Robert Black was a delivery driver who carried posters for a London firm to towns across Britain and to Northern Ireland. He was convicted of kidnapping and murdering four girls between 1981 and 1986: Jennifer Cardy, 9, in Northern Ireland; Susan Maxwell, 11, on the Scottish border; Caroline Hogg, 5, in Edinburgh; and Sarah Harper, 10, in Leeds. Each was taken from a public place near her home and her body was left many miles away. The cases against him were circumstantial. They rested on his employer's records and his own fuel receipts, which placed him on the roads near each girl at the time she vanished, and on the pattern of his other crimes.
He was caught by a neighbor. On July 14, 1990, in the village of Stow in the Scottish Borders, a retired sub-postmaster named David Herkes saw a girl being bundled into a blue Transit van while he was mowing his lawn, and he alerted police. They stopped the van and found a six-year-old girl inside. Black pleaded guilty to abducting and sexually assaulting her. Four years later an English court convicted him of three of the murders. A fourth conviction followed in Northern Ireland in 2011. He died in prison in January 2016, weeks before, police said, he would probably have been charged with the 1978 disappearance of a 13-year-old Devon girl, Genette Tate.
Black was born in 1947 near Falkirk, in central Scotland, to a single mother who worked in a factory, according to a Press Association profile published on the day of his death. Within weeks she had placed him for fostering. A couple in their fifties took him in at Kinlochleven, in the West Highlands. Within 11 years both foster parents had died, and he was moved to a children's home in Falkirk.
At 12, the Press Association reported, he was accused of a sexual attack on a young girl in Falkirk. No charges followed, but he was moved to an all-boys' home in Musselburgh, east of Edinburgh. He later said that a male member of staff there had sexually abused him. While at Musselburgh he walked to Portobello to swim and to work as a lifeguard at the resort's pools; Caroline Hogg disappeared close to those pools some 20 years later. At about 15 he moved to Greenock, near Glasgow.
In 1963, at Greenock Juvenile Court, Black was convicted of assault and lewd and libidinous practices against a seven-year-old girl. The sentencing judge in his 2011 case recorded that he was admonished after sentence was deferred. Press Association reports describe him as having lured the girl from a swing park with a promise of kittens.
He returned to Falkirk and, around 1966, was working as a builder in Kinlochleven, where the couple he lodged with reported him for abusing their young daughter. In 1967, at Oban Sheriff Court, he was convicted of three counts of indecent assault on a female under 14 and was sent to borstal training. The Press Association placed him at Polmont borstal, near Falkirk, for a year. The Court of Appeal in Northern Ireland later summarized his record as two convictions for "interference with a girl", the first at 16 and the second at 19, the second while he was babysitting.
That was the last conviction on his record until 1990. It was also, for police purposes, nearly invisible. Andrew Watt, the former chief superintendent who led the national investigation after 1990, said in 2011 that the records of his teenage sexual offense in the old Argyll and Bute police area had been lost when police and courts were reorganized in the 1960s and 1970s. When officers checked everyone in Scotland convicted of sexual or similar offenses, Black appeared to have no record at all. "It was a different era," Watt said.
After borstal, Black moved to London. The Press Association reported that he again worked as a swimming pool attendant, that he became involved in the trade in child sexual abuse images, and that in the 1970s he made trips to Copenhagen and Amsterdam to buy such material.
In 1976 he took a job as a van driver with a London delivery firm, Poster Despatch and Storage Ltd, known as PDS. For more than a decade he delivered posters across Britain. The firm also ran deliveries to Northern Ireland, using a Datsun van that went over on the Liverpool to Belfast ferry, according to the Court of Appeal. Drivers who made the Ireland run were paid a bonus of 50 pounds. Black later accepted, in interviews with police, that he had been a regular driver on that run.
The job meant long journeys alone on fixed schedules, with fuel paid for on a company card. The firm kept his delivery schedules and the fuel receipts he signed, and those papers would one day place him, by date and time, near each girl.
