by Chris Clark
One of his regular parking spaces was the old Cope yard behind Big John’s Bar (now called the Bridge Inn) in Dungloe. This yard is a regular truck stop, an open place guarded by the sea on one side and a warehouse on the other. Time and again Black and a regular group of innocent friends would go out together by car but however many of them there were he never offered anyone a lift or even took his van. On one occasion his van was already in the car park when they arrived and one of the girls approached the van and she thought she heard a crying sound coming from within; she assumed it might be a pet. Black wasn’t in the van on this occasion, neither did he have a pet.
On another occasion, as they were leaving Big John’s, one of the girls headed towards the van and she was followed hurriedly by Black who became very aggressive and reprimanded her harshly for having gone anywhere near it. He seemed suddenly supercharged with hostility and she was frightened by his overwrought reaction.
The year after Mary Boyle disappeared, an exchange took place that is particularly sickening with hindsight, reported in the Irish Independent on 16 May 1999.
[It was during] a conversation that occurred on one of his visits to a bar in Dungloe. One of the girls innocently referred to the Mary Boyle murder a year previously, and Black asked if some of the girls would show him where her house was. ‘I want to see where her twin sister lives,’ he said. When they declined, he became enraged and agitated. He was very insistent about them showing him the house. Thinking that he had a strange obsession with dead people, they refused to bring him.
On top of all of this information there is a conversation that Black himself had in a London pub in 1983, as reported to me by ‘John’ (see p. 269). In this conversation he spoke of girls murdered, and mentioned two Irish girls, one of them Jennifer Cardy, whom he was later convicted of murdering. The other one he referred to has to be Mary Boyle as there were no others.
On 27 July 2014 I appeared on a live linkup with Mary Boyle’s mother Ann Boyle on Highland Radio, Donegal; the full interview and Ann’s views on the subject are within an article under ‘Radio Interviews’ on my website (www.armchairdetective.org.uk). Ann Boyle was pleased with my input but having heard a number of different theories on what may have happened to Mary has confused her over the years.
Since the broadcast, however, Mary’s twin sister appears to be focusing on a more localised suspect and in 2016 she was engaging her energy in persuading the Garda to reinvestigate Mary’s case as murder and hold an inquest with her suspect in mind. As much as I respect the family’s views in this case, there appears to be quite strong evidence from various other sources freely available on the internet and elsewhere to lead me to the belief and conclusion that Black has to be the common denominator in what happened to Mary.
I mentioned above that it is known that Black was in Enniskillen on 18 March 1977, delivering and helping to put up posters. Cashelard is only about 30 miles west of there, a half-hour’s drive along the Lough Shore Road. There is also the petrol receipt discovered by British police in 1994 that shows that he bought petrol somewhere in Northern Ireland in March 1977.
Other interesting testimonies that point to Black’s involvement in the disappearance of little Mary Boyle include reports of a white van in the area. Indeed, Ann Boyle, Mary’s mother, herself said that on the day Mary vanished, she saw a white van drive down the road away from the house.
In 2015, Tosh Lavery, a retired Garda diver, published a memoir, Tosh: An Amazing True Story of Life, Death, Danger and Drama in the Garda Sub-Aqua Unit. He writes about the Mary Boyle case:
On the day of her disappearance, there were three brothers poaching from the lakeshore, the postman was doing his rounds in a white van, while another van was also seen in the area. A man cutting timber across the road [from the lake] said he saw a white van go past … A girl standing at Cashelard graveyard with her father and a local man saw a white van come flying round the corner and said that the man driving the van had a priest’s collar on him, remarking that he looked like ‘the kind of priest you wouldn’t visit’…
So there is continuity of sightings of an unknown white van on the afternoon of 18 March 1977, travelling from the southern end of Cashelard from Belleek Road by Columbkille Lough past the Gallagher and McCauley homesteads to the northern end, travelling at speed past witnesses at St Mary’s Church, Cashelard, heading towards the N15 and Donegal which route then continues along the N56 to Annagry.
