Serial Killer Documentary - The Peter Tobin Story

Serial killers are not uniquely American.

Across the world, murderers commit crimes just as chilling.

Tobin has earned a reputation as a manipulator and pathological liar.

In the UK, one of the most notorious is Peter Tobin. Over the course of 15 years, Peter Tobin killed a string of young women.

He's 60 years old with a criminal history of serious sex offenses.

Tobin showed a chilling calculation.

Gave a false name and details, and he has since vanished.

This case became one of the biggest cases in Scottish history.

In prison, he has boasted of killing 48 women. Peter Tobin is one of Britain's most prolific criminals.

Tobin subjected his victims to horrific acts.

He has this view of who women are. He wants to rape them, he wants to violate them.

Yet for decades, Tobin deceived everyone.

How are they describing Peter Tobin? Hey, nice guy, personable, people like him.

Even those closest to him were fools.

I thought he only did this to me.

I have never been so scared in my entire life.

I'm Beth Karras, and this is Living With a Serial Killer.

September 27th, 2006, Glasgow, Scotland.

Scottish police are looking for a young Polish woman who had been reported missing two days earlier.

When we heard of the story originally, it was about a missing person. It was a young woman concerned. She was from a different country.

Angelika Klute, she was a well-educated person from Poland. She came to Glasgow to make money to better her lifestyle.

Angelica Cluck had come to Glasgow on a working holiday and very quickly found some work at St. Patrick's Catholic Church. But when police searched the church where Angelica was last seen, there's no sign of her.

Police conducted a detailed search of the church where Angelica Cluck had been staying. The 23-year-old was last seen helping the church handyman, known as Pat McLaughlin.

So who is Pat McLaughlin? And could he somehow be involved in Angelica's disappearance?

At first blush, there's nothing about Patrick McLaughlin that's suspicious. There's nothing about him that would lead anybody to believe that he's involved in anything nefarious.

Everyone liked Patrick McLaughlin. He was a very helpful individual.

He was described as personable. He had a bit of charm about him. And he seemed to get on well with Angelica. He actually spoke to the police.

The police officer took a statement from him. He gave a statement in the name of Patrick McLaughlin when he had last seen her.

He claims that he doesn't know where she is.

And that's pretty much the end of the story.

There's really nothing to suggest anything terribly suspicious going on.

But within a day, detectives are forced to re-evaluate their assessment of McLaughlin.

The police officers decide they want to go back and talk to Patrick McLaughlin again.

Well, suddenly, Patrick McLaughlin is gone.

Whenever you have an individual like this, a witness like this.

They are very, very crucial.

So for this witness to just disappear, I think this is when he goes from witness to suspect.

Locating McLaughlin becomes a major priority, and police turn to the media for help.

In my experience, using the media to track down suspects, witnesses, it is the best way to do it.

Patrick McLaughlin's face is soon appearing on newspapers and news bulletins across the country. More than 400 miles away from Glasgow, on England's south coast, the image of Pat McLaughlin comes as a shock to one woman in particular.

My aunt phoned me at 9.15 in the morning and said, turn on the television.

I said, which channel? She said, any channel. So I turned the television on in the lounge and I just screamed. I screamed.

It's an image Kathy Wilson had never expected to see again. And it raises uncomfortable truths for her teenage son, Daniel.

Daniel came rushing down the staircase. What is it, mum?

And I just sort of shakily pointed at the TV and he's going, what?

And I said, him. And he said, who is it? And I said, it's your father.

And as the minutes passed on, I read the name again and I'm thinking the name's wrong.

The name Kathy Wilson knows this man by is Peter Tobin. And she is all too aware that he is extremely dangerous.

And then what kicked in was the fear that I've been living with for years and years and years.

He's on the run. He's coming for me.

A really significant part of this investigation was when the police received a response saying, this is not Pat McLaughlin. This is Peter Tobin. He is a convicted sex offender.

This is huge in the investigation.

In 1993, he was convicted for brutally sexually assaulting two teenagers.

He's 60 years old.

With a criminal history of serious sex offenses, including the rape of a 14-year-old girl.

He is a convicted pedophile.

Detectives are already starting to feel a little anxious about what may have happened to Ms.

