You Could Do Something Amazing with Your Life [You Are Raoul Moat] Page 6

  This is Raoul Moat on the fifth of July 2009 and this is an audio log. It’s a record of what I’m doing, what I’m thinking, and why I’m doing what I’m doing. It’s for the public, but it’s going to the papers first. I’ve tried communicating with the police, but they’re holding a lot back. As far as I’m concerned the public has a right to know the truth and they will know the truth by the end of this tape. Right, as people are aware, me and Sam started seeing each other in 2005. Well, it was New Year’s Eve in 2004, so you could say it was 2004, but either way, we were seeing each other for nearly six years. Before I met Sam I’d always wanted to die, but I wasn’t willing to kill myself because my gran put her whole life into bringing me up. If there is an afterlife, which I believe there is, it would piss her off to watch me throw it away, but irrespective of my religious beliefs, I was happy for people to take pot shots at me. I worked my ticket. Kids came in my house with boiler suits and swords and machetes, all kinds of rubbish going on. Back then nobody made me happy, even though I was with some really good women, though this business about Marissa being terrified of me is bollocks. Me and her fought like cat and dog, and okay, I set about her, she got a few clips, which weren’t too light either, but she’s like a weapon against me [you punched her and throttled her and hit her with a baseball bat, smashed her head with your knee, pushed her into a wall, threatened to hire a hit man to murder her, and left her terrified of you even after your relationship had ended], but anyway, who cares, the thing with Sam was, I liked her way before I went out with her. She was stunning, with lovely hair, great legs, a real head-turner. She used to go down to the Bigg Market, inappropriately dressed, you know. I didn’t know how young she was, but she used to come and talk to me on the door. She was seeing someone at the time though, and me being me, I don’t want to put my cock where somebody else’s is, so I said to get rid of him, which was a double bluff really, but she’s stubborn beyond belief, and the second week passed and that was it, time’s up, so I started seeing this other woman who was reasonably pretty, but a little on the big side for me. The bottom line is, I’m not a person who settles for second best, so I got this call from Sam on New Year’s Eve and we had a good talk. I don’t like many women. I don’t understand them. But with Sam it was like having a conversation with myself. We decided to go out. We loved each other even before it got physical. It was like out of a textbook, and very quickly she moved in. We were inseparable. It was fantastic. She was jealous, very possessive, which I liked, being honest, but we had a few problems, and it wasn’t so much the swearing, but she could be hurtful, quite mean, and there was one day when I lost it and pushed her. It came from nowhere. I didn’t expect it. I didn’t think I could do it with her, but she hit the floor and split her head. I was fucking gutted to be honest. It showed up straight away in her blonde hair, and obviously she was upset. She was crying. I was upset and pissed off with myself, because I didn’t want that with her, so we both calmed down and I said I’d be off if I ever did that to her again, because violence always progresses, a slap turns into a punch, and we’d end up shooting each other. I told her she had to stop getting in my face, and me and her were fine after that. Whenever I had an outburst it was just punching things, anything but her, but the thing is, you can’t be smashing up things you’ve paid £150 for, or hurting your hands, so it became apparent I needed to cut Marissa out of my life. I shouldn’t have kept my ex that close. After she was out of the picture the arguments became non-existent and it was fantastic again, though we had a few more break-ups. This thing in the paper pissed me off actually, saying she went to her gran’s after getting beaten up. Not at all. The first time she went to her gran’s was when I was getting it from both sides, Sam and Marissa, and I got them in the car and said, listen, just get out there and have a fight on that bit of grass, but they’re not fighters, they can’t fight to save their lives, so it was a stupid thing to do. Two women shouldn’t be fighting, but Sam was upset about that and went to her gran’s, which is when I sweet-talked her and she came home, but it was nothing to do with domestic violence [Sam said she left because you’d been violent]. Sam was the turning point in my life. I went straight when I met her. I came off the doors. I spent all my time with her. Most days we went out together, and I’ve got loads of recordings on the computer, going to the coast and the kids being on the horsey beep-beep ride, things like that. Great times. But I got arrested for daft things, like the conspiracy to murder, which sounds terrible, but it was a nonsense, just part of the hunting season on Mr Moat, while others were being protected, and it was around then that I taxed this gun and buried it.

