Original subtitles

OK, this interview is being tape -recorded. The interview is being

an interview room at Hampton Police Station.

Robert, could you give me your full name, please? Robert Black.

OK, and your date of birth, please?

21 -4 -4 -7.

The reason that Robert Black, I think, is one of the most dangerous people I've

ever met is because you would not look twice at him if you walked down the

street. He just looks ordinary, but his crimes were so horrific.

If you saw a young girl, tell me what would happen then.

He was admitting nothing.

So how to prove all those years later that he was the man who had killed these

girls?

What happened after the arrest of Robert Black was even more remarkable than

what happened before.

There are a number of issues, Robert, that we would like to talk to you about.

Are you happy enough with that?

Carry on.

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

was found in the lake.

Mrs. Maxwell said that that day had been the first time Susan had been allowed

to walk home alone.

Fifty officers are scouring the area looking for clues.

Caroline was allowed out to play for just five minutes. She was last seen in

company of a 30 to 40 year old man.

started near the spot where Sarah was found and worked their way upstream

the banks of the River Trent.

He's not going to stop us there, is he?

Black 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.

Maybe it was the beginning of the road to some sort of justice.

Would you like to look at the person who murdered your daughter?

We didn't find any forensic evidence that connected Robert Black with any of

these children.

A predatory paedophile who targeted young girls.

How could it not be him?

You really have to go into every dark corner of the case and try and get the

next piece of evidence.

Robert Black was the red flag killer. This had to work. There was no other way

out. He's a vile, evil man.

The man of the most...

Evil current.

14th of July, 1990.

Seven years after Caroline.

Eight years after Susie.

Four years after Sarah Harper.

The police officers stop the van and the driver of the van is Robert Black.

underneath all the clutter, there is like a purpose -built sleeping bag.

And in that sleeping bag, they found a wee girl.

Pulled the girl out, and Robert Black's arrested.

It was immediately apparent that the circumstances of that abduction were

special, to say the least.

The way in which she had been very forcibly bound, gagged, This is out of

ordinary. This is just not right.

This is not a first time.

He's done this before, without doubt.

There was more to this guy than we thought.

Immediately you have a localised crime to investigate.

While you're doing that, you're discovering things at that crime scene

that vehicle that set alarm bells ringing big style.

He was a driver. He delivered posters throughout the UK. He had a van, which

used basically as a mobile home.

He had sleeping bags, he had a foam mattress, he had foodstuffs, bindings,

implements which would suggest some form of...

sexual activity taking place.

Everything pointing to travelling the length and breadth of the country and

prepared to forcibly abduct children.

And it was really quite menacing.

He's a loner. He has failed to have relationships with adults.

He was obsessed by pornography.

He's obsessed by children.

He is the classic offender.

Robert Black appeared at the High Court in Edinburgh in August of 1990.

Within less than a month of his arrest, he was tried and convicted.

He pled guilty for the offence in Stow.

He was sentenced to a mandatory life sentence for abduction and assault to

danger of life.

Robert Black left Edinburgh High Court to start a life sentence for what the

judge described as a horrific, appalling case. The court was told that if she

hadn't been discovered, she could have died within the hour.

We have Robert Black in prison and we still have three unsolved significant

major child murder inquiries on our hands.

It was quite clear at that stage that given the circumstances that we already

knew about the deaths before, previously of Susan Maxwell in 1982, Caroline Hogg

in 1983, and Sarah Harper, and the abduction in Stow, that this could very

be the most viable suspect that we'd yet seen to date after all these years of

investigation.

They had him in prison.

Now, could they prove?

that he had committed other murders.

Maybe it was the beginning of the road to some sort of justice for the families

of those whose daughters didn't survive.

When it's a child, it affects everyone.

Everybody wanted some answers and wanted someone being convicted for what

happened.

And I saw a photograph of him and the description that we'd been given at the

time. I just knew it had to be him.

That was the man who'd committed the murder of Sarah Harper and the others.

There was no question that this inquiry had to work. There was no other way out.

We had three cases which were definitely linked together. They were massive in

terms of documentation, records, forensics.

To my knowledge, there's never been a linked serial murder investigation

involving children to anything like the extent that this was.

There was an inherent negativity, a fear that this was all too big,

all too complex, all too challenging.

