by Chris Clark
Once they had returned to 25 Beach Lane little Caroline, still full of exuberance and energy, begged to be let out once more for a few more minutes’ play before bedtime. It was 7 p.m. and still a nice bright evening. Caroline’s parents agreed that she could go out for just five minutes as long as she changed out of her good party shoes and promised not to venture out of the playground, which faced the sea. Caroline had often been forbidden to go onto the promenade, near the sea, beach or to any of the arcades or funfair without the company of an adult. The little girl changed into a pair of pink trainers and went out for a few minutes’ fun, passing the local primary school Towerbank, which she attended, on her way. After a little while in the playground Caroline, as many little children do, forgot her promises and ventured onto the promenade towards the bright lights of the funfair and amusements despite her parents’ warnings. As she made her way along the seafront a man was following her. A teenage girl who knew Caroline would later come forward to say she had seen Caroline at the start of the promenade walking along, with a man walking just behind her. A number of people were to see Caroline with this man that evening, and came forward after she was reported missing as witnesses, to say they had seen her in the company of a man whom they all gave the same general physical description of a scruffy, overweight individual with glasses.
As Caroline sat down on the wall of the promenade the day’s activities were starting to take their toll. The little girl was tired and was probably thinking of going home when this scruffy glasses-wearing man engaged her in conversation. The next thing witnesses reported seeing was Caroline walking hand in hand with the scruffy stranger towards the funfair, which was called Fun City. There was nothing immediately worrying or sinister about the sight – many children were on the promenade that night, some alone or in the company of other children playing happily on the beach or at the amusements and funfair. Many were with their parents or grandparents, aunts or uncles, just as in any coastal suburb in the United Kingdom during the summer holidays. So to see a little girl smiling and seemingly happy as she walked along, holding the hand of a man who could have been her father, uncle or family friend into the funfair was nothing unusual. As they walked into Fun City the stranger paid 15p for Caroline to go on a children’s roundabout ride, watching and waving to her as she sat on the little carousel’s bus. After the ride was over Caroline was then seen once again walking hand in hand with the scruffy-looking spectacled man, only this time walking together in the direction of the back exit of Fun City. Little Caroline, like so many children, had innocently put her trust in an adult, and that adult would go on to break that trust in the most devastating and cruel fashion.
At 7.15 p.m., Caroline’s mother Annette, wondering where her daughter was, looked outside and called her name. There was no reply, and she stepped outside her house and found her eleven-year-old son Stuart playing football with friends; she asked him if he had seen his sister, for it was approaching her bedtime. Stuart, however, had not seen Caroline. With a sense of dread Annette informed her husband John and soon the whole family were searching the immediate area around Beach Lane and the local playground and then through the hundreds of people thronging the promenade. It was 7.30 p.m.
This was also the time of the last reported sighting of Caroline: she was last seen by a seventeen-year-old boy who worked at Fun City, and was indeed none other than the attendant for the roundabout ride Caroline had been given money to go on by the scruffy man. The youth had seen them leave towards the back exit of Fun City hand in hand.
By this time the Hogg family, neighbours and friends were out searching for Caroline and word spread that a child was missing. The very sad possibility remains that those searching for Caroline had entered the Fun City amusement park at the front entrance at the same time Caroline and her abductor were leaving at the back entrance, or if not at the same time, then within a matter of minutes, frustratingly just missing each other. This thought was reinforced by a little boy who had seen Caroline hand in hand with a scruffy man with a stubble-type beard and thick-lensed spectacles that had black frames with no bottoms; the young boy was quite insistent that Caroline was not laughing and happy-looking as other witnesses had described seeing her earlier on the promenade. On the contrary, he described Caroline as frightened-looking. His grandmother lived near Caroline and they knew each other well but when he called out a greeting to her, Caroline did not reply, the little girl afraid and no doubt confused. The funfair ride was over, now where were they going?
At 7.50 p.m. with a situation that was becoming increasingly serious the police were called. Immediately Edinburgh police mobilised search parties and by that Sunday the local area had been thoroughly searched by several hundred volunteers under the direction of the police, but all to no avail. A week later at Portobello Town Hall thousands of people crammed in for a police briefing as volunteers came from far and wide to help look for the little girl whose smiling face was soon on every newspaper and news bulletin, just as Susan Maxwell’s face had been almost twelve months previously. The search widened across the city of Edinburgh with army regiments drafted in, and the coasts and hills beyond, but again no trace of the little girl was found. A mobile police caravan was also set up in Fun City.
Caroline’s parents John and Annette Hogg attended a press conference as the search for their daughter went on, with John Hogg making an appeal to Caroline’s abductor ‘Just give her back, whoever has her.’