  The tape runs out. You turn it over and press record.

  Moving on, me and Sam got the house in Fenham, and she gave birth to my daughter. That was a nice experience. I’m a little paranoid where women are concerned. I’ve seen them at their worst on the doors, but I trusted Sam and enjoyed watching her grow. Even with her huge belly I still fancied the pants off her. She was getting everything ready, a different kind of woman, really upmarket, and I went to the hospital for her to have the baby. It was emotional, nice, a kid born out of love, a good memory. So I came home, and of course there was the inevitable downside. It sounds daft, but Sam mothered me. I need cuddles. I like to lie and have my hair stroked, that kind of thing. It’s nice to feel that bond, but inevitably when you have a baby you get pushed out. I got through it though, and suggested opening a business to secure our future together. She had faith in me, because I am a grafter, and if I put my mind to something then anything is possible, so I opened Mr Trimmit, a landscape company. I worked all hours God sends, seven days a week, trying to make it a success, when I could have done any number of things, like gone back into licensed fighting, but Sam didn’t want that. She liked the bad boy thing for a while, but she liked this other side of me more. Unfortunately this other side of me is a bit boring. So I opened the company, and before I realised it things were deteriorating. The problem was, like I said, I need my bond. It’s not sex. I never had that kind of relationship with Sam. That’s not what I was with her for. It was just that she was angry, because she was left on her own while I was away working, so there were fights between me and her, pushing and shoving, that kind of thing, which I’m not proud about. I get funny when I get hurt. The problem of it was, I might be able to control a punch this time, or a slap that time, but she was getting in my face again, and I knew it would progress. I did give her a few clips, but always with an open hand, never with a fist, and she hurts me more with her mouth than I hurt her with my fist [she said in court that you stamped on her and dragged her by her hair and throttled her]. I took time off work to be with her, but I didn’t want to let the business go. I should have closed it and romanced her again properly, but on January the thirteenth of last year I came back to the house from work and she’d gone. The only two people I ever cared about are my gran and Sam, on equal levels. I don’t give a shit about anybody else. My kids, yeah, but I’ve no interest in other adults. I was devastated. I tried my magic, but got nowhere. On Valentine’s Day I got close, but she pulled away. My heart sank. I tried to address it. I didn’t push her though, because sex has to be given, so I took her home and it was in limbo. Now I’m funny about truth and honesty. I don’t like fucking liars. But Sam asked a few times if I’d cheated on her while we were split up. I told her I’d met a couple of girls and always said no, but Sam never quite believed it, probably because she knew what I was like before her, when I always had three or four women on the go. The way I tried to explain it to her was that I’d changed. I told her the way I used to see women was, I’d put a hundred fishing rods out to catch ninety-nine small fish and one whopper, because back then I thought if I only put one fishing rod out at a time I might waste much of my life waiting for that whopper. But now I’d caught that whopper, which was Sam, and there was no way I was going to let it go. So it occurred to me that there are these things in the Yellow Pages where you can ring up and do a
lie detector test. I thought it would make a nice little present for Sam, which I wish I’d never mentioned, but anyway, time progressed and I started to deteriorate, because she’d say things like she wanted me out of her life, which meant I was crying a lot, and it’s terrible to say, really terrible, because I love my kids, but Sam comes before anything, and it’s more than love. It’s something else. It’s probably something depraved. Then it was June, and that’s when the allegation of assault [on a child] came. Obviously it’s not worth going into. I’ve given my account. Whether people believe me is entirely up to them. As far as I’m concerned the medical evidence proves I didn’t do it. I’ve been punching people for years and whenever I punch them they get a huge amount of swelling, so there’s no possible way I could have hit a child and not caved them in. It’s just common sense. But the witch-hunts started and the police stuck their oar in and all the rest of it, and I’ve ended up being hanged for something I didn’t do, and I’m pissed off, because I’ve had enough trouble off the police, arresting me for things I didn’t do, and now I’m seeing these things in the paper, like the sword in my car boot, which this is the thing, right, that sword was just an unsharpened sword going to a collector’s because it had a snake on it which scared the girls so I was getting it out the house. Then there’s this knuckleduster thing, which is I allegedly had a knuckleduster, but there’s no way, because I’d kill someone with a knuckleduster if I hit them with it, look at the size of me, so during the interview I told the officer I wanted a swipe done on my hands for metal fragments to prove I’d never had any metal on them, rings or anything, but to cut a long story short, they were saying I’d jumped on this guy’s head, even though I didn’t even want to fight in the first place as I was a bit knackered actually, and anyway, these things always fell apart when it got to court, like the knuckleduster didn’t even fit on my hand, but I’ve been pulled over one hundred and eighty-four times [again, Northumbria Police recorded you being pulled over fourteen times between 2000 and 2010], and it shows there are officers targeting me for whatever reasons.

