Scotland's most shocking crimes: Depraved child killer Robert Black 'a lost cause to humanity'

Still dressed in her party clothes, tiny Caroline Hogg asked her mum if she could go out to play for a short time before bedtime.

The five-year-old lived close to Edinburgh’s Portobello beach and it was a warm July night in 1983.

Her mum, Annette, said she could go out for five minutes if she changed out of her party shoes.

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Happy the youngster skipped out – it was the last time her mum would see her alive.

Fifteen minutes later, Annette was concerned when Caroline didn’t return home so the family took to the streets to look for her.

A local boy told them he’d seen her on the promenade with a man so the family searched there. When no trace of the child was found, Lothian and Borders Police were called in.

Within a few hours, more than 2000 local people and 50 members of the Royal Fusiliers regiment had volunteered to search for Caroline.

It was the largest search in Scottish history at the time – at first they concentrated on Portobello before including the whole of Edinburgh.

By July 10, two days after her disappearance – the search was widened to include the UK and was making headline news.

Playmates of Caroline reported seeing a scruffy man watching them as they played near her Beach Lane house.

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At least nine known paedophiles were found to have been in the area but all were eliminated from the inquiry.

Numerous witnesses came forward to say they saw the little girl being followed to the fairground by a unkempt, balding man who she was then spotted talking to her on a bench.

Teenager Jennifer Booth, 14, told police she overheard Caroline reply “Yes please” to the man before they walked off holding hands. One witness told police the child seemed frightened.

Twelve days after she went missing, her body was found in a ditch close to the M1 motorway in Twycross, Leicestershire – more than 300 miles from her home.

She had been sexually assaulted but, due to decomposition, the cause of her death could not be determined. It was concluded her body had been placed in the ditch on or around July 12.

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Following her murder, detectives in Staffordshire and Leicestershire believed Caroline’s murder and the killing of 11-year-old Susan Maxwell the year before was the work of the same killer.

Susan Claire Maxwell was abducted as she walked home from playing tennis in Coldstream, in the Scottish borders, on July 30, 1982.

Susan, who lived on the English side of the border in Cornhill-on-Tweed, was last seen alive at 4.30pm crossing a bridge over the River Tweed. The alarm was raised when she didn’t return home and the next day a full search was mounted.

Like Caroline, her body was discovered 12 days later in a copse 245 miles away near Uttoxter.

She had been bound and gagged with sticking plaster and there were signs she had been sexually assaulted.

A taskforce was launched and police revealed they believed the murderer was most likely a lorry or van driver or travelling sales rep.

Both girls had been bound and likely subjected to sexual assault prior to their deaths and each had been wearing white ankle socks at the time of her abduction, which may have triggered a fetish in the perpetrator’s psyche.

It was concluded that due to geography and the circumstantial nature of the abductions, the killer was deemed to be an opportunist.

Detectives believed the killer was tied to a delivery schedule and hundreds of drivers between Scotland and the midlands were questioned.

In March 1984, Caroline’s father, John, made an appeal for witnesses following a televised reconstruction that was broadcast to the nation.

He said: “You think it can never happen to you but it has proven time and time again that it can – and it could again if this man isn’t caught in the near future.”

Hector Clark, assistant chief constable of Northumbria Police, took overall charge of the investigation.

He established incident rooms in Northumberland and Leith police stations to liaise between the four police forces involved.

On the March 26, 1986, 10-year-old Sarah Jayne Harper left her home to buy a loaf of bread from the corner shop 100 yards away from her home in Morley, Leeds, then vanished.

The shop owner confirmed that a balding man had briefly entered the shop, then left as Sarah made her purchases.

Sarah was last seen alive by two girls walking into an alley leading towards her Brunswick Place home.

Jackie Harper reported her daughter missing to West Yorkshire Police and immediately an extensive search was launched to find the child.

More than 100 police officers were assigned full-time to the search. Police established that a white Ford Transit van had been in the area where Sarah had been abducted.

Sarah’s partially dressed, gagged and bound body was found on April 19 floating in the River Trent in Nottingham.

She had died from drowning but had been subjected to a serious sexual assault prior to being thrown in the river.

It would be four years after Sarah’s death before the real breakthrough would come in all three murders.

Robert Black, a predatory paedophile with a long history of sexually abusing youngsters, was from Grangemouth in Stirling.

He was arrested in 1990 when police stopped his van and found a six-year-old girl bound and gagged in the back of his vehicle.

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The case, in Stow in the Borders, led police to his previous victims – Susan, Caroline and Sarah.

In 1994, he was found guilty of all three murders and sentenced to life.

In 2011, police were able to tie him to the 1981 abduction and murder of nine-year-old Jennifer Cardy in Northern Ireland. Her body was found near her family home in Ballinderry, outside Lisburn, County Antrim.

The detective in charge of the Cardy murder inquiry described Robert Black as “a lost cause to humanity”.

Black died from natural causes in prison in January 2016. He was 68.

His ashes were scattered at sea.

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