Blinded traffic cop PC David Rathband was haunted by the face of gunman Raoul Moat after he lost his sight.
Previously unheard tapes recorded before his death, reveal how the tortured officer saw the killer who robbed him of his sight in his dreams, whilst tragically being unable to picture the faces of his loved ones.
PC Rathband was left blind after Moat blasted him in the face with his shotgun while on the run in 2010.
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The search for the fugitive murderer has been dramatised in new ITV series, The Hunt for Raoul Moat.
And now, recordings PC Rathband, then 42, made in the immediate aftermath of Moat’s rampage have been made public for the first time.
In the audio files PC Rathband, who took his own life 18 months after the shooting says: “Moat, he used to come all the time. I used to see his face, [it’s] like a death face. He has an open flap of skin from above his left eyebrow to the right hand side of his face.
“And as I look at him it opens up, and I can see inside. He’s that grey colour of death. I struggle to see faces but he’s the exception, yeah. I can see his face – as clear as day.”
Moat became Britain's most infamous fugitive when he went on the run.
It was during the early hours of July 3, 2010, that former doorman Moat arrived in Birtley, Gateshead, with a sawn-off shotgun. He blasted his ex Samantha Stobbart, 22, twice and killed her new partner Chris Brown, 29.
Less than 24 hours later he made a phone call to Northumbria Police declaring he intended to target police officers before creeping up on PC Rathband, and shooting him through the window of his patrol car.
Moat, 37, shot himself dead a week later after police cornered him in Rothbury, Northumberland.
In the months after the rampage PC Rathband, who was left with 34 pellets embedded in his skull, opened up to former radio DJ Tony Horne who helped write his autobiography.
Now, more than 200 hours of recordings made as Tony helped write the book Tango 190 are being released on Friday as a podcast called The Rathband Tapes.
In them, PC Rathband repeatedly talks of how he was haunted by the gunman’s deathly image.
In a clip recorded the day before the killer’s accomplices, Karl Ness and Qhuram Awan, were jailed in 2011, he said: “I had a visit from Mr Moat. I haven’t had that for a few days or a few weeks actually.
“It’s the first time since the trial started [that] he’s come to visit me. And I was awake at four o’clock.”
Tony said: “The dreams seemed to drop off after the trial.
“But for a while, David had a recurring dream that he was standing in front of his mirror at home and Moat would appear in the reflection behind him.”
The writer added that the officer feared Ness and Awan would get off.
He said: “He was paranoid he would walk past them in the street and not know it was them.”
In the aftermath of the horror, it was believed that PC Rathband was targeted at random by Moat.
But it was later revealed that the officer had arrested him for driving offences at year earlier.
And in the recordings PC Rathband tells of his believe that he was chosen by Moat deliberately.
He says: “People would say, ‘It’s such a shame, you were in the wrong place, you weren’t picked out, you weren’t targeted.’ Well, I was picked out, I was targeted, because he drove past me twice.”
And he spoke of his shock when he learned from a report that senior police did not warn officers on patrol about Moat’s sinister call declaring “war” on the force.
He went on: “When I read that report, it was like hitting me with a hammer. You can read through the contents of the calls, what Raoul Moat said, word for word. That was the first time I knew something had gone drastically wrong.”
After PC Rathband's death his siblings Debbie Essery and Darren Rathband continued with legal action PC Rathband had started against Northumbria Police, relating to the fact that he was not warned of Moat's intentions to harm police officers.
Their case was thrown out by a judge in 2016. The family claimed the force’s failure to issue a warning to officers after Moat stated his intent to shoot police left PC Rathband a “sitting duck”. However, the judge ruled that even if a warning was issued it would have been unlikely to have made a difference.
On the night of the shooting, Moat spoke to a Northumbria Police call handler for almost five minutes, saying he would kill any officer who came near him, that he was not coming in alive and, at one point, that he was hunting for officers. He ended the call at 12.34am on July 4 and PC Rathband was shot at around 12.42am.
Northumbria Police defended its actions that night, saying if commanders had rushed orders another serious incident could have occurred.
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