The Face of Evil

by Chris Clark

  In his later interview with Ray Wyre he said, ‘Too many houses about, people about and this fellow back up the road working on his car.’ Clearly he had taken all of this in, like a leopard stalking its prey until it was safe and the right time to strike.

  Frustrated, Black drove around a bit more, then stopped off at the village café located in Townfoot Road, that he had eaten at several times before. As he finished his meal and gazed out of the window, his thoughts were dominated by the urge to abduct a child as he watched another little girl walk along the pavement near the café. His earlier, failed, attempt would not thwart him – this village was no different from Ballinderry or Coldstream, from where he had successfully abducted little girls. And even though by staying in the village for hours with no valid reason, he could have begun arousing suspicion, he just had to be patient, and the right opportunity would surely come along.

  The right opportunity seemed to come shortly after he got back into his van and resumed driving round the village. He noticed a pretty, blonde-haired little girl walking past him in the opposite direction along the main A7 road and turning right towards the north of the village. Black continued on in the same direction until he came to a lay-by where he turned around and headed back towards where the child – six-year-old Laura Turner (not her real name) – was. Or should have been – for, unbeknown to him, she had popped briefly into a friend’s house. His frustration growing, Black headed on into the village streets again, looking for her, before executing a three-point turn and heading back once again in the direction where he had first seen her. As he did so, Laura suddenly came out from the lane to her friend’s house, to continue walking along the pavement, again in Black’s view. Black drove past the little girl and pulled his van up onto the pavement on her side of the road as she approached his van to walk past it. Black had positioned the vehicle perfectly for his purpose, as the only way that Laura could continue her journey was either to squeeze herself between the van and the stone wall, thus passing the passenger door, or to walk around the van on the road, which would have taken her past the driver’s door. Either way Black instantly knew he had a perfect opportunity to abduct the child; she would be very near to him and he knew that, with his strength and size and the child being so young and small, the whole operation would be completed in a matter of seconds, not minutes. Black opened the passenger door to block her way and quickly jumped through it onto the pavement as the little girl walked slowly but steadily towards him. Then with just one arm he lifted her off the ground and bundled her into the passenger seat of the van. Laura screamed in terror only to be warned with a scowl to be quiet as Black pushed her little body down to the vehicle floor under the dashboard. He then hastily ran round to the driver’s side of the van, jumped in and drove away at speed. No dogs or potential witnesses to stop him in his latest abduction of a little girl.

  But he was wrong. There was a witness, and although Black failed to notice him, he certainly noticed Black and indeed had witnessed the entire incident. What is more, he had the presence of mind to realise what it was that he had seen, and to get help. The man in question was a neighbour of Laura’s, David Herkes, who at the time happened to be out mowing his lawn, which was below road level so that he was hidden from view. He saw Laura walking out of her friend’s driveway and making her way along the pavement; he also saw the van pull up in front of her. Black was unaware of him and there was no tell-tale sound of mowing as something had caused the lawnmower blades to snag. Mr Herkes was down on his knees fixing the stuck blades and was low enough to see below the van to the pavement on the other side. There were two pairs of feet, Laura’s and those of the driver. But when he again glanced towards the van a couple of seconds later, there was one pair of feet, the driver’s. Those of the child had vanished. As Mr Herkes stood up he could see the van driver apparently pushing something through the passenger door before quickly running round to the other side of his vehicle, jumping in and driving away. There was no sign of Laura. Mr Herkes wondered where her feet had gone; he knew he had not seen her walk along the other side of the van. What must have happened was at once clear to him. Quick-thinking, he made sure to take note of the van’s registration number and then hastily ran the short distance to Laura’s house where he told her mother what he had just seen. Mrs Turner immediately telephoned the police and within minutes policemen and cars had swamped the village. The police in Scotland were only too aware of the abductions and murders of Susan Maxwell and Caroline Hogg some years previously, and police cars in the area were straightaway radioed the details of the incident and the description of the abductor’s van.

  * * *

  Once he had seized the child, Black headed out of the village back towards Edinburgh, effectively in the wrong direction. While there are those who suggest that this error demonstrates the severity of the depraved sexual frenzy Black was in at the time, Black himself would later explain to Ray Wyre his reasons for doing so, and while he may have added or omitted a few details, the explanation is both plausible and supported by circumstantial evidence.

  There was still one more delivery to make, Black explained, but with the child huddled in the footwell on the passenger side, it was too risky for him to go straight to the delivery point in Galashiels. Somebody could have gone up to the van to collect the delivery off him and seen her. Or even before then she just might have managed to attract another driver’s attention as they travelled south towards Galashiels. But he knew of a lay-by a couple of miles away on the road to Edinburgh. So he headed back in that direction and stopped in the lay-by. There, unseen, he took the little girl out of the front of the van and into the back, where he had what might be called his home-made abduction kit.

