EVIL PSYCHOPATHS (True Crime) (29 page)

Robert Black

It was a very strange sight. A man swimming up and down the pool, with a broom-handle protruding from his anus where he had earlier inserted it. By day he worked as a lifeguard and at night he broke in and swam. He loved swimming. He also loved little girls.

Robert Black had been unloved from almost the minute he was born on 21 April 1947. His mother, Jessie, was not prepared to face the stigma that being an unmarried mother brought in those days and having already refused to name her baby’s father on his birth certificate, gave the child up for adoption as soon as she could, at six months. Within a year, she was long gone, married and living in Australia where she had four children, none of whom was told about the half-brother they had back in the old country, Scotland.

Meanwhile, the boy, christened Robert, was fostered out to the Tulip family who lived in the town of Kinlochleven in the West Highlands. He would spend the next eleven years of his life there. He was serially unlucky in his choice of parents, however. His foster-father, Jack, died when Robert was only five and his foster-mother, Margaret, passed away when he was just eleven. During those years, however, life was no bed of roses for Robert. Friends and neighbours remember him being covered in bruises and he was often beaten with a leather belt when he misbehaved. He was known as ‘Smelly Robert’ to schoolmates and, indeed, Robert Black had a problem with body odour that remained with him.

He is reported to have been an aggressive lad who did not mix well with children his own age, preferring instead to hang around with a gang of younger kids that he could boss about. He was a bully and one friend recalls a particularly savage beating he gave for no reason at all to a boy with an artificial leg. However, he never got into any really serious trouble.

He did confess after his eventual arrest, to an unnatural fixation with his anus and his urge to see what he could fit in it. He said that he would put a little piece of metal up there, but photographs recovered following his arrest show him with such items as a telephone handset and a table leg inserted.

When Margaret Tulip died in 1958, Black was sent to a children’s home near Falkirk and a year later, at the age of only twelve, he made his first attempt at rape. He and a couple of other boys from the home, took a girl into a field, lifted her skirt and tried to rape her. When the girl informed on the boys, it was decided that Black needed a home with stricter discipline. He was sent to the all-male Red House children’s home near Musselburgh on Scotland’s east coast. Unfortunately, he became the subject of repeated sexual abuse by a member of staff.

Aged fifteen, he left the Red House, the authorities finding a job for him as a delivery boy while he lived in a rented room in Greenock in Glasgow. It was while doing his deliveries that he began to live some of his fantasies, molesting around forty girls as he did his rounds. Incredibly, no one reported him at the time. A year later, however, he was convicted for ‘lewd and libidinous behaviour’.

Black, now aged seventeen, had met a seven-year-old girl in a park and asked if she would like to go with him to see some kittens. He led her to a disused building where he held her down by the throat until she was unconscious and removed her underwear. He then assaulted her and masturbated over her unconscious body. When he left her, he had no idea if she was alive or dead. Neither did he care.

She was later found wandering in the street, distraught and bleeding.

Astonishingly, Black was merely admonished for this act, the psychiatric report suggesting that this was no more than ‘an isolated incident’. Nonetheless, Social Services sent him back to his home-town of Grangemouth, hoping that he would make a fresh start to his already troubled life.

He found a job with a builders’ supply company and seemed to settle down. He even had a relationship with a woman, Pamela Hodgson, that looked as if it might result in marriage. But rumours about his sexual predilections began to circulate before long and Pamela ended it. They were more than just rumours, however. He had been up to his old tricks again with the nine-year-old daughter of his landlord and landlady. They did not involve the police, not wanting to put their daughter through the anguish of an investigation but word soon got out and Black lost his job. He returned to Kinlochleven, renting a room in a house. Unfortunately, there was a seven-year-old girl in the house and Black was soon caught molesting her. The police were called this time and in March 1967 he was sent to Borstal at Polmont for indecent assault.

On his release, he decided to head for the anonymity of the big city and moved to London. He managed to stay out of trouble throughout the 1970s, but fuelled his sexual urges, instead, with child pornography magazines. He also used his time working as a swimming pool attendant, watching little girls as they swam. It was around this time that he would break into the swimming pool and perform his weird swimming ritual with a broom-handle. He was also reported for touching a little girl again but the police did not pursue the case, fortunately for him.

