The Face of Evil

by Chris Clark

  27 June 1987, Île-de-France, France: Sabine Dumont (nine) was last seen alive in Bièvres when she went to buy a tube of white paint from the bookshop down the road from her home; the following day her body was found in the commune of Vauhallan a few miles away. She had been sexually assaulted and strangled. Black was formally named in 2011by French police as a prime suspect in her murder.

  11 May 1989, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany: Ramona Herling (eleven) was last seen walking from her home in the town of Bad Driburg to a nearby swimming pool. She never arrived at the pool and has not been seen since.

  A number of these will be discussed in further detail in the pages that follow, in which Chris Clark discusses those we believe to have been victims of Black, and explains the reasoning behind our beliefs. His account includes a case that is very personal and close to home for him – the attempted abduction of his wife Jeanne when she was a teenager in the summer of 1971.

  PART TWO

  CYCLE OF OPPORTUNITY

  (BY CHRIS CLARK)

  11

  COLD CASES

  Following Black’s 1994 conviction, a number of police forces, as mentioned earlier, came forward, all anxious to look into the possibility of Black being responsible for a number of other murders of young girls. Once the case of Jennifer Cardy could be taken off the list, with Black’s conviction in 2011, police renewed their investigations into him.

  * * *

  I started to take a personal interest in Robert Black in 2010 when my wife Jeanne told me about an incident that had occurred to her nearly forty years before, when it became clear to me that she had nearly been seized and taken away.

  Having always thought, since his arrest in 1990, that Robert Black was involved in the 1969 abduction and murder of April Fabb from my home county of Norfolk, I realised that the circumstances of the incident Jeanne recounted to me were identical to those of the abductions of April Fabb, Genette Tate and Jennifer Cardy – all girls out on cycles on a hot sunny day.

  With this in mind I tried to piece together Black’s life from 1968, when it is known that he moved from Scotland to London, to 1976 when he started driving for Poster Despatch and Storage (PDS), which is where subsequent police enquiries into his background started from.

  On 22 March 1967, a month before his twentieth birthday, Robert Black was sent to borstal for one year at Polmont near Grangemouth. During his time in this establishment he formed a relationship with another young inmate who appears to have been a rapist or at least a potential rapist. Together they planned a series of sexual attacks on adult women. One shudders to think that his potential co-partner could have been someone of the ilk of Peter Tobin or Angus Sinclair, fellow Scots of a similar age to Black, each eventually convicted of a string of violent rapes and murders.

  The Robert Black of the late 1960s was short at five-foot-seven, and athletic, with a wiry build; his straight, light brown hair was already thinning and rapidly receding, and he had a very strong body odour. He was an articulate, lonely, odd young man who spoke with a ‘Sean Connery’ Scottish accent. Upon his release some time around the end of March 1968, Black, now aged twenty-one, moved into a probation hostel in Glasgow; when he left there with two recorded convictions for offences against young girls there was no supervision and no follow-up: he simply disappeared under the radar, away from authorities’ view.

  After a brief period in a nearby bedsit and an arrest for loitering with intent to steal on 12 August 1968, which earned him an important ‘mugshot’ but no conviction, Black suddenly crossed the border into England and moved south to the anonymity of London. (My co-author Robert Giles has covered Black’s days in London in more detail in an earlier chapter.)

  There he first took a cheap bedsit at 24 Bergholt Crescent, Stamford Hill which he moved into before 10 October 1968. This is where he would have been residing when April Fabb went missing during the Easter holidays of 1969. This address is only two streets away from the East and West Reservoirs in Stoke Newington which serve North London: do those waters hold a grim secret? Two of his known victims, Jennifer Cardy (1981) and Sarah Harper (1986) were thrown into water – Jennifer into McKee’s Dam and Sarah the River Trent.

