Hospital is home to insane and dangerous
CARSTAIRS has housed hundreds of patients judged criminally insane since it opened in 1948.
About 120 patients are detained at the hospital. Seven have been there for more than a quarter of a century.
The most infamous patients, Thomas McCulloch and Robert Mone, murdered a nurse, a patient and a police officer with axes in an attempt to escape in 1976.
Controversially, McCulloch was freed in 2013 and has since married and lives in Tayside.
Mone is still incarcerated and is regarded as Scotland’s longest serving prisoner.
In 1999, killer Noel Ruddle, who shot his neighbour with a semiautomatic Kalashnikov type rifle, walked free from the hospital after exploiting a legal loophole. He had served seven years but a sheriff gave him an absolute discharge because his mental illness was deemed untreatable. He later boasted he “beat the system”.
The Scottish Government rushed through a bill to close the loophole forever.
Serial child rapist James Ferguson, 70, became the longestserving patient, having been sent there in 1969 after child killer Sam Glass was moved to a medium security hospital in November 2015.
Glass, who stayed at Carstairs for 48 years, molested, stabbed and strangled five-year-old Jean Hamilton near her home in Bridgeton, Glasgow, in 1967.
The average patient stay is seven years. The hospital employs about 650 people, including 100 admin staff, at an annual budget of around £35million. It was recently rebuilt at a cost of about £80million.