Klug.

We've got enough here that we need to find him, we need to find him quickly, and we need to talk to him.

Police begin a search into Tobin's past in an effort to turn up leads. Kathy Wilson had first met Peter Tobin in the English coastal town of Brighton in 1986. Only 16 years old at the time, Kathy had recently left the home she shared with her grandparents, who had raised her after her own mother had died. Parentless and jobless, she found herself immediately drawn to the charismatic Tobin, who was 30 years her senior.

I first met Peter Tobin in a biker's bar, and I had a little 50cc motorbike, and outside were all the bikes lined up, Harley Davidsons. My little one was just on the end, but I loved it in there. There were seven or eight of us. He had the whole table enthralled with the stories. No one else was talking.

We were just listening to him in rapture. He said that he was running a hotel. and that he could get me a job in the bar at the hotel on the reception. And although that wasn't exactly what I wanted to do, it was work, it was local, and I liked him. And I thought, well, there's nothing else that I've got to lose, really.

I might as well have a go.

When I got there, of course, it was just one double bed, so I was expected to sleep with him. But I'd liked him, so I didn't feel too shabby about doing that. And we got on really well, so why not?

But Kathy quickly learns there is no job for her at the hotel.

I don't recall being happy or unhappy, just confused and without a job.

Although there is no job for her to do, Kathy decides to try to make the most of her situation.

Really, this was just someone that I knew, that I liked, I felt happy with.

So I thought I'll put all of my efforts and energy into being a homemaker. So I'd asked him in the morning what he'd like for dinner and he'd said a pork chop. So I grilled what I thought was a perfectly adequate chop with a crispy, fatty rim to it and a nice mix of vegetables to go with it, expecting him to be pleased with me.

And he didn't.

He picked the plate up and he just threw it at the wall behind my head. It missed me by inches. That was my first insight into how it was going to be.

Despite Tobin's senseless, violent outburst, the teenage Kathy stays with him and over the following months begins to accept his erratic behavior.

I look back now and I really think it's important people understand how mental abuse in the hands of someone who's skilled can happen very quickly before you've even known it.

The phenomenon that's unfolding is often referred to as coercive control. a term that psychologists use for the abusive relationship, that kind of testing of tolerance that happens to see how much she'll put up with and how much he can get away with.

So coercive control usually starts with really small, little messages, but they build up and it becomes incredibly hard to get out.

And to leave.

I was just absolutely determined that I was going to make the best relationship I possibly could. Behind there definitely was the feeling that I can't go home and I've got nowhere else to go.

Could Kathy have seen anything in those early days to indicate that the man she was letting into her life would become one of Britain's most notorious criminals?

Peter Tobin is a predator. That is who he is.

Today's verdict confirms Peter Tobin is one of Britain's most prolific criminals.

The fact that somebody could carry out a crime like this on a young girl in a church of all places, it's just shocking.

Friday, September 29th, 2006, Glasgow, Scotland. Missing Polish student Angelika Kluck had not been seen for five days. Police suspect the last person she was seen with, 60-year-old Peter Tobin, is somehow involved in her disappearance. But Tobin himself has now gone missing. And as details of Tobin's background come to light, detectives have serious concerns for Angelika's safety.

The police have a lot of red flags going up at this point in the investigation. Peter Tobin has lied about his name. He was the last person to see Angelica alive. He has basically fled the scene. So this really does set their alarm bells ringing.

With no clues as to Peter Tobin's whereabouts, experienced Detective David Swindle is brought in to manage the case.

I was contacted as a senior investigating officer because the police had discovered that the person that Angelica had been last seen with was actually Peter Tobin, the missing sex offender.

So now we've got to start doing the background on Peter Tobin and start to track down this guy's experience and where he has been within the country.

Is there anything in Peter Tobin's past that could provide a clearer picture of the suspect?

Running the criminal history of Peter Tobin.

Detectives find out that in 1993, he was convicted for brutally sexually assaulting two teenagers.

Detectives discover that 12 years earlier, Peter Tobin had received a 14-year prison sentence for the sexual assault of two teenage girls in Havant, southern England. Shockingly, Tobin had carried out this brutal attack in his own home.