He began taking an interest in photography, but his snaps and videos were only of little girls.

In 1976, he found work as a driver for a company called Poster Dispatch and Storage, delivering posters to depots all over the country. He loved the work. Very much a loner, it allowed him to be on his own all day and to keep to his own schedule. For ten years he worked for the company, frequently doing the longer runs for other drivers who did not like to be away from home for so long. What they did not know was that in the back of his van were various masturbatory implements that he would insert into his anus. Sometimes he would dress up in girls’ clothing or swimming costumes in the back of the van while he fantasized about touching little girls.

He finally killed one hot summer’s afternoon in July 1982.

Eleven-year-old Susan Maxwell lived in a farmhouse just outside the town of Cornhill-on-Tweed, on the English side of the border. She had gone to play tennis with a friend in Coldstream, just on the other side of the border. When her mother went to collect her after the game, she was nowhere to be found. A phone call to her friend confirmed that she had left to walk home, in which case her mother should have passed her on the road.

The police were called and it emerged that Susan, dressed in bright yellow and holding a tennis racket, had been seen by a number of people until she crossed the bridge over the River Tweed at which point she seems to have vanished.

Two weeks later, her body was discovered in a ditch beside a lay-by on the A518 at Loxley, near Uttoxeter, 250 miles from her home. She had been there a while and her body had badly decomposed in the summer heat. They identified her from her dental records but it was difficult to conclude how she had died. Her underpants had been removed and folded beneath her head and her shorts had been replaced. There was no doubt that, however she died, the motive for the attack was sexual.

The investigation into Susan’s death lasted for a year, but came to no conclusion, in spite of 500,000 hand-written index cards that had been compiled. It was the days before computer databases made crime-fighting much easier.

He struck again on 8 July 1983 in his old haunt, Portobello, a seaside resort just outside Edinburgh. Five-year-old Caroline Hogg had attended a party that day and had gone out to play before bedtime. The playground was only a few minutes away and her mother had seen no harm in letting her daughter out for five minutes.

When fifteen minutes had passed and she had not returned, her mother sent her brother out to find her. When he came back saying there was no trace of her, panic set in and the police were called. They immediately established that Caroline had been seen by numerous people holding hands with what was described as a ‘scruffy man’. He had taken her to a nearby fairground, ‘Fun City’, where he had paid for her to go on a ride. They were last seen walking out of the entrance, still holding hands.

A massive search was instigated, the largest ever in Scotland, while her parents, like the Maxwells, spoke to the press, her mother weeping as she explained how much she missed her beloved daughter.

They found Caroline’s body on 18 July in a lay-by at Twycross in Leicestershire, close to the A444, a road that stretches from Northampton to Coventry. She was 300 miles from home, but within just twenty-four miles of the location of Susan Maxwell’s body. She was identified from her hairband and a locket and this time, the body was completely naked.

The police, naturally, linked the two cases and the Deputy Chief Constable of Northumbria, Hector Clark was put in overall charge of the joint operation that now involved a number of police forces. Clark set about computerising all the data gathered thus far. The police had learned from the Yorkshire Ripper investigation just how valuable computers could be in the hunt for a murderer.

They interviewed witnesses and made house-to-house enquiries. They sat for weeks on the A444 taking down registration numbers of passing cars and checking them out. Police forces all over the country were asked to provide the names of possible suspects and holiday-makers from around the world sent in rolls of film taken at Portobello on the night in question. They found nothing, however. Once again, they had no leads.

There was a gap of three years before the next incident. On 26 March 1986, ten-year-old Sarah Harper went to a local shop for a loaf of bread and never returned to her home in Morley in Leeds. Within an hour the police were called and an intensive search was launched. Her body was found on 19 April by a man walking his dog by the River Trent in Nottingham. It was estimated that she had probably been dumped in the river at Junction 24 of the M1 while she was still alive. Her injuries were described as ‘terrible’.

