Original subtitles

A little nine -year -old girl had just learnt she could have her own new

bicycle.

The

last

sighting I would ever have of our little girl was the imprint of her hair

sweeping around her face as she closed the door behind her.

There was still some school holiday left, and I wanted Jennifer to be able

enjoy travelling to her friends' houses.

And Pat says, no, don't be buying a new bike. Keep it for Christmas present. And

I says, no, the better that she has it for the holidays.

Pat didn't want me to buy that bike.

And if I hadn't have bought it, she wouldn't have been out on that bike to

Take him.

Most people are good and kind, but there are some who want to hurt children.

This man came up and said, would I like to see some puppies? And I said yes.

I had warned her on lots of occasions about taking lifts in cars.

So I know that if she did get in the car, she was forced into it.

We were dealing with a travelling sexual predator.

We would just give anything, everything we've got, just to have her back.

When a child disappears, publicity is vital.

Bring her back, whoever has her.

This was now a serial killer.

There was somebody lurking there, waiting to snatch a child.

The young girl just walking down the street never came back again.

There just cannot be anything other than evil.

Because somebody else has a child next.

They never stop at one.

Abducted, taken south, murdered.

an aggressive predatory paedophile, a heat -seeking missile, and once his

was locked on, sadly, end of story.

Will you catch him?

I think so.

A man was mowing his lawn when he looked up

and saw a neighbour's girl walking past.

She was actually on her way back to her house because her friend hadn't been

where she thought she would be.

He continued with what he was doing.

He saw a van.

And this man had stopped his van.

She disappeared into thin air.

The van disappeared.

He felt that something was seriously wrong and raised the alarm.

The police officer comes down straightaway to the road and is actually

to the informant when all of a sudden coming south in the same van.

when the van came into view.

The policeman he was talking to ran in front of the van and

stopped it.

The policeman opened the van.

The van appeared to be empty except for what appeared to be

a bundle of

He thought he saw the bundle of rags moving and he realised

that actually what was a bundle of rags was a child.

Bound, gagged, wrists tied, elastoplast on her mouth,

her cushion cover zipped up and tied over her head, very much longer.

And she would have undoubtedly died of asphyxiation.

He released the child.

And it was his own daughter.

How that police officer managed to maintain his professionalism is one of

most extraordinary events I've ever covered as a reporter.

Northern Ireland in the 1980s was a place that was very troubled, but in

of Northern Ireland it was much more normal, and actually it was quiet, it

rural, it was almost a yesterday.

In this area it's all farmland, mostly.

You get lost very easy.

People coming to this house get lost.

In 1981 our family was complete.

Pat was 34 and I was 33.

Mark was 14.

Jennifer was 9.

Philip was 6.

Victoria was only 8 or 9 months old.

I'll never forget going out. I think we were going up to Antrim to the lock for

an afternoon.

I'll never forget parking the car and every door opened and the boot opened

children fell out. It was just lovely.

Jennifer was a lovely child.

She loved people, having her friends here and going to friends.

We had a lovely relationship, so we had a lovely relationship.

When I got home, Pat was standing at the back door.

I said, what's wrong? Pat says, Jennifer hasn't come home.

She went off on her bike to see a friend, which is about two and a half

down the road.

We drove down to the house where Jennifer was supposed to go to and she

had arrived.

So we went round other houses and up lanes and eventually

we went to the local police station and said, look, we can't find her.

We knew we had a serious situation.

When Jennifer went missing, my father happened to be the station sergeant in

Hillsborough Police Station.

My father knew Andy Carty. Jennifer was a carefree girl, enjoyed the country

life. She was near my age.

The house was filled with people.

A friend of mine arrived with a pickup truck and he says, look, what

direction did you go Andy?

And just about a mile and a half down the road, the lights picked up the

reflection on our bike.

So when the bike was found, then we knew that we had a big problem.

We knew that somebody had abducted her.

I was difficult to sleep

because of so much commotion and I was worried for my sister.

I heard my mum scream and I got up and I came out and it

was because her bike had been found.

It was only then.

