The Face of Evil

by Chris Clark

  4

  THE MIDLANDS TRIANGLE

  During his brief period of unemployment in 1976, Black must have found he had time to indulge in and enlarge his collection of child pornography, which he would continue to build up for the next fourteen years. Following his arrest in 1990, police searched his attic flat at Stamford Hill and discovered over a hundred child pornographic magazines and almost a dozen child pornographic films inside a blue suitcase. Black, in taped conversations with Ray Wyre later in prison, explained that he used to purchase the porn from a shop in the King’s Cross area that sold ordinary books as a front but had an ‘adult’ section at the back of the premises. Initially, Black bought adult pornography, and then a chance enquiry about teenage sex magazines was met with material featuring children. Black claimed to Ray Wyre to have been embarrassed, taking the material and making a quick exit, but there can be no doubt that he had found a source of such obscene and depraved material and probably revisited the shop on several more occasions. He also disclosed that he obtained child pornography while on trips to Amsterdam and Copenhagen.

  Black’s spell of unemployment was a short one as he soon found a job that would provide him with a steady income and employment for the next fourteen years. As well as providing him with these, the natural requirements of any worker, this job would also unwittingly facilitate his unnatural needs.

  Poster, Despatch and Storage, or PDS as it was generally called, was a company based in Goodwin Street, Hoxton, East London. Formed in the 1950s but now defunct, the company’s business was sending out vans to deliver posters used in billboard campaigns at over a hundred locations around the United Kingdom and occasionally in Europe. The drivers would use a variety of different vans, often depending on the route they were taking and the load they were carrying. For Black, who had dishonestly gained driving experience working in the 1960s in Scotland delivering newspapers without a driving licence, it seemed a good choice of employment. There is evidence that he had access to several vehicles in London – indeed, he was arrested for an offence involving cars in 1972 (see p. 310) – and there is even a suggestion that by this time he had obtained a white Transit van for his own personal use and had already started working delivery jobs on an occasional basis. Full-time work in this field seemed a logical next step. He had no partner or family to spend time with and for a young man with no ties a job with long hours travelling away from home did not present a problem. One problem however was his lack of a driving licence – he needed one, and soon, in order to get the job of courier with PDS. His years of driving experience served him well, though, and he seems to have passed his driving test with no hitch. Once he had his full driving licence he became a PDS employee.

  PDS directed its drivers to make deliveries and stops at a variety of different runs and routes up and down and across the United Kingdom. Robert Black would at one point or another work all of them. The five main runs were:

  The South Coast Run. This was one of the longer delivery routes for the PDS drivers and could involve runs or deliveries from London on to Gloucester, then Cardiff and Swansea or, after Gloucester, on to Bristol, then Taunton, Exeter, Plymouth, or then on to Southampton, Portsmouth, Eastbourne, and then on to Hounslow in London. In August 1978 a thirteen-year-old girl called Genette Tate would disappear from an area within the points of this particular delivery route.

  The Scottish/Northern Run. This delivery run was also long in terms of distance and time, and was not favoured by many of the PDS drivers, especially those with wives and families, and usually because it was a weekend run. It took in stops from London to the southern towns of Luton and Northampton, then went on to the Midlands cities such as Coventry and Nottingham, on to Yorkshire cities like Sheffield and Hull, then through the Border areas of Scotland and on to the cities of Edinburgh, Dundee and Glasgow. The return leg of this route would follow the west coast of England via the M1 motorway. Black was willing to do this route the majority of times, usually having nothing to do over weekends. On this route over a four-year period in the 1980s three young girls would disappear and later be found murdered, their bodies dumped in a triangular area of the East Midlands.

  The East Coast Run. This was a shorter route for the PDS drivers in terms of the number of drop-off points and the shorter distances and times undertaken to complete the journey; it therefore offered smaller bonuses. The stops on this route took the driver from London to Northampton, on to Norwich, as far as Lowestoft, then back south through Ipswich and past Chelmsford and back to the capital.