When I spoke to Robert, my co-author, about this, he was quick to remind me of the 1980 photograph of Robert Black wearing a pullover with white piping around the neck, which at a quick glance would look like a priest’s dog collar. Knowing Black’s lifestyle and lack of care about his personal appearance and hygiene, it is quite likely that he already had this item of clothing some three years previously, in 1977.
16
TWO MORE DISAPPEARANCES
THE GENETTE TATE CASE
Thirteen-year-old Genette Tate vanished into thin air just after 3.45 on the afternoon of Saturday, 19 August 1978 whilst in the middle of holiday relief work delivering newspapers in Withen Lane in Aylesbeare, a quiet village situated in East Devon just off the main A30 Honiton-to-Exeter road some three miles south-east of Exeter Airport and less than five miles from the M5 motorway, which to the north links with the M4 that runs eastwards to London and westwards to Wales. Just five minutes previously Genette, or ‘Ginny’ as her friends called her, had been chatting happily a short distance away around a bend with two school friends just as April Fabb had stopped to talk with friends at the donkey field. One of the girls asked Genette for her mother’s paper before she cycled off round the bend and out of sight. That was the last time anyone saw Genette, apart from her abductor. Five minutes later the girls came across Genette’s cycle abandoned in the middle of Withen Lane and the contents of her bag, newspapers, lay scattered in the road; Genette had vanished off the face of the earth.
Launching what was to become the biggest operation ever mounted by the Devon and Cornwall Constabulary, all available resources were activated in the search for Genette Tate.
Immediately officers were rushed to Aylesbeare, an RAF helicopter was called in and the massive investigation to find out what happened to Genette was under way.
The village hall was taken over as an incident room and for the next six weeks more than eighty officers combed the fields and woodlands within a five-mile radius of the village. They were joined by Royal Marines and during one Saturday afternoon more than 7,000 members of the public responded to an appeal for help in searching nearby Woodbury Common.
Further helicopters, an RAF reconnaissance aircraft equipped with the latest photographic equipment, mounted officers from Avon and Somerset, and police dogs from West Mercia specially trained to sniff out human remains, all joined the search, covering hundreds of acres.
The Force Sub-Aqua Unit mounted an operation to explore 387 gravel pits, ponds, wells and streams in the area. Hundreds of barns, ricks and silage pits were thoroughly searched and acres of undergrowth cleared as the hunt widened.
A team of seventy divisional and regional Crime Squad detectives mounted intensive enquiries in and around Aylesbeare, nationally and abroad.
Senior detectives from Norfolk and Devon and Cornwall forces conferred on the close similarities between Genette’s disappearance and that of April Fabb some nine years before.
For many months Genette’s disappearance attracted tremendous local and national publicity. Pictures of the missing girl and the story of her disappearance reached almost every town and village in Britain through newspapers, television, radio and (ironically, considering Black’s employment) thousands of posters issued by the force.
One local television station set up a special telephone line inviting the public to call with information, but not a single clue as to Genette’s whereabouts emerged.
The teams of searchers were eventually disbanded and the incident room switched from Aylesbeare to Heavitree Road Police Station in Ex
eter. Detectives continued the painstaking work of sifting through the masses of information that had accumulated, in the hope that somewhere they might find the key to the mystery. Eventually, the Missing Person enquiry ground to a halt and was wound down after amassing more than 20,000 nominal and motor vehicle cards in the indexed filing system.
In 2002 DNA belonging to Genette was found on a jumper kept by her mother, which would allow her body to be identified quickly if discovered. During 2005 some twenty-eight years after her disappearance, fifteen years after Black’s arrest and imprisonment for abduction, and eleven years after his triple convictions for murder, Robert Black was finally investigated by Devon and Cornwall’s newly set up Cold Case Team and interviewed in prison over Genette’s kidnapping. He denied any involvement. In 2008 Devon and Cornwall announced that Black would not face charges in the case of Genette Tate.
During 2011, following Black’s conviction for the thirty-year-old murder of Jennifer Cardy, Devon and Cornwall Police were given fresh hope and impetus in Genette’s case.
