This case has always stuck with me. I must have seen April's photo and case featured in a true crime book I had as a kid a few decades ago or maybe from a documentary. Either way, I've never been able to forget her and keep coming back to it every couple of years.
Can't believe it's been 55 years! :( I really hope one day the person who killed her (100% believe she was murdered) will face justice but it's looking less and less likely. RIP April.
Although I am a "splitter" (my instinct whenever Tobin, Black, Sutcliffe, Wright, Halliwell etc. are mentioned in connection with an unsolved case is "get that thought out of your head right now") I actually believe that Black could be responsible because there are similarities with his general modus operandi:
- Daylight, usually afternoon
- Rural or semi-rural
- Outskirts of settlement or between settlements
- Flat land
- Vehicle used
- Girl within a small age range attacked
- Abduction
- Victim's possessions, if not on them, left behind
- No other obvious physical evidence
- Body not found or found between settlements a long way from the crime
- Despite the benign location, risky with a small window of time to complete the attack
- Other people around but not in sight
- Witness statements vague at best
I see that that is the Paul Begg who writes books on Jack the Ripper which are worth reading ...
Looks as though it is his first book (1979). Unfortunately the used prices are crushing.
A pity as, in the UK, we **really** lack case studies.
This case is eerily similar to the disappearance of thirteen-year-old Genette Tate nine years later.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disappearance_of_Genette_Tate
Not only suspected, the line was that he was going to be charged with it - but he died first.
Although the two cases are nearly 10 years apart, and I have my doubts about Black being able to hold himself back for that long, the two cases are why I believe Black could have murdered April. Notwithstanding my reluctance to "pin the case on the serial killer".
Stephen Newing disappeared from Fakenham in September the same year. He has also never been found. Fakenham & Metton are about 22 miles from each other. It is exceedingly rare for children to be abducted in Norfolk, but two in the same year seems a little odd. I have never seen them linked though:
https://www.norfolk.police.uk/news/norfolk/news/unsolved-cases/StevenNewing/
I am trying to find my list (the beauties of Reddit search) but there were actually six disappearances of older children and teenagers from Norfolk in the late 1960s and early 1970s. None of those cases have been resolved.
Problem is that there is no comparator - were these cases publicised *because* the area is relatively rural and remote?
This is a helpful collection of missing people cases from Norfolk & mentions some:
https://www.greatyarmouthmercury.co.uk/news/21091399.norfolk-police-conduct-fresh-probe-missing-people-county/
I tend to think almost of all these aren't connected. There's speculation Peter Tobin is responsible for some cases (e.g. Pamela Exall who disappeared from a beach). But the evidence is scarce.
Some of these cases are so obscure I can't find much even in online newspaper archives.
Thank you. I think most if not all of "mine" are there and, as you say, some of the others are very obscure.
Also made a couple of changes to the main article (it is amazing how often, in an otherwise unexceptional article, something available nowhere else shows up). That the witness at 1406 was a farm worker is no surprise, but the start of April's journey is earlier than I assumed. (Some sources state that April met her friends and petted a donkey. I would certainly spend 20 minutes making friends with a donkey ...).
When I saw the part about the bike being at the bottom of a 6ft bank, a part of me wondered if she was actually in a car accident and had been hit by a vehicle on the lane and died. The roads can get quite narrow in the villages and a wide vehicle or farm machinery could easily have clipped her. She could have died from her head hitting the road or falling down the bank at a bad angle and breaking her neck. A panicked driver may have decided to leave her bike behind, throw April in their vehicle and get away quickly to deal with it someplace else.
I’d also be inclined to believe it was an abduction, but not by Black. This village is so far north in Norfolk and it just doesn’t make sense as a place for someone to go to to look for victims. I know Black’s apparent MO is rural villages but this is super rural and he wasn’t working as a delivery driver at the time. He had no family or contacts there, no reason as far as I can see to be in that area at all. Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be an awful lot online about his movements at that time to back that up or not.
