I was rapt by this real-crime, real-time drama, and hoped that Moat wouldn’t kill as many as Derrick Bird, the taxi driver who shot 12 people in Cumbria just weeks earlier. I took notes about the hunt.
- Text size
Sympathy for the Devil
Raoul Moat, the super-ordinary working-class man, the underdog hunted by armed and bullet-proofed cops, the “big lad” who evaded capture for seven days, finally, on the seventh night, on the banks of the River Coquet, knelt down with his sandwiches and blankets and held a shotgun to his spongy head and, before pulling the trigger, said: “I had no father.”
