by Chris Clark
Black continued to be obsessed with orifices of the human body, not just his own rectum, but the vaginal and anal areas of little girls. He was fixated on thoughts of how much he would be able to fit into them, a depraved form of gynaecology which would follow him into adulthood and into his life as a sexual predator and criminal offender. His early and continued practice of rectal self-abuse was in no way an indication of any kind of homosexual ambitions he may have harboured, but rather, it was rather his way of making up for the fact that he did not have a vagina. He commented to Ray Wyre that he disliked male genitalia and in my opinion he may have wished he had been born a girl – this might be backed up by the female children’s clothing that he used in acts of transvestism later in his life. Black always denied any interest in homosexuality and all of his confirmed and known victims and the targets of his depraved perversions have been female.
In 1958, at the age of eleven, Robert Black once again lost someone close to him. Although only foster parents, the Tulips were the only family he had had any experience of at that point, but Jack Tulip had died when Black was only five years old, and now, six years after her husband, Margaret ‘Betty’ Tulip, the only maternal figure in his young life, also died. For the young Robert Black the parental loss in his only short life must have been shattering: Whatever emotional bonds might or might not have existed, the Tulips had provided some stability and a home environment. In hindsight it is hard not to feel sorry for the young Robert Black as he had had far from the best start in life, and may, as the years went by, have experienced feelings of abandonment and rejection when looking back at his early beginnings and his childhood and lack of normal family life. The absence of love and affection that he probably experienced as a young boy cannot for one minute be seen as an excuse for his later monstrous actions of abduction, abuse and murder. There are many others who have suffered similar, and in some cases worse, starts in life and have gone on to lead perfectly normal lives, but it can help us perhaps understand the lack of empathy and sympathy he had for the childhoods of his later child victims, which he destroyed forever through his deeds. One episode from his childhood might serve to illustrate the kind of deprived and affectionless childhood that Black may have felt he had had. In Ray Wyre and Tim Tate’s brilliant 1995 book on Black and his crimes The Murder of Childhood, Black talks about one Christmas when he was about eight or nine when he received no gifts from Father Christmas or his family, because, Betty Tulip told him, he had been bad that year and would not be getting any presents. He did at least receive one gift – of a football from a woman who was possibly a neighbour or friend of the Tulips, which he eventually lost. He could not remember any verbal or physical affection from his foster mother. Both verbal and physical affection are vitally important for the healthy emotional development of any child. Black it seems received little of either.
Following the death of Betty Tulip, a decision had to be made about where the young Robert Black went next. A local couple who were friendly with the Tulips, the Taylors, whom Robert knew as Uncle John and Auntie Flo, offered to take the young orphan in, but as they already had four children of their own the local Social Services decided it was not a good idea.
Soon the eleven-year-old Robert Black found himself placed in an establishment known as Redding House in Stirlingshire. The children’s home catered for children both male and female, from young babies up to thirteen years of age.
In November 2012 I travelled to Dungannon Crown Court in my home county of County Tyrone, Northern Ireland to have a chat with a Mr Bill Nichol, an officer at the court. Bill had for six months shared a bedroom with Black at Redding House all those years ago. When I contacted him and asked if we could have a chat about the time he spent with Black as a young boy, Bill said he’d be happy to talk to me and answer any questions I had. I started off by asking him what Black was like as a boy.
‘Strange but he initially appeared to be fairly normal. I shared a room with him, had a bed next to his in the six months I was there. Some of the female staff, or children’s nurses as they were called, he would make very weird sexual remarks about them, he displayed an over-active interest in the pursuit of young girls both younger and older than him.’
Bill’s life could not have gone in a more different direction than Robert Black’s did. Whilst Black was travelling the length and breadth of the country stalking, abducting and killing young girls, Bill had undertaken a twenty-five-year-long career in the Scots Guards with his experiences taking him to the Falklands War and an award for exceptional bravery.
