Raoul Moat Was A Super Hero: Pictures And Evidence
RAOUL Moat is a dead super hero. And the Mail’s David Jones is gawping at his legacy and burnishing fame’s jockstrap:
Watching a procession of tattooed and track-suited hero-worshippers reverentially placing bouquets beside Raoul Moat’s abandoned council house this week, one question kept gnawing away.
Before Jones’s question: we have a few, albeit all on a single theme. Did you see the Asian man with his hipster flip-flops and jeans laying flowers? Did you see the Muslim women reading the notes of condolence and hate? Did you see the man in his slacks and no tattoos, and the girls in their pulled up socks and skirts? Or did you only see what you wanted to see, David Jones?
As for a procession, it wasn’t.
How could this freakishly muscled and cold-blooded killer, with his paranoid loathing for authority, possibly have come from the same family as his older brother, Angus, a respectable officer with HM Customs and Revenue?
Ummmmmmmmmm..?
But later, as I delved into Moat’s background – speaking at length to Angus and other family members and friends – some intriguing answers began to emerge.
Were they different people, by any chance? Don’t want to ruin the story, but were they?
Indeed, while it’s clear that Moat was a deranged killer, there are clues as to how he became that way.
He liked violence. He had a gun. He never joined HMRC. He never loved his Barbie dolls…
Since every moment of this deeply troubling case has been played out in public on social networking website Facebook, it is being seen as Britain’s first major information age crime.
What? Every moment of this case has been played out on rolling TV news, the media tickling the viewers with visions of muscular, tooled-up coppers, TV presenters with guns, shot-in-the-face cops, death scenes, kinky sex, Facebook ghouls, scaremongering police and more.
Appalled at the twisted morality displayed by some 35,000 subscribers to one page, sickeningly titled ‘RIP Raoul Moat You Legend!’, the Prime Minister David Cameron has now shamed the site’s bosses into closing it down.
Not all of those subscribers, as Jones calls them, supported Moat. You can read some of their views expressed here. And David Cameron did not shame the site’s boss, social media guru Siobhan O’Dowd, into shutting her page. She has not said why she shut it done. The Sun says it made her do it, not Dave. Everyone wants a slice of the action a chance to look good and wholesome.
With one of Moat’s victims – courageous PC David Rathband – permanently blinded, his love rival dead, and his former girlfriend Samantha Stobbart recovering from gunshot wounds, Mr Cameron’s outrage is all too understandable.
Yes. But did it need saying in Prime Minister’s Question Time? Was Dave that shocked to discover the mentality the electorate that he addressed the Commons on a Facebook page?
Anyhow, Jones wants us to look at Raoul Moat and his brother Angus as a study. Let’s look at the mum, Josephine Moat. Her brother-in-law Charles Alexander is spoken with:
‘She wore her hair in tight ringlets and was one of those flower-power, free-love sort of people,’ the 72-year-old former coal miner and Royal Artillery warrant officer told me…
‘Josephine lived in the same house at first, but she was always going off, and it was Grannie Moat who raised them.’
Adds Angus Moat:
‘Our mother was selfish. Without getting all dewy-eyed about it, we had a terrible childhood. My mother is not a very nice person.
‘She suffers from bipolar disorder, and she has been in and out of hospital – but I know other people with bipolar, and they are not like her. There was a lack of maternal affection.
‘I know all this caused Raoul a lot of problems. That much is evident from what he said during his last moments on the riverbank. He was talking about having no dad.’…
He also suffered from asthma.
So. What else made them so different? Why hasn’t Angus Moat become a media folk hero?
‘But despite all that’s been written this week, it would be quite wrong to suggest that he was evil and I was a complete angel. My theory is that he had some self-esteem issues.’
But Moat is not to be understood. He’s a killer. The Facebook sickos who laud him and want him understood are,well, sick. Jones, you need to stop:
By the time Angus had completed his degree, he barely recognised Moat, who had undergone a Superman-style metamorphosis…
He’ a hero!
And get a load of those tattooed, track-suit wearing swine laying flowers to Super Moat:
Outside their former home this week, Moat’s apologists ranged from the owner of the grocery store opposite his house, to an Ethiopian neighbour, Leila Ibrahim, who laid some flowers from her garden at the makeshift shrine (because ‘he always loved gardening’) and waxed about his qualities as a father.
Well, she did know him. Others knew Moat too:
If we believe Dawn Cook, one of the first stereotypically skeletal, rough-looking bottle-blondes that he was attracted to, and who he picked up in his bouncer days, he was a monster who would beat her to a pulp.
Rough-looking bottle-blondes love it rough. Women-haters are drawn to them.
Yet in Newcastle – a city not known for its love of cowardly bullies who beat up women – there are any number of ordinary people who refuse to believe these lurid stories.
Not like in Sunderland, say, or Paris.
On Tyneside, men of his huge dimensions are much in demand in the underworld, and he began associating with types his brother didn’t approve of.
In London men of his size become coppers and pet groomers.
Jones then gets onto the bit about Sam Stobbart telling Moat she was shagging a copper:
I can also reveal, however, that according to one of Moat’s closest friends, Samantha exacerbated this fateful error by calling him at least twice to taunt him about her romance with Mr Brown, just hours before he shot them.
But do not have any sympathy for Raoul Moat, the “monster” who appeals to the tattooed dregs of society.
Says Moat’s pal Tony Laidler:
‘Samantha told Raoul that she was with a PC and he was betterlooking, fitter and younger, and if Raoul came over he would do him,’ says Mr Laidler.
‘Then Raoul ended the call, and she rang back. In the second call, she said she would soon be having sex with the new boyfriend.’
But let us not find excuses for Raoul Moat. Says Angus Moat:
‘My mother should be burnt at the stake for what she has done. No one in their right mind would have said that, in the position he was in, and it gives a glimpse of the person she is. I think some people are just born like that. Raoul wasn’t born bad, but I’m saying my mother was. The only reason I’m speaking now is to show he wasn’t a cartoon character, as he’s been portrayed. But I’m not glorifying him. He was a troubled soul. He was sick, and he needed help.’
But let us not glorify him nor try to understand a monster…
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Posted: 17th, July 2010 | In: Reviews Comments (4) | TrackBack | Permalink
