THE LOST CHILDREN

By JAMES O. JACKSON

FOR THOSE WHO STOOD, BEWILdered, on the streets of Dunblane that terrible day last week, the sight of the anguished woman is one they can never forget, a defining vision of the Scottish town's moment of horror. "Victoria!" she cried, as a convoy of ambulances sped past, sirens screaming and lights flashing. "Victoria!" That was one of the names: Victoria. Others, read out in a mournful voice by police chief superintendent Louis Munn, were as familiar and as evocative of middle-class Scottish family life: Emma, Melissa and Megan; Charlotte, Kevin, Ross and Hannah; David, Mhairi, Brett and Abigail; Emily, Sophie, John and Joanna. Ordinary names, pretty names, the names on teachers' attendance lists, on captions of school pictures, on programs for school pageants, on lineups for school games. And they are the names of the dead and maimed of Dunblane's little primary-school gymnasium where a man with a pocketful of pistols and a mind filled with hatred massacred children.

In all, 16 five- and six-year-old first-graders and their teacher died Wednesday when a failed youth leader named Thomas Hamilton, 43, barged into the school and emptied four handguns into them as they screamed and cowered in the gymnasium. Two other teachers and 12 children were wounded, three critically, before Hamilton put one of the guns to his head and blew part of it away. Nobody can know just what monsters of the psyche drove the strange moonfaced man's mind to crack at that moment, or why he chose the gentlest, most innocent of the school's 729 pupils to be the victims of his inner torments (see Essay). For those who lived through it, the questions have but one answer. "Evil visited us yesterday," said Ron Taylor, the school's headmaster and one of the first to reach the scene of the killings. "We don't know why, we don't understand it, and I guess we never will."

So far, authorities can only put together the sequence of events that led to the evil of Dunblane. The start might be traced back as far as 1974, when Boy Scout officials dismissed Hamilton, then 21, for "inappropriate behavior" as leader of a local troop, and to subsequent incidents involving his attempts to organize boys' sports clubs in the area. Or it might have arisen from his fascination with handguns, which he obtained as long as 20 years ago and owned legally despite strict British laws. But whatever its origins, the culmination came at around 9 a.m. Wednesday when Hamilton left his shabby bachelor apartment and headed for the school. A neighbor, Kathleen Kerr, 71, said he waved to her as he stepped into a car. "He seemed cheerful and perfectly happy," she said.

He was not. In the pockets of a black coat he carried four loaded handguns--two Browning 9-mm automatics and two .357 magnum revolvers--plus a packet of bitterly angry letters to British news organizations detailing his grievances against the town for treating him as a "pervert." He apparently stopped to mail the letters, which reached their destinations two days later. Then he went directly to the school. He was at the entrance at about 9:25 a.m.

He started shooting in the playground, then down a corridor as he made his way to the gymnasium. Firing from a corner of the room, Hamilton hit teacher Gwenne Mayor as she tried to shield the 29 children she had taken there for phys ed. She died on the spot. Then he moved around the room, methodically shooting the screaming children, chasing some as they ran and pumping at least one and sometimes three or more bullets into the little bodies. Then he retreated to a corner away from the carnage and fired the final bullet into his own brain.

Rescuers were greeted by a hellish silence: no cries, no screams, very little movement at all amid a chaos of scattered shoes, clothing, blood and painfully small bodies. "I just cannot get the images out of my head," said headmaster Taylor.

By all accounts Hamilton was odd. The woman he always believed was his sister was, in reality, his mother. His father, Thomas Watt, 65, abandoned the family when Hamilton was 18 months old. He never took interest in him again until he learned, with shock, of the killings. "I can't live with this," Watt said. "I brought this monster into the world." It was a world that proved difficult for a man whose compelling life interest appeared to be youth leadership--but who was regarded in town as a pedophile. His attempts to organize boys' clubs ended when parents withdrew their sons after hearing of Hamilton's abnormal interest in the boys' bodies. Said Gerry Fitzpatrick, 27, owner of a bar in Dunblane who attended one of the clubs in his teens: "He would make us take off our shirts all the time. He liked looking at us. There was something creepy about him."

If some thought him a "sicko" and "a loner," no one could have foreseen the depth of evil in their midst. At the local morgue, hospital chaplain Jim Benson comforted parents as they identified their children. But no words, no memorials or visits by the Queen will make it easier for a parent to comprehend that a son, a daughter is never going to wake again. After one mother looked at her dead child, she turned to Benson and said, "My baby always sleeps like that."

--Reported by Michael Brunton/London and Barry Hillenbrand/ Dunblane

With reporting by MICHAEL BRUNTON/LONDON AND BARRY HILLENBRAND/DUNBLANE