Staff at Cults academy, a high-performing state secondary of about 1,000 pupils set in an affluent suburb south-west of Aberdeen, were gearing up for a busy lunchtime. The miserable weather that day would mean fewer of the older pupils would take advantage of the privilege that allowed them to walk down the hill to the local shops.
But 16-year-old Bailey Gwynne, a tall, fit boy who hoped to join the Royal Marines, did leave school that Wednesday. The fifth-year pupil, who lived in the nearby village of Maryculter with his mother, her partner and family headed for the nearby Tesco Express, where he is believed to have a bought a packet of biscuits.
It was a trivial, everyday act. Yet it contributed to his untimely death, for Bailey was killed following a fight said to have involved the biscuits and which took place in the school corridors where pupils were sheltering a few minutes later.
Headteacher Anna Muirhead, having completed her canteen duties, picked up a cup of soup for herself and walked back to her office, down a passageway known as “the street”, where pupils would gather on wet break times. She passed a group of fifth-year boys outside a toilet block.
Among them was another 16-year-old. What Muirhead did not know was that this boy had been carrying to school on a regular basis a folding knife with an 8cm blade that he had recently bought on Amazon for £40.
The teenager would later tell the police officers who interviewed him at Kittybrewster custody suite: “I’ve never fitted in so I was just trying to look cool, act confident, act tough, but I wasn’t.”
The boy claimed he had originally put the knife – along with a pair of knuckledusters also bought online – in his inside blazer pocket “to show my friends” but had forgotten the items were there. Earlier that day he had moved the knife to a different pocket so he would remember to take it out when he got home.
Muirhead continued her walk, past the boy and his friends and on to her office. The first bell, which warns pupils that the lunch hour is coming to an end, sounded at 1.19pm. Muirhead was working at her desk when the office manager burst in and told her: “Anna, there’s been a fight. It looks serious. We’ve called an ambulance.”
What happened in those intervening minutes will probably never be entirely known. The most complete account came from the teenager himself in his videotaped interview with the police, conducted the day after the killing. He has never denied stabbing Bailey, but insisted he “didn’t mean it”. His account could not be directly examined in court, as the boy chose not to give evidence. in the trial that followed. A jury concluded that he was guilty of culpable homicide, an offence in Scottish law roughly equivalent to manslaughter in England.
The interview, which was played in full to the jury over the second and third days of the murder trial, showed the boy sitting in police-issue blue paper shorts and T-shirt. He told officers that Bailey had started talking to some of the group outside the toilets towards the end of the lunch hour. Bailey was sharing a packet of biscuits with a few friends but refused to give one particular boy a second biscuit, telling him: “You don’t want to get any fatter.”
To this, the 16-year-old responded: “Just like your mum.” He was, he said later, “trying to defend a friend”.
By this point, the first bell had rung and Bailey had turned away to go to his next class. Then he turned back, perhaps because he heard the insult, perhaps because one boy was reported as saying to him: “Are you going to take that?”
The boy continued: “[Bailey] looked angry. As he approached me I pulled out the knife, opened it up and tried to scare him away with it. He came closer and I got pretty scared so tried to scare him away again by, like, moving it. He got in the way and it stabbed him.”
A pathologist later testified that the knife penetrated up to 4cm between Bailey’s ribs and into the left ventricle of his heart. He said that while the weapon did not penetrate up to the hilt, the injury was fatal.
Further into his police interview, the boy suggested he did not initially realise that he had stabbed Bailey. He said: “I thought [the knife] had closed. I felt it bend back, so I put it back in my pocket. I ducked then he hit me a couple of times ... then the teacher walked in and shouted at us to stop.”
The granular pace of courtroom evidence belies the nauseating speed with which these events unfolded. Four other 16-year-olds who witnessed the sudden escalation – which they estimated to last between 20 and 30 seconds – offered their own recollections.
Three of the witnesses to the fight said that Bailey either had his opponent in a headlock or trapped against the wall, punching down on him. But this was not something the 16-year-old involved in the scuffle remembered.
The testimony also exposed the delicate ecosystem that exists in every playground and remains baffling to adults, as well as the casual cruelties and dumb bravado of adolescence.
Another boy offered some background to the initial exchange of insults, first asking advocate depute Alex Prentice if it was “okay to say the word” in court.
He said Bailey described his opponent as a “a fat cunt”, who in response said to Bailey “your mum’s a fat bitch”, which “really upset him”. He explained that people insulted Bailey’s mother “all the time” because they knew how much it distressed him.
Nobody involved – including the defendant – has suggested that there was any prior history of arguments between the boys.
Nevertheless it was plain that the accused was extremely sensitive about his size: he had recently started refusing to participate in PE lessons because he was too embarrassed to undress in front of fellow pupils. It was suggested by Ian Duguid QC, defending, that he was particularly teased about having “women’s breasts”.
Asked to describe his build during the police interview, the boy replied: “Fat, slightly short.” Asked whether he had a nickname at school, he simply said: “Fat.”
Muirhead, who sat in the public benches throughout the trial after being called as the first witness, described the boys involved in the fight as quiet. But she did confirm that she had cautioned the defendant about the dangers of carrying a knife when he had been a much younger pupil, although the circumstances prompting this warning were not revealed in court.
It became evident during the trial that the defendant was fascinated by knives: internet searches discovered on the laptop he used included “illegal knives UK”, “Aberdeen stabbings deaths per 1,000” and a YouTube news report entitled: ”14-year-old Bronx student stabs bully to death outside school.”
During the wide-ranging police interview, in which he detailed a chaotic family background, one thing was clear to those present in court. For all his distress and apologies, the boy was apparently unused to that much adult attention, and was basking in it.
Towards the conclusion of the videotaped interview, the senior police officer can be heard formally charging the teenager with Bailey’s murder. The boy starts to sob, insisting: “But I did try and save him.” In the courtroom, Bailey’s mother wept as she listened to the exchange, rocking back and forth in her seat as relatives tried to comfort her.
Throughout the five-day trial, grief in the modern and relatively small courtroom was palpable. The defendant, who listened attentively throughout the trial, wept as the police constable who detained him described his distress as Bailey lay dying, and the court was briefly adjourned to allow the boy to compose himself.
As the story of Bailey’s final minutes was retold in court, it became evident that nobody immediately recognised the seriousness of the boy’s injury. Indeed, he and the defendant were marched 50 metres down the corridor towards the head’s office before Bailey collapsed.
At this point, said witnesses, the defendant moved to help the boy, trying to take off his blazer and undo his buttons. Muirhead described him as “distraught”.
But it was too late. Gary Gillespie, a paramedic who was on the scene five minutes after the emergency call was made, said it was clear that Bailey was suffering “catastrophic blood loss”. As the ambulance arrived, Gillespie was already performing CPR after Bailey’s heart had stopped.
The defendant was taken to wait in the deputy head’s office. There, he texted his parents then called his mother and told her that he loved her.
In court, PC Christopher Masson repeated his first words on being handcuffed. Reading from his police notebook, Masson described how the boy, who was by now “very distressed”, asked him: “Is he dead? It was just a moment of anger.”
