On the afternoon of July 14, 1990, David Herkes, a fifty-three-year-old retired postmaster, was mowing his front lawn in Stow, in the Scottish Borders, when a blue Transit van stopped across the road. As he bent to clear grass from the mower he saw the feet of his neighbor's six-year-old daughter lift off the pavement, and when he straightened up the driver was pushing something through the passenger door and climbing across to the wheel. Herkes took the registration as the van pulled away and ran to the girl's house. Within minutes six police cars were in the village. While Herkes was describing the van to officers it came back down the road toward them, and he shouted that it was the same one. An officer stepped into its path. One of the policemen was the girl's father. He climbed into the back calling her name, saw something move in a sleeping bag, and untied it to find his daughter with her wrists bound behind her back, her legs tied, her mouth taped with sticking plaster and a hood tied over her head.
The driver was Robert Black, forty-three, who delivered posters for a firm in Hoxton, in East London. In the car to Selkirk police station he said it had been "a rush of blood to the head," that he had always liked little girls, and that he had tied her up to keep her until he had dropped off a parcel and then meant to let her go. A doctor found she had been seriously sexually assaulted, and she was able to show police the lay-by on the A7 where it had happened. His last delivery of the day was scheduled for Galashiels. A medical expert later told the court she would probably have suffocated inside the sleeping bag within fifteen minutes. For eight years detectives from six police forces had been hunting a man who took girls off the street in a van and left their bodies far to the south.
Black was born in Grangemouth, Stirlingshire, on April 21, 1947, the illegitimate son of Jessie Hunter Black and a father nobody identified. His mother had planned to have him adopted before she emigrated to Australia. The adoption never happened, and at six months he was placed with Jack and Margaret Tulip, a middle-aged foster couple in Kinlochleven, whose name he used while he lived with them. He wet the bed and later said his foster mother beat him for it; at school he was bullied and bullied smaller children in turn, and classmates called him Smelly Bobby Tulip. By 1958 both Tulips were dead. Placed with another family in Kinlochleven, he dragged a young girl into a public lavatory and fondled her, and his new foster mother had him removed. From a mixed children's home near Falkirk, where he exposed himself to girls, he was sent to the Red House Care Home in Musselburgh, a strict home for boys where he was Boy Number 28, and where for three years a male member of staff sexually abused him.
In the summer of 1963, working as a butcher's delivery boy in Greenock, he lured a seven-year-old girl into a disused air-raid shelter with a promise of kittens, held her by the throat until she passed out and masturbated over her. He was charged with lewd and libidinous behavior the next day. A psychiatrist decided it was an isolated incident, and the court let him go with an admonition. In 1966 the elderly couple he lodged with in Grangemouth found he had been molesting their nine-year-old granddaughter on her visits; they put him out and did not call the police. Back in Kinlochleven he lodged with a couple whose daughter was six, and within a year they reported him. He pleaded guilty to three counts of indecent assault and served a year at Polmont Borstal. He would talk freely about everything else in his childhood, the abuse at Musselburgh included, but about Polmont he said only that he had sworn never to be locked up again. That 1967 case was the last conviction on his record for twenty-three years.
He moved to London in September 1968, to a bedsit near King's Cross, and drifted through casual work; a job as a lifeguard at a pool in Hornsey ended when he was caught fondling a girl, and no charge followed. Through a contact at a King's Cross bookshop he began collecting child pornography, and he photographed girls at swimming pools himself, keeping it all in locked suitcases. At the Three Crowns in Stoke Newington he was known as a good darts player, and there he met Edward and Kathy Rayson, a Scottish couple who in 1972 let him their attic in Stamford Hill. They found him a quiet tenant with poor hygiene, and he was still living there on the day he was arrested.
In 1976 he took a permanent job driving for Poster, Dispatch and Storage Ltd, whose vans carried pop posters and billboard advertising across Britain and into Europe. His employers thought him conscientious; he volunteered for the long runs that married drivers did not want. He learned the road network of the whole country. He changed his appearance from run to run, growing a beard, shaving it off, sometimes shaving his head, and he owned more than a dozen pairs of glasses. The rear windows of his van were covered with black curtains.
