by Chris Clark
Her body was callously dumped in McKee’s Dam as if it were a bag of rubbish being thrown at the side of the road. Black’s later, mainland-based victims would be disposed of in similar fashion and their bodies found in an equally undignified situation. To Black these little girls were not innocent children loved and cherished by many, they were not even considered as human beings but as objects of his depraved paedophiliac lust, to be discarded without any kind of dignity at all when he had finished his awful deeds, to the shock of the victims’ families and the general public – a callous message of defiance to the police.
This confidence, arrogance or defiance, call it what you will, displayed by Jennifer’s killer led to some uncomfortable questions being asked in August 1981. Had Jennifer’s killer killed before? Had he experience of abducting children? Such questions about the possible other crimes of Robert Black pre-August 1981 are still being asked today.
The difficult task of identifying Jennifer’s body fell to her father Andy at Craigavon Area Hospital where Jennifer’s body had been taken after the police had removed it from McKee’s Dam. A post-mortem revealed that Jennifer had died from drowning although police did not at the time reveal publicly how Jennifer had been killed. The further details of her post-mortem would provide evidence for the prosecution in its case against her killer.
Jennifer’s funeral took place on 21August 1981 and was attended by many from the local community and from afar, including the leader of the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) James Molineux, and the leader of the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) Ian Paisley. As the hundreds of mourners both Protestant and Catholic, many of whom had helped in the search, lined the road beside the Cardy household, an outdoor service took place in the garden, where Jennifer’s favourite hymns were sang. The minister thanked those who took part in the search in a cross-community effort. Pink carnations in the shape of a heart were wrapped around the small coffin of a much-loved little girl. Jennifer was buried in the Laa Lau graveyard in nearby Glenavy.
One of the speakers at Jennifer’s funeral was the Reverend William Beattie, who, following Robert Black’s conviction in October 2011, recalled to Northern Ireland’s BBC Newsline the sadness and grief felt by the Cardy family at the time.
‘They were devastated. They were showing signs of shock and devastation from the beginning, but when they heard what happened, that she had been found in water, in a dam face down, there were all sorts of concerns as to what happened.’
The police still had their hands full with events surrounding the hunger strikes at the Maze Prison and the public disorder each striker’s death brought to certain areas of Northern Ireland, but they did widen their search for the killer. As the murder hunt intensified, they initially suspected that the killer was a local man.
‘My view, because of where the body was, was the killer could have been local,’ said the retired RUC inspector Cyril Donnan in the Daily Mirror on 28 October 2011, explaining, ‘At the time I only lived three or four miles away from where she was found and I never knew a dam to be there. But at the time it was totally overgrown. There was no connection between Hillsborough and Aghalee.’
However, the fact that the nearby lay-by that adjoined the dam was known to be used by lorry drivers and van drivers made police revise that viewpoint. ‘There was a lay-by where lorries could have pulled up, and potentially if you were in a cab in a lorry or van you would have been able to see the dam,’ continued Cyril Donnan. ‘I thought she had been picked up in a vehicle of the size to take a bicycle.’
The police realised there was really no reason for anyone to be in these rural surroundings unless they lived locally or (as was to prove to be the case) they were delivery drivers.
The police began checking with companies in the area to see if any deliveries had recently been made; one of these was Hicklands Cycles (where two weeks before, Jennifer had gone with her father to pick up her new red bicycle), based on the Glenavy road towards the nearby city of Lisburn, but it led to nothing.
Ultimately, they were right that Jennifer’s killer was a delivery driver but he was not delivering bicycles but advertising posters – something that, over thirty years later, Robert Black would be confronted with in Armagh Crown Court.
While parents across Northern Ireland, as well as the police, were haunted by the thought that Jennifer’s killer could strike again – which tragically would prove to be the case – they could have been forgiven for never imagining a serial killer was at work. Child murder in Northern Ireland, and indeed on the whole island of Ireland, was a rare thing, and child murder committed by a stranger rarer yet. In mainland Great Britain, however, child murder was unfortunately a less rare occurrence, as former RUC inspector Cyril Donnan remarked in the Daily Mirror interview: ‘It never crossed your mind it was going to be a serial killer. That was something you read about in papers such as the Moors Murders in England, not in Northern Ireland.’
Detectives in the RUC and the local media did note the similarities between the abduction and murder of Jennifer Cardy and another similar crime, the disappearance of thirteen-year-old Genette Tate who had gone missing as she delivered newspapers in her home village of Aylesbeare in Devon almost three years previously. These similarities included the facts that both girls were travelling on bicycles near their homes in rural villages when they were abducted; that they were of a similar age and abducted during the hot summer month of August at a similar time of day, and that they lived in villages near motorways. At the time, though, there was nothing to establish a firm evidential link between the two cases. Detectives from East Devon hunting for missing Genette certainly noticed the similarities between the two cases and contacted the RUC at an early stage of the Jennifer Cardy investigation, yet whilst they did compare notes between the cases there remained no suspect in 1981 to tie the two cases together. That would all change and the similarities would take on a greater significance after Robert Black’s first murder convictions in 1994.