  The Midlands Run. This included stops in the West Midlands cities of Birmingham and Coventry before sometimes going further into the north-west to Liverpool and Manchester, before returning south via Peterborough and Northampton. Interestingly, the Midlands run also included, when required, a trip to Northern Ireland, where PDS drivers would mostly make deliveries in and around Belfast and then go on to the County Down city of Newry and sometimes as far west as the town of Enniskillen and the County Fermanagh border. It was whilst making this work trip that, on 12 August 1981, Black would abduct Jennifer Cardy from the village of Ballinderry, not far from the main motorway linking the cities of Belfast and Newry, and murder her.

  The European Run. There was also the occasional work trip into the central part of the continent, and Black would make deliveries for PDS in parts of northern France and to Germany during the mid and late 1980s. A number of murders of little girls would occur in those areas, during these periods …

  To his work colleagues Black was someone whom they could never get really close to and from the comments after his arrest had no real desire to as his body odour problem followed him into further adulthood and his new long-term employers and fellow workers would often complain to each other about his smell and personal hygiene. They obviously had no idea how dangerous and cold a man Black was and the monstrous crimes he would go on to commit while working for the company, but they did have their suspicions that Black was a pervert and that he had a liking for younger girls. On one occasion a young woman in her late teens or early twenties passed by where the drivers were gathered in the company’s yard, and, as many men can do, they remarked on how pretty this young woman was. One driver, however, then turned to Black and commented that she was too old for him. These are words that Black would have not taken well as he would have been desperate to keep his paedophilia a secret. One incident in particular may have led to the remark and to the suspicion amongst his colleagues that Black was perverted. One Christmas Day he was invited to a work colleague’s house to spend the day with him and his family. During his stay Black was playing with his workmate’s children but whilst many adults love children and play innocently with them, Black’s type of play was viewed as anything but innocent by the children’s father. When later asked by another PDS employee how he got on with Black on Christmas Day, the father replied that whilst ‘playing’ with his children Black would repeatedly put his hand on his daughter’s genital area during what he was obviously trying to portray as innocent horseplay. To the father, it certainly was not innocent, and Black, he said, would never again be welcome in his home. No repeat invitation was forthcoming.

  Despite these later suspicions and worries about Black’s character to many at the company he was generally viewed as a hard-working driver who never complained when asked to do any of the less desirable trips and who was willing to help out other drivers who couldn’t make particular routes on any given day for a particular reason. Many workplaces in all fields have workers who although maybe not personally popular are popular in their work ethic and reliability for helping out their employers in certain areas. Robert Black could be considered one such person. He was a fast and sometimes reckless driver and would often cost the company a lot of money in insurance claims, due to a number of road traffic accidents and scrapes throughout the years, which eventually resulted in his dismissal in 1986. The company was bought out in 1987 by two employees and Black was re-hired with the provis
o that he bought his own vehicle and insured it himself, with PDS merely supplying him with the posters and instructions on where to deliver them. Black readily accepted this new arrangement and by 1989 he was a freelance delivery driver and thus became self-employed.

  Because the early-morning traffic in London was often nightmarish in its busy and time-consuming flow, the company introduced the practice of having their drivers leaving the yard at night, thus beating the early-morning traffic not only in London but also on the motorways up and down the country, which saved time and improved efficiency. It also meant that Black and the other drivers were issued with a set of keys so that they could leave the posters at the required location should the delivery take place out of hours. The drivers would have to sign a document, a delivery log or book, giving their name, detailing the precise time of delivery and what they had delivered. This practice would help bring about Black’s eventual arrest, when the police began investigating him in connection with a number of child murders as it would prove when and where he was when making certain deliveries.

  Another procedure that would later provide the police with irrefutable documented evidence in building a case against Black was to be the petrol agency cards PDS issued each driver with when they set off on a work journey. These cards would be used to pay for fuel for the work vans and also served to record the time, date and location the cards had been used.

  Robert Black would drive a number of vans for PDS during his employment with them, from 1976 when he began working for the company. These included:

  Mercedes vans (1976)

  VW LT vans (1976)

  Fiat Dailys (1980s)

  Ford Transits (1980s to 1989)

  Nissan/Datsun (usually used for the smaller runs and the Northern Ireland trip)

  These vans would vary in colour but were usually white or a dark/navy shade of blue. Some of the Transits might also have been fire-engine red.

