Now we’ll never know the truth
Child killer Robert Black dies in jail ... but did he take secret of Genette Tate to the grave?
A DEPRAVED child serial killer has died in jail – weeks before he was expected to be charged with the murder of a fifth schoolgirl.
Robert Black – serving 12 life sentences for murdering four girls in the 1980s – died of natural causes in prison in Northern Ireland.
The 68-year-old was strongly suspected of killing another 13 children, including Genette Tate who vanished in a country lane close to her Devon home in 1978.
Police fear he has taken numerous secrets to his grave, denying parents of the missing girls justice and the chance to bury their daughters. Black worked as a delivery driver and cruised the length of the UK looking for victims to abduct in the 1970s and 1980s.
His reign of terror ended in 1990 when he was caught by police with a barely alive six-year-old girl.
She was found hooded, bound, gagged and stuffed in a sleeping bag in the back of his van in the Scottish village of Stow.
In 1994 he was found guilty of the murders of Susan Maxwell, 11, Caroline Hogg, five, and Sarah Harper, ten. Black was also found guilty in 2011 of abducting Jennifer Cardy, nine, in his van as she cycled to a friend’s house in 1981.
He sexually abused and killed her before dumping her body in a nearby beauty spot.
Only Moors Murderers Ian Brady and Myra Hindley – whose five victims were aged ten to 17 – killed more children in modern British criminal history.
Thomas Hamilton killed 16 in the 1996 Dunblane massacre but is not considered a serial killer as this happened in one brutal day.
As many as 40 cases were examined by police in the 1990s but 13 possible killings are understood to remain potentially linked to Black, including the Tate case.
A source close to the investigation said Black’s death was a ‘cruel blow’ for the Tate family as police had expected to charge him with her murder. Detectives have spent months preparing a case for the Crown Prosecution Service.
No trace of the newspaper delivery girl, 13, has ever been found. All that remained were her bike and scattered papers in the lane.
Last night her father John said at his home in Manchester: ‘I hoped that one day he might have made a deathbed confession.
‘We have waited all these years for a breakthrough and it seems we have been denied again just as something major was about to hap- pen. I would have liked to have seen Black go on trial charged with Genette’s kidnap and murder but now that has been denied us. This is a major blow to our hopes of trying to discover the truth.’
Scottish-born Black neve spoke about the killings but after his arrest, he admitted his depravity, telling police: ‘I’ve always liked young girls since I was a young kid.’
Police abroad have looked at links between Black and the killings of four girls near Paris in 1987 and a girl, seven, in Amsterdam in 1986.