World's Most Evil Killers - Season 3, Episode 13 - Derek Bird - Full Episode | Forensic Files

-June 2010, Cumbria, in the northwest of England, the peaceful community of Whitehaven
was about to be shattered by the murderous rampage of one man. -This perfectly ordinary 52-year-old taxi driver
had suddenly taken it into his head to shoot everybody in the area. -Over the course of one day,
Derrick Bird would kill 12 people and injure 11 more. -He picked people off who were just going about their --
their day-to-day lives, and it seemed to make absolutely no sense whatsoever. -That was the worst day of my life.
I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy. -The callous killer only stopped when he'd run out of ammunition,
finally turning the gun on himself as the police were closing in. -We have a man who had committed no substantial crime
in his life, who, in one moment, transformed himself into a spree serial killer.
-This senseless and horrific shooting spree of unarmed and innocent victims makes Derrick Bird one of the world's most evil killers.
♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ Whitehaven, northwest England, on the 2nd of June, 2010, a lone gunman embarked on a deadly killing spree
that rocked the nation. Shooting many of his victims at close range, 52-year-old taxi driver Derrick Bird
even murdered his own brother. -Bird's shooting spree effectively occupied only about 12 hours.
And the impact was extraordinary because this was in the days, of course, of rolling news, of 24-hour news channels.
As it unfolded and as Bird became more and more obsessed by killing anybody he came across,
so it became ever more dramatic. -Most of Bird's victims were completely random targets.
-People delivering catalogs, people taking their shopping home, people just going about their day-to-day business.
And I think it emphasizes to me how fragile life is, especially when you encounter somebody like Derrick Bird,
who has nothing to lose. -Derrick Bird killed 12 people, injured a further 11, and then turned the gun on himself.
After his death, his family released a statement to the press via the local vicar.
-"He was a loving dad and recently became a grandfather. We would like to say that we do not know
why our dad committed these horrific crimes. We are both mortified by the sad events."
-This killer's story begins in 1957. Derrick and his twin brother were born on the 27th of November in Ennerdale Bridge,
a village a few miles out of Whitehaven, to a seemingly ordinary family. The twins had an older brother,
and their father worked nearby for the local council. The twins went to a school in Whitehaven.
Despite being older by only five minutes, Derrick seemed to be in the shadow of his younger
twin brother David. -It's always assumed, isn't it, that twins will adore each other?
You know, there are many twins that are like that. But in this particular case, I don't think they were.
I think they were rather isolated from one another. David was probably the more likeable one.
Derrick, the quieter one. He was kind of a bit of a loner. -As the brothers grew up,
the differences between them became more apparent. -David was his twin brother, but that was where any resemblance ended, I think.
David was better at sports. He was on the rugby team at school. Derrick wasn't a particularly athletic child.
David was cleverer, he was more handsome, he was more successful, and many people
have described Derrick as "living in David's shadow." And this isn't anything unusual.
Many siblings are outshone by others in their family. But they don't carry the kind of rage and the kind of resentments
that Derrick Bird did, I think, because that was what his personality was. He really did catastrophize this relationship with his brother,
and he blamed him for so many things. -Despite their differences, the twins shared their father's passion for hunting game,
and just before his 17th birthday, Derrick was granted a shotgun license. -His father was involved in guns.
In small towns in the countryside of England, owning weapons is, especially a shotgun
for hunting, is not unusual. [ Gunshot ] -Bird's passion for guns continued into adulthood.
After leaving school, Derrick Bird found work as a carpenter at Sellafield nuclear power station
near Seascale. Just before he started his new job, he began dating a woman who was five years younger than him.
-She was somebody he met at school, and she was several years below him, so I think for him, this was important,
because he was the dominant figure in the relationship, he was that bit older. They never got married. They did live together.
-Things seemed to be going well for the couple. They moved in together in 1978 and had their first child in 1982.
But in 1990, Bird lost his job at the nuclear plant after he was caught stealing wood.
He received a six-month suspended sentence. In 1994, his partner decided to leave him.
-It's pretty clear from early on, she senses something is slightly off about Derrick Bird.
She never marries him. She leaves him before the birth of their second child. -So, this was his first relationship.
This was a relationship that failed. This was another thing, I think, to add to his collection of grievances,
