There was now a three-year gap until the next murder in the series of child killings that was already being dubbed by the press as the most horrific since the Moors Murders. On 26 March 1986, ten-year-old Sarah Harper was the third little girl to be taken. Sarah lived in Morley, Leeds, which was further south than the two other girls, but still in the north of England. At eight o’clock that evening just as Coronation Street was ending, Sarah’s mother, Jacki, asked if one of her children would go to the corner shop and buy a loaf of bread. Sarah volunteered to go. Taking £1 from her mother and picking up two empty lemonade bottles to get the deposit on them, Sarah left her home in Brunswick Place to go to K&M Stores on Peel Street, just over a hundred yards from her house.

At K & M the proprietor, Mrs Champaneri, clearly remembers Sarah coming in. The girl returned the lemonade bottles, and bought a loaf of white bread and two packets of crisps. She left the shop at five past eight and shortly afterwards two girls who knew her saw Sarah walking home towards the ‘snicket’, an alley used by locals as a short cut. Then, like Susan and Caroline, she disappeared.

At about 8.15 Jacki started to worry, as the journey should have only taken Sarah five minutes. Although Jacki thought that Sarah was probably just “dawdling” or eating crisps in the alley, she sent Sarah’s sister, Claire, out to look for her. When Claire came back with no news of her sister, the family went out in the car to search for her. At nine o'clock the police were called and once again searches and inquiries were swiftly set into motion. Once again they proved fruitless.

On 19 April David Moult remembers how he was walking his dog by the River Trent in Nottingham when he spotted “something floating in the river. I thought it was a piece of sacking then the current turned it round and I realised it was a body.” Using a stick, Moult managed to drag the body over to the side of the river bank. He then called the police. It was later determined that Sarah Harper had been put in the river at around junction 24 of the M1 when she was still alive. The pathologist who examined her body described the injuries, which had been inflicted pre-mortem, as “terrible”. As Ray Wyre later described it, “Sarah’s assailant had violently explored both her vagina and her anus.”

Jacki Harper, like Liz Maxwell, vividly remembers being told of the discovery of her daughter’s body.

“All he [the officer] could say was ‘Would you like to make a cup of tea?’ And all I kept saying was ‘Will you tell me what you have to tell me?’ I knew why they were there - it was obvious. But he wouldn’t tell me: he just kept going on about this bloody tea. All I wanted him to say was ‘Yes, we’ve found her.’”

It fell to Terry Harper - Sarah’s father, Jacki’s ex-husband - to identify his daughter’s body: “It was worse than I ever dreamed of”, he said.

Although Hector Clark was careful to keep an open mind, he believed at the time that Sarah’s abduction and murder was not connected to those of Susan and Caroline. The differences, he said, outweighed the similarities. Susan and Caroline were both abducted on hot July days, in colourful summer clothes; Sarah was abducted on a cold, dark, rainy night in March, her small body covered with an anorak. Both Coldstream and Portobello are on, or near, main roads, commonly used routes through which many travellers pass; Morley is not the sort of place you go without a reason. This initially lead Clark to believe that Sarah’s abduction was committed by a local man who knew the area well.

In retrospect, however, the similarities, although perhaps fewer in number, were certainly more telling. All of the victims were young girls who had been skilfully abducted from public places for a sexual purpose. They were all driven south and murdered, their bodies dumped in the Midlands, within 26 miles of each other. Sarah may have been subjected to a more vicious attack than the other two girls (although the evidence is inconclusive), but if anything this pointed to, and not away from, the same offender being responsible. In serial murders the attacks frequently get more violent as they go along (this is true of Peter Sutcliffe, for instance) as the killer gains confidence and needs more and more acts of violation and mutilation to keep him aroused. Therefore it would not be surprising if the murder of Sarah Harper was more extreme in its sexual brutality than the murders of Susan Maxwell and Caroline Hogg.

Initially the investigation into Sarah Harper's murder was conducted as a separate inquiry, led by Detective Superintendent John Stainthorpe of the West Yorkshire police. Yet close links were maintained to the joint Maxwell/Hogg inquiry in order to keep all avenues of approach open. The same painstaking inquiries were made in the case of Sarah Harper as had been with Susan and Caroline. House-to-house inquiries were conducted, people who had seen a white van parked by and near Sarah's house were interviewed, and an artist’s impression of a strange man who was seen on the street and in K&M Stores was circulated. LIO's were again asked to draw up lists of men who had committed similar offences, and they were all interviewed.