  Once they were confined in the back of the van, Black told Wyre, he asked Laura her name and then proceeded to tie her hands behind her back. Tearing a length of sticking plaster off a roll, he put it across the child’s lips, asking her if she could breathe okay through her nose. He took her socks and shoes off and put a cushion cover over her head like a hood, and then sexually assaulted her before bundling her into a sleeping bag and returning to the front of the van and turning it round in order to carry on with his journey to Galashiels. The whole episode lasted just under fifteen minutes.

  To get to Galashiels he had to head back into Stow. As he made his way into the village he must have been somewhat alarmed by the number of police vehicles about, and the unusual number of people milling around. But perhaps he felt safe in the knowledge that his abduction of the little girl had not been witnessed, or so he thought …

  * * *

  David Herkes, standing by the roadside giving police officers – one of them the child’s father – as much detail as he could about what he had witnessed, was more than a little startled when he saw the blue van heading back towards him. ‘That’s him! That’s the van! That’s the same van!’ Black, as he drove along the road was suddenly forced to brake sharply and swerve to avoid hitting a police officer who had leapt out into the centre of the road, shouting for him to stop. He brought the van to a halt.

  Black was taken from his vehicle and immediately handcuffed, while Constable Ian Turner hurried to open the back of the hot, stinking van, calling his daughter’s name. At first, disturbingly, there was no answer, then he glimpsed slight movement coming from what looked like a pile of bedding in the far corner of the van. Frightened at what he might find, he pulled at it and saw it was a sleeping bag, which he dragged out and hurriedly opened. Ripping off the cushion cover that was encasing the head of the small figure in the sleeping bag, he was overcome with relief to see that the little girl was alive – gagged, terrified, red-faced from the heat and lack of air, but, apparently, physically unharmed (it was not known at this point that she had been sexually assaulted).

  As the policeman untied his daughter’s hands and took the plaster off her lips, that relief quickly turned to fury as paternal nature kicked in, and he turned to Black and shouted at him, ‘That�
�s my daughter! What have you done to her, you bastard?’ Black did not react in any way, he did not speak or give any indication of what he was feeling emotionally. He remained cold, quiet and distant.

  * * *

  In a BBC Northern Ireland Spotlight programme broadcast in February 2016 retired PC Ian Turner was interviewed about the circumstances surrounding the day his daughter was abducted. In the programme Mr Turner stated that he immediately recognised Black as being someone he had seen before, the spitting image of a sketch that he had seen some seven years earlier, in 1983, when Caroline Hogg was abducted from a funfair in Edinburgh.

  It was this hitherto publicly restricted identification of Black that led directly to him being investigated for the abduction and murders of Susan Maxwell, Caroline Hogg and Sarah Harper.

  This was to prove the end of the road for the criminal activities of Robert Black. He would never again be a free man, but regarding the details of those crimes and the growing number of them coming to light and public attention it was only to be the beginning.

  * * *

  As he was being taken to Selkirk Police Station, some fourteen miles away, Black spoke openly to officers, remarking that it should have been the day before, Friday the 13th, as he had been having an unlucky day, what with an earlier road traffic collision in Edinburgh and now his arrest for child abduction. He went on to offer an explanation for his actions, saying that he had ‘always been interested in young girls since I was a lad’, claiming to a police sergeant, ‘It must have been a sudden rush of blood to the head.’ Black went on to say he had only touched her ‘a little’ and that he wanted, after he finished his delivery, to take her somewhere ‘like Blackpool’ so that he could spend some time with her.

  Black readily admitted the abduction and sexual assault of Laura Turner – he had been caught red-handed so he could do nothing else. His strategy here was undoubtedly to appear as open and honest as possible regarding the crime, and he co-operated with the arresting and interviewing officers as well as with the psychiatrists who were to be used in his upcoming trial for both prosecution and defence, explaining the nature of the sexual assaults he would have carried out on the child. His ultimate aim was to be seen as a man who had given in to an abnormal fantasy in a ‘sudden rush of blood to the head’, be given treatment, serve his time in prison and then be released back into society. Despite the fact that Laura, bound, gagged and stuffed into the sleeping bag like a discarded bit of clothing, had come close to dying from suffocation, Black insisted if she had it would have been ‘accidental’!

  There is no doubt that he had had no intention whatsoever of taking his latest little victim to Blackpool or anywhere else like that; the likelihood is that she would have ended up another little body dumped in the Midlands as he made his way back to his home in London. Thanks to the sharp eye and quick thinking of David Herkes, who sadly passed away in 2012 at the age of seventy-eight, that never happened. His swift actions that day undoubtedly led to Black’s immediate arrest and it is impossible to know how many young lives were potentially saved by him and his quick thinking.

  Detective Superintendent Andrew Watt, as the weekend senior officer on duty in Lothian and Borders, had been notified of Black’s arrest and he soon spotted the similarities between the circumstances of the abduction in Stow and the Midlands Triangle murders and quickly notified Hector Clark of the arrest and the details surrounding it. Clark and his team began to ask themselves if this could be the man they had been hunting for almost a decade. Coupled with PC Turner’s seeing in the man he had arrested a strong similarity to the 1983 artist’s impression of Caroline Hogg’s abductor, this certainly seemed likely.