At first they thought that her death was not linked to the Maxwell and Hogg killings. There were differences – Susan and Caroline had been much younger than Sarah and had been dressed in bright summer clothes. They had both been taken near main roads. Morley was out of the way and you did not go there without a reason. However, there were also similarities. All three were abducted for sexual purposes and driven south to the Midlands where their bodies were dumped. Admittedly, Sarah’s injuries were more extreme than the others, but it is thought that the offender tends to escalate the violence he perpetrates, the more murders he or she commits and the more confident he or she becomes.

In July 1990, Robert Black was finally caught. Six-year-old Mandy Wilson was walking to a friend’s house in the village of Stow in the Scottish borders. A neighbour, David Herkes, watched her walk past as he cut his grass. He later explained that as he bent down to look at the blades of his lawn-mower he noticed her feet standing next to a man’s. ‘Suddenly they vanished,’ he said, ‘and I saw him making movements as if he were trying to stuff something under the dashboard. He got into the van, reversed up the driveway the child had just come from and sped off towards Edinburgh.’

He quickly memorized the car’s registration as it disappeared and ran indoors to call the police. The number was radioed out to every police car in the vicinity, but as he stood explaining what had happened to a police officer, Robert Black’s van suddenly appeared again. The policeman ran into the road and the car swerved to avoid him before stopping. The officers dragged Black out and handcuffed him. In the back of the van they found the little girl, wrapped in a sleeping bag with tape over her mouth to prevent her calling out.

When questioned about the girl, Black displayed the true characteristics of a psychopath. He was completely disassociated from her, saying ‘I wasn't thinking about her at all . . . like, you know, what she must be feeling.’ If she had died, he added, ‘it would have been a pure accident.’

Robert Black was sentenced to life imprisonment for Mandy Wilson’s abduction and, later received sentences of thirty-five years for the other murders. He will be eligible for parole in 2029 when he will be eighty-two years old. It is thought that he might be responsible for a great many more murders of little girls, such as the unsolved killing of thirteen-year-old Genette Tate who disappeared in Devon in 1978. So far, he has not been willing to talk about these deaths.

As he was taken down after sentencing, Black turned to the twenty-three police officers there to hear the verdict and said with a smile, ‘Well done, boys.’

Michel Fourniret

They called him the ‘Ogre of the Ardennes’ when they finally caught him. He confessed to ten murders but some put the probable total closer to forty and when he was arrested, police forces across Europe re-opened unsolved murders to establish whether Michel Fourniret might have been responsible.

He was in prison already, in Belgium, having been caught trying to abduct a thirteen-year-old girl of Congolese origin who had managed to run away from him. If she had not escaped, there is little doubt that she would be dead. His wife, Monique Olivier, had been closely following the paedophile murder case that had been horrifying Belgium, that of Marc Dutroux. She had what you might call a professional interest in the case. When she saw Dutroux’s wife being sentenced to thirty years imprisonment for ‘trying to cover up her husband’s crimes’, she took fright, realising that she had actually done a lot more than cover up her husband’s crimes – she had helped him to trap his unfortunate victims. She would ride in the car with him when they went out ‘hunting for virgins’, as they called it. When potential victims were approached, they were reassured by the sight of a woman in the car and thought nothing of climbing in. Worse still, Monique Olivier sometimes took along with him the couple’s young son, Sélim, to reassure victims even more. No one knows what horrors those young eyes had to witness.

Fearing her fate at the hands of the courts, she denounced her husband to the police, naming him as the murderer of nine people – mostly girls – in France and Belgium. She initially claimed that she played no part in the crimes but that she was fully aware that when he told her he was ‘going out to hunt’ that he was going out in search of a victim. It emerged before long, however, that she was often intrinsic to the success of the ‘hunt’ and, often, he would order her to watch as he raped and killed his victims.

