Peter Tobin Victims

Case background and investigation

Peter Tobin was a Scottish sex offender who was convicted of three murders in three separate trials between 2007 and 2009. According to STV News, his victims were Angelika Kluk, a 23-year-old Polish student, Vicky Hamilton, a 15-year-old schoolgirl, and Dinah McNicol, an 18-year-old from Essex. Hamilton and McNicol both disappeared in 1991, and their fates were unknown for 16 years.

Kluk was living at St Patrick's Church in the Anderston area of Glasgow, where she also worked as a cleaner, in September 2006. Tobin was working there as a handyman. According to STV News, he raped and stabbed her and hid her body beneath the floor of the church, where police found it on September 29, 2006. Wikipedia's account, drawing on court reporting, says she was last seen alive on September 24. Tobin was tried at the High Court in Edinburgh and convicted in May 2007 of her rape and murder. He was sentenced to life imprisonment with a minimum term of 21 years. STV reports that he had been released from prison in 2004 after serving part of a 14-year sentence for attacking two 14-year-old girls in Hampshire in 1993.

After that conviction, police examined where Tobin had lived in earlier decades. According to ABC News, which carried agency reporting from the trial, he had been living in Bathgate, West Lothian, when Vicky Hamilton vanished there in 1991. In November 2007 her remains were found at a house in Margate, Kent, that Tobin had occupied in the 1990s. The remains of Dinah McNicol, who disappeared in 1991 after hitchhiking in Hampshire, were found at the same property.

A jury at the High Court in Dundee convicted Tobin of Hamilton's murder in early December 2008 after a trial lasting about a month and less than three hours of deliberation, ABC News reported. The judge, Lord Emslie, set a minimum term of 30 years. In December 2009 a jury at Chelmsford Crown Court convicted him of McNicol's murder; according to Crime+Investigation UK, the trial lasted three days, the defence offered no evidence and the jury took 13 minutes. STV News describes him as serving a whole-life term at HMP Edinburgh.

Police set up a national inquiry, Operation Anagram, to establish whether Tobin was responsible for other crimes. David Swindle, the former detective superintendent who led it, told STV News that the team never established how many victims there were. According to Wikipedia, the operation was wound down in 2011 without further charges. Tobin was never convicted of any other killing.

Tobin died at the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh on October 8, 2022, aged 76. According to the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service, he had fallen in his cell at HMP Edinburgh on September 8, 2022. Because he died in legal custody a Fatal Accident Inquiry was mandatory, and its determination was published in October 2024.