The Firmaments Of Wrath

It was this photograph that inspired me to write The Firmaments of Wrath, a 14,000 word article published in Headpress Journal #27. Taken in the early part of the 20th Century in my home town of Morley, it exuded to me pure Wicker Man vibes and seemed to confirm all my suspicions about the place. Morley is just another northern town, grim in aspect and as beaten down by the indistrial collapse of the 20th century as any of its neighbours strewn across the Ridings. The high street is lined with cancer shops and low-rent traders, all suffering from the boom to the south that is Leeds, sucking away all the money and the energy and leaving the place hollowed out. It’s where I was born – in a reputedly-haunted house – and where I grew up, surrounded by a cast of small-town eccentrics that afforded some distraction to what was a fairly bleak period of IRA bombs, power cuts, industrial collapse and, of course, the Yorkshire Ripper. His third victim – Emily Jackson – lived in our village of Churwell, just to the south of Morley. Tragedy had already struck their family several years earlier when their son Derek fell through a second-storey window at home and died. I think that’s one of the dominant themes within my memories of that time: dead children. We had a cot death in our own family, there was the Carl Bridgwater murder in 1978 that was all over the news, the children murdered by the IRA in the M62 coach bombing, Donald Neilson – the Black Panther – who my mother used to go to school with, and with the ongoing adventures of the Ripper – who killed a 16-year-old girl in 1977 – it all came together in my mind as this overwhelming impression that growing up where I lived was dangerous. All of which set the tone for what was to happen in 1986 when Robert Black came to town.

Robert Black was born doomed to be a bastard. Shortly after his birthdate of 21st April 1947, his factory-working mum Jessie gave him up for adoption. She later married and emigrated to Australia to start a new family, while Robert was left in the care of Jack & Margaret Tulip who lived in the Highlands of Scotland, in the town of Kinochleven. They adopted Robert at the age of 6 months and raised him at their home for the next few years. Jack Tulip died when the boy was just five years old and the parenting chores became the sole responsibility of his wife, who applied a stern Prebysterian discipline to Robert’s childhood misdemeanours. He would turn up at school covered with bruises but claimed no parental abuse as such, though his mother was known to lock him in the house or lash his bare arse with a leather belt whenever he fell foul of her commandments. He was a habitual bedwetter and a nose-picker, called ‘Smelly Robert Tulip’ by the other boys and regarded as a bully. He would lash out at those he knew he could physically dominate – younger and smaller boys and, on one occasion, a lad with an artificial leg who was stomped mercilessly for no apparent reason. He would not, could not, mix with boys his own age and cobbled together gangs of smaller children to lord it over, administering the kind of stern justice he had learnt at home. Whilst he cultivated a reputation as a hooligan – a “wild wee laddie” – he never got caught doing anything the other boys weren’t all capable of in some way.

Privately, he played his own games. Prematurely aware of his own body he began to fumblingly experiment with its potential for sensation, and set out to discover what kind of things he could insert up his anus. This started out as small household items, before progressing in later life to the kind of items that police later found polaroids of: table legs, wine bottles, fists. It was the culmination of an obsession with bodily orifices, a way of exploring his sexual identity, a chance to be the girl he had always grown up wishing he was.Despite the indiscriminate anal antics, he was not homosexual and from an early age evinced a fascination with girls. It was just the usual Doctors & Nurses games at first but they turned nasty after his foster mother died, when Robert was aged 11. He was sent to a Children’s home near Falkirk and it was here, on the cusp of puberty, that a more violent and aberrant aspect of his sexuality came into fruition. He took part in an attempted gang rape when he was just 12, though neither he nor the other two boys could raise a sufficient erection to consummate the act. The matter was hushed up and it was decided it would be best for a boy with Robert’s proclivities to be raised in a home with a stricter regime. The Red House in Musselburgh was an all-boys environment, where he was repeatedly abused by a male member of staff. The loss of his mother had unhinged him just as he was entering a critical phase of his development,and through the beatings at his old home, to the rectal bedroom games, to his latest experience of warped physical intimacy, Robert had learnt to regard the world as a hostile environment from which desires must be satisfied via force.