of things that other people have done to him. So this is just adding to his pity, essentially.
-And if there was a telling moment in Derrick Bird's emergence into adulthood, it was the failure of that relationship.
-A few months later, Bird began dating again. -Derrick Bird formed a relationship
with another woman. They never lived together. Bird, at that point, was still, you know,
employed in various odd jobs. -A year later, Bird became a taxi driver. He finally had a stable job again,
but his love life was anything but. His relationship with his partner was becoming increasingly volatile.
-Now, they're together for some years. It's alleged that there was some domestic abuse.
-The extraordinary nature of Bird's relationship is demonstrated by the fact that in January 1998,
the police are called after she insists that he's head-butted her. But no charges are brought.
-In October 1998, Bird's life was turned upside down yet again when his father died.
Even though he was still working as a taxi driver, Bird became his mother's carer,
and he would visit her every day. The instability of this double life began to spill into his day job, and just over a year later,
Bird was arrested for demanding money with menaces. However, no charges were ever brought against him.
By now, his partner had had enough, and in 2000, after six years, she finally left him.
-She says that Bird became emotionally detached, wasn't sympathetic, wasn't compassionate.
I don't think Bird was capable of compassion. I don't think he felt much in the way of anything for anybody.
-Life as a taxi driver became hard for the father of two, and he'd started to get a bad reputation among the drivers.
-Being a taxi driver in a fairly isolated seaside town in Cumbria was getting more difficult.
More taxi drivers, fewer passengers. There was a good deal of rivalry on the Whitehaven cab rank,
clearly, with some not particularly pleasant remarks one driver to another. He's not a popular figure on the Whitehaven rank.
-Bird had a particularly volatile relationship with a young driver called Darren Rewcastle.
-Darren, he had a few bust-ups with Bird, 'cause Bird used to drive in front of the taxi
before there was readers put there, and Bird was one of the worst for that. And one day, he found this sour milk thrown all over his taxi,
all over the back seat of the taxi, and that upset him, and he had a good idea it was Bird that did it,
because Bird had taken a fare off him. -Sharon Moore, Darren's sister, recalls the hostile relationship between her brother and Bird.
-I can't say a bad word about him, because he was me brother. He definitely, definitely wasn't a bullier.
But most of these taxi drivers got, "He used to bully Derrick, and he used to do this, he used to do that."
It was tit-for-tat, do as bad as each other. -Over the next few years, the rivalry between the two drives intensified.
-Darren Rewcastle, he slashed Derrick Bird's tires. There had been a number of incidents,
but that was, obviously, the most severe, and it would've been expensive, because new tires for a taxi
are not a cheap thing to buy. There was a whole sense of it being relatively difficult to make a living.
-Isolated from the other taxi drivers, in 2002, Bird was involved in a fight outside a nightclub in Workington.
His nose was broken, but he withdrew the charges against the other man. Five years later, aged 49, Bird was attacked again,
this time whilst he was working. -Derrick Bird was assaulted by some passengers who'd made off without paying from his taxi.
It was a serious assault. He had a laceration to the head, he had broken dentures,
he had a chipped tooth. This was something that he took very, very personally, This is further fuel to the fire.
-His first girlfriend leaves him. His second girlfriend leaves him. The only good job he ever had at a nuclear plant,
he loses because he engages in theft. He has his tires slashed by other taxi cab drivers,
fares who run out on him, assault him, one assault being serious enough that he was hospitalized.
His life was just on a downward descent. -Bird had been briefly hospitalized after being attacked by passengers in his taxi.
The incident had left Bird anxious. -He actually changed the nature of how he did his cab work,
when he did his cab work. He became more cautious, he had nightmares, he obsessed about it as a repetition compulsion.
Now, those are all valid symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. I don't doubt that he had it.
What's odd is that the trauma is relatively minor compared to most things that cause PTSD.
And what that makes me think is that before that assault occurred, because of the nature and stresses of his life,
he was in a state of such fragility that his fabric just wasn't sufficient to deal with the next stress.
-Bird was a gun enthusiast and would regularly go on holidays to Thailand where he would visit shooting ranges.
He owned several guns, and in March 2007, he purchased a new 22-caliber rifle. -There's no doubt that he had a great interest in guns,
which I think had been given to him by his father. He had a shotgun license for many years, in 1974.
