‘Kitty, did you hear there’s a gunman on the loose in Rothbury?’, one of my classmates asked me.
‘No there isn’t, Lisa man,’ I remember retorting, rolling my eyes heavenward as I carried on to lunch with a little niggling feeling in my stomach.
It was July 2010, I was 15, and up until that day, the most worrisome crime to come out of the sleepy Northumberland countryside – where I’m from – was a stolen quad bike.
Populated by no more than 5,000 people, Rothbury is my nearest town, home to one tiny supermarket with the worst layout in the history of supermarkets.
It’s a town where potholes are a political football, and you’ll most likely receive a nod or a wave if you pass someone in a car.
So to hear there was a gunman roaming around my neighbourhood just seemed absurd – but there was, and his name was Raoul Moat.
I began to believe Lisa when my parents rang to say I wouldn’t be able to get home from my school in the bigger town of Alnwick, as the B-road was closed, and armed police, sniffer dogs, and helicopters were patrolling the area.
It was said that an ex-convict from Newcastle – the 37-year-old subject of the new ITV drama The Hunt for Raoul Moat airing Sunday – was wandering around the countryside within miles from my remote family home.
Yikes.
And so off I went to my friend Annabel’s house, safe in the people-buffered confines of Alnwick.
But, honestly, I don’t think I was scared – more baffled by the whole situation.
Growing up in the countryside, you almost feel immune to and detached from those types of terrifying crimes you hear about in the news from big, scary places like London, or even just down the road in Newcastle.
So much so, that when the news broke Moat was on the loose with a gun and a two-day shooting spree under his belt, having been recently freed from prison for assaulting his nine-year-old relative, I wasn’t perhaps as concerned as I should have been. It was all too surreal.
Giddy with drama, Annabel and I walked to her house and worked ourselves up into a frenzy when the phone rang and a man asked whether her parents were in.
We got it into our heads the man was in fact Moat, checking to see if the coast was clear to come into the house and, I don’t know, steal a sandwich or eat an apple.
So we quickly hung up the phone and didn’t have to wait long until Annabel’s dad arrived home and asked whether his colleague had called. Oops.
Of course, the serious reality of the situation was lost on my teenage self.
I was oblivious as Moat shot three victims; his ex-girlfriend Samantha Stobbart, her partner Christopher Brown and PC David Rathband.
Stobbart survived her injuries, while Brown tragically did not.
PC Rathband, who Moat shot twice while he sat in his police car, was blinded by the impact and later died by suicide 20 months later, apparently unable to cope with his condition.
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As the days rolled on, the severity of the situation became clearer and I started to worry for mine and my family’s safety.
Locals worried Moat might target rural farmhouses and cottages – a little like my own – as he was said to be raiding vegetable patches in Rothbury’s surrounding countryside.
After one particularly restless night imagining Moat skulking around fields I’d grown up in, I decided to leave the killer a packed lunch outside our house, so at least if he was just hungry he would take it and leave us alone.
In hindsight, this was an odd and almost deranged move, and I quickly scuttled outside to retrieve it after hearing police officers on the news warning that anyone found to be helping Moat would face consequences.
My parents remember being worried, as Moat had ties to our particular patch of countryside.
One of my friends remembers how his gran wasn’t allowed out of her Rothbury house when the town was locked down on July 6 after Moat’s car was found, while another spoke of a woman not being let into her house.
Everyone was fearful, but I remember being told there was no huge risk posed to members of the public, just police officers.
However, there was a sense that everyone knew this might not be the case, no matter how many times people told each other ‘not to worry,’ in a cheery Northumbrian rhythm.
Indeed, it was later reported Moat had threatened to kill a member of the public every time there was an inaccurate story in the news about his private life. I’m quite glad I didn’t know this at the time.
I asked an ex-Northumbria police officer if he remembers what it was like.
Although he was retired by 2010, he recalled: ‘The police on duty kept ringing me to ask where woodlands were when he was sighted as they had no local knowledge’.
Indeed, Northumbria Police were accompanied by 10% of the country’s whole police force, the RAF, and even snipers for the manhunt.
Eventually, after a week of living in what felt like the Wild West, with everyone at school spreading rumours and fabricated stories, swathes of press, randomly spotting armed police in fields I used to walk in – and general bewilderment – Moat was found.
In the small hours of July 9 Moat exited a storm drain in Rothbury, and what ensued was a six-hour stand-off before he eventually shot himself dead.
I was on a pre-booked family holiday in France when I heard the news, which was fortunate timing. But I was relieved that everyone else at home was safe again.
After all the false reports from the previous week, I almost couldn’t believe it when I heard former England footballer Paul Gascoigne, aka Gazza, had turned up to the riverside stand-off and offered to bring Moat some chicken and lager.
Everything was as it was again in the weeks that followed, although the tragedy of the lives lost understandably lingers on.
Physically, the only reminder of the events of 2010 are a few bunches of flowers that occasionally – and controversially – appear in the spot Moat found his end.
When I reached out to a local Facebook group asking for people’s memories of 2010 my post was blocked by the moderator, who said she would not add to the media frenzy and what she called the ‘glorification’ of a killer, which many locals think is happening in the new ITV series.
As for me, I will be watching the series because I’m too curious not to.
But I will do so with a critical hat on, and will probably nit-pick my way through the hyperbole, which makes these kinds of recent-history dramatisations so popular, but so frustrating for people who were actually there.
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