EXCITED to be riding her new bike, nine-year-old Jennifer Cardy said goodbye to mum Pat and whizzed off in the direction of a friend’s house, two miles up a country road.
It was the last the family saw of their precious little girl.
Just a few yards away from the family home in Ballinderry, County Antrim, Jennifer was snatched by serial killer Robert Black, who sexually assaulted her and strangled her before dumping her body in a dam 16 miles away.
The horrific crime, on August 12, 1981, was the first of four known murders by evil Black. But while he was eventually jailed for life in 1994 for the other three, it would be 30 years before Jennifer's devastated family saw justice for their daughter.
For her dad Andy, who had treated his little girl to the bike days earlier so she could enjoy her school holidays, the pain of her loss is still present every day, 40 years on.
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“We survived but there's always a sadness there, to this day,” he tells The Sun.
“I don't visit the grave regularly. I go down occasionally and I look at pictures of us together as a family and it's terribly sad. But we know that we'll be reunited again in heaven and Pat, who died last year, is already there. She's been reunited with Jennifer up in heaven, which gives me comfort.”
Black’s murder spree - which also claimed the lives of Susan Maxwell, 11, Caroline Hogg, five, and ten-year-old Sarah Harper - sparked one of the most extensive manhunts in UK policing history.
He was eventually caught by a police officer in Stow, in 1990, after a local resident reported a girl being abducted by the driver of a parked van.
Incredibly, when the policeman stopped and searched the van, he found his own daughter gagged, bound, hooded and zipped into a sleeping bag in the back.
Now a new Channel 5 documentary, The Child Snatcher: Manhunt, reveals the painstaking investigation into the serial killer’s crimes and the dogged determination that led to the final conviction, in 2011, for Jennifer’s murder.
Committed Christian Andy, 74, says he always trusted that justice would be done, despite waiting 17 further years after Black was first jailed in 1994.
“There was a huge amount of police work with tonnes of evidence and research to prove that he had travelled to Northern Ireland on the day,” he says.
“It never frustrated Pat and me because we knew that eventually he would be convicted of our daughter’s murder. So we let the police do their job.
“They kept us up to date and we just sat back with the knowledge that someday he would be convicted and we didn’t mind the delay because he was in jail and wouldn't be able to murder another child.”
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Loving family
Jennifer was the second of Andy and Pat’s four children.
“In 1981, our family was complete,” says Andy. “Mark was 14, Jennifer was nine, Phillip was six and Victoria was only eight or nine months old.”
“Jennifer was very pretty and lovable and had a gentle way with her. She just was a lovely child. She was a happy child and we had a very happy family.”
That August, with the summer holidays ahead of her, Andy decided to buy her a new bike, although Pat disagreed, feeling they should wait until Christmas.
“Back then the roads were not as busy and it wasn't the same world,” says Andy. “The word paedophile was not even in my vocabulary.
“Pat wanted to keep the bike for a better present at Christmas but I said other little girls are cycling to our house and her bike is too small for her so she can't cycle to their house.
“I wanted her to enjoy her holidays and have a bike so I walked her down to the shop and she picked one out.”
In the documentary, he adds the heartbreaking observation: “If I hadn't bought it, she wouldn't have been out on that bike to be taken.”
But he tells The Sun that’s a thought he usually pushes to the back of his mind.
“Pat dwelt occasionally on the fact that she allowed our daughter to go off on the bike and I could dwell on the fact that I bought her the bike, and beat myself up for that, but there’s no mileage in that. It is what it is and I was doing it for the right reasons.”
Snatched away
At lunchtime on August 12, after feeding her baby sister, Jennifer set off towards her pals’ home on her bike and was told to be back at 4pm.
When Andy arrived home that evening, he found Pat standing at the back door and he could tell that something was wrong.
She was worried that Jennifer hadn’t returned from her friends and Pat hadn’t been able to go and look for her because her car had a slow puncture.
Andy told her “children are children and maybe she stayed there for her dinner”, but when they drove to her friend’s house they discovered Jennifer had never arrived.
“There was panic but being a supreme optimist I said that maybe she's gone somewhere else so we went to different farms and different places and nobody had seen her,” he says.
After reporting her missing at a local police station, they continued to search with the help of friends and neighbours who had come out to help.
When nothing was found the police launched a bigger search, bringing in more officers and army personnel as well.
“The search really got momentum,” says Andy. “Very quickly thousands of people were looking for Jennifer.
“I don't think words have ever been invented to explain the feeling or the panic of and the awfulness of it, knowing that your child is missing.”
I don't think words have ever been invented to explain the feeling or the panic of and the awfulness of it, knowing that your child is missing
Andy Cardy
Just before midnight, a family friend spotted Jennifer’s bike, thrown over a hedge not far from home. On hearing the news, Patricia let out an anguished scream.
“When we found the bike, we knew that something awful had happened. We knew that our little girl had been abducted,” says Andy.
“We think that she left home and it started to mizzle (rain) a bit, so she stopped to put her cardigan on. While she was doing that, she was snatched and her bike thrown over the hedge.”
For six days, the search continued, then came the news the couple dreaded - Jennifer’s body had been found by fishermen 16 miles away, in McKee’s Dam. She had been sexually assaulted and strangled.
Andy was called in to identify the body.