He had a proper license for a 22-caliber rifle, complete with a silencer. He had a license to have quite a lot of ammunition.
-Bird loved shooting. It was very much a solitary pursuit. He had very little in common
with his fellow taxi drivers in Whitehaven. In February 2008, his taxi was vandalized,
and he suspected one of them. -There is often quite a bit of banter between taxi drivers,
and sometimes this can turn quite nasty, especially when there are disputes over fares,
whether somebody has picked up somebody else's passenger, because this is how these guys make their living.
But for Derrick Bird, he attaches an awful lot of significance to this, because he has this permanent exclusion narrative --
"Everybody is out to get me, everybody is against me." And I think this just added to that.
-Money was tight for Bird, and he became increasingly paranoid about it. -When Derrick Bird's father had died,
there was an argument about the will and who was to get what in the will. Bird felt that his twin brother and the family's solicitor
were planning to reveal to the tax authorities, who were examining Bird's affairs at the time,
that he had a secret bank account in which there was £60,000. He was convinced that the world, his brother, his solicitor,
and every other taxi driver was against him, and then added on top of that, a little fuel that everyone was against him.
-Bird also discovered that his father had lent his twin brother David money before he died.
-Derrick found out that his father made an unspoken secret loan to David. Even at the point where he's the person, you know,
taking over and being responsible for the welfare of his mother, David is getting the money.
Feeling disinherited and believing as he did that his brother and his accountant
were plotting against him to get him jailed for tax fraud, were just too much for him.
-He was of the view that his brother and his solicitor had conspired against him.
He felt very bitter about a £25,000 loan that his father had made to his twin brother back in 1998.
So this is somebody who really does hang on to grudges. He collects them, he stores them away.
He doesn't deal with those issues, with that anger, and it all boils and boils and boils away.
-He was a man who was rapidly going nowhere, was finding himself alone. The frustration was simply too much for him.
-Alienated from everyone and increasingly annoyed that his twin brother may have benefited
from his father's death, Derrick Bird had finally had enough and came to a fateful decision.
Full of rage and armed with his rifle, in the early hours of June 2nd, he drove to his brother's house in Lamplugh.
-Derrick Bird arrives in his brother David's house with his silenced 22-caliber rifle
and confronts him sometime in the early hours. I can only imagine that the brother
would've been utterly bewildered. Suddenly, his brother appears in the middle of the night,
wakes him up. Bird proceeds, without any warning, to shoot his brother, not once or twice,
but 11 times in the head and the body. -This was a really, really cowardly act. He's caught his brother at the time when he's most vulnerable.
It wasn't just an intention to kill, it was an intention to completely destroy. Shooting somebody 11 times, that's way more violence
than you need to get the job done, so I think this does show the intensity of the resentment
that Bird felt towards his brother. -For him, it was a cathartic release. Remember, this isn't just a brother from
his point-of-view, that cheated him out of some inheritance, you know, late in life.
This is a brother who was the person to whom he was compared for his whole life and compared unfavorably.
So, this was the final act of justice, from his point-of-view. -Having shot his twin brother dead,
Derrick Bird then left David's house and made his way to the home of 60-year-old Kevin Commons.
-Just after 5:00 that morning, Derrick Bird drives to the house of his solicitor, Kevin Commons,
and he hangs around waiting for him for around about four hours. So, for me, this is really significant
because it's showing that Bird has a rage that is not dissipating. I think when most people are angry
and they don't have an outlet for that anger, it does fizzle away, and people calm down, people feel better.
But not Derrick Bird. -Several dog walkers saw Bird outside Kevin Commons' farmhouse
in the village of Frizington. He waited there for several hours planning his next deadly move.
-Around about 10:00 that morning, Kevin Commons drives up his driveway, sees Derrick Bird blocking him in,
and probably wonders what on earth is going on. He's not given long to process that thinking,
until Bird comes out and shoots him twice. He must be absolutely shocked. You know, what on earth is he doing?
So he's just basically trying to survive at this point in time. He hasn't killed him.
So, he stumbles to his feet, he starts to crawl away to go back towards his house.
-A neighbor heard the gunshots and saw Kevin Commons trying to flee. -Bird follows him, but replaces the shotgun with a rifle
and proceeds to shoot him twice more, killing him on the spot. ♪♪ -Just after 10:00 A.M., the concerned neighbors
call the police, who discovered Kevin's body in his driveway, but Bird was nowhere to be seen.
