Robert Black (serial killer)

• 1. Introduction

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  Robert Black, a Scottish van driver who delivered posters across Britain, was the quarry in a manhunt that its own commander called the biggest crime investigation in United Kingdom history. Detective Hector Clark told a jury in 1994: "I don't believe there has been a bigger crime investigation in the United Kingdom, ever." The paperwork supports him. When detectives finally had enough to charge Black, the dossier they had assembled was estimated to weigh 22 tonnes, and the inquiry was estimated to have cost £12 million.

  To people who knew him, Black was a conscientious employee, a proficient darts player and a quiet lodger whose only fault was poor hygiene. Yet he was eventually convicted of kidnapping and murdering four girls. How does a man travel the length of Britain for years without being caught? What finally brought him down after eight years of searching? And how does a jury reach a verdict of guilty when the scientists could not tie him to a single victim?

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• 2. Boy Number 28

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  On the 21st of April 1947, in Grangemouth, Stirlingshire, Jessie Hunter Black gave birth to a son whose father was never identified. She first planned to have the child adopted, then emigrated to Australia to escape the stigma of his birth. At six months old, the boy was placed with an experienced, middle-aged foster couple in Kinlochleven, Jack and Margaret Tulip. He used their surname until his foster mother died.

  Classmates called him "Smelly Bobby Tulip", because he cared little for his own hygiene despite his foster mother's insistence on cleanliness. He was known as an aggressive child with few friends, prone to tantrums and to vandalising school property. Other children bullied him, and he in turn bullied younger ones. Locals later remembered bruises on his face and limbs. Black said he could not recall where they came from, yet he freely admitted that his foster mother beat him for wetting the bed.

  By 1958 both of the Tulips had died, and he was placed with a second foster family in Kinlochleven. Soon afterwards he committed his first known sexual assault, dragging a young girl into a public lavatory. His foster mother reported the offence and insisted he be removed from her home.

  A mixed-sex children's home outside Falkirk came next, and then Red House Care Home in Musselburgh, a high-discipline, all-male institution where he was listed as Boy Number 28. A male staff member sexually abused him there for three years. Black attended Musselburgh Grammar School, took up football and swimming, and struck other students as taciturn.

  In 1963 he left Red House for a boys' home in Greenock and found work as a butcher's delivery boy. He later claimed that, on his rounds, he had fondled thirty to forty girls who were home alone. None of these incidents seem to have been reported.

  That summer evening in 1963, in a Greenock park, he lured a seven-year-old girl to a deserted air-raid shelter by promising to show her some kittens. He held her by the throat until she lost consciousness. He was arrested the next day and charged with lewd and libidinous behaviour. A psychiatrist judged the incident an isolated one, found no need for treatment, and Black was only admonished.

  Back in Grangemouth, he lodged with an elderly couple and worked for a builders' supply company. He dated one young woman from a local youth club for several months. Black said he proposed marriage and was devastated when she ended it, partly because of his unusual sexual demands. She was his only known girlfriend.

  In 1966 his landlords discovered that he had molested their nine-year-old granddaughter. They evicted him but did not call the police, wanting to spare the child more trauma. Back in Kinlochleven, he lodged with a married couple who had a six-year-old daughter. Within a year they told the police he had repeatedly molested her. He pleaded guilty to three counts of indecent assault and was sentenced to a year at Polmont Borstal.

  Black spoke openly about almost every part of his youth, including the abuse at Red House. About Polmont he would say only that he vowed never to be imprisoned again, which led to speculation that he was brutalised there. Six months after his release, in September 1968, he moved to London and took a bedsit close to King's Cross station.

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• 3. The Van Driver

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  The Three Crowns, a pub in Stoke Newington, was where Black became known as a proficient darts player. There he met Edward and Kathy Rayson, a Scottish couple, and in 1972 he moved into their attic on West Bank road in Stamford Hill. The Raysons found him a responsible if reclusive tenant, with poor hygiene the only cause for complaint. They suspected he looked at pornography but never imagined it involved children. He stayed with them until his arrest in July 1990.

  Between 1968 and 1970, Black lived on casual work. One job was as a lifeguard at a Hornsey swimming pool, where he was soon fired for fondling a young girl. No charges were brought. Through a contact he made at a King's Cross bookshop, he began collecting child pornography, first in magazines and photographs and later on video. A keen amateur photographer, he also secretly photographed girls, mostly aged between eight and twelve, at places such as swimming pools. He kept those pictures in locked suitcases alongside the rest of his collection.