  The tape runs out. You put a second tape in and press record.

  This is Raoul Moat again. July 2010. So, coming to the cars now, which is basically some daft lad who took the number plate off my car for whatever reason, so I put it in the windscreen until I could get more sticky things, and the next thing I know is, I’m rewinding my tapes. The CCTV by the way is for protection against the police, because they’d arrest me for some pretty amazing things if I didn’t have it. I’m well aware they might plant something in my garden. People don’t want to know the police are like that, but that’s my opinion. They’ve tried everything but leaving cheese out to get me off the streets. The bottom line is I wake up and there’s a ticket on my car, so I rewind my tapes and they’re going over my car, which is why I go straight to Etal Lane police station and put in a complaint, asking why they’ve got nothing better to do, with crackheads and smackheads and all kinds of shit going on at that estate, and next thing is, my car’s been uplifted. So I’m fired up, and I’m shouting and bawling on the phone, and I go up to the station saying the car’s been crushed, well, not crushed, but I’m telling them how it’s in a million bits now, totally smashed, and they tell me I’ve got to go up to Ponteland, so I go up there and get some smarmy cunt, blah, blah, blah, saying it didn’t have a tax on the window. Fair enough, it had been vandalised at the time and had a smashed windscreen, and what it was is, I’d taken the lights out the back in case they got smashed, because I had a rick with somebody at the time who was a bit of a crazy gunman, so there’d also been a crowbar put over the windscreen and the top of the roof [all this damage had happened before the police took your vehicle away], big fucking deal, and the copper’s attitude was just like, fuck off. Moving on to the more serious stuff in my criminal history. The conspiracy to murder beggars belief. That was in about 1999 [it was in 2000]. I remember being in the house when they pulled me in and it was like the Terminator, just about every cop outside the house, and they said to exit one at a time. I came out last, and apparently I’d conspired to murder this guy, but obviously I’m not worried because I haven’t conspired to murder anybody. So that’s that, which is boring. I was locked up for five days I think, and they love to do things like not give you any water so you’ve got to drink out the toilet. Well fuck that, I don’t give a monkey’s, I’ll drink out the toilet. They put you in the hottest cell so you sweat your knackers off, but I’m not bothered. It’s nothing compared to Spain. Anyway, I got interviewed and it’s not worth discussing really. They had nothing on me. Their story was I was planning on going to this location to shoot this guy, and apparently I set a shotgun off down the phone. My argument was it could have been a balloon bursting, but supposedly I threatened to shoot him and they were arguing that I was going to lead him to this spot. So they raided my house and pulled it to bits, footmarks up the wall, on the sofa, bin bags emptied — trashed, basically. The next thing is, they try to send me to court without footwear. Now by law I have to have footwear in court. I think that’s how the law works anyway, so I said that to them, and in the end they gave me shoes, size six, even though I’m size twelve, and me being me, I just chewed the backs off and used them as flip-flops. In court they were talking about putting me on remand before a trial, but the story sounded ridiculous because you don’t go from normal citizen to blasting anyone [this is your version of what happened] so I got an NFA [the CPS withdrew the charges]. Next thing is I’m working as a doorman and this woman keeps making a beeline for me, offering me drinks at night and things. Well, I’ve been teetotal since I was seventeen because I need my inhibitions, without them there are problems. So she’s asking me about the doors and fights and violence, and something’s not right, which is why I start digging. Next thing is, my friend tells me he thinks she’s involved with the police, so I spin her a line and tell her that some guy got my girlfriend pregnant and how I’m going to take him fishing off the rocks at Whitley Bay and he’ll have himself a little tumble, no forensics. Next I rang another mate and got him to ring me, to create a theory of conspiracy, but I didn’t tell my girlfriend or the guy I was saying had got her pregnant, because they might not have gone along