Bill recalled waking up one night to see a little girl of around six in her night clothes standing next to Robert Black’s bed. Bill remembered a nurse then walked in and took the little girl out of the room. Bill saw nothing to suggest Black had touched the little girl but the next day Bill remembered Black being summoned to the see the Matron. Not long after, Black was gone from Redding House. From Bill’s point of view Redding House was a fantastic place, a safe and clean environment where the staff broke their backs to make sure the children were well looked after. Bill believes the care system was not to blame for the horrendous future path Robert Black would begin to walk down.
‘It was drilled into us, the difference between right and wrong,’ said Bill. ‘But something interrupted that sense in Black. No one should have any pity for this evil degenerate.’
After he left Redding House in Falkirk, the powers that be decided that an all-male environment would be best for Robert Black. That environment was Red House, an all-boys home based in the East Lothian town of Musselburgh about six miles east of Edinburgh. He would spend four years of his life at this establishment. From 1958 when he was aged eleven to the summer of 1962 when he was fifteen, Black was a resident here and was given a number like the other boys who stayed there. Black was boy number 28. His sleeping quarters were in the attic room of the tall building, which he shared with several other young boys resident at the home. Whilst this placement was intended to be a fresh start for the young Robert Black it would be anything but. Robert Black found himself in a role rather different from what he was used to previously in his short life; for while Black had already shown abusive tendencies, had been a predator in the past as he would be again in the future, he was now in the role of victim, the prey for another predator. For at least one of the years he spent in Musselburgh, perhaps even two, Black was routinely sexually abused by a male member of staff, now dead. The man’s routine was to target a young boy to abuse and when in due course that boy moved on, as was normal in children’s homes, he was made to suggest another boy in the home to take his place. Robert Black had the misfortune of being named by the man’s previous victim when that boy left the home. Later, after his final arrest in 1990, Black was to tell sex-crimes expert Ray Wyre of the cycle or routine that the abuse would take. ‘He would make me put his penis in my mouth, touch him, you know. He did try to bugger me once, but he couldn’t get an erection.’
For Robert Black this period of abuse would reinforce the wrong, dark and dangerous ideas, attitudes and feelings that he already had and would have for the rest of his life as a predator in regard to sex. Sex to the young Black was to take what he wanted when he wanted it, it was about domination over another person – during his period of being abused he identified with his abuser rather than his own victims. A fighting bully and a molester of little girls, while at Red House, aged only twelve, Black, along with two other boys, attempted to rape a young girl in a field but they could not get erections. Even then he showed how little he cared about his victims and the wrong he had done them; he had no sympathy, no remorse of any kind for the damage he had done to them. His own abuse by an adult male had confirmed in his dark mind that his victims, past and future, were not people, they were merely objects, playthings for his own sexual gratification.
Whilst at Red House, Black attended the local Musselburgh Grammar School, where despite his early setbacks as a child and his less than favourable start i
n life, he was on the higher side of average in terms of academic ability. His real talent and passion in terms of schooling was sport. He enjoyed football and was goalkeeper for Red House’s own football team; athletics was another favourite and he was good at both. Table tennis and billiards he also enjoyed, and as an adult he liked to practise weight-lifting in order to obtain a stronger upper body. His real passion sportswise, however, was swimming, which he enjoyed thoroughly. He would often walk from Musselburgh to the nearby Portobello swimming baths were he would swim; even gaining a lifesavers’ badge for his ability as a young swimmer. Black’s visits to Portobello had a darker side, however, as he would spend time watching the little girls in their swimwear splashing about in the pool.
In April of 1962, Robert Black would turn fifteen. By the summer of that year he was to leave Red House in Musselburgh and also leave school.
On the move again, this time free from school and care-home environments, the young Robert Black would take his first steps into employment and young adulthood. It should again have been a fresh start, a move away from his past experiences, but in spite of the changed circumstances Black’s sexual perversions would continue to fester, grow and come to the surface as Robert Black the sexual predator of children was never far away. No matter where Black moved to, his dark, paedophiliac attacking instinct was forever with him like a shadow.