That it sort of hit me. My sister's missing.

You know, what's going on?

From that minute onwards, our child was in danger.

I awoke.

To the phone ringing very early on and it was another inspector.

I was rather surprised because I knew that he had not been scheduled to work

overnight and he apprised me then of the situation.

Advised me somewhat bizarrely to make sure I brought Wellington boots because

there was going to be a lot of searching to be done.

Child disappearances at that time were few and far between.

Very quickly, there was hundreds and hundreds of people, armed forces and

officers looking for Jennifer.

The word had travelled so fast.

There wasn't a house, there wasn't somebody out searching.

Everybody helped.

A nine -year -old just doesn't disappear.

Like this hand and heart, hello, I wouldn't have said so publicly.

I was very concerned that something sinister had happened.

You would expect that a nine -year -old would turn up within 12 hours.

The search began last night. It's centred around a wide area of remote

countryside and the difficult terrain is hampering the operation.

Police blocked off roads and interviewed motorists, hoping that someone might

have remembered seeing the girl.

The first plan of action is to gather information, but we're talking about a

nine -year -old child who left home.

The previous afternoon, to go to a friend's house, and she never reached

friend's house, and she didn't return home.

We were searching in a concentric ring from the location of the bicycle.

There was no leads, there were no clues, so it was a question just of carrying

on, spreading out further.

There'd be a group of citizens.

with a police officer attached, giving a search area, and out they went to try

and find Jennifer, to try and find items that might belong to Jennifer, to try

and find anything else that might have been out of place.

The search would have been stretched in a line across a field and moving across

that field, but looking particularly at the hedgerows and looking particularly

at outbuildings.

The army are using helicopters to cover thousands of acres of field and teams of

helpers are taking it in turn to look for the girl.

I remember, even as a child, was the news changing.

So yes, the troubles were going on. Yes, the hunger strikes were going on. Yes,

there were shootings. And yes, there were bombings. But the emphasis of the

changed to Jennifer's disappearance.

Northern Ireland was a place where we did a lot of bad things to each other,

we didn't do them to children.

And suddenly this was different.

In 1981, I was sent to Northern Ireland to report on their troubles.

During the course of that, a child disappeared.

I spoke to her father.

It's a moment a reporter dreads to knock on the door of a

family where a child has gone missing.

He was a committed Christian who hoped that whoever it might have been...

who had taken her. He would find it in his heart to return his daughter.

Jennifer, she was very, very pleasant.

I had warned her on lots of occasions about taking lifts in cars, and she told

me, don't you be silly.

There's no way that I would get into a car, you know? So I know that if she did

get into a car, she was forced into it.

It was all about hope.

It was all about hope that we would see her again.

To walk into this room and her Wendy house was here and toys were all here

all of a sudden she's not there.

It was just so dreadful. You just wanted to go away.

I had not really left this house over them days.

So we went down to the headquarters and we met the senior policeman.

And all of a sudden, he was called away.

We were asked to leave. And within the hour, there was a lovely girl called

Yvonne. She called to tell us that her body had been found.

Two guys are out at a location which then becomes quite infamous, McKees Dam,

and they see something on the water, and they think it's a coat.

They go straight to a local police station, and the police officer they

is my father.

He took one of the constables, they got in the car and accompanied the two back

to McKees Dam.

We walked in and could see the distinctive red, and sadly it turned out

Jennifer.

The perpetrator intended that she would be found.

If they didn't want her to be found, they could have taken her around to the

other side of the dam, could have taken her away from the path.

You couldn't walk in there and not see the red clothing.

Yvonne called and told me I would have to go to identify Jennifer's body.

I can remember they opened the body bag.

And Yvonne had to hold me up because I would have collapsed.

And because she'd been in the water for so many days,

I couldn't

really identify her.

I asked, would they unzip the bag further down?

I wanted to see her shoes.

And then I knew it was her, so I did.

A massive hunt for the missing girl was called off this afternoon after her body

was found in the lake.

A full -scale murder hunt has got underway and volunteers who helped

remote countryside stood down. It's not yet known how she died.

