A small Scottish town, Dunblane has been invented in the minds of many. Every gridlocked city stalker, every choking urban cowboy, every panicked nighttime mother has conjured up dreams of escape to a Dunblane of their own.
"Nothing ever happened here," said 15-year-old Stuart McInnes, with a smile that held regrets, as he stood besieged by gathering newsmen March 13. "The place was just dead. Friendly like. But dead.""It was a quite lovely community," said Councilor Jean Davidson, who sits on the board of the primary school. "There was something wholly special about Dun-blane. People would help without thinking about it."
It was, said Olive McDonald, the kind of place where, if a child fell in the street, three people would rush to pick him up.
On March 13, as couples clutched each other tight in misery, the talk at the bar of the Tappit Hen pub was of the way news of the day's events had spread. Dunblane, they said, was "the kind of place where if someone had some good news, it would be all over town."
That same network had worked that morning with the bad; the main street had cleared in a little over a minute when they heard.
A generation of professionals - doctors, lawyers, journalists - had dreamed of somewhere the air was so crisp you can actually smell the smoke from a chimney; where fearsome things come in picture books; where the water of life is softly reassuring as it falls, or golden, as it washes the back of the throat. Dunblane was that dream incarnate.
It was an hour away from Edinburgh and Glasgow, and the commuters flocked to breathe in the air and to bring up baby. A dormitory town with character, with family businesses and warm pubs, it was the '50s. It was too good not to be true.
South of Dunblane is Stirling and, beyond, the pebble-dashed sprawl of the Braeside public housing estate, home to Dun-blane's moon-faced nemesis. The two communities are separated by about five miles and a thousand prejudices.
Thomas Hamilton did not belong to the manicured world of Dun-blane. His home was a scruffy, damp maisonette on a joyless public housing estate on Kent Road in Stirling.
Nor had he enjoyed the stable, happy childhood apparent in some of the children at Dunblane Primary. His father, Thomas Watt, now 65, had run off with a bus conductress when he was only 18 months old. Hamilton was brought up by his grandparents, believing that his mother, Agnes, was his older sister.
The family lived in a beautiful, rambling graystone manse that had been converted into two apartments in Upper Bridge Road in Stirling. In the late 1950s, it was a tightly knit working-class neighborhood, the cobbled streets resounding to the laughter of large families.
But Thomas, a lonely only child, was always on the outside. His real father was never mentioned at home.
Anthea Callaghan, 58, who was the family's neighbor for two years, said: "At the time, I thought Agnes had Tommy illegitimately and that the grandmother was trying to cover it up. The ages didn't add up. But the grandmother actually went to great lengths to tell me about her pregnancy, what a difficult labor she had with Tommy.
"My thought was how awful it was for Agnes never to be called `Mum.' The old lady always said `My son this, my son that,' but Agnes didn't exist. Agnes was tall and dark-haired. But she was always stooped, she was shut away. We assumed she was hidden away to pay for her sins."
Former classmates at Riverside Secondary School in Stirling recalled Hamilton as an outsider who seemed to delight in creating fear.
Hamilton dawdled away his time in class, doodling on his books and taking little interest in academic subjects, though he was keen on chess.
He left school at 15 with few qualifications and opened a do-it-yourself shop. It did well, and he expanded into selling fitted kitchens. Local shopkeepers saw him as ambitious. But the business ran into trouble in the mid-1980s, and he blamed a "whispering campaign" against him. That was the last time he worked.
To the casual observer, Hamilton was a normal middle-age man. At 43, round-faced, overweight and balding, his more polite neighbors said he kept to himself.
But almost everybody else who had met him described him as weird, a man who left others feeling uncomfortable in his presence.
"You just knew," said a painter and decorator who used to do work passed on to him by Hamilton when he ran his do-it-yourself shop. "There was something about him. You just knew he was a pervert."
As Hamilton slipped into adulthood, two obsessions were beginning to dominate his life: guns and young boys. Over the years, these twin passions became more closely entwined. As he met more boys, his collection of weapons and ammunition grew.
