Child killer Robert Black set to appeal

Published on Tuesday 22 November 2011 00:00

Child serial killer Robert Black is to appeal against his latest convictions for kidnapping and murdering a schoolgirl in Northern Ireland.

The 64-year-old Scot was found guilty last month of snatching Jennifer Cardy as she cycled to a friend’s house in Ballinderry, Co Antrim, in 1981.

The former delivery driver, who was in the area on a work trip from London, murdered the nine-year-old before dumping her body in a dam close to a roadside lay-by.

He then caught the overnight ferry back to England.

Following a six-week trial, the jury at Armagh Crown Court delivered unanimous guilty verdicts on the counts of kidnap and murder.

It is understood the killer’s legal team will submit appeal papers to the court authorities in Belfast within two weeks.

Already serving multiple life sentences in Wakefield prison in West Yorkshire, Black will be sentenced for Jennifer’s kidnap and murder on 8 December.

Jennifer’s murder was the fourth for which Black has been convicted. In 1994, he was found guilty of three child murders in the 1980s – Susan Maxwell, 11, from the Borders, Caroline Hogg, five, from Edinburgh, and Sarah Harper, ten, from Leeds – and a failed abduction bid in Nottingham in 1988.

In 1990 Black was caught with a six-year-old girl hooded, bound, gagged and stuffed in a sleeping bag in the back of his van in the Stow in the Borders. He had sexually assaulted her moments earlier.

Detectives in England are reviewing the evidence against Black in connection with another schoolgirl disappearance, that of Genette Tate, 13, who was last seen in a lane in Devon in 1978.

No trace of the newspaper delivery girl has ever been found. All that remained at the scene were her bike and scattered papers.