At 1:40 on the afternoon of August 12, 1981, Jennifer Cardy, nine, set off on her bicycle to a friend's house in Ballinderry, County Antrim, and never arrived. Her bicycle was found less than a mile from home, hidden under branches and leaves, its stand down, as if she had stopped to talk to someone. Six days later two anglers found her body in a reservoir beside a lay-by at Hillsborough, sixteen miles away, near the main road between Belfast and Dublin that delivery drivers used. She had been sexually assaulted and had drowned, most likely while being strangled with a ligature. Her watch had stopped at 5:40. Nobody would be charged with her murder for twenty-eight years.
Susan Claire Maxwell, eleven, lived in Cornhill-on-Tweed, on the English side of the border. On July 30, 1982, she walked home from a game of tennis in Coldstream and was last seen at 4:30 crossing the bridge over the Tweed. At the peak of the search three hundred officers went through every property in Cornhill and Coldstream and eighty square miles of country around them. On August 12 a truck driver found her body under undergrowth in a copse beside the A518 near Uttoxeter, in Staffordshire, 264 miles away. She had been bound and gagged with sticking plaster, and her underwear had been removed and folded under her head. Black's schedule that day took him to Edinburgh, Dundee and finally Glasgow near midnight, and he drove back to London the next day, so she was in his van, alive or dead, for more than twenty-four hours. A colleague suspected him and asked him about it. Black lied, and the colleague never went to the police.
On the early evening of July 8, 1983, Caroline Hogg, five, was playing outside her home on Beach Lane in Portobello, in Edinburgh. Witnesses saw an unkempt, balding man in horn-rimmed glasses watching her. Jennifer Booth, fourteen, saw Caroline sitting on a bench with him and heard her answer "Yes please" to something he asked before they walked off hand in hand to a fairground on the promenade, where he paid fifteen pence for her to ride the carousel. A witness said she looked frightened when they left at about 7:30. Two thousand volunteers and fifty soldiers of the Royal Scots Fusiliers searched Portobello and then the whole city, the largest search Scotland had then seen. On July 18 her naked body was found in a ditch near the M1 at Twycross, in Leicestershire, 310 miles from home and twenty-four miles from where Susan Maxwell had been left. Black had delivered to Bedworth, nearby, on July 12, and insects on the body showed it had been put there on or after that day.
Detectives from Staffordshire and Leicestershire agreed that one man had killed both girls and that he probably drove for a living. Hector Clark, assistant chief constable of Northumbria, was put in overall charge. The Maxwell inquiry alone had produced 500,000 index cards, and Clark, knowing how the Yorkshire Ripper hunt had drowned in paper, moved the work onto computer. In January 1987 the files went into the new HOLMES system, paid for with £250,000 from the Home Office; it came to hold information on more than 189,000 people and 220,000 vehicles and on interviews with over 60,000 people.
At about 7:50 on the evening of March 26, 1986, Sarah Jayne Harper, ten, left her home on Brunswick Place in Morley, Leeds, to buy a loaf from a corner shop a hundred yards away. The shopkeeper sold her a Warburtons loaf and two packets of chips, gave her twenty pence for two empty lemonade bottles, and noticed an overweight, balding man come in just after her and leave again. Two girls saw Sarah walk into the alley that led toward home. When she had not returned by 8:20, her mother, Jackie, and her younger sister, Claire, went looking. On April 3 Jackie Harper told a press conference that she believed her daughter was dead: "I just want her back, even if she's dead." On April 19 a man found Sarah's body, bound and gagged, in the River Trent near Nottingham, seventy-one miles from Morley. She had been violently sexually assaulted, struck on the face and head, and thrown into the water, probably unconscious, where she drowned between five and eight hours after she was last seen. The pathologist called her internal injuries "simply terrible." Black's last two deliveries that day had been in Brighouse and then in Morley, at a firm 150 yards from the Harpers' home, and he had bought fuel between the two shortly before she disappeared. Her murder was formally linked to the others in November 1986.
The hunt now covered six forces, and it kept missing him. To narrow the field, every force was asked to list men convicted of serious sexual offenses against children within ten years of Susan Maxwell's death. That produced 40,000 names, and Black's was not among them, because his only conviction dated from 1967. On April 24, 1988, in the Radford district of Nottingham, a man in a blue Transit stopped ahead of Teresa Thornhill, fifteen but small for her age, raised the hood and asked her if she could fix engines. When she walked on he grabbed her from behind and tried to carry her into the van. She kicked, squeezed his testicles and bit his forearm, and her friend Andrew Beeston came running and shouting; the man dropped her in the road and drove off. Nottinghamshire Police never reported the attempt to the national inquiry.