  In the mid-1970s Black bought a white Fiat van so that he could drive for a living. In 1976 he won a permanent post as a van driver at Poster, Dispatch and Storage Ltd, a Hoxton firm whose fleet carried posters and billboard advertisements around the UK and Europe. The posters typically showed pop stars. His employers saw a conscientious worker who would take the long-distance runs that his married colleagues disliked.

  The job gave him a thorough knowledge of the British road network. Later, that knowledge let him take children in one part of the country and leave their bodies hundreds of miles away.

  He also worked to avoid being recognised. Black alternately grew a beard or went clean-shaven, and sometimes shaved his head completely. He owned over a dozen pairs of spectacles and wore a pair very unlike his usual ones when abducting children. Opaque black curtains covered the rear windows of his van.

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• 4. Three Girls

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  At 4:30 p.m. on the 30th of July 1982, eleven-year-old Susan Maxwell crossed the bridge over the River Tweed on her way home from tennis in Coldstream. She lived in Cornhill-on-Tweed, on the English side of the border. She was last seen alive on that bridge, and is believed to have been abducted minutes later.

  The search began the next day. At its peak, 300 officers worked on it full-time, with search dogs, and they combed every property in Cornhill and Coldstream and over 80 square miles of terrain. Several people had noticed a white van nearby, and one said a van had been parked in a field gateway off the A697. On the 12th of August a lorry driver found Susan's body under undergrowth. She had been bound, and a coroner's inquest concluded that she died shortly after being taken.

  Black's delivery schedule that day ran through Edinburgh and Dundee to Glasgow, where he made his last drop close to midnight. So Susan stayed in his van, alive or dead, for over 24 hours. On his way back to London he left her beside the A518 near Uttoxeter, 264 miles from where she was taken. One of his colleagues suspected Black and asked him about it. Black lied, and the colleague never told the police.

  Caroline Hogg was five years old, Black's youngest known victim. On the early evening of the 8th of July 1983 she was playing outside her home on Beach Lane in Portobello, an Edinburgh suburb. When she had not come back by 7:15 p.m., her family searched nearby streets. A boy told them he had seen her with a man on the promenade.

  The search that followed was the largest in Scottish history at that time, with 2,000 local volunteers and 50 members of the Royal Scots Fusiliers. Witnesses described an unkempt, balding, furtive-looking man in horn-rimmed glasses. Fourteen-year-old Jennifer Booth saw Caroline sitting beside him on a bench and heard her answer "Yes please" to a question. The man then paid 15 pence for a carousel ride at the fairground. By about 7:30 p.m., a witness said, Caroline looked frightened.

  Black made a delivery in Glasgow several hours afterwards and refuelled in Carlisle early the next morning. On the 18th of July, Caroline's body was found in a ditch near the M1 at Twycross, 310 miles away and only 24 miles from where Susan Maxwell had been left. Caroline's father appealed on national television the following March: "You think it can never happen to you, but it has proven time and time again that it can, and it could again if this man isn't caught in the near future."

  Sarah Jayne Harper, ten years old, left her home in Morley, a suburb of Leeds, at about 7:50 p.m. on the 26th of March 1986. She was sent to buy a loaf of bread from a corner shop 100 yards away. The shopkeeper sold her a Warburtons loaf and two packets of crisps, and gave her 20 pence for two returned lemonade bottles. A balding, overweight man had stepped into the shop just after her.

  Over 100 officers searched, covering more than 3,000 properties, handing out over 10,000 leaflets and taking 1,400 witness statements. At a press conference on the 3rd of April, her mother, Jackie, said: "I just want her back, even if she's dead. If someone would just pick up the phone and tell us where the body is." On the 19th of April a man found Sarah in the River Trent near Nottingham, 71 miles away. She had drowned, after injuries to her head had probably left her unconscious.

  The three bodies lay within roughly 25 miles of one another, and the area became known as the "Midlands triangle". Yet Sarah's case was not formally linked to the other two until November 1986.