Fourniret had been a qualified draughtsman and by his early thirties, was running his own tool-making business near Paris. He was an expert handyman. However, he was already well known to the police. He was twenty-four years old when he was first convicted, for abducting and abusing a ten-year-old girl in his hometown of Sedan in the Ardennes. After a further two convictions, he was picked up and put in preventive detention in 1984 for a series of kidnaps and sexual attacks on teenage girls and young women in the Paris area. At this time, he placed an advert in a weekly Catholic magazine, looking for a penpal. Monique Olivier, who had already been married twice and had two children, from whom she was estranged, answered the ad and they began to write to each other. It was an intense correspondence. She called him ‘My Dear Shere Khan’ – from the Jungle Book and ‘my beast’. In the letters, they discuss raping virgins and Fourniret, in one letter, gruesomely describes virgins as ‘membranes on legs’.

He was tried in June 1987 for eleven sexual assaults and sentenced to seven years in prison for rape and indecent assault on minors. Unfortunately, he was released after only four months for good behaviour and because he had already spent three years in custody awaiting trial. When he walked out of the prison gates, Olivier was waiting for him. They moved to the village of St. Cyr-les-Colons in northern Burgundy.

It had not been his first offence. His convictions for sexual assault and rape stretched back as far as the 1960s. In 2006, there was speculation that he might have been the real perpetrator of one of France’s most controversial crimes of the second half of the twentieth century – the murder of eight-year-old Marie-Dolores Rambla, killed at Marseille on 3 June 1974. Christian Ranucci had been convicted of the crime and guillotined for it in 1976, one of the last people to be guillotined in France.

That day, Marie-Dolores was out with her brother when a man came up to them asking them to help him find his lost dog. The girl climbed into his car and they drove off. An hour later, the car was in collision with another vehicle, but the kidnapper quickly drove off. He was followed by an elderly couple who saw him later with a large package. A huge search was launched for the missing girl who was found a little later, stabbed to death, in some bushes. Ranucci was arrested and charged simply because he had been in an accident that day and had also been spied carrying a large package. In his car, police found a pair of trousers that had on them traces of dried blood that turned out be the same blood type as that of Marie-Dolores.

At first Ranucci confessed, but the next day, he retracted his confession and it has, in fact, been suggested that his file was altered and evidence tampered with so that it fitted what he confessed. The bloodstains have been found to have been much older than the day of the murder and were due to a motorcycle accident Ranucci had. Unluckily for him, he had the same blood type as the dead girl. The evidence of the elderly couple has also been doubted by commentators and, crucially, a red pullover that was found at the scene did not belong to Ranucci, as was originally thought.

Chillingly, it emerged that Michel Fourniret had been holidaying in Marseille at the time of the murder. Furthermore, the car he was driving at that time was the same colour as the one described by witnesses. Crucially, his modus operandi – the lost dog – was identical to the one that Fourniret would use in later killings. Marie-Dolores showed no sign of sexual assault. Fourniret often did not assault his victims, but masturbated over them instead.

It did not take long for him to claim his first victim in St. Cyr-les-Colons. Seventeen-year-old Isabel Laville was snatched on her way home from school on 11 December, just six weeks after his release. Olivier later told police that she was picked because she resembled her when she was young and still a virgin. She had pulled up alongside the girl and asked her for directions, persuading her to get into the car to show her the way. Further along the road, they came upon Fourniret who posed as a stranded motorist who had run out of petrol. She stopped for him and, sitting in the back seat, he reached over and put a cord around Isabel’s neck. They drugged the unfortunate girl and drove her back to their house. When Fourniret found himself unable to rape Isabel, Olivier stimulated him with oral sex. Isabel was buried at the bottom of a deep, disused well in the countryside.

In August 1990, Fourniret was involved in a bizarre incident that he was lucky to get away with. His van was parked at the side of the road, near Reims. A passing female motorist, believing him to have broken down, stopped to ask him if he needed help. He ignored her question and blurted out that he wanted to sodomise her. She put her foot down hard on the accelerator and sped off to the nearest police station. He followed her and made excuses for his behaviour. He was let off with a caution.

Fourniret confessed to the murders of six girls and women – thirteen-year-old Marie-Ascension Kirombo, twelve-year-old Elisabeth Brichet, thirteen-year-old Natacha Danais, seventeen-year-old Isabelle Laville, twenty-two-year-old Jeanne-Marie Desramault and Farida Hellegouache, whose age was unknown.