  To Black his van would eventually become a lot more than just his work vehicle – his workmates, if he gave them a lift, for example, would complain and wonder about the smell and the rubbish strewn inside with the mattress in the back after he had used it for a delivery run. It would become his home away from home, the centre of his secret depraved world and an important part of his offending pattern. The dark, stinking and frightening back of his van was his secret lair, the physical manifestation of the fantasy world in which Black was the king. It was in his van that his deviant thoughts become a reality. The van not only transported him and his load of posters for work purposes, but transported him in thought and action away from the normal world he had been living in with the Raysons at his attic home in North London. The quiet man who chatted pleasantly over a pint in the pub, or played darts, the hard-working van driver for whom no trip was too small or too long and who helped his fellow drivers out from time to time, as he stepped into his van, stepped, too, into the secret world in which he would abduct, abuse and kill children. Previous to this the only type of regular paedophiliac indulgence he had was in the privacy of his attic flat where he would view his child-pornography films and leaf through his child-pornography magazines. Additionally, his van was important in that it enabled him to carry out attacks on children well away from his home territory or base, which is one reason why there was never any question that Black had attacked or interfered with any of the Rayson children. As was commented after his first murder convictions in 1994 he likely did not wish to mess on his own doorstep, and after having had to flee across Scotland for doing just that, he had no ambition to once again be on the move looking for a new home or, worse, face prison. The job of delivery driver unwittingly gave him the opportunity to explore the length and breadth of the United Kingdom, abducting and killing a number of young girls before returning home to North London as if nothing had happened, slipping back into the normal reality of the world he had cultivated around him. Just an ordinary bloke who enjoyed a pint of shandy and playing darts in pubs and listening to country music when not working hard travelling such long distances.

  The geographical mobility his job gave him would provide a cover for Black to carry out his crimes, making him the very dangerous ‘travelling offender’ type. A travelling offender is much more difficult to pinpoint and track down than the offender who carries out his crimes within the community in which he lives. By the 1980s police were just beginning to understand this dangerous type of offender, particularly the ones that used their job and the geographical mobility that came with it as a tool or weapon to help them commit and conceal their crimes.

  THE MIDLANDS MURDERS

  THE MURDER OF SUSAN MAXWELL

  The village of Cornhill-on-Tweed in the county of Northumberland lies just on the English side of the border with Scotland. A beautiful rural civil parish with fields and farming families within it, a proud community not dissimilar to that of Ballinderry in County Antrim. The vast River Tweed runs through the village and the nearest significant-sized town is Berwick-upon-Tweed, over a dozen miles away. A mile to the east lies the smaller town of Coldstream.

  Eleven-year-old Susan Maxwell was enjoying her summer holidays when she went missing. The daughter of journalist Elizabeth Maxwell and journalist-farmer Fordyce, Susan Claire Maxwell lived on Cramond Hill Farm in Cornhill-on-Tweed with her parents, sister Jacqueline and brother Tom. On the early afternoon of Friday, 30 July Susan arranged to meet up with her friend Alison Raeburn who lived just over the border with Scotland, in nearby Coldstream. It was a lovely hot day and the two school friends agreed to meet in Coldstream for a game of tennis at the tennis club Susan had joined the previous week. Susan had originally planned to cycle into Coldstream but her mother thought it was not a good idea so she decided to walk into the town; in the end she did not have to, however, as one of the workers on the farm gave her a lift. Susan arrived early in Coldstream and went to the local post office in the Tweed Garage to buy some stamps before meeting her friend. Susan and Alison played tennis for an hour with Susan emerging the victor, winning the set six games to five. The two girls left the tennis club together to walk home, and parted at Lennell Mount in Coldstream, a short walk from the River Tweed, agreeing to see each other at a carnival in Coldstream the next week. Susan, who was wearing a bright yellow T-shirt with a palm tree motif on the front, a pair of yellow shorts and white ankle socks, walked on towards Cramond Hill Farm. As she approached the Coldstream Bridge over the Tweed she would have had no idea of the imminent danger she would face. It was about 4.15 p.m. As she came to the bridge, she was spotted by a van driver passing her on the opposite side of the road heading in the direction of Coldstream town centre. Susan began to walk over the bridge while the driver, who had already turned his vehicle round, was now driving, in a southerly direction, back the way he had come, again passing Susan, only this time on the same side of the road as her. Black passed Susan and made his way over the bridge and soon came across an empty entrance to a field just off the road. There was no gate at the entrance and he was able to reverse his van into it where the vehicle would not have been visible to anyone until they actually came upon and passed the field’s entrance. Black knew it was the perfect place to park his van and he knew this was another opportunity to abduct another child. Knowing that Susan was walking across the bridge and would be imminently walking past his van, Black waited for a minute and then exited his vehicle as the child approached. Susan was then, in a matter of seconds, abducted.

