The Face of Evil

by Chris Clark

  An indication of how much Pamela’s spurning of Black wounded him, and how he allowed the rejection to fester, is the comment he made in 1992, getting on for thirty years later, after being served with ten summonses by police for a number of very serious charges, including the murders of three little girls. As the police began to leave his cell, Black called out to them the words, ‘Tell Pamela she’s not responsible for this.’ He clammed up when they asked him to explain further. That Black brought up Pamela’s name without the police having even mentioned it, after being charged with three murders, implies that he was blaming her for the path he had taken after she had broken up with him. This attempt by Black to shift the blame for his actions (or, at that time, alleged actions) is of course ridiculous but it demonstrates how resentful Black was at Pamela’s dumping of him, one more rejection by a female in his life.

  After his break-up with Pamela, Black’s life as a sexual predator came to the fore once again. In 1966 he was found to be regularly interfering with the young granddaughter of the couple he was staying with. He was immediately ordered to leave the house. The police were not called at the time as the family felt that the young girl had been through enough, although they did consider notifying them. The girl was aged nine or ten at the time. Many years later, when police interviewed the victim after Black’s 1990 arrest, she told them he would regularly insert his fingers into her vagina.

  So once again, it seemed, Black had luck on his side, at least when it came to any dealings with the law. Shortly after this he was called into the office of the builders’ supplies company he was working for, and was told his employment there was ended. He later admitted that he lost many jobs through his inability to arrive at work on time.

  Black was once again on the move, and soon he was back in the familiar territory of Kinlochleven, where he had once lived with the people who were the nearest he had ever had to parents, the Tulips. Here he found employment, taking on various labouring and driving jobs, and lodged in the Appin Road area with a married couple, the parents of one of whom had been friends with the Tulips.

  The couple had a six-year-old daughter whom they frequently trusted him to babysit. One night while Black was drinking in the local pub, police showed up and arrested him. At the police station he was charged with three counts of indecent assault. He had been abusing the little girl while he was supposed to be looking after her.

  This time Black would not escape a prison sentence, and on 22 March 1967, a month short of his twentieth birthday, he was sentenced to one year in borstal. He was also convicted of the lesser charge of voyeurism: the village postwoman had caught him staring through a window at her young sister and had complained to the police.

  A year later, in 1968, Black left borstal and stayed for a brief period in a probation hostel in Glasgow, where he again had a brief brush with the law when he was collared by local uniformed police for loitering outside a shop with the intention of stealing.

  After this Black was once again on the move. This time, however, where he moved to would be his home until 1990. England’s capital city was an attractive option for a young man like Black. Like many young Scots who travelled down south to the capital, he saw better job opportunities in London, a big city with a big population. He also recognised that London offered anonymity – most important to a repeat sex offender with a past and convictions – and the chance for a truly fresh start as, unlike people and police in Scotland, those in London were unaware of his past. Authorities made no attempt to keep track of him; he was a free man.

  London was to be the next chapter of Robert Black’s life; he would get a new home, a new job, a new circle of friends and at last a long-term period of stability, and would appear to be the most settled and happiest that he would be in his entire life. This however was to be no Dick Whittington-type story. Sadly, despite these new opportunities and stabilities, instead of turning his back on past paedophiliac tendencies and depraved behaviour, Robert Black would continue to develop as an increasingly dangerous and deadly sexually predatory criminal. So deadly in fact that by the next time he would be behind bars, over twenty years after he first arrived in London, he was no longer just a serial abuser of children, he was an abductor and serial killer of children.

  3

  HEADING SOUTH

  Robert Black arrived in London at some point between August and October 1968, a young man ready to seek out lodgings and employment. As a predatory paedophile arriving in a big city full of unsuspecting people he must have been aware of the opportunities to seek out victims. Although the capital can be a frightening place for a newcomer, given its size and general fast-paced way of life, the twenty-one-year-old Robert Black quickly began to integrate into London life despite its being a world of difference from the rural and tightknit Scottish towns and villages he was used to. Although he would never venture too far away from King’s Cross, he would live at three different addresses in the Stamford Hill/Stoke Newington area of North London. The first one was an attic bedsit at 24 Bergholt Crescent, a five-bedroom guest house, where Black lived for at least a year, moving in before 10 October 1968 (the cut-off point for the 1969 electoral register, which has Robert Black’s name on it). During his stay at Bergholt Crescent a thirteen-year-old girl by the name of April Fabb disappeared as she cycled near her home in the Norfolk village of Metton, in April 1969.