  Whether April Fabb was one of his earlier victims is not proven but her disappearance some nine years before that of Genette Tate and twelve years before the murder of Jennifer Cardy has glaring similarities to both. Black did not hold a full driving licence at this time but, importantly, he already had an extensive driving record from at least three firms in Scotland during the years 1964–1967, and, as will be seen later, had also incurred vehicle-crime-related convictions in 1972 prior to his acquisition of a full driving licence, which was obtained in 1976, and it is known that he had access to at least four vehicles at various times during that period: a white Hillman Imp, a blue Vauxhall Victor, a green Ford Zephyr, and a blue Ford Anglia; there may have been many more, not necessarily legally acquired. By the time he was working for PDS, Black’s knowledge of Britain’s road networks was comprehensive.

  12

  THE APRIL FABB CASE

  On Tuesday, 8 April 1969, the day after Easter Monday, I was working a late-turn foot beat at King’s Lynn when one of Norfolk’s biggest mysteries occurred during that afternoon some 40 miles away in a quiet village in north Norfolk.

  April Fabb, a shy thirteen-year-old a fortnight off her fourteenth birthday and on her Easter school holidays, set off from her home on that fateful afternoon in the quiet rural village of Metton to cycle the two miles to her eldest sister Pamela’s home in Roughton, near Cromer, to give her brother-in-law Bernard a packet of cigarettes as a belated present for his birthday that had fallen on Easter Monday, but she never made it to the end of that quiet and little-used country lane.

  Metton, close to Cromer, is situated in a triangle formed by the A148 to King’s Lynn (leading to the A10 to London) and, nearer to Roughton, the A140 from Cromer to Norwich (leading to the A11 link road to London), while the third side of the triangle is the A47 between King’s Lynn and Norwich.

  April 1969 was a very sunny month, except in east Scotland and on the coasts of eastern England. Despite the sunshine, though, it was also a rather cold month and at times very windy, particularly on the south and east coasts on the 5 and 6 April, reaching gale force at times. Easter – 4 to 7 April – was very sunny and warm at times and the north Norfolk seaside resorts of Cromer and Sheringham were packed with holidaymakers; picnickers were abundant. On 8 April local temperatures reached 22 degrees Celsius, but the prevailing wind in exposed places made it feel colder and that is probably why April was dressed sensibly, wearing a green jumper, a wine-coloured woollen thigh-length skirt, long white socks and wooden-soled sandals. Her hair was brushed back into a bunch, tied with a brown crinkly ribbon.

  April was seen at 2.06 p.m. next to a field where she had stopped with her bicycle to join two girls who were petting a donkey; she stayed there for a short while before continuing her journey, probably singing her favourite pop group Amen Corner’s latest release ‘If paradise is half as nice as heaven that you take me to, who needs paradise, I’d rather have you’. If so, it would have been prophetic as well as poignant, looking back.

  She was last seen at 2.12 p.m. by a farmworker driving by in a Land-Rover, as she was about to turn right into Back Lane towards Roughton; just three minutes later her blue and white bicycle was found lying on its side where it had been thrown over a six-foot-high bank into a field in Back Lane. There was no sign of April – she had disappeared in the flicker of an eye, spirited away never to be found.

  It was a world where a crime of this sort was a rarity and there being no record of other unsolved child abduction or murders committed from the time of Black’s release 1968, this case strongly indicates to me that April was Black’s first full abduction and murder, committed less than two weeks before his twenty-second birthday (which fell the day before April’s birthday), utilising a motor vehicle of some description, and I am convinc
ed that if we keep plugging away, eventually the missing pieces in April’s jigsaw, which are likely to be found in London and not Norfolk, will provide sufficient evidence to point to Black’s involvement. (Author update: Since June 2016, I have been working with a Norfolk-based medium who is trying to locate where April’s remains are buried; this work is ongoing.)

  Two vehicles were in the area during the material time that were never traced; they were a vaguely described grey car and a newish-looking red Mini with new-type reflective number plates; both have since been dismissed.

