Serial Killers and Haunted Places

Robert Black

Fostered by foster parents in their 50's, Jack and Margaret Tulip. Black was not a popular child. To his classmates at primary school Robert - or 'Smelly Robbie Tulip' as he was known - is remembered as having been an aggressive and slightly wayward boy. Getting involved in petty crime from a young age.

As well as the petty violence, Black was also developing a peculiar sexual self-awareness. As confessed by Black years later to a prison psychologist,

"I used to push things up my anus". After his arrest in 1990 police found photographs that Black had taken of himself: one showed him with a wine-bottle up his anus, another with a telephone-handset, yet another with a table leg. Black also remembers fantasizing about excreting on his hands and then rubbing the feces in. He also always had an uneasy feeling that he would have preferred to have been a girl. But he was not homosexual in his desires.

His foster mother, Margaret Tulip died in 1958. Black was only 11 and was once again deprived of a mother.

It was decided that Black would go to a Children's Home near Falkirk, close to where he was born. It was during Black's time there that his fascination with sex, and particularly with the vagina, finally drove him across the line from childish experimentation to criminal behavior.

At the age of 12, Black made his first inept attempt at rape. He was moved several times, finally being moved to a school in London. Once in London, he tried out as a footballer, failing due to bad eyesight. He eventually became a lifeguard, he was a keen swimmer and this was great for his pedophilic fantasies. He loved swimming and had the choice of two local pools, over 20 years later a little girl called Caroline Hogg was to be abducted from Portobello and later murdered. Caroline's house was on the route between two swimming-pools.

In the summer of 1962 when Black was fifteen, his time at the children's home was up. Black got a job as a delivery boy and found a room to rent in a boys' home in Greenock, outside Glasgow. He later admitted that while he was doing his delivery rounds he molested 30 or 40 girls.

Black's first conviction came shortly afterward. The charge was for 'lewd and libidinous' behavior with a young girl. Black, who was now seventeen, had approached a seven-year-old girl in the park, asking her if she would like to go with him to see some kittens. The girl trustingly followed him as he led her to a deserted building.

When he left the girl in that derelict building he didn't know - nor, it seems, care - whether she was unconscious or dead. She was later found wandering the streets: bleeding, crying and confused.

Black left Greenock and return to Grangemouth to make a new start. Here he got a job with a builders' company and rented a room. He also met his first real girlfriend, Pamela Hodgson, and he fell in love, developed a sexual relationship and decided to get engaged, but, she broke off the engagement not long after, and told him it was over.

In 1992 after Black had been served with ten summonses, including three for the murder of three little girls, in an attempt to shift the moral responsibility he told officers: "Tell Pamela she's not responsible for all this." This, of course, implied the opposite: that the break-up of their relationship had left him so devastated that she had driven him to murder.

30th July 1982, 11-year-old Susan Maxwell

8th July 1983, five-year-old Caroline Hogg

bodies were found within 24 miles of each other - 300 miles from the abductions.

26 March 1986, ten-year-old Sarah Harper

14 July 1990 attempted abduction of Mandy Wilson.