In the midst of all this and as they organised search parties, the police were also taking witness statements from those who had seen Caroline just before she had disappeared. Almost thirty people had seen her, and half that number reported seeing her on the promenade and in Fun City with the stranger, giving a similar description of the man each time – the word ‘scruffy’ continually coming up. Adults and children had noticed the man both in Caroline’s company and beforehand on his own. Some thought he looked like a tramp, others thought he was under the influence of alcohol. Some had seen him roll and smoke a cigarette whilst staring at a group of children. Two witnesses who although they had only seen the man for a few seconds gave police enough to go on, and an artist’s impression of the scruffy stranger was drawn up. The police, however, decided to hold it back from public release, on the grounds that doing so could be counterproductive, choosing to save it for a later stage in their hunt. It was indeed to be very useful in the conviction of Robert Black for Caroline’s murder.
John and Annette Hogg were certain that Caroline would never have gone to Fun City on her own as she had been repeatedly warned never to venture that far onto the promenade – on one occasion when she did make it that far on her own she was punished. The little girl, her parents were sure, had to have been enticed there and those witnesses who saw Caroline in Fun City with the scruffy-looking stranger confirmed this is what happened.
Caroline’s body was found on 18 July 1983, and, like the remains of Susan Maxwell, found in an unlikely place. Ten days after her disappearance her decomposed body was found by a motorist who had pulled into a lay-by in Twycross in Leicestershire to answer a call of nature. The lay-by was located just off the A444 connecting Northampton and Coventry. Just as in Susan’s case the hot weather had had an effect and because of the state of decomposition a cause of death could not be established. Caroline was identified from the little baubles that held her hair and a locket around her neck. Police were also certain that Caroline’s murder was sexually motivated – the little’s girl’s body had been found without a stitch of clothing. The detective who arrived at the scene was Detective Chief Superintendent David Baker, head of Leicestershire CID. David Baker as well as being involved in the hunt for Robert Black is also the detective who caught Colin Pitchfork, a serial flasher who abducted and murdered two teenage girls in villages in Leicestershire in the mid-1980s, that particular case being of note as it was the first murder conviction secured by the help of the now world-renowned but at the time just-discovered genetic fingerprinti
ng or, as it is commonly known, DNA evidence.
Over thirty years after Caroline’s murder David Baker recalled the horrific crime, as reported in Scotland’s Daily Record and Sunday Mail on 12 April 2015:
‘It was extremely difficult because the body was badly decomposed and it was my job to go to Portobello to see Caroline’s parents. I had to get them to try to identify her by what we found. We had a couple of little trinkets.’
The location point of disposal was over 300 miles from Caroline’s point of abduction yet only 24 miles away from where the body of Susan Maxwell had been discovered in a ditch off a lay-by in Uttoxeter the previous August. Had Susan’s killer struck again? Was the same man involved in both child killings?
The similarities between the cases were noted by the detectives from four respective police forces now involved in the two murder investigations. Both little girls were pre-pubescent and wearing white ankle socks when abducted on a warm Friday in July twelve months apart after enjoying outdoor activities near their homes, one on the border between Scotland and England, the other a suburb in Scotland’s capital. Both were abducted and taken away in some kind of vehicle and transported hundreds of miles south, with their bodies both found dumped in lay-bys in the English Midlands 24 miles apart. Both killings were sexually motivated.
The four police forces now involved were the Northumbria and Staffordshire forces, with regard to the Maxwell case, and Lothian and Peebles Edinburgh Division (from where Caroline was abducted) and the Leicestershire Constabulary (from where Caroline’s body was found). All agreed that, given the strong similarities between the two murders, one man was responsible. The four Chief Constables also agreed that a joint enquiry with one senior investigating officer overall overseeing things was the best way to go.
The man chosen for the job was Hector Clark from the north-east of England and serving Deputy Chief Constable of Northumbria Police. He was viewed as a wise choice on account of his vast experience and his success rate in murder investigations – for which he was known as ‘El Supremo’. This nickname was quickly picked up by some of the media upon his appointment to catch this evil child killer already being compared to the infamous Moors Murderers Ian Brady and Myra Hindley of some twenty years before. His first day on the job was the 22 July 1983.
Clark had already been involved in the Susan Maxwell investigation, recommending to investigating officers that all lay-bys 100 miles north and south of Coldstream be searched in the hunt for Susan, as they subsequently were. Now Hector Clark had the task of overseeing and directing the overall joint enquiry into the abduction and murders of Susan Maxwell and Caroline Hogg.
The last murder investigation the United Kingdom had seen that was similar in scale to the Maxwell/Hogg investigation was that of the hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper, Peter Sutcliffe, a few short years previously. To ensure the mistakes that were made during the Ripper investigation – where significant clues and connections were lost in the sheer volume of paperwork – were not repeated here, Hector Clark began to look at the investigative advantages provided by computerising all data and information. All information that stemmed from the Maxwell case had already been recorded by hand on index cards, but Clark decided that the data and information from the Caroline Hogg investigation should be entered into a computerised system. As he explained at the time to the press: ‘What we had in the past is a paper manual index of vehicles and people, and they’re subject to misplacement, misfiling and loss. Now the computer just does not allow this. We shouldn’t overlook something that perhaps has happened during previous enquiries.’
To ensure that time was not wasted in transferring the vast number of indexes from the Maxwell enquiry it was kept in the form of a manual paper index.
