‘It was the worst experience of my life’, says pathologist

It was a scene so awful that Professor Anthony Busuttil was forced to stop in the doorway and fight the urge to turn around and run away.

The pathologist had arrived at Dunblane Primary School in the ghastly aftermath of Thomas Hamilton’s gun rampage.

Just an hour earlier, the 43-year-old loner had opened fire on a class of primary one children, killing 16 of them and their teacher before turning the gun on himself.

Twenty years on, the now retired Edinburgh University professor is still haunted by the memories of what he saw in the school gymnasium.

“It was the worst experience of my life,” the now 70-year-old told The Courier in an interview from his home in Edinburgh.

“To see all these young bodies lying all over the place was so awful. It was not something I ever expected to see.

“In fact when I first told my students there had been a school shooting, one of them said, ‘what, in America?’. When I said Dunblane, it was a case of ‘away and boil yer heid…’. No one could quite believe it.”

Professor Busuttil, who spent many years as Scotland’s leading pathologist, said it became a case of mind over matter. He didn’t want to enter the gym hall. But professionally he had to face what lay inside.

He said: “I had to get on with my job. Things had to go on, they had to proceed. This was an emergency.”

Instructed to attend Dunblane by the procurator fiscal at Stirling, it was his job to carry out a scene-of-crime examination and conduct the pathological investigation of the killings.

He had the unenviable task of identifying the deceased, of showing the bodies of the victims to their families, of determining in each instance the cause of death and collecting trace evidence of the shooting.

“You could not work with the bodies of five-year-olds at the hospital and not be incredibly moved,” he added.

At a later stage he had to produce reports for the fatal accident inquiry and then give evidence in court.

The Dunblane investigation benefited from the professor’s experience of another major disaster eight years earlier: Lockerbie.