A child killer who evaded justice for more than 30 years has been found guilty of murder.
David Boyd took seven-year-old Nikki Allan to an abandoned building where he beat her with a brick and repeatedly stabbed her to death in 1992.
The wrong man was charged and found not guilty after a trial. Scientific breakthroughs enabled police in recent years to forensically link Boyd, once a neighbour of Nikki and her family in Sunderland, to the crime.
On Friday, a jury at Newcastle crown court found Boyd, 55, of Stockton-on-Tees, guilty of murder.
Cries of “yes” and “you bastard” could be heard in the public gallery, with relatives of Nikki hugging and shouting in jubilation as the verdict came in after two and a half hours’ deliberation.
Boyd was 25 at the time of the crime and the partner of a woman who babysat Nikki. He lived on the same floor of maisonettes as Nikki’s grandparents.
The court heard that Nikki must have known her killer and was lured to her death. One witness described seeing a young girl skipping alongside a man, now known to be Boyd.
The prosecutor Richard Wright KC told the court: “The little girl would occasionally drop behind and would then skip to catch up. This was Nikki Allan. She was with her killer and she was unwittingly skipping to her death.”
The court heard that Boyd forced Nikki through the boarded-up window of a derelict warehouse, killed her and tried to hide her body in a cellar.
Boyd denied murder but Wright, summing up the prosecution case, said: “He crushed her skull with a brick and he pulled up her top and exposed her chest and stabbed her again and again and again. And then he dragged her down in to that cellar, with her head bouncing off every step as he went.”
After a reinvestigation and a mass DNA screening of people in the area, police arrested Boyd in 2018. He claimed his DNA may have come to be on Nikki when he spat from the balcony of his flat while the girl played below.
But the prosecution suggested that the argument did not stack up. None of Boyd’s DNA was found on Nikki’s coat but traces that were a one-in-28,000 match were found on her cycling shorts, and a one-in-5,100 match on her T-shirt, the court heard.
“It is the clothing that her killer would have inevitably had to handle when forcing her into the building, picking her up inside and manhandling her,” Wright said.
The court heard evidence that Boyd once admitted to a probation officer to having sexual fantasies about naked young girls.
His previous convictions included a breach of the peace in 1986 after approaching four children aged eight to 10, grabbing one and asking for a kiss. In 1999, he was convicted of indecently assaulting a nine-year-old girl who was playing in a park by asking lewd questions and groping her.
Boyd chose not to give evidence at the trial. The defence counsel, Jason Pitter KC, said in his summing up that the case against Boyd was entirely circumstantial.
After the verdict, Det Ch Supt Lisa Theaker, the senior investigating officer in the case, said Nikki would be 37 today and who knew what her life could have been.
“This is a huge day for Nikki’s family,” she said. “I would like to thank them for their incredible strength – after 30 years, they have justice.”
Theaker said new forensic techniques were a key part of what had been “a complex and challenging case”.
It has been alleged that Boyd managed to slip through the net because police were convinced another neighbour, George Heron, was responsible for the crime. He was arrested and charged, and fervour in the north-east of England was so heightened that it was decided the trial should be held in Leeds.
Heron confessed to the crime but only under duress. The case against Heron unravelled quickly when the judge, after two weeks of legal argument, ruled that a number of police interview tapes were inadmissible because officers had used “oppressive methods” to obtain the confession.
When Heron was acquitted, 20 police officers had to restrain the packed public gallery.
Nikki’s mother, Sharon Henderson, campaigned for three decades to get justice for her daughter.
Boyd will be sentenced on 23 May.
