On Wednesday the 13th of March, 1996, Thomas Hamilton, 43, walked into Dunblane Primary School with two 9mm Browning pistols and two Smith and Wesson revolvers. He made his way to the gym where he fired multiple shots at point-blank range at a first-year primary class and their teacher, Gwen Mayor. He murdered sixteen children between five and six years old and the teacher before turning one of the guns on himself and committing suicide. It was the deadliest attack on children in the history of the UK.
Jamie and I were at the school that day. Most people know that. I have been asked about it in press conferences a few times and I've always said that, because I was so young, I don't have any real recollection of the day. That is true. I genuinely can't remember much and it's not something I have ever wanted to go back and find about because it's so uncomfortable.
It doesn't belong in my childhood at all. It seems randomly attached to my history, but in a way that I can't describe. To me, Dunblane was, and still is, one of the safest places in the world. Last Christmas I said to Mum that I could imagine people there not bothering to lock their front doors. That might seem strange when something so terrible happened in the middle of the town while I was there, but that is the way I have always felt. I don't want to dig deeper. I want that sense of comfort to stay the same. I don't think something so crazy and horrific should scar my feelings for my hometown. I think I am lucky I don't remember.
JUDY MURRAY: The boys have always said they were too young to appreciate the enormity of what happened and I'm grateful for that. I have never said much about it except that it was, unquestionably, the worst day of my life. Everybody in the town would say the same thing. We never forget it, but what gives me the most pride and comfort is that Dunblane has not surrendered its spirit. It makes me proud that Andy and Jamie have played a small part in that. When people talk about Dunblane, they don't just think of the shootings, they might also think: 'That's where the Murrays come from.'
We have moved on, but, of course, you never forget. Having spent my childhood here and then come back in my twenties to raise the boys, I still find it really hard to believe something like that happened in what feels like a little village to me. It is such a quiet, lovely place to live.
My mother and I ran a children's toy and clothing shop in the middle of the town. That morning I was working in the shop with another woman who often came in to help. The phone rang and my colleague answered it. It was her daughter ringing to say she'd just heard on the radio that there had been a shooting at Dunblane Primary School and that a man with a gun was in the playground.
'Are you sure?' I said, when she told me. It seemed utterly beyond belief. We were still trying to make sense of it when my mum came flying through the door, shouting: 'Have you heard? Have you heard! There's been a shooting up at the primary school.' I didn't hear any more, I just picked up my car keys and ran out of the door. I don't even remember saying anything to her.
I got in the car and drove off. Of course, lots of other people were driving the same way at the same time. I can just remember slamming on my horn and swearing at the top of my voice while shouting: GET OUT OF THE WAY! GET OUT OF THE WAY! Eventually I had to stop the car and pull over somewhere. You couldn't get near the school for all the police vehicles and other cars that lined the road. I ran towards the school gates. You couldn't get near those either. There were dozens and dozens of other parents there, all barred from entry and desperate to find out what was going on. No one knew. There were rumours, whispers, but no one knew anything for sure.
At last someone came and escorted the parents who had children in the school to a small guest house on the same road. I remember sitting there with a crowd of people and yet no one was saying anything, everyone gripped by the same terrible fear. More people came in, the room was filling up. We talked in whispers. I was sitting opposite a woman who was a head teacher at a primary school in the next town. Her son was one of Jamie's best pals and she said she had heard a rumour that a primary one class was involved, but she didn't know whether or not it was true. It was starting to get pretty crowded and I budged up on my chair to share it with a girl I had been at primary and secondary school with.
Eventually, someone came in and asked all the parents with children in Mrs Mayor's class to please leave with them. There was a part of me in that moment that almost collapsed in relief. But the next second I was feeling so guilty because the woman I'd been sitting with jumped up and cried: 'That's my daughter's class!' I stood up to go with her because she was shaking terribly, but we were told that no one could go except the parents of the children involved. It was horrendous beyond words.
This had all taken hours and hours. The shootings happened at 9.30am and it was now way beyond lunchtime. It was taking ages to organise the evacuation of the children in all the other classes. The authorities needed to make sure they were kept away from the scene of the gym and shielded from all the police cars and ambulances.
I was finally given the boys at 2.30pm. I was trying to stay calm but I probably hugged them harder than they have ever been hugged in their lives. I have to say the school did an unbelievable job because they managed to get Andy and Jamie out to me together, despite them being in different classes, and it was obvious that they had absolutely no idea what had happened. They had simply been told that a man with a gun had been found in the school. The teachers had even managed to feed them lunch in their classrooms.
By that time, we had heard that the murderer was this guy Thomas Hamilton who had run a Boys Club at the primary school and at Dunblane High School for years. We were all aware who he was. Andy and Jamie used to go to his club.
So I stopped the car on the way home and explained to them what had happened. I didn't want them to find out from somebody else. It was my job to tell them as gently and carefully as I could. To this day Jamie never talks about it. He never asks any questions and he never mentioned it again. But Andy said immediately: 'Why would Mr Hamilton do a thing like that? Why wouldn't he just shoot himself?' I have never forgotten him saying that. I said: 'I think he must have just gone mad, Andy. Only a crazy person might do something like that.'
For days after it happened the children were kept off school and the town was eerily quiet. If you went out, even for a newspaper, there were journalists waiting to stop you and ask questions: 'Did you know so-and-so?' So we stayed home, watching everything we could on television and still not being able to believe that it had happened just down the road.