By 16 years of age, Robert was engaging with the world as an adult. He had left the boys home in Musselburgh and was now renting a room in Greenock, near Glasgow. Working as a delivery boy gave this now damaged-beyond-repair individual access to the homes of hundreds of people, and it was during this period that he admitted to molesting anywhere between 30 to 40 young girls. Given the number of victims it’s hard to accept that his behaviour wasn’t noticed by any of the parents but this seems to be the case, and it wasn’t until a year later that he received his first conviction for ‘lewd and libidinous’ behaviour, an legalese euphemism for what was basically attempted murder. Using the standard ruse of having some kittens to show her, he took a seven year old girl to a derelict building and made his assault, by first pinning her down on the ground and throttling her and then, once inert, stripping her and fingering her body, before kneeling over her and masturbating which, without all the hammers and bloodshed, was practically the same ritual Peter Sutcliffe would perform on his victims. Once spent, he left her for dead, oblivious to the repercussions. The girl had been unconscious and woke up confused and bleeding. She was found later walking the streets in a state of distress, and her attacker was soon named and brought before the courts. Despite a record that included attempted rape, numerous molestations and now an obvious attempt at murder, Black was given nothing more severe than a telling off, what’s known under Scottish law as an ‘admonishment’. The Judge’s decision was based, in part, on a psychiatric report on the boy, which implied that this incident was a ‘one off’ and that it was unlikely he would commit any such similar offence again.

Scot free, so to speak, Black moved to Grangemouth in 1964 where he rented a room from a couple who needed the extra income from a tenant. He had a job with a builder’s supply merchants and when he began seeing local girl Pamela Hodgson on a regular basis, he felt some sense of stability come into his life for the first time. He fell in love with Pamela and, after the relationship had developed a sexual aspect, he proposed marriage to her, which she accepted. The engagement didn’t last long though and a ‘Dear John’ letter from her left him distraught, his fragile new world crumbling around him, causing him to revert to his former patterns of behaviour. Maybe he never really curtailed his molestations but having a girlfriend would have certainly prevented him from the kind of indiscriminate activity he soon embarked upon once she’d told him it was over. He was caught molesting the nine-year old granddaughter of his landlady and once again the matter was hushed up, with Black being asked quietly to leave the premises. He moved on to Kinochleven, the town where he had been raised, and soon reverted to type once more, this time with the young daughter of the couple he rented a room from, only this time the police were called. He was 20 years old, guilty of indecent assault and banged up in Borstal. On his release he knew that he had developed a certain notoriety throughout the areas of Scotland he was familiar with, and with his welcome outstayed it was time to seek out new horizons.
London became his new home. He lived in bed-sits and paid his rent with casual labour, drifting through his days and nights. He hung around pubs, swigging pints of lager shandy and taking the piss out of strangers. A match of darts he sometimes joined in on but he wouldn’t allow himself to be drawn into any kind of social circle. He stayed distant, remote, a moon with nothing but dark side, orbiting around a metropolis that didn’t seem to care, least of all about another child molester in its midst. He wasn’t alone in his perversion, as he discovered when exploring some of the more obscure and rarely trodden alleyways of Soho. Child porn magazines from Amsterdam could easily be purchased and Black acquired a large collection throughout the 1970’s, progressing onto videos when the technology became more widespread. One of his casual jobs had been swimming pool attendant, clearly a post filled with no enquiry into his past, where he would watch the little girls doing lanes. At a loose end of an evening he would break into his workplace and enjoy the facilities for himself, casually breast-stroking up and down the pool with a broom handle stuck up his arse.

Black became interested in photography and recording video. His favourite subject matter was, of course, young children, especially little girls down on the beach, running around in their bathing costumes. These images acted as aids to refine his fantasies down to specifics, allowing him to strip away all the extraneous details and get down to what really mattered. And what really mattered was getting into the back of a van, dressing up in girl’s swimming costumes, stuffing who knows what up his arse and then wanking himself silly. He was at the point where simply fulfilling his fantasies within his own mind could not sustain him for long and he would have to act out in the physical realm his desires, in order to feel some sense of ‘release’. It’s been suggested that he may well have already murdered by this time, and whilst the first incident directly attributed to him didn’t occur until 1982, there remains compelling reason to suggest that he killed several times during the 1970’s. His job as driver for PDS (Poster Dispatch & Storage), delivering posters all over the country, gave him ample opportunity to spread his predations far and wide, and due to his willingness to handle the longer haul routes that would have kept his colleagues away from their families, he was often on the motorways between England and Scotland. On the 30th July 1982, a delivery job brought him close to the town of Coldstream, just across the border in Scotland where 11-year-old Susan Maxwell had cycled over to her friend’s house to play tennis. Several witnesses remembered a girl matching her description, seen crossing the Tweed Bridge at about the same time as her mother was expecting her home. After that, nothing. She was never seen alive again.