Jennifer Cardy was nine and lived in Lower Ballinderry, County Antrim, near Lisburn. Her family has been described as deeply religious; she had a sister and two brothers. Her mother later said that Jennifer "had a lovely thoughtfulness beyond her nine years." Two weeks before she disappeared she had been given a red bicycle for her birthday.
On August 12, 1981, she set off on the bicycle to a friend's house about a mile and a half away. She never arrived. Her parents reported her missing to police at 9:10 p.m. Her bicycle was found behind a hedge on the road she would have taken. After extensive searches, her body was found six days later by two anglers in McKee's Dam, a pond behind a lay-by on the main A1 dual carriageway between Dublin and Belfast near Hillsborough, County Down. Reports put the dam about 10 to 15 miles from where she was taken. Dolores Kelly, later an SDLP member of the Northern Ireland Assembly, recalled taking part in the search.
A post-mortem examination found that she had drowned. At Black's trial 30 years later, forensic pathologists disagreed about the cause of death. The sentencing judge found that she had died by drowning within hours of being taken.
No one was charged at the time. The investigation was reopened only in 2002.
Susan Maxwell was 11. She lived on the family farm at Cramond Hill, near Cornhill-on-Tweed, on the English side of the border with Scotland. Her father was a farmer and journalist, and her mother later worked in local newspapers.
On July 30, 1982, Susan played tennis in Coldstream and set off to walk home over Coldstream Bridge. She never reached the farm. Her mother called police at once. About two weeks later her body was found by a lay-by near Uttoxeter, in Staffordshire, on the A518, about 264 miles from home.
Twenty years after her death her father wrote an article that began, "Life continues, but the pain of loss never fades." It was 12 years before anyone was convicted of her murder.
Caroline Hogg was five and lived in Portobello, the seaside district of Edinburgh. On the sunny evening of July 8, 1983, still wearing a gingham dress from an afternoon party, she begged her mother for a few more minutes outside so she could visit a swing park near their home. Witnesses later said they saw her riding a double-decker bus on a roundabout at the Fun City fairground on Portobello Promenade. After the ride she walked away hand in hand with a scruffy-looking man who had paid 15 pence to the cashier. She was not seen alive again.
Thousands of volunteers joined the search, coordinated from Portobello Town Hall. Tom Wood, later deputy chief constable of Lothian and Borders Police, said officers quickly saw "abundant similarities" with Susan Maxwell's abduction a year before. Ten days after Caroline disappeared, her body was found in a ditch in Leicestershire, about 300 miles from home.
Wood, who was the statement reader in the incident room at Leith police station, said in 2013 that the abduction "knocked the area on its head" and that the promenade became a place people avoided. Robert Thomson, a former Edinburgh Evening News reporter, said everyone in the city from that time still remembered the case.
The Maxwell and Hogg cases were joined. Hector Clark, then assistant chief constable of Northumbria Police, led the joint murder inquiry; in 1984 he became deputy chief constable of Lothian and Borders Police. Incident rooms were set up in Northumberland and at Leith, and the inquiry used early fax machines to send photographs between them. Caroline's case was among the first featured on the BBC's Crimewatch program. Over the years the Black inquiry gathered 189,000 witness statements, The Scotsman reported. Clark was later credited with pioneering the use of new computer systems to manage serious crime cases.
Sarah Harper was ten and lived on Brunswick Place in Morley, Leeds. She sang in a choir. On the evening of Wednesday, March 26, 1986, during the Easter school holidays, her mother sent her to a nearby corner shop. The shopkeeper later recalled that she bought a loaf of bread and two packets of crisps. She was last seen walking down a short alleyway on her way home.
About three and a half weeks later, a man walking his dog saw her body in the River Trent at Wilford, near Nottingham. A post-mortem examination found that she had drowned.
