By the time Raoul Moat shot himself, after being surrounded by police in the Northumbrian woods, he was already a hero to some. This man, who had blasted his ex-girlfriend with a shotgun, murdered her partner, blinded a police officer and then gone on the run was the object of a Facebook shrine with thousands of members.
In common with the London riots a year later, in 2011, the rise of Ukip and perhaps even the rise of Jeremy Corbyn, the mass veneration of a killer seemed a manifestation of England’s deep disquiet: a popular disaffection towards the established order of things, verging on nihilism, in a nation assuming the dimensions of a dystopia.
Told almost entirely in the second person, the journalist Andrew Hankinson’s account of Moat’s dramatic last days is an attempt to judge whether Moat’s actions were anything other than vile and heartless. Does Moat deserve at least some of our sympathy? (Unsurprisingly, David Cameron came down unequivocally on the matter. He told parliament: “As far as I can see it is absolutely clear that Raoul Moat was a callous murderer, full stop, end of story.”) Why did Moat win the applause of a section of the English population by shooting three innocent people?
The answer is twofold. First, swayed by Moat’s self-justifying pronouncements, some came to see him as the victim of a negligent system. Flowers and notes were left by the riverbank in Rothbury where he made his final stand. (“RIP Raoul. You were not helped and failed by the system massively.”) Second, there was a cinematic, easily romanticised quality to the way Moat evaded capture for a week by a small army of police officers, hiding in the wilderness like Rambo, finally choosing death over surrender.
Hankinson has assembled his taut, uncomfortably thrilling book almost entirely from documents that Moat left behind (including the Dictaphone tapes and the written “murder statement” he made while he on the run) and from records of the authorities and institutions with which he came into conflict.
The result is an unvarnished reconstruction of Moat’s murderous rampage, which allows the facts – and the perpetrator – to speak for themselves. For the most part the author removes himself from the narrative, assuming an editorial role over the documentary materials, yet this reads like fast, fierce pulp fiction.
Having failed as a man, Moat made himself the anti-hero in his own shoot-'em-up: "You walk across the road to the barber's and ask for a Mohican, like Robert De Niro in Taxi Driver." Hours later, 'You walk over to him. He's on his hands and knees . . . You shoot him in the head.'
Sympathy, or at least the possibility of it, is established early on, before the bloodshed. A prologue lists Moat’s answers to a questionnaire from the regional department of psychotherapy, from which he was seeking help. Among his “achievements” he includes: “HAVING THE MORALS I HAVE”; “BEING A DAD” and “NOT LOSING THE PLOT AND BEING IN JAIL”.
In the same questionnaire he betrays a dangerous volatility: “LOOK I’M NOW REALLY PISSED OFF BECAUSE THESE QUESTIONS SHOULD BE DISCUSSED IN PERSON . . . [I] SEE THIS AS TOTALLY DISMISSIVE AND UNCARING, AND WAS ABOUT TO CHUCK THESE FORMS IN THE BIN.”
Moat filled out that form in 2008. Two years later he did wind up in jail, for assaulting a child. While he was locked up Sam Stobbart, his young girlfriend and the mother of his daughter, broke up with him. She then became involved with a karate instructor, Chris Brown.
Sam warned Moat that Brown was younger and stronger than him – Moat had frequently beaten her up while they were together, part of a long history of his domestic violence. Moat confided to a fellow inmate that he intended to do serious harm to Stobbart and her new man. The day after his release he posted an ominous Facebook status that ended with the words, “I’m not 21 and I can’t rebuild my life. Watch and see what happens.”
What happened is that, before the day was through, Moat shot Brown and Stobbart in front of Stobbart’s family, seriously wounding her and killing him. Moat later claimed that he meant only to superficially wound Sam, so that she would “get compensation and be set for life without me” – a peculiar form of love, expressed through the barrel of a shotgun.
Aided by two friends, he fled the scene. He made taunting phone calls in which he declared war on the police, then camped out in the woods. His friends come across as witless goons: their ploy was to pretend they were not Moat’s accomplices but his hostages.
One of them sent a letter to his sister, cheerfully boasting that “I AM ACTUALLY SAFER THAN SAFE – BURN THIS LETTER!!!” After Moat’s suicide both of them were put away for decades.
Moat’s next victim was a police officer. David Rathband was in his car when Moat stalked up and shot him in the face. Rathband survived but was left blind. In the aftermath of the crime his marriage collapsed, and in 2012 he hanged himself. “You did that,” Hankinson adds in the book’s damning penultimate paragraph – a rare and necessary instance of overt authorial judgment.
A 6ft 3in former cage fighter, Moat sought to kill as many police officers as he could before being taken down. The 37-year-old was assured of his righteousness in all this; he repeatedly claimed that the police had always been against him, goading and obstructing him when all he wanted was to go straight and raise his children well.
Self-pitying though they are, his recordings and statements are also poignant, lurching between sentimentality and raw desperation (“All my life I’d wanted death”).
Moat was a tormented man with little mastery over his violent urges. His testimony lays bare a retarded moral sense: right until the end he was largely unrepentant of his actions, elated even, and indifferent or oblivious to the pain he had caused. He was a destroyer, not a hero.
For all the grievances and frustrations of his life, Moat made the choice to multiply his miseries rather than to bear them alone. “I’m going to destroy a few lives like you’ve destroyed mine,” he tells a police operator. Secure in his status as victim, he granted himself agency over other people’s suffering.
The final pages bring to light the full extent of Moat’s delusions. Might it be that his paranoia and his furies are evidence of serious mental illness and that “the system” really did fail Raoul Moat? Perhaps. But Moat failed himself as well.
Having sent in the mental-health questionnaire that is transcribed at the start of this book, he was scheduled for a series of appointments with a clinical psychologist. Moat never showed up.
Rob Doyle’s second book, This Is the Ritual, was published in January by Bloomsbury and the Lilliput Press