with it. Anyway, it worked like a charm. The police were all over it. Whether my friend said anything to anybody, I don’t know, but I’m convinced it was this woman [you don’t know what happened]. She tried to defend herself and I just smirked and she let rip, saying I was born with nothing and the police would make sure I had nothing for the rest of my life. Well she didn’t say police, but I knew where the message was coming from, and I found out the hard way, because they’ve been mucking my life up ever since. I lost my job on the doors because of the police, after I kept gripping them [that’s what you believed, but there’s no evidence for it]. They’re the biggest army there is, the biggest gang in town, that’s what they say, worse than doormen. Half of them were bullied at school, just prom leftovers, shagging each other’s wives, drowning them in the bath and all that shit, and there were other things the police arrested me for, I’m just trying to think of them. Oh yeah, this traffic warden I supposedly assaulted. I used to pull up outside Sam’s work. She worked at a hairdresser, so to save parking halfway across town I’d pull up and just wait, where this traffic warden was. Anyway, about a year later I was driving along the bottom of the Bigg Market and I said to my friend, look, there’s that tosser, and my mate’s daft so he shouts something about how this traffic warden should get a proper job, you fucking mug. So this warden comes over and he’s putting his head in the window and I’m winding the window up on him, and unfortunately I put my hand on his back, so I try to drive round him to leave, and the next thing I know is, I’ve got the cuffs on and I’m in the back of the van, so obviously Sam is crying her eyes out, she’s hysterical, which is why I’m getting rowdy in the van. Down at the station I get interviewed, and it goes to court, and there are these inch-high private eyes, and obviously nobody’s go
ing to believe I was doing anything other than trying to defuse the situation, so I got let off [this is your version of what happened]. But this is just skimming the surface. The main thing is, there’s a law for the public and a law for Raoul, and the law for Raoul is I cannot defend myself. A herd of wildebeest with flick-knives can try to do me in and I just have to stand there and take it. Anyway, that’s all rubbish. My main problem with the police is I’ve gone straight with Sam yet they’ve hounded me. They even came to my door, after the charge, saying they’ve got information that leads them to believe I’m in danger [you were asked to visit the police station, where you were warned that a person or persons may want to cause you physical harm, though the police wouldn’t give you any more details other than saying it was nothing to do with the current charge against you; it’s called an Osman warning]. Well, unless it’s Martians invading, I can’t see what that was about, so I was asking if I’m going to be shot or stabbed or what, or if it’s just fisticuffs, trying to get more disclosures really, but they wouldn’t say anything, which isn’t much help. It’s not like I haven’t made enemies, like this guy who I went to the station about this other time, because unfortunately his car had burst into flames, I’m not sure how that happened, but the police came round saying they saw me drive away, which is impossible, because like I told them, the camera at my house proved it couldn’t be me. Anyway, they gave me this warning that I was in danger, but all they’ve done is get me winding myself up in the house [a few days later you called the police officer who delivered the warning and told her you thought they were deliberately provoking you into starting a fight with someone, at which point they would then arrest you, proving that you were out of control and violent, and you told her the timing would be perfect for Northumbria Police, describing it as the cherry on top of the case; she said the warning had nothing to do with the current case and assured you there was no hunting season on Mr Moat]. And at the same time, funnily enough, a lot of my friends were becoming informants. I nearly caught one of them because he was getting these funny cheques at his house. When I asked about it he said it was benefits, but it looked like the wrong colour. Also, this woman who’s sweet to me came over one day and said my house was going to get raided. I’d noticed the helicopter following me actually. So I ditched my friends around then. It was just me and Sam after that, the way I like it.