He raped and almost killed two young girls.

They were really lucky to escape with their lives. This is a man who is capable of serious harm.

After serving only 10 years of his sentence, Tobin was released in 2004. But as investigators look at the details of Tobin's previous crime, one key question seems relevant. How did Tobin get these young women into his home in the first place?

The two teenage girls that Tobin attacked, he gets them in his flat. He makes them drink alcohol. And that really is testament to this predatory and this manipulative nature of Tobin.

Angelica had only known Peter Tobin under the alias Pat McLaughlin for a short time when she went missing. Could Tobin have lured and manipulated her just as he lured those teenage girls?

Angelica had known Tobin for around about six weeks, and that's a relatively short period of time. So for him to have been able to gain her trust in that time, that really does tell us how manipulative this individual is.

It seems Peter Tobin has been manipulating women all of his life. In 1987, he successfully manipulated Kathy Wilson into making a life-altering decision by lying about a health scare.

He told me he had cancer of the testicles, and he was going to have an operation, a laser operation, and he wouldn't be able to have children after that.

We'd only been.

Together three or four months, but I thought I'm probably going to want to have children at some point in my life. Then I ought to have one now, really, which is crazy, because I was 16 and a half. I didn't have a job. I had no real.

Income of my own.

Kathleen quickly becomes pregnant, but four months later, when she accompanies Tobin to his operation, she talks to the surgeon and discovers that she's been duped.

I said, isn't it lucky that I was able to get pregnant before this? this operation takes place, and the doctor surgeon just looked at me and said, what do you mean? I said, well, after he has this laser treatment, he won't be able to have children anymore. And the doctor turned around to me and said, no, he's going to lose one or two percent of his ability, if that, probably none at all. That was a watershed moment for me.

I've been completely conned because I wouldn't have chosen to have a child at 16 by any stretch of the imagination. It's stupid, stupid He had changed the direction of my life.

Tobin had out and out tricked Kathy into getting pregnant.

When we look at men who are habitually abusive towards women, pathological lying is something we come across very often. And these men make themselves indispensable. And in the process of doing that, they really do take control of women's lives.

So I think before I got pregnant, most of the abuse, which now I understand was abuse, was mental.

It was wearing me down, belittling me, making me feel small.

But it seemed once I was pregnant, and particularly when I started to show, he started to get physically aggressive with me. But I think now that having accepted that level of violence, he knew then that he was able to go further.

Four days before Christmas in 1987, Kathy gives birth to her son Daniel. And for a moment, everything changes.

The second that my baby was put into my arms, not just the pain, but the disappointment in Peter, they all were bundled into the same pile of, that's all forgotten now.

Because look what I've got. And there's nothing quite like the feeling of that.

I don't think.

Becoming a mother is a deeply significant moment in Kathy's life.

It's important to remember that Kathy had, if you will, a hole in her heart from her own childhood. It wasn't a happy childhood and she didn't have two parents and she never knew her father.

My mom is like a butterfly, I think. That's how I describe her.

She's flitting from one thing to another, never stopping very long, looking beautiful all the time. because when she was there and she was lucid, she was a fantastic mother.

But my mother was taking drugs.

I now believe quite hardcore drugs at that age, but I didn't even know what drugs were.

I didn't understand it. My mother was deteriorating.

Our whole situation was deteriorating.

We were just spiraling down.

When Kathy was six, her mother died. But it was only when Kathy turned 16 she learned that her mother had killed herself with a heroin overdose. Just a few months later was when she met Peter Tobin.

For Kathy to jump into that relationship at 16, on the one hand, can.

Seem really risky.

But having a history of abuse often leaves people more vulnerable. to abuse later on in life.

Glasgow, Scotland, Friday, September 29th, 2006. Polish student Angelika Kluck has now been missing for five days. Police have established that the last person to be seen with her was Peter Tobin, a registered sex offender who is now also missing. The pressure is on for lead investigator David Swindle and his team. Could they have missed something vital at the church where Angelica and Tobin were last seen?

What I asked for was a better search of the church to be done. We arranged for specialist search teams to examine the church. And within, I think it was probably two hours, a woman's body was found underneath the church.

