A SCOTS child killer has taken with him to the grave the secret of why he murdered a four-year-old boy.

James Reid, 73, is believed to have died of natural causes in Dumfries Prison, 14 years after he was found guilty of the hammer attack on James Ward at his home in Castlemilk, Glasgow.

Reid, whose killing provoked anger and revulsion, claimed throughout his trial that he did not commit the murder and did not know how James met his death.

James was being cared for by his grandmother when he disappeared virtually “in the blink of an eye” as he walked from his great grandmother Grace Boyle’s home to the home of her sister, who looked after him while his parents were working.

Chronic alcoholic Reid, who lived nearby, struck the youngster with so many blows to his head with a slater’s hammer that his skull was smashed into fragments.

But despite the overwhelming evidence against him, Reid refused to accept responsibility and shook his head at the guilty verdict following a four-day trial at the High Court in Glasgow in August 1997.

Even when questioned by police, Reid was indignant, saying he wasn’t responsible and that someone else must have gained access to his flat with a set of lost keys while he was walking his dog, to carry out the murder.

However, traces of the boy’s blood were found throughout his home in Ardencraig Quadrant, in his garden, and on his trousers. Even 59-year-old Reid’s spectacles were smeared with the boy’s blood. He claimed his two dogs had brushed the blood on to his clothing after they had become covered in it.

His defence QC, Donald Findlay, told the court: “This matter has been fully investigated from every conceivable angle and the accused’s position is, as he said before the trial and in the witness box, that he is innocent.

“There is one thing the jury will want answered and that is why a man of 59 with a blameless record should have committed such a crime as this.

“I regret that this is a question I cannot answer here today.”

Police said the horror of the crime may have made Reid forget the details.

The trial heard that when Mrs Boyle went to pick up the little boy she discovered he had never arrived at his great aunt’s, her sister Margaret Stewart.

The two women scouted the area calling his name and asking locals if they had seen him. They found James’s body in a back court just over the wall from Reid’s back garden.

As ambulance men tried in vain to revive the child, police followed a trail of blood over the garden wall and across Reid’s lawn to his back steps. Police had to use torches in the flat because there were no bulbs in some of the light fittings and Reid was found covered in blood.

He had been watching TV and the floor was strewn with empty sherry bottles and strong lager cans.

In his bedroom, where he had repeatedly struck the boy, they found a blood-soaked pillow. There was blood on the walls, blood on the bath, blood on damp clothing in the bath which he had tried to wash clean, and blood in the kitchen and on a hammer.

The jury heard a tape recording of him indignantly denying any knowledge of James or the killing.

Reid told Mr Findlay during cross-examination that he loved children, adding: “I would rather bring children into the world. I couldn’t take a life. I don’t believe in violence. I would walk away from it.”

One police officer said the only explanation of why he denied killing James was that he had either blanked out the memory or “made himself too horrified to admit what he did”.

Last night the Scottish Prison Service said that police had been notified of Reid’s death on Friday and a report has been sent to the procurator-fiscal.