John Errol Ferguson

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Family

American homicide; found guilty on 5/25/1978 of six murders and sentenced to death by execution. By 1990, he was still on death row with delays caused by appeals. A good-looking black guy, he was diagnosed as homicidal and dangerous by court psychiatrists in 1975 when he was acquitted of six robberies and two assault charges on a plea of insanity. He was given 18 months prison and two years probation and released in May 1977. That same month, he robbed, savagely beat and shot an elderly couple in a motel. On 7/27/1977, he forced his way into a private home posing as a repair man and with three accomplices, shooting eight people in the head execution style, six of whom died. It was a drug-related crime, the worst mass murder in the history of Miami. Ferguson was suspected of rapes on October 14 and October 30, 1977. On the later date, he shot two teenagers parked in a car and wounded, they drove off. He raped a woman on October 31. On 1/08/1978, he shot to death two teens in a parked car. He was arrested 4/05/1978 and taken to trial. John was the fourth to the oldest in a family of eight kids. He dropped out of school in the ninth grade after repeating three grades. His repeated problems with the law began after the death of his dad when the boy was 13. At 21, he tried to kill a police officer. On 10/30/1977 his teenage brother shot and killed a security guard at a Miami nightspot because the guard has asked him to prove his age with ID. On this same evening, according to police, John Ferguson shot two teenagers parked in a car when they refused to unlock the door. The youngsters drove off, wounded, but fortunately survived the attack. Two months later on 1/08/1978, police say that Ferguson shot and killed another young couple who were parked in a car. Friends and kin describe Ferguson as gentle as a lamb. A court-appointed psychiatrist diagnosed him in 1975 as "dangerous to himself and others, homicidal, and should not be released under any circumstances." He had been acquitted of six robberies and two assault charges on a plea of insanity and sent to the Florida mental hospital, from which he later escaped.