Robert Black was born in Grangemouth on April 21, 1947, to an unmarried mother, was fostered, and after her death at eleven was moved through children's homes where he was abused. He had convictions for indecent assault on children from 1963 onwards, one of which produced only an admonition and another a year in borstal. Other children called him Smelly Bob.
From 1976 he worked as a van driver for a poster delivery company in London, on routes that took him across the whole of Britain, several hundred miles a day, with no fixed schedule and nobody checking where he was. That job is the case: it explains how one man could take a child in Northumberland, another in Edinburgh and another in Nottinghamshire, and leave each body hundreds of miles from where she was taken.
Jennifer Cardy, nine, disappeared in County Antrim in August 1981. Susan Maxwell, eleven, disappeared at Coldstream in July 1982 and was found in Staffordshire. Caroline Hogg, five, disappeared from Portobello in Edinburgh in July 1983 and was found in Leicestershire. Sarah Harper, ten, disappeared in Morley in Leeds in March 1986 and was found in the River Trent in Nottinghamshire.
On July 14, 1990, in Stow in the Scottish Borders, a man saw a van driver grab a six-year-old girl off the street and bundle her in. He took the registration and stopped the van when it came back through the village. The child was in a sleeping bag in the back, alive. The man who had raised the alarm was her neighbour; her father was a police officer in the village.
Black was convicted of that abduction and, in 1994 at Newcastle, of the murders of Maxwell, Hogg and Harper. In 2011 he was convicted in Northern Ireland of the murder of Jennifer Cardy. He was suspected of others across Britain and in continental Europe, where his deliveries had also taken him, and admitted nothing. He died of a heart attack at Maghaberry prison on January 12, 2016.