The puzzle for police really at that stage was that this was a nine -year

girl in this rural area and she's found in a dam 15 miles away.

So you're thinking, what's the connection?

How did her body get miles away from where her bike was?

Who had taken her? Why did they take her?

For what reasoning did someone have a vendetta against my dad and do this on

purpose? There's lots of things going through my head.

I have to admit, right, and I don't often tell this, but I have to admit

that revenge was a big part of my life then.

If I had of...

found out who had done what they did to Jennifer, I would have

killed them.

I mean that, I would have killed them.

It was very important that he was caught. He could obviously do the same

another girl.

I'm looking at an account of the disappearance of Jennifer Cardie.

We called her Little Red Riding Hood to get the attention of the reader.

Extraordinary though the murder of Jennifer was, I could not have imagined

over the next months and years I'd be reporting on yet more murders of young

girls.

I didn't think Jennifer's murder could have been that of a serial killer.

It turns out it was.

Mrs.

Maxwell said that that day had been the first time Susan had been allowed to

walk home alone.

When she didn't turn up, Mrs. Maxwell drove to the town tennis club to try and

find her, but there was no sign of her.

She then began ringing around friends and relatives, but no one had seen

Susan had gone missing while walking home from a game of tennis with a

Sadly, she disappeared on her way back home.

I am Roger Orr. I retired in 2008 as the Detective Chief Superintendent, Head of

CID, in Lothian and Borders Police.

Susan was 11 at that time.

She had quite dark, shoulder -length hair, and would have been quite

distinctive, even at that time, on a busy route, which was a main trunk road

from south to north.

A very responsible young girl.

who does what she's told, follows regular routines, who has suddenly and

inexplicably gone missing for the first time.

I was an inspector in the serious crime squad.

Right from the start, they thought it was a serious matter.

We very, very quickly traced witnesses who had seen her on the road and then a

car had come along a few minutes later and she'd been gone.

So we were very, very quickly of the view.

that she'd been snatched, Susie had been dragged into a vehicle and away.

When a child disappears, publicity is vital.

We would just give anything, everything we've got, just to have her back. Please

let us have her back.

Susan's parents, Liz and Fordyce, were both journalists, so they understood

why we were there and the value of publicity.

in the hunt for their missing daughter.

Nobody knew where she was. She could have been anywhere.

Trace, interview, eliminate.

Now, the tracing and interviewing is the easy part.

The eliminating is harder because sometimes people don't have an alibi.

Who could possibly have snatched Susie from outside Coldstream?

One of the main groups that used that road were delivery van drivers.

We started to build up a picture of what we knew was travelling on that road at

that time as best we could. And of course, after 24 to 48 hours, you're

for the best, but you're fearing for the worst.

This afternoon, 12 -year -old Susan Jackson played the part of the missing

Maxwell in this reconstruction of last Friday's walk.

Susan, wearing an identical outfit and carrying a tennis racket and ball,

crossed the bridge over the river Tweed at Coldstream and continued 50 yards to

the spot where she was last seen.

This case brought huge publicity. As the word went out and as more and more

people became involved and more and more people became interested in the case,

so more and more of these phone calls came in.

We were pretty well set up in the 1980s. There was one problem, one weakness,

and that was we were still working with the old card index system. And that

really hadn't changed in 100 years. I mean, if you went back and looked at the

Whitechapel Ripper murders of 1888, the famous Jack the Ripper murders, you

would recognise the admin system they used were the admin system we were using

100 years later.

The problem with card index systems is not where you start, but where you

finish. You have massive incident rooms with tens of thousands of cards, which

are impossible for any human being to actually get their head round or

Every morning I feel this is going to be the day. We're going to get that phone

call today to say she's going to be all right.

Liz appeared on the radio to further the appeal.

Very sadly, as that broadcast was going out, Susan's body was found.

Susan's body was found nearly 250 miles from where she had been abducted, in a

lay -by off a minor road near the village of Utopseter in Staffordshire.

She had been placed in a copse of trees adjacent to the lay -by.

