The official story is that a mad loner called Thomas Hamilton shot dead 16 children at a primary school in Dunblane in Scotland. The unofficial story is that Thomas Hamilton was supplying pornography, and possibly young boys, to top people including policemen and politicians; and Thomas Hamilton may have been murdered, to shut him up. More than 100 documents about the Dunblane mass murder have been sealed from public sight for 100 years. When the Dunblane Inquiry ended, citizens who owned handguns were given three months to turn them over to local authorities. The few who didn’t were visited by police and threatened with ten-year prison sentences if they didn’t comply. Police later bragged that they’d taken nearly 200,000 handguns from private citizens. All of the guns had been registered and licensed so they knew where they were.
Tennis star Andy Murray was a student at the Dunblane Primary School when the massacre occurred.
Sandra Uttley, author of ‘Dunblane Unburied’ has the following statement on her website:
When the Dunblane massacre happened in March 1996, I was in the most stable settled part of my life. I’d lived on the outskirts of Dunblane since the early 1980s, but in April 1995 I bought a small flat in the town itself, not far from the imposing 13th century Cathedral.
In August 1995 I joined the Scottish Ambulance Service and began work at the station just 9 miles north of Dunblane. I am ashamed to say that during my training I didn’t pay much attention to dealing with gunshot injuries as to my mind that was a ‘city’ problem and not something I was likely to encounter in the little backwater where I lived and worked.
Fortunately I wasn’t due back on duty on 13 March till 8pm. My colleagues Alison and Les received THAT dreadful call and were the first ambulance personnel to arrive at the school, declaring it a Major Incident.
I was called in a few hours later to relieve them from duty. Having collected the ambulance from Stirling, myself and another colleague Russell went back to station to clean out the ambulance that had transported 5 year old Mhairi MacBeath to hospital. She was declared dead on arrival, from a single gunshot wound to the head. Mhairi’s father had been my philosophy lecturer at university in the early ‘80s. He had tragically died six months before Mhairi’s murder, from a brain haemorrhage. He hadn’t lived to see his second daughter, Katherine, born. And on the day of Mhairi’s murder, a memorial service was being held in his memory. His wife Isabel had thought about keeping Mhairi off school that day, but decided it was for her own selfish reasons and besides, Mhairi didn’t want to miss gym. Within an hour, her daughter was dead.
I bring in such personal detail, because to my mind it is too easy for people to forget the enormous loss of life on 13 March 1996 and the individual tragic stories involved in each death.