Yet this time the police had an advantage as by now the Home Office Large Major Enquiry System had been established. HOLMES had been donated to the West Yorkshire police after the Yorkshire Ripper ‘fiasco’, and it was utilised from the first day of the Sarah Harper investigation. The system was designed to efficiently log, process, collate and compare information at the press of a switch. Once all the data from the investigation had been fed in to HOLMES, names of possible suspects or vehicle registration numbers, for instance, could be fed into the system, which would instantly tell the user whether the name or vehicle had come up previously in the investigation.

Despite this new technological efficiency, however, the police were getting no further in their investigation. Ultimately no matter how sophisticated HOLMES was, if the name of the offender was not stored anywhere in its memory it was useless. The police were relying on their killer’s name being in the system; if it was, then the right questions to HOLMES would then unearth him. Failing this, the computer was reduced to an efficient storage container. It would not identify a murderer.

After eight months of the Sarah Harper inquiry had lapsed, Her Majesty's Inspector of Constabulary decided that all three cases should be linked and that one database ought to be established. This was a gargantuan task. The Maxwell investigation had never been computerised at all; the Hogg investigation had been, as had the Harper, yet the programmes were incompatible. All three complete investigations had to be inputted, with the necessary conversions, into one database. The process took three years: in July of 1990 the task was finally complete.

It transpired however, that there was no opportunity to test the effectiveness of a single database. Once again, as in previous serial murder investigations, luck was to prove a key factor in apprehension. As Clark said, "Once we had exhausted all our lines of inquiry the best chance of catching the man responsible was if he struck again." Clark added, "My biggest hope, however, was that he would be caught before he went too far and killed a girl." As with Peter Sutcliffe, Black's apprehension came about during the course of an abduction which would certainly have turned into another murder.

A "Rush of Blood"

It was 14 July 1990, a sunny day in the village of Stow in the Scottish Borders and six-year-old Mandy Wilson was walking to her friend's house to play. As she walked down the road one of her neighbours, David Herkes, watched her approach a van with its passenger door open. Herkes later told the police in his statement that as he bent down to look at his mower blades,

“All I could see were her little feet standing next to the man's. Suddenly they vanished and I saw him making movements as if he were trying to stuff something under the dashboard. He got into the van, reversed up the driveway the child had just come from and sped off towards Edinburgh.”

David Herkes had the presence of mind to take the van’s registration number, and then quickly rang the police. Police cars were promptly on the scene and the van's description was radioed to officers in the area. Herkes remembers what happened next:

“I was standing near the spot where the child had been abducted, briefing the police and the girl's distraught father about what had happened. Suddenly I saw the van again and shouted 'That's him'. The officer dashed into the road and the van swerved to avoid him before coming to a halt.”

While officers handcuffed the man who identified himself as Robert Black, Mandy’s father, Mr Wilson, recalls:

“I shouted at Black 'That's my daughter - what have you done to her, you bastard?' But his reaction was nil, he had no expression. I could have got my hands round his throat there and then, but my concern was for my daughter, not him. Where was she? Was she alive or, God forbid, dead? I went straight for a pile of rags just behind the seat and felt a little body inside the sleeping bag... I can't tell you how I felt as I unwrapped her from the bag and saw her little face bright red from the heat and lack of air. She was so terrified as I untied her and took the tape from her mouth that she didn't utter a word.”

Before Black had tied Mandy's hands behind her back, covered her mouth with Elastoplast and shoved her into a sleeping-bag, he had sexually assaulted her. He later told Ray Wyre that, "I pulled her pants to one side and I had a look. I thought I'd just sort of stroked [her vagina]... but there was bruising on the inside - I don't know how." He then told Wyre what he would have done if he had not been caught:

“When I'd done the delivery in Galashiels down the road, I would have assaulted Mandy sexually. I would have probably stripped her from the waist down, but I would have untied her and probably took the plaster off her mouth. And if she called out when I was assaulting her, then I might have put the gag back on.”

