by Chris Clark
CONTENTS
Title Page
Foreword by Mark Cardy
Introduction and Background
Introduction by Chris Clark
PART ONE: TEARS BY THE LAY-BY
1. What Happened to Jennifer?
2. Who was Robert Black?
3. Heading South
4. The Midlands Triangle
5. The Midlands Murders
The Murder of Susan Maxwell
The Murder of Caroline Hogg
The Murder of Sarah Harper
6. A Lucky Escape
7. Stopped in Stow
8. The First Murder Trial
9. The Second Murder Trial
10. The Trial Continues
PART TWO: CYCLE OF OPPORTUNITY
(BY CHRIS CLARK)
11. Cold Cases
12. The April Fabb Case
13. Near Misses
An Alarming Encounter
The Jeanne Twigden Case
14. A Disappearance and Another Near Miss
The Christine Markham Case
Another Near Miss?
15. The Disappearance of Mary Boyle
16. Two More Disappearances
The Genette Tate Case
The Suzanne Lawrence Case
17 Across the Channel
The Silke Garben Case
The Virginie Delmas Case
The Hemma Davy-Greedharry Case
The Perrine Vigneron Case
The Sabine Dumont Case
The Ramona Herling Case
18. An Endless Lust for Killing
PART THREE: THE STORY NEVER REALLY ENDS
19. Secrets to the Grave
20. Filling in the Gaps
Plates
Copyright
FOREWORD
I have read two books about Robert Black and of those it has been over two decades since the last was published. He was convicted of my sister’s murder in 2011, since when a lot more about him has come to light.
Robert Giles met with me last year and let me know he was writing a new book about Robert Black, and had got together with Chris Clark to gather true information and investigate Black’s past and his travels.
I have read the chapter about Jennifer’s trial and it is very comprehensive and detailed. Some of the details even I had forgotten. I am really grateful that Robert and Chris have produced a book that is up to date.
I remember the trial very well, and remember that Robert Black’s face never changed expression and certainly never showed any remorse. I think the only time his expression altered was when the court read out some of the fantasies and sexual things he had done to himself. One thing that all of the people who were present at the trial remember is that when the verdict of ‘Guilty’ was read out, and he was unanimously found guilty on all counts, nobody in the courtroom cheered or punched their fists in the air. What they did notice was that everybody in the courtroom (including journalists) was in tears. The court clerk (of some thirty years’ standing) said it was the first time this was ever seen. Robert Black’s face was still expressionless.
Robert Black took our sister from us in 1981. Our family stayed together, and as my dad, Andy, said after the trial, ‘Robert Black stole the life of our daughter, Jennifer, but Robert Black didn’t steal the lives of me and my family – we’ve lived a happy, prosperous life, but we miss Jennifer each and every day.’
We stayed together with the help of God, and he was with us throughout the trial. We have no hatred for Robert Black and we prayed for him through and beyond the trial.
Our family waited over thirty years after Jennifer’s death – through all the years without her, the investigation, the trial – to see her killer convicted.
We got the information, the trial and closure, for which we are very grateful. I feel so sad for the families that never received that closure.
It wasn’t about bringing someone to justice, or punishment, or revenge. It was about closure. Finding out who did this, and why. We may not have got all the answers, but thank God that we got closure.
MARK CARDY (Jennifer Cardy’s older brother)
INTRODUCTION AND BACKGROUND
This book has not been an easy book to write. At times it will not be an easy book to read. The subject matter at its very heart – the murder of children – is an indescribably disturbing one. Any act of murder is horrific by its very nature, both the act of murder and its end result: the taking of a human life. A life ended in an unnatural way and a life ended too soon.
The murder of a child ranks at the very top of the list of murders that produce shock, anger and fear. The general public and the police share feelings of disgust and dread matched with a desire for justice and a determination that the perpetrator or perpetrators should be caught before they have the opportunity to take another child’s life. The depths of human depravity can sink no lower. Putting any child through such an ordeal spits in the face of all that is moral and right in our society. It is, simply put, an act of pure evil. It is a life wasted and an innocence lost. Left behind are the broken hearts of the parents, wider family circles, friends, the general public and the police forces that are with them every step of the way. The murder of a child always has been and always will be one of life’s unbearable tragedies; a tragedy that is the subject matter of this book.
The United Kingdom has sadly had its fair share of infamous child murderers and killers, too many to list all of them here. In 1948 Peter Griffiths, a twenty-two-year-old former Guardsman, abducted three-year-old June Devaney from a Blackburn Hospital. He raped and battered her to death. Griffiths went to the gallows following his conviction. John Straffen would later go on to become Britain’s longest-serving prisoner after he murdered three little girls in the 1950s. Raymond Morris from Walsall was convicted of the 1967 murder of little Christine Darby and sentenced to life; he died in prison in 2014, but remains the prime suspect in two other unsolved child sex murders that took place in and around the Birmingham and West Midlands areas during the mid-1960s. In 2001, Midlands-based farm labourer Brian Field, aged sixty-five by then, was convicted of the brutal 1968 abduction, rape and murder of fourteen-year-old Roy Tuthill, on his way home from school. Field had a history of serious sexual offences against children dating back many years. As with Morris, he remains a suspect in the disappearances and murder of other young boys in the West Midlands.
