Genette Tate's bicycle lies abandoned in the spot from which she was snatched in 1978. When her friends discovered the bicycle, its back wheel was still spinning.
The 13-year-old's disappearance became synonymous with a single, haunting image which remains as chilling today as it was then: a picture of Genette's bike lying in the middle of a country lane near her home in Devon, from where she was snatched in broad daylight.
Genette lived in the hamlet of Aylesbeare, three miles south-east of Exeter and close to the M5 motorway. She was a Girl Guide and a popular member of the church choir. Like many children of her generation, she also had a paper round.
At around 3.45 pm on Saturday, August 19, 1978, she was delivering the evening paper, the Express & Echo, to houses in Withen Lane. She stopped briefly to speak to two of her friends, before whizzing off on her bike. Moments later, her friends walked around the corner and found her bicycle โ but there was no sign of Genette. The bike's back wheel was still spinning. 'The girl who vanished into thin air' was the headline in one national newspaper the following morning.
The search for Genette โ also known as 'Ginny' โ turned into the biggest missing person hunt in Britain, with the village hall transformed into a major incident room. Scores of police officers were joined by Royal Marines based at the commando training centre at nearby Lympstone. While more than 7,000 volunteers combed the moors and woodland near Genette's home, divers scoured gravel pits, ponds, wells and silage pits. Helicopters and RAF reconnaissance aircraft were a constant presence above Aylesbeare.
In the weeks and months that followed, detectives resorted to increasingly desperate measures to try to find Genette. Specialist sniffer dogs, used by the Israeli army, were flown in from the Middle East. Spiritualists were consulted, and a mother and her daughter were put under hypnosis in an attempt to help them recall details about a 'suspect' vehicle in the area at the time Genette was snatched.
But no trace of Genette Tate was ever found. Not an item of clothing nor a strand of hair. Nothing. The case papers, including 3,500 statements and 12,000 exhibits crammed into 250 crates and weighing seven tonnes, are stored at the headquarters of the Devon and Cornwall constabulary in Exeter. But one name, metaphorically speaking, stalks these files. That name is Robert Black.
Until this week, Black was serving multiple life sentences for murdering four girls in the 1980s and kidnapping and sexually assaulting a fifth. Only Moors Murderers Ian Brady and Myra Hindley, whose five victims were aged ten to 17, killed more children in modern British criminal history.
Black was also, it has now emerged, the prime suspect โ the only real suspect, in fact โ in the abduction of Genette Tate all those years ago.Had he not died suddenly from a suspected heart attack in jail in Northern Ireland a few days ago, at the age of 68, he was, according to police, about to be finally charged with her murder.
Genette Tate's (left) face stared out from newsstands and 'missing' posters across Britain, and her parents made emotional appeals on TV.
Most of all, though, they just want to know what happened to their daughter. They want to be able to bury her and lay flowers at her graveside โ like the parents of any child who has ever died. But any lingering hope they may have had about eventually finding some kind of peace was extinguished with the death of Robert Black.
Genette's mother and father were already divorced when she went missing. Sheila Tate, as she was, has remarried and moved to Bristol. John Tate, 73, is confined to a wheelchair and lives in sheltered accommodation in Manchester. 'I never got an opportunity. He wouldn't see me. I've written lots of letters to him, but I've never got anything back.'
Above the fireplace in Mr Tate's living room is an enlarged photograph of Genette sitting beside him outside their local library. They were waiting for the arrival of the annual carnival procession, and it was taken shortly before she was kidnapped. Over the years, I tried to get to see [Robert Black] in prison. All I wanted to do was to talk to him and find out what he did with her so we could give her a decent Christian burial.
Genette lived with Mr Tate, then a sales rep, and her stepmother Vi, his second wife, following the break-up of his first marriage. On the fateful afternoon, Mr Tate and Vi were returning to Aylesbeare from Exeter. 'When we arrived home and parked up, we saw two of Genette's friends coming towards us pushing her bike,' recalled Mr Tate. 'They said they could not find Genette.
'We went down the lane shouting her name over the hedge. We thought she might be playing a prank, although that was not the type of thing she would do. We couldn't believe anything bad had happened, not in the village.' Aylesbeare was described in one report at the time as a 'sun-dappled rural idyll' with a 13th-century church and a 400-year-old pub and 'scarcely a car to be seen in its pretty, hedge-lined lanes'.
