ROBERT BLACK
ROBERT BLACK
Full name: Robert Black
Nickname: Bob the stinker (Smelly Bob)
Nationality / Country: Scotland, United Kingdom of England
Date of birth: April 21, 1947
Zodiac sign: Taurus
Arrested on: July 14, 1990
Permanently sentenced on: April 19, 1994
Date of death: January 12, 2016
Arch of the Murders: August 1981 - March 1986
Established victims: 4
Presumed victims: 4+
Modus operandi: kidnaps young girls from public places with the help of a van, then rapes them, tortures them and kills them.
We present the biography of Robert Black, Scottish, pedophile and serial killer convicted of the kidnapping, rape and murder of 4 girls aged between 5 and 11 years.
The events took place between 1981 and 1986, delivering some of the most brutal pages in recent UK history to the news. The shadow of his signature also hovers around several unsolved detective stories, which concern the violent death of some children between England, Ireland, the Netherlands and France.
A sex offender and a multiple murderer, he died at the age of 68 in prison on January 12, 2016, due to a cardiac arrest.
Robert Black, childhood and adolescence
Robert Black was born in Grangemouth (Scotland) on April 21, 1947. Jessie Hunter Black, his mother, is unmarried and decides to give him up for adoption immediately after the birth. The two will never meet again.
He is thus entrusted to a 50-year-old couple, Jack and Margaret Tulip: his adoptive father, shy and not very inclined to affection, seems to have used to beat him often. But he dies when Black is just 5 years old.
School life turns out to be very difficult, studded with episodes of bullying and ridicule by classmates: the nickname "Smelly Robert Tulip" ("Robert Tulip the stinker") accompanies his childhood, until his adolescence, like a shadow.
Black soon shows a certain propensity for the company of younger children, a trait that will become a constant of his adult personality.
Despite not showing obvious psycho-social problems, Black begins at an early age to approach some sexual experiences, burning the stages and moving towards the development of a strong idolatry for the vagina.
At only 5 years old when he discovers the difference between male and female genitalia, 8 when, as he himself will declare in adulthood, he undertakes autoerotic practices involving the use of foreign bodies (some of which are "stuck" in the anus).
Practices that man will never abandon, so much so that the police themselves find photographs that portray him in obscene poses during sodomy (in particular with bottles of wine, telephone handsets and other improbable objects of pleasure).
1958 marks the appointment with one of the most traumatic events in man's life: he is 11 when the adoptive mother dies, a preamble to his transfer to an orphanage in Falkirk, the Redding's Children Home. It is here that just a year later, with the complicity of two other children, he will become the protagonist of the first sexually committed crime, an attempted rape against a young girl, whom the three immobilize and try in vain to penetrate.
Due to the evident difficulty of managing his social profile in a promiscuity environment, Black is transferred to the male-only Red House facility in Musselburgh.
Inside the walls, for about 2 years, the boy is repeatedly raped by one of the caretakers. He will leave the facility at the age of 15 to go to work as a bellhop in Greenock, near Glasgow.
He will later declare that he has molested at least forty girls without, however, judicial aftermath.
First sex offenses: Robert Black and pedophilia
In 1964 she met a 7-year-old girl on the street, and after convincing her to enter a disused building, she tightened her neck until she lost consciousness, undressed and masturbated in front of her, who now believed to be lifeless. It will be the testimony of the minor, who escaped by a breath to death, to frame him and allow his arrest.
The detention lasts very little, as it does not follow any sentence but simply a warning from the court called to comment on the incident.
Transferred to Grangemouth to work on a construction site, at the disposal of social services, he undertakes a consensual relationship (first and only time) with Pamela Hodgson. A love that will last for a few months, before the young woman decides to close the story. It is a rupture that deeply affects Black's psyche.
It was 1966 when the elderly couple who hosted him discovered him intent on harassing their 9 year old granddaughter. No complaint against him even in this case, only a removal from the family of the child. The first conviction for pedophilia-related offenses dates back to 1967, when he was formally reported for harassment to the daughter of a couple to whom he was transferred, to Kinlochleven. For Black, the sentence is a year of reform.
It was not long before he moved to London, where he worked as a lifeguard until the revelations of a little girl who claimed to have been molested by him in the swimming pool. He loses his job, but manages to escape a second complaint incredibly.
In 1972 he settled in the home of Eddie and Katie Rayson, spouses without female daughters, an element that for a time kept Black away from the material translation of his sexual drives towards girls.
Four years passed and in 1976 he was hired by a London transport company, a job that allowed him to continue in his solitary life, with frequent travel between the British capital and Scotland.
The first victim: Jennifer Cardy
August 12, 1981: The first murder attributed to Robert Black dates back to this date. The victim is Jennifer Cardy, 9 years old, kidnapped, raped and killed.
The child's bicycle is found less than a mile from her home in Ballinderry in the county of Antim in Northern Ireland. The research leads to nothing, despite the commitment of about 200 volunteers.
The body will be found six days after the disappearance, 26 km away from home. On the corpse the obvious signs of sexual abuse.
The autopsy exam will reveal the drowning death and obvious signs of strangulation. Jennifer's clock stopped at 5.40 in the afternoon suggests immediately that death occurred immediately after the disappearance.
The location of the discovery, along one of the main arterial traffic routes between Belfast and Dublin, immediately leads the police to suspect that the perpetrator of the crime may have been an individual able to move easily in that area, apparently very popular.