Her shoes had been removed, although she was still wearing the white socks that

she had had on.

The circumstances clearly indicated a forcible abduction with a very strong

belief of a high degree of sexual motivation in the abduction and in her

murder.

It seemed inevitable, but it was nonetheless terrible.

Fifty officers are scouring the area looking for clues.

In particular, they still want to find the tennis racket Susan had with her

she disappeared.

Keeping the story going, as we say in the business, became increasingly

difficult because there was no more to write about.

Susan was dead.

She'd been murdered. The story now was a hunt for the killer.

Police from Staffordshire and Northumbria are now manning an incident

around the clock. They're hoping that someone may have noticed the

vivid clothing as they drove past the spot where she was found.

We now had a very, very complicated investigation on our hands. We had

and Borders, we had Northumbria and we had Staffordshire.

You've got vast distances, you've got very, very little in the way of forensic

evidence and you've got three police forces.

trying to work together using an antiquated system of administration.

It doesn't get any harder than that.

There's also a prospect that you're in for the long haul.

In July of the following year, 1983, Caroline Hogg, aged five, goes

missing.

She has been allowed to go out to play for just a little longer at the end of a

long, hot summer's day.

And she's dressed very prettily in a little dress with training shoes, white

socks, and her hair is blonde, tied up with punches.

Caroline was allowed out to play for just five minutes at seven o 'clock in

evening. Inexplicably, she wandered further than ever before from her

home. At the end of the road, just 100 yards away, the Fun City Fairground was

in full swing, and that's where she went.

She's seen by several people on the promenade at that time, and one in

particular is also able to describe someone on his own watching the children

playing.

Over subsequent days, evidence emerges...

about Caroline being in the company of a man.

And a picture is built up about her potential movements.

There was a description of a girl like Caroline on the promenade, hand in hand

with this scruffy -looking man.

There was a description of Caroline and this scruffy -looking man in the

funfair.

The scruffy man pays for her to go on a ride in the amusement arcade.

And then these sightings stop.

One minute she's there, the next minute she's disappeared.

It's a strange phenomenon, because there were so many people on that promenade

that night who felt they should have seen something significant, all of which

may have been true, and none of which may have been true.

Marion Beck, the four -year -old daughter of one of the policemen hunting

Caroline, retraced the girl's footsteps.

She was dressed identically in an effort to jog the memory of anyone who might

have seen Caroline the night she disappeared.

Police are still appealing to anyone who was at the fair on July the 8th to come

forward. The sightings of the scruffy man were obviously of importance.

Whilst they had a degree of variation between them, there was sufficient

commonality that justified us in putting out one artist's impression.

Enquiries revealed that there was a significant number of people who would

potentially be of interest to us who were present on that day. A surprisingly

large number of people who had convictions for interfering with

indecency offences. What was emerging there was quite a rapidly growing list

potential suspects.

All these people were of incredible interest to us.

The thing is, none of them had transport. They had no mechanism for

Caroline away.

All police leave in Edinburgh has been cancelled and extra men drafted in. Her

disappearance has so shocked the area that 600 volunteers came forward to help

search for the little girl.

Bring her back, whoever has her.

If anybody knows anything at all, just to let the police know.

In 1983, my daughter was four.

It actually alters the way you see things.

Caroline was everybody's child and everybody was hugely concerned about

happened to Caroline.

Caroline's body was found almost 300 miles south of where she had gone

again in a lay -by adjacent to a busy road near the village of Twycross in

Leicestershire. The sad discovery of the body in Leicestershire yesterday

occurred only 30 miles from the Staffordshire lay -by in which 11 -year

Susan Maxwell's body was found last August.

She too had disappeared many miles to the north.

When the body of Caroline was found in Leicestershire,

We knew then this was the same man who had snatched Susie.

Abducted, taken south, deposited in very, very similar places,

just off Main A Road.

Both murdered.

We knew then that we were not only dealing with a travelling sexual

but we were talking about a repeat offender as well.