He'd fled the scene in his car armed with two weapons, a 12-gauge sawed-off shotgun and a 22-caliber rifle.
-Shotguns and rifles are very different weapons. A rifle is designed to send a stable projectile
a long distance. A shotgun is designed to spread pellets out. A rifle certainly can fire a small projectile
that can kill you, but it's short range. The massive pellets can produce utterly devastating injuries.
With greater range, less effective, but close up, a shotgun is far more deadly. -Derrick Bird had killed two innocent men --
his twin brother David, and 60-year-old family solicitor Kevin Commons. Having fled the scene, Bird returned to his
home village of Rowrah, and at approximately 10:30 that morning, he decided to go to his friend's house
to collect another gun he'd left there. His friend wasn't home, so Bird couldn't get his gun.
He quickly left and made his way to Duke Street in Whitehaven, where 43-year-old Darren Rewcastle
had just started his shift at the taxi rank. -I used to have breakfast with him.
But I don't know why, for some reason, I stayed in bed that morning, and he'd just gone out when I came downstairs.
If I'd got up when I normally did to have breakfast with him, he would've gone out later
and this thing might never have happened. -Darren Rewcastle was strolling across the road with a coffee
in one hand and a cigarette in the other, just like it was any other normal day.
And Derrick Bird pulls up in his car and calls Darren over to him. He's got that control over him.
He knows what he wants to do with this victim. He wants Darren to be facing him.
And when he is, he shoots him in the face. I think this is a really significant murder
because he feels slighted by Darren. He feels that this popular, affable, likeable man
is somebody who has turned against him. He's somebody who has basically turned the other drivers against him,
so he's externalizing all of that rage. And the fact that he shot him in the face is really significant,
because somebody's face is their identity, it's a sense of their personhood. So it wasn't sufficient for Bird to kill him.
He wanted to absolutely obliterate this individual. -Sharon received the devastating news about her brother's murder
just minutes later. -I got a phone call at 10:35 to say that Darren had been shot.
It was one of the taxi guys. He was quite close to our Darren. He just said -- he said, "Sharon,"
he said, "I'm so sorry." He said, uh, "Darren's been killed." And I just went, "You're joking, aren't you?"
He went, "No." He said, "I'm serious." I said, "When was he killed?" He said, uh, "Couple minutes ago."
And he might as well have hit me in the stomach with a sledgehammer, because it was the worst feeling ever.
Ever. I couldn't get the words out. I feel really sick. I was crying. It was just...
It was as though it was happening to somebody else. -In utter disbelief, Sharon called the police.
-And I rang the police, and I said to them, I said, "Can you tell me if it's Darren Rewcastle, please?"
And she went, um, "Well, who's calling, please?" I said, "It's his sister." And she turned around and she went,
"Well, I don't know. We haven't got everybody's names and this, that, and the other and..."
So, she says, "I'll ring you back at half-past 11:00." -With no one to officially confirm Darren's death,
his family had an agonizing wait ahead of them. With the reports of another man being shot dead,
the police deployed every armed officer in the county to try and stop the deadly gunman.
-He was literally shooting at anything he felt like. That's what made it quite difficult for the police
to stop him at once, because there was no obvious pattern. -Bird was now on the run, but he wasn't finished.
Still at the taxi rank, Bird then fired his gun at two other local taxi drivers.
Donald Reid was shot in the back and Paul Wilson in the face. Incredibly, both men survived.
-It's no accident that Bird, who is by now, clearly obsessed with revenge against his fellow taxi drivers,
that he aimed at their faces. He's not seeking to wound. He's seeking to disfigure.
-Derrick's Bird's rage goes from the specific to the general. So he's targeted his brother, he's targeted his solicitor,
he's targeted the men at the taxi rank, but after this point, anybody could fall victim to him.
He is literally driving around the streets of Cumbria picking off people that he comes across.
-What I believe happens then is he loses all control over the aggressive impulse.
It's now just a wild, derelict impulse seizing a moment to kill. -A local police officer in Whitehaven heard the shootings
and spotted Bird's silver car with a shotgun pointing out of the front passenger window.
As he gave chase, he saw Bird aim his shotgun at another taxi traveling with a passenger in the opposite direction.
-He didn't do anything to avoid capture. He was driving around killing people. The net result of that, was within moments,
every member of the people force was on the street looking for him. So he operated without regard,
the possibility that he would be caught. -The local policemen stopped to help the occupants of that taxi.