  It later transpired that one of Black’s favourite pastimes was to go to the seaside frequented by young children or to a playground and video or take snapshots of them playing – did he go to Cromer in Norfolk during 1969? It was reported in the press after his 1994 conviction that Black had visited Norfolk on a regular basis, but I can find no evidence of that, but it is my belief that Robert Black visited Cromer over that busy Easter weekend (there may be undiscovered photographic evidence amidst the collection seized after his 1990 arrest confirming this), and that on the Tuesday lunchtime rather than driving through Metton, he was sitting in his vehicle in the little-used Back Lane at a pull-in between two trees. He had probably just eaten or was consuming food when April rode into the lane behind him, and he saw his opportunity. He would probably have stopped her to ask directions, then perhaps quickly kicked her bicycle out of the way and, grabbing hold of her, he would have abducted her and driven off to an area where he could carry out what he has become infamous for. It now seems that he could virtually make children vanish into thin air.

  That Black did not have a driving licence at the time did not, as we have seen, stop him from driving. He had been driving many years without a licence and generally seems to have managed to escape trouble; he was a competent, experienced driver and – as Ray Wyre learnt from him in interviews for The Murder of Childhood, ‘His employment record has been substantially as a van driver, having had several jobs in the London area in this work.’ He therefore frequently had the use of a vehicle.

  Full details of April’s story and the hunt for her are in a book written and dedicated to her memory, by one of my ex-bosses, retired Detective Chief Superintendent Maurice Morson, who inherited the outstanding enquiry from Detective Chief Superintendent Reg Lester in 1983 when Reg retired. Dedicated to April’s memory, The Lost Years tests the original investigation.

  Until April and later Steven Newing who both went missing in 1969 with neither body being found locally, cases in the UK of abduction by a travelling paedophile were unknown, now there were two, one who targeted girls and the other boys. Prior to this, most cases of child murder that emerged from the 1960s were all committed in a radius around where the perpetrators resided – names that spring to mind are Ian Brady and Myra Hindley, Raymond Leslie Morris and Ronald Jebson

  During 1968 many police forces had amalgamated, including the former Norfolk Constabulary, which fused with the former Norwich City and Great Yarmouth Borough forces to become Norfolk Joint Police. At the same time the Collator or Local Intelligence Office (LIO) came into being as part of Unit Beat Policing, which replaced the ‘George Dixon’ types, thus supplanting the local village bobby’s knowledge of local people and criminals.

  As the name local intelligence implies, it comprises intelligence about local criminals and local crime patterns, but includes little or no sharing of information outside that division or sub-division; indeed most of what I, as a serving officer in the force, knew then about April’s disappearance came from the Norfolk newspaper, the Eastern Daily Press, popularly known as the EDP, and television.

  It took another six years and the Baumber Report to look seriously at the sharing of intelligence at force and regional level, and nothing was geared up for the professional travelling criminal and the likes of Peter Sutcliffe or Robert Black who recognised no invisible policing boundaries.

  April’s criminal abduction and murder, although listed for many years as a non-crime Missing Person enquiry without a crime file being raised, bears many resemblances to a number of other child-murders linked with Black that have been discussed in this book, in particular the 1971 attempted abduction of Jeanne Twigden, of which more below, the 1978 abduction of Genette Tate, and the 1981 abduction and murder of Jennifer Cardy. All four incidents involved young girls on bicycles in warm weather and rural settings. Following the disappearance of Genette Tate, Norfolk police were in contact with investigating officers in Devon, having noted the similarities between the two cases, but it took many more years before enough evidence could be collected in the case of Genette Tate, while April Fabb remains a cold case.

