Raoul Moat- stranger than fiction

July 13, 2010 at 10:01 pm Leave a comment

Let’s face it, Raoul Moat is a pretty exotic name for someone that looks like this

"Whatchoo lookin' at"

I mean, he looks more like a Jim Smith doesn’t he? He could have been named Jacquez Valesquez and it wouldn’t have been more surreal.

For many, that was the whole thing about this case- it was just totally bizarre from start to finish. A psychopathic nutter, just out of jail for ABH, shoots his former girlfriend and kills her new boyfriend, then decides on a snap vendetta against the police and shoots an officer. He goes on the run and evidence is found in a sleepy northumbrian backwater, which soon becomes the centre of attention for the world’s media. In amongst the evidence are long, ranting letters to the police, of up to forty pages long and even a recorded message on a dictafone threatening to kill a member of the public for every news report on him he considers ‘false’. Having been utterly incapable of finding him for days, he turns up, out of the blue, wandering through that very same backwater before entering into a six hour stand off with police that runs into the early hours of the morning- during which ex-footballer Paul Gascoine, of all people, turns up like the drunk at the party claiming to be his friend and asking to see him. His legacy is even weirder- 18,000 Facebook users have joined a memorial page, with some calling him a ‘legend’ (Uh uh… I’m sorry, WHAT??).

It sounds like something from a crime novel, or an action movie. And of course the news channels loved it- especially Sky News, that delighted us once again in reporting innaccurate information from the unverified sources they’d been hanging around like vultures all night (all part of the fun, I suppose). At 1.56 the intimidatingly self-assured Kay Burley told us she’d “put those levels up for you”- just in case we hadn’t heard Moat’s gunshot loud enough. What a service you provide, Kay.

I’ll finish on a lighter note, with two more surreal aspects of the case.

Firstly, what do you get when you cross…