We had no idea whether there was any head of steam to take this to trial at

We had huge responsibility and we just had to find a way through.

Detectives from Lothian and Borders have been questioning a 43 -year -old man.

Inquiries into his background led them to visit a rented bedsit in the Stamford

Hill area of North London, where it's understood a number of items were

for forensic examination.

There were a huge number of challenges from a forensic perspective.

The first one was just the sheer volume of work.

In terms of Robert's accommodation in London, when we searched that flat, we

discovered swimwear belonging to children,

skirts, clothing, objects, which were used as part of his own self -abuse.

There were something like 4 ,000 individual items ranging from tubes of

toothpaste through to pornographic cinefilms. Child sex magazines,

videotapes which he spliced together, photographs, scrapbooks, but all

very, very worryingly centred around the direct abuse of young female children.

His entire material world was in the hall and loading on the board of the

police. Everything he possessed, apart from whatever he wore in prison.

It must have been an absolute nightmare to our forensic people to stand there

and think, well, where do we start with this lot?

It was probably the biggest case in the country since the Yorkshire Ripper

investigation.

We went through pretty much all 4 ,000 items and we reduced them to

a few hundred.

The focus on these items was to look for hairs, fibres, blood,

saliva that was being transferred to black from the victims or from the

back to black.

Quite a tiring process, sparing down a microscope for hours on end. And, of

course, if you get tired, you could miss something.

But despite the time spent on the case and the extent of the examinations, we

didn't find any forensic evidence that connected Robert Black with any of these

children. They went through every single item.

Every single item. And at the end of the day, there was not one single item of

evidence in there that forensically...

linked Robert Black to these investigations.

He wasn't talking. He was admitting nothing.

So how to prove all those years later, without forensic evidence, that he was

the man who had killed these three girls?

In the absence of forensic evidence, I think it's realistic to say that

the average member of the public...

understands police work or detective work to be cctv cameras and forensic

science nothing could be further from the truth certainly in 1990 nothing

be further from the truth or in 1982 83 or 86 it was just slogging common

down -to -earth detective work get out there do the work don't expect it to

in fall into your lap you've got to go and find it And we began to dig in for a

long haul, principally to try to eliminate Robert Black from his

in these murders. And that's an important point.

Sounds counterintuitive to the public, but it is in fact perfectly rational

you think about it.

Eliminate this person, and if you can't eliminate him, he's your man.

You start to retrospectively...

looked back and put a magnifying glass over what was by then eight years of

investigation. We decided a three -pronged approach would be the best way

strategically, and that consisted of looking at his employment records in

of the wages that he earned and in terms of the deliveries that he made.

He was given what we called petrol cards. These were small, almost like a

card, which could be used at petrol stations to refill the vehicles.

We could build up a picture of not only the driver's use of the car, but Robert

Black's personal use of the car.

He was a prolific hoarder of receipts. He would stop and buy a bottle of

lemonade. He would subsequently find a receipt in his flat in London for a

particular place at a particular time on a particular date, on days which are of

significance to our inquiries.

You have a picture of us superimposing one element over another element.

Deliveries, petrol.

The hunt for a possible triple child killer was stepped up at Easter when a

police computer called Holmes came online after months of being fed with

hundreds of thousands of separate pieces of information.

The advantage of the Holmes computerised system was that it enabled research to

be done retrospectively. The Holmes computer system was aptly named after

Sherlock Holmes and it stands for...

home office, large, major inquiry systems. So it was a database of

on all major inquiries.

There was dedicated officers working on the computers, and that was their role,

sifting through the information that they had and putting it onto the

The wife and where the bodies were found was very important.

We've traced all the vehicles that he used over a period of years. We've

physically recovered and forensically examined them.

They used vans all the time. Once we discovered Robert Black was using white

vans, we then looked back and we put in white van Coldstream, where Susan

Maxwell was last seen.

Boom. Up comes the unidentified sighting by witness A of a white van on the

offside of the road south of the Tweed Bridge at Coldstream.

And at that time it was driven and used by Robert Black, who had shortly before

picked up petrol at Stannington Petrol Station.

And was en route to Edinburgh to deliver a poster.

The home computer was absolutely revolutionary.

It just saved months and months of work.

