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Convicted Child Killer Robert Black 68, Who Kidnapped, Abused and Murdered Four Young Girls Has Died in Prison
- Notorious child killer Robert Black has died in prison of natural causes
- Black was found guilty in 1994 of three child murders in the 1980s
- In 2013 he was convicted of the murder of nine-year-old Jennifer Cardy
Daily Mail UK, 12 January 2016
Notorious child murderer Robert Black, who was jailed for life for killing four children in the 1980s, has died in prison.
Serial child killer Black, 68, originally of Grangemout h, in the Forth Valley, abducted and abused young girls from across the UK before murdering them and was serving 12 life sentences for his crimes.
The former delivery driver died of natural causes in Maghaberry prison in Northern Ireland.
Serial killer Robert Black, 68, of Grangemouth, Falkirk, who abducted and abused young girls from across the UK before murdering them, has died of natural causes in Maghaberry prison
In 1994 he was found guilty of three child murders carried out in the 1980s - those of 11-year-old Susan Maxwell, from the Scottish Borders, five-year-old Caroline Hogg, from Edinburgh, and Sarah Harper, 10, from Morley, near Leeds.
In 2013 he was convicted of the murder of nine-year-old Jennifer Cardy from Northern Ireland, who was snatched as she cycled to a friend's house in Ballinderry, County Antrim, Northern Ireland, in 1981.
Only UK Moors Murderers Ian Brady and Myra Hindley – whose five victims were aged between ten and 17 – killed more children in modern British criminal history.
Dunblane killer Thomas Hamilton killed 16 but he is not considered a serial killer as his massacre happened in one brutal day.
Victims: Susan Maxwell (pictured top) was 11 when she was killed by Black, Jennifer Cardy, was nine
In June 2014 police launched a new bid to charge Black with the murder of 13-year-old schoolgirl Genette Tate who disappeared 36 years ago.
Devon and Cornwall Police have long suspected Black of murdering Genette, who was last seen in a rural lane in Aylesbeare, Devon, in 1978.
No trace of the newspaper delivery girl has ever been found. All that remained at the scene were her bike and scattered papers.
His reign of terror finally ended in 1990 when he was caught red-handed with a six-year-girl hooded, bound, gagged and stuffed in a sleeping bag in the back of his van in the Scottish village of Stow.
He had sexually assaulted her moments earlier.
Eventually he was linked to as many as 40 different cases which were examined by police in the 1990s, and 12 further killings are understood to remain potentially linked to Black.
Other murders linked to Black include:
- April Fabb, aged 13, killed in Norfolk in 1969
- Christine Markham, six, S****horpe, Lincolnshire, 1973
- Mary Boyle, seven, from Ballyshannon, Co Donegal, 1977. Her body has never been found
- Susanne Lawrence, 14, Essex, 1979
- Pamela Hastie, 16, Johnstone, Scotland, 1981
- Patsy Morris, 14, Feltham, west London, 1990
In addition detectives in France are examining links between Black and the killings of four schoolgirls who were abducted near Paris in 1987, and a seven-year-old in Amsterdam in 1986.
Today, a NI Prison Service spokeswoman said: 'The Prison Service has confirmed that a 68-year-old prisoner has died at Maghaberry Prison.
'While this is not being treated as suspicious, the Prison Service has informed the PSNI, Coroner, and Prisoner Ombudsman. It would not be appropriate to comment further at this time.'
Murdered: Sarah Harper (pictured top) was 10 when she was killed. Caroline Hogg was just five
SORDID CHILD KILLER ROBERT BLACK TAKES SECRETS TO THE GRAVE
Robert Black, one of the UK's most notorious serial killers, has gone to the grave carrying many untold secrets from his murderous past.
Convicted of four child murders and range of other sex crimes, the delivery driver who stalked the roads of Britain and Ireland for his young victims has long been suspected of involvement in other unsolved disappearances.
He was born in 1947 near Falkirk in Scotland to single mother Jesse Hunter Black. The factory worker put her son up to be fostered within weeks.