Susan Maxwell’s body was found in a ditch next to a lay-by on the A518, near Uttoexter in the West Midlands, on Friday 13th August 1982. This was over 250 miles from where she was last seen alive and a common area for Robert Black to pass through on his long-distance runs between Scotland and the capital. Due to the hot summer weather in the two weeks since her disappearance, her body had decomposed to the extent where it could only be identified through dental records. The police acted promptly and conducted the kind of sprawling enquiry you’d expect from such a crime, though it was soon in danger of being compromised by the overwhelming amount of leads and information coming in. Some two years on from the Yorkshire Ripper case there were significant lessons that had still to be learned about co-ordination and use of the information becoming available. In the days before computerisation the Staffordshire police had only a manual database of index cards to work with and after a year the inquiry began to lose momentum. With no promising leads and no prime suspects there was little else to be done, least of all the prevention of such a crime from happening again.

Portobello is a seaside resort, east of Edinburgh. It was from here on 8th July 1983 that Robert Black abducted five-year-old Caroline Hogg. She’d been allowed to play out late after a friend’s party and was down at the children’s playground just a short walk from her home when she vanished. Eyewitnesses claimed to have seen her holding hands with a “scruffy man”, who seemingly took her through the park to the amusement arcade at Fun City and let her ride on the roundabout, before walking off with her hand in hand. She was never seen alive again. Despite tearful press-conference pleas by her parents for her to be brought home, and the thousands of volunteers who joined in to search for the girl – the largest of it’s kind in Scotland at that time – there was nothing, absolutely nothing, that could now be done to stop the inevitable. 10 days later, Caroline’s body was found in a lay-by in Leicestershire, just off the A444 and less than 24 miles from where Susan Maxwell’s body had been found. And again, as with Susan, the summer heat had caused her remains to decompose so rapidly that identification could only be made by the locket she was still wearing. Other than that, she was naked.
The similarities between the two murders demanded a co-ordinated response from the four police forces now involved – Leicestershire, Staffordshire, Northumbria and Edinburgh. Computers were used for the first time in a major enquiry of this type, in order to collate all the data. This would involve the transcription of a massive number of manual files, a daunting and time-consuming task that resulted in the decision to log only the Caroline Hogg enquiry into the computerised database, whilst the Susan Maxwell case, now over a year old, would remain manual. How impactful this decision was on the subsequent investigation it was too early to say.

26th March 1986, the Harper family were indoors at their home in Brunswick Place, just off Peel Street in Morley, watching television. Jacki Harper asked her 10-year-old daughter Sarah to go to the corner shop. She took two empty pop bottles with her, to claim the deposit, and set off up the road to K&M Stores on Peel Street, just a short walk that she had undertaken many times before. Sarah arrived at the shop, returned the empties, and bought some bread and crisps. She set off back home, taking a short cut down a narrow unlit snicket, a route that would have been familiar only to locals. At about the same time, there’d been sightings of a ‘strange man’ walking around the streets, and an unfamiliar white van parked close to Brunswick Place. This man was seen going into K&M Stores shortly before Sarah arrived but after that, he seems to have vanished. So, it seems, had Sarah. After an hour the police were called.
Two weeks later, on April 19th, a man was walking his dog along a pathway that ran parallel to the River Trent in Nottingham. A dumping ground for all manner of material, it wasn’t unusual to see something floating in the river. What he initially thought was a bundle of old sacking made him curious enough to go down the riverbank for a closer look. The current was turning the bundle around as he moved closer and that’s when he saw that it was actually a body. Using a stick, he managed to drag the body to the riverbank, where he could now see that it was a young girl, dead. It was Sarah Harper. A post-mortem later determined that she had still been alive when dropped into the river, and had suffered violent injuries, especially to her bodily orifices. It was clearly the handiwork of a sexual sadist, who had treated the girl like a doll for his own personal amusement and satisfaction. She had been abducted, tortured and killed by Robert Black, who had kept her in his van for days, before dropping her into a river as he drove through Nottinghamshire, down the M1 on his way back to London.

