Robert Black’s bleak life and death in prison, after Netflix’s Manhunt: The Child Snatcher

Netflix’s Manhunt: The Child Snatcher has shot up the UK’s most-watched list, revisiting one of Britain’s most disturbing child murder investigations. The two-part documentary follows the decades-long hunt to put serial killer Robert Black in prison, a predator who travelled the UK in a delivery van, using his job as cover to abduct young girls.

Featuring interviews with detectives and victims’ families, the documentary retraces how multiple police forces eventually linked a string of disappearances across the UK and Ireland to a single offender who hid in plain sight.

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In 1994, he was convicted of the kidnap, rape and murder of three victims: Susan Maxwell, 10, Caroline Hogg, 5, and Sarah Harper, 10. He was also convicted of the attempted kidnapping of another girl and had previously been jailed for abducting and sexually assaulting a fifth child.

Black was sentenced to life imprisonment with a minimum term of 35 years.

It was only after he was caught in 1990 during the attempted abduction of a six-year-old girl in Scotland that detectives began connecting him to earlier child murders across different regions.

Life behind bars and prison attack

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Black spent the rest of his life in high-security prisons, including HMP Wakefield and later HMP Maghaberry.

In July 1995, he was attacked in his Wakefield cell by two inmates who threw boiling water mixed with sugar over him, a common prison assault known as “napalm”, before beating and stabbing him with an improvised weapon. He suffered burns and superficial wounds; both attackers received additional prison sentences.

Why he never confessed

Despite overwhelming evidence and multiple convictions, Black never admitted responsibility for any murder.

Psychologist Ray Wyre, who interviewed him repeatedly in the early 1990s, believed the refusal was rooted in control. Black retained power, Wyre said, by withholding information from victims’ families and investigators.

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According to Wyre, the closest Black came to acknowledging guilt was before his 1994 trial. Asked why he had never denied the charges, Black replied: “Because I couldn’t.”

Death in prison

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Black died aged 68 on 12 January 2016 after suffering a heart attack at HMP Maghaberry in Northern Ireland. His death meant some families never received answers about missing children.

Police later confirmed they had been close to charging him with Genette Tate’s murder. A senior detective said early CPS indications suggested a charge was likely within weeks.

Linked to more murders across the UK and Ireland

For years, investigators suspected Black of additional killings. In 2011, he was convicted of the 1981 sexual assault and murder of nine-year-old Jennifer Cardy in Northern Ireland.

By the time of his death, police considered him the prime suspect in the 1978 disappearance and murder of 13-year-old Genette Tate in Devon. Detectives later revealed they were weeks away from charging him when he died.

Black is also suspected in several other unsolved child murders across Britain and continental Europe between the late 1960s and 1980s, though many cases were never proven.

Black took the full truth of his crimes to the grave, and with it, the locations and details that might have brought closure after decades of uncertainty.

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Featured image credit: The Scotsman/Shutterstock