The child murderer who looked upon his crimes as sickness

They provided a chilling insight into the mind of a child murderer.

Conducted at Peterhead prison in Aberdeenshire, Black and Wyre discussed Black’s murders in an attempt to shed light on his behaviour.

Discussions of Black’s early life centred on the abuse he suffered at a Falkirk children’s home.

“The only thing I’m aware of that was painful was the abuse at the home when I was 14 or 15,” he said.

“The rest of the time I’ve thought I had a happy childhood, put it that way.”

In 1963, aged 16, Black carried out his first sexual assault of a child.

“I very rarely think of that first incident, but when I do, it’s not with erotic feelings or anything like that,” he said in the interviews. “It’s always revulsion.”

In another exchange, Wyre pressured Black to reveal the truth about his behaviour and asked him whether he had ever considered the suffering he had caused.

“You’ve caused such misery and heartache and there isn’t much that you can do about that now except to talk and to show what it is that’s going on in you so that we might learn and make some sense of your life,” Wyre said.

After a long silence, Wyre pressed again: “How are you going to carry on evading your responsibility and stopping allowing yourself to discover more about yourself?

“How long are you going to go on pretending?”

Black finally replied in a soft, Scottish accent: “I’ve often felt in the past, going back years, that I’m disgusted with myself that I’ve got this thing about girls … I’ve often thought why do I do it? Why am I like that?”

“I find it difficult because I don’t know myself. I don’t know the reasons. I can’t describe feelings”.

At one stage, Wyre asks Black if he could imagine what it was like for a little girl to be abducted and dragged into a van.

Wyre: “Can you imagine what it’s like for these girls? Have you ever tried to put yourself in their shoes … what it must be like to have this big man taking hold of a little child off the street, dragging them into a van?

Black said: “I don’t think so. I don’t think … maybe I’ve blotted it out. I can’t recall ever putting myself in the reverse situation.”

Black told Wyre he was different from other people.

“I can’t separate thinking and feeling like you,” he told Wyre, adding: “I don’t look at it as a crime, but more as a sickness.”

Black never knew his mother. He was handed over to foster parents a few weeks after his birth in Falkirk.

When Wyre asked Black if he knew that his mother was dead, he simply replied: “No. Disappointing – I never met her.”

Black seemed to have no desire for public notoriety.

When asked by Wyre: “What do you want the world to know about you?” Black replied.

“I’d prefer it if they know nothing”.

Black, a van driver, talked for more than 30 hours with Wyre. He seemed desperate to trace the roots of his obsession.

At one stage, he asked Wyre: “Am I mad or am I evil?”

One of the most shocking aspects of The Black Tapes was the surprise with which Black countered questions about his victims.

Wyre, frustrated with Black’s long silences in one interview, asked: “You never mean to hurt them, do you?”

Black replied, quite seriously “No, I was just thinking that like at the time with the little girl at the Borders I wasn’t thinking about her at all, like you know, what she must be feeling.”

After discussing an attempted abduction in Nottingham, Black and Wyre talked about guilt.

Wyre: “Do you feel bad?

Black replied: “Yes, for attempting what I do”

Wyre: “How long after that feeling did you stay in control?”

Black: “I’d say that it wouldn’t have mattered if I’d seen a nice girl of ten or nine or something like that. If she had been in a short skirt, with socks up to here or something like that, I’d probably have thought, ‘Cor, good lassie, that …’ ”

The interviews were full of long pauses, with short, staccato-like responses from Black.

When asked how he thought the world would see him, Black answered: “I wouldn’t be looked at as a man … I’d be looked at as a monster.”