The grim decision.

Was made at around 8 o'clock last night. Forensic officers have spent the night gathering evidence at the chapel.

Because of what we know, there's no doubt this is going to be Angelica. Well, now we've got something that we didn't have before. We've got a body, and we now have a scene that needs to be processed.

Forensic biologist Carol Rogers is tasked with conducting the initial assessment. But even accessing the body is no easy task.

My first impression of the crime scene itself, I can't believe how small the trapdoor was. Once I went down in, I could see clearly she had what appeared to be multiple stab injuries to her chest. And she also had facial injuries. She had insulating tape wrapped around her mouth. And there was a lot of blood around about her face, and her face did look quite swollen.

The crime scene made it clear that Angelica had been subjected to horrific final moments.

She was fully clothed, but the fly of her trousers was unbuttoned. And also her shirt and bra were pushed up.

To expose her abdomen and her breasts.

So it was quite apparent from just the way her clothing was that this was going to be a sexually motivated murder.

When Angelica's identity is confirmed, the severity of the crime remains shocking for even the most experienced officers.

The horrific murder of Angelica Kluke is something that I will always remember. And the ferocity of how she was killed The.

Fact that somebody could carry out a crime like this on a young girl in a church of.

All places, it's just shocking. The whole thing is just such a tragic story.

But can the scene at the church help investigators catch the man responsible?

The bad news is that we've now verified that Angelica's dead. The good news is that the evidence gleaned from this scene is a treasure trove.

Underneath the floor was bloodstained clothing. There was a knife and other things.

And on Angelica's body itself, investigators discover traces of semen. With DNA samples available, will police finally be able to prove that missing sex offender Peter Tobin is their man?

We need DNA results as quickly as possible. Whosever semen that belongs to that is going to be the killer.

And if DNA proves the murderer is Peter Tobin, is it possible he's killed before?

The ferocity of the killing, the way that Peter Tobin had concealed Angelica's body under the church, this wasn't, in my mind, the first time that this person had killed.

This behaviour doesn't just emerge overnight. This is behavior that develops over a series of years and even decades. There would have been an escalation up to this. She would not have been his first victim.

As suspicions grow that Peter Tobin is not a first-time killer, Swindle decides to set up a second, separate investigation.

All of the things that Superintendent Swindle has put together here now that is leading him to believe... that we now have a serial killer, that puts the wheels in motion for Operation Anagram.

Operation Anagram turns a traditional murder investigation on its head. Instead of searching for a killer, police will now be searching for victims.

It is unusual to have an operation like Operation Anagram. Here, they have the potential to clear up not just this case, but many, many others.

It's something that had never been done before and I don't think it's been done again. And basically, I called it investigative analysis of a serial killer.

But with Tobin himself missing and much of his past history as yet unknown, how can investigators start to look for other possible victims?

So now we need to build a timeline for Peter Tobin and start to track down this guy's experience and where he has been within the country.

But police will find that Tobin had worked hard to ensure much of his life remained a mystery. In 1988, in Brighton, England, even after having had a son with him, Kathy Wilson was beginning to realize that she knew very little about Tobin.

I don't recall any particular bonding between Peter and Daniel.

Peter was going out full days at a time, doing what I really don't know. And I never questioned him. because I didn't really care. He wasn't in the house. He wasn't bothering me. I do wonder what he was up to. Peter was spending a lot of time at the Catholic Church, and then he said one day that the priest was very uncomfortable about the fact that our son was out of wedlock and that we really.

Ought to be married.

I don't even recall getting down on the one-me.

Kind of proposal.

It was just an acceptance that the next stage of my life involved getting married.

But in getting married to Tobin... Kathy uncovered a secret that he had been hiding from her.

Having had the idea proposed by the priests at the Catholic Church, which was my understanding, when it came to it, they wouldn't marry us there because he'd been divorced.

Well, this was the first time I even heard that.

He'd had a wife.

Kathy had discovered that Tobin had been married before, but what she didn't yet know were the horrors that being the wife of Peter Tobin could entail. Coming up, is Peter Tobin's killing driven by a psychopathic personality?