Their Criminal Cases Review Unit have been slowly building a case against Black and he was again interviewed at the end of 2014 and once again during 2015. The matter was being decided by the CPS Complex Case Unit as to whether they had enough evidence to prosecute Black for Genette’s abduction and murder when he died in prison.
On 25 October 2016 BBC News reported that Black was the ‘only suspect’ in the case, but died only days before he could be charged. Her parents have now been shown a 500-page dossier of evidence. Genette’s father John Tate said the report contained information gathered by experienced former officers from Devon and Cornwall Police. Mr Tate who lived in the village of Aylesbeare when Genette disappeared, said: ‘I am now convinced that Robert Black was the culprit.’… Black always denied any involvement in Genette’s disappearance, but interestingly new information includes a ‘jail confession’ to a member of prison staff. In a conversation, Black mentioned to the staff member that he had visited Aylesbeare. The staff member replied that he had not heard of it and asked, ‘Aylesbury?’ But Black stressed it was ‘Aylesbeare’.
Black was particularly attracted to girls on bikes as they were vulnerable and made easy targets because they could roam away from village centres. It is highly improbable that Genette was his first murder victim when he was thirty-five years old considering the acts he committed when he was a sixteen years old.
There are some close similarities between the abduction and disappearance of April Fabb, the attempted abduction of Jeanne Twigden, the abduction and disappearance of Genette Tate and the abduction and murder of Jennifer Cardy. Of the classic trio that provide a basis for crime detection –Means (or Method), Motive and Opportunity – all that is missing is opportunity in two of these cases. These two cases (April Fabb and Jeanne Twigden) having been committed prior to Black’s employment with PDS, there is no evidence of opportunity in that it is not known whether or not he was in the area. In Jennifer Cardy’s 1981 case opportunity was established by Black’s employment record and fuel receipts placing him in Northern Ireland at the time of her disappearance.
There is, however, strong circumstantial evidence in the shape of petrol receipts and witness statements to place Black in Exeter, less than 10 miles from Aylesbeare, on Saturday, 19 August 1978 and during the school summer holiday; additionally, in 1996 a woman came forward and told police that she recognised Black from newspaper photographs as being the man she had seen at Exeter Airport, only a few short miles from Aylesbeare, leaning against a red Transit-style van watching her children, on the day Genette vanished; he had then driven off towards Aylesbeare. The woman made up an e-fit and it bore a striking resemblance to how Black looked then. A red Transit van was one of the few vehicles to come into the Genette Tate enquiry and was seen leaving the village at speed around the time of Genette’s abduction.
This, coupled with similar fact evidence, if put before a jury as a kidnapping, as in the Cardy, Maxwell, Hogg, Harper murders, should in my opinion have been sufficient to convict Black on a charge of kidnapping and then be assessed as to whether a conviction for the murder of Genette would be safe. But once again, he escaped justice, when in April 2016 the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) said Black would not be charged as it does not charge dead suspects.
THE SUZANNE LAWRENCE CASE
During the summer holiday of 1979, on Saturday, 28 July, fourteen-year-old Suzanne Lawrence, a pupil at Neave Comprehensive School, left her home in Leamington Road, Harold Hill near Romford in Essex with her younger sister Michelle, aged thirteen, saying they were going to stay with a girlfriend in Dagenham, some seven miles away.
Michelle returned home on Tuesday 7 August without Suzanne and told her mother Pauline Lawrence that they had been staying at someone’s home in Highbury, North London. Pauline told the Romford Recorder, published Friday, 10 August 1979: ‘Michelle has been back with the police to Highbury but she cannot remember the house where they stayed or even the surname of the girl they were staying with. Suzanne has never done anything like this before, we have not had any arguments. She is only fourteen but likes wearing make-up and looks a lot older than she actually is. I will not be able to stop worrying until she is back safe and sound.’
That same article stated that police had stepped up their hunt for Suzanne who by then had been missing from home for three weeks, and were working on the theory that Suzanne could have joined up with a travelling fair after one of her brother’s friends reported seeing her at a North London fair in Highbury Fields. The police stated: ‘Suzanne has some connections with fairgrounds and we are making several enquiries along these lines.’