Hamilton began working in boys clubs in the early 1970s when he also became a volunteer assistant with the Scouts in Stirling, helping to take boys on trips. It was the perfect pastime, giving him close contact with boys at clubs and at camps away from the onerous presence of their parents.
But the idyll didn't last long. In 1974, Hamilton was kicked out of the Scouts. The official reason was incompetence - on a trip he had made a group of boys sleep in a camper van after claiming he had booked them into a hostel - but one leader said that there had also been concern about his "unhealthy attitude" toward his young charges.
Hamilton resented the decision bitterly and developed a grudge that was to grow and fester - more rapidly after two attempts to rejoin the Scouts were rejected - for the rest of his life.
The Scouts were right. He couldn't be trusted with boys. Worried neighbors often saw him playing with them in the evening, backlit in the window, pictures of young boys in varying stages of undress pinned up on the walls behind him.
One neighbor, Grace Ogilvie, said he had once asked her in to look at photographs and a video of "my boys" running around in nothing but skimpy black shorts. "There was something odd about it all," she said. "I felt like having a shower afterwards. I got out as fast as I could, and I never went in again."
Despite this, his self-delusion and paranoia was to grow to such a pitch that, by the time of his death, he believed the queen, no less, would step in to declare him an upright and much-maligned citizen, skilled in bringing out the best in Britain's young.
Hamilton's fixation with guns was also well-known. He showed off his armory - which included a Kalashnikov until Britain's gun laws changed - to an insurance agent and to the boys.
Scott Edgar, 15, from Stirling, who attended Hamilton's clubs, said, "He used to say, `Come round and see my guns.' I thought he was a right weirdo."
Three weeks ago, Hamilton stepped into D. Crockart and Son, the brightly lit gun shop in Dunblane, pushed his license across the counter and asked for his usual order, 9mm and .357 ammunition. The shop owner gave the license a cursory glance, noticing that it had been renewed last year, and turned away to retrieve the boxes of shells.
Hamilton was a regular customer, coming in every couple of weeks to the shop. He was always pleasant, although he never made small talk, as owner Robert Bell recalled. "He knew exactly what he wanted each time," Bell said. "He was always very precise."
It was to be his last visit, before setting off for Dunblane Primary School with the new ammunition in his two semiautomatic pistols, the Beretta and the Browning, and the two .357 magnums he had also bought at Crockart's.
Being strange was no bar to gaining and retaining a gun license. Hamilton had had his license, for two rifles as well as the handguns, since 1977, passing each of the periodic checks on his fitness to keep weapons. Last year, central Scotland police renewed 340 other firearms licenses, turning none of them down, along with Hamilton's.
And yet there was a catalog of circumstantial evidence that he was not, in the words of the law, a "fit and proper person who would not be a danger to the public or the peace."
Hamilton's second dismissal from a position of trust came in 1981 when he was fired as a leader of a Boys Brigade, a youth club, after incidents involving nakedness and fondling at a summer camp.
Seemingly denied access to young boys, he reacted by starting his own network of independent boys clubs from Bishopbriggs, on the outskirts of Glasgow, to Dunfermline and Linlithgow in Fife, to, fatefully, Dunblane.
Everywhere he set up, allegations of misbehavior surfaced.
Doreen Hagger, whose 11-year-old son had attended one of Hamilton's summer camps at Loch Lomond in 1988, told police he had threatened her at gunpoint. She had triggered an investigation after she discovered from her son that Hamilton had forced young boys to rub suntan oil over his body, including his genitals.
She confronted him several times, on one occasion pelting him with eggs and flour, and shortly afterward he turned up on her doorstep in a small village in West Lothian and warned her off at the point of a shotgun. She reported this to the police, but Hamilton was not prosecuted, probably because of a lack of corroboration.
This was in 1989. Then Hamilton began to set up a string of camps and clubs for boys across central Scotland, next in Fife and then to Dunfermline and Linlithgow.
Less than three years later, he had become, in the words of the police, "well-known" to four Scottish forces - knowledge that seemed to fail the test of criminal proof.
Scottish law is particularly onerous in the level of proof demanded, requiring corroboration, usually from another witness to the event. Difficult in normal adult cases, almost impossible when those involved are young children.
