Survivors recall Derrick Bird’s Cumbria massacre 15 years on

Fifteen years ago, taxi driver Derrick Bird killed 12 people in a murderous shooting spree across Cumbria. Many locals still refuse to speak of it to this day, but some, including survivors and relatives of victims, have shared their stories.

Terry Kennedy had just picked up his first fare of the day, 19-year-old Emma Percival, to take her for a doctor’s appointment.

Terry had been friends with Derrick Bird for years, the pair holidaying together in Thailand and fishing in the Lake District when they weren’t chatting at the area’s cab ranks.

“I’d never seen Derrick have an argument with anybody,” Terry recalls, adding: “He was just a quiet sort of a bloke.”

On 2 June 2010, with Emma ensconced in his car, Terry was heading into Whitehaven when he saw his friend’s Citroen Picasso approaching.

As 52-year-old Bird pulled alongside, Terry told Emma the man they were about to see was probably going to make a stupid joke or something.

Bird was grinning at Terry, the smile remaining fixed as he raised a shotgun and fired straight at his friend’s face.

Terry was the sixth person to be shot by Bird that morning, Emma the seventh as she was struck by multiple shotgun pellets.

“If I hadn’t have got my hand up fast enough, he would have taken my head right off,” Terry says.

He raises his arm to demonstrate his defensive motion, but instead of his hand there is now a stump, the limb that saved him needing to be amputated in the aftermath.

Emma is adamant Terry’s hand saved her life as well, absorbing the brunt of the point-blank blast.

“I was covered in glass and blood, my neck was cut,” she says, adding: “I had lots of flesh and blood all over me.”

They were saved from a second shot by Terry’s taxi lurching forwards as his foot slipped from the clutch.

A policeman quickly came to their aid and got Emma out of the car.

They both believed Terry was dead.

“I felt really bad for leaving him,” Emma says, adding: “The panic had kicked in and I thought it was just best to get out of the situation.”

Miraculously Terry survived and after a long and painful recovery, he tried to return to work.

“It didn’t work out”, he says, adding he is still haunted by what happened.

“It’s still raw, you’re reminded of it 100 times a day.”

He does not believe Bird knew he was firing at his friend.

“I think he was just in a bloodlust for any taxi driver who had given him a hard time,” Terry says.

Emma’s trauma has also been long-lasting, for months she had nightmares about Bird, but she is also very grateful to have survived.

“Someone was watching over me that day because I got to come home to my little boy,” she says.

As Bird was beginning his rampage, Cumbria Police were discussing budget cuts.

Jerry Graham, the then Assistant Chief Constable and a specialist in firearms management, was chairing the meeting at its headquarters in Penrith when, shortly after 10:30 BST, a colleague’s phone rang.

There had been a shooting, they said, an unusual event even in a rural county with a high number of gun owners, Jerry recalls.

What followed was “controlled pandemonium”.

Phones were ringing, people were shouting at each other over computer screens, a rapidly evolving puzzle needing to be immediately pieced together.

“I just thought I have to take myself off into a space and try to work out what’s happening here,” Jerry recalls.

By 11:00 a Gold Command structure was set up, a team formed to direct the emergency response.

“By then quite a few people had been shot and shot dead,” Jerry says, adding: “When I was trying to get resources into the county, [Bird] was making his way through Cumbria on a shooting spree.”

Bird had started in the early hours by killing his twin David, shooting him 11 times in his brother’s farmhouse.

He then murdered his solicitor, Kevin Commons, waiting in the lawyer’s driveway for him to start heading to work before shooting him twice in the head.

No-one can know what was going through Bird’s head, but an inquest would later hear his violence was driven by the belief his brother and Mr Commons were conspiring to have him jailed for tax offences.

He also targeted fellow taxi drivers, shooting three and killing one, Darren Rewcastle, at a rank in Whitehaven in warped revenge for having been the butt of their jokes and banter.

Cumbria Police’s armed officers were rapidly scrambled, assisted by firearms officers from the nearby top security Sellafield nuclear site, as well as neighbouring forces.

Police were desperate to stop Bird.

Some were prepared to launch their cars at speed directly into his.

Firearms officers were in helicopters, against protocol, in the hope of spotting him and ceasing his rampage.

“There were lots of individual acts of bravery shown that day,” says now-retired Jerry, tears pooling in his eyes, although he adds there was also great frustration and disappointment Bird could not be stopped sooner.

“I will go to my grave and this will be etched on my brain,” he says, adding: “I go back over it a lot and think often about the families.”

In total, Bird would kill 12 people and injure 11 along his murderous, 54-mile long drive across west Cumbria, before turning the gun on himself in a wood.

He targeted people at random, firing at them as they walked down streets, rode bikes or drove their cars.

One woman was shot dead as she carried home her shopping, a young farmer was felled instantly in his field.

Bird would slow and beckon people over to him, ask the time or directions before shooting them at point blank range.

He pulled alongside one parked car, calmly asking a woman if she was having a nice day before shooting her in the face.

Miraculously she survived.

Pub landlord Harry Berger encountered Bird as they came face to face either side of a single-width railway tunnel in the seaside village of Seascale.

He reversed his Land Rover back to let the Picasso pass, which is when he first noticed the shotgun barrels pointing out of the other driver’s window.

“I thought ‘that’s a bit weird’,” Harry says.

Bird stopped and wound down his window, prompting Harry to do the same.

Suddenly he had a gun pointed at his face.

“I said you don’t want to do that, its not a good thing to do,” Harry recalls.

And then Bird fired.

Like Terry earlier in the day, Harry instinctively threw his hand up, two fingers being shot off his right hand before Bird drove away.

Medics from the nearby surgery ran to Harry’s aid, firefighters used a ladder as a makeshift stretcher to take him to a nearby shop from where the Great North Air Ambulance took him to hospital.

Bird would end up shooting himself just 400m from Harry’s then-pub, the Woolpack Inn in Eskdale.

Harry is pleased Bird is dead, relieved he will never get a phone call saying his attempted murderer and the killer of so many others could be released from prison.

“My justice is done, he is dead, he is rightly not around,” Harry says.

With the aid of a walking stick, Barrie Robinson slowly walks through the old lychgate into the graveyard of St Peter’s Church in Drigg.

She has come to visit her identical twin sister Jane, who was 66 when she was the last of Bird’s victims.

“She was a very active cheerful woman like myself,” Barrie recalls, adding: “She loved animals and she loved birds and she was fond of children.”

The sisters were well-known in Seascale, their large seafront house having operated as a school where Jane taught.

Leaving her sister at home on that fateful June morning, Jane was enjoying her new job in retirement delivering Betterware catalogues.

She was not far from her front door when a taxi driver beckoned her.

“She thought it was somebody wanting to know the way so she immediately walked over,” Barrie says.

The driver was Bird, who killed Jane instantly with two shots to the head.

Barrie heard the wail of sirens and roar of helicopters overhead but had no idea what had happened until a neighbour knocked on the door and broke the news.

The man had seen her sister’s body not far away, left on the roadside.

“I dream about her such a lot,” Barrie says.

“Then you have to wake up and you suddenly think ‘oh, its back to square one, she is not here’.”

Those killed were:

• David Bird
• Kevin Commons
• Darren Rewcastle
• Susan Hughes
• Kenneth Fishburn
• Isaac Dixon
• Jennifer Jackson
• James Jackson
• Garry Purdham
• James Clark
• Michael Pike
• Jane Robinson