Police tried for years to link Tobin to unsolved murders but he has taken his secrets to the grave
Serial killer Peter Tobin has died after falling ill in prison where he was serving three life sentences, ending hopes of possible answers to unsolved murders.
Tobin, 76, was taken from HMP Edinburgh to hospital, thought to be the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh, on Wednesday and subsequently died, Sky News reported. He had cancer.
The killer was serving life for raping and murdering 23-year-old Polish student, Angelika Kluk and hiding her body under the floor of a Glasgow church in 2006. He was also doing time for the 1991 murders of of 15-year-old schoolgirl Vicky Hamilton, of Redding, near Falkirk and Dinah McNicol, 18.
The teenager’s bodies were found 17 years later, buried in the garden of Tobin’s former home in Margate, Kent.
Dinah went missing while hitch-hiking home from a music festival in Liphook, Hampshire, while Vicky disappeared from a bus stop in Bathgate, West Lothian.
Angelika was working as a cleaner at a church in Anderston, Glasgow, when she vanished.
Tobin was reportedly in “total denial” about his crimes and never admitted the murders.
Detective Chief Superintendent Laura Thomson, head of major crime at Police Scotland, said after Tobin’s death was announced there had been “recent attempts to encourage him to do the right thing” and give police information about other crimes he may have committed, Sky reported.
Police have, for years, examined hundreds of other unsolved murders to see if they could also be linked to Tobin, in an operation codenamed Anagram. It ran from 2006 to 2011.
Officers believe Tobin had at least 40 aliases and 150 cars during his life to hide his tracks as he targeted vulnerable women.
In 2010, two addresses in Sussex – Marine Parade in Brighton and Station Road in Portslade – both the Scottish murderer’s former homes, became the subject of police searches for more than a week.
At the time, it was reported, that the operation had narrowed its focus to nine cases, however, the only ones Tobin was confirmed as having down were the three murders for which he was convicted.
As Anagram was postponed, Detective Superintendent David Swindle, of the then Strathclyde Police, who led the operation, voiced hope Tobin would give up his secrets before he died in prison.
But the killer has now taken those secrets with him to the grave.
Swindle said: “Peter Tobin is totally evil. He has absolutely no respect for human life.”
Tobin bludgeoned Kluk to death, then tied her up and stabbed her 16 times, and once, reportedly told a prison psychiatrist that he’d killed as many as 48 women, and taunted him to “prove it”.
The killer’s life of crime was said to have started when he was sent to a reform school at the age of seven and in his teens and early twenties he was jailed for burglary, forgery and conspiracy.
Tobin was sentenced to 14 years in 1994, for a double sex attack on two schoolgirls, abusing them after plying them with dugs and alcohol, and was a serial wife beater. All three of his former wives claim he attacked them.
The killer became the subject of a documentary in 2019, The Real Prime Suspect, with former Scotland Yard detective Jackie Malton interviewing police officers, forensic scientists and the legal team who brought him down.
“We know that Tobin convicted the last murder at quite a late age in life, he was 61 years of age. We also know that he committed two murders in 1991, and he buried the bodies in the garden of a house in margate in Kent,” Jackie says in a clip for the show.
Former senior investigating officer for the case, David Swindle, said: “I believe Tobin has definitely killed other people. You don’t get to 60 years of age and kill someone the way he did [for the first time].”
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