Now one of Britain's biggest manhunts is on for the man who walked hand in hand

with Caroline Hogg from Portobello in Edinburgh, the same stranger who may

been responsible for the death a year ago of 11 -year -old Susan Maxwell from

North Northumberland.

It was clear from the outset that the best way forward for everybody was for

these two cases to be linked together in terms of a single directed

investigation. The officer who was then appointed to lead the two linked

investigations was Hector Clark.

Hector Clark was the man with an impressive record of solving murders.

He was one that was challenging him.

We would urge people who think they may have some information which will lead us

to this chap to come forward.

Will you catch him?

I think so.

What we knew about this person was that he was a predatory paedophile who

targeted young girls.

He had access to a vehicle. Best chance was a covered vehicle.

They had to have somewhere where he took the child and very quickly hid her from

view.

We were struggling. Fortunately for us, the ghost of the Yorkshire Ripper came

to our assistance because...

The Yorkshire Ripper had been such a catastrophe for policing in the UK.

It was a classic case of very good people but poor systems.

Hector Clarke, as a young detective, had worked on the Yorkshire Ripper cases

and he had the bruises.

He went to see the Chief Constable of Lothian and Borders Police and we had

got a computer system for crime recording and Hector used that computer.

to build the very first major incident index system on it.

Police hunting the killer or killers of Caroline Hogg and Susan Maxwell say they

can avoid the mistake for the Ripper investigation.

I think it's the first time that it's been used in an inquiry involving a

of police forces.

The equipment will enable indexing and cross -referencing to be done

immediately, avoiding mountains of paperwork.

Well, the computer's giving us a technical assistance in a way that we've

had before.

We have forensic examinations being carried out all over the country. We

locations being forensically examined. We've been interviewing people. We've

been tracing suspects. We've been eliminating suspects.

We've been doing pretty much everything that we can between, at that stage, four

forces.

And despite all this effort and the collation of all this information, there

no single strong, viable, sustainable suspect emerging from that.

There was a sense of unease.

that this man was still out there somewhere.

Where was he?

And, of course, unspoken was the fact that he's done this twice, at least.

He'll come back again.

On the 26th of March, 1996...

I received word across the force area that a child had gone missing.

Sarah Jane Harper, she was 10.

She'd gone to the corner shop, which she'd probably done numerous times.

Apart from going for a loaf, she took two empty bottles of pop with her to get

the refund on the bottles, which she'd spend then on sweets.

It's about 100 metres from her home.

She'd go to the corner shop, but she never returns.

So the balloon goes up, as they say.

We've got a young girl missing. Where the hell is she?

I was a police officer at the time that Sarah went missing back in 1986.

Female officers were very much in the minority.

I received a call to say that Sarah had gone missing and that the investigating

officer would like a female police officer from the unit that I was working

to go and work with the family on that inquiry.

And my role was to be a liaison between the family and the investigation team.

Nowadays it's... always the case that a family layers an officer is appointed

whenever anything like that happens but it was probably one of the first times

an officer had worked in that way all i can do really is to be there in case

there is anything that um that she needs sarah's mum was jackie harper It was

very difficult for the family. Jackie was under a great deal of media

which she obviously wasn't used to, police attention, which she wasn't used

This was just an ordinary family living in an ordinary suburb of Leeds and

suddenly thrust into the limelight. The volunteer search parties crowded into a

school playground as the hunts for missing Sarah intensified. They began

in teams under police supervision, concerned for the girls' safety growing

the hour.

I worked at Putsy CID and I was a detective constable in that office.

The local community were devastated, terribly upset, you know, that a young

just walking down the streets had never come back again.

It was just horrendous and lots of people, you know, were helping in the

It was like an invasion.

Officers down every street.

Every grate was lifted, every shed was checked.

We searched 3 ,000 properties, took 1 ,400 witness statements.

That's massive, and it's time -consuming.

Whilst I was inside the house with Jackie and the family, I could sense the

tension outside.

And Jackie could sense that as well.

The only person that can help is the person that's taken her.

Bring her back, let us know where she is.

Every home and every garden will be checked before the operation moves on.

We've turned this place upside down.

We're still doing that, of course, with a lot of houses still to search.