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Beginning in the early 1970s and into the 1980s, the United States of America had experienced a serial murder epidemic with a frightening number of sexually motivated serial killers striking fear into major American cities. The killers included such as Ted Bundy, who murdered at least thirty young women and girls, and possibly many more; John Wayne Gacy, who murdered thirty-three young men and boys; Richard Ramirez, the Los Angeles ‘Night Stalker’; and Jeffrey Dahmer, to name but a few who between them claimed possibly a hundred victims.
In 1981convicted and confirmed serial killers in the UK were comparatively rare. Earlier that year thirty-four-year-old Peter Sutcliffe had been arrested and subsequently confessed to being the notorious ‘Yorkshire Ripper’, the depraved killer who murdered thirteen women and almost killed another seven over a five-and-a-half-year period across the north of England. In 1976 Bradford man Donald Neilson was sentenced to life imprisonment for four murders, two attempted murders and the kidnapping of seventeen-year-old heiress Lesley Whittle, whose death was one of the murders he was convicted for. Neilson, whose crimes were all for financial gain, was named ‘The Black Panther’ for his speed as he committed his crimes and because he dressed entirely in black during his violent crime spree.
Serial child murder was deemed rare despite the infamous Moors Murders, which saw partners Ian Brady and Myra Hindley murder five children from the early to mid-1960s in and around the Greater Manchester area in a case that still makes the headlines today, over fifty years after their first killing. The murder of Jennifer Cardy gave nobody in 1981 any indication of the other young lives that would be snuffed out by the same man over the years that followed, or indeed the years that went before. We will perhaps never know what little girl became the first ever to have her life cruelly ended by his murderous actions. There is a good chance that when Jennifer Cardy and Black encountered each other on that quiet country road in Ballinderry Black was already an experienced child killer. We will explore this possibility at a later point.
By October 2011 and Black’s conviction for killing Jennifer Cardy, the number of confirmed and convicted serial killers in the United Kingdom had increased and Black’s name is now amongst the very worst of examples.
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On 19 August 1981 – the day after Jennifer’s body was found – the police staged an already planned reconstruction of Jennifer’s last movements in an effort to jog someone’s memory. The part of Jennifer was played by a twelve-year-old girl from the nearby village of Agahallon. As she cycled the route Jennifer had taken, wearing similar clothes to Jennifer’s and on Jennifer’s bicycle, the police blocked the roads and set up a large noticeboard asking local people, passing motorists, and those who watched the reconstruction on television, three important questions.
1. Were you in this area on Wednesday last?
2. Did you see a child like this?
3. Can you help?
Police then revealed to the media that they thought that it may have started raining that day shortly after 2 p.m., after Jennifer had set off to visit her friend. The onset of rain, they believed, may have meant Jennifer stopped beneath a tree on the side of the road where her bicycle was found thrown over the hedge to remove her cardigan from the carrier bag on the bicycle. It was as she was putting on the cardigan, the police believed, that Jennifer was abducted. The police ended by reiterating the warning to parents not to let their children out alone.
In the months following Jennifer’s murder, the investigating team, led by Detective Superintendent David McNeill, continued to appeal for information from the general public while they sifted through witness statements, possible suspects and persons of interest. While determined to catch the cruel killer of this young child, they would continue to be frustrated as days turned to weeks, weeks turned into months and months into years, in their efforts to find Jennifer’s abductor and killer; as the murderous conflict known as the Troubles continued to rage, police would find themselves stretched, yet the investigation remained open and they continued to do as much as they could.
In 1984 people’s hopes were raised when a man seemed to confess to the murder – but it later emerged that he suffered from mental health issues and had a history of confessing to crimes he had not committed.
In 1992, the investigation into the murder received a blow when a Provisional IRA bomb destroyed the forensic laboratories in Belfast. The laboratories contained the clothing that Jennifer was wearing the day she was abducted and murdered: not a shred survived the bomb blast. With the advancement of forensic science and forensic analysis in recent years and the important part it can play in solving cold cases, this is particularly galling as it means that no physical evidence can ever be recovered from Jennifer’s clothing.
In terms of child murder in Northern Ireland that of Jennifer Cardy stood alone as a horrific yet solitary case. Whilst there were other child murders in Northern Ireland, none bore any similarities to the Cardy killing; in the years prior to 1981, and in the years since, no other child has been abducted and murdered in Northern Ireland in an even remotely similar way. When put in context of the life and crimes of Robert Black after his conviction in October 2011 for Jennifer’s murder, however, it took on a familiar aspect of a depressing and deadly pattern of offending.
As the years passed, people continued to wonder who was responsible. Rumours and reports in the media by the mid-1990s began to focus attention on a possible suspect that the police were looking at in connection with Jennifer’s murder – a recently convicted serial killer of young girls on mainland UK. It was to take over fifteen years, however, before the suspect was confirmed and convicted in a court of law as the man responsible.
But who was this man who had struck fear into the hearts of Ulster folk in the summer of 1981? What other fear would this man strike into other hearts before he was finally caught?
Who was Robert Black?
2
WHO WAS ROBERT BLACK?
