Sarah Ditum

The making of a legend

Will Andrew Hankinson’s study of Raoul Moat’s spree-killing obsession become a script for further murder?

For one week in July 2010, the aspiring spree killer Raoul Moat was the only news. ‘Aspiring’ because he didn’t actually achieve his violent ambitions: by the time he died, he’d only managed to shoot three people (four if you include himself) and murder one (two if you count PC David Rathband, who was blinded by Moat and killed himself four years later).

But he made it, in a way. His self-constructed mythology had all the makings of a folk hero —working-class man, wronged by his woman, a grudge against the police — and there was a public ready to embrace him. Floral tributes were left outside his home and at the site of his suicide, and a Facebook page called ‘RIP Raoul Moat You Legend!’ attracted over 35,000 likes before it was removed. David Cameron obligingly ensured Moat’s outlaw credentials by calling him a ‘callous murderer, full stop’ and declaring there should be ‘no sympathy’ for him.

Andrew Hankinson’s account of the case is a direct challenge to the Prime Minister’s words: ‘You have nine days and your whole life to prove you are more than a callous murderer. Go.’ The ‘you’ here is Moat, because the book is written entirely in the second person, using Moat’s own recordings and letters to patch together the internal monologue of a killer; where Moat’s account diverges from the factual record or clarification is needed, Hankinson adds a commentary within square brackets. We only know what Moat knew, so there is thankfully no interlude with Gazza and his fishing rod.

This device means that sympathy is inevitable: it is, as a matter of grammatical practicality, impossible to read a text in the second person without feeling some kind of identification with the ‘you’.

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