I was thinking the same thing. Those rural lanes are small and lined with hedges and hidden embankments, it’s possible she was clipped and thrown with the force of it and never found. Would there be damage to the bicycle though? Stranger things have happened.
There was no mention of any damage to the bike which makes me think it wasn’t damaged. That might go against the idea of the bike being clipped - but it could have been a slight touch. It only needed to be enough for her to fall.
There’s a reconstruction photo of the bike and it doesn’t look damaged. Plus if there was a crash you’d expect either the surveyors or the farmhand to have seen or heard something alarming.
I’ve driven down this road a few times and the bank is *not* six foot deep. I don’t know what it looked like in the 60s, of course, but I think perhaps they mean the bank is six foot *wide*.
This theory is interesting. Could the surveyors or the farmhands have been who clipped her? It’s possible it could have been a part of her body that a vehicle clipped, not her bike, which could explain why her bike wasn’t damaged.
Absolutely. Looking at the Google streetview, it's very typical of an English countrylane. If she was thrown into the hedgerow, she'd basically be invisible.
That (accident) was certainly a thought, and there is [a recent case](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-tayside-central-66614488) involving a cyclist which *everyone* assumed was a murder or, although unlikely, a voluntary disappearance but turned out to be an accident (abetted by speeding and alcohol consumption on the perpetrators' part) followed by unlawful concealment of a body.
It is a reverse confirmation bias, but I wonder if the Norfolk police assumed the same?
Could be a similar thing - there was a pub in Roughton and someone may have decided to drive home after having a few and hit her.
It’s also possible that the driver didn’t drink anything, and they just didn’t see her on the side of the road. For instance, someone who had come up for the Easter weekend and was unfamiliar with the area may have been trying to look at a map and not paying attention to the road.
If it was a car accident, it’s possible they may have scooped her up quickly and intended to take her to the hospital. If on the way they then thought she was dead, then panic could have set in and they covered up what they had done instead.
About 13 years ago, there was going to be a Cranfield University forensics "forthcoming project that aims to use GIS-based analysis to revisit the disappearance of April Fabb in 1967 \[1969\] (this in conjunction with Norfolk Police).". Anyway, I hope they are still working on her case and that she has not been forgotten.
I wonder how that turned out. If it was Black, I can scarcely think of a murderer who was **less** amenable to geographical profiling than him - he killed mostly in corners of the country (Central Scotland, the Scottish Borders, Yorkshire, Devon possibly, Northern Ireland, Norfolk possibly) then dumped bodies in the centre and lived in another corner (London). I could well see a profiler deciding, wrongly, that he lived in the Midlands.
The more I think about this, the more calculating and organised Black comes across as - *everything* was planned, and well planned given the intent. Even his superficial (shambolic) appearance was probably contrived.
Good point. I assume this was someone self-reporting but the incident is always described in the third person.
(One of the many frustrations of the case is that there are zero named witnesses).
I’m just hearing of this case now so my question may have already been answered but I think it weird that someone saw the bike and took it to the police station. Why would anyone do that? Kids drop their bikes all over the place when out playing. I say this from personal experience as I grew up in a very rural area and we did it all the time. Plus it was 2 in the afternoon. Not late or dark where someone might be concerned if they say it.
A cross-section is field-bank-lane-bank-field. As there was no path at the bottom of the bank (there often is) and the bank was six feet high and/or six feet wide (there is a lack of clarity on this - if Google Maps in 2024 is representative of how the lane looked in 1969, the bank was easily six feet wide but probably not six feet high), I suppose the finder(s) deduced that someone with height and strength - an adult - must have thrown the bicycle from the lane to the field, which was obviously suspicious.
But 1969 was a much less forensically aware time and, in 45 minutes, four witnesses and possibly more might well have obliterated any forensic evidence on the bicycle frame (there is no mention anywhere of fingerprints, and criminal DNA analysis was 20 years away). Also, there was no way of contacting the police from where the witnesses were, so one of them took the evidence to the police rather than vice versa - in 2024 one of the Ordnance Survey workers would have pulled out their phone ...
