by Chris Clark
‘If they were burying each other in the sand I might join in, or something like that,’ he said. He explained to the detectives how he would set up a scenario to gain the trust of a child’s parents: ‘I would ask them to watch my watch and glasses while I went for a swim.’
Whilst befriending the parents Black could obviously do no harm to the children, but he would watch them for a while before moving on to another potential victim. ‘I would just observe them as long as I could and then carry on walking along the beach, keeping my eyes open for another opportunity.’ When questioned about Jennifer, Black denied he had anything to do with her murder. However, he was willing to talk about stalking young girls when he was driving about for work.
‘I would look at her and try to guess what age she was, maybe, I might park up for a couple of minutes and watch her. If she was walking a dog I would get out and stroke the dog or ask for directions.’
Black also freely admitted to a sexual interest in little girls and talked about his ‘fantasies’ involving the abduction of and sexual assaults on young girls. These he insisted were just fantasies and were never acted out in real life. But in reality these statements from Black were a type of coded confession, these were not mere stories, tales or fantasies. His claim that they were ‘fantasies’ was merely a tactic to talk about them without implicating himself. During the 1996 interviews Black refused to admit his guilt over the three ‘Midlands Triangle’ murders of which he had been convicted in 1994. The interviewing detective told Black that he had been found guilty of the three murders in what had been a fair trial, remarking, ‘This isn’t a conspiracy.’
‘Feels like it.’
When asked by the detective what crime he had committed, Black replied, ‘I’ve done things where I should have exerted a bit more self-control, that’s all.’
When discussing the abduction of Laura Turner in Stow in 1990 he indicated this was one such example of him failing to exert self-control. ‘I had no intention of keeping her tied up and gagged like that,’ he maintained.
Quizzed on how he would have felt if the child had died, he answered, ‘I think I would have been devastated, I think that would be the word.’
This was a devious effort to disassociate himself from the murder of a child in the minds of others. He claimed there were only three occasions when he lost self-control and he said these were:
When he was sixteen in Greenock in 1963 and he attacked the seven-year-old girl in the air raid shelter.
When he was nineteen and he molested a young girl whom he was babysitting.
The 1990 abduction of Laura Turner in Stow which led to his arrest and downfall.
Referring to the second of these, for which he was sent to borstal for a year, Black said something which could be analysed as having a double meaning:
‘I did not like getting locked up and vowed I would never get locked up again.’
What did Black mean by this? He was of course trying to indicate that he never attacked another child until 1990 when he abducted Laura Turner. Or he could have been trying to back this up by pointing to the vast collection of child pornography he had built up in an effort to control his paedophiliac desires. On the other hand, his words could also have indicated his intention to ensure that no other child would tell of his attacks because they would not survive to tell the tale.
He followed his attempt to portray himself as an innocent man who had had three moments of weakness by talking of an incident when he had had the opportunity to abduct a little girl he found crying near his van. She had lost her mother.
‘There was nobody in the car park,’ he said, ‘there was a hill behind the car park that hid the car park from the rest of view, it would have been quite easy to get her in my van. But I didn’t. I took her by the hand and took her across the car park and she spotted her mother and ran to her.’
This incident may have happened, it may not have; however, it is irrelevant either way as it was a clear attempt by Black to distance himself from the labels of ‘monster’ and ‘child killer’, which he disliked – and he confirmed as much in telling the detective, ‘I don’t like the idea of people thinking of me as a killer.’
Trying a direct line of questioning, the detective put it to Black that he had murdered Jennifer Cardy and should just confess.
‘Why don’t you give your secrets up?’ he asked.
‘Cos I ain’t got no secrets,’ Black said flatly.
The detective then tried to get Black to empathise with the victims of such attacks in an effort to get him to talk.
‘You too were a victim?’ he prompted.
‘Yeah.’
But Black would not budge at this point from the position of denial.
The detective returned to the subject of Jennifer Cardy. ‘Who would have thought Robert Black, a delivery driver from PDS, would have done that?’
‘I would like to help you but I can’t.’
* * *
Before the recordings were played, a retired detective who had been part of the original investigative team was questioned by Black’s defence counsel. David Spens, QC, asked retired RUC Detective Chief Inspector Stephen Clarke about a number of witness sightings of a blue van in and around the Ballinderry area at the time of Jennifer’s abduction. The Crown were claiming that Black was driving the smaller, white Datsun van that was used primarily for the work runs like Northern Ireland – this line of questioning by the defence was an attempt to cast a shadow of doubt over that claim by implying it was the driver of a blue van that had been spotted in the area and not the driver of a white van who had abducted and killed Jennifer. However, Mr Clarke was able to state that all blue vans and other vehicles that were spotted in the Ballinderry area at the time were subsequently followed up, traced, accounted for and ultimately eliminated from the investigation.