Yet it was here that police are now as sure as they can be that Genette became Robert Black's first victim. The cruel irony is that the 13-year-old should never have been in Withen Lane that August day in 1978. Another paperboy was supposed to be on duty, but he called in sick and Genette agreed to fill in for him. Had she not done so, she most likely would still be alive today.
It would take 12 years, however, for Black to become the prime suspect. It was in 1990 that, purely by chance, a suspicious local saw him bundling a six-year-old girl into his delivery van in the village of Stow in the Scottish Borders and made a note of his registration number.
After molesting the little girl in a layby, Black made the mistake of doubling back through Stow, where the youngster's father bravely stepped out to halt the van. His barely-alive daughter was found hooded, bound, gagged and stuffed in a sleeping bag inside. Black was jailed for life for the kidnap.
His conviction unlocked the key to a string of other unsolved child murders in the 1980s. Petrol receipts and employment records from the company he worked for โ the now defunct London firm, Poster Dispatch โ revealed he was in the relevant place at the relevant time when 11-year-old Susan Maxwell from Cornhill-on-Tweed, Northumberland, Caroline Hogg, five, from Edinburgh, and Sarah Harper, ten, from Morley in Leeds were abducted and killed.
Black was given a further ten life sentences for those crimes in 1994. By now, detectives from Devon and Cornwall were convinced he had also taken Genette Tate. They felt certain he'd killed her, but couldn't prove it because his employment file at Poster Dispatch prior to 1980 was not complete.
No petrol receipts were found placing him nearby on the day she vanished, as they had done for the three other girls. At least one receipt, however, did put him in the vicinity shortly beforehand and other slips confirmed he knew the surrounding area well.
Other evidence emerged. In 1995, a series of revelations appeared in a book, The Murder Of Childhood, by Ray Wyre, a criminologist who pioneered the treatment of child sex offenders. He taped conversations with Black inside Peterhead Prison in Aberdeenshire. It is believed that these were the only times Black ever spoke to anyone about his predilections.
During the interviews, Black admitted that he was always on the lookout for girls. Asked when he first got the idea of snatching a child, he started talking about a 'papergirl'. Did he mean Genette? 'Yes,' Black replied, before going on to refer to the 'kidnapper' in the third person. 'He's obviously persuaded her to get off her bike or grabbed her off her bike; one of the two,' he said.
Genette's mother Sheila Cook with her husband Bob at the scene of Genette's disappearance
Officers from Devon and Cornwall went to interview Black in prison following the publication of Wyre's book, but he refused to cooperate. They continued to build a case against him, however, and the file will be submitted next month to the Crown Prosecution Service, despite Black's death, in a bid to give Genette's family some measure of peace.
It is understood to contain fresh witness statements from fellow inmates and from two women who, as children, were targeted by a young Robert Black while they did paper rounds on their bikes but managed to escape his clutches. Black's interest in young girls is believed to have started when he was just 12, when he was accused of trying to rape a little girl.
Months after leaving care at the age of 16, he molested a seven-year-old girl in an abandoned air raid shelter on the pretext of showing her a box of kittens. He choked her to within an inch of her life. It was the start of a campaign of attacks during which he admitted 'touching up' more than 40 young girls over three years. It culminated in him being sent to Borstal in 1967 for indecent assault.
Detectives have now managed to confirm that at the time Genette Tate went missing a decade later, Black was making deliveries in a red van. A red van was one of the very few vehicles spotted near Aylesbeare at the crucial time. It was never traced or eliminated. The catalyst for re-opening the Genette Tate case came four years ago when Black was convicted of abducting Jennifer Cardy, nine, in his van as she cycled to a friend's house in County Antrim in 1981.
Why was this so significant? Because following a recent change in the law, evidence of 'bad character' was put before the jury โ including Black's previous murder convictions. The jury took four hours and 15 minutes to reach its guilty verdicts. In 2013, the Court of Appeal upheld Black's conviction.
It also meant that his previous 'bad character' could be used were he to be prosecuted for the murder of Genette Tate. Superintendent Paul Burgan, head of major crime in the Devon and Cornwall force, this week told the Mail that Black would have been charged. He said: 'The early indication from the CPS was that a charge was probable.'
He admitted to being 'frustrated' that Robert Black died before that could happen. In Aylesbeare itself, lying in the shadow of St Mary's Church, is a memorial stone for Genette. The poignant inscription reads: 'May she someday be returned to this place to Rest in Peace.' Recent events mean that is unlikely ever to happen.
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