Pills keep N.Z. man from killing again

Press, 12 June 1984, Page 21

Pills keep N.Z. man from killing again

NZPA staff correspondent Sydney The “head-in-the-oven killer,” James Ferguson, has admitted that without medication he could revert to the mental state in which he killed his Sydney landlady in 1980. Mr Ferguson said in an interview televised in Sydney on Sunday evening that if he had been taking his pills at the time he would never have killed LaurieJeanne Callagher. Mr Ferguson, who now works in an Auckland hotel, was being interviewed on Channel 9’s ‘‘6o Minutes” programme. The producer, Mr Peter Wilkinson, said during the programme’s prerelease publicity last week that Mr Ferguson gave the interview on condition that it not

be televised in New Zealand. At his 1981 trial for the killing, Mr Ferguson was found not guilty of murder on the ground of insanity and ordered held at the Governor’s pleasure. Last June he was released from jail and deported to New Zealand where he entered a psychiatric hospital as a voluntary patient before discharging himself and eventually finding work in the Auckland inner-city hotel. Mr Ferguson described in the interview how he had loved Mrs Callagher, but had become suspicious of her as his condition, deteriorated. He described the day he killed her, cut off her head and threw it into an oven. “In my insanity I had to kill her because she was a witch.” “There’s no way I would have committed that act if I had been on my medication.” During his Sydney trial, the Court was told that Mr Ferguson had stopped taking his pills and had been taking vitamins instead. Asked whether he could guarantee he would now remain on medication to maintain his stable condition, Mr Ferguson replied: “We’re doing our best to make sure it won’t happen again. “I have a urine test every week which establishes whether I am still taking my medication and I check with my psychiatrist once a week to make sure he feels happy about the way I’m going.” Mr Ferguson has written a book on his experiences and quoted from a passage referring to before the Sydney killing, in which he described himself as “drift-

ing in and out of madness” and while apparently lucid to a casual observer, his real throughts and feelings were “bubbling away in my mind’s own cauldron of insanity.” Asked if such a state could recur, he said: “Only if I was ill. If I had been off’ my medication and fallen ill, that could happen.” The psychiatrist who treated Mr Ferguson in Sydney jails expressed concern that it was left to his former patient to take his own medication and said he had a previous history of psychiatric trouble. Mr Ferguson told the interviewer the only thing he could do was to try and live life as normally as possible and asked: “When are the media going to be happy?”