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• 5. The Manhunt

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  The card index for the Maxwell case alone held 500,000 cards. Hector Clark, then assistant chief constable of Northumbria Police, took overall charge after Caroline Hogg's body was found. Senior Staffordshire and Leicestershire detectives had already concluded, mainly from the distances involved, that one man had killed both girls. They reasoned that he drove a lorry or a van or was a sales representative, travelling between Scotland and the Midlands. Both girls were abducted on a Friday, which suggested a delivery or production schedule. Both also wore white ankle socks, which might have appealed to the killer. Transport firms linking Scotland and the Midlands were contacted, and their drivers were asked where they had been. It produced nothing.

  Clark remembered the criticism of the Yorkshire Ripper inquiry, which had drowned in a card filing system. So he chose a computer database that every force could consult. By January 1987 the information on the murders then linked to Black was in the new HOLMES system, and the Home Office paid the £250,000 cost. Based at the Child Murder Bureau in Bradford, it grew to hold details on over 189,000 people and 220,000 vehicles, plus interviews with over 60,000 people. Much of it came from three confidential hotlines set up in 1984. Several unrelated crimes were solved along the way.

  After Sarah Harper's murder, six forces were involved. Clark, by then Deputy Chief Constable of Lothian and Borders Police, kept command and created a headquarters in Wakefield. On the 21st of April 1986, Phillip Corbett of the Metropolitan Police's Criminal Intelligence Branch hosted a meeting at Scotland Yard. Senior officers from 16 forces discussed twenty unsolved child murders and abductions, dating back to the disappearance of Genette Tate in 1978. The inquiry had by then cost more than a million pounds.

  The meeting also led police to ask the FBI for a psychological profile. It arrived in January 1988. It described a white man aged between 30 and 40, probably nearer 40, who was a classic loner. He would be unkempt, would have had less than 12 years of schooling, and would probably rent a home alone in a lower-middle-class area. The FBI judged that the motive was sexual and that he would be fixated on child pornography and would keep souvenirs.

  There was one fatal flaw in how the database was fed. To keep the numbers manageable, police decided to check only men convicted of serious sexual offences against children within ten years of Susan Maxwell's murder. That shortlist came to 40,000 men. Black's only conviction dated from 1967, so his name was never on it.

  On the afternoon of the 24th of April 1988, Teresa Thornhill, a slightly built fifteen-year-old, walked home through the Radford district of Nottingham with her friend Andrew Beeston. A blue Transit van slowed ahead of her, and the driver raised the bonnet and asked, "Can you fix engines?" When she said no and walked faster, he grabbed her from behind and tried to carry her to the van. Teresa fought him, bit his forearm and screamed for her mother. Beeston ran at the van, shouting at the man to let her go, and the man released her and drove off.

  Both teenagers described an unkempt, overweight, balding man between 40 and 50. Nottinghamshire Police did not connect the attack to the child killings, so it never reached the national inquiry. The next time that blue van drew attention would be on the 14th of July 1990, in the Scottish Borders.

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• 6. A Lawn in Stow

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  David Herkes, a 53-year-old retired postmaster, was mowing his front lawn in the village of Stow on the 14th of July 1990 when a blue Transit van pulled up across the road. The driver got out, apparently to clean his windscreen, just as the six-year-old daughter of Herkes's neighbour walked past. Herkes bent to clear grass cuttings from his mower. When he looked up, he saw the girl's feet leaving the pavement and the driver pushing something through the passenger door. Herkes memorised the registration number as the van sped off, then ran to the girl's home, where her mother called the police.

  Six police vehicles reached the village within minutes. While Herkes described the van to the officers, it came back down the road, and he cried out: "That's him! That's the same van!" An officer jumped into its path and forced it to stop. Another officer, who happened to be the girl's father, opened the back and found his daughter inside a sleeping bag with her hands and legs tied. Her mouth was taped and a hood was tied over her head.

  On the way to Selkirk police station, Black said: "It was a rush of blood to the head; I have always liked little girls since I was a lad." He had meant to make a final delivery in Galashiels, and then to abuse the girl further and almost certainly kill her. A doctor found that she had been seriously assaulted.

  Searching the van, police found ropes, sticking plaster and hoods, a Polaroid camera, many articles of girls' clothing and a mattress. The Metropolitan Police searched his Stamford Hill lodgings and found child pornography, including 58 videos and films. They also found children's clothing, six pairs of spectacles and a newspaper report of the attack on Teresa Thornhill, which he had kept.