More specifically, Wyre quotes Dr Baird, psychologist for the Crown, who Black told that,

“he would have put things into her vagina 'to see how big she was'. He would have put his fingers in and also his penis. When asked about other objects, he agreed he might have put other objects into her vagina, and when asked for an example, he saw a pen with which I was writing... ”

When Wyre asked Black how he could do such a devastating thing to a child while simultaneously claiming (as he had done previously) that he loved children, Black admitted that "I wasn't thinking about her at all... like, you know, what she must be feeling". If she had died "it would have been a pure accident".

This extraordinary dissociation, which transforms the little girl into a simple object, is frequently to be found in the cases of other serial killers, but in Black’s case it seemed to preclude the sadism that takes pleasure in the victim’s sufferings. The child became a plaything, to be experimented with, poked, probed, and eventually disposed of. It seems to have been a matter of indifference to Black whether she objected to the process or not.

On the way to Selkirk police station Black told officers that the abduction was "a rush of blood" and added, "I have always liked little girls since I was a kid." He said that he had just wanted to keep her until he had done his next delivery and then he would have "spent some time with her", maybe in Blackpool. Then he would have let her go.

Robert Black’s case came to trial the next month, on 10 August 1990. As the evidence in this particular case was overwhelming Black had little choice but to plead guilty. In light of the plea the job of the prosecution was simply to give the facts of the case, which the Lord Advocate, Lord Fraser, did, stressing that medical opinion said that Mandy would probably have been dead within the hour if she had been kept bound and gagged in the sleeping-bag. Dr Baird's report for the Crown said that Black was, and would remain, a danger to children. The task of the defence was to speak in mitigation. To this end, Herbert Kerrigan said that Black had admitted to liking little girls but had never before acted upon his desires. The abduction had been a one-off, and Black merely wanted to spend some time with Mandy; he did not intend to injure her, certainly not to kill her. Furthermore, Black had accepted that he was a threat to children and, said Kerrigan, "wishes to engage in some sort of programme to get assistance".

Dismissing the arguments of the defence, the Lord Justice Clerk, Lord Ross, described Mandy’s abduction as being "carried out with chilling, cold calculation." "This was", he said, "no 'rush of blood', as you have claimed. This is a very serious case, an horrific, appalling case." Lord Ross sentenced Black to life imprisonment and told him that his release would not "be considered until such time as it is safe to do so".

Search for Justice

Of course the abduction of Mandy Smith made Black a prime suspect for Hector Clark, as the MO was strikingly similar to that in the cases of Susan, Caroline and Sarah. When Clark first saw Black following his arrest in July 1990 he remembers,

“Slowly he looked up at me and my gut feeling was that this was my man. I had always thought that when I saw him I would know him and every instinct told me this was the guy. I knew by his body smell and his dishevelled appearance. Except that he was bald, he was just as I expected.”

But "gut feeling" and "instinct" are not good enough. In spending so much time analysing such crimes, the police inevitably start to feel that they know the offenders in certain ways. They think they know what they will look like and how they will behave. George Oldfield, heading the Yorkshire Ripper inquiry, similarly said on several occasions that if he were in a room full of potential suspects he would instantly 'know' his man. But as the Ripper investigation showed us, this is a dangerous assumption. Peter Sutcliffe was interviewed nine times during the course of the five-year investigation, but nobody 'recognised' him.

In the hope of eliciting some incriminating evidence, the police decided to interview Black. As he was already serving a life sentence they thought that he might be willing to talk about any other crimes he had committed. Interviewed in Scotland, Black talked candidly to officers about the offences for which he had previously been convicted, for the best part of six hours. He was frank about a variety of topics, including his one proper relationship with a woman, his attraction to little girls, the sexual abuse he had endured as a child, his fantasy life, and his masturbatory practices. Eventually however, when the officers asked Black about his work with Poster Dispatch and Storage and his whereabouts on the day of Caroline Hogg’s abduction, he fell silent. When it came to the abductions and murders of the three little girls, Black would simply not talk to the police.

It was apparent that the police would have to find their evidence the hard way, through old-fashioned, painstaking detective work: they were going to have to look at Black's life over the past eight years. In most cases the tracing of a person's daily movements over the past decade would prove an impossible task, but in this case the police were fortuitous due to the nature of Black's work. From a careful examination of work records, wage books, and receipts from fuel credit cards, the police were able to begin tracing Black's life.