Driver Terry Kennedy was shot in the hand and passenger Emma Percival was hit by pellets in the neck, arm, and side.
Both received significant injuries, but survived. Another police van took over the pursuit and confronted Bird,
who'd pulled into a driveway. The officers, however, were unarmed. -When the police finally did catch up with Derrick Bird,
he's a very dangerous individual, at this point in time. He has got nothing left to lose.
So, when he points his gun at the police officers, they quite wisely back away, and that gives him
the opportunity to go on the run again. So, they've come very close to getting him,
but I think it was a wise decision to give him a wide berth at this point in time.
-After Bird threatened them with a shotgun, it became clear to the local police they would need help to apprehend him.
-This is Cumbria. This is not the mean city streets. You're not expecting there to be a spree killing
in this part of the world, so the police were perhaps not as well set up to respond to this as they could've been.
So, there were some issues with the radio communications, there were some issues in passing information
from one service to another. So, I think this spree killing really did take everybody by surprise.
-By now the shocking news broke that a deadly gunman was on the loose in Cumbria.
-Stay indoors. He's randomly shooting people on the street. -With modern news, you can actually see
these sort of events evolving in real time. You don't see serial killers in real time.
But to sit there as a person and watch as it's unfolding live is just unbelievable, really.
-At 11:00 A.M., the body of David Bird was discovered, and the police realized they now had three people dead
and four people seriously injured. Helicopters were deployed to scour the area for the crazed gunman.
But Bird continued his deadly mission and arrived at the village of Egremont, where he killed his next two victims in quick succession,
57-year-old Susan Hughes, who was out doing her shopping, and 71-year-old Kenneth Fishburn,
a retired Sellafield worker. -His M.O. was as simple as can be. You drive around, you see somebody,
you have the slightest inclination to kill 'em, you kill 'em, and if you don't, you kill 'em.
He virtually killed almost everyone within range of his gun and taxi as he drove around.
-Bird's next victim was 65-year-old Isaac Dixon, who was killed in a field in the village of Carleton.
Between 11:05 A.M. and 11:10 A.M., he then drove to the village of Wilton. It was thought he was looking for members of a diving club
with whom he'd fallen out. Unable to find anyone, he turned his gun to an elderly couple,
Jennifer and James Jackson. -I suspect he's now become so dissociated from the world,
he doesn't really know what he's doing. He knows vaguely that he's got an end game in his mind,
but there's no predictability. -The police urge the public to stay indoors whilst they try to track down the crazed gunman.
Bird then made his way to Gosforth, where a 31-year-old part-time farmer and semi-professional rugby player
was shot dead as he was working in a field. -He wasn't seeking out people. He was shooting at people pretty much at random --
passerby, a woman on the way back from the shops, a man with his dog, a man in a field.
-Around 11:25 A.M., Bird drove to Seascale, where he aimed his gun at 23-year-old estate agent Jamie Clark,
who, upon being shot at, crashed his car and tragically died. Minutes later, Bird shot at 40-year-old Harry Berger,
a pub landlord, who survived, but lost two fingers. -He's being pursued by armed response officers,
helicopters, the whole panoply of a manhunt, and he's literally zigzagging across western Cumbria,
I mean, it's horrifying to say, but looking for targets. There is no rhyme nor reason for that.
The only rhyme or reason is in the completely distorted reality of the empty, lonely shell of Derrick Bird.
-At approximately 11:27 A.M., Derrick Bird shot two victims in Seascale, 64-year-old cyclist Michael Pike,
and 66-year-old Jane Robinson, who was just yards away from the house she shared with her twin sister.
Bird had murdered 12 people on a frenzied shooting spree and injured seven more.
The police knew who they were pursuing, but were still unable to apprehend the 52-year-old taxi driver.
-There were a couple of occasions, without question, in which Bird might have been stopped.
At one point, a police armed response team were pursuing him, following radio instructions.
When he passes them in the opposite direction. They do an abrupt U-turn and follow him,
but then, Bird gets through some roadworks before they do, they get stuck under a bridge, he gets away.
-Fleeing police, Bird drove to Eskdale Valley and opened fire at six random people.
He then stopped carer Fiona Moretta and asked her if she was having a nice day before shooting her in the face.
Incredibly, she survived. -He drove around until literally he ran out of bullets.
The only thing that stopped him was running out of bullets. -By this point, Bird is pretty well aware
that the net is closing in around him. He then starts to crash into vehicles. You can imagine by now his grasp of reality
is distorted, to put it politely. He bangs into vehicles, he damages the tires of his taxi, eventually, so badly