We plot him on these different days. We plot him on the 30th of July for Susan

Maxwell. We plot him for the 26th of March for Sarah Harper. And we plot him

the 8th of July for Caroline Hobb.

Likewise, we plot him again.

on the days around the deposition dates.

And we gradually see a very strong, very potent picture linking him entirely

across these three incidents.

That's always a realistic possibility that somebody else might come out from

mass of evidence as being a more preferred suspect.

Didn't happen in this case. From day one, Robert Black was the red flag

He was implicated at every turn.

Putting together the huge circumstantial case that Hector Clark and Roger Orr

did was astonishing.

They wove an incredibly complex fine mesh net to show that Robert Black

had the motive, he had the opportunity, he was there at the time.

They simply put together a case which is so compelling, which showed Robert

Black. in all the right places at the right times.

It was immensely challenging on multiple fronts.

What began to emerge was an idea seeking to use a very unique legal process

known as similar fact evidence.

Evidence of similar fact means you could use the example of the abduction in

Stowe to say, look, this is what he did.

And here is Susie Maxwell.

identical circumstances.

And here is Caroline Hogg, identical circumstances.

And here is Sarah Harper, identical circumstances.

So you're saying to the jury, how could it not be him?

How could it not be him?

The deputy chief of Lothian and Borders Police has headed a nine -year inquiry

into the deaths of the three girls. Six police forces were involved.

I can confirm that late today,

Criminal proceedings have been issued on the authority of the Crown Prosecution

Service against Robert Black, aged 44 years, a driver

from London.

Robert Black was driven to Newcastle's Moot Hall for his Crown Court trial this

morning for the alleged abduction and murder of three schoolgirls in the

The defendant himself was covered by a blanket as he emerged from a police van.

Fixed police forces have been involved in the inquiry and have accumulated 20

tonnes of paperwork and evidence.

The mood in the courtroom was electric.

that really contributed to the drama that was maintained throughout.

I think I would be wrong if I said that there wasn't any tension in that

building.

I've never gone through anything like that in my life. I don't think I will

again, and I think that applied equally to all the officers there, let alone

Jackie Harper, Annette Hogg, the Maxwells.

Jackie, Sarah's mum, how many years had passed and how old Sarah would have been

at that point.

I cannot imagine how that must have felt for her.

You can never bring Susie back or Caroline back or Sarah.

It destroys the families of these girls.

You never bring them back.

But it's important that justice be done.

You can be confident, but you've got to be careful.

Anything can happen, because the job's not over until that foreman stands up.

Robert Black may be a convicted child molester, but that does not make him a

murderer, his defense counsel said today.

And Ronald Thwaites QC took the highly unusual step of revealing Black's

criminal record to the court.

For the first time, the jury has been told that Black is already serving life

imprisonment for the abduction of a girl in 1990.

But his criminal record goes back three decades, with sexual offenses against

schoolgirls in 1963 and 1967.

The trial was just over five weeks.

Robert was his normal self, or what we'd come to understand as his normal self,

pretty detached, pretty much disinterested, very little interaction

counsel, if any, no handing down of notes or contesting evidence.

The most dramatic moment was when the jury, after weeks of listening to the

increasingly compelling evidence, came back.

The thing that I always remember was that because of the fact that we were

linking these cases using similar fact, we understood that if the very first

charge was found not guilty, the rest fell.

Conversely, if the very first charge was found as a guilty, the rest were going

to be guilty.

I looked up at Jackie Harper, I think, at the time, and she was kind of wide

-eyed and semi -shocked looking.

There's not a lot you could have said. There was nothing anybody could say.

It was palpable.

First charge in the Maxwell case.

Guilty.

It was just one massive sigh of relief.

And then the doorman just proceeded to read out the ten verdicts of guilty.

The families of his three victims listened and with considerable dignity

the judge call Robert Black a very dangerous man and sentenced him to life

imprisonment ten times over.

When he was convicted for all three of the murders, I can't tell you, it was

just a fantastic day in my life. I was so pleased.

Anybody that can pick up a young child from a roadside and do the things he did

to them just cannot be anything other than evil.

I remember afterwards Susan's mother telling me she was very grateful to the

jury for returning a unanimous verdict.

It seemed very important to her that they all agreed that he'd done it. Very,

very relieved at the verdict.