West Yorkshire Police classed the case as a Category A murder and mobilized the whole force. Bob Bridgestock, then a detective sergeant in Calderdale, was brought in because he knew the Morley area. Black, it later emerged, had made a delivery in Morley that evening. The Yorkshire Evening Post reported that a return trip to London by way of the Trent would have used the same M1 exit he took when visiting a friend in Donisthorpe, Leicestershire.
In April 1988, in Nottingham, a man tried to abduct a 15-year-old girl. She resisted, and the attempt failed. Six years later this attempt was one of the counts on which Black was convicted.
On Saturday, July 14, 1990, Black drove his van into Stow, a village in the Scottish Borders. About an hour earlier, according to the Edinburgh Evening News, he had approached another girl in the village but had been scared off by her dog.
David Herkes, who had spent most of his life in Gorebridge, Midlothian, as a private hire driver and later an undertaker before retiring to Stow, was mowing his lawn when he saw the abduction. He alerted police. A member of the public "saw a young girl being bundled into the back of a blue Transit van," the Court of Appeal in Northern Ireland later recorded, and police stopped the van shortly afterward. Officers found the six-year-old girl in the back. Black was the driver.
After his arrest, the Edinburgh Evening News reported, he said, "What a day it's been," and told officers that he had always liked young girls. He later insisted that Stow had been his only slip and the only time he had taken a girl in his van, the Press Association reported.
The girl survived.
Black pleaded guilty before Selkirk Sheriff Court to abduction and sexual assault, according to the Court of Appeal in Northern Ireland. The sentencing remarks in his 2011 case list the 1990 conviction at Selkirk Sheriff Court as assault and abduction for a sexual offense on a female. The sentence imposed in 1990 was not reported.
David Herkes died in 2012, aged 75. Residents of Gorebridge campaigned to honor him, and in October 2017 a new street on the site of the former Greenhall school there was named David Herkes Way. "If it wasn't for David how many other kids would there have been?" said Gary Forbes, the bus driver who started the campaign.
Tom Wood said he linked the Stow arrest to the Hogg case at once. "I just thought, 'that's got to be him,'" he said. "It rang bells right away." Andrew Watt led the national investigation launched after the arrest. Only after 1990 did police learn of Black's early conviction; a witness told an inquiry officer about his childhood in care homes.
There was no confession. Under Hector Clark, officers from five forces built a circumstantial case. They went through about half a million fuel receipts, expense records and delivery schedules from Black's employer, The Scotsman reported, and these placed him near the places where the girls disappeared and where their bodies were found. Gary Copson, a former Metropolitan Police commander, later described the fuel receipts as Black's "souvenir," the record that placed him at the scenes. Detectives spent four years matching the work records to the three murders.
"What Hector Clark and his team did, painstakingly, was build a circumstantial case which proved compelling in court," Wood said in 2021.
The Crown Office in Scotland declined to prosecute for lack of evidence, The Scotsman reported, and the case was tried in England, at Newcastle upon Tyne Crown Court, in the Old Moot Court Room. The judge was Mr Justice Sir William Macpherson. Toby Hedworth, who 17 years later would lead the prosecution in Northern Ireland, was junior counsel for the prosecution.
In May 1994 Black was convicted of the kidnapping and murder of Susan Maxwell, Caroline Hogg and Sarah Harper, and of the 1988 offense in Nottingham, which the 2011 sentencing remarks call false imprisonment and press reports call a failed or attempted abduction. He received life sentences, reported by the Yorkshire Post as ten in all, with a minimum term of 35 years, which the Northern Ireland judge later said would run to 2029.
Black was held at Wakefield prison in England. In 1994, investigators said he might be responsible for 15 other unsolved child murders in Europe between 1969 and 1987, the Londonderry Sentinel later reported. The Scotsman reported that his name had been linked to four murders in France and five in the Netherlands. None of these cases was charged.