that one deflates completely, he crashes into a wall. ♪♪ -Bird was now running out of petrol.
With no ammunition and his car damaged, he drove to a beauty spot near Boot called Doctor Bridge.
-He'd run out of shotgun bullets, and suddenly, he realized that, unlike his hyperbolic fantasies before this,
life as he knew it was really over. -At approximately 12:30 P.M., police found Bird's car
abandoned with one of his guns inside. Bird was now on foot armed with his rifle.
With the public still at high-risk, the police had now taken the decision to name Derrick Bird as their prime suspect,
but there was still no sign of him. Then, at approximately 1:30 P.M., police officers found Derrick Bird's body
in a wooded area near Boot. He'd shot himself. -He'd engaged in the ultimate failure act.
There was no reason for him to be here anymore. -He's got nothing left to lose at this point in time.
And spree killers will often take their own lives, and what this represents is a way of taking back control,
so they are the ones who are making the final decision on when it is they die. They don't want to go to prison.
They don't want to have to face the consequences of their actions, so they take that very calculated decision to kill themselves.
-Meanwhile, Sharon was still waiting anxiously for news on her brother Darren. -So, we waited and we waited.
Half-past 11:00 came and went, no sign of any phone calls. And I said, "We'll just go up to Mum's."
Went up to Mum's, and I walked in, and Mum said to me, she says, "What do I owe this pleasure?"
And I just said to her, I says, "Put Sky News on." So, she put the Sky News on, and she just started screaming, and she went,
"That's our Darren, that's our Darren." -And then about 6:00, police came to tell us
it was Darren. He was just left on the pavement. That's what really got to us. They never covered him, never put a tent over him.
When the police came, we asked them about that, and they said, "We haven't got one."
So, that was it. -Sharon realized she had met her brother's killer before, but could never have known what was to happen.
-A week before all that happened, I got in Derrick's taxi. I said to our Darren,
"The taxi driver was really unsociable, so I think," and he was like, "Oh, that's just Derrick.
He's harmless." I think that's the puzzling bit out of it all for me, is when our Darren said, "Oh, he's harmless."
I always say, "You never know what goes on in someone's head." -With the news of the Cumbria shootings
all over the national press, people were still trying to make sense of why Derrick Bird did what he did.
-A large number of people that he killed were literally people whose killing was a punishment for them being on the public streets.
There is no motivation there, there's no connection there to anything in his life.
It is really what some people would call an expressive homicide, a homicide that's taking place more to give him
cathartic relief than anything to do with who the victim is and whether or not they deserve to be punished.
-The Queen paid tribute to the victims and the then-British Prime Minister David Cameron,
visited the scene. The small close-knit community in Cumbria was hit hard by the killings
and wanted to show their support for the victims. For Darren Rewcastle's family, it was overwhelming.
-We booked the crematorium for 150 people, but when we got there was, I would say,
a couple hundred stood outside. The taxis made a procession to follow the hearse.
I would say just about every taxi in the area was there. People lining the streets as we went past.
♪♪ [ Sighs ] It was heartbreaking. So many people knew him, and so many people liked him.
-It was a huge, huge amount of people there. They're proud of him. To think how many people he touched,
and not just in his job, but in general. -The families could now put their loved ones to rest,
but nothing could explain Bird's actions. -Well, I'll be honest with you, I hated him,
because he took somebody special away from me. Then I'll be like, it's his family I feel sorry for
because you've destroyed your own family. And then his lads were at school, the same school as my lasses went to.
And he just wrecked so many lives just because he couldn't handle his own. You can't be a normal person
and shoot people several times. There's no justification for it anyway. None whatsoever, apart from losing the plot.
-This is an individual who's wrought complete havoc, and he's never going to be brought to justice
for doing this. -Bird certainly never explained, what did you do that for? He left no suicide note, for example, no note of apology,
no suggestion of what was in his mind when he suddenly decided to shoot all these people.
Anyone who is prepared to take lives at random or apparently at random, for no obvious reason,
without any explanation, to me, is genuinely evil. -Bird callously aimed his gun at anyone that stood in his way
or he felt had wronged him. In less than 24 hours, he murdered 12 innocent people,
including his twin brother, and injured 11 others. All of this makes Derrick Bird
one of the world's most evil killers. ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪

