The first time I heard my father Raoul Moat’s voice
DAUGHTER SPEAKS OUT AHEAD OF ANNIVERSARY
THE daughter of Raoul Moat has revealed that the notorious gunman threatened to kill her before she was even born.
Katelaine Fitzpatrick discovered her biological dad made the threat when her mum Caroline told him she was pregnant, the Mirror has reported.
Katelaine was 11 when she first heard her dad’s voice – it was on TV because her father was Raoul Moat.
His voice was calculated, calm and almost trance-like and a million miles from what the little girl had longed to hear.
But Katelaine was transfixed – she listened attentively to the voice of the dad who had always refused to accept or even meet her.
She said: “I can’t believe I come from that man.
“I’m so glad I didn’t know him, and that I became the person I am today despite all I have been through.”
Moat, 37, was being hunted by police after he had shot his his ex-girlfriend Samantha Stobbart, 22, and her partner, Chris Brown, 29, near Gateshead, on July 3, 2010. Mr Brown was killed.
Almost 10 years from Moat’s rampage Katelaine is bravely giving her first in-depth interview.
The double shooting happened two days after Moat had been released from Durham Prison on July 1, where he had been held for assault.
A day after shooting Mr Brown and Miss Stobart, Moat shot PC Rathband, 42, as he sat in his patrol car in Newcastle, leaving him permanently blinded. He took his own life two years later.
Moat had called police threatening to kill more officers if they continued to search for him.
The call was broadcast on TV which is when Katelaine first heard his voice.
Moat warned he would only stop when he was dead and he eventually shot himself after a six-hour stand-off with police seven days later in the village of Rothbury, Northumberland.
Katelaine and her mum, who has three younger children, learnt of his rampage on the TV.
Caroline knew that with Moat on the loose the family had to flee.
Katelaine recalls: “It all happened really quick. I was playing out, Mum shouted us in and said: ‘I dreaded this moment, we need to leave the area.’ I remember some fear, being very still, thinking about it, ‘Is this really happening?’”
With a police escort, they fled and stayed with relatives in the Midlands.
Speaking from her home near Newcastle, the emotions Katelaine still wrestles with – shame, disgust, abandonment – are painfully clear.
She said: “I’m so sorry to the people he has hurt. If I had the chance to meet the victims and their families and say I’m so sorry for what my dad did, and show that I care, I would.”
Katelaine, who has Moat’s strawberry blonde hair and blue eyes, adds: “Being his flesh and blood sickens me at times, it’s hard to believe who I am.”
“I’m so glad I didn’t know him, and that I became the person I am today despite all I have been through.”
She was relentlessly bullied through school, taunted for her physical similarity to Moat.
Recently, she was playing with a social media app that swaps the sex of people in photos.
Blinking her piercing blue eyes, she admits the result was horrifying.
“I did it and oh my God, I regretted it so much,” she says.
“I showed my mum and she nearly had a heart attack. I looked like 18-yearold Raoul Moat.”
Katelaine thought her mum Caroline’s ex-partner was her dad, until a relative told her the truth when she was around seven.
Caroline, who had hoped to protect her, was then honest, explaining her real father “had been a good man, but the drugs and stuff had taken over”.
In fact, Katelaine was to learn her mum had suffered attacks by Moat after they met in 1996.
His volatile nature was magnified by his steroid addiction and when Caroline told him she was pregnant with Katelaine, he threatened to kill the unborn child.
Caroline took out an injunction and Moat moved on, refusing ever to meet the little girl.
Yet with moving honesty, Katelaine
admits she still, in a way, yearns for the dad she never knew.
She writes him a birthday card each year on June 17 – then she burns it and releases a balloon to float away.
“It is not about honouring him. It is not for him, but for me, for my peace of mind,” she said.
“I do a little speech in my head. One year it might be: ‘I hope you’re proud of me despite everything you have done.’ Other times I have thought: ‘Why couldn’t you just be the right person? Do the right thing?’”
Katelaine remembers vividly Moat ending his life, as the stand-off was broadcast on rolling TV news a week later.
“I watched it,” she says, bluntly, although says she can’t recall the emotions she felt at the time. “Everyone instantly looked at me and Mum cried.”
At the end of that summer she started
secondary school, though the timing was terrible.
She recalls: “I was targeted. People would be like ‘You’re Raoul Moat’s daughter.’” She began playing truant.
At the end of Year Nine when a teacher confronted her, she lashed out and was excluded from the school and sent to a behavioural school where she punched a child.
But her new school and her mum gave Katelaine the support she needed and despite suffering depression, she is now settled in a happy relationship and hopes to work as a carer.
Over the past four years she has built a friendship with two of Moat’s other children, the daughters of another of his abused exes.
She says of Moat: “He has made some really good people despite the man he was – it’s probably the one good thing he did in his entire life.”