We'd like to thank the jury for coming to the right and just decision, although

we've had a long wait for it.

There was enormous relief for the parents and the police who'd grown close

during this exhaustive investigation.

He's a vile, evil man, a man of the most evil kind.

Robert Black was evil, sadistic, had no compassion

for his victims, for his children that he abducted and murdered, or for the

families that were left behind.

A strange thing happened just immediately after the verdicts were

Black was being taken down the steps and into the cell holding area below where

we were. And unbelievably, and still unexplained to this day, he hesitated

he looked up.

He was looking directly at me.

And all he said was, well done, boys.

And immediately put his head down and went down the steps.

Never forget that.

Yeah.

Not easy.

Today, one of Britain's most far -reaching murder investigations finally

But the questions about what other terrible crimes Black may be responsible

are only just beginning.

Detectives working on unsolved cases want to visit Black in jail to find out

he killed even more children to satisfy his perverted mind.

We were given probably, I think, in excess of 40 cases to look at. And in

of those cases, we were able to eliminate him positively because we had

receipt placing him in a certain place on a certain date.

One or two other cases, perhaps.

There's a good chance this is him.

Two of them were Jeanette Tate in Devon in 1978 and Jennifer Cardy in Northern

Ireland in 1981.

There was an opening of the case again in 1996.

Detectives from Northern Ireland went across to England and spent time going

through this.

We met the police in secret because we didn't want the press to get hold of it.

We knew that there was a lot of work to be done, tons of paperwork to go

through, fan loads of it. We knew all of that.

Detectives from Devon and Cornwall Police and their colleagues from the RUC

come here to Wakefield, where they interviewed Robert Black until late last

night. They want him to give them information about the disappearance of

Jeanette Tate and the murder of Jennifer Cardy.

Robert Black was interviewed, but there were no firm conclusions drawn from that

interview. He never admitted that he was in Northern Ireland, and it was decided

at that point that there wasn't enough.

to go forward with the prosecution and the case went cold again.

Jennifer was always missed, always talked about and always missed.

But as a family, we had to live as a family.

Now, that doesn't mean to say that we didn't suffer and miss

Jennifer and think about it in our quiet times, but we didn't live it in front

of other people.

We didn't live in fear.

2002, I'm promoted as Detective Chief Inspector.

The outgoing CID officer did a handover in their office and said, have you heard

of the Jennifer Cardy case? And literally handed me a green folder.

I actually read it that night.

There were three people that were possibly connected to having carried out

offence. Only one of them was a fixated, paedophile, child molester of the

nature of Robert Black.

When Jennifer went missing, my father, he was a station sergeant, there was

actually a required drink with my father, just talking, and he brought up

Cardiff case, turned around and said to me, if there's one thing you do before

you retire, solve the Cardiff case.

The one thing that struck me...

that he was convinced that he would put an end to this.

Raymond was on mission, and his mission was that someday he would finish this

case.

We went up to Myer Police Station, the whole family, and they talked about how

they're going to reopen the case and try and get... Robert Black, I didn't think

they were going to get a conviction because there was very little forensic

evidence and it might be going on more circumstantial evidence.

When you begin to look at the material that has been gathered diligently over

the years, you suddenly begin to realise that this is actually a massive task.

We knew it was going to be a long haul. We knew this was not going to be a case

that was going to be resolved in weeks or months and actually it was going to

be. probably measured in years.

To be honest, you're supposed to get operational names out of a government

database so that nobody duplicates it, but we did go slightly off -piste and we

felt that Operation Perseverance was probably the best name for it because

is what it was going to take.

We thought it would take years.

We knew it would take years. I think they told us that at the time.

So we were content to sit back.

What we did was re -interview every major member of the poster industry that

could find. And during those investigations, we found a new witness.

A man who owned multiple poster display sites in a town called Newry in Northern

Ireland. And the town of Newry is located at the bottom of the A1. And

Dam, where Jennifer's body was located, is halfway along the A1.

We knew that he came in on the ferry and the ferry was docked at 7am. We could

prove that then from the harbour records.

We knew that his deliveries would have been completed by 11am, which put him

right in the absolute time frame for having abducted Jennifer somewhere in

around 1 .40pm to 2pm when she was on her bicycle travel.