The local child welfare authorities and agencies had a responsibility to set Black up in new lodgings with a job opportunity. Across the United Kingdom, most young men who came from poorer backgrounds and who left full-time education in the 1960s at the age of fifteen, went into full-time employment to earn money – perhaps in a local factory, as a farm labourer or an apprentice. Robert Black would become an apprentice to a butcher and work as a delivery boy in the western Scottish town of Greenock, lodging in a boys’ hostel in the town.
Greenock is located within the central western lowlands of Scotland around twenty miles away from Port Glasgow, which lies to its east side. Following the Second World War it had a heavy industrial presence within the town and it was during this boom that young Robert Black got employment. He quickly saw its possibilities and started using – not for the last time either – his job as a means to approach and sexually abuse young girls. Whilst on his delivery rounds for the butcher he worked for, Black would regularly seek out little girls to molest at every opportunity that happened to come his way. The exact numbers may never be known but Black would later confess to Ray Wyre that the number could be anything from thirty to forty girls; sadly, the true number could be much higher as, Black conceded, he was only going on his memory of the attacks.
‘If there was a girl on her own in the flats where I was delivering,’ he told Wyre, ‘I’d, like, sit down and talk to her for a few minutes, like, you know, and try and touch her: sometimes succeeded, sometimes not.’
It is extremely difficult to believe that Robert Black got away with all of this, that none of these assaults were reported to the authorities, or, if any of these attacks or attempted attacks came to the knowledge of the local law, that he was lucky enough never to have been connected to them. It is particularly hard to believe when you consider the sheer number of victims or potential victims. Even if he had vastly inflated the number of victims – and it is impossible to know either way – Black was now by his own admission a serial molester of children. At the age of just sixteen.
There was an incident, he recalled when speaking to Ray Wyre, during his early days in Greenock. He described how he, another young boy and a young girl, together went into a sort of hut, similar to a deserted old henhouse, in a field. There, the girl agreed for Black to look at her privates in exchange for a cigarette. Black cannot remember if he touched her or not, but clearly remembers the girl being in what he considered to be a position of control in regard to her telling him when they should stop, and then smoking the cigarette.
This incident serves to show how Black’s obsession with orifices, and in particular the genitalia of little girls, was increasingly at the forefront of his sexual offending. Perhaps he was trying to paint a picture of a small group of children experimenting in an innocent doctors-and-nurses type of scenario with little damage to any of those involved, but in the light of what we know Black had done previously and would go on to do in the future, it is not a believable picture. In any case, he, and presumably the others, were somewhat too old for such explorations to be totally innocent.
It wouldn’t take long for Black’s offending to increase in brutality and cruelty. From voyeurism and molestations, Black soon went on to carry out an attack that would be both more sophisticated in its pre-meditation and horrific in the level of violence that he used. It would also result in his first court appearance for a sexual offence against a young female child.
It was an early summer afternoon in 1963 and Black had ventured into a local playground. There was a group of children playing on the swings. He bided his time as the children went home one by one until one little girl was left alone on the swings. He approached the little girl, who was aged only seven, and pushed her on the swings briefly. He knew where there were kittens, he told her, and offered to take the little girl to see them. As he and the little girl exited the park they passed a local policeman whom Black knew – he was at the time attending a local youth club that was run by a local police sergeant.
Black took the little girl to a nearby abandoned air-raid shelter. As they entered it and encountered the darkness, the little girl grew frightened and, wanting to leave, started to cry. But rather than being in the company of a caring young person who would relieve her of her distress, she was in the company of a youth who was in a depraved sexual frenzy and would proceed to subject her to a terrifying ordeal. Black put one of his hands over the child’s mouth to stop her from crying out and screaming, and then put the other hand around her throat, throttling her, and pushing her down to the ground. The little girl fell unconscious and Black proceeded to assault the defenceless child, lifting her skirt up, taking off her underwear and inserting his finger into her vagina. Black then masturbated and ejaculated onto the floor, following which he put her underpants back on the child and left the shelter, apparently unaware of the state of his victim – whether she was still alive or if he had killed her as he throttled her – and unconcerned. This disregard for the life and well-being of his victim is particularly distressing, and telling at the same time, considering what we know of the murderous offences Black would go on to commit in the future. Thankfully, his young victim survived and was later found walking the streets alone and distressed, tired, confused, crying and bleeding.