  Some months later, Black moved again, to another bedsit, at 47 Albion Road in Stoke Newington, only a couple of miles away from Bergholt Crescent. This was at some point between the 10 October 1969 and February 1970, and he would remain there until the autumn of 1971.

  It was during Robert Black’s time as a resident of 47 Albion Road that, in the spring of 1971, a fifteen-year-old girl called Jeanne Twigden had a lucky escape when an attempt was made to abduct her as she cycled home from an open-air pool near the village of Great Paxton, Cambridgeshire. Jeanne would later go on to become the wife of Chris Clark, co-author of this book. There will be more on April and Jeanne’s cases and their connection to Robert Black later in the book.

  * * *

  During his early years in London, Robert Black had a variety of casual jobs, most of them poorly paid, but he was never heard to complain, seeming happy to supplement his wages with part-time work as pub barman. Indeed, pubs were to form a regular part of his social life as well, and Black would often be found drinking in various pubs of North London, a regular at a number of them. While he would take a drink he never drank heavily, preferring to stay in control, just sipping at a pint of lager or Bass shandy. He stood out as a fairly good darts player and played in several different pub teams on the amateur North London pub league darts circuit, winning several trophies along the way. One of the teams he played for was that of the Baring Arms pub on the Baring Road in Islington, just on the border of Hackney and just south of Albion Road in Stoke Newington, where he lived. He would be a regular at this pub for many years. One of the many darts players he played against on the amateur circuit was none other than future world darts champion Eric Bristow. Black’s fondness for football would also reemerge during his early years living in the capital as he was invited to play a trial match for a well-known non-League London football club, Enfield Town FC. However, any potential career in football was unlikely due to Black’s poor eyesight and the trial did not result in Black being offered professional terms or a playing contract.

  Whilst he would make acquaintances in his social activities at the local pubs near his home and in and around the Church Street/Stoke Newington areas and was accepted as a regular part of the neighbourhood and local drinking community, he never made any real friends, and one word that would continually come up when his former fellow pub regulars were asked for their thoughts on him was ‘loner’. Black remained a loner throughout his life, a man whom people couldn’t get close to, or maybe more precisely did not want to get close to, and he was never seen with a girlfriend when he went to the pubs, although he did enjoy annoying or winding u
p women with the occasional remarks and swear words.

  In regard to his working life one of the jobs Black took was that of a lifeguard at an indoor swimming pool (now long gone) on Clissold Road, which was only around a five-minute walk from his home on the Albion Road. He was put on a six-month trial but before he got the chance to be offered a permanent position he was sacked for being late for his early-morning shifts. Black would later tell the late Ray Wyre, who interviewed him in prison, that he found it hard to get up in the mornings and that as a result he lost a lot of jobs because of poor time keeping. It must have been a disappointment to lose the lifeguard job, which would have suited him well – he was good at swimming and he enjoyed it. Rather more sinisterly, the work gave him plenty of opportunity to watch little girls clad only in their swimming costumes, and the possibility of touching them while they were swimming. There was the added interest of a primary school in the close locality.

  After taking on and then being sacked from a variety of jobs for his bad time-keeping, Black saw an advertisement for a job as pool attendant in an open-air pool for the whole of the summer season, which would have been from May to September. He applied for the job and got it. It is believed this was the Clissold Park Paddling Pool, again situated only half a mile from where he lived. Black worked there through the entire summer period, and when the pool closed at the end of the season he applied for a similar job with a different council and again he was successful. For the next couple of years he worked as swimming pool attendant at Hornsey Road Swimming Baths.

  Robert Black was by no means the only young Scotsman to move down south to the English capital to look for work and a new life. Many others had moved south to other parts of the United Kingdom in search of work, and had integrated into local communities whilst retaining their Scottish identity. In autumn 1971 Robert Black met one such couple, Edward and Katherine Rayson, fellow Scots who had moved to London from north of the border. Edward and Katherine, or Eddie and Kathy as they were usually known, got into conversation with Black whilst he was playing darts at the Three Crowns pub in Stoke Newington. As they chatted, Black soon discovered that the Raysons were originally from Musselburgh, where Black himself had lived for between the ages of twelve and fifteen, at the Red House. In the course of their conversation Black confided to the Raysons that he was unhappy with his current accommodation at Albion Road, where he had been staying for anywhere from a year to two years, although he never explained why: had his landlord or landlady become concerned about Black’s behaviour in the neighbourhood? Black then asked Eddie Rayson if he had a spare room he could rent off him. Eddie Rayson was reluctant to invite the young man whom he had met only briefly to stay at his house straight away but he talked to his wife Kathy about Black’s proposal. Kathy was more open to the idea than her husband, and shortly afterwards Robert Black moved into what would be his third and last North London residence, the attic room of 7 West Bank, Stamford Hill, a four-storeyed Victorian property, with Eddie, Kathy and their seven children.