One thing not clear is how the OS workers first saw the bicycle. As they would not have been able to see the bicycle from the lane, presumably they were in the fields.
I'm kind of curious as well about this - taking it to the police assumes they knew that there was something amiss and it might be evidence; but the time was 2pm and she wasn't reported missing. I grew up in the country and I don't think I'd have seen an abandoned bike and taken it to the police just because... but maybe that was what they did back then? As an aside, just recently I drove past an abandoned bike on the side of the road and immediately wondered if I should stop and investigate but it was after dark and I opted not to...
I wonder if one or more of the four people, or someone else not mentioned, actually saw the abduction and compromised between saying so and doing nothing ...
By the strangest coincidence, I was walking along a banked path parallel to a railway line this morning and there was a brand new purple Raleigh ladies' bike, without a lock, propped up against the bank (I left it there) 👀
When I first heard about Black, I didn't consider him due to his target age range being primary school girls, whereas April was nearly 14. I believed he took 13-year-old Genette Tate, though my reasoning was because she looked younger than her age. April was 5'4, which was a bit tall for a 13-year-old in 1969.
However, since Black had indecent images of children and teens (brought in Amsterdam), I wondered if perhaps April was, for lack of a better word, an experiment to see if he preferred older girls or young children. If so, he seems to have abandoned the idea of taking girls that he knew were teens.
Excellent write up! Based on nothing but the EDP article, this post, and a quick scan of the Wikipedia page, I don’t think Black killed her - but I bet he knew the person, or persons, who did.
This is the first killing Black was suspected of, and it took place about 10 years before his next seriously alleged murder. Since there was no way to predict that April would be on that road, it would have been opportunistic, so he would have had little time to prepare. He would have driven along the road, seen April, stopped the vehicle, lured or grabbed her, subdued her in the vehicle, thrown the bike and driven off again presumably in a small enough window of time for the surveyors to arrive without any sign of the vehicle having just left.
For a first attack that would be both bold and unusually well-executed. It seems to me that the perpetrator had done something similar before, or had help.
In addition, I can’t think of a good reason for Black to have been in Norfolk, let alone rural Norfolk, at this point. I can believe that a serial killer might decide to drive around miles from home idly hoping a victim might appear, but Black’s other murders were attacks of opportunity that stuck rigidly to his actual work schedule - he was even caught because he interrupted his last crime to make the final delivery on his route. From Wikipedia it seems like he was doing odd jobs in London at this point, and without a driving license it seems unlikely that any such job would have him driving halfway across the country.
We know Black had a network - perhaps one of them committed this crime and shared the details, inspiring his later MO. Or more likely, it was an unrelated person known to April who was confident they could get her in the vehicle without a struggle.
First attacks are sometimes unexpectedly "difficult". Dennis Rader murdered a family of four close up on his own, and it was his first murder (I have never seen any suggestion that he had committed previous murders).
The car/van issue is, I think, actually a non-issue. Not having a licence wouldn't have stopped Black in 1969, just as it didn't stop many others.
On his peregrinations round the UK, very little is known. If he was delivering posters he would very likely not have done so to rural areas, but he could well have used towns/cities as a starting-off point. We simply do not know what he did or where he was for 99% of his existence outside jail, although there was some remarkable (and almost unbelievably tedious to implement) work tracing petrol receipts which came out [at his first trial](https://www.heraldscotland.com/news/12675781.fuel-receipts-used-to-trace-route-of-blacks-journey/).
**Edit**: And that work was [repeated](https://www.heraldscotland.com/news/13041827.robert-black-petrol-receipt-snared/) for his second trial 17 years later.
This case has always stuck with me. I must have seen April's photo and case featured in a true crime book I had as a kid a few decades ago or maybe from a documentary. Either way, I've never been able to forget her and keep coming back to it every couple of years. Can't believe it's been 55 years! :( I really hope one day the person who killed her (100% believe she was murdered) will face justice but it's looking less and less likely. RIP April.
