by Chris Clark
This is understandable considering how many vehicles there are to be seen every day, being driven or stationary by the side of a road, and indeed considering how similar most everyday vehicles are to one another. Unless there is something very unusual in the appearance of a vehicle, in its location, or in the way it is being handled, drivers and pedestrians will be aware of it but not give it a second glance, never mind noting its make or registration. The sightings of this white van, however, would take on a much greater significance during the investigation, trial and conviction of Susan’s killer some twelve years later.
The next day saw a full-scale search undertaken for the missing girl, with scenes very similar to those the previous August, with the Royal Ulster Constabulary and local volunteers searching for Jennifer Cardy in rural Ulster, although at the time nobody imagined the two cases were connected and the same killer was responsible. Fordyce Maxwell, Susan’s father, joined the army of volunteers who under the direction of Northumbria Police, working in tandem with Lothian and Borders Police, combed through areas stretching across some fifty miles of mostly rural terrain. Specialist police diving teams from the North-East of England were drafted in to search the River Tweed, while from its banks to the forests and fields, searchers, including police with specially trained tracker dogs, systematically scoured the land in the hope that little Susan would be found safe and well. But while that flame of hope flickered on, with each hour and day that passed it was getting dimmer.
As the Maxwell family, like Andrew and Patricia Cardy had done the year previously, spoke to the media, giving interviews and making pleas for Susan’s safe return on television and in newspapers, the police in Northumbria were carrying out investigative actions similar to those their counterparts in Northern Ireland had undertaken the previous summer. A reconstruction was staged with a little girl who looked similar to Susan filmed walking in similar clothing across the Coldstream Bridge. This was done, like all reconstructions, in a bid to reach potential witnesses who had not come forward or to trigger the possibility of new information coming in to police. One plea made by detectives was for three youths who had been seen having a picnic on the English side of the Coldstream Bridge between 4.30 p.m. and 4.45 p.m. that afternoon. They had been travelling in an old purple-coloured Mini-Traveller. The vehicle and the young men were later traced, interviewed and subsequently eliminated. That Sunday, the second full day of the search, prayers were said for the Maxwell family and Susan’s safe return in the nearby church.
As the days passed and the following week was upon the team of detectives searching for Susan, the Maxwells, both respected journalists, used their knowledge of the media and the way it worked to their advantage knowing that the more Susan’s face and description was on television and in the papers the better the chance she would be found. Liz would normally be the one at home speaking to journalists and surrounded by friends and family who were there to support her whilst she was there for her two younger children, three-year-old Tom and five-year-old Jacqueline. Fordyce was spending every hour he could with the search teams desperately looking for his little girl.
‘At least it kept me doing something,’ he said. ‘It kept my mind occupied and stopped me sitting round thinking too much.’ (Quoted in Fear the Stranger: Susan Maxwell, Caroline Hogg and Sarah Harper by Hector Clark and David Johnston, 1994.)
Fordyce was questioned by police about his movements the day of Susan’s disappearance and his relationship with her – this is normal police routine investigation and Fordyce was quickly eliminated as having had nothing to do with Susan’s disappearance, but it would have no doubt added to their pain. That Tuesday was Jacqueline’s birthday and in an effort to maintain a level of normality for her two other children in the midst of such a worrying time for the Maxwell family a little birthday party was held with presents for little Jacqueline from her big sister Susan, as photographers from the newspapers snapped her cutting her birthday cake, all in attendance aware that keeping Susan’s story in the public eye was the priority via whatever necessary means.
That same day police held a meeting in the packed local village hall where Chief Inspector Fred Stephenson from Northumbria Police addressed those in attendance specifically focusing on Susan’s last journey over the Coldstream Bridge and appealing for witnesses to Susan on this her last known walk to come forward with any information. Also in attendance was the Chief Constable of Northumbria Police Stanley Bailey who announced to the residents of Cornhill village that he wished them to agree to every house being searched so that the village could be eliminated. The possibility of nearby Coldstream also having every house within it searched was also raised with Lothian and Borders Police helping in that task, which would undoubtedly be a bigger one but police were eager for both areas and their residents to be eliminated from the enquiry. Whilst this ultimately meant a request for police to search every home, outhouse and private property of the local people there were no objections from anyone local such was the eagerness to find a little girl from their own community who was missing. Parents attending the meeting no doubt would also have been conscious of the possibility it could have been one of their own children who had been abducted. In a two-day search every property, business, house and shed, in Cornhill-on-Tweed was searched by police with the agreement, and support of local residents. Nothing of significance, however, was found.
Liz Maxwell herself had a feeling about what had happened to her daughter and it was in the end proved to be the correct analysis of the situation.
