasise the resentful spite, (although the Sun has of course managed it) because Derrick Bird meted out the same ‘punishment’ to both his grudge victims and to strangers. He lashed out against the parochial and the arbitrary, an apparent nihilism where he, his brother, his associates and strangers in his line of vision had no advantage in being alive. He let the struggles and arguments of his life tint everything before him as he prepared to end the world from his perspective, and also the worlds of his 12 victims and 11 injured intendeds. His ultimate conclusion on life appears to be: whoever you are, whatever you do (for I don’t know) it isn’t important, it can’t be important - you might as well be dead for all that you were alive.
The conclusion doesn’t fit, though, because the previous afternoon he gave a large sum of money to his son Graeme, ‘for the baby’ [1]. At that point at least he felt that his grandchild and the boy’s parents had potential futures to be invested in, and this was after he had allegedly been planning the next day’s actions.
So I don’t buy any of the whys yet; there have been no good causes offered - certainly not the connecting of a person’s suicide, and murdering of others, with their bills, debt, stress and grief. Those lists of Facts are good for trials and that is all. They are symbols, signifiers of Derrick Bird’s recent life, but offer little of his state of mind, or his ultimate perspective in the final hours of that life. There was something more intense and complicated in his head when he killed those people and himself. Some view of human existence far more potent as an incitement to act, far more complex than money worries and ‘petty’ (petty!) grudges that we’ll never understand. Doubtless Bird himself would not have been able to communicate it, had he been caught mid act.
We shouldn’t trivialise the people that died on Wednesday by imagining that David Bird, Kevin Commons, Darren Rewcastle, Garry Purdham, Jane Robinson, Michael Pike, Kenneth Fishburn, James Jackson, Jennifer Jackson, Susan Hughes, Isaac Dixon and Jamie Clark were killed in settlement of Derrick Bird’s grievances, money worries and stress.
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[1] Cahal Milmo, Mark Hughes and Patrick Hill, ‘The grievances and grudges that drove Derrick Bird over the edge’, The Independent, 4th June 2010, <http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/the-grievances-and-grudges-that-drove-derrick-bird-over-the-edge-1991093.html>.