Susan Maxwell's abduction had taken place in Coldstream on 30 July 1982. It was the task of the police to establish where Black was at every stage during that day. The first step in the process was to see whether PDS had records of journeys carried out by drivers dating that far back. The police were initially dismayed to find that potentially vital company records had been destroyed just months beforehand, as was company policy after a certain length of time had elapsed. Yet new hope arose when it was established that the wage books from that time were still available. As different runs command different wages it was established - from the amount of money that Black received in his pay - that he must have done the London-Scotland run sometime between 29 July and 4 August.

The time still needed narrowing down, however. The police next looked at petrol receipts from the company's fuel credit cards that all drivers carried and it was established that Black had been in the Borders area on 30 July. He had filled up his white Fiat van just south of Coldstream before the time that Susan was snatched, and just north of Coldstream after the time of her abduction. The quickest route between the two garages was the A687, directly through Coldstream. Black had previously told his work-mates that when returning from a Scottish-run he preferred not to take the most direct route (which was the M6 to the M1) but to get to the M1 via the A50 through the Midlands. Susan's body was found by the A518 in Staffordshire, not far from the junction for the A50.

The case against Black for the murder of Caroline Hogg was built in a similarly meticulous fashion. On 8 July 1982, the day of Caroline's abduction, it was established that Black had delivered posters to Mills and Allen in Piershill, just over a mile north of Portobello. Petrol receipts showed that he had filled up at a petrol station in Belford, Northumberland, on this day and that the most obvious route from Belford to his delivery point in Piershill was through Portobello. The post-mortem had found that Caroline's body had been kept by her killer for four days after her abduction - dead or alive, they could not determine - making the 12th the first day on which her body could have been disposed. On this day Black had delivered posters to Bedworth, just over ten miles from where Caroline's body was found.

The circumstantial evidence for the case of Sarah Harper was equally strong. On 26 March, the day of her abduction, Black had delivered posters to a depot just 150 yards from the place that Sarah was last seen. Petrol receipts from the next day put Black as driving directly past the spot on the A453 to Nottingham where Sarah's body had been deposited.

In addition to the growing mountain of circumstantial evidence another incident came to Clark's notice. On 28 April 1988, 15-year-old Teresa Thornhill had been to the park with some friends. Teresa walked part of the way home with one of these friends, Andrew Beeson. Just after she and Andrew had gone their separate ways, Teresa noticed that a blue van had stopped just ahead of her on the opposite side of the road; the driver had got out and was looking under the bonnet. As she approached, the man shouted to her: "Can you mend engines?" Uneasily she replied that she could not and walked on. The next thing she knew, the man had grabbed her from behind, picked her up and was carrying her across to his van. She said later:

"I will never forget his hairy arms, sweaty hands and smelly T-shirt. He came over to me and got me in an all-encompassing bear hug which I could not get out of because he was very strong. I tried to struggle free and began shouting for my mum. I was looking around for something to hit him with, but there was nothing there. Then I grabbed him between the legs."

She also knocked his glasses to the ground, screaming all the while. Teresa's friend Andrew heard her screams and ran towards the van shouting, "Get off her, you fat fucking bastard." Teresa's struggle and Andrew's timely arrival meant that her attacker had little choice but to drop his victim and make his get-away.

Unfortunately, at the time there was nothing to obviously link Teresa's attack to the abductions and murders of Susan, Caroline and Sarah. Most importantly, these girls were aged between five and 11, whereas Teresa was 15, nearly a woman. Teresa looked far younger than her years, however: she was under five feet tall, with a girlish figure, and wore no make-up. She did not look like a teenager. If this had been taken into account at the time, the abductions would have seemed remarkably similar. If this case could be shown to be linked to the murders, then it was an important breakthrough as Teresa's description of her attacker and his van matched Black exactly.

By the end of 1990 the police had gathered a mass of circumstantial evidence against Black, but unfortunately they had no forensic evidence and no confession. They decided to re-interview Black more rigorously, but for three days he refused to answer any of their questions, as was his right. The police had no real choice but to proceed with what they had. In May 1991 the police submitted their report to the Crown Prosecution Service who would decide whether to go ahead with a prosecution. In April 1992 Black was served with ten summonses.

A "Murderer for All Seasons?"