In the mid-1980s members of a vicious gang of paedophiles led by middle-aged fairground worker Sidney Cooke and operating out of a flat in Hackney, East London, were responsible for the cruel deaths of at least three young boys and, again, are feared to have been responsible for other deaths and disappearances.
Thankfully, most child killers are caught after their first murder of a child; examples of this include the aforementioned Peter Griffiths, Roy Whiting, who murdered eight-year-old schoolgirl Sarah Payne in Sussex in July 2000, and school caretaker Ian Huntley who murdered schoolgirls Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman at his home in the village of Soham, Cambridgeshire, in August 2002. Even though these men were caught after their first murderous attack, it is still one attack too many for the victims’ families.
There are cases, however, of child killers who have only been convicted of one child murder and yet are suspected, in some cases very strongly, of involvement in other unsolved child killings. Raymond Morris and Brian Field are examples of this and both have been investigated and questioned in relation to other serious criminal matters. If these suspicions and subsequent investigations and charges turn into convictions then we are dealing with an even more alarming and disturbing prospect: that of a serial child killer. Sadly, in most of these cases, when dealing with suspected repeat offenders, we are left w
ith more questions than answers.
I have already mentioned the gang of child killers led by Sidney Cooke, infamous. in the levels of depravity they exercised upon their young victims. But probably the best-known and infamous example of serial child murder in modern-day British criminal history is the case of the Moors Murders. Young couple Myra Hindley and Ian Brady collaborated on the paedophilia-driven murders of five youngsters of both sexes, aged between ten and seventeen, from July 1963 to October 1965 in the Greater Manchester area. They buried four of their five victims on Saddleworth Moor outside Manchester. The body of twelve-year-old Keith Bennett, abducted and murdered in June 1964, at the time of writing still remains unfound on the moors.
The Moors Murders case has been widely reported and written on since its discovery over forty-seven years ago. Numerous books have been published about the case, countless newspaper articles printed, and documentaries and television dramas made; and even though many of the main players in this dreadful story are now dead, including both perpetrators, it is a story that is unlikely ever to be forgotten.
At that time, in the 1960s, if children were told not to talk to strangers, they usually assumed them to be men. Paedophiles were largely imagined to be dirty, scary-looking old men hanging around outside schools, not young women like Myra Hindley. Her deep involvement as a young woman in this horrific case changed the perception of what could be a threat to our young.
This book, however, is not about Myra Hindley and Ian Brady. It is not about Raymond Morris, Sidney Cooke or any of the other evil child killers and their deeds mentioned above.
No, this is a story about a serial child killer whose life of crime I have been following, studying and researching for over fourteen years. A man whose criminal path may not be as well-known or followed by the British public and media as that of the Moors Murderers or Sidney Cooke’s gang but whose crimes are every bit as horrifying and nightmarish. A man who overtakes those other serial child killers in terms of the geographical mobility he was able to take advantage of while committing his crimes, crimes that spread throughout the four corners of the United Kingdom and were committed over a near ten-year period.
A man who in my opinion will overtake those other infamous serial killers of children, both in terms of number of victims and in terms of the many years he got away with abducting and killing little girls. The name of this man, this vicious serial killer of children, is Robert Black.
Robert Black was serving eleven life sentences for four of the most horrific cases of child murder to have ever been committed on the British Isles when he died from a heart attack on 12 January 2016. If the full truth of the past crimes and life this man led ever becomes known then I suspect he could be accounted the worst serial child killer and one of the worst serial killers the UK and Europe has ever had stalking its lands. It was this suspicion that set me on the road to writing this book.
In May 1994 Robert Black was convicted at Newcastle’s Moot Hall of the abduction and murder of eleven-year-old Susan Maxwell from Cornhill on Tweed in July 1982, five-year-old Caroline Hogg from Portobello in Edinburgh in July 1983 and ten-year-old Sarah Harper from Morley in Leeds in March 1986. He was also convicted of the attempted abduction of fifteen-year-old Teresa Thornhill in March 1988. He received ten life sentences. Black was an obsessive paedophile and all the attacks had a sexual motive.
For fourteen years from 1976 to the summer of 1990 when he was arrested and subsequently sentenced to life for the abduction and sexual assault of a six-year-old girl whom he abducted from the village of Stow in the Scottish borders, Robert Black was employed by the now defunct courier company, Poster, Despatch and Storage (PDS) as a long-distance delivery-van driver, delivering posters that were used for advertising purposes, mostly on giant billboard campaigns. It was while on these work trips up and down and all over the country in his van that he abducted and murdered his young victims, dumping their bodies in such undignified ways.
