A serial rapist who targeted children has died after nearly 50 years in Carstairs.
James Ferguson, 72, attacked and maimed girls in Glasgow in the late 60s.
He’d worked for a time as a binman, which gave him knowledge of the city’s labyrinth of tenement closes and lanes.
Ferguson, from Glasgow’s east end, was detained without limit of time at the State Hospital in Carstairs, Lanarkshire, in 1969, when he was 23.
It cost in excess of £10million to hold him there for nearly five decades.
He was suspected of 13 sexual assaults and knife attacks on young girls aged between 18 months and 11 years old.
His reign of terror began in October 1967 with an assault on a girl in St George’s Cross, Glasgow.
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Attack followed attack and the area around Garnethill, Towhead and Woodside became known as the Square Mile of Terror.
It only ended after a tip-off to police at Springburn two years later.
Joe Jackson, the officer who received the intelligence and went on to become a detective superintendent, last week recalled the distress among hardened officers at Ferguson’s offences.
He said: “The full horror of what he subjected those girls to is unprintable.
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“I remember the female officers who were carrying the children to hospital were in tears at the physical state he had left the children in. The moment we received a tip-off, which provided his name as a suspect, was a massive breakthrough.”
He added: “At least he was never released to place the public in danger again.”
Police later discovered he had been released weeks before the first attack from Lennox Castle mental hospital, where he’d been sent for sexual offences.
He died last September from stomach cancer that spread to his liver.
He was the longest-serving patient at the time of his death and the only one to have been held there since the 60s.
A source said: “Ferguson was held for many years with other paedophiles at the hospital’s old Clyde ward and was friends with a small number including child killer Karl Tonner.”
A spokeswoman said the State Hospital was unable to provide information about specific patients.