We'd all thought Dunblane was such a safe place. It was. It is. Yet somewhere in our past is this terribly tragedy that doesn't fit in. At the time, we just did our best to cope. The school was closed for about a week and when the children finally went back, everything had changed. Suddenly, you had to sign in and there were many changes in terms of security. I can't remember now whether the gym had already been knocked down, but it was eventually turned into a memorial garden.
The extent of the teachers' ordeal soon became clear. Somebody told me that the nursery teachers were asked to go in and identify the bodies of the children who had been shot. Their own teacher had been killed and many of those children didn't have names on their gym kit. The only people who would know them, apart from the parents, were those who had taught them the year before. Can you imagine anything more terrible and more sad than that?
I still couldn't believe how – with all those children in the school and with all that furore and upset going on – the teachers had managed to keep the rest of the children in the classroom fed, watered and completely unaware of the horror so close to them. Those teachers saved the children from a million nightmares. Can you imagine if they had seen something? It could have haunted them for life. It was a heroic job the teachers did that day, and continued to do by getting themselves back to work when it was over.
It went round in our minds for a long time afterwards. There had always been question marks about Hamilton, but for all that he was an oddball, I never, ever thought he was dangerous. It was only later when you read things about his collection of guns, that he lived on his own, ran the Boys Club . . . did you realise the problem was perhaps there all along.
I'd given him a lift from the Boys club to the train station a few times because he lived in Stirling and he didn't have a car of his own. I had actually sat beside him and spoken to him. I didn't know him well by any means. He was definitely odd and a loner, but we had no idea that he had the potential to be a murderer.
I think the police had tried to investigate him over the years because people had expressed concerns, but nobody had ever been able to prove anything. I think there was an effort to stop him setting up a boys club somewhere else but he took the case to the local ombudsman and they overturned the ban. There was obviously a major investigation later into the failings of the authorities. One parent, little Sophie North's father, continues to fight an anti-gun campaign. His story is so tragic because he lost his wife to cancer and all he had was his beautiful little five-year-old daughter. Suddenly he'd lost her too in a way you could never imagine.
You still see the parents of the some of the children who were killed – down the street, at the golf club – trying to get on with their lives. A few moved away. Not many. The rest of us can never imagine what it must be like to lose a young child in such a way. It goes unspoken now. I can't remember the last time I heard anyone talking about it locally. That doesn't mean it will ever be forgotten.
ANDY: I have always found it difficult to talk about Dunblane. It is not something I want to look back on or think about in huge detail. Some of my friends' brothers and sisters were killed. I have been asked about it in press conferences from time to time, but it's hard to get the words right. I can't remember much, but I don't want to sound as though I am holding anything back. The trouble is I don't have anything to hold back. I was too young to understand the magnitude of it. But if I said that, people might think I didn't care.
I have only retained patchy impressions of that day, such as being in a classroom singing songs. I don't remember which songs exactly, but I do remember that the school headmaster had told us to go into a classroom – not our usual classroom – because we'd been on our way to the gym. That is a pretty devastating thought.
I know I asked my mum lots of questions about it afterwards. We had eight or nine days off school and I obviously wanted to know why it happened. The weirdest thing was that we knew the guy. He had been in my mum's car. It's obviously weird to think you had a murderer in your car, sitting next to your mum. That is probably another reason why I don't want to look back at it. It is just so uncomfortable to think that it was someone we knew from the Boys Club. We used to go to the club and have fun. Then to find out he's a murderer was something my brain couldn't cope with.
When you're eight years old and you go on an aeroplane, you don't have any nerves or fear. You're not scared of anything. Once you start to get older, you hear about plane crashes, then you experience turbulence and you begin to feel fear because you understand a little more about the way the world works. I never minded flying at all, then after 9/11 I was pretty uncomfortable. It was the same with the shootings. I was completely naïve and the reality just went way over my head.
I understand now that the person who did it must have been mad, but I've never wanted to find out the psychological reasons behind it. Perhaps it's too close for comfort. I could have been one of those children.
In the end, I think I decided it was just this freak thing. I think if I had been fourteen or fifteen, it would have shocked me far more deeply. Mentally, it would have scarred me. But I was so young, it just didn't affect me like that.
When we went back to school, it was very different. We had to use a buzzer to get into the school and key cards to go through doors. I remember listening all the time to a song released to commemorate those who were killed. I think it was 'Knock, Knock, Knocking on Heaven's Door'. Quite a few kids in my school sang the chorus.* The money from the sale of the song went to a charity to help rebuild the school.
*With Bob Dylan's consent, the song was re-recorded with a new verse written by Dunblane musician Ted Christopher. The new version has the brothers and sisters of those killed singing the chorus.
A lot of people say that everything happens for a reason but I can't believe that. I don't know if what happened that day changed the way I thought about religion. I think it's great to believe in stuff. I have no problem with that. But I haven't looked into any particular religion, so I wouldn't know which one to believe in. I've tried to understand space and how the world works, but my head starts hurting after twenty minutes. Quite a few of my friends are religious and that's absolutely fine with me. I just wish people didn't fight.
I don't really think it was a belief that helped Jamie and me come through it all. It was the way family, friends, teachers, everyone pulled together. In some ways, it probably made the town much friendlier and more polite because of the mutual compassion. It seemed to make the place stronger.
Since I left as pupil, I've never been back to the primary school. But Jamie and I have been in touch with the secondary school. They named the new assembly hall after us. It's great to be remembered like that. I would like to go back one day and see what it's like, maybe visit the Memorial Garden at the primary school. I'm glad it's still a school and that children still play there. Dunblane is still the quiet, lovely place I remember from when I was a kid. What happened was a terrible, horrible tragedy but I think it's important that one madman didn't destroy the place I'm proud to come from.