  On the 10th of August 1990, Black stood trial at Edinburgh High Court before Lord Ross. The hearing lasted a single day. Black's lawyer, Herbert Kerrigan QC, said at the outset that his client would plead guilty. The Lord Advocate, Lord Fraser of Carmyllie, said the girl would likely have suffocated within 15 minutes had she not been found. The girl's statement said she "didn't know Black was a bad man". Ross sentenced Black to life imprisonment, calling it "a horrific, appalling case", and he praised David Herkes for his vigilance.

  On the 16th of July, two days after the arrest, Clark had travelled to Edinburgh's St Leonards police station to question Black. The answers were mostly single words, but Clark came away convinced. Two weeks after the Stow trial, Clark sent Andrew Watt and Roger Orr to carry out a recorded six-hour interview. They were told not to be judgemental. Black spoke freely about his early sexual experiences and admitted to assaulting more than 30 young girls between the 1960s and 1980s. He also said that, in late 1985, he had enticed two girls into his van in Carlisle and let them go only when eyewitnesses appeared.

  The detectives then steered towards Caroline Hogg. They told him they knew he had been in Portobello that day, and they hinted at eyewitnesses and petrol-station receipts. Orr laid the composite drawing of the man at the funfair beside photographs of Black from the early 1980s. His answers turned evasive and one-word. Asked at the end to confess, to end the suffering of the victims' families, he did not respond. Afterwards Clark told his colleagues: "That's our man. I'd bet my life on it."

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• 7. Petrol Receipts on Trial

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  Seven million credit card slips on microfiche became the backbone of the case. Black's firm held accounts with several oil companies, and the companies agreed to hand over their records of fuel bought on those accounts between 1982 and 1986. A team in a reopened incident room in Newcastle upon Tyne searched the slips for his distinctive signature. Beginning in October 1990, they found him buying petrol close to each abduction site, shortly before or after each child was taken.

  The firm's own archives backed this up. Staff confirmed that Black always paid for petrol by credit card and then submitted the receipts to claim expenses. Old delivery schedules showed his runs to the relevant areas. On the day Sarah Harper vanished, his last two deliveries were in Brighouse and then Morley, at a business 150 yards from her home. He had refuelled between the two shortly before she was last seen. Investigators also learned that on trips back from the north he often slept at a house in Donisthorpe, Leicestershire, belonging to his landlord's son. It stood near where all three bodies were found. On his Morley runs, he often slept in his van at the premises he delivered to.

  By December 1990 the team believed it had enough circumstantial evidence, though Clark was troubled that no forensic evidence tied Black to the murders. The file went to the Crown Prosecution Service in May 1991. In March 1992 its lawyers decided to try Black for the three murders and the attempted abduction of Teresa Thornhill. Clark announced it to the press on the 11th of March.

  In January 1994, Judge William Macpherson refused to let the defence split the charges into separate trials. He allowed the prosecution to argue that the cases shared similar features, and to use the Stow conviction. He ruled out the transcript of the 1990 interview with Watt and Orr. The trial opened on the 13th of April 1994 at the Moot Hall, Newcastle upon Tyne, where Black pleaded not guilty to all ten charges.

  Prosecutor John Milford QC called it "every parent's nightmare" and spoke for five hours. Relatives of the three girls wept openly as the evidence was read. Black rarely showed any interest and generally kept an expressionless face. Defence counsel Ronald Thwaites cross-examined hard, pointing to a mismatch between the times in a delivery record book and the petrol receipts. It proved to be an administrative error.

  Forensic scientist James Fraser had examined more than 300 items from Black's van and lodgings. He conceded that in over 1,800 microscopic comparisons, no link had been found between Black and the three victims. Fraser explained that the long gap before the arrest, and the fact that Black had bought that particular van only in 1986, made such a link unlikely. When Clark testified, he confirmed that Black's name had never entered the HOLMES database, because his conviction predated the cutoff used for it.

  Thwaites told the jury that after eight fruitless years the police had grabbed a convenient scapegoat to relieve their "frustration and failure". He did not put Black in the witness box. Defence witnesses reported seeing other suspects and vehicles. One of them, Thomas Ball, said he saw a girl who matched Susan Maxwell's description hit a maroon Triumph with a tennis racket. In his closing speech Thwaites asked: "Where is the jury that will acquit a pervert of multiple murder?" Milford replied that if Black's presence at every site were chance, it would be "the coincidence to end all coincidences".