A reconstruction of Caroline’s last movements in Fun City was enacted and shown. House-to-house enquiries in Portobello were undertaken and those witnesses on the promenade and in Fun City that night were traced and interviewed.
Holidaymakers, including those from the other side of the world, were asked to send in their holiday snaps and video film in an effort to find any photographs or film footage of Caroline or her abductor or both of them together, but sadly and frustratingly nothing of note was photographed or recorded. Parking tickets in Edinburgh were examined whilst police in Leicestershire sat close to the A444 road noting the registration of every vehicle that during the next couple of days passed by close to the lay-by where Caroline’s body was found, in case her killer used the road regularly and a vehicle registration was spotted more than once and a link or connection could be established at some point in the enquiry.
The forensic pathologist who examined Caroline’s decomposing body was tasked with finding out for the police when and how she died. There are perfectly routine questions a detective will ask a pathologist in the aftermath of a post-mortem of a murder victim as the answers to such questions often aid the police in catching a murderer: a time of death helps establish what happened between the abduction of a victim and their body being discovered, and a cause of death can help establish a modus operandi or MO (method of operation) that an offender, particularly a serial offender, uses and can help build a psychological profile of a suspect.
The doctors informed the police that Caroline had not been strangled as there were no markings on her neck or skin or injuries to that particular area, but while strangulation was ruled out, a cause of death could not be established. On the time of death, the police gained from the help of scientists and entomologists who studied the cycle of insects that, as little Caroline’s body lay out in the open, in warm weather, laid eggs that hatched in her body. It was their professional opinion, although admittedly it was an estimate at best, that the body had lain in the lay-by ditch anything from four to six days. So Caroline’s body had been left in the lay-by at some point between 12 and 14 July, and was in the possession of her abductor and killer anything from four to six days beforehand. The difference in time between Caroline’s abduction and the earliest point of her body being disposed is distressing to think about.
A couple by the name of Mr and Mrs Flynn came forward to say they had witnessed a scared-looking young girl with a man driving a blue Ford Cortina. Whilst initially this looked a promising lead it eventually proved to be unconnected with the abduction and murder of Caroline Hogg, but not until after 20,000 blue Ford Cortinas were traced and their drivers interviewed and eliminated. This in hindsight was similar to a possible lead that cropped up during the investigation into Susan Maxwell’s murder the year before, when a psychiatric nurse named Mark Ball came forward to say that on the day Susan Maxwell was abducted he had witnessed a girl matching Susan’s description hitting out with a tennis racket at a maroon Triumph 2000. As with the later Flynn sighting, this had initially seemed promising but was ultimately ruled out – again only after the drivers of nearly 20,000 maroon Triumph 2000s were traced, interviewed and eliminated.
By the summer of 1984, one year later, a television documentary had already been made and broadcast on the unsolved murders of Susan Maxwell and Caroline Hogg consisting mostly of reconstructions of the girls’ abductions, based on evidence and hypothesis, news footage, photographs and interviews with the families and detectives involved. It was broadcast in the hope that one of its viewers would recognise something in the programme and come forward with a clue or information that would bring the investigation forward. It would also have been broadcast in the hope of reassuring the public that the investigation was still open and on-going and even though the killer was still at large all effort was being undertaken to find him and bring him to justice.
Despite this the reality was that the police were aware of the lack of real leads or real suspects in the case. There was little to go on despite the near half a million index cards containing information on the Susan Maxwell enquiry and the computerised system brought into force in connection with the murder of Caroline Hogg. Intelligence officers with every force in the country were asked to send
in lists of possible persons of interest but these too had failed to come up with a strong suspect.
Because the killer had struck twice in the summer warmth of the month of July police wondered again about the possibility that he was someone who took advantage of children being off on school summer holidays and being outside more in the hot weather; they also speculated that he might holiday in Scotland before travelling south through the north of England on to the Midlands where he would dispose of the little girls’ bodies; and they once more pondered the high probability that he was someone who used a vehicle and could travel great distances for his work, and again the questions were raised: was he a travelling salesman, a lorry driver or, as turned out to be the case, a delivery driver using a van?
So the police, media and general public could have been forgiven for being nervous that summer of 1984 as they wondered if the scruffy-looking stranger would strike again as the summer months rolled by.
Black was no doubt aware of the media frenzy that followed his abduction and murder of Caroline Hogg in July 1983. He would also have been aware, just from watching the television and reading the newspapers, of the renewed efforts of the police to find him as the four constabularies came together in a joint enquiry to hunt him down. He would have read and listened to the words of the man in charge ‘El Supremo’ Hector Clark, and must have known that the police would never slow down in their bid to catch him. Part of him must have been waiting for a knock on the door of his Stamford Hill flat – after all, a lot of people had seen him on the promenade in Portobello smoking his cigarette, watching the children and walking hand in hand with Caroline Hogg as he led her away like a lamb to the slaughter. The police were bound to come to his door and arrest him, someone must have recognised him or the description of him or put his name forward to the enquiry. But luck, it seems, was at that point on Robert Black’s side, for no knock on the door would ever come.