In 1992, Fife officials, worried about allegations that Hamilton was filming young, seminaked boys on council premises, refused to rent halls to him.
There were many more complaints about his behavior. Hamilton was banned from using a swimming pool because he was deemed unsuitable. A local camera shop refused to develop his film because of the nature of his photographs. Parents told of tearful sons upset after being touched "in an unusual manner" by Hamilton.
Mothers at Braehead primary school, 500 yards from his house in Stirling, told how they had stopped their sons from going to his clubs. Boys complained that he had made them take their shirts off while playing games, rewarding the boy with the finest torso by making him team captain and often capturing the scenes on his video or still camera.
Successive councils banned him from using their school gyms. Nevertheless, he continued to run his clubs in other places. Just 36 hours before he loaded his guns and set off for Dunblane, he had been running a youth club at Thomas Muir High School in Bishopbriggs.
He launched leaflet campaigns to persuade parents that he was the victim of malicious smears, that their children were safe in his hands. Many parents believed him; some even joined his campaign, and he used their backing to outwit the authorities.
Hamilton relied on the system to protect him. Between 1983 and 1992, he complained to local government ombudsmen about what he said was a campaign of vilification, successfully intimidating most of the councils into continuing to allow him to use their premises.
In November 1983, his first club in Dunblane High School had been closed following allegations of pedophilia. He appealed to the ombudsman, who ruled that the charges were "little better than gossip." This judgment became Hamilton's license to continue, and he opened the club again.
Last year, an unsuccessful complaint was made to police about an alleged sexual assault at a youth soccer club. By then, Hamilton had actually been caught in an act of public indecency in Edinburgh by police. He had been cautioned six months before by officers after being nabbed with his trousers down in the embrace of a young boy in Edinburgh, a notorious gay red-light district.
Parents in Dunblane were becoming extremely worried as stories spread about Hamilton's unnatural interest in their children.
In a final bid to clear his name, Hamilton had 10,000 leaflets printed in November protesting his innocence, which he began pushing under the doors of the town.
By then, police and social workers across central Scotland had enough evidential strands that could have enmeshed Hamilton, or at least provided a protective net denying him his young prey. However, the numerous complaints against him were not collated and his gun license was again renewed.
None of the police forces involved will comment on the Hamilton case, nor will the social work departments involved. All maintain that the forthcoming inquiry into the killings and the judicial investigation gag them.
Hamilton's simmering resentment against a life of rejection became focused on Dunblane, a 15-minute car ride north of Stirling. He was inexorably linked to the town. His introduction to guns was there. He was a stalwart of the Dunblane gun club, now defunct, which practiced on a military range on a hillside overlooking the place. The Stirling gun club, which he then joined, also uses the range.
By March 12, he had little room left to maneuver. He faced losing the boys club he ran on Thursday evenings at Dunblane High School, which was closest to his home. It was, he believed, a last bid to exorcise him from the town.
For all the disorganized state of his home - it was a garbage "tip," according to neighbor Grace Ogilvie, with cups and plates spilling on the floor - Hamilton made sure his letters were neat. Crisp, literate and organized, they signaled none of the bedlam within.
And so, on March 12, he folded copies of 20 years of correspondence into several careful bundles, stamped them second-class, addressed them to Scotland's newspapers and TV stations and prepared for his last night. "I cannot even walk the streets for fear of embarrassing ridicule," he said in one letter.
In the morning, the two worlds met, close-knit community and unraveling mind. Hamilton waved to his neighbors and drove off slowly, with fresh ammo lying beside him, along with the guns and the rifleman's earmuffs he used to protect his hearing while firing.
He drove into Dunblane, passing a steady stream of commuters who would soon be racing back into town, their hands cold with anguish on the wheel.
Inside the school, small paper snowflakes line the windows of the classrooms. Five miles away, in unconscious echo, similar white-paper snowflakes pepper the windows of the children's ward of Stirling Royal Infirmary, where injured children still lie.
In the playground, you can stand on the hopscotch grid where the first shot was fired, where the story ended and the horror began.