Yet it would be another two years before the case was tried. Aside from the fact that there were 22 tons of evidence that had to made available for the defence to examine, there were many difficult legal problems to sort out in the preliminary hearings. Firstly there were jurisdictional questions to clear up, given that the crimes had been committed across two countries with different legal procedures. Additionally, the prosecutions’ case relied upon being allowed to present the murders as a series, while the defence applied for severance of the charges. Finally, the abduction of Mandy Wilson was an issue under hot debate. The prosecution needed to present it as evidence of the defendant’s unique MO, whereas the defence wanted it precluded from proceedings. The submission of a past offence as evidence of the commission of a present offence is called ‘similar fact evidence’ and is notoriously controversial. It is usually only permitted when the past offence is ‘strikingly similar’ to the present. In Black’s case it was allowed. The pre-trial rulings were all made in the prosecution’s favour and at last the case was ready to come to trial.

As most of his crimes had been carried out in England it had been decided that this was where Black would be tried. Mr John Milford, leading for the Crown, began his opening speech at two o’clock on the afternoon of Wednesday 13 April 1994 in the Moot Hall in Newcastle. Ultimately he aimed to prove that the murders of Susan Maxwell, Caroline Hogg and Sarah Harper, and the abduction of Teresa Thornhill, were all part of a series committed by the same person; and that this person had to be Black. There was no forensic evidence nor any admissions of guilt from the defendant himself, so the case was to be based upon evidence which, while admittedly circumstantial, was still very strong. Black had been in all the abduction points and the places where the bodies had been dumped at the pertinent times; descriptions given by witnesses matched Black's appearance at those times; on the days in question Black was driving the types of van spotted at the scenes; and he had already admitted to an abduction in 1990 which bore exactly the same unusual MO as the offences for which he was now being charged.

Milford highlighted to the jury the similarities between the murders in order to prove that they were all committed by the same man, which was his first essential point:

·         All the victims were young girls.

·         All were bare-legged, wearing white ankle socks.

·         All were taken from a public place.

·         Susan and Caroline were both abducted on hot July days.

·         All were abducted in a vehicle of some sort; Susan and Sarah were both abducted in Transit-type vans.

·         After abduction, all the victims were taken some miles south.

·         All the bodies showed signs of a sexual motive for the attack: “Each victim was obviously taken for sexual gratification. Susan Maxwell’s pants were removed, Caroline Hogg was naked and Sarah Harper was found to have suffered injury.”

·         "None suffered any gross bruising or broken bones."

·         Both Susan and Sarah had been unclothed and then reclothed; all three victims had their shoes removed.

·         No real attempt was made to hide the bodies.

·         All the bodies had been dumped in what became known to police as the ‘Midlands Triangle’, a 26-mile area encompassing parts of Nottinghamshire, Staffordshire and Leicestershire.

These murders, said Milford, “are so unusual, the points of similarity so numerous and peculiar that it is submitted to you that you can safely conclude that they were all the work of one man.” And this one man, as overwhelming evidence would prove, was Robert Black. “The Crown alleges that Robert Black kidnapped each of his victims for sexual gratification, that he transported them far from the point of abduction and murdered them.”

Having outlined the similarities in the murders, Milford moved on to the charge of the abduction of Teresa Thornhill in Nottingham in 1988. This case clearly had the same features as the previous abductions: Teresa was a girl (who looked younger than her 15 years) who was snatched off a busy street in the north of England by a scruffy looking man driving a van. After detailing the similarities, Milford told the court that on that very day Black was delivering posters to a firm in Nottingham in his blue Transit van, and the description that Teresa gave to the police of her attacker matched photographs of Black at the time. When police searched Black's room after his arrest they found a paper from 1988 with a report in it about the attempted abduction. Teresa also told police that her attacker smelt strongly; the Rayson children had nicknamed their lodger ‘Smelly Bob’, and Eric Mould, Black's former boss at PDS, told the court that his workers used to complain that Black was unclean and had bad body odour.

Following Justice Macpherson's pre-trial ruling the court were next told of Black’s arrest for the abduction and assault of Mandy Wilson in Stow in July of 1990. Milford said that Black had admitted to this abduction and assault and that it had all the hallmarks of the three murders and the abduction that he now stood trial for. In fact, the crimes were “virtually carbon copies. At Stow he was repeating almost exactly what had happened at Coldstream.” Milford continued,

“The little girl in Stow was wearing shorts when she was taken, was bare-legged and was wearing white socks. She was to be transported many miles south. Again it was the end of the week, it was July and it was hot. Stow and Coldstream are similar villages only 25 miles apart... Even more remarkably, like Susan Maxwell, the little girl was wearing yellow shorts.”