‘The only thing I can suggest is that somebody stopped and asked her directions – and grabbed her,’ Liz Maxwell said during the search for her daughter (quoted in The Murder of Childhood).
One week after Susan’s disappearance detectives depressingly had to admit they hadn’t one single strong lead in the investigation and the little girl’s whereabouts were still unknown. By the following Friday, 13 August, which marked the second week since Susan went missing, her fate was to become known, in a horrific and distressing way.
Susan Maxwell’s body was discovered in a ditch beside a lay-by on the A518 road at Loxley near Uttoxeter in the county of Staffordshire in the West Midlands of England – over 250 miles south from where she had disappeared. The warm weather of that 1982 summer had taken its toll on Susan’s remains, so much so she could only be identified by her dental records. The Maxwells had just made a plea on the popular BBC Radio 2 programme The Jimmy Young Show, which reached an audience of millions, for information on their missing child. The police arrived at the local radio station to collect the Maxwells and brought them home to a detective waiting to deliver the news that every parent of a missing child dreads to receive. In breaking the news to the Maxwells, the officer told them that a girl had been found but he could not bring himself to say the girl was dead, telling them instead that she had been ‘found not alive’. The search for a missing child had ended, but a new search, the search for her abductor and killer had just begun.
Susan’s body was discovered by a gentleman by the name of Arthur Meadows. Mr Meadows lived in nearby Uttoxeter and was a lorry driver. He had stopped in the lay-by to take a shortcut on to a friend’s house when he looked to his left and saw a pair of white socks in the ditch; he felt uneasy but tried to convince himself that what he’d seen was a tailor’s dummy that someone had dumped. He went to his friend’s house, then travelled on to Scotland with his work, all the while trying to convince himself that he hadn’t seen anything untoward in that lay-by ditch and that it was something entirely innocent. Doubt got the better of him however and he confided in a work colleague about what he thought he may have discovered. His colleague advised him to call the police, which Mr Meadows did when he arrived home in Uttoxeter.
When the police arrived at the scene they were certain they were looking at the body of a young child and whilst the clothing was similar in description to what Susan was wearing when she went missing, a comparison of dental records and fingerprin
ts removed any doubt that it was Susan’s body.
The pathologist who examined Susan’s body was unable to confirm her cause of death or if she had been sexually assaulted due to the state of decomposition her remains were in when she was discovered, though he was able to determine from them that Susan had been dumped in the lay-by shortly after she was abducted.
There was a clue, however, that pointed Staffordshire Police – who had taken over the Maxwell murder investigation as her body had been found in Uttoxeter, which was in their force area – in the direction of looking at a sexual motivation behind the killing. Whilst Susan was found in the clothing she had been wearing the day of her disappearance two weeks previously, her shoes were found beside the body and, more tellingly, her underpants had been removed and folded up neatly underneath her head. Her shorts had then been put back on her after her underpants had been removed. This discovery reinforced fears that Susan had been abducted and killed by a paedophile.
Staffordshire Police started the murder investigation by releasing a large poster displaying a picture of Susan Maxwell in her bright yellow outfit, detailing the date and location she was last seen and the date and location of where her dead body was found, and then crucially asking the following question ‘Did you see her between those dates?’
They also cordoned off the wood that was adjacent to the lay-by ditch where Susan’s body was found but, despite the fact the wood was used sometimes to dump items of rubbish and resembled an unofficial tip, nothing of note or significance was found during the forensic examination. Following this, Staffordshire Police interviewed people living in Uttoxeter and the surrounding areas, as well as those staying in caravans and hotels, in case the perpetrator had been holidaying in Scotland before returning south to his home or was a tourist. There were a number of possible reasons as to why Susan’s abductor would transport her body and dispose of it so far away. Others who were interviewed were men who worked for firms that required them to travel between Staffordshire and Scotland, the police reasoning that this would explain the distance of some 250 miles between Susan’s abduction point and the location where her body was discarded. The killer could perhaps be a travelling salesman or lorry driver … or van driver?
The man who had killed Susan Maxwell was indeed someone who travelled between the Midlands and Scotland and back again as part of his job, the job of a van driver – but his name never entered the investigation and neither was it at any point put forward to detectives as a possible suspect or person of interest.
Black would have been aware of the hunt for Susan Maxwell and the murder investigation that started two weeks later with the discovery of her body. He would have been watching the news in his attic room in Stamford Hill watching the desperate pleas of a frantic mother seeking news of her child; he would have read the national papers detailing Susan’s disappearance whilst eating in a roadside café during a break as he continued working delivering posters up and down the country. He could have phoned the police and let them and the Maxwell family know what he had done at any time and brought their suffering to an end much sooner but he chose not to. He had a similar opportunity to do the same thing for the Cardy family twelve months earlier, when he abducted and murdered their daughter. Again he chose not to. Instead he continued his life, separating his public and private worlds – publicly the hard-working, darts-loving, foul-smelling van driver who would sip a pint of shandy in the pub, and privately the sadistic paedophile who had abducted and killed two innocent little girls, and more than likely, as we will look at later, had killed more. Black by now, his thirty-fifth birthday having passed a few months previously, was firmly on the road of serial child abduction and murder, and showed no sign of stopping or slowing down. If anything, the carnage was just beginning.