The couple that took him in - the Tulips - were in their 50s and lived in Kinlochleven in the West Highlands.
Within 11 years both had died, and Black was placed in a children's home back in Falkirk.
Black was questioned by police about the disappearance of 13-year-old newspaper delivery girl Genette Tate
He claimed his desire to self-abuse and his fascination with young girls had already developed well before then.
In Falkirk his proclivity for sexual violence emerged when, as a 12-year-old, he was accused of trying to rape a young girl. No charges came of it, but Black was moved to an all-boys' home in Musselburgh as a result.
In that institution he claimed he was the victim of sexual abuse at the hands of a male staff member.
When in Musselburgh he would walk the short distance to Portobello to swim and work as a lifeguard at the coastal resort's swimming pools.
Twenty years later one of his victims, Caroline Hogg, would disappear close to those same pools.
When he turned 15, Black left the home in Musselburgh and moved west again, to Greenock, outside Glasgow.
A year later, in 1963, he faced the courts for the first time after molesting a seven-year-old girl in an abandoned air raid shelter.
He had lured her from a swing park with the promise of showing her a box of kittens. Instead he choked her to within an inch of her life and then violated her. He left her in the darkness, lying unconscious.
Yet he was not incarcerated for the crime, receiving only a caution for lewd and libidinous behaviour.
Black relocated back to Falkirk where he started dating his one and only girlfriend. They stayed together for a while and Black even asked her to marry him. She said no, and the relationship ended acrimoniously.
He harboured immense bitterness over the rejection from then on.
Black, pictured in 2010, after being found guilty of the murder of schoolgirl Jennifer Cardy at Armagh Court
Three years after attacking the girl in Greenock, and now working as a builder back in Kinlochleven, he was not so lucky with authorities after being reported for abusing the daughter of a couple he was lodging with.
In 1967 he was found guilty of three counts of indecent assault and sent to borstal in Polmont, outside Falkirk, for a year.
Black moved to London on his release and soon became immersed in the sordid world of under-the-counter child pornography.
Again he found work as a swimming pool attendant, where he could earn money while spying on young girls in their costumes.
Swimsuits were one of the paedophile's particular fetishes and behind the locked door of his rented room in north London he would squeeze himself into young girls' costumes and act out sordid sex acts.
A one-piece suit found in his van when he was finally captured in Stow in 1990 was sized to fit ages eight to 10.
In the 1970s, his lust for hard-core child porn took him on shopping trips to Copenhagen and then to Amsterdam.
The court heard he snatched nine-year-old Jennifer Cardy (pictured) as she cycled to a friend's house
Around this time he also obtained his driving licence, enabling him to secure a job with a London-based delivery firm in 1976.
In retrospect, this job turned out to be his means to facilitate his murderous reign. Delivering posters throughout the UK for more than a decade, he was able to roam the country as an anonymous van driver.
The back of his van became a lair where he would abuse himself and his victims with a vile stash of crudely-fashioned instruments.
A delivery run took him past Coldstream in 1982 when he snatched Susan Maxwell, then back to Portobello a year later when he stole Caroline Hogg from the promenade, and through Leeds in 1986 when he abducted Sarah Harper.
Robert Black would probably never have set foot in Northern Ireland in August 1981 if he had not been sent there to deliver posters for the start of new beer and cigarette campaigns.
It was there, on a rural road in Co Antrim, he snatched nine-year-old Jennifer Cardy as she cycled to a friend's house.
After being caught red-handed in Stow, with a barely conscious victim hooded and gagged in the back of his Ford Transit, he insisted that was his only 'slip' - the only time he ever kidnapped a young girl in his van.
Of course, that was a lie. Four murder convictions followed.
Detectives across the country have spent the last 25 years trying to find firm evidence to link Black to other unexplained disappearances.
Police investigating the case of missing 13-year-old Genette Tate, who was last seen in a rural lane in Aylesbeare, Devon, in 1978, perhaps came closest to bringing another murder charge.
Black died in jail, but many families will feel he never faced full justice.