Jennifer's watch so that Jennifer would have the right time to know when to come

back. The watch had stopped at 5 .40, which again gave Black plenty of time to

get to Belfast, to be at the dock, to get on the ferry.

It was all these granular examinations that really began to harden up the time

frame and that circumstantial case began to get tighter and tighter and tighter.

We felt that actually the case, putting Robert Black in Northern Ireland had got

really, really strong.

We thought we had a body of evidence, but we were never going to be satisfied

with that. You really have to go into every single dark corner of the case and

try and get the next piece of evidence. A decision was made at that time that we

would move towards interviewing Black himself.

The PSNI review approached me and asked me for any advice or assistance that I

could give them in relation to the particular aspect of interviews with

Black. And I think that was valuable that we were able to give that to

investigators who themselves would be faced with a limited time to cover a lot

of material and a lot of points.

The planning for the interview took a year.

The interviewers were very carefully picked, all highly, highly experienced.

And we decided to use a male and a female interviewer.

We talked to Roger about how that might create an interesting dynamic.

The first key objective was, can we get him to admit that he is in Northern

Ireland on the 12th of August?

Okay, this interview has been tape recorded. The interview is being

an interview room at Anthon Police Station.

Robert, could you give me your phone name, please?

Robert White.

Okay, and your date of birth, please?

21 -4 -4 -7.

There are a number of issues, Robert, that we would like to talk to you about.

Are you happy enough with that?

Carry on and see how it goes.

Okay.

I've got one question, though. Yeah.

Why, in this situation, is it always a female officer that talks about these

things?

In what respect?

When I'm being interviewed by a male and a female.

It seems when I'm questioned about these murders, it's always the female ones

that does the questioning.

The interviews took three days.

They were covered across 21 separate audio tapes. And after each interview,

would then discuss that interview. What had it told us evidentially?

How it was impacting on him? Was he opening up? Was he closing down?

What if he didn't speak? What if he did speak?

What if he actually made a confession?

So it was really, really agile.

They immediately connected with the female interviewer, Pamela Simpson,

fantastic. And Pamela's big skill was she could talk about the most horrendous

things without any trace of judgment on either her face or her voice.

I'd be driving along and see a young girl.

I'd get out and talk to her and try to persuade her of getting into the van.

One of the things we did in order just to build that rapport and the connection

was we had an original Collins 1981 road atlas and we put that in front of him

and he's just fascinated by it. He's tracing it with his finger, he's

engrossed in this and we were fascinated watching him being fascinated and you

can almost see that rapport growing.

I'm not exactly proud of the way I feel towards young girls.

Like, there's the part of me that knows I'm wrong, that knows that it's wrong,

that I shouldn't be doing things like that, I shouldn't even be thinking

like that.

But there's the other part that says, you like it, go on.

She then moves from that to get into the more evidential stuff.

We have the receipt of you getting petrol in the Ireland vehicle.

We also have the receipt of you getting diesel at sale, royal

sale, in your mainland vehicle, again the same day.

Now, it's not aggressive, but it's much more robust. You can see just this

gentle change in his expression.

Because he's a fairly impassive character.

And I thought, yeah, you know now that danger is all around and actually that

the door's closing here on you.

We looked at the wages book as well. Do you accept that you did the Ireland run

that week?

Yeah. You did.

So in effect that you would have been in Ireland from the morning of Wednesday

the 12th of August until that evening.

He admitted he was in Northern Ireland and that was a big moment for us.

We knew the police were doing their utmost to bring this to a conclusion.

There was obviously things they could tell us and there was things that we

understood they couldn't tell us.

We knew that it would come to...

maturity in the end, and we left it with them to do that.

If you saw a young girl, tell me what would happen then.

In the course of those interviews, it became clear for the first time he was

willing, or it appeared to be willing, to explore his culpability by way of a

fantasy. We'll look at her, try to guess what age she was, maybe.

I might park up for a couple of minutes and watch him.

And how long would you sit and watch the young girl?

More than five minutes.

But effectively what he was doing was using the fantasy to admit his guilt

to a particular extent.

In your fantasy, what the country situation would be like?

Well, it was just a narrow road.

It was going downhill.

And way at the bottom of the hill where the road turned away, there was a house

set back from the road a bit.