  Liz Maxwell, meanwhile, thinking her daughter might be rather tired to walk home after playing tennis in the summer heat, decided to put Susan’s younger siblings in the car and go surprise her by meeting and giving her a lift home. But when she arrived at the tennis club the place was empty and locked up. Considering it strange that she hadn’t seen Susan on her way into Coldstream and that the child wasn’t at the tennis courts either, she returned to Cramond Hill Farm and telephoned Alison Raeburn, who told her that she had last seen Susan on the outskirts of Coldstream, walking in the di
rection of her home. Panicked and worried, the Maxwells quickly phoned 999 and told the police their daughter was missing.

  Local police based both at Cornhill-on-Tweed under the Northumbria force, and at Coldstream under the branch of Lothian and Borders Police immediately began searching the general area where Susan was last seen, which was just over the Coldstream Bridge; they made house-to-house enquiries, and urgently traced and contacted possible witnesses who might have seen Susan, such as motorists who could have passed her on the road, in the hope they had seen anything of relevance. The Maxwell family were positive that Susan would not have readily accepted a lift from a stranger. Detectives working on the case almost immediately began to fear the worst – that Susan Maxwell had been abducted.

  The police were quickly able to establish that there had been a number of witnesses who had seen Susan walking home that afternoon carrying her tennis racket, walking towards, and then across, Coldstream Bridge. A number of motorists had seen her walking along the bridge, which is on the main road linking the northern English city of Newcastle to Coldstream, containing the actual border line between England and Scotland; just past the bridge is a small white monument that displays the red cross of St George, marking the entrance into England from Scotland. As it was a busy road full of drivers on holiday or business trips as well as drivers who lived locally, it was not surprising that there were a number of sightings of Susan as she made her way across the bridge, but there was a small gap between the last sighting made by a motorist (a Yorkshire businessman) of the child making her way over the bridge and, two minutes later, when another motorist passed. The second motorist had seen no sign of Susan, which indicates that she had disappeared during the two-minute gap between these two motorists driving by. There was also a woman who worked in a nearby garage based in Cornhill and a lorry driver who stopped on the English side of the Coldstream Bridge for a break in the minutes after Susan had left Alison Raeburn to walk home; both of them were adamant that Susan had not passed them. This confirmation from various motorists who had crossed the Coldstream Bridge at that time of the afternoon passing both ways quickly strengthened the fears of the police that Susan had been abducted. There had been sightings of her walking towards a certain point of the road just off the end of the bridge at a certain time and after that time there had been no further sightings. In less than two minutes she had been abducted. Frustratingly for police, a local farmer who would normally have been in a particular nearby field at that time of the afternoon was elsewhere so he didn’t see Susan making her journey home. Interestingly, however, there were sightings of something else from witnesses around the time of Susan’s disappearance: it was a vehicle, to be precise it was a white van. The vehicle was at one point seen parked in a field gateway near to the point where Susan Maxwell was last seen alive walking, just across the Coldstream Bridge on the English side. Police could never positively trace the van or the driver due to the fact that whilst several people had seen the van in the nearby vicinity they could only offer a general description of its colour and type.