Two 15-year-old boys have been given custodial sentences of more than a decade for planning a Columbine-style massacre at their Yorkshire school.

After representations from the media, the judge agreed to name the two defendants: Thomas Wyllie, sentenced to 12 years, and Alex Bolland, who received 10 years.

They were 14 when they conspired to use bombs and guns to target a “hit list” at the school in the market town of Northallerton.

The two schoolfriends researched bomb-making techniques and began building a stockpile of weapons before counter-terrorism police swooped last October.

In police interviews after their arrests, both boys claimed the plan was nothing more than a fantasy, but jurors at Leeds crown court convicted them of conspiracy to murder in May.

The judge, Mrs Justice Cheema-Grubb, told the pair their plan “was not wishful thinking or fantasy, it was a real plot”. She said: “You planned to murder teachers and pupils at your school in North Yorkshire by shooting them in a re-enactment of the Columbine massacre … [it was] a firm plan with specific targets in mind as well as a plan to make indiscriminate explosives.”

She concluded by saying the boys had intended to cause “terror on the scale of the school shootings that have been seen in America”.



Facebook Twitter Pinterest Items found in the rucksack belonging to one of the boys which prosecutors argued were instruments for building an explosive. Photograph: North East CTU/PA

Prosecutors said the older boy, Wyllie, “idolised” Eric Harris, who in 1999 massacred 13 victims with Dylan Klebold at Columbine high school in Colorado before turning a gun on himself.

Police uncovered a diary in which Wyllie espoused far-right views, writing that he was going to commit “one of the worst atrocities in British history” and said: “Fuck, I hate my school. I will obliterate it. I will kill everyone.”

Beside drawings of a swastika and a heavily armed man, he confessed his love for Charles Manson and the Columbine killers and described his own life as a “miserable existence, full of torment and macabre themes”.

During the trial, jurors heard how the teenagers researched weapons online and downloaded a bomb-making manual, while Wyllie attempted to gain access to a store of seven shotguns at his girlfriend’s house.

In his diary, the boy wrote in October that he had been planning the mass killing for more than a year but it developed when he met his girlfriend that summer. The girl, also 14, told police she initially liked Wyllie but that he quickly became controlling and scared her.

In the diary , Wyllie wrote he would “lay low” in Catterick before murdering his former girlfriend’s parents and stealing her father’s guns.

When the girl’s parents stopped contact between the pair because of his “malign influence”, he went to her house dressed like Eric Harris and wearing a T-shirt daubed with a threat to her parents.

He fled carrying a large knife that was later found with the word “love” written on the blade. The teenager was cleared of one count of aggravated burglary but convicted of unlawful wounding after carving his name into his then girlfriend’s lower back.

The school attack plot surfaced in September when Bolland told a schoolgirl via Snapchat that they were planning to carry out a shooting. When she asked if he was joking, he responded: “No. No one innocent will die. We promise.”

The next day, Bolland confessed first to the school’s deputy headteacher and then the police, admitting that they had planned to kill fellow pupils who were bullying them.

Giving evidence, the teacher said Bolland claimed his targets were “infecting the gene pool” and that he and Wyllie were performing a “service to society”.

Police spoke to both boys separately at home after the incident. Bolland confirmed they “planned to go into school with a firearm in order to get rid of those who had wronged them”, but Wyllie denied everything.

A month later, detectives seized the latter’s diary and found a rucksack in his hideout containing a balaclava, a bag of screws, cable ties and a bottle of flammable liquid. He told police he had the items so he could run away with his girlfriend. He denied planning to kill her parents or pupils and teachers at his school.

Bolland handed himself in two days later, telling police he had been manipulated and was only going along with the conversation as a joke without intending to harm anyone.

Prosecutors said North Yorkshire police did not respond adequately to the threat until a specialist counter-terrorism team took over the investigation a month later. Phil Cain, assistant chief constable, admitted their investigation fell below standards and that a review had taken place.

The boys struck up an unlikely friendship before hatching their plot. Wyllie was the tall, guitar-playing frontman of a punk band called Blurred Pixels, which grew from lunchtime rehearsals at school to play gigs around Northallerton. Bolland, meanwhile, was a video game-playing bespectacled teenager who chose to wear his school uniform for the start of the trial despite having not attended since his arrest. Wyllie expressed interest in serial killers and punk whereas Bolland appeared more interested in playing video games, sharing links on social media to first-person shooters. Neighbours of Wyllie described him as coming from “a lovely family”. They lived in a quiet, middle-class suburb, just under two miles away from the Brompton estate where Bolland lived with his father, who is believed to be a manager at a garage.



The father of one of Wyllie’s schoolfriends said the teenager “got pretty badly bullied” at school – the trial heard how he would revel in his nickname “the school shooter” – but Bolland was described as “a really nice kid”.



The boys had both denied conspiracy to murder, with Bolland claiming Wyllie “was serious about the mass killing”, whereas he was not, but Wyllie maintaining that “no one was serious about any of it”.