April Fabb was abducted and presumed murdered in rural Norfolk on the 8th of April 1969, whilst cycling to take a birthday present to her older's sister's fiancé. Her bike was found behind a hedge on a main road, and there were reports of a van in the vicinity at about the right time for that to have played a role in her disappearance. April was fifteen at the time, but her own birthday wasn't long after the date of her disappearance.
People have been trying to make Robert Black fit into the April Fabb case for almost as long as it became known that he'd used his white Fiat van to abduct, or attempt to abduct, abuse and kill girls ranging in age from seven or eight up to fourteen. The reason why the police have made no progress with that line of inquiry is brutally simple: although Black's first "abduction" and sexual assault on a little girl happened in 1958, when he was only eleven years old and he would have been around twenty-two when April disappeared, was that the van and the poster-delivery job which paid him to maintain the van and drive all over Britain and the near continent, was still some years in the future, as was the long-term lodging in an attic bedroom which allowed him the privacy to develop his fantasies and a stable base from which to operate.
In 1969, Black had already offended and was taking jobs which allowed him to photograph young girls at swimming pools etc, and he had, as a teenager committed the abduction of a younger girl and an attempt to keep her captive in an air-raid shelter, which case may have helped trigger the novelist John Fowles into writing "The Collector" once he realised that there were folk tales all over Europe about that sort of story, because it was something that really happened in much the same way in several different countries.
None of Black early offences involved a van, because he was on a bike or public transport, in Scotland the London area and even then in one part of London and had no stable address to keep a motor vehicle at, nor any notion to acquire one, until he was befriended by an un-named but evidently more experienced offender who told him how to get much stronger pornography from the continent, and that he would benefit from having a job which required a van.
Vans make it much easier to contain and transport a captive than a car: that is why the police always prefer to wait for a van to transport a suspect rather than putting them on the back seat of a police car.
In 1969, Black's offending was nasty and dangerous, but he hadn't been exposed to extreme porn, or corrupting advice, at that stage, he did not have a van, nor did he have a job which allowed for and paid for constant travel to a wide variety of locations, often involving drops in several different towns in a single day.
So, to maintain Black as a suspect in the April Fabb case, one has to abandon the van, which is the only reason anyone connects him with the case as a suspect. So, if it was him, there's a really big random element rather than a small one.
But that does not mean that study of Robert Black is of no value to the case.
Exemplar rather than Suspect!
One of the key things about the April Fabb case, was that the rural location limited the pool of potential suspects to a point where the police decided to talk to, and perhaps take blood-type samples from, every male between seventeen and seventy who'd been in the district at the time. (DNA was not a thing at the time, but blood types could be used to sift a group of suspects and eliminate all those who simply couldn't be guilty if stains linked to an offender were found.)
Now, if one looks at Robert Black as a well-documented example of a male who accords with much of what is known scientifically about the emergence of psychopathic traits between the ages of eleven and thirteen, according to whether or not family life was secure and stable for the male between the ages of nine and eleven (Black's life was never secure and stable at any point in his childhood!) one sees him commit his first attempt at a sexually-linked abduction at age eleven!
So, an offender following a similar pattern of offence-development as Robert Black, would have slipped the net used by police in the April Fabb case for the first six years of that development.
Another issue is that the lower age threshold in the police net for their "talk to everyone" policy is based on the age at which a boy might have been legally driving a van on the highway. It was the nineteen-sixties and it was a rural location. Many local boys would have been driving tractors on farms from the age of about thirteen and fifteen-year-olds might even have had jobs driving dumper trucks on a building site up to around the point where the school leaving age was raised to sixteen in 1972. In more recent times, police have stopped stolen cars (after high-speed pursuits) with boys of thirteen or even eleven found at the wheel.
The higher age threshold, where no men over seventy were suspected of any crime with a sexual motive, has since been thoroughly exploded by what is know of the lifelong career of Sidney Cooke, who is still in jail and still seen as a potential risk to little boys at the age of ninety-eight! His physical fitness is as remarkable as his mental unfitness.
So, if one uses Black as an exemplar, between the ages of eleven and sixteen rather than grabbing his victim and driving them away to meet their doom, he is manipulating or forcing little girls to walk to a structure (public toilet in the first instance and an old air-raid shelter in the other) where he has some privacy and attempts to control them. From sixteen onward he is making deliveries on a bicycle for a butcher and assaulting girls nearer his own age if he finds them home alone and they answer the door to accept delivery. It isn't known how often this happened because most of them were unwilling to tell their parents, let alone the police. In his twenties, he was in London and taking casual jobs which allowed him to spy and develop fantasies about young girls: it isn't proven that there were serious assaults but there might have been.
He was twenty-five before he made the life changes which enabled him to commit the crimes he is famous for.
Therefore, although an unknown offender similar to Black would have gone about April Fabb's abduction in several different ways depending on his own development, his access to vehicles and other resources and his practical knowledge of how to go about kidnaps, rape and murder, that very progression can be used to differentiate how different potential suspects would have gone about things given the state of those factors for them personally in the spring of 1969.
A young potential suspect with no access to a van would probably have had to walk (or cycle) April to a structure of some kind where she could be contained.
For a potential suspect to be trusted by an employer to make distant deliveries without any direct supervision, they couldn't, in 1969, have been much younger than Robert Black was in 1972! So for any potential suspect below the seventeen years of age threshold used by the original investigation, a structure in the countryside where April was abducted would have been most likely to be where she was contained and she might still be there for all we know.
A potential suspect above the high threshold of seventy years of age might have had the experience, money and contacts to recruit helpers, as Sidney Cooke did. And that allows not just for multiple suspects, but for the suspect group to be multi-generational.
A different unsolved case:
Medawar suggests that some of the above logic might lead one to think that Glennis Carruthers, who was murdered in the Clifton area of Bristol during a power cut in 1974, could have fallen victim to an emergent psychopath somewhat younger than the police might have been willing to consider. But, as she was a Physical Education student (and students of the College of Physical Education in Bedford were famously fit!) the youthful offender would have needed to be a strong boy and probably at least thirteen or fourteen years of age. A fourteen-year-old schoolboy could have matched her height and body-mass, though, and there was the element of darkness and surprise. And nothing about the offence speaks of any great prowess or experience (or even motive) so it's not unreasonable to suppose it might have been someone's first ever serious offence.
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