“I can remember they opened the body bag and (police liaison officer) Yvonne had to hold me up because I would've collapsed. Because she'd been in the water for so many days, I couldn't really identify her. So I asked, would they unzip the bag further down. I wanted to see her shoes. And then I knew it was her.”
'Scruffy man' strikes
A year later, on July 30 1982, 11-year-old Susan Maxwell disappeared while walking home from a tennis match in Coldstream, in the Scottish Borders.
A white van had been seen in the area and, 13 days later, her body was found 264 miles away in Uttoxeter, dumped in a lay-by.
She had been sexually assaulted and strangled.
The following July, five-year-old Caroline Hogg disappeared from the beach opposite her home in the Edinburgh suburb of Portobello.
The seaside town was heaving with visitors but witnesses reported seeing a “scruffy man” watching Caroline on the beach. Another witness recalled seeing them talking on a bench before he led her by the hand into a fun fair, paying for her to ride on a carousel before leading her away.
Her naked body was found near a layby on the M1 in Twycross, 310 miles from her home and just 39 miles from where Susan’s had been dumped.
Police quickly linked the murders of Susan and Caroline, believing the killer was someone who travelled long distances, possibly for work, in a van or covered vehicle.
Delivery firms from Scotland to the Midlands were asked to provide details of their drivers’ movements on the relevant dates.
Four forces - Leicester, Staffordshire, Edinburgh and Lothian and Borders - were now working together on the case and Hector Clarke, the assistant chief constable of Northumbria who had worked on the Yorkshire Ripper case, was called in to lead the manhunt.
For the first time a central computer was used to sift through the mountains of evidence from all over the country, and cross reference details.
Tragically, the search was still ongoing when Sarah Harper, ten, disappeared from the Leeds suburb of Morley, after popping to her local corner shop for bread on March 26, 1986.
An extensive search of over 3,000 properties uncovered no clues and her partially clothed body was found 71 miles away in the River Trent, near Nottingham, almost a month later.
The operation was now the biggest serial killer investigation since the arrest of Peter Sutcliffe with over 187,000 people interviewed, 60,000 formal written statements taken and over a quarter of a million vehicle records reviewed.
Twist of fate
In April 1988, Black struck again, attempting to abduct 15-year-old Teresa Thornhill, although she managed to fight him off and run away.
The breakthrough finally came when David Herkes, a retired postmaster, was mowing his lawn in Stow. As a blue transit van stopped nearby, he spotted the six-year-old daughter of a neighbour walking up the road.
Stopping to clear grass cuttings from his lawnmower, he saw the girl's feet lifting from the pavement, before the vehicle's driver pushed something through the passenger, clambered in and drove off.
He took the vehicle registration and raised the alarm, and was talking to the local bobby when the van returned to the street, causing the brave officer to run into the road and flag it down.
In a horrifying twist of fate the officer found his own daughter, bound and gagged in the back. She had been sexually assaulted.
Long wait for justice
Finally under arrest, Robert Black denied all the charges against him but police discovered he had previously been “admonished” for abducting and assaulting a seven-year-old in a Greenock park before almost strangling her to death.
As a delivery driver, he travelled all over the country and frequently delivered to Scotland before returning to his lodgings in London.
While Jennifer’s murder was not linked at the time, Pat Cardy suspected her daughter’s killer had struck again.
“It wasn't nice not knowing who had done it, knowing there was somebody still at large that killed our daughter,” says Andy.
“But as Christians, we left it with the Lord knowing that someday somebody would come and be punished for what they did to our daughter.
“When Robert Black was caught, Pat clicked immediately that this man could have done it.
"We were told, in the early 1990s, that he was in the province on the day that she went missing.
“We knew then that Robert Black had killed our daughter. It was only a matter of time waiting and being patient knowing that he would come to trial at some stage in our province.”
Black’s trial, in 1994, was traumatic for the Cardys as they learned more about what their own daughter had likely gone through in the final moments.
“Initially it wasn't clear exactly how and what he did but as time went on, particularly during the trial, we heard what he did to little girls and that was horrifying,” Andy says.
“If I was to dwell on what Jennifer went through before he killed her, I’d probably go berserk. so I try to blank it out.”
Black’s link to the murder was investigated under detective Raymond Murray, in 2002, and after nine years of sifting through mountains of evidence, in 2011, it finally came to Armagh County Court.
Black, who was already serving a minimum of 35 years, was finally convicted of Jennifer’s murder and, in a generous gesture, Pat immediately walked over to the lawyer who had defended him to give him a hug.
The Scottish serial killer, who died in 2016 at 68, is thought to have murdered many more between 1969 and 1990, including 13-year-old papergirl Genette Tate, who disappeared in 1978, and numerous children in Ireland, the Netherlands, West Germany and France.
Andy, who is now battling bladder cancer, lost Pat in February 2022 and says she was “absolutely at peace” when she died.
And he says the family were able to cope with the murder of their beloved Jennifer by becoming even closer.
“Life had to be lived for us all,” he says. “If I had broken down under that stress, there was no chance of my family surviving.
“So we knitted together as a family, supporting one another. We survived because of family, and the bigger family, including my mum and dad, brother and sister, all of our friends and our church.”
The Child Snatcher: Manhunt airs on Channel 5 on August 7 and 8