  Judge Macpherson told the jurors to put aside their disgust, and to decide whether the "interlocking similarities" between the cases proved guilt. They deliberated for two days. On the 19th of May 1994 they convicted Black of three kidnappings, three murders, three counts of preventing the lawful burial of a body, and the attempted abduction of Teresa Thornhill. He received life sentences, with a recommended minimum of 35 years for each murder. Macpherson spoke of "offences which are unlikely ever to be forgotten".

  Leaving the dock, Black turned to the detectives and said: "Tremendous. Well done, boys." Several of them wept. Outside the Moot Hall, Clark said: "Black is a man of the most evil kind, but no longer important to me. I care not about him."

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• 8. Silence and Suspects

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  At 1:40 p.m. on the 12th of August 1981, nine-year-old Jennifer Cardy was last seen by her mother, cycling to a friend's house in Ballinderry, County Antrim. She never arrived. Her bicycle turned up hours later, less than a mile from home, covered with branches and leaves, its stand down, as if she had stopped to talk to someone. Two hundred volunteers searched. Six days later two anglers found her body in a reservoir at Hillsborough, 16 miles away. Her watch had stopped at 5:40 p.m. She is the first murder Black is proven to have committed.

  For thirty years he was never charged with it. He was summoned to Armagh Crown Court in December 2009 and the trial opened on the 22nd of September 2011 before Judge Ronald Weatherup. Black pleaded not guilty, though he accepted he might have been in Northern Ireland that day. Investigators had searched 560,000 petrol receipts in his former employer's archives. Prosecutor Toby Hedworth said that finding his signature on them was as good as Black signing his own confession.

  A salary ledger showed Black was paid £50, a sum given only to drivers who delivered to Northern Ireland. He was one of only two drivers at the firm willing to go there, because of the Troubles. An order book recorded a billboard delivery due near Ballinderry that day. Records showed he caught an overnight ferry to Liverpool that night, then refuelled in Coventry. Defence counsel David Spens suggested the Coventry receipt meant only that Black had delivered there, but a colleague said the firm made no Coventry deliveries in the early 1980s. Pathologist Nathaniel Cary described the deaths of Cardy and Sarah Harper as "remarkably similar".

  On the 27th of October 2011, after a six-week trial and four hours of deliberation, the jury found him guilty. On the 8th of December, Weatherup set a minimum term of 25 years, telling Black he would be at least 89 before release could be considered. Spens, who said he had no mitigation to offer, spoke no plea for mercy.

  Black appealed his 1994 convictions, arguing that the Stow evidence had made the trial unfair. On the 20th of February 1995 Lord Taylor refused leave to appeal at the end of the first day of a hearing expected to last three. In July 1995, two fellow prisoners at Wakefield attacked him with boiling water mixed with sugar, a table leg and an improvised knife. His wounds were superficial and the attackers were jailed for three more years.

  Black never admitted any of the murders. Ray Wyre, a pioneer in treating sex offenders who interviewed him between 1990 and 1993, said that it was about control: "Having information about what he's done gives him power." The nearest Black came to a confession was before his 1994 trial. When Wyre asked why he had never denied the charges, Black replied: "Because I couldn't."

  Black died of a heart attack at HMP Maghaberry on the 12th of January 2016, aged 68. Nobody from his family or among his friends attended his cremation at Roselawn Crematorium, outside Belfast, on the 29th of January. The Presbyterian chaplain, the Reverend Rodney Cameron, read from Psalm 90. His ashes were scattered at sea in February 2016.

  Senior detectives believed the true number of his victims was at least eight. In 2008 the Crown Prosecution Service said it had insufficient evidence to charge him with further murders. He has been linked to at least fourteen other child murders and disappearances in the UK, Ireland, France, Germany and the Netherlands, between 1969 and 1989. They include April Fabb, thirteen, who vanished while cycling in Norfolk on the 8th of April 1969, and Christine Markham, nine, last seen walking to school in Scunthorpe in 1973.

  Genette Tate, thirteen, was abducted while delivering newspapers in Aylesbeare, Devon, on the 19th of August 1978. Her bicycle was found in a country lane. Her body has never been found. Black made numerous poster deliveries to the south-west of England in 1978, and by 2016 he was regarded as the prime suspect. When he died, Devon and Cornwall Police were preparing a fresh file for the Crown Prosecution Service, seeking abduction and murder charges.

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