Only one man ever got inside the evil mind of serial child-killer Robert Black .
And today the terrifying secrets he unearthed, revealed her in the Sunday People , will send a chill down the spine of every parent in the country in the wake of the monster’s death in jail.
Because Black revealed his dark side to sexual crimes expert Ray Wyre in a series of interviews – explaining in his own words how he carried out attacks and what drove him to do it.
Black, 68, died on Tuesday in Maghaberry prison in Northern Ireland, serving 12 life terms for the abductions and murders of four young girls in the early 1980s.
His victims were Jennifer Cardy, nine, of County Antrim, Sarah Harper, 10, of Leeds, 11-year-old Susan Maxwell, of Northumberland, and Caroline Hogg, five, from Edinburgh.
Police were days from charging him with the 1978 killing of Devon paper girl Genette Tate , 13.
In one of the 1990s interviews Wyre asked the killer how his victim’s parents could have protected their children from him.
Black replied: “Never take their eyes off their kids, I suppose.”
The killer told Wyre he was battling to understand his lifetime obsession with attacking young girls and asked: “Am I mad or am I evil? I’ve often felt like I’m disgusted I’ve got this thing about girls. I’ve often thought, why am I like that?”
Asked by Wyre to talk honestly, Black replied: “I find it difficult because I don’t know myself. I don’t look at it so much as a crime but more as a sickness. There’s things about me I wouldn’t want anyone to know about.”
When questioned about his feelings for victims, Black said: “Maybe I’ve blotted it out.”
Talking about his first serious offence at 16 against a girl of seven in Greenock, he said: “I was in the park. I talked to her, gave her a push on the swings.
“I asked if she wanted to go and see some kittens. The funny thing was we passed a policeman who knew me.
“I took her down to this air-raid shelter. As she started to go in, she realised it was dark inside and she started to cry. She wanted to come out.
“I think I put my hand over her mouth to stop her crying out. I held her down on the ground with my hand round her throat and she must have gone unconscious. I left her there and the next day I was arrested.
“From what I gathered she was found wandering, crying and bleeding. I very rarely think of that first incident, but when I do it’s not with erotic feelings.”
But as Wyre got under Black’s skin, the killer went into denial.
As he talked about the six-year-old girl he was caught abducting in his van in Stow in the Scottish Borders in 1990 he said he had “offered to write to the parents of the little girl and apologise”.
He told Wyre: “I wanted to kill her because I didn’t want her to be hurt.”
Wyre asked: “What about the others?” And Black snapped back: “I can’t do anything about the others.
“It’s just going to be ‘not guilty’ across the board.”
He refused to admit he had killed Susan Maxwell, Caroline Hogg and Sarah Harper.
But Black did confess to Wyre about his failed abduction of Teresa Thornhill, 15, in Nottingham in 1988 – which he had denied in court.
“I called myself all kinds of idiots,” said Black.
Asked if almost being caught then had helped him control his urges for a while, he said: “I’d say it wouldn’t have mattered if the next day I’d seen a little girl of 10 or nine.
"If she had been in a short skirt, I’d have probably thought ‘Cor, good lassie that.’”
Wyre, who died in 2008, also got him to talk about Genette Tate, and Black let his guard down, admitting the case got him aroused.
Black added: “I think that was how I started with the scenario with paper girls. Early morning, getting myself into a position where it would be possible to take somebody.”
But the killer continued to deny killing Susan, Caroline and Sarah.
Wyre told him bluntly: “You’re a child sex abuser, you’re a child abductor, and you were there every time. What’s your defence?”
Black said: “It wasn’t me.”
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