Axe murderer Thomas McCulloch makes fresh bid for early release

Axe murderer Thomas McCulloch has made another bid for early release just months after a previous bid was turned down.

McCulloch is currently in HMP Castle Huntly, an open prison near Aberdeen, after killing three people in 1976 at the Carstairs State Hospital and is now re-applying to the parole board to be let out early.

The application is the latest in a long line of bids for freedom, all of which have been refused as he is still deemed too dangerous.

Diagnosed as a psychopath, McCulloch was detained without limit of time in Carstairs in 1970, where he struck up a partnership with another patient, Robert Mone.

The 1976 escape bid saw McCulloch, along with Mone, kill a policeman, a nurse, and scaling a barbed-wire fence.

The pair were caught a short while later in Carlisle