The Face of Evil

by Chris Clark

  Indeed, Black actually chose to appeal his 1994 convictions, contending that he had been denied a fair trial because details of his 1990 abduction and sexual assault charges had been introduced as similar fact evidence – a ruling his defence counsel had objected to but been overruled on. In addition, Black argued, the final instructions delivered to the jury by Mr Justice Macpherson had been unbalanced. The appeal was heard before the Lord Chief Justice Lord Taylor at the Court of Appeal on 23 February 1995; it had been expected to last three days, but at the end of the first day Lord Taylor ruled the verdicts had been safe and satisfactory and dismissed the appeal.

  A few months later Black was attacked in his cell by two other inmates of Wakefield Prison who threw a mixture of boiling water and sugar over him in an attempt to ‘rip his skin off’, battered him with a table leg, and stabbed him in the back and neck with a homemade knife. The defence counsel for one of them said at their trial that Black was a ‘particularly notorious prisoner’ and attacked because of the nature of the offences for which he was serving his sentence.

  Neither of these setbacks is likely to have helped persuade Black to open up to the detectives questioning him. Many years later, in October 2011, Roger Orr, one of his earliest interrogators, interviewed by the BBC, said of Black: ‘He was a cooperative individual in a sense, but very closed and very controlled. There was a coldness in his empty eyes. In police interviews, any time we would close in on specific details, he would sit and stare at you for long periods of time, in complete silence.’

  A fellow inmate of Wakefield Prison, confirmed this, as reported in Northumberland’s ChronicleLive on 19 January 2015: ‘He sits back, puts his hands behind his head and just smirks.’

  According to Ray Wyre, the prime reason for Black’s resistance both to cooperating with investigators and to admitting his culpability was an issue of control for him. In an interview granted not long before his death in 2008, Wyre summarised the psychology behind Black’s non-cooperation: ‘He’s the sort of person for whom it’s all about power and control. Having information about what he’s done gives him power. He has no desire to ease his conscience, and he’s not going to give up the one thing that gives him power over the pain that his victims’ families are suffering.’

  The closest Black ever came to admitting to any of his crimes was when, shortly before his 1994 murder trial, Ray Wyre asked him why he never actually denied any of the charges brought against him. Black, Wyre reported, had simply replied with the words, ‘Because I couldn’t.’

  9

  THE SECOND MURDER TRIAL

  The year was 2009 and Robert Black was sitting alone in his cell at Wakefield Prison in West Yorkshire. Christmas was fast approaching and as the Police Service of Northern Ireland officers entered his cell Black sat on his bed and looked at them. They were there to give him something but it wasn’t a Christmas present – it was a summons charging him with another child murder, that of nine-year-old Jennifer Cardy in August 1981.

  It was a cold Wednesday, 16 December 2009, when the news broke: news Andy and Pat Cardy had been expecting – that a man had been charged with their daughter’s murder, and that the man in question was Robert Black. The Cardys had been aware since the mid-1990s, following Black’s first murder convictions, that the Royal Ulster Constabulary (PSNI from 2001) were looking at Black as a strong suspect in their daughter’s murder. They also knew that the police, having trawled through half a million petrol receipts, had found evidence that he had been in Ulster at the time of Jennifer’s murder, in the form of a docket signed by Black. The investigators were to go on to find a wage book from Poster, Despatch and Storage that would add to the documented paper trail that put Black in Northern Ireland on that day. Due to the long and complicated nature of the investigation and the patient waiting and planning it entailed, it became known as ‘Operation Perseverance’.

  At the police conference in July 1994, two months after Robert Black had been convicted and given ten life sentences, officers representing police forces from across the British Isles and from Europe dusted off their cold-case files of missing and murdered children, some going back over twenty-five years, to see if there was anything that could link Black to them.

  Just under twenty cases were looked at from different parts of England, Scotland, Northern Ireland, the Republic of Ireland, France, Germany and Holland. The media latched on to these and reported on them, naming the victims and citing the potential links to Black no matter how tenuous these links were.

  At the end of the conference the numerous police forces involved took what they had learnt about Black and went back to the drawing board. In the years that followed, he could never be ruled effectively out of several of the cases but there was insufficient evidence to take the cases any further forward. For others he was completely ruled out and in some instances other men would later be charged and convicted of the murders in question.

  But there was a small number of cases in which he certainly seemed a very serious suspect; so much so that the police forces involved knew there was further work to be done and intensified their investigations, focusing on whether they had a case against Black. One of those forces was the Royal Ulster Constabulary, who certainly had the strongest case to link Black with – the murder of Jennifer Cardy. In June 1996 the RUC and the Devon and Cornwall Police, who were investigating the disappearance of Genette Tate, went to Wakefield to interview Black at the police station. The information they gleaned from this interview was insufficient for them to press charges, but they continued to investigate him and over the years various police forces conducted further interviews with Black and with possible witnesses.

  * * *

  It was the morning of Friday, 22 January 2010 and the small public gallery at Lisburn Magistrates’ Court in County Antrim was full. Murmurs spread through the seats of the public gallery as a prison van arrived carrying Robert Black, just flown in from Wakefield Prison in West Yorkshire. He was escorted from the van and into the court, handcuffed, wearing a blue jumper and navy jeans and glasses.

