A case of grievance - profile of killer responsible for massacre in Scotland's Dunblane Primary School

National Review, April 8, 1996 by Anthony Daniels

UNTIL the Falklands War, few people other than stamp collectors had ever heard of those barren, windswept islands in the South Atlantic; and until Thomas Watt Hamilton walked into Dunblane Primary School last Wednesday morning and shot 16 children and their teacher dead, then turning his gun upon himself, few people had ever heard of Dunblane. After the three-minute massacre of the innocents, however, the name of Dunblane, a typically dismal small Scottish town, was -- and remains -- upon everybody's lips.

As well it might: for Thomas Watt Hamilton's crime was the very acme of modern social pathology. It wasn't only that the crime was followed at once by scores of psychologists, counselors, and psychiatrists giving their opinions on television and in print as to how the full exploration of Hamilton's fantasy life might have prevented the tragedy; it was that the crime was itself a perverted form of psychotherapy, a cathartic release from the frustrations from which its perpetrator had long suffered.

Thomas Watt Hamilton was a strange man, but he was not by any means unique: on the contrary, I meet his like among my patients not infrequently. Those who dream of mass killing are a tiny minority of the total population, perhaps, but they are not therefore a negligible number. And since the last such mass killing in Britain occurred in 1987, when a young man in the small and equally obscure English town of Hungerford went on the rampage and killed 17 people, perhaps the question should not be why such events happen at all, but why so few of them happen.

Hamilton was a loner who had expressed a somewhat steamy interest in young boys since about the age of 20. In everyday life, he could be perfectly polite, but he was close to no one. At the age of 22 he was expelled from the Boy Scout Association, not for any sexual deviancy, but because he had failed to take proper care of the boys in his charge on an outing to the Highlands. Instead of staying in a hostel, he had made them sleep in his van in the freezing cold.

Apparently, he never forgot or forgave. He devoted himself to his twin interests, guns and boys' clubs. They were to be united in the most unhappy fashion.

He hired local halls and started his own clubs. On three occasions, permission to hire halls was refused him because of persistent rumors about him. On one occasion, he appealed successfully via the legal system, unproved allegations being no grounds to refuse anything to anyone, apparently.

Nevertheless, his reputation remained distinctly unsavory. It was known to some that the walls of his apartment were covered with pictures of small boys in various states of undress. He was known to be a fitness fanatic who exercised the children entrusted to him with sadistic ruthlessness. He took photographs of naked boys which the local shop refused to develop, so that he had to take them instead to Glasgow. One mother reported his activities to the police, but nothing was done. Nor was anything done when Hamilton later threatened her with a gun. The police merely said that he had a gun license, and that therefore everything was in order. Hamilton wrote a circular letter to the parents of Dunblane protesting his innocence of sexual perversion.

In 1992, however, the local council decided that enough was enough, and refused him further permission to run any boys' clubs at all. Thereafter, Hamilton gave himself over to the expression of bitterness at this terrible injustice, and he wrote uninterruptedly to the powerful and important to complain. Shortly before the denouement of this terrible story, he mailed a bundle of querulous letters to radio and television stations, and even one to the Queen.

The locus classicus of his prickly self-absorption is in a letter he wrote to the Scottish Secretary (the cabinet minister at the head of Scottish affairs) on March 24, 1993, a year after he had been prevented from running boys' clubs:

With the horrific murder of little James Bulger, possibly by two 10-year-old boys, the whole question of juvenile crime is in greater debate across the whole country.

The work of my group in providing sporting and leisure time activities for young boys has the effect of channeling young energies into creative and worthwhile pursuits . . .

It is ironic the decline of these clubs was caused by the irresponsible actions of overzealous police officers from Central Scotland police, obsessed with child abuse, in carrying out their failed pervert hunt using unfair tactics. . . .

The proper and legitimate purpose of the need to take such photographs had been fully explained previously to [police officers]. When senior officers had been shown these photographs in earlier years, their only comments had been "the colors were nice."

. . . If the Government is going to effectively condone the police undermining, smashing and destroying voluntary youth groups in modern day witch-hunts, it is perhaps hardly surprising that bored children with little or nothing to do turn their energies to crime from a young age.