Black had admitted to the abduction of Mandy Wilson; this abduction was a 'carbon copy' of that of Susan Maxwell; the abduction of Teresa Thornhill and the abductions and murders of Caroline and Sarah were carbon copies of Susan's abduction and murder, ergo, Black committed the three murders.

The prosecution had made a good start. It had detailed striking comparisons which linked the murders of Susan, Caroline and Sarah, and the abduction of Teresa, as a series. It had also shown the similarities between these offences and the one to which Black had already admitted. It was an important beginning but by itself was not enough: they had established a series, but they now had to establish that Black was the perpetrator. The prosecution's next job was to go through the police inquiry for the court telling them exactly how the police had gathered the evidence which put Black at all the abduction and dumping areas at the salient times. At the end of this evidence, which lasted for some days, Milford sardonically concluded that either Black was the killer, or a similarly perverted “shadow” of Black was following him around the country – a shadow who also had convictions for sexual assaults on children and a penchant for child pornography. The murders of Susan, Caroline and Sarah, and the abduction of Teresa, were all committed by one man and Robert Black had been present at all the pertinent sites at the these times.

Deputy Chief Constable Hector Clark was saved for last. Clark described the mammoth investigation as "the largest crime inquiry ever held in Britain”. The computer held details of 187,186 people, 220,470 vehicles, and interviews with 59,483 people. When Milford asked Clark how unusual it was for three children to have been abducted, murdered and then dumped a relatively long distance away Clark replied that in his 39-year career as a policeman, “I have no knowledge of any other cases with these features.” The case for the prosecution was closed.

There had been much speculation as to how Ronald Thwaites would conduct the case for the defence. Certainly the prosecution had no forensic evidence nor did it have any help from the defendant himself. But equally Black had not offered any alibis which the defence could use, nor did it have any other alternative suspects. Thwaites also had a self-admitted child abductor and molester to defend. The only realistic path to take was to acknowledge Black’s previous known offences and admit to the court that yes, this was a “wicked and foul pervert” but argue that this did not necessarily make him a murderer.

Thwaites said that Black had become “a murderer for all seasons”, a scapegoat for the desperate police who, after an eight-year investigation, had got no further than from where they had started. “This series of cases,” said Thwaites “reeks of failure, disappointment and frustration.” When Black was arrested for the abduction in Stow, officers “set to work to dissect the whole of his life”, with total disregard for anything that didn’t fit into their picture of events. Thwaites told the jury of Black’s previous convictions in Scotland for ‘lewd and libidinous’ behaviour, and spoke of the paedophilic pornography found in Black’s room. Of the abduction of Mandy Wilson he said that, “The judge saw it fit to give him a life sentence. No one can be surprised by that and everyone must applaud it. Black’s lifelong interest in children is further confirmed by the haul of pornography in his home. It is revolting and sickening to look at.” But, he said,

“However wicked and foul Black is, and I am not here to persuade you to like him or find any merit in him at all, it is not unreasonable to suppose that there might be some evidence to adorn the prosecutions case other than theory. This case has been developed before you using one incident of abduction, which he admitted, as a substitute for evidence in all these other cases. There is no direct evidence against Black.”

By evidence of course, he meant that of a forensic variety, as there was plenty of other evidence to link Black to the murders. Although it was the prosecution who had called James Fraser of the Lothian and Borders police forensics laboratory his testimony benefited the defence. Fraser testified that he and four to six other scientists had spent six months working solely on this case, examining over 300 items belonging to Black, “almost all his worldly goods”. When Thwaites asked him, cross-examining, “Have you been able to make a scientific link between this man, Black, and any of these murders?”, Fraser replied, “No.” (The prosecution did, however, regain some credibility by asking Fraser if he would expect, after a decade, to find any significant forensic evidence to which Fraser replied that he would not.)