Robert Black was finally captured in July 1990. The investigations into the murders of Susan Maxwell, Caroline Hogg and Sarah Harper had ground on and since 1986 the three inquiries had been painstakingly brought together in one database, the work completed at around the same time that Black was driving his van up the M1, towards Stow, a village in the Scottish borders about 5 miles north of Galashiels. The 14th July was a high summer day, bright and sunny, and 6-year-old Mandy Wilson was walking to her friend’s house. One of her neighbours saw her walking down the road when a van pulled into a driveway beside her. The door opened and a man got out, stooping to speak with her. Then, suddenly, the man was bundling the girl into the cab of the van, climbing in after her and then driving away at high speed towards Edinburgh. The neighbour took note of the van’s registration number and called the police. Squad cars were quickly on the scene, with the van’s description & registration radioed around the area. The neighbour was stood in the driveway from where the girl was snatched, explaining what he saw to the police and the child’s father when he saw the van coming back down the road. A copper ran into the road to bar the vehicles way, causing the driver to swerve and lose control. Policemen descended on the vehicle, pulling the driver, Robert Black, out of the cab and handcuffing him. The child’s father was screaming expletives at Black, demanding to know what the bastard had done with his daughter. He climbed into the back of the van and found a pile of rags behind the drivers seat. Under the rags was a sleeping bag inside of which he could feel a small human body inside. Tearing open the bag, he saw his daughter’s face, bright red from lack of oxygen, a strip of sticking plaster across her mouth. He removed the Elastoplast, untied her hands and cradled his girl, who had been shocked into silence by what had just happened to her.

Robert Black has never confessed to his crimes, except for the abduction of Mandy Wilson, which would have been fairly hard to deny seeing as she was found bound and gagged in the back of his van. In later discussions with psychologists, Black gave details of the sexual assault he had intended for Mandy, a crime he claimed was an isolated one, a “rush of blood”, where he would have kept her with him until his next delivery and then simply let her go after “spending some time with her” and if she had died during his predations it would have been unintentional, “a pure accident.” He seemed happy to talk about this subject, open and candid about his sexual inclinations for little girls, and during 6 hours of questioning, gave intimate details of his prior offences for which he had been convicted – the molestations and rapes in Scotland – along with an insight into the abuse he suffered as a child, his masturbatory fantasies and his relationship with Pamela Hodgson. However, when the subject of his involvement in the abduction and murders of three little girls was ever broached, he refused to answer. There was no attempt at denial or the establishment of an alibi; he simply would not speak of these things.

The police stopped trying for a confession and resorted to building up a damning body of evidence against him. Using wage books and receipts from PDS’ fuel credit cards they were able to place Black’s movements to within spitting distance of each of the 3 abduction points in each of the 3 cases, on the significant dates in question. All circumstantial evidence but when taken as a whole, and tied in with the kid porn haul from his flat, it suggested that they had, at the very least, a strong suspect. There was no forensic evidence to support the case against him, but the Crown Prosecution Service decided there was enough to serve ten summonses against the man. It took another 2 years of legal wrangling before the case finally came before a court and in May 1994 he was found guilty on all counts. Eligible for parole in 2029, by which time he would be 82 years old if he lived that long, Robert Black was jailed, no longer a threat to little girls anywhere. Beyond the three murders for which he was convicted it’s believed by police forces both in the UK and on the European mainland that Black is responsible for numerous other crimes in France, Amsterdam, and Germany, along with at least ten unsolved murder abductions that occurred during the years that he was at large. The girls who died were April Fabb, Christine Markham, Genette Tate, Suzanne Lawrence, Colette Aram, Patsy Morris, Marion Crofts, Lisa Hession

Is it just blind fate that brought Robert Black to Morley? His job brought him there, but perhaps the place itself generates some malefic pulse that registers far beyond the visible spectrum, detectable only to a certain kind of individual? On the surface it’s just another depressed former mill-town, a crust of industrial history caught in the armpit of Yorkshire. It’s a town where nothing else seems to happen, which means anything is possible and there’s an inevitablility about Robert Black’s attraction to the place that I can’t rationally dismiss. In the meantime, Robert Black is now a resident of Her Majesty’s pleasure at Wakefield Prison, just down the road from Morley, and that’s where he’ll probably die. No-one will notice and no-one will care.

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