In Cumbria, 2010 taxi driver Derek Bird took his gun and, in less than 24 hours, shot dead 12 people and injured 11 more. The callous killer only stopped when he had run out of ammunition, finally turning the gun on himself.

An in-depth look at the lives and crimes of some of the world's most evil killers, including Jeffrey Dahmer, Ted Bundy, Richard Ramirez, Cary Stayner, Leonard Lake, Dorothea Puente and more.

Brief Summary

Derrick Bird's 2010 shooting spree in Cumbria left 12 dead, driven by personal grievances and a troubled life.

Key points

Derrick Bird's Deadly Rampage. In June 2010, taxi driver Derrick Bird killed 12 people in a shocking spree.
The First Victim. Bird murders his own brother in a violent act of betrayal.
The Attack on Taxi Drivers. Bird targets fellow taxi drivers in a fit of rage, leaving several injured.
Derrick Bird's Deadly Rampage. Derrick Bird embarks on a frenzied shooting spree, targeting random victims in Cumbria.
The Tragic Discovery. Police discover the body of David Bird, marking the beginning of a tragic series of events.
Community Mourning. The close-knit community of Cumbria comes together to mourn the victims of the shootings.

Episode highlights

Episode quotes

I think it emphasizes to me how fragile life is.

2:41WatchAug 3, 2021

Tension

85/ 100High tension

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