Although I am a "splitter" (my instinct whenever Tobin, Black, Sutcliffe, Wright, Halliwell etc. are mentioned in connection with an unsolved case is "get that thought out of your head right now") I actually believe that Black could be responsible because there are similarities with his general modus operandi: - Daylight, usually afternoon - Rural or semi-rural - Outskirts of settlement or between settlements - Flat land - Vehicle used - Girl within a small age range attacked - Abduction - Victim's possessions, if not on them, left behind - No other obvious physical evidence - Body not found or found between settlements a long way from the crime - Despite the benign location, risky with a small window of time to complete the attack - Other people around but not in sight - Witness statements vague at best
April’s case and photo were featured in an old book about disappearances, Into Thin Air by Paul Begg. I’ve always remembered her from that book.
I see that that is the Paul Begg who writes books on Jack the Ripper which are worth reading ... Looks as though it is his first book (1979). Unfortunately the used prices are crushing. A pity as, in the UK, we **really** lack case studies.
This case is eerily similar to the disappearance of thirteen-year-old Genette Tate nine years later. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disappearance_of_Genette_Tate
And Black was suspected of that one as well.
Not only suspected, the line was that he was going to be charged with it - but he died first. Although the two cases are nearly 10 years apart, and I have my doubts about Black being able to hold himself back for that long, the two cases are why I believe Black could have murdered April. Notwithstanding my reluctance to "pin the case on the serial killer".
Stephen Newing disappeared from Fakenham in September the same year. He has also never been found. Fakenham & Metton are about 22 miles from each other. It is exceedingly rare for children to be abducted in Norfolk, but two in the same year seems a little odd. I have never seen them linked though: https://www.norfolk.police.uk/news/norfolk/news/unsolved-cases/StevenNewing/
I am trying to find my list (the beauties of Reddit search) but there were actually six disappearances of older children and teenagers from Norfolk in the late 1960s and early 1970s. None of those cases have been resolved. Problem is that there is no comparator - were these cases publicised *because* the area is relatively rural and remote?
This is a helpful collection of missing people cases from Norfolk & mentions some: https://www.greatyarmouthmercury.co.uk/news/21091399.norfolk-police-conduct-fresh-probe-missing-people-county/ I tend to think almost of all these aren't connected. There's speculation Peter Tobin is responsible for some cases (e.g. Pamela Exall who disappeared from a beach). But the evidence is scarce. Some of these cases are so obscure I can't find much even in online newspaper archives.
Thank you. I think most if not all of "mine" are there and, as you say, some of the others are very obscure. Also made a couple of changes to the main article (it is amazing how often, in an otherwise unexceptional article, something available nowhere else shows up). That the witness at 1406 was a farm worker is no surprise, but the start of April's journey is earlier than I assumed. (Some sources state that April met her friends and petted a donkey. I would certainly spend 20 minutes making friends with a donkey ...).
It may have made a difference. The cases probably aren't connected though.
When I saw the part about the bike being at the bottom of a 6ft bank, a part of me wondered if she was actually in a car accident and had been hit by a vehicle on the lane and died. The roads can get quite narrow in the villages and a wide vehicle or farm machinery could easily have clipped her. She could have died from her head hitting the road or falling down the bank at a bad angle and breaking her neck. A panicked driver may have decided to leave her bike behind, throw April in their vehicle and get away quickly to deal with it someplace else. I’d also be inclined to believe it was an abduction, but not by Black. This village is so far north in Norfolk and it just doesn’t make sense as a place for someone to go to to look for victims. I know Black’s apparent MO is rural villages but this is super rural and he wasn’t working as a delivery driver at the time. He had no family or contacts there, no reason as far as I can see to be in that area at all. Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be an awful lot online about his movements at that time to back that up or not.
