Ferris trial highlighted in Scandals that Shocked Scotland series

Each episode of The Scandals that Shocked Scotland will look at two cases ranging from miscarriages of justice to High Court dramas, banking bailouts to public health disasters.

The first episode looks at the trial in 1991 of Paul Ferris, who was acquitted of murdering Arthur Thompson Junior, aka ‘Fat Boy’.

No-one has ever been found guilty of the gangland killing of the eldest son of the godfather of Glasgow’s biggest criminal clan, outside his home in Provanmill, Glasgow.

Ferris worked as a debt collector for Thompson and had known his son well. He was arrested and charged after the murder. The night before Thompson’s funeral, two of Ferris’s friends, Bobby Glover and Joe ‘Bananas’ Hanlon, were found shot dead in a car on the funeral cortege route. As well as being Scotland’s longest ever trial, it cost a record £4 million and heard evidence from 300 witnesses.

The long-running saga of the delays and spiralling cost of building the Scottish Parliament is also examined in the first episode.

In 1997 Scotland’s inaugural First Minister, Donald Dewar, launched the Scotland Bill with the declaration: “There shall be a Scottish Parliament. I like that.”

By the time it opened in 2004 – three years late – it was ten times over budget. Tragedy also stalked the building of the Parliament at Holyrood.

Its architect, Barcelona-based Enric Miralles, and Dewar died within a year of each other without ever seeing the building – which in the end cost £414m to build.

Episode one of The Scandals that Shocked Scotland will be broadcast on Thursday 28 November on BBC Scotland at 8.30pm.