A Lanarkshire family has paid thousands of pounds to exhume from their grave after learning they had been buried next to one of Scotland's most notorious child killers.
Sam Glass was locked up for longer than anyone else in Scotland for his horrific crimes after indecently assaulting, stabbing and strangling a five-year-old girl in Glasgow in the 60s.
He died in at the age of 71 in November 2018 in a secure hospital. His unmarked grave went unnoticed at a Lanarkshire cemetery near the State Hospital, Carstairs, for more than a year.
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However, a local family were horrified when they saw that his headstone, bearing his adopted name John Frederick Faucet, had been erected next to the grave of their loved one. They embarked on an almost three-year mission to have their relative exhumed and reinterred at a different spot within Carnwath cemetery, the Daily Record reports.
A member of the family, who do not want to be identified, told the Record the thousands of pound paid to move him was a “small price to pay”, saying he is now “at peace”.
They have called on South Lanarkshire Council not to allow anyone else to be buried around Glass's grave without relatives first being made aware, but the council said they are bound by "data protection" not to disclose any information.
The family source said: “It’s not a cost you would want but we weren’t going to leave him where he was. He’s at peace and we are happy now.
“The headstone of Sam Glass is currently sitting on its own with nothing either side of him. It should stay that way.”
Glass molested and murdered Jean Hamilton near her home in Bridgeton, Glasgow, in 1967.
Then aged 20, he was ordered to be detained at Carstairs without limit of time and was held in secure hospitals for 51 years, where he later fell ill with a brain tumour.
He was held at the State Hospital at Carstairs then, for the last three years of his life, at Glasgow’s Rowanbank Clinic.
Glass, who changed his name to John Faucet in 2015, died with an estate of £50,000 which he accrued in benefits over the years and is understood to have put his burial plans in place long before his death.
The Record told in 2020 of the family’s horror at discovering who their relative had been buried beside the previous year, saying a “good man” had been laid to rest alongside “evil through and through”.
They told how their loved one’s widow was too traumatised to visit the grave as frequently as she once had.
Following the discovery, the family instructed a lawyer and applied through the court system for an exhumation order - a process which took more than two years to complete.
A family source said: “They moved him at 5am so no one was around and moved him further up within the same cemetery.
“They put one coffin into another and just moved him quietly. His widow is happy now because she can go and visit whenever she likes.
“We can all settle now as she had planned to go in with him and couldn’t have if he had stayed next to Glass.”
The family paid an undisclosed sum of several thousands pounds for the exhumation and more fees to an undertaker who oversaw the process.
They now want assurances from the council that no other family will go through what they have.
The source said: “I’d hate for another family to go through what we have and for a child to have been put in there.
“Our loved one is now laid to rest next to a wee baby who was born sleeping. I dread the thought of this wee baby being put next to Sam Glass.
“I don’t think the council had thought properly about the area they put him in. There are lots of ex Carstairs hospital workers in the area who know exactly who he was and what he did. It was insensitive.”
The Record understands the lairs around Glass’s grave will still be available for use.
A South Lanarkshire Council spokesman said: “Requests for bodies to be exhumed from lairs are dealt with on a case-by-case basis.
“We understand and sympathise with the sensitivities in this case.
“However, information about adjacent lair owners cannot be released in any circumstances as this is personal information and to do so would be a breach of data protection legislation.”
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