On Friday, 24 August 1979 the Romford Recorder printed an article under the banner ‘Police Fear for Girl’s Safety’: ‘Police say they are gravely concerned for the safety of a 14-year-old Harold Hill girl who has been missing for four weeks. A massive search for Suzanne Lawrence of Leamington Road has drawn a blank, and her natural father, who lives in Surrey, is appealing for her to contact him.’
Two thoughts on Suzanne being yet another victim of Robert Black are:
That she was last seen at Highbury Field Funfair only a mile and a half from Black’s haunts and on the doorstep of the A1 and A12, both roads Black used for deliveries to the north and the east. Funfairs, like playgrounds and the seaside, were favoured by Black as places to observe children playing about. In all likelihood, Suzanne would have been hitchhiking back to Harold Hill and he could have offered to give her a lift.
And that the local newspaper, the Romford Recorder was the only newspaper that ran Suzanne’s disappearance, yet some four years later during a conversation Black had in the Red Lion pub, Stoke Newington, in 1983 he mentioned, in the course of talking about better-known cases of abducted and murdered girls, a girl from Essex who was murdered – this has to have been Suzanne, an obscure case going back some four years. Working on the premise that Suzanne would have been hitchhiking back to her home and Black gave her a lift, there would have been conversation prior to his finding a suitable isolated location in which to attack her, so he would have known at least her name.
During a senior police conference held in Newcastle in July 1994 to discuss other unsolved cases possibly victims of Black, the name of Suzanne Lawrence was added to the list.
17
ACROSS THE CHANNEL
THE SILKE GARBEN CASE
Silke Garben, aged ten years, was last seen on 20 June 1985 in the garrison town of Detmold in Germany on her way to a dentist’s appointment. She was a very pretty child – similar in looks to Jennifer Cardy although with lighter-coloured hair. She failed to turn up for her appointment and it seems certain that she was snatched on her way there.
She was found the next day, face down, dumped in a stream near the army base and had been sexually assaulted and strangled, just like Jennifer Cardy and Sarah Harper, and, strikingly, she died of drowning but was most probably alive though unconscious when dumped in the wa
ter – like Jennifer and Sarah. Silke, like Sarah, had been subjected to a brutal sexual assault with horrific vaginal/anal injuries, the pathologist reporting a 6-centimetre tear in her vagina.
The details of the murder, injuries and disposal of her body are almost identical to the modus operandi used by Black, who made two trips to Germany that year, one of which coincided with Silke’s abduction and murder. He was working in Essen, and Detmold is 105 miles towards Hanover. Black’s main route whilst in Germany was from Hanover in the north-east to Essen in the south-west, using the German A2 motorway that links the two with another garrison along the way at Herford, which is only 18 miles from Detmold off the A2 at this point.
In 1985 British forces had large garrison towns at Herford, Paderborn and Gütersloh, all situated in a 20-mile radius of Detmold, so it is quite conceivable that Black would have been dropping off advertising posters for alcohol and cigarette at most if not all four towns, as well as the North Rhine-Westphalia base at Mönchengladbach near Essen and Osnabrück north-east of Detmold and Hohne near Hanover.
Edward and Kathy Rayson moved to the Dordogne in France during the mid-1980s and Robert Black was known to visit them; he also had access to a caravan in France.
In 1987 in the space of a few weeks four girls were abducted and murdered during May and June around the suburbs of Paris, which (with the help of a French translator), I detail below.
THE VIRGINIE DELMAS CASE
On Saturday, 9 May 1987, some time after 3 p.m., ten-year-old Virginie Delmas went down to play with friends in front of the block of flats where she lived in Neuilly-sur-Marne in the Seine-Saint-Denis suburb of Paris. It was the first time she’d been allowed out on her own by her protective mother but she would be nearby, just a few floors down, and it was a sunny afternoon with many people around. When Virginie did not show up later, her mother went down to look for her. There was no sign of the girl – her friends had not seen her – she had disappeared without anyone noticing. Her mother called the police. It was thought most likely that she had been abducted in a motor vehicle.