And it was the only house in sight.

And as he was doing it, these officers...

knew instinctively, having been at the location, that he was exactly describing

the road in which Jennifer Cardy was abducted and the hedge in which Jennifer

Cardy's bike was thrown behind.

Spookily and chillingly, he was going as far as he was prepared to go in

reliving those events.

And he almost admitted that he had killed Jennifer.

He described exactly the spot where he had lifted her.

We described it perfectly, so we did.

It's a tribute to those officers who interviewed him that they managed to get

him there.

We felt in ourselves that we'd met the threshold, and then we began to

the main file to go forward to the court process.

I was... nearly sick in the stomach, going to court.

In truth, would you like to look at the person who murdered your daughter?

That's a big thing for Pat and I.

We often talked about it. Wish we never knew who had been caught.

Wish we never had to look at the man who had been caught.

I was concerned about the impact on the family.

Although I knew they were very, very resilient, but even so, having

put by that stage, was a 30 -year journey.

I had to sit watching this man, and he described why he liked little

girls rather than mature women.

And, you know, all I could do was sit and weep at the thoughts of what our

child had went through.

It would have broke your heart.

His expression never changed, he never changed, even though there was things

said against him, accusations, information, his face never changed.

I remember waiting, and I can remember the jury coming back, and I can remember

the judge warning that there should be no celebrations or any noise when

the verdict was announced.

And the poor man announced that he was guilty.

The verdict came back unanimous from the jury.

It was just such a release.

Since 1981, we've been waiting for so long for this.

We knew that this murder of Jennifer will not finish without

an end result.

We always had that.

faith to know that the Lord would eventually reveal who killed Jennifer.

We as a family really have never tried to understand or tried to think of

what in the last hours of her life that she went through and all of a sudden

were confronted with the awfulness of them last few hours and what she would

have had to suffer and that has been truly awful.

Whatever I said was from my heart, but in truth I can't remember.

Black stole the life of our daughter Jennifer, but Robert Black didn't steal

lives of me and my family.

Police say the investigation into Robert Black continues.

The story of Robert Black doesn't end with this verdict here today.

There are lines of inquiry which we still have and that we are still looking

I had written to him when he was in prison and I asked for a visit.

I only sent the one letter and I got no reply.

I would have liked to have met him, talked to him and understood what's

happened. I knew there was other families, other girls around the country

never had closure and I would have really liked for them to have closure

Black was convicted. He was given a tariff of 25.

which in effect meant he would eventually die in prison.

He did die in prison, but a lot sooner than we would have wanted.

He died in 2016. The news came through that he'd passed away, natural causes,

and had failed.

I felt nothing when Robert Black died, except that perhaps he had died before

could have been held to account for other murders.

including one very long -standing cold case in the West Country of Jeanette

Tate, whose bicycle was found abandoned with the wheel still

spinning in a road. And it's certain enough for Devon and Cornwall Police to

have been ready to charge him before he died.

Her body has never to this day been found.

The inquiry was able to furnish Debenham Cornwall with a good deal of evidence.

They themselves then developed that as best they could and were about to submit

full case files and paper to the Crown Prosecution Service literally within

weeks of the death in prison of Robert Black.

It's taken a big chunk out of my life for many, many years.

It was a continuation of what I personally had always set out to do,

professionally to finish the case, to reach the finishing line.

These cases happened at a time of seismic change.

I think 100 years from now, if they're writing the history of the

turning points in criminal investigation...

then I think that this case will merit a chapter in that history because of all

the unique circumstances that came together.

This photograph here is of Jennifer.

And one day she brought this photograph to me, framed.

and she said, you don't have a photograph of me in your office, so

put that in your office.

These photographs are in the dressing table right beside my bed, so they are.

reminds me what she looked like when she left home on her bike.

I certainly miss Jennifer.

You couldn't not miss Jennifer.

Pat's passing has...

left a massive void.

We were married for 54 years and we lived here together 45 years

almost.

The fact that Pat was alive when Robert Black was convicted was

a fantastic relief.

Pat started to write a memoir about Jennifer.

It brings back so many emotions.

I live a life of faith.

Pat was now with Jennifer.

Jennifer could never come back to us, but we can go to Jennifer.