Thwaites alleged that as both the police and the prosecution were so certain that Black was their man they refused to look elsewhere. The Crown had “tried to match together a new suit made from oddments, but it is full of holes whereas the original suit has been left - until discovered by my team.” Black himself, said his defence, would not be testifying on his own behalf as nobody could be expected to remember routine details of their lives going back over ten years. But the truth was that the girls’ killer or killers were still out there.

In an attempt to convince the jury of this the defence called Thomas Ball as their star witness who testified that on the day of Susan’s abduction he saw a young girl hitting a maroon Triumph with a tennis racket. “She was making quite a lot of noise,” he recalled, “It seemed to be a child throwing a fit of temper.” He said that there were two or three people inside the car; the driver was a teenager with a wispy beard. When later shown a photograph of Susan by police he said he was “certain” it was the child he had seen.

Other defence witnesses included Sharon Binnie who told the court how she and her husband had seen a dark red saloon car like a Triumph 2000 parked in the same place as Thomas Ball described; Joan Jones and her husband, who had also seen a dark coloured car in a lay-by; and Alan Day and Peter Armstrong who had similarly seen red saloon cars. Michelle Robertson, who was a young girl at the time of the murders, testified about seeing a “scruffy” man in a blue Ford Escort; Kevin Catherall and Ian Collins claimed to have seen red Fords. This evidence did not further the case of the defence, however, as none of the people associated with these cars were doing anything remotely suspicious, they were simply in the vicinity of the abductions when they occurred.

Ultimately the question for the jury to decide, said Thwaites, “is whether it may be proved he graduated from molester to murderer. There is nothing automatic about that.” “The prosecution", he said dramatically, "has conducted their case here from beginning to end without letting you into an important secret. The secret is that there is no evidence against Black.”

On Tuesday 17 May Mr Justice Macpherson sent the jury away to begin their deliberations. It was not, however, until the morning of the third day - the 19th – that the jury finally agreed upon a verdict. When they found Black guilty on all counts, a sigh of relief went around the courtroom. Mr Justice Macpherson sentenced him to life for each of the charges, adding that for the murders "I propose to make a public recommendation that the minimum term will be 35 years on each of these convictions."

As Black was taken down he turned to the 23 officers who were there to hear the verdict and said, "Well done, boys." At a cost of some £1m to the tax-payer the trial was over and Black would not be eligible for parole until he was at least 82, in 2029. To this day Black has never admitted his guilt to the police. But in his last talk with Ray Wyre, when Wyre asked why Black had never denied the charges to him, Black replied that he hadn't done so because he couldn't.

Recriminations

Once Black had been convicted the recriminations began. Everybody wanted to know why it had taken eight years for Black to be apprehended, three years longer even than it had taken to catch Peter Sutcliffe. Amazing one might think, considering Black’s past. And unlike in the hunt for Sutcliffe computers in general, and HOLMES in particular, were used to track Black. Partly of course, the problem was that the murder investigations were not initially stored on one database which meant that information between cases could not be adequately cross-referenced. When all three cases were eventually conjoined on one database, by this time Black had already emerged as a suspect. Thus the effectiveness of the new system could not been tested.

However although one database would have been invaluable in data storage and comparison between the investigations, it probably would not have caught Black. HOLMES might well have played a vital part in catching Sutcliffe as one of the major downfalls of that investigation was that poor cross-referencing meant that when questioning Sutcliffe officers simply didn't realise that he had been interviewed several times before. If they had realised this there is little doubt that Sutcliffe would have emerged as a strong suspect. But the police had never interviewed Black in connection with the murders, he was simply not in the system as Sutcliffe was. Black was not in HOLMES for the Harper inquiry nor had his name cropped up in the Maxwell or Hogg inquiries. The single database would not have changed this.

The question is really why Black was not identified as a suspect at any stage. After Black's trial criticism was directed at Hector Clark from the media and, more distressingly, from other officers on the inquiry, particularly Detective Superintendent John Stainthorpe who had headed the Sarah Harper investigation. Stainthorpe's criticism was that Clark had defined his parameters too narrowly when looking at men with records for sexual offences as potential suspects. Clark had confined his search to men who had been convicted of serious sexual offences: the attempted or actual abduction, rape or murder of a child under 16. Black however, had been convicted of 'lewd and libidinous' behaviour - a charge which did not match the severity of the offence - with a seven-year-old girl in Scotland in 1967. Stainthorpe said that if Clark had included all sexual offences Black would have been a first-class suspect straight away, or at the very least would have been in the system: "Black should have been arrested years ago, with his history and convictions."