On August 10, 1990, Black pleaded guilty at the High Court in Edinburgh to abducting and assaulting the girl from Stow. Lord Ross gave him life, called it "a horrific, appalling case," and praised David Herkes from the bench. In the van police had found ropes, sticking plaster, hoods, a Polaroid camera, girls' clothing, a mattress and sex aids; Black said that on long runs he would pull into lay-bys and put on the children's clothes. His attic in Stamford Hill held fifty-eight videos and films of child sexual abuse, more children's clothing, six pairs of glasses and a copy of a Nottingham newspaper reporting the attempt on Teresa Thornhill. Two weeks after the plea, detectives Andrew Watt and Roger Orr interviewed him for six hours. He admitted sexually assaulting more than thirty girls since the 1960s and went silent whenever they came near the murders. When they laid a composite drawing of the man at the Portobello fairground beside photographs of him from the early 1980s, his answers shrank to single words. Clark told them afterward: "That's our man. I'd bet my life on it."
Proving it took four more years. Black paid for fuel with company credit cards and claimed the receipts as expenses, and the firm still had them, along with old delivery schedules. Detectives then obtained seven million fuel slips on microfiche from the oil companies the firm dealt with, covering 1982 to 1986, and in an incident room in Newcastle upon Tyne officers went through them looking for his signature. From October 1990 they began to find it, at filling stations near each abduction site, timed shortly before or after each girl vanished. They also learned that on his way back to London he often slept at a house in Donisthorpe, in Leicestershire, that belonged to his landlord's son, close to where all three bodies had been left. By the time the case went to prosecutors the file was estimated to weigh twenty-two tons, and the inquiry had cost about £12 million.
His trial was held at the Moot Hall in Newcastle. On May 19, 1994, the jury convicted him of three kidnappings, three murders and three counts of preventing the lawful burial of a body, and of the attempted abduction of Teresa Thornhill. Mr. Justice Macpherson gave him life on each count, with a recommended minimum of thirty-five years on the murders, and said the crimes represented "a man at his most vile." As Black left the dock he turned to the detectives who had hunted him and said, "Tremendous. Well done, boys." Several of them wept. The Court of Appeal, under Lord Taylor, refused him leave on February 20, 1995, after a single day. That July, at Wakefield prison, two inmates threw boiling water and sugar over him, beat him with a table leg and stabbed him in the back and neck; he was not seriously hurt, and both men got three more years.
Northern Ireland detectives went back to the firm's records for Jennifer Cardy and searched 560,000 fuel receipts. Black was charged in December 2009 and went on trial at Armagh Crown Court on September 22, 2011, before Mr. Justice Weatherup, accepting that he may have been in Northern Ireland that day and denying the murder. The prosecutor, Toby Hedworth, told the jury his signature on the receipts was as good as a confession. A salary ledger showed he had been paid the £50 the firm gave only to drivers who went to Northern Ireland; during the Troubles he was one of two drivers willing to make the trip, and the records cleared the other. An order book showed a delivery due near Ballinderry that day, and the receipts showed him taking the overnight ferry to Liverpool and filling up in Coventry the next day. The jury took four hours to convict him on October 27, 2011. On December 8 the judge set a minimum of twenty-five years, telling him he had subjected "a vulnerable child to unpardonable terror and took away her life." His own counsel, David Spens, said there was no mitigation and offered none.
Black never admitted any of the killings. Ray Wyre, who treated sex offenders and interviewed him several times between 1990 and 1993, said that what Black knew was the one form of power he still had over the victims' families, and he would not give it up. Senior detectives believed he had killed at least eight children. In 2008 the Crown Prosecution Service said there was not enough evidence to charge him with any more, and police linked him to at least fourteen further child murders and disappearances in Britain, Ireland, France, Germany and the Netherlands between 1969 and 1989. When he died he was still the prime suspect in the 1978 disappearance and murder of Genette Tate, thirteen.
He died of a heart attack at HMP Maghaberry, in Northern Ireland, on January 12, 2016, at sixty-eight. He was cremated at Roselawn, outside Belfast, on January 29. No family or friends came; the prison's Presbyterian chaplain read from Psalm 90. His ashes were scattered at sea that February.