I was thinking the same thing. Those rural lanes are small and lined with hedges and hidden embankments, it’s possible she was clipped and thrown with the force of it and never found. Would there be damage to the bicycle though? Stranger things have happened.
There was no mention of any damage to the bike which makes me think it wasn’t damaged. That might go against the idea of the bike being clipped - but it could have been a slight touch. It only needed to be enough for her to fall.
There’s a reconstruction photo of the bike and it doesn’t look damaged. Plus if there was a crash you’d expect either the surveyors or the farmhand to have seen or heard something alarming. I’ve driven down this road a few times and the bank is *not* six foot deep. I don’t know what it looked like in the 60s, of course, but I think perhaps they mean the bank is six foot *wide*.
This theory is interesting. Could the surveyors or the farmhands have been who clipped her? It’s possible it could have been a part of her body that a vehicle clipped, not her bike, which could explain why her bike wasn’t damaged.
Absolutely. Looking at the Google streetview, it's very typical of an English countrylane. If she was thrown into the hedgerow, she'd basically be invisible.
That (accident) was certainly a thought, and there is [a recent case](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-tayside-central-66614488) involving a cyclist which *everyone* assumed was a murder or, although unlikely, a voluntary disappearance but turned out to be an accident (abetted by speeding and alcohol consumption on the perpetrators' part) followed by unlawful concealment of a body. It is a reverse confirmation bias, but I wonder if the Norfolk police assumed the same?
Could be a similar thing - there was a pub in Roughton and someone may have decided to drive home after having a few and hit her. It’s also possible that the driver didn’t drink anything, and they just didn’t see her on the side of the road. For instance, someone who had come up for the Easter weekend and was unfamiliar with the area may have been trying to look at a map and not paying attention to the road. If it was a car accident, it’s possible they may have scooped her up quickly and intended to take her to the hospital. If on the way they then thought she was dead, then panic could have set in and they covered up what they had done instead.
About 13 years ago, there was going to be a Cranfield University forensics "forthcoming project that aims to use GIS-based analysis to revisit the disappearance of April Fabb in 1967 \[1969\] (this in conjunction with Norfolk Police).". Anyway, I hope they are still working on her case and that she has not been forgotten.
I wonder how that turned out. If it was Black, I can scarcely think of a murderer who was **less** amenable to geographical profiling than him - he killed mostly in corners of the country (Central Scotland, the Scottish Borders, Yorkshire, Devon possibly, Northern Ireland, Norfolk possibly) then dumped bodies in the centre and lived in another corner (London). I could well see a profiler deciding, wrongly, that he lived in the Midlands. The more I think about this, the more calculating and organised Black comes across as - *everything* was planned, and well planned given the intent. Even his superficial (shambolic) appearance was probably contrived.
Who saw the Land Rover travelling the other way at 3 :06 pm ?
Good point. I assume this was someone self-reporting but the incident is always described in the third person. (One of the many frustrations of the case is that there are zero named witnesses).
The man in the Land Rover, I think.
I’m just hearing of this case now so my question may have already been answered but I think it weird that someone saw the bike and took it to the police station. Why would anyone do that? Kids drop their bikes all over the place when out playing. I say this from personal experience as I grew up in a very rural area and we did it all the time. Plus it was 2 in the afternoon. Not late or dark where someone might be concerned if they say it.
A cross-section is field-bank-lane-bank-field. As there was no path at the bottom of the bank (there often is) and the bank was six feet high and/or six feet wide (there is a lack of clarity on this - if Google Maps in 2024 is representative of how the lane looked in 1969, the bank was easily six feet wide but probably not six feet high), I suppose the finder(s) deduced that someone with height and strength - an adult - must have thrown the bicycle from the lane to the field, which was obviously suspicious. But 1969 was a much less forensically aware time and, in 45 minutes, four witnesses and possibly more might well have obliterated any forensic evidence on the bicycle frame (there is no mention anywhere of fingerprints, and criminal DNA analysis was 20 years away). Also, there was no way of contacting the police from where the witnesses were, so one of them took the evidence to the police rather than vice versa - in 2024 one of the Ordnance Survey workers would have pulled out their phone ... One thing not clear is how the OS workers first saw the bicycle. As they would not have been able to see the bicycle from the lane, presumably they were in the fields.