  Black was to stay here until his arrest some nineteen years later, and the Raysons were to become the closest thing Robert Black ever had to a family and a settled family life. After Black’s first murder convictions in 1994, a shocked Eddie Rayson spoke to Ian McKerron of the. Daily Express (Friday, 20 May 1994).

  ‘He was a perfect tenant. He always paid his rent on time and never caused any problems. He had the flat at the top of the house. We would go in occasionally for a game of cards or to listen to a record. He had masses of LPs, mainly Country and Western. And he spent a lot of money on hi-fi and video equipment.’

  The Rayson family would have no idea that the man who shared their home for so long was a dangerous predator until Black’s 1990 arrest for child abduction and sexual assault. To them Black was the hard-working fellow countryman who would eat his meals with the family, accompany the Rayson men to the pub for a game of darts and a pint of shandy, and play an occasional game of cards and listen to Country and Western records with them. When not working or at the pub playing darts he would amuse himself by watching television, solving crossword puzzles and lifting weights in a makeshift gym he had in his attic flat.

  Black would attend the christenings of the Rayson grandchildren and other family events through the years and would give gifts to Kathy Rayson, who encouraged him to take regular showers and to keep himself fresh and clean – though it appears that personal hygiene and cleanliness were low on Robert Black’s list of priorities, and the Rayson children would tease him over his body odour problem. They would never see him with women or see any evidence that he was interested in dating or pursuing a relationship. There was a possibility he may have used prostitutes but the Raysons only ever recalled him having a girl back to his flat once in the nearly twenty years he lived with them, and whoever this girl was she was gone in the morning and would never again be seen at Stamford Hill.

  The Rayson family, like Black’s work colleagues and associates from his early days in his native Scotland, were shocked and appalled when his crimes came to light

  ‘This has been very upsetting for the family,’ Eddie and Kathy’s son Paul said to the Daily Express (20 May 1994). ‘We never had a clue that he could be capable of such terrible crimes. How could we?’

  They would jokingly refer to Black as David Bailey after the famous photographer. Black owned an expensive camera and, although he was not keen on having his own photograph taken, he enjoyed taking photos of other people. When, following Black’s arrest in 1990, police searched his flat, they discovered videos and photos taken of children at playgrounds and by the seaside, so it appears his purchase of the expensive camera and video equipment had a more sinister purpose than at first appeared. (Black is similar in this respect to the American serial killer Rodney Alcala who took hundreds of photographs, mostly of young women and children whilst on a spree of savage murders in the 1970s.) Police also found in Black’s flat a photograph album containing photos of the Rayson children. There was never, however, any suggestion of anything untoward, and the family have roundly rejected such an idea – Black would by now have realised that any such action would ensure a repeat of what happened to him in Scotland: he would at the very least be banished from the household and forced to seek new lodgings or be would be put in prison and have to move to a new area to live after his release and find new employment. No, Robert Black had become settled in Stamford Hill and in North London generally and did not wish to jeopardise what had become the most settled part of his life. If victims of his sexual depravity were to be found it was to be elsewhere.

  * * *

  While Black was good at swimming and enjoyed it, his job at Hornsey Road Swimming Baths also brought him the advantage of doing different shifts on different weeks, one week he did early shifts, the next week he did later shifts, which gave him the chance to lie in. And although pool-attendant pay was poor, he worked in the evenings at various pubs to boost his income.

  It was not long, however, before Black’s perversions would come into his work at the pool, and would ultimately cost him his job. At the start his lust for kicks was satisfied by behaviour such as going underneath the pool and removing the lights so that he could watch from below, unseen, young girls as they swam round. Another distasteful activity he would indulge in during his period as pool attendant was to break into the swimming pool at night and swim lengths with a broom handle inserted in his rectum. Before long, the inevitable happened and Black once again found himself in trouble over an incident with a child. A ten-year-old girl complained that he had indecently touched her while they were both in the pool. Black was arrested and taken to the local police station where he protested his innocence, stating that there were several kids of both sexes in the pool at the time and if he had touched her it was accidental not intentional. However, when the police became aware of his previous convictions he was ordered to hand in his notice to the pool. The police advised management to accept his resignation or they would
ensure Black was sacked. After a meeting with management they accepted his decision to quit. This incident occurred in the early part of 1976, and Robert Black was no longer to work in a swimming-pool environment again. His next job, whilst not involving working with children would provide him with employment for the next fourteen years and would regrettably also provide him with opportunities to abduct, abuse and kill children.