In July 2004, he further admitted the murders of Celine Saison and Manyana Thumpong. He denied the murder of the au pair employed by him and his wife. Monique had claimed that when she came home to find her husband and the girl naked, he killed the au pair to prevent her telling anyone. The number of murders he had now admitted came to nine after he claimed to have shot dead a man at a motorway rest stop in order to rob him.

He would look specifically for virgins, digging a three-metre deep grave in the grounds of his house in the Ardennes before setting out on one of his excursions. One exception was a woman that Fourniret killed for money.

While incarcerated in a French prison he encountered an inmate named Pierre Hellegouache. Hellegouache, who had been imprisoned for being a member of a far-left urban guerrilla group called Action Directe, that had set off a number of bombs in France in the 1980s, let slip to Fourniret that his wife, Farida, was looking after the organisation’s war chest of gold coins, worth £20,000. Released from jail, Fourniret decided to get his hands on this money. He traced Farida Hellegouache, forced her to tell him where the money was hidden and killed her. He proceeded to use it to buy an 18th century farmhouse set in thirty-two acres of land in Donchery in the French Ardennes, just over the border from Belgium. It was from there that he would launch his hunts and it was to there that he would bring the bodies of a number of his victims. In July 2004, he led the police in a search of the grounds, clad in a bullet-proof vest, showing them the burial sites of twelve-year-old Elisabeth Brichet and French student Jeanne-Marie Desramault. As police uncovered the remains of the two girls, it was reported, Fourniret showed no emotion whatsoever.

He was sixty-five years old by the time he bought the farm. Fourniret and Olivier were thought of as quiet by locals and they even found work in the local primary school, working as playground and canteen supervisors

When Monique Olivier was interrogated by two French detectives in Belgium in February 2005, the plump, dowdy fifty-six-year-old was silent for hours, refusing food and drink. She had said nothing about the killings for seven months. Suddenly, however, she opened up, describing to the two men the 1988 murder of nineteen-year-old Marie-Angèle Domece. She said that her husband had stalked the girl for weeks before the two of them had persuaded her to get into their car. Her husband had disposed of the body, she told them. Then, however, she started describing another killing in Burgundy, informing them first of all that it was one of which they knew nothing about, as yet. It turned out to be the 1990 murder of a young British girl, Joanna Parrish. Joanna’s death had been the subject of one of France’s longest-running murder investigations.

Joanna, from Gloucestershire, was a student of Modern Languages at Leeds University and part of her course was to teach in France. She had found a position at a secondary school in the town of Auxerre and was in the last week of her time there.

She had placed an advert in a local paper offering English lessons and a local man had, it seems, responded to the ad. She arranged to meet him in a square in Auxerre at seven one evening. She went to Auxerre with a friend and then the two separated and Joanna set off to meet the man. She was never seen alive again.

On the morning of the next day, 17 May, a fisherman saw her body floating in the Yonne River, not far from Auxerre. She had been drugged, tied up, raped, beaten and strangled before her killer had thrown her into the Yonne.

It turned out to be a case that was thoroughly bungled by the police. They failed to search all the land in the vicinity and then allowed the public on to it too soon after her body was found, contaminating the crime scene. Critical evidence such as bite marks on the body seem to have been ignored and the police failed to hold DNA tests of the local male population. Neither did they allow any media appeals.

Olivier confessed to driving the van into which they had thrown Joanna to an isolated spot in the countryside. As she drove, her husband savagely beat Joanna ‘until she spoke no more’, as she described it. She was thrown into the nearby river when he had finished with her, Olivier went on.

Fourniret denied it the next day when they confronted him with what his wife had described. It was not the first time he had denied murders that he later admitted to, however, and the detectives knew it might only be a matter of time before they had him for these murders, too.

Both Fourniret and Olivier were sentenced to life imprisonment. Judges stipulated that she should serve at least twenty-eight years before being considered for release. He is unlikely ever to be freed.