It was on Monday, 21 April 1947 that Jessie Hunter Black, an unmarried twenty-four-year-old factory worker, gave birth to her firstborn son at Falkirk’s Royal Infirmary. He was christened Robert. Jessie lived in the nearby Grangemouth Docks area and was the daughter of a railway worker.
Robert Black was never to know the identity of his biological father or come to know his natural birth mother, who refused to put the name of his father on the birth certificate. Having a child out of wedlock carried with it a certain social stigma back in the 1940s and for many years afterwards. As a low-paid factory worker and unmarried, Jessie felt she was in a poor position to raise an illegitimate child. During the weeks following Robert Black’s birth the possibility of adoption was explored but never acted upon. Instead, at six months old, Robert Black was fostered. For her part, Jessie was to emigrate to Australia, where she died in 1987. Within a year of Robert Black’s birth she married a local man, Francis Hall, with whom she went on to have four children – none were told about their half-brother.
Jack and Margaret – or ‘Betty’ as she was also known – Tulip were a couple in their mid-fifties who had experience of fostering children, having already fostered several other children. Jack was originally from England and Betty was Scottish, originally from Motherwell. They lived in the Highland village of Kinlochleven in Argyllshire, on the eastern edge of Loch Leven, not far from Glencoe, the site of an historic massacre in 1692.
The Tulips had experience of looking after badly behaved or difficult children and it was soon clear that the young Robert Black was to be no different. From an early age he displayed signs of both anti-social behaviour and an aggressive temper, particularly towards other young children.
When Black was aged five, his foster father died. Jack Tulip was the closest thing Robert Black ever had to a father figure, but Black had no clear memory of Jack Tulip despite the fact he was five when Jack died. As a criminologist, I have wondered whether Robert Black repressed this particular part of his early childhood due to the way he may have been treated physically by his foster father. Did the trauma of any possible physical abuse block out this part of his memory?
When he was old enough, Black started attending the primary school situated in Kinlochleven village. Whilst his foster mother did her best to keep the young Robert looking well-groomed and dressed, the other primary school children could be cruel in their jibes and taunted the young boy with ‘Smelly Robbie Tulip!’. While this could be put down generally to children being hurtful and insensitive to other children, it is interesting that such a description would follow Robert Black well into his adult and working life, where he was generally regarded by those that knew him either through work or social activities as having a body odour problem and being of generally rough and scruffy appearance and dress.
At primary school Robert Black quickly began to earn himself another reputation however – that of an aggressive bully. He was not afraid to use his fists on his fellow pupils and in the school playground had younger children hanging around him in your typical playground gang. He would often bully or beat up those children younger, smaller, or generally weaker than himself. Black even once dished out a ferocious beating to a disabled boy who had an artificial leg. The beating was unprovoked.
Punishment for this bullying and aggressive behaviour was usually carried out by Betty Tulip, who would lock Robert inside the house or pull down his trousers and underpants and slap his bottom with a belt. Although a local policeman by the name of Sandy Williams, quoted in Anna Gekoski’s 1998 book, Murder by Numbers: British Serial Sex Killers Since 1950, remembers Black as a ‘wild wee laddie’ who ‘didn’t give a damn – no respect for authority’ and ‘needed a smack round the ear to keep him in line’, the boy was perhaps rather more vulnerable than he seemed. At night he would sometimes have a recurring nightmare of a large hairy monster under his bed waiting to get him, sometimes this monstrous figure would be imagined to be in a cellar full of water. When awakened from this bad dream Black would find that he had wet the bed, an
d that meant another beating from his foster mother would follow.
As well as the anti-social and the aggressive nature of the character of the young Robert Black, he was worryingly beginning to display abnormal behaviour and attitudes towards sex. At the age of five he and a little girl who lived locally compared genitalia and whilst this can be looked upon as little more than childish experimentation of the doctors-and-nurses variety between two curious young children, Black soon began to display more abnormal signs of his sexuality. At the age of eight he was looking after a neighbour’s young baby, wheeling her around in her pushchair, and took the baby girl into his house. He told sex crimes expert Ray Wyre, who interviewed him following his arrest for child abduction in 1990, what followed: ‘I took her home … And I looked at her privates.’ (From The Murder of Childhood by Ray Wyre and Tim Tate, 1995.)
Around this time young Robert Black was sent to Highland dancing classes, but he seemed to be more interested in lying on the floor and looking up the skirts of his female class mates rather than learning traditional Scottish folk dance.
Also at about that age Black began to experiment with self-abuse. He would insert items into his anus in a crude and bizarre way to see how much he could fit in it. The first of these items, he recalled, was a small piece of metal. He also had a strange fantasy of defecating into his hands then rubbing the faeces into his body; however, he admitted he never acted this particular fantasy out. This early form of self-abuse and self-penetration and exploration would be best described as an obsession with the orifices of the human body. When police raided Black’s flat after his arrest in 1990 they found several crude Polaroid pictures that showed him inserting a variety of objects into his anus – these included a wine bottle, a telephone handset and the end of a table leg. Black also confessed to Ray Wyre that he liked to dress up in little girls’ clothing – in some of the photos he was dressed in a little girl’s swimsuit.