Family life probed for key to deadly spree

As shocked neighbours and relatives sought to understand the reasons for Lake District gunman Derrick Bird's violence, attention focused on possible clues in his family history.

Police are investigating whether simmering tensions between Bird and his more successful and popular twin brother, David, may have boiled over.

But the seeds of his resentment — and its devastating culmination — may have been sewn years earlier when the brothers were growing up in rural Cumbria.

Bird apparently inherited his interest in guns — and the weapons themselves — from their father, Joe. A wildlife expert, Joe was known as "a real countryman" who used to hunt rabbits and contributed regularly to local radio.

As children, Derrick and David attended the same Whitehaven school, Ehenside Comprehensive, which has since been pulled down. But despite being twins, former teacher Nan Wilson, 75, remembers them as "like chalk and cheese".

"Derrick was introverted, he was a quiet lad," she said. "David was the more outgoing of the two."

David became a successful mechanic with his own business. Derrick Bird was said to be bitter after being fired from his job at Sellafield in 1990 for theft, and resentful over his taxi driver colleagues, some of whom, he is said to have believed, cheated him out of fares.

David married Susan Davis in 1980 and they had three daughters, who have denied there was a family feud. David and his wife were said to have parted amicably recently.

Derrick Bird never married and was reported to have split from partner Linda Mills soon after she became pregnant with their second son.

Bird's mother, Mary, 90, frail after a series of strokes, is believed to have moved out of her house in Ennerdale, the family home for generations.

Bird's cousin, Joy Ryan, said: "She just couldn't make sense of it all. She kept saying she wanted to talk to them, she wanted to talk to her sons."