He travelled extensively throughout the British Isles and Europe with his job and following his May 1994 conviction, detectives from throughout Europe began to look at cold-case files they had in regard to missing and murdered children to see if any links could be made between these cases and the travels undertaken by Robert Black. The gaps in between the offences in which he had been convicted of were large and empty and, now knowing Black’s capabilities, and his history of travelling far and wide, police and criminologists alike were convinced there was a strong possibility of more victims.
One of the police forces that began to look at Black’s background and movements was the Northern Ireland police force, the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC), who had an unsolved murder case from 1981 that they felt might be connected to Black, particularly when they became aware that Black travelled to Ulster frequently, making deliveries in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
It was this unsolved murder and the possibility of Robert Black being responsible that got me interested in the case – the thought that a child could have been murdered in Northern Ireland, that in spite of the Troubles was one of the safest places to live in Europe in terms of non-politically motivated crime, both disturbed me and made me wonder if Black was responsible.
The murdered child was a little girl called Jennifer Cardy. Jennifer was nine years old when she was abducted on 12 August 1981 from the roadside around a mile from her home in the village of Lower Ballinderry, County Antrim. Her body was found ten miles away six days later in the local mill pond known as McKee’s Dam just outside Hillsborough.
As a child I had always been warned not to talk or go with strangers, and the Soham case and the case of the abduction and killing of little Sarah Payne in Sussex two years earlier in 2000, made me realise why I had been warned of the dangers.
The Soham murders really brought home to me, a young teenager at the time, the dangers that children could face in life, that there were bad people out there who had the potential to take children away from their loved ones and do them great harm.
In August 2002 during the search for the missing Soham schoolgirls Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman, I asked my mother if she remembered anything of this awfulness happening in Northern Ireland, where we lived, as was happening in England. She mentioned that the only case that stuck out in her memory was the murder of Jennifer Cardy and as she told me the basic details that she could remember about the case I listened horrified. As a young woman my mother was living in the County Armagh town of Lurgan at the time of Jennifer’s abduction – not that far away from where Jennifer lived in the village of Ballinderry. My mother had a younger sister who was about the same age as Jennifer and she remembers the police going around her estate with a megaphone and ‘Missing’ posters of Jennifer on the police cars and in the shops in Lurgan, appealing for any information. She also remembers the sadness and fear expressed by the community when Jennifer was found murdered six days later.
I then asked my mother if they had ever caught the killer. She told me that they had not but that suspicion was on a convicted child killer who had murdered little girls in England and Scotland and who was working as a van driver in Northern Ireland on the day that little Jennifer was snatched. Robert Black was first questioned by Northern Irish detectives over the murder of Jennifer Cardy in 1996, two years after he was convicted of three child murders in 1994.
That conversation with my mother was what led me to discovering and studying the crimes of Robert Black and the (at the time) unsolved murder of Jennifer Cardy.
Soon after Robert Black’s 2011 trial for the Cardy murder and his conviction I began a correspondence with a former Norfolk Police intelligence officer named Chris Clark who like myself was carrying out his own research and investigations into Black’s past. Like myself, he believes that Black was responsible for other unsolved crimes, including the attempted abduction of his now wife, Jeanne Clark (née Twigden) when she was a fifteen-year-old schoolgirl in the early summer of 1971 – of which more later.
This b
ook is the tragic story of what happened to Jennifer, the investigations involved in bringing her killer to justice, his eventual trial, and the possibility of him having claimed other victims. It will also explore the other serious crimes Robert Black has been convicted of and the life he led from his early childhood to his death.
His little victims, like all children who die young, were angels. This book is a tribute to them and their memory, to their loved ones, friends and families, who still miss them every day and who suffered such an unfair tragedy.
This book is dedicated to my family and friends, whose encouragement and support is much appreciated.
It is also dedicated to the memory of the late great American true-crime writer Ann Rule. She was the author behind the book that inspired me to become a true-crime writer, The Stranger Beside Me, based on the crimes of the serial killer Ted Bundy. I would have loved Ann to have read this book but sadly she died in 2015.
Finally, I would also like to give a special thanks to my co-author and good friend Chris Clark and his wife Jeanne. Their friendship, encouragement and enthusiasm for this project has been inspirational to me and will forever be appreciated. Chris is a detective not only of intelligence but of bravery and perseverance, and it is these qualities that have those responsible for murders still unsolved, up and down the country, sleeping less easily at night.
ROBERT GILES
May 2017
INTRODUCTION
BY CHRIS CLARK
It was round about 2009 when I was researching material for my forthcoming police-force autobiography that my wife Jeanne confided to me the detail of her attempted abduction during the spring of 1971. This led me down the various paths I have trodden since.
In August 2012 the Hackney Gazette in London, the local paper to where Robert Black resided from 1968 to1990, ran an article on Jeanne’s attempted abduction and appealed for information on Robert Black.