As Susan Maxwell’s little body was laid to rest in the graveyard after a memorial service in the village church that only two weeks previously had said prayers hoping for her safe return, the Maxwells stood dignified as they said goodbye to their child. The congregation sang Susan’s favourite hymn ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’ during the funeral service. As the newspaper photographers and television cameramen filmed the service and subsequent burial many would have been forgiven for momentarily turning their thoughts to the individual behind this tragedy. The man responsible. Who was he? How could he have done something so cruel? Perhaps however most chillingly was the question would he do it again? Almost one year later, he would answer that question in the worst way possible.
THE MURDER OF CAROLINE HOGG
Friday, 8 July 1983 was the day the inquest into the death of Susan Claire Maxwell was held at Uttoxeter, Staffordshire. The enquiry into her murder had been wound down and was almost entirely based in Staffordshire, although there was still a high number of detectives working on the case. Ironically, that was also the day that Robert Black would abduct another young victim. Just as he had done, almost a year before, on the day he abducted and killed Susan Maxwell, Black left his East London work base with a van full of posters to be delivered. Posters that, just like on the day that Susan Maxwell was abducted, had to be delivered to areas of Scotland. He left on the morning of Thursday, 7 July and travelled north, making a delivery in Gateshead near Newcastle that night before pulling his van up for a few hours’ sleep. The next morning he was up and continued his journey, leaving the North-East of England and using the A1 to travel over the border into Scotland. His next delivery was due at the Mills and Allen depot in Portobello, an eastern coastal suburb of Edinburgh. To reach it he had to drive through Musselburgh, a place of which he had bad memories and flashbacks due to the unhappy time he spent there in his youth. After making his delivery he travelled down the Portobello road, on to the promenade where he parked his van and got out of it. His next delivery drop was due to be at another Mills and Allen depot, this one in Glasgow. But rather than continue on his work journey straight away Black decided to go for a stroll along the promenade and stretch his legs.
Sadly, going for a walk and stretching his legs was soon to be the furthest thing from Black’s mind. It was a nice, warm, sunny and calm July evening and the promenade was full of people, young and old, male and female, both local and holiday-makers from outside the area. The beaches were full of people relaxing, building sandcastles, or venturing into the sea for a paddle. Also on the promenade were numerous amusement arcades and an amusement park full of children and young people enjoying their school holidays. Black walked through these buildings as he tried to normalise his presence in the crowds but even in a place full of people he stood out on account of his shabby, scruffy and generally unkempt appearance. He was an unappealing-looking figure and yet drew no real attention to himself as he strolled along the promenade taking in all the fun and activities in his sight. He rolled himself a cigarette and leaned against the railings of a children’s playground to smoke it. There was a small group of children there, playing on the slides and the swings, Black watched them until he fixed his sights on one little girl in particular. Soon the little girl was on her own. Just like back in Scotland in June 1963, and, more recently, the summer days when he had spotted Jennifer Cardy and Susan Maxwell – a child, alone. Black saw his opportunity and began to draw in. The fears of everyone connected with the Susan Maxwell murder a year previously were about to be confirmed, this opportunistic predator was to strike again.
Five-year-old Caroline Hogg like so many children in the United Kingdom that day was enjoying the summer holidays. That Friday in the warm sunshine her day had been packed with activity and fun. She had spent most of the day at her friend’s birthday party playing party games and enjoying party food with the other children there. The little girl with long blonde hair was pretty as a picture and in fact a now heart-breaking photograph of the little girl was taken at that very party, the last ever photograph to be taken of the child, wearing a lilac and white dress with white ankle socks and her special shoes for the party. Her mother collected her around 4 p.m. and the
y returned the short distance home to 25 Beach Lane, Portobello where Caroline and her brother Stuart lived with their mother Annette and their father John. As she went through the door of her home she was pleased to see her grandmother there but quickly went outside once more for more adventure, staying close to her home, however, as her parents had strictly warned her not to venture past a certain point from the family house. Normally Caroline would ride her little bicycle but it was broken at the time and few of her wee friends who lived locally were about. Soon it was tea time but Caroline was not hungry and would have preferred to continue playing. After tea she accompanied her mother to drop her granny off at the bus stop.