Several forces questioned him over the years. Devon and Cornwall Police, investigating the 1978 disappearance of Genette Tate, first treated him as a suspect in 1994 and interviewed him in 1996. Northern Ireland's police, then the Royal Ulster Constabulary, also questioned him in 1996, and a Scottish detective had interviewed him in 1990. Police Professional reported that he was arrested in prison in 2005 over Genette Tate's disappearance, but there was not enough evidence to prosecute. In 2005 detectives also questioned him inside Wakefield prison, the Yorkshire Post reported.
In June 2002 Detective Superintendent Raymond Murray of the Police Service of Northern Ireland reopened the investigation into Jennifer Cardy's murder. He led it for nine years. There was no DNA or fingerprint evidence. The case instead depended, Murray said, on "convincing a jury that this was how it was."
The key interviews took place in May 2005 at the serious crime suite in Antrim police station, which was cleared for three days. Black was brought from Wakefield prison. Police had spent a year planning the operation, and the first interview began on May 16, 2005, which was Jennifer's birthday. The interviews filled 21 tapes.
They were led by Pamela Simpson, an officer with 12 years' experience working with victims of sexual abuse, with Detective Sergeant Patrick McAnespie beside her saying little. Her approach was to get Black talking about his own sexual interest in young girls. "Nobody knew before we went in to the interviews whether he was even going to talk at all," she said later. He admitted fantasies about girls aged eight to twelve and the possession of child sexual abuse images, the Court of Appeal recorded.
Simpson gave him a 1981 road atlas, and he traced his old routes with a finger. Detectives also worked from ferry timetables and from the time shown on Jennifer's watch, which had stopped. Black described a quiet country road that swept downhill and turned left, with high hedges and a single house set back from it. Police said this closely matched the place on the Crumlin Road in Ballinderry where Jennifer was taken. In police interviews, asked about the Coventry fuel receipt from the day after she vanished, he said, "As I said, that seems the most likely explanation." He accepted that he would have been in Northern Ireland on August 12, 1981.
Court papers charging Black with Jennifer's murder were served on him in an English prison in December 2009, RTE reported. Her family said they did not wish to comment.
On January 22, 2010, Black, then 62, appeared at Lisburn Magistrates' Court. Two charges were read: taking and carrying away Jennifer against her will, and murdering her. He spoke only to confirm that he understood them. His solicitor, Gabriel Ingram, said: "He is an innocent man and he will be contesting the charges." The resident magistrate, Rosemary Watters, sent the case to Craigavon Crown Court for arraignment.
The trial opened at Armagh Crown Court on September 21, 2011, before Mr Justice Ronald Weatherup. Toby Hedworth QC and Ms McColgan QC prosecuted; David Spens QC and Mr Taggart appeared for Black. He denied both charges.
The prosecution case had two parts. The first was opportunity. A fuel receipt dated August 13, 1981, showed that Black's fuel card had been used to fill the Datsun, the van used for the Northern Ireland run, at Coventry; another receipt that day showed the card used near Manchester for a Fiat van. The PDS wages book showed an Ireland-run bonus of 50 pounds paid to him in the week ending August 14, 1981; other drivers said such a sum could have been made up from other runs. A witness named Mould, interviewed on September 27, 2011, after the trial had begun, described a dairy council milk promotion advertised on buses from September 1981 and the potential penalties for failing to deliver. The judge admitted his evidence over the defense's objection. The prosecution said the work brought Black to the Lisburn area on August 12.
The second part was Black's past. The jury was told of his earlier crimes as evidence that he was the man who had taken Jennifer. The prosecution set out thirteen similarities between her case and his others. Each girl had been taken from a public place; each wore white socks; in each case a vehicle was used to carry her away. The Crown argued that the kidnapping and murder bore the hallmarks and signature of Black's other crimes. There were also differences, which the Court of Appeal later set out: Jennifer was taken eight miles from the nearest point of the Newry to Belfast road, she was wearing trousers, and there were other differences in the circumstances.
The jury of nine women and three men began deliberating on Wednesday, October 26. The judge told them, "I do not want you to feel under any pressure to reach a conclusion to this trial," and noted that they could find Black guilty of manslaughter rather than murder. They were sent home that evening after almost three hours.