  It was the first time he had been seen in public since his murder trial in 1994, almost sixteen years before. His hair and beard had gone from grey to white, he had put on weight and looked older and slower. But Robert Black was still the same man. A cold, calculating and remorseless paedophile and serial killer. Prison hadn’t softened him in any way. He entered the dock and stood behind a glass wall; from there he confirmed his name and also that he understood the charges he was facing: the kidnapping and murder of Jennifer Cardy from a location only a few miles from the courthouse he was now in.

  If the infamy of the prisoner was in doubt, the fact that, while the handcuffs were removed as he stood in the dock, four prison officers stood around him with another four just outside the dock, dispelling any doubt as to the enormity of the offence with which he was being charged. An even greater indicator of this would be Black’s journey to Northern Ireland. This was no ordinary scheduled flight to Belfast – instead, the prisoner travelled with three prison officers in a private jet from Leeds Bradford Airport, a forty-minute journey during which he sat comfortably in his seat chatting to the guards and looking out of the window.

  Black’s defence counsel told the court that his client would be pleading innocent to the charges. The resident magistrate Rosemary Watters told him he would be remanded in custody in nearby HM Prison Maghaberry in County Antrim and would be arraigned at Craigavon Magistrates’ Court in March.

  * * *

  The trial began on Thursday 22 September 2011 at Armagh Crown Court. The prosecutor was Mr Toby Hedworth, QC – who had been Mr Milford’s junior at the 1994 trial, and was therefore well acquainted with Black’s iniquities. He laid the case out to the jury, informing them that police investigators had gone through more than half a million petrol receipts, old accounts and company records and in so doing had established that Black was in Northern Ireland at the time of Jennifer Cardy’s murder.

  He
went on to detail the evidence as follows:

  A salary ledger indicating that in August 1981 Black was paid a £50 bonus for the week in question– the bonus that was paid to drivers who did the Northern Ireland run.

  The exclusion of all other drivers from Poster, Despatch and Storage (PDS) who did the route at that time.

  A petrol receipt demonstrating that on the day after Jennifer’s murder Black was driving the company’s only white Datsun van. (This smaller vehicle was used only for short runs in nearby East Anglia and in and around London, and for the Northern Ireland run – for which it was the only vehicle used on account of the fact that it was small enough not to fall into the commercial-vehicle category, which meant that the cost of travelling on the ferry was considerably reduced.) The receipt, signed by Black, was from a Shell petrol station near Coventry on a southbound carriageway towards London from the West Midlands. This, Mr Hedworth said, showed that Black was returning from a Northern Ireland run after leaving the boat at Liverpool and heading south for home – and not working in London or East Anglia.

  Order books from PDS indicating that a poster delivery to Northern Ireland was due around that time.

  Black sat impassively in the dock wearing a grey jumper, white T-shirt and blue jeans; along with his glasses he wore a headset provided to him by the court due to his poor hearing so he could follow the proceedings better.

  The first witness to take the stand was Jennifer’s mother, Patricia Cardy, who recalled the last time she seen Jennifer. While her husband Andrew, Jennifer’s father, and daughter Victoria, Jennifer’s younger sister now aged thirty, watched from the gallery she began to speak about the day her older daughter disappeared. The plan that day had been for Jennifer to cycle to her best friend Louise Major’s house, only a mile away, to spend a couple of hours with her.

  Pat Cardy told the court how Jennifer had been holding her baby sister Victoria shortly before she set off from home on her shiny new red bicycle. She would never return from that journey. ‘I can well remember what she was wearing,’ Mrs Cardy recalled. ‘It was her favourite T-shirt, a white T-shirt trimmed with red round the neck and on the T-shirt were red strawberries.’

  Mrs Cardy went on to say how she had wound up her daughter’s red watch before the little girl set off as Jennifer was punctual and didn’t like to be late:

  ‘She was a very thoughtful little girl and her time to leave was always 1.40 p.m. because she liked to get to her friend’s house for about 2 p.m. Most importantly, she liked to be back in time for Jackanory and for that reason she always checked her watch. Just before she left she had given our baby Victoria to me. She made a cheeky little remark about her weight – that Victoria was a little heavy.’

  The judge, Mr Justice Mr Ronald Weatherup, listened quietly as Mrs Cardy recalled how she became increasingly concerned when Jennifer had not returned by dinner time, and how, when she and Andy could not locate their daughter, the police were notified. As family, friends and neighbours began to search the vicinity, Jennifer’s bicycle was found lying in a field half a mile away from her home, thrown over the hedge from the roadside.

  Mr Hedsworth for the prosecution then recounted how, in her 1981 statement to the RUC, little Louise Major recalled that she and Jennifer had once watched a TV programme where someone was abducted when they got into a strange car. ‘Jennifer said she would never do that,’ Louise had said.

  Alluding to the evidence he had put before the jury, Mr Hedworth, QC observed that, while Black travelled all over the UK for his job, every bit of the evidence pointed to him being in Northern Ireland on that day just over thirty years before.

