Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
Torturing and abusing girls was like being ‘an actor starring in a play’
Evil Black’s whining interview with leading doctor before he died
SERIAL killer Robert Black described his torture of young girls as being like a theatre performance, it has been revealed.
Black made the chilling claim to a forensic psychiatrist who conducted a series of interviews with him in prison.
The murderer compared himself to an actor starring in a play when he carried out his shocking crimes.
Dr Richard Badcock said: “There were areas of his life that he was happy to talk about and areas of his life that he wasn’t.
“One thing he did say was he had no recollection of what happened to the victims... of whether they died or not.
“He said it was like a theatre. Like the curtains opening at the start of a play.
“What had gone on before the curtains opened he had no knowledge of. What happened after the curtains closed he had no recollection of – these were the areas where the girls were killed and the bodies disposed of.”
Delivery driver Black was convicted in 1994 of raping and murdering Susan Maxwell, 11, in 1982, five-year-old Caroline Hogg a year later and Sarah Harper, 10, in 1986.
In 2011, he was found guilty of the 1981 sexual assault and murder of Jennifer Cardy, nine, from Ballinderry, Co Antrim.
Black was found dead in his cell in Maghaberry Prison in 2016 aged 68.
The experts concluded he could not have been “cured” and would have gone on to kill many more if he had not been caught.
Dr Badcock said: “He was not terribly intelligent but he had quite a lot of what you might think of as natural cunning. He didn’t have lots of opportunities for conversations so he was quite happy to talk about himself.”
A group of experts studied the Scot’s crimes for TV series Making A Monster.
They concluded that he was driven to kill because of anger at the ill-treatment and abuse he suffered as a child.
Black, from Grangemouth, was brought up by foster parents and later spent time in care homes where it’s thought he was sexually abused.
In an interview behind bars, Black whined: “I remember one Christmas I didn’t get presents because I had been bad.
“She says ‘Santa Claus isn’t coming this year to you’. And he didn’t.” Dr Badcock, who also held interviews with mass murderer GP Harold Shipman, said of Black: “Would he proudly describe himself as a serial killer? No.
“He would describe himself as the unfortunate victim of life.
“What he mostly wanted to get across was how badly he’d been treated.
“It’s certainly clear something very traumatic happened to him at a very early age which he never discussed, presumably in the form of sexual abuse.
“It was something that so disturbed him he shut himself off from it completely.”
Forensic psychologist Dr Eric Cullen said: “I don’t think he was retrievable and there’s no punishment sufficient to mark the magnitude of his crimes. He was beyond redemption.”
The Making A Monster episode featuring Black is on Crime+investigation channel on February 24 at 9pm.