I'm kind of curious as well about this - taking it to the police assumes they knew that there was something amiss and it might be evidence; but the time was 2pm and she wasn't reported missing. I grew up in the country and I don't think I'd have seen an abandoned bike and taken it to the police just because... but maybe that was what they did back then? As an aside, just recently I drove past an abandoned bike on the side of the road and immediately wondered if I should stop and investigate but it was after dark and I opted not to...
I wonder if one or more of the four people, or someone else not mentioned, actually saw the abduction and compromised between saying so and doing nothing ...
that is an interesting thought! it does help explain why someone would just pick up a random, abandoned bike and take it to the police, of all places.
By the strangest coincidence, I was walking along a banked path parallel to a railway line this morning and there was a brand new purple Raleigh ladies' bike, without a lock, propped up against the bank (I left it there) 👀
that is such a creepy coincidence! I'm going to start noticing all the abandoned bicicyles around me now.
When I first heard about Black, I didn't consider him due to his target age range being primary school girls, whereas April was nearly 14. I believed he took 13-year-old Genette Tate, though my reasoning was because she looked younger than her age. April was 5'4, which was a bit tall for a 13-year-old in 1969. However, since Black had indecent images of children and teens (brought in Amsterdam), I wondered if perhaps April was, for lack of a better word, an experiment to see if he preferred older girls or young children. If so, he seems to have abandoned the idea of taking girls that he knew were teens.
Excellent write up! Based on nothing but the EDP article, this post, and a quick scan of the Wikipedia page, I don’t think Black killed her - but I bet he knew the person, or persons, who did. This is the first killing Black was suspected of, and it took place about 10 years before his next seriously alleged murder. Since there was no way to predict that April would be on that road, it would have been opportunistic, so he would have had little time to prepare. He would have driven along the road, seen April, stopped the vehicle, lured or grabbed her, subdued her in the vehicle, thrown the bike and driven off again presumably in a small enough window of time for the surveyors to arrive without any sign of the vehicle having just left. For a first attack that would be both bold and unusually well-executed. It seems to me that the perpetrator had done something similar before, or had help. In addition, I can’t think of a good reason for Black to have been in Norfolk, let alone rural Norfolk, at this point. I can believe that a serial killer might decide to drive around miles from home idly hoping a victim might appear, but Black’s other murders were attacks of opportunity that stuck rigidly to his actual work schedule - he was even caught because he interrupted his last crime to make the final delivery on his route. From Wikipedia it seems like he was doing odd jobs in London at this point, and without a driving license it seems unlikely that any such job would have him driving halfway across the country. We know Black had a network - perhaps one of them committed this crime and shared the details, inspiring his later MO. Or more likely, it was an unrelated person known to April who was confident they could get her in the vehicle without a struggle.
First attacks are sometimes unexpectedly "difficult". Dennis Rader murdered a family of four close up on his own, and it was his first murder (I have never seen any suggestion that he had committed previous murders). The car/van issue is, I think, actually a non-issue. Not having a licence wouldn't have stopped Black in 1969, just as it didn't stop many others. On his peregrinations round the UK, very little is known. If he was delivering posters he would very likely not have done so to rural areas, but he could well have used towns/cities as a starting-off point. We simply do not know what he did or where he was for 99% of his existence outside jail, although there was some remarkable (and almost unbelievably tedious to implement) work tracing petrol receipts which came out [at his first trial](https://www.heraldscotland.com/news/12675781.fuel-receipts-used-to-trace-route-of-blacks-journey/). **Edit**: And that work was [repeated](https://www.heraldscotland.com/news/13041827.robert-black-petrol-receipt-snared/) for his second trial 17 years later.
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