Black was arrested the very next day and charged with ‘lewd and libidinous behaviour with a young girl’. In hindsight, however, and looking at the facts and details of the attack he should have been charged with attempted murder. He received a twelve-month suspended sentence at Greenock Sheriff Court on 25 June 1963.
The sentence was little more than a telling-off, a slap on the wrist, a warning. No account of the incident was written up in any newspaper. A psychiatric report at the time concluded that the incident was isolated, a one-off that was unlikely to happen again. We now know that, sadly, nothing could have been further from the truth. Black was not offered or recommended for any kind of treatment although a report by the Probation Service released three weeks before his court admonishment suggested that he might need residential psychiatric care; it appears to have been ignored. It seemed luck was on Robert Black’s side: the sixteen-year-old had already a disturbing criminal career of repeat molestations, an attempted rape, and now enticing, attempting to murder and indecently assaulting a young girl, and was still not served a custodial sentence. He had got away with an awful lot of offending.
Following his admonishment for the park attack, Black lost his job, and the local Social Services, taking a far more serious view of what he had done to the little girl in the park than did the psychiatrists or court, decided he should l
eave Greenock. Once again Black was on the move, this time back to more familiar territory in Grangemouth, near Falkirk, close to where he was born. If this was supposed to be another fresh start for Black again it failed miserably as his past behaviours simply followed him and eventually reappeared.
It is thought that, in 1964, at the age of seventeen, Robert Black got his first job as a delivery driver with John Menzies, the newspaper and magazine distributors. This was reported in the 20 May 1994 edition of the Daily Express newspaper. Co-author of this book, retired Norfolk Police intelligence officer Chris Clark, contacted former Fleet Street journalists Ian McKerron and James Gryllis who told him it was their understanding that Black at this time worked first as a delivery driver for the Glasgow Evening Times and then John Menzies. Unbeknownst to his then employers, Black did not have a driving licence at the time – he did not pass his driving test until 1976 when he was twenty-seven, so this early driving work indicates, like many young men at that time, he was prepared to gain driving experience at the risk of not having a licence or the appropriate paperwork.
It is known that while in Grangemouth, Black worked for a while at a builders’ supplies company as well as having the odd labouring job at other times. He lived with an elderly local couple in the Newlands Road area. They provided a homely setting that was the first Black had experienced for some years, having only known children’s homes of one sort or another since leaving Kinlochleven, and his life came as close to ‘normal’ as it ever would. He attended a local youth club, and there he met a young woman, Pamela, with whom he struck up a relationship. It would be the only real consensual relationship he would have, and the only one with an adult female. For several months they dated and Black harboured hopes that they would one day marry. Whilst this relationship appears to have been fairly normal, there is little doubt that Robert Black’s paedophiliac desires remained within him. He would later reveal to Ray Wyre that he and Pamela fell in love, had a normal sexual relationship and that things were good for period of time. It all came crashing down, however, when Black received a letter from Pamela telling him it was over. It is unclear as to why Pamela decided to end it. Was it his body odour and personal hygiene problem? Had she met someone else? Or had she heard of Black’s past and reputation in regard to his sexual inclinations? Whatever the reason, the break-up devastated Black, who refused for a long time to accept that Pamela had left him. The theme of rejection by women was becoming as familiar to him as his deviant sexual offending. From being given up as a baby by his natural mother, to his foster mother dying when he was a young boy, to the constant teasing by his classmates and then his break-up with Pamela as a teenager; these events would no doubt have had a detrimental effect on Black as a person, and whilst none of it can condone or justify for one second his actions against young girls, it can help us understand his lack of feeling or compassion, his coldness and cruelty as an offender towards his victims and their loved ones.