On Thursday, October 27, 2011, after four hours and 15 minutes of deliberation over two days, the jury found Black guilty of kidnapping and murdering Jennifer Cardy. He showed no emotion. Her mother sobbed in the public gallery and was comforted by her husband. "You have been convicted by a jury of murder," the judge told Black. "There is only one sentence that will be imposed by law." He passed a life sentence and told the guards, "Take him down please." One juror was seen to become emotional.
Outside court Jennifer's father spoke for the family. "Robert Black stole the life of our daughter, Jennifer, but Robert Black didn't steal the lives of me and my family," he said. The family had lived without bitterness or vengeance, he said, and they missed Jennifer every day. "We pity Robert Black and the awful life he has led." He said they had prayed that Black would come to know Jesus as his savior. He also said he believed that killers like Black should be put to death, "not in a vengeful way" but "in a just and righteous way." The trial, he said, had been "absolutely horrendous": "We heard things that, in all honesty, were not even in our imagination."
Detective Superintendent Murray called Black "a lost cause to humanity." Susan Maxwell's brother said he was glad the jury had reached the correct verdict and that the 30-year mystery of who murdered Jennifer was over.
Weatherup J passed sentence on December 8, 2011, in remarks published as The Queen v Robert Black [2011] NICC 40. He set a minimum term of 25 years on the life sentence for murder, to run from October 27, 2011, and imposed a discretionary life sentence for kidnapping; a fixed term for the kidnapping alone would have been eight years.
He called the abduction "an act of sexual predation" and found that within hours Jennifer had died by drowning. He found her particularly vulnerable and Black's culpability exceptionally high. He treated the concealment of her body in the dam and Black's readiness to take any opportunity that presented itself as aggravating factors, and he found no mitigation of any kind: no lack of premeditation, no remorse, and nothing in Black's age. Black continued to deny the murder. David Spens told the court, "This is one of those rare cases in which there is no mitigation and so I propose to say nothing in that regard." Hedworth had asked for a whole life term; the judge declined to impose one.
"You subjected a vulnerable child to unpardonable terror and took away her life," Weatherup J said. "It was a wicked deed." He had read victim impact statements from Jennifer's father and from her brother, who was six when she died. "Taking a life of a family member takes away parts of the lives of many others," he said. "By the manner of that loss you also wounded forever a family that treasured that child." He noted that Black, then 64, would be 82 when his existing minimum term expired; press reports said he would be at least 89 before he could be considered for release in the Cardy case. He also said Black would be placed on the children's barred list.
Black appealed. His grounds were that evidence of his bad character could not by itself prove that he was the killer, so the case should have been withdrawn from the jury; that evidence about his sexual habits was irrelevant and prejudicial; that Mould's late evidence should have been excluded; that the evidence did not prove he was in Northern Ireland that day; and that the judge had not properly explained the idea of a "signature" or the significance of the differences between the cases.
On June 27, 2013, the Court of Appeal in Northern Ireland, with Lord Chief Justice Sir Declan Morgan sitting with Higgins LJ and Girvan LJ, dismissed the appeal in R v Robert Black [2013] NICA 35. The court held that bad character evidence can, in a proper case, establish identity. Jennifer was the only pre-pubescent girl abducted from a public place, carried away in a vehicle and killed in Northern Ireland, and the similarities with Black's other crimes were highly probative. "We do not consider that the dissimilarities undermined materially the strength of the evidence of similarity," the court said. It described the evidence that he was in Northern Ireland on the day as "a formidable case." "We do not consider that the conviction is unsafe," Sir Declan said. "The appeal is dismissed." Black watched by video link from Maghaberry Prison. Jennifer's parents were in court.
Genette Tate was 13 and delivered newspapers. In August 1978 she vanished from a rural lane in Aylesbeare, in east Devon. Only her bicycle and scattered newspapers were left at the scene. Her body has never been found.
