Having been in LA for two weeks, I’ve missed some things. I was hanging out with my friend Ben today and he filled me in on the two big news stories that have happened while I’ve been out of the country.
The first concerns a SERIAL KILLER. I know, right? Apparently this amazing serial killing event happened while I was out of the country and I missed it all.
Backstory: this guy called Raoul was put in Durham Prison for just under five months for “assaulting a nine-year-old relative” – I know, less than five months, even though he’d already had one previous conviction for common assault, had been arrested twelve times in the past and had been charged for seven separate offences.
So his sentence is up – he told police he needed psychiatric help for himself, to which they evidently did nothing and let him go anyway – and then two days later, after declaring (on Facebook) that he wanted to shoot his ex-girlfriend and her new partner … he shot his ex-girlfriend and her new partner.
After that, this maddening search begins, with Raoul releasing 49-page letters saying he hates the police, that the public don’t need to fear him but the police do because he’ll keep shooting police officers until he dies; on July 4th, twelve minutes after calling up the police to tell them he was going to shoot a police officer on patrol, he shot a police officer on patrol. Everyone’s feeling helpless because he keeps telling people who he’s gonna shoot before he shoots them but yet nobody can ever seem to stop it. In the meantime, the media started reporting absolutely mental stories about him, which drove him madder and he declared that for every inaccurate story printed, he would kill a random member of the public. Which as you can imagine was crazy, because the media seldom like to get things right. While this was happening, the police brought in – I shit you not – “TV survival expert Ray Mears” to help track his movements (chief constable’s a fan?).
Everything came together in Rothbury. This a town with a population of less than two thousand people, used as a staging point for “recreational walking” – you couldn’t have picked a better place if you were writing Hot Fuzz. And this became the setting for the culmination of the biggest manhunt in British history, with over 160 armed police officers and armed response vehicles chasing the guy with sniper teams, helicopters, dogs, armoured anti-terrorist police vehicles and a fucking Royal Air Force jet. And I missed all of this!
The guy eventually shoots himself and everything comes to an end, we’re left with all the usual inquiries and the media can now officially start being shit about him again (although I suppose they have good reason).
So that’s the first story – remember, I said there were two big news stories of equal magnitude while I was away?
The second is that Cheryl Cole got a disease on holiday so now she can’t do The X Factor.
I fucking hate the news.
x