  13

  NEAR MISSES

  AN ALARMING ENCOUNTER

  In September 2014 a sixty-year-old woman I will refer to as J sent both Professor David Wilson and myself an e-mail stating that she had just seen a re-run of Professor Wilson’s 2012 documentary Killers Behind Bars, featuring Robert Black, on the internet. She could not watch all of the programme as she believed that she recognised Black from one of the photographs of him that were shown as being the man who tried to abduct her in April 1968 (I believe April 1969) when she was fifteen years old, and when Professor Wilson said, ‘There must have been others’, she was inspired to get in touch.

  J was cycling the two miles to her farmhouse home along very quiet lanes one evening from a riding school at St Lawrence near Bodmin in Cornwall on what was the A30/A389 crossroads, where there was a garage and café, She became aware of a car that kept overtaking her and stopping ahead and overtaking her again as though the driver was looking for somewhere or was lost.

  About halfway into her journey J noticed the same vehicle, now parked in a field gateway near a small bend in the lane, and as she neared it a man, the driver, appeared in the middle of the road and stopped her, saying he was looking for a particular farm. She told him that he had just passed it and tried to cycle on but was physically stopped by the man. She panicked and threw the bike down and ran but the man chased her and forced her back to his car. At that moment a car came onto the scene driven by a local farmer whom J knew and the man ran off. J was taken home by the farmer and the incident was reported to the local police. J later made a statement, but heard nothing more.

  J said to Professor Wilson in her e-mail to him, ‘Poor April Fabb and Genette Tate are often in my thoughts as they were on bikes … I never cycled the lanes again. If I could help in any way I would, I was stalked for several miles by a predator, it was not a chance meeting!’

  I subsequently had a long telephone conversation with J and through me she contacted the Devon and Cornwall Genette Tate team.

  THE JEANNE TWIGDEN CASE

  Up until the time of April Fabb’s disappearance and the next decade when Robert Black was on the prowl it was a rarity for children to be abducted and murdered. Any reports of children being enticed into vehicles after April’s case were regarded by all East Anglian Police Forces as demanding ‘high alert’ action and subsequent transmissions of intelligence to their neighbouring forces.

  Jeanne (who is now my wife) was nearly such a statistic and on this occasion certain members of Huntingdonshire Mid-Anglia Constabulary let her and the system down big-time. Her near-miss incident is what led to my personal journey in researching Robert Black and his early years from 1968 until 1976.

  During the spring of 1971 Jeanne was a shy, just-turned-fifteen-year-old girl who could easily pass for a ten-year-old. On one hot Sunday early afternoon in May she cycled from her home in Offord D’Arcy, situated between Huntingdon and St Neots in Cambridgeshire, with her swimming bag some five miles to the open-air baths at St Neots via the quiet B1043 road, seldom used by strangers as it is by-passed by the A1 Great North Road. One village along the road is Great Paxton, situated just off the main A1 and some 50 miles from London.

  After her swim and in the middle of the afternoon, Jeanne retraced her route back home for tea. When she was about a mile into her
journey and close to the outskirts of Great Paxton she came across a dog lead lying in the carriageway and being an animal lover stopped to look at it. It is quite apparent to me, looking back, that the lead had been deliberately placed there in order to attract her attention and make her stop, and that Black, unknown to Jeanne had already targeted her when driving past; he had then planted the lead, before turning around and driving back. She soon became aware of a blue Mini or van travelling in the opposite direction, which slowed down and stopped opposite her, the driver of which was intently staring at her legs.

  Jeanne started cycling fast towards Great Paxton, open fields on either side of her. The vehicle had turned and was now behind her, keeping pace before it came up beside her very slowly and then pulled in front still being driven slowly, forcing her to cycle at its pace – tactics very similar to those described by the woman I have called J.

  After about a minute it drove off towards Great Paxton to an area sheltered by trees and undergrowth and when Jeanne next saw the vehicle it was pulled sharply at an angle into a gateway field entrance near a left-hand bend and the driver was out of the vehicle and standing by the rear offside of the vehicle. She describes him as a small, thin-faced man, clean-shaven and not wearing spectacles. The description fits the young man that Robert Black was then, just turned twenty-four.