Today’s Moon-faced Yet Truly Morbid Fact!
At about 9:00 a.m. on Wednesday, March 13, 1996, Thomas Hamilton, a small, moon-faced man of 43, walked out of his shabby bachelor apartment in the central Scottish town of Stirling. As he got into his car, he waved to his neighbor, 77-year-old Kathleen Kerr. “He seemed cheerful and happy,” she was to tell the police later. She had no way of knowing that Hamilton’s top coat concealed two Browning 9mm automatic pistols and two .357in Magnum revolvers. A half hour later, Hamilton pulled up outside the primary school in Dunblane, a small dormitory town some 15 miles from Stirling.
He got out of his car and headed toward the school entrance, pulling one of his handguns out of his pocket as he went. “The incident started in the playground,” Chief Superintendent Louis Munn said later. “Several people saw him, but I don’t think they had the opportunity to challenge him.” Hamilton fired several shots through classroom windows from the playground, then marched through the front door and past the administrative office, shooting randomly into classrooms as he made his way toward the school gymnasium.
His first victim was a teacher, Mary Blake, who survived despite being struck with a bullet behind the ear. Needless to say, the children were terrified. Eleven-year-old Laura Bryce described how she and her classmates cowered on the floor, trying to shield themselves behind their desks. “The bullets came through the windows and the door. One went straight through my friend’s chair. I thought we weren’t going to see one another again.”
Seconds later, Hamilton burst into the gymnasium where 29 children from the first grade, aged between five and six, were attending a physical education class under the instruction of Eileen Harrild and Gwenne Mayor. Eileen Harrild was the first to be shot, taking a bullet in the chest. She too was destined to survive.
Gwenne Mayor with her year one class. Incidentally, that kid in the top row next to Mayor was convicted of assaulting and attempting to rape an elderly woman in 2010.
Then the carnage began in earnest. Hamilton stood in the corner of the room and shot Gwenne Mayor dead as she tried to shield some of her pupils. Then he walked around the room, methodically shooting the screaming children at point-blank range, pumping up to three bullets into each little body. Finally sated, he retired into the corner and fired one bullet into his own head.
In the space of less than five minutes, Thomas Hamilton had killed 16 children, one teacher, and himself. He had also wounded 12 other children, some critically. Only one child, six year old Robbie Hurst, escaped uninjured. He was found buried beneath the bodies of his school friends, soaked with their blood and shocked into silence.
The burning question remained: Who was Thomas Hamilton and what drove him to commit this dreadful crime? Bit by bit, a picture of the killer emerged.
Thomas Hamilton came from a broken home and was raised by his maternal grandparents. He showed evidence of pedophilic tendencies throughout his life and during his brief employment as a youth leader but this does not explain what drove him to murder 16 defenseless children. There are, however, some clues. Hamilton, like many serial killers, was socially inept, a failure in his chosen profession, friendless, and alone. No one knew or cared about his existence. Nobody noticed him. Perhaps it was as simple as that. Thomas Hamilton had an intense ambition to be noticed, to be someone of consequence, and he chose a particularly appalling method of achieving that goal.
Hamilton shared another characteristic with many other serial killers, an obsession with firearms. Handgun controls in Scotland are extremely rigorous yet, despite his dubious mental state, Hamilton had licenses for the four handguns he used in the slaughter in Dunblane.
British law stipulates that no one with a criminal record or a history of mental disorder can own a firearm of any description. The trouble is that this law fails to cope with borderline cases. Thomas Hamilton’s pedophilic tendencies were well known but never proved, and his mental instability was never subject to professional assessment. Whatever their misgivings, and some local police officers had expressed them openly, they would have found it hard to justify removing Hamilton’s permits within the framework of the law as it existed in March, 1996.
When it became widely known that Hamilton had held a firearms permit, the public outcry was instant and vociferous. Members of Parliament from all parties demanded radical changes in firearms legislation. The Conservative Government set up an inquiry and in October, 1996, Home Secretary Michael Howard announced: “A package of measures which will give this country the toughest gun-control laws in the world. The country expects nothing less.” He went on to say that the Government was preparing legislation which would effectively rid British homes of handguns entirely. High-powered, automatic, and semi-automatic guns would be destroyed, some 200,000 in all. Only single-shot .22in caliber target rifles would be licensed and even those would have to be stored in safes at one of the country’s 2,000 gun clubs.
Culled from: Crimes and Punishment Yearbook 1998
You know the punchline, Americans. I’ll leave it to you.
Halloween Cometh!
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