Clark was quick to defend himself to the press and public: "We just couldn't check on everybody," he said, "It would have overloaded the system to an unmanageable extent." He argued that criteria based on the most likely suspects had to be utilised, and given that the charges being investigated were for murder, looking at those offenders with convictions for more serious offences seemed the most sensible way to proceed.

However, when we look at research done into the backgrounds of serial killers we see that if they have any past convictions they are hardly ever serious and usually not sexual. John Christie, Ian Brady, Colin Ireland and Fred West had previous convictions for offences such as theft, fraud and breaking and entering. Peter Sutcliffe, Dennis Nilsen, Myra Hindley and Rose West had no criminal records at all before their convictions for murder. But Black was not just – or primarily - a serial killer, he was also a paedophile and unlike serial killers paedophiles often do have past convictions for sexual offences. These offences, however, may often be relatively minor. Thus if the investigation was to be centred around the creation of suspects based on previous form, Stainthorpe was right to say that even minor sexual offences needed to be included. But of course this was not a viable way to conduct the inquiry. In this sense, at least, Clark was right: the creation of a database with all sexual offences committed in the past 20 years on it, and the subsequent investigation of the offender, was not a task the inquiry could manage.

Just as the case of Peter Sutcliffe highlighted the need for a computer system such as HOLMES to replace the old manual system of data collation, the Black inquiry made apparent the need for a constantly updated national database of all sex offenders and killers. They needed a system such as the FBI's VICAP which can search its memory of sex offenders and their MO’s to match the case under investigation. As John Stainthorpe said, "had Black been on a computerised criminal intelligence system, his name would have popped up like a cork out of a bottle." And it probably would have, provided that the types of offence initially fed into the computer were comprehensive and went far enough back in time.

In a case such as Sutcliffe's where the killer has committed no past sexual or violent offences, such a system would be of little use in the identification of possible suspects. In Black's case, however, the system would have had a two-fold usage. It would have identified Black as a man with convictions for sexual assaults on young girls, and also have unearthed offences which he may have perpetrated but had not yet been linked to.

As it was it emerged only after Black's trial that he was almost certainly responsible for more than the three murders for which he was convicted. A serial killer like Black having killed Susan in 1982 and Caroline in 1983, is highly unlikely to then leave a gap of three years before killing Sarah in 1986. And Susan was unlikely to have been his first victim. At the age of 17 Black had assaulted and left a seven-year- old girl for dead; his first murder was allegedly when he was 35. But the incident in 1967 hadn't left him full of remorse or regret: these were things he told Wyre that he knew he should, but could not, feel. When looking back on the event all he felt was lust. The image of that day reformed again and again in Black's fantasies, as he relived it and improved upon it until it was just right. The compulsion to re-enact and refine the experience in reality would have been too deep and over-powering to leave for almost 20 years.

In July 1994 a meeting was held in Newcastle to consider the possibility of Black’s involvement in similar murders. As well as possible murders in France, Amsterdam, Ireland and Germany, there were up to ten unsolved abductions and murders in England which bore Black’s MO: April Fabb who was abducted from her bicycle in Norfolk in 1969; nine-year-old Christine Markham who was snatched in Scunthorpe in 1973; 13-year-old Genette Tate who disappeared in Devon in 1978; 14-year-old Suzanne Lawrence who was found dead in Essex in 1979; 16-year-old Colette Aram who was found strangled and sexually assaulted in a field in Nottingham in 1983; 14-year-old Patsy Morris who was found dead near Heathrow in 1990; and Marion Crofts and Lisa Hession.

One senior officer was quoted in the Express as saying, "We know he killed Genette Tate and April Fabb, and we believe that their bodies are buried somewhere in the Midlands Triangle." John Stainthorpe said that in his opinion there was an 80 percent likelihood of Black being involved in the disappearance of Genette. Inquiries into these murders have been re-opened. Had these abductions and murders been linked at the time to the cases of Susan, Caroline and Sarah, the police might have unearthed useful new leads. Had they had a national database Black might have been identified as a suspect. An enormous amount of fruitless work could have been averted, a quicker conclusion reached, and lives saved.

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