The 2013 appeal ruling changed the position. Detective Superintendent Paul Burgan of Devon and Cornwall Police said "the appeal court ruling was a game changer for us," because it showed that Black's past could be used as evidence. A reinvestigation began in 2014, with a team of ten officers, and police said they had found new potential witnesses. "It was surprising after 37 years to get new witnesses," Burgan said.
In 2011 Genette's father, then 69 and dying of cancer, had said he believed Black was responsible and urged him to say where she was. "If he told us where she was... it would be a tremendous weight lifted off my shoulders," he said.
When Black died in January 2016, Burgan said the Crown Prosecution Service had indicated that "in all probability, we would have charged Robert Black with Genette's abduction and murder," and that a decision had been expected in weeks rather than months. He called Black's death "a complete shock" and described him as "an aggressive, predatory paedophile." On April 5, 2016, Devon and Cornwall Police said "the major part of a file concerning this matter has now been sent to the CPS for a charging decision" and that the family had been kept informed. No charging decision was reported. Black was never charged with Genette Tate's disappearance and was never tried for it.
By 2013 Black was held at Maghaberry, the high-security prison near Lisburn. On Tuesday, January 12, 2016, he was found in his cell there; he had collapsed at 3:45 p.m. and was pronounced dead at 4 p.m., the Londonderry Sentinel reported. He was 68. The Northern Ireland Prison Service said the death was not being treated as suspicious and that it had informed the police, the coroner and the Prisoner Ombudsman. The police told Jennifer Cardy's family.
No relative claimed the body. Local council members worried that he might be buried a few miles from Jennifer's grave, and the local member of the Assembly, Paul Givan, said that "given the sensitivities it would be wholly inappropriate for him to be buried here." The body was cremated after a short service conducted by a prison chaplain, which no family attended. On February 19, 2016, the Prison Service said his ashes had been scattered at sea, "without ceremony, beyond these shores," in accordance with the legal requirements for disposal.
The Coroners Service for Northern Ireland spent nine months trying to trace Black's next of kin, and Coroner Patrick McGurgan said that "all efforts need to be made" to find them so they could take part. None was found. The inquest was held before a jury at Armagh courthouse from December 3, 2018, to examine, among other things, whether there had been problems with his medical care in prison.
A general practitioner, Dr Joseph Palmer, told the inquest that Black had smoked about 25 grams of hand-rolled tobacco a day for 51 years and had kept smoking despite angina, and that he had been "at risk of having a cardiovascular event." He had high cholesterol and narrowed arteries, had suffered a stroke about 20 years before his death, and had been diagnosed with diabetes in 2015. Neither Black's family nor the families of his victims attended.
On December 7, 2018, the jury found that he had died of cardiac arrest, with degeneration of the walls of the coronary artery as a secondary cause, and that his age, smoking, diet, high blood pressure, his earlier stroke and diabetes were underlying factors. It found no defects in his care by the health authorities, or in the systems of the Northern Ireland Prison Service, that had contributed to his death.
The four families have spoken in different ways. Jennifer's parents attended the trial, the sentencing and the appeal, and spoke of their faith and of living without bitterness. Susan's mother said after Black's death that he had been "fortunate enough to die of natural causes which is more than he deserved," and that he would be mourned by no one; she said she was relieved he would never be released. Retired Detective Chief Superintendent Roger Orr, who had been central to bringing him to justice, said: "I don't think for a moment that he only killed four times." Bob Bridgestock said he would have liked a deathbed confession for the families' sake, and added, "There is no sadness in my heart for him."
Hector Clark died in April 2021, aged 87. Susan's father died in October 2022.
Proven by final conviction: the abduction and sexual assault at Stow (plea, 1990); the kidnapping and murder of Susan Maxwell, Caroline Hogg and Sarah Harper and the 1988 Nottingham offense (1994); the kidnapping and murder of Jennifer Cardy (2011, upheld 2013). Black never admitted any of the four killings.