The defence had another throw of the dice to play, however. Junior defence counsel Paddy Taggart then stood up and asked Mr Clarke if the police investigating Jennifer’s murder had been able to identify a blue van reported to have been seen at the lay-by adjacent to McKee’s Dam where Jennifer was later discovered. Mr Clarke said that police were not able to trace that particular blue van, but he remarked that many vehicles used the lay-by as it was very popular place to pull over for drivers, located as it was off the A1 motorway between Newry and Belfast. It was a good answer to a tough question. Many vehicles would have used the lay-by that day, the day of Jennifer’s abduction; however, in the investigation that followed not all of them would have been reported to the authorities or even noticed.
When asked about the forensic value of re-examining the victim’s clothing, Mr Clarke confirmed that any evidence from it was ultimately lost forever as the forensic laboratories where Jennifer’s clothes were stored were destroyed in a Provisional IRA bomb in 1992. Mr Clarke then told the court that Jennifer’s parents Andrew and Patricia (who were sitting in the public gallery) had donated Jennifer’s red bicycle to a children’s charity in Romania.
* * *
The fifteenth day of the trial, Tuesday, 18 October, heard from recordings of interviews between PSNI detectives and Robert Black made over three days in 2005. These dialogues took place at Antrim Police Station when Black had been taken in for questioning over Jennifer’s murder while he was serving ten life sentences in Wakefield Prison.
The tapes revealed a strategy that Black seemed prepared to use during interviews. In an effort to talk about his feelings about child abduction and sexual activity with children without implicating himself, he talked about the two subjects as if they were a fantasy, a non-reality, a story that he would simply play over in his head like a dark movie of the mind where he was the director. The reality, however, was that the events he was describing were not fantasy but real-life events; events that he had taken part in. Before the tapes were played, Jennifer’s parents Andy and Pat left the courtroom, to return after they had been played.
The exchange that took place as follow
s was between Robert Black and Detective Constable Pamela Simpson.
DC Simpson: ‘You also mentioned that part of your fantasy, or in your imagination, included abducting a young girl.’
Black: ‘I don’t recall talking about that.’
DC Simpson: ‘Well, if I could ask you, Robert, is that part of your fantasy?’
Black: ‘It has been in the past, yeah.’
DC Simpson: ‘Can you tell me about that?’
Black: ‘I’d be driving along and see a young girl, I’d get out and talk to them, try to persuade her to get into the van and take her somewhere … quiet. I’d take her into the back of the van … and all that stuff.’
DC Simpson: ‘What would happen then?’
Black: ‘I’d drop her off somewhere, maybe take her back where I found her.’
DC Simpson: ‘So, you’re driving along in your van and you see a young girl that you’re interested in. How would you then get to talk to her?’
Black: ‘I might ask her directions, and then “Do you want to show me where it is?” That’s the way it used to work in my mind. Cos in fantasies it always works.’
DC Simpson: ‘And what type of area would you be in?’
Black: ‘Either a quiet urban street or a rural surrounding.’
DC Simpson: ‘So if she resisted and said, “No I’m not getting into your van”, what would happen?’
Black: ‘In your fantasies that doesn’t happen. Things always work out the way you want them in fantasies. You know in your fantasies you never pick up an awkward customer. You’re lucky that way.’
DC Simpson: ‘What would be the ideal place, Robert, to go to?’
Black: ‘Some place maybe like a picnic area, for instance. I might have a spot that I think would be an ideal spot that I’ve seen in the past and then I might be in that general area and I might see a girl that triggers off a fantasy, what it would be like to pick her up and take her there.’
DC Simpson: ‘Would the lay-bys we talked about earlier play a part?’
Black: ‘Some, but lay-bys are dodgy. You’d always have other people driving into lay-bys.’
DC Simpson: ‘When you say they’re dodgy, is it something you would consider?’
At this point Black went silent and did not answer the question. The exchange was undoubtedly a strong and important one for the PSNI and prosecution to play before the jury. Black’s description of this ‘fantasy’ could easily be made comparable with what he did to his three murder victims, but crucially could also be compared with what happened to Jennifer Cardy. Black’s refusal to continue with that line of questioning was one of two moments during the 2005 PSNI interviews when he realised he had said too much.
This ‘fantasy’ could easily be viewed as a coded confession – something that the prosecution were eager to demonstrate to the jury. That those parts of the interview describing driving along and seeing a young girl, in an area of rural surroundings, persuading her to get into the van and the possibility of taking her to a picnic area or lay-by, could be compared with what was believed to have happened to Jennifer Cardy was not lost on the courtroom – in particular a statement from Black regarding the ideal spot that he might have seen ‘in the past’, about being in the general area and seeing a girl, which would trigger off a fantasy of taking a young girl to that ideal spot. It could easily be speculated that this ideal spot that Black had known of ‘in the past’ was McKee’s Dam, the general area referred to being Ballinderry and its surrounding roads, only ten miles from McKee’s Dam, and the girl he had seen who triggered off the fantasy was Jennifer Cardy. Ultimately, we know for a fact that Jennifer was taken from Ballinderry and then to McKee’s Dam.
One of the few moments of the trial when Black showed any expression or body language – shifting uncomfortably where he was sitting in the dock, eventually looking down at the floor in, for him, a rare show of embarrassment – was when the items removed from his work van in Stow in 1990 were shown to the court: the sex toys and other ‘aids’ which were equipped for abuse. Black had been questioned during the interviews about the various items that had been found. Asked specifically in the 2005 interview about two child’s dresses and a little girl’s swimsuit, Black had described how he would wear these items when committing sexual acts on his own body.
