June 2012

Northumberland girl’s killer to confess horror crimes on TV

THE parents of murdered schoolgirl Susan Maxwell have spoken of their “mixed feelings” about a television programme in which interviews with killer Robert Black (who abducted and murdered at least 4 kids) will be broadcast for the first time.

The sexual predator, who abducted the youngster near her Northumberland home before murdering her and dumping her body, is the subject of a Channel 5 documentary, which will be shown tomorrow night at 8-9 pm (26/06/2012)

See also full profile on black – Child killer

In the series Killers Behind Bars, criminologist Professor David Wilson attempts to uncover the true scale of the crimes committed by some of the country’s most notorious serial killers.

In tomorrow’s episode he will examine the theory that Black may be guilty of more murders than the four he has been convicted of, and attempt to link him to two of the UK’s longest-running unsolved cases.

But Susan’s parents, Liz and Fordyce, who live in Berwick, have been warned that the programme will feature a series of interviews with Black, recorded in prison, during which he confesses to some of his crimes in horrifying detail.

Yesterday Mrs Maxwell said: “We have not decided whether we are going to watch it yet. We have very mixed feelings. It is very upsetting.”

Susan was abducted on July 30, 1982, after she left her home in Cornhill-on-Tweed, north Northumberland, to play a game of tennis in Coldstream.

Black, now 65, raped and strangled her, before dumping her body by the side of a road near Uttoxeter in Staffordshire, some 250 miles away.

In 1994 the paedophile, from Stamford Hill in London, was given 10 life sentences at Newcastle Crown Court for the murder of Susan, Sarah Harper, 10, and Caroline Hogg, five.

His killing spree only ended in 1990, when he was caught red-handed by police with a barely-alive six-year-old girl hooded, bound, gagged and stuffed in a sleeping bag in the back of his van in the Scottish village of Stow.

But the family of one of his victims, Jennifer Cardy from Northern Ireland, faced a 30-year wait for justice as it was not until October last year that Black was finally jailed for life over her murder.

The nine-year-old was snatched as she cycled to a friend’s house in the quiet County Antrim village of Ballinderry on August 12, 1981. Her body was found six days later in a dam behind a roadside lay-by 15 miles away at Hillsborough, County Down.

Killers Behind Bars, which airs at 8pm tomorrow, will feature interviews with Scotland-born Black, recorded at Aberdeen’s Peterhead Prison.