There's not a sighting at all.

Everybody's a suspect.

The main one is the shopkeeper, because that's the last person that saw her.

And we've got to check. And you check the shop, you check the sellers, you

his vehicle, you check everything.

But he's a good witness.

What the shopkeeper could tell us was a man came in behind her.

But he went back out. He didn't buy anything.

A bald -headed man with a beard.

Does anybody know him? Can anybody identify him?

And nobody could.

The murder bureaus were up and running, so you knew about Caroline Org and Susan

Maxwell. Was it connected?

At this moment in time, it'd be very easy to say yes, but the answer was,

dealing with this independently.

You don't assume anything, and you clear the ground beneath your feet.

Sarah should have been safe.

And 99 times out of 100, she would have been.

But on that day...

There was somebody lurking there, waiting to snatch a child.

Sarah was alone, and she got snatched.

Police searchers started near the spot where Sarah was found and worked their

way upstream along the banks of the River Trent. Her body was only partly

closed. They're looking for the shoes, blue anorak and pink corduroy skirt she

was wearing when she was abducted.

After the body of Sarah Harper was found, I was absolutely shocked.

I remember going to the bathroom after we'd had that sort of briefing and

crying. It was just so, so upsetting. And I know quite a lot of my colleagues,

you always put a poker face on for the public, but it was really hard.

She was a very streetwise young girl, Sarah. She was a real little local

She could stand up for herself.

She, quite clearly, had put up a considerable struggle.

When her body was subsequently discovered floating in the River Trent

Nottinghamshire, she too had been forcibly abducted.

She had been restrained. She had been subject to manual strangulation.

We weren't sure where she'd been put in the river, but we knew where she was

found. And where she was found was in fairly close proximity to the other

deposition sites.

Where her body was found was in this triangle.

And we journalists called it the murder triangle.

The next big moment in the story was when Hector Clarke announced that they

linking the three murders.

This was now.

A serial killer.

He's not going to stop at Sarah, is he?

He could be somebody else's child next.

I don't know if he can live with himself.

If he could just see what he was doing to people, he'd not be able to live with

himself.

These combined investigations represented the single biggest serial

investigation. Since the arrest of Peter Sutcliffe, 187 ,000 people being spoken

to, over a quarter of a million vehicle records, 60 ,000 plus formal written

statements from people, which amounted at the end of the day to over 20 tonnes

of material, huge volumes of stuff.

Somewhere in the back of a very twisted mind, he may have wondered that...

events would catch up with him.

I'm sure the killer would have known he'd been hunted. He'd have seen the

reports in the press, on the TV, the description of the person, and I'm sure

he'd look to see if he'd made any mistakes.

And we're waiting for him to make that mistake.

Word came to us that there had been a significant arrest.

Then the extraordinary circumstances of how the man was arrested

were given to us.

In July 1990, he drove his transit van through a village on the Scottish

borders. Here, he abducted a schoolgirl that was spotted and stopped by the

local police.

And this is a child walking down towards the van and then disappearing at sight.

You have this man who is an ordinary member of the public.

He's got his eyes open.

I run into the car and got a pen and paper and looked at the registration.

It's almost stranger than fiction.

The local police officer who is on duty that day steps out and stops the van,

opens it up.

They find what looks like a purpose -built sleeping bag and in that is his

daughter.

A man had been placed into custody and was being taken to a local police

station.

The man arrested was a disgusting pervert with a fixation on young girls.

Robert Black.

I remember

being told by the police the story of how he was arrested and when they found

the little girl in the back of the van how he had treated her.

Almost immediately the police told us that. We were 100 % sure it was Black

murdered Jennifer.

What happened after?

The arrest of Robert Black was even more remarkable than what happened before.

We still have three unsolved significant major child murder inquiries on our

hands.

This could be the most viable suspect that we'd yet seen to date after all

years of investigation.

He wasn't talking. He was admitting nothing.

So how to prove all those years later that he was the man?

who had killed these girls.

This interview has been tape recorded. Robert, could you give me your full

please? Robert Black.