DC Simpson: ‘The girl’s one-piece swimsuit was size age eight to ten.’
Black: ‘I would have thought that was for a larger child than that. Cos I know I could get it on and I’m no nymph. When I was at home I sometimes put it on.’
When pressed about what he would do with a particular item specifically adapted for self-abuse, Black’s calm demeanour gave way to an angry and more reluctant response: ‘No, you obviously know what it was for. I’m finished talking about that. I’ve done. Done this before and I’m not doing it again.’
Despite this outburst Black also seemed, perversely, to enjoy aspects of the questioning, commenting to DC Simpson as she questioned him: ‘I am quite enjoying watching you struggle.’
* * *
On day sixteen, the court heard more of the May 2005 interview recordings between Black and PSNI detectives. They started with Black describing how his fantasies, in his own words, nearly became reality only the once. The incident he was referring to was the 1985 incident with two young girls, two sisters whom he talked into getting in his van.
Black: ‘Just the once. Can’t remember when exactly. It was somewhere up around Carlisle way. I stopped and started chatting to these two sisters. I actually managed to persuade them to get into the van and I drove them round like towards where they lived and I actually went past and went round a big, like, another road that led into where the houses were and I turned round and parked up and let them out. I had to sort of talk myself into it then talk myself out of it. I would see a girl on the road and think, Could I, should I, will I? Usually it didn’t go any further than that, no, too many people around, you know? Until 1990 and the roof fell in. If I’d known she was only six years old I wouldn’t have done it.’ Black laughed as he uttered this last sentence causing one of the jurors to jolt.
Before this exchange Black had told detectives that he had never explained his fantasies about young girls and abduction before. This was a blatant lie as Black had done just that during recorded interview sessions with the late sex crimes expert and therapist Ray Wyre in the early 1990s while awaiting trial over the Midlands Triangle murders and associated offences.
DC Simpson: ‘And is there any particular reason why?’
Black: ‘I don’t know, maybe because I’m not exactly proud of the way I feel towards young girls. Like there’s a part of me that knows I’m wrong, that knows that it’s wrong, that I shouldn’t be doing things like that, I shouldn’t even be thinking things like that. But there’s the other part that says, “You like it, go on.” There’s a side that says, “You’re not hurting these children … they like it really.”’
This account given by Black of his feelings about assaulting young girls certainly does not sound like the inner battle of a man dealing with a perverted fantasy; it reveals, rather, a man who knew that what he was doing was wrong but was determined to justify it.
Understandably, the interview recordings had by this stage become too much for Jennifer’s mother; breaking down in tears, she left the courtroom weeping. Andy Cardy sat, head bowed down, before getting up to join his wife. After a short courtroom break the couple, with immense courage, returned to their seats in the public gallery to hear another recording. This time it was Detective Sergeant Pat McAnespie who put it to Black that he had abducted and murdered Jennifer Cardy.
DS McAnespie: ‘There are twelve similarities between the Jennifer Cardy murder and that of the three child murders of which you have already been convicted.’
Black: ‘That must be a coincidence because I didn’t do any of them.’
DS McAnespie: ‘We believe, having looked at the facts, that it proves you were involved in the abduction
and murder of Jennifer Cardy.’
Black: ‘No way.’
DS McAnespie: ‘You’re a man who accepts that he likes pre-pubescent girls, you’re a man who accepts that he fantasises about abducting these girls, you’re a man who accepts that he wants to carry out some form of sexual act on them, so you’ve got all the motive in the world. Isn’t that right?’
Black denied he was involved and claimed young girls willingly got into his van in his fantasies.
DS McAnespie: ‘Robert, let’s face it now, there’s not much chance of a child willingly getting into your van.’
[DS McAnespie had then produced a photograph taken of Jennifer on the day she was abducted. Jennifer is standing outside her home in the sunshine, smiling proudly at the camera beside her new red bicycle.]
DS McAnespie: ‘You see Jennifer on her bike?’
Black: ‘Was that taken close to the time she went missing?’
DS McAnespie: ‘Shortly before it. That’s the bike we are talking about. She got that bicycle for her birthday.’
Black: ‘Looking at that, I would have thought she was younger than nine years old.’
DS McAnespie: ‘Would you? Those are the same clothes, believe it or not, white socks, corduroy trousers, blouse. Did you ever see her, Robert?’
Black: ‘No.’
DS McAnespie: ‘Were you on the B12 and you saw that girl and you thought, Happy days, I’m in a van, open the door, throw her in, away we go?’
Black: ‘No’.
DS McAnespie: ‘No? Okay. That’s what we say happened, Robert. We’re saying that this is the perfect situation for you … You see her and you stop and you want to speak to her. What do you say? “Excuse me, wee girl, can you show me how to get somewhere?” And an obliging nine-year-old girl with nothing to fear says, “Yes, sir, I’ll help you,” and you talk to her, and your urge, your fantasy takes over.’
Black: ‘No’.