Dennis Ferguson: Australia’s most hated man

LIKE other inmates, he had access to newspapers every day. But it wasn’t the current affairs that interested him. He liked the Target catalogues. Particularly the children’s fashions pages.

Dennis Raymond Ferguson.

THEY’D come in their thousands to see the royal family, screaming women in their heels, clutching purses and waving floral bouquets.

They were wild scenes, the newspaper would report. Women everywhere, crowding the city.

A cacophony of squeals and shouts.

At least 30 had collapsed in the crush as the crowds surged forward towards Sydney’s Town Hall.

Earlier that day, away from the crowds, the Queen Mother had toured a housing project, meeting with some of the residents.

A little boy had been chosen to present her with a posy of flowers at the completion of the tour.

The boy, dressed in his best shirt and tie, had been selected from students at Wahroonga Blind School to perform this most important task.

Dennis Ferguson presenting a posy to the Queen Mother in 1958. Picture: Sydney Morning Herald

The little boy did have some sight. He was legally blind. But he kept his eyes down as he held a posy of flowers out to one of the most elegant women in the world.

No doubt the thousands of screaming women who’d argued and grappled with police as they pushed their way into George St would have given much to trade places with the boy who’d met the Queen Mother. Whose photograph graced the front page of the newspaper the next day, standing in front of royalty.

But that was 1958. In the coming years, that boy would grow to become one of the country’s most detested villains.

His name was Dennis Ferguson.

A man so hated that protesters followed his every move, throwing rocks at his home and shouting at him in the street.

Dennis Ferguson — a long time child sex offender — was serving time in Long Bail jail in the 1980s when he hatched a plan to kidnap the children of a fellow inmate.

After his release, Ferguson and his 23-year-old male lover went to stay with the children’s uncle.

The pair abducted the inmate’s six-year-old daughter and sons aged seven and eight and boarded a flight to Brisbane with them.

Police found them the following night.

They were at a motel in Ascot.

Ferguson was naked. The little girl was too, lying on a bed.

“I can help you,” Ferguson told police.

“Kiddy porn. I can get you kiddy porn.”

A judge sentenced him to 14 years in prison, remarking that Ferguson’s chances of rehabilitation were zero.

He was right. Aside from the offences Ferguson would later commit, Queensland prison guards were forced to keep a close eye on the notorious child sex offender during his time behind bars.

Ferguson, like other inmates, had access to newspapers every day. But it wasn’t current affairs that interested the former salesman.

Ferguson liked the Target catalogues.

He’d turn to the pages where children’s fashions were displayed and carefully cut out the ones that interested him.

Back in his cell, he used toothpaste to stick the pictures to the walls. A gallery of children used for his own perversion.

Guards were often tearing them from his walls.

Ferguson was released from prison in 2004.

Over the next eight years he was forced to repeatedly move, after the media and neighbours identified his new living arrangements.

In 2012 he was found dead in a Surry Hills unit in inner-Sydney. His body had lay undiscovered for several days.

Ferguson had been due to front court yet again after he’d been caught attempting to sign up to do volunteer work with children.

Originally published as Dennis Ferguson: Australia’s most hated man