  Shortly before Black was due to appear at Selkirk Sheriff Court on the Monday morning, Hector Clark arrived at Selkirk Police Station to meet him. He had previously stated that he believed that the killer he had been hunting would eventually ‘slip up’ and that this slip-up would lead to an arrest. As he left the police cell, having asked Black a few brief questions, to which he had received even briefer replies, he was sure that he had just been in the presence of the man they had been after for so long. The tough work would now really have to begin as instinct and feeling are not enough in a court of law – now they had to prove it.

  After his initial court appearance that Monday, 16 July, Robert Black was remanded in custody at Edinburgh’s Saughton Prison until his trial. On Friday 10 August he pleaded guilty in the High Court, hoping that by pleading guilty and therefore not making any witnesses take the stand in what was clearly a distressing case for all involved, he would get a lenient sentence. He was, however, to be disappointed, for he was sentenced to life imprisonment with the condition set by the judge that he would not be considered for release until it was safe to do so. Whilst Black’s defence counsel had stated to the court that the abduction had been an isolated crime and that he had never acted upon any previous temptation and that the child would not have been killed, the psychiatric reports assembled by two prominent psychiatrists painted a very different picture. They painted a picture of man who was and would continue to be a grave danger to young children, and there is no doubt this was accurate.

  As Black’s legal team went to work on an appeal, Hector Clark and his team were already working hard to build a case to prove that the man who abducted and sexually assaulted a six-year-old girl in Stow, leaving her twenty minutes from suffocating to death, was the man who was responsible for the Midland’s Triangle killings of Susan Maxwell, Caroline Hogg and Sarah Harper. It was to be a long, challenging and complicated investigation.

  Black’s appeal against his life sentence was lodged in September 1990, but it was dropped two months later, in November 1990, after the evaluation of Black, at the behest of his legal team, by the eminent sex-crimes expert Ray Wyre (referenced several times in this book) provided nothing to disagree with earlier psychiatric reports. Ray Wyre would interview Black twice in Saughton Prison in Edinburgh and would continue to interview him even after Black dropped his appeal. The book, co-written with Tim Tate, that he published in 1995, The Murder of Childhood, is based on these interviews and his thoughts of the Black case. Ray Wyre died in 2008 but there is no doubt he got closer to discovering the reasoning behind Black’s actions, and what else he may have done, than anyone else did. He like David Herkes is an unsung hero in the Robert Black saga.

  8

  THE FIRST MURDER TRIAL

  After Black’s arrest, a search of his impounded Transit van revealed a number of items used as restraints, among them assorted ropes, sticking plaster and hoods. In addition, investigators discovered many articles of girls’ clothing – none of which, they subsequently discovered, belonged to any of the victims – a mattress, a Polaroid camera, and a selection of so-called sexual aids. When asked to account for these items Black explained that on his long-distance deliveries he would often pull into a lay-by, dress in the children’s clothing and masturbate. He would not give a plausible explanation for the sexual aids that had been found. These, it was later ascertained, had been kept, along with the mattress and restraining devices, in readiness for use upon his victims.

  The Scottish police contacted London’s Metropolitan Police, who at their request carried out a search of Black’s Stamford Hill lodgings in search of any incriminating evidence. Their search, as mentioned earlier, uncovered a large collection of child pornography in the form of magazines, books, photographs and videos, including fifty-eight videos and films depicting graphic child sexual abuse, which Black later said he had purchased in continental Europe. The police also found several items of children’s clothing, a copy of a Nottingham newspaper with an account of the attempted abduction of Teresa Thornhill in 1988, and a variety of purpose-designed sex aids. All of this was impounded and sent to Edinburgh to assist the team there in their investigation.

  Two weeks after Black’s trial for the abduction of Laura Turner, Hector Clark again travelled to the police station in Edinburgh to conduct a
second, and recorded, interview with Black. On this occasion he was accompanied by two colleagues, Andrew Watt and Roger Orr, whom he had appointed to conduct the actual interview, with specific instructions that they were to inform Black at the start that they would in no way be judgemental of him, whatever he might choose to divulge.

  In this six-hour interview Black readily spoke of his early sexual experiences, his exploration of self-abuse, and his liking for wearing young girl’s clothing; he also told the detectives how he was attracted to young children; and he admitted to having sexually assaulted over thirty young girls between the 1960s and 1980s. But when the questions became more specific, even when they pertained only loosely to any unsolved child murders and disappearances, Black became evasive. He did, however, volunteer that, in Carlisle in 1985, he had successfully enticed two young girls into his van on the pretext of asking for directions and had not much later allowed them to leave.

  As the interview progressed the two detectives began to turn their questioning to the subject of child abduction and murder, at this stage focusing specifically on the murder of Caroline Hogg. They told him that police knew he had been in Portobello on the date of the little girl’s disappearance, indicating that they had eyewitness accounts and petrolstation receipts that further proved his presence there at the time. Orr then brought out a facial composite drawn from descriptions given by eyewitnesses of the man who had been seen with Caroline. He placed this composite alongside photographs of Black that dated from the early 1980s and pointed out the similarities.