Nikki Allan murder: Police release interview footage of the child killer who thought he got away with it

When police eventually knocked on his door he asked “what evidence have you got anyway”.

Prosecutor Richard Wright KC told jurors: “He made comments on arrest that you may think were significant.

“In particular he was recorded as saying ‘I haven’t got any involvement in it’, but then asking, ‘what evidence have you got anyway’.

“You will have to consider whether or not the reaction of man confronted with an historic allegation of murder of which he has no knowledge.

“Or rather, whether it was someone who had committed that murder and assumed for many years that he had got away with it wondering what evidence the police may have gathered against him.”

Boyd, who used alias names as a younger man, told police he was born in London and his father was in the army, so they moved around a lot.

He said his parents split up when he was a child and his mother remarried.

At the age of 14 he went Redworth Hall residential school in County Durham and left when he was 16.

At the age of 17 he went to Barnardos at Ryton Dene near Blaydon, Gateshead.

He left when he was 18 and moved into a boarding house.

He said he then moved to a resettlement unit in Chester le Street and then onto Sunderland.

Boyd indecently assaulted a nine year old girl at a park in Stockton, in April 1999. He had approached the victim and her friend, both of whom he did not know, and asked what they were doing.

He asked the victim if she had any knickers on and then sexually assaulted her when she did not answer.

The girls screamed and ran away and Boyd was picked out at an identity procedure and later convicted of indecent assault.

In 2000 Boyd told a doctor he had feelings of “guilt and shame” about his behaviour and said he had been “depressed and drunk and acted on impulse”.

He then told a probation officer he had had “dirty thoughts” about the victim and had began to feel excited about the thought of touching the girls.

Boyd said he later felt “ashamed and disgusted” with himself and blamed alcohol for leading him to behave like that.

Mr Wright KC told the jury the probation officer said in a report at that time: “He initially denied ever having any sexual thoughts about young children but subsequently informed me that, when he was approximately 22 years old, he began to fantasise about both adults and children, in particular young girls.

“He said he would think about young girls being naked and what it would be like to touch their body and have sexual intercourse but describes it as a phase he was through and something he grew out of.”

Boyd had also been convicted of breach of the peace in October 1986 after he approached four children, aged between eight and ten, in Sacriston, County Durham then grabbed one of them, a girl, by the arm and asked to kiss her before telling the group not to tell anyone.

At the time of his arrest he lived in Teesside, had no job and has no children that are known of.