  ‘He was in fact on that Wednesday morning driving a poster delivery van off the Liverpool ferry at Belfast dock and commencing his drops at Belfast, then Dunmurry and finally at Newry, before returning to Belfast to catch the evening ferry back to England.’

  He added: ‘This would leave him – after completing his deliveries – with time on his hands in the general Lisburn area at exactly the time that little girl was plucked from the roadside in Ballinderry.’ It was Mr Hedworth’s opinion, moreover, that Black’s return trip to the Belfast ferry would have taken him past the lay-by near which Jennifer’s body was later found.

  During 2005 interviews with the PSNI, Black had conceded he must have been in the area at that time – that he would have been in Ireland on 12 August 1981 as that was the day he made routine deliveries to firms in Belfast and Newry; he had also agreed that he used to use the A1 dual carriageway that ran between Lisburn and Newry when he was working in Ulster.

  As the first day came to a close, Mr Hedworth concluded, ‘Child murders in the UK are extremely rare, even rarer in Northern Ireland. That little girl never got to her friend’s,’ adding, in an echo of Mr Milford’s words in 1994, ‘Somewhere along the way, every parent’s nightmare occurred. She was abducted, sexually assaulted and killed.’

  The jury of nine women and three men were then left to ponder as he asked:

  ‘Why would anyone take a young girl from the roadside and then, when they were done with her, discard her body?’

  * * *

  On the second day of the trial, Monday, 26 September, Black’s defence team examined invoices from PDS that showed that Black was in Northern Ireland. The retired head of the London advertising agency Concord and Poster Link (CPL), which had commissioned PDS to deliver posters to Northern Ireland in August 1981, Alan Simmons, was brought to the witness stand, to answer questions from both prosecution and defence on the transactions between CPL and PDS.

  The Crown’s case relied heavily on Black’s work documents proving he was in Northern Ireland on the day of the murder before getting the overnight ferry back to Liverpool. CPL had appointed PDS to deliver a large array of billboard posters to be used in nationwide campaigns to advertise the products of several major companies. As the advertising campaigns were scheduled to start on 1 September, Mr Simmons explained, ‘I would expect PDS to take delivery early in the month before and distribute them around the middle of the month.’

  He then stated that if the posters had not been delivered as commissioned he would have known as he had a regional employee who would check that deliveries had been made on time. This explanation was useful to the prosecution. The timing fitted – PDS would have taken delivery of the posters in early August, and they would have distributed the posters in the weeks after, around the middle of the month – which period included Wednesday, 12 August, the day Jennifer was murdered.

  Black’s defence team, headed up by Mr David Spens, QC, tried to show that there were no specific delivery dates recorded:

  ‘There’s no document that demonstrates on its face there was a delivery to Northern Ireland in the middle of August 1981?’ Mr Spens asked.

  In response Mr Simmons admitted that ‘I can’t give you a specific date, just a likely period during which it would have been delivered.’

  David Spens then suggested that, rather than in the middle of August, PDS could have delivered the posters perhaps at the start of the month, or maybe even the end of the month – perhaps as late as only five days before the 1 September deadline.

  ‘We didn’t work to those sorts of short deadlines,’ Mr Simmons replied.

  The prosecution responded to this attempt by the defence to confuse things by pointing to the petrol receipt from the day after the murder, dated and signed by Black, which could not be wrong or confused as to when the petrol was purchased. They reiterated that the receipt showed he was driving the Datsun van used for runs only in Northern Ireland, East Anglia and in and around the London area. The fact that the petrol was obtained near Coventry ruled out the possibility he was working in East Anglia or London and pointed to him having bought the fuel from a garage as he travelled home to London after leaving the Liverpool ferry up north having completed his work in Ulster.

  Next to enter the witness stand was retired Lothian and Borders police officer Thomas Bell who was one of th
e officers tasked with going through the thousands of petrol receipts located at Shell UK’s company headquarters in Manchester in 1996 in an effort to locate Black’s signature. He told the court that the police involved in the search had to comb through 304 boxes of microfiche film containing petrol receipts. While checking the signatures, they had found one of interest: ‘Mr Black’s was quite clear, it was quite distinctive.’

  Mr Spens then asked if all the fuel purchases made by PDS drivers had been traced, but Mr Bell explained that only Shell UK had the records from 1981 still intact; the records from BP filling stations had already been destroyed by 1996. There were no records of any sort for transactions at filling stations other than Shell, he said.

  * * *

  The next day of the trial would hear from a retired customer of PDS based in Newry, who recalled talking to Black in the early 1980s. George Hughes, who was the owner of billboard sites in the city of Newry, recalled Black mentioning that he sometimes used a petrol station in Hillsborough, County Down, near where the body of Jennifer Cardy was discovered. There was a petrol shortage at the time, Hughes recollected, and yet Black had driven over from England. He asked Black why, and ‘He told me he had a card he could produce at Shell petrol stations and they would give him a fill-up and he told me he got a fill-up at a station in Hillsborough that morning.’ This was a BP service station at the start of the A1 between Lisburn and Hillsborough.