I hunted one of Scotland’s worst serial killers, I thought we might never catch him
A RETIRED cop involved in hunting serial killer Robert Black has told how he feared the probe would repeat the mistakes that almost saw the Yorkshire Ripper escape justice.
Tom Wood, 73, said the inquiry was hampered by cops having to file updates on a card index system that was overwhelmed with details and not properly cross referenced.
And the former deputy chief constable of Lothian and Borders Police said this made it difficult to spot links between vital clues.
He also recalled how having several different police forces caught up in tracking down Scots-born Black also complicated the investigation — just as it did a decade earlier when murderer Peter Sutcliffe was on the loose.
Crimebuster Tom was called in after schoolgirl Susan Maxwell, 11, was murdered in July 1982.
She had vanished while walking to her home in Cornhill-on-Tweed, Northumbria, after playing tennis just over the border in Coldstream, Berwickshire.
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Two weeks later her body was found 300 miles away on the A518 near Uttoxer, Staffordshire.
Recounting his role in the grim case as part of a Crime Time Inc podcast, Tom said: “You’ve got Lothian and Borders, where she was last seen, Northumbria and you’ve got Staffordshire.
“And because the body was found in Staffordshire, they become prime in the investigation and start to drive it.
“You’ve not only got physical distance between the forces, they had different techniques. So it became very, very difficult.
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“All the time the numbers of cards in these damned carousels multiplied. And with every hundred or 500 new cards, we knew the error factor was growing.”
He added: “While none of us in that era had been involved with the Yorkshire Ripper case, we knew the disaster of that had all been about the fallibility of the card index system.
“It simply was not designed for, and could not cope with, large multi-force investigations.”
Referring to the flawed Ripper probe, Tom told podcast co-host and fellow ex-cop Simon McLean: “This was 13 linked murders of young women, some sex workers, some not, in the Midlands, West Yorkshire area, with four or five forces involved, including Northumbria.
“And the card index system failed utterly.
“When eventually the culprit Peter Sutcliffe was arrested in a routine traffic stop by a uniform cop, it was found he had been through the card index system no less than nine times.” Tom explained the failures paved the way for the introduction of computerised methods.
He added: “It’s a shame it usually has to be a disaster that brings about change.”
Black, of Falkirk, was found guilty in 1994 of murdering Susan plus Sarah Harper, 10, from Leeds, and five-year-old Caroline Hogg, of Edinburgh. In 2011, he was convicted of killing nine-year-old Jennifer Cardy in Co Antrim in 1981.
The monster died aged 68 of a heart attack in 2016 while serving 12 life terms in Northern Ireland.
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Sutcliffe, of Bingley, West Yorkshire, died in prison in 2020, aged 74. He murdered 13 women and tried to kill seven more in a five-year reign of terror across the north of England between 1975 and 1980.
lCRIME Time Inc is available now on podcast platforms.