The second victim: Susan Maxwell
July 30, 1982: 11-year-old Susan Maxwell disappears into thin air as she returns home to the Cornhill on Tweed area on the border of England and Scotland. The baby's body was found two weeks later, on the edge of a road near Uttoxeter, a village about 425 km south of the disappearance site.
Due to the advanced state of decomposition of the body, the causes of death cannot be established during an autopsy. The only detail that leads to a likely sexual assault on the victim is the absence of panties.
A witness reports to investigators that he saw the little girl in a brown Triumph in the company of an adult with a beard.
The third victim: Caroline Hogg
July 8, 1983: 5-year-old Caroline Hogg disappears near Portobello in Edinburgh, Scotland. Impressive searches, which lead to the discovery of the body about 310 miles (almost 500 km) from the place of the disappearance.
We are on the edge of the highway linking Northampton to Coventry. The body is naked, and no certain indication leads to the author of the barbaric murder of the minor.
Some testimonies, however conflicting, refer to a blue car without allowing the police to identify a precise model.
The fourth victim: Sarah Harper
March 26, 1986: Sarah Harper, 10, disappears as she returns home to Morley, near Leeds, England. His body was found almost a month later, on April 19, 1986, by a passerby along the Trent River, Nottingham, about 115 kilometers away from the place of the kidnapping.
From the autopsy, the fact that the child was repeatedly subjected to sexual abuse, then brutally tortured before being killed, emerges strongly.
No track leads the police in the direction of a single matrix behind the heinous murders. Despite some similarities found between two or more cases, Sarah Harper's death seems to completely escape a framework that leads to the same criminal hand.
Missed victims and arrest
April 28, 1988: Teresa Thornhill, 15, is the victim of an attempted kidnapping. According to the reconstructions of some witnesses, the author is said to be a "hairy" man with "a bad smell".
There is talk of a blue pickup truck, on which the girl would have been loaded if she had not reacted promptly: screams and kicks to the attacker's lower abdomen put him on the run, warding off the worst.
July 14, 1990: Mandy Wilson, 16, walks the road in Stow, still near the border between England and Scotland. A van approaches her, and a few moments pass before the kidnapping takes place. A man kidnaps her, but fortunately he is caught in the act by a local resident, David Herkes, ready to mark the vehicle's license plate and notify the police.
Just at the arrival of the agents on the spot, the van speeds past the place where the policemen are interrogating the witness, thus allowing them to recognize him immediately.
The police set off in pursuit of the vehicle, succeeding in an attempt to save the girl. They intercept the van, block it and search it, finding the young woman hidden under a pile of rags, tied, gagged and closed in a sleeping bag.
To drive the vehicle is Robert Black.
Robert Black on trial
Inside the killer's home, the investigators find an impressive amount of pornographic and child pornography material, an evident symptom of its profound and deviant inclination.
It is August 10, 1990 when the trial against him for the attempted kidnapping of Mandy Wilson opens. The defense claims that there was no murderous design, supported by the statements made by the accused: "I just pulled her pants down and took a look. I touched her a little. "
He admits that he wants to rape her at the end of the delivery round, using a series of objects to be inserted into the girl's vagina "to see how big it is". Among the shocking revelations of the man, the one to the psychiatrist during the interrogation: "If it is big enough (the vagina, Editor's note), it is old enough".
The jury does not believe in the defense version and for the serial killer Robert Black the prison doors are opened with a life sentence.
Robert Black: other convictions, detention and death
Jennifer Cardy, Sarah Harper, Susan Maxwell, Caroline Hogg: only one signature on their tragic end, that of Robert Black. The police arrive there a few years after Mandy Wilson's kidnapping process, thanks to the support of HOLMES, the database in the hands of British investigators implemented after the failures on the Yorkshire ripper case.
Black is also held responsible for the attempted kidnapping of Teresa Thornhill, a detail that definitively frames him within the contours of the rapist and serial murderer.
Charged for all four murders and for the two attacks on girls who survived death, on April 19, 1994, he was definitively sentenced to 4 life sentences.
He died in 2016, on January 12, inside the prison. Unsolved doubts still hang over him about a material responsibility in the disappearance of 9 other children: perhaps kidnapped, raped and killed, wrapped in the riddle that survived his death.
Black's name may be linked to the death of 13 other victims across the UK, Ireland, the Netherlands, Germany and France. Murders and kidnappings could be attributed to him between 1969 and 1987. The police are convinced, although no evidence emerged before and after the death of the serial killer to ascertain the truth about the mysterious cases in question.
Robert Black: the profile of the multiple homicide pedophile on TV
There are many products for TV that have dealt with the profile of Robert Black, pedophile and multiple murderer.
A 25-minute documentary broadcast by a Scottish broadcaster tackled the history of the serial killer with attached original videos of the massive manhunt.
Channel 4 packaged a 40-minute documentary first aired in May 1997, titled The Death of Childhood: Unspeakable Truths, with interviews with eyewitnesses of some of Black's disputed episodes, including David Herkes, the man who intercepted the van indicted at the time of the kidnapping of Mandy Wilson.
The BBC also dealt with the criminal portrait of Robert Black with a documentary on February 23, 2016 in the Spotlight program, in which excerpts of original audio of the time were also aired, including some chilling passages of interrogations to the murderer.
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