Suspected but never charged: the disappearance of Genette Tate in 1978, which Devon and Cornwall Police said would in all probability have led to charges; and a range of other child killings and disappearances in Britain and Europe that investigators linked to him over the years. Retired detectives and police have offered different estimates of how many he killed. None of these cases was tested in court.
Accounts differ on several details: the date of Susan Maxwell's disappearance (July 30, 1982, in most reports; June 1982 in one 2021 article); the distance from Coldstream to where she was found (264 miles or about 250); the distance from Ballinderry to McKee's Dam (about 10 miles or about 15); the year of the Cardy conviction (2011, as the court records show; several 2016 reports say 2012); the number of life sentences he was serving at his death (12 in most reports, 13 in one); whether the Nottingham count was attempted abduction or false imprisonment; and the ages at his early convictions (16 and 19 in the Court of Appeal judgment; 1963 and 1967 in the sentencing remarks). Some reports describe further convictions in the 1994 and 2011 cases; the convictions recorded by the courts are for kidnapping and murder (and the 1988 offense).
1947: Robert Black is born near Falkirk, Scotland; placed with foster parents in Kinlochleven within weeks.
Childhood: after both foster parents die, he is moved to a children's home in Falkirk, then to a boys' home in Musselburgh.
1963: convicted at Greenock Juvenile Court of assault and lewd and libidinous practices against a seven-year-old girl; admonished.
1967: convicted at Oban Sheriff Court of three counts of indecent assault on a girl under 14; sent to borstal training.
1976: begins work as a van driver for Poster Despatch and Storage Ltd, London.
August 1978: Genette Tate, 13, vanishes at Aylesbeare, Devon.
August 12, 1981: Jennifer Cardy, 9, vanishes while cycling in Ballinderry, County Antrim; her body is found six days later in McKee's Dam near Hillsborough.
July 30, 1982: Susan Maxwell, 11, vanishes after tennis in Coldstream; her body is found about two weeks later near Uttoxeter, Staffordshire.
July 8, 1983: Caroline Hogg, 5, vanishes from Portobello Promenade, Edinburgh; her body is found in Leicestershire ten days later.
March 26, 1986: Sarah Harper, 10, vanishes on an errand to a shop in Morley, Leeds; her body is found in the River Trent at Wilford about three and a half weeks later.
April 1988: a 15-year-old girl fights off an attempt to take her into a van in Nottingham.
July 14, 1990: arrested in Stow, Scottish Borders, with an abducted six-year-old girl in his van.
1990: pleads guilty at Selkirk Sheriff Court to abduction and sexual assault.
May 1994: convicted at Newcastle upon Tyne Crown Court of the kidnapping and murder of Susan Maxwell, Caroline Hogg and Sarah Harper and of the 1988 Nottingham offense; life with a minimum of 35 years.
1996: questioned by Devon and Cornwall Police about Genette Tate, and by the RUC.
June 2002: PSNI reopens the Cardy investigation.
May 2005: interviewed at Antrim police station, beginning on May 16, Jennifer's birthday.
December 2009: charge papers in the Cardy case served on him in an English prison.
January 22, 2010: first appearance at Lisburn Magistrates' Court.
September 21, 2011: Armagh Crown Court trial opens.
October 27, 2011: convicted of kidnapping and murdering Jennifer Cardy.
December 8, 2011: minimum term of 25 years set.
June 27, 2013: Court of Appeal in Northern Ireland dismisses his appeal.
2014: Devon and Cornwall Police reopen the Genette Tate investigation.
January 12, 2016: dies at HMP Maghaberry, aged 68.
February 2016: his ashes are scattered at sea.
April 5, 2016: police say the main part of the Genette Tate file has gone to the CPS.
October 2017: David Herkes Way is named in Gorebridge.
December 3 to 7, 2018: inquest at Armagh; the jury finds death by cardiac arrest with no failings in his care.