He said, I'll kill your son if you ever leave me. I have never been so scared in my entire life.

Animal mutilation. The extreme domestic abuse. These are all early indicators of progression towards more serious conduct.

Following the discovery of Angelica Cluck's body, police in Scotland are hunting for lead suspect Peter Tobin. They have also opened a second investigation, looking into the theory that Peter Tobin is a serial killer.

We've got a viable suspect, so what do we do? We start putting out feelers because we want to find people that are associated with Peter Tobin.

But when investigators speak to those who know Tobin, will those closest to him confirm his violent, dangerous profile?

How are they describing Peter Tobin? Hey, nice guy, personable, people like him.

This is someone that looked normal, a normal person.

But police know Tobin is a violent offender. So does his ability to hide that from people tell them anything?

There is a certain sort of murderer who is very accomplished at hiding his true identity from the general public.

When police track down Tobin's first wife, Margaret, a very different picture emerges.

One thing that she talks about that separates Tobin from everything that we've heard in a positive way is that their relationship through the marriage, he was brutal.

She was kept prisoner in her house in the east end of Glasgow by Tobin. And Tobin had seriously assaulted her.

The controlling and abusive behaviour that we see from Tobin towards his wife is a clear indication of somebody for whom other human beings do not have a real identity, are not seen as truly human. It's a type of controlling behavior that is symptomatic of a psychopath.

The psychopath feels absolutely nothing, no compunction about harming others, and an inability to express any remorse or shame or guilt when they do something wrong.

By all accounts, Peter Tobin is on that spectrum.

Completely unaware of what Tobin had put his first wife Margaret through, Kathy begins her marriage to Tobin as a new mother in 1989. But only a few months later, Tobin tells her they'll be moving away.

And then announces it's in a place called Bathgate. God, I don't know where Bathgate is.

In Scotland. I think I must have just been incredulous.

Moving Kathy to the other end of the country, away from everyone she knows and everything she's familiar with, it really does appear to be yet another effort by Peter Tobin to isolate his wife, and one of the hallmarks of psychological domestic violence.

In Bathgate, Scotland, Cathy is now totally alone and hundreds of miles from anyone she knows.

As soon as he got me up there, he isolated me even further from everyone. I certainly was being fully now locked down in the property. I wasn't able to go out of the house except for the shops and that was an accompanied visit. I really felt that I had to now leave this. There was nothing for me to stay for at all. I had no idea how Peter was going to react to.

Me asking for a divorce at all.

I just knew that the point I was going to ask had to be a point where he was very calm. And I just think I said simply, this isn't working.

I need a divorce.

The next thing I know, he's literally picked Daniel up from the landing next to him and dangled him over the staircase. And he said, I'll drop your son if you ever leave me. I'll kill your son if you ever leave me. And I just saw Daniel there and his eyes were scared.

And the only job I have in my.

Life, the only job I have in my life is to protect him.

And I'm Screwing it up.

So I said immediately, you're right. It was a really, really silly idea. I don't know where I got that from. Put it down your back.

Locked up in her own home and terrorized by Tobin, escape seems impossible until one day Tobin makes a mistake.

For some reason, I went and checked the door and it hadn't been locked. The front door hadn't been locked. It just came over me, you've got to go now. So that was it. So I literally grabbed a carry bag with some clothes on for Daniel and a soft toy for him. I grabbed a pot of money and must have got a cab to the coach station. The guy was convinced that I was going to get killed and Daniel wouldn't have me anymore.

But then the bus arrives. And I can't believe it. I'd got away.

Probably.

I got away.

But will Kathy ever be truly free of Peter Tobin? It's late September 2006, and police in Glasgow, Scotland, are continuing their search for Peter Tobin, the man they suspect of raping and murdering Angelica Cluck. But with no trace of Tobin for several days, and his deadly past becoming clearer, detectives fear he may have escaped.

At this point in the investigation, Peter Tobin's become a ghost.

When Peter Tobin realized that the heat was on, that there was a big investigation regarding Angelica Kluk, he left the scene.

So now the challenge is to find Tobin.

After no sightings for a week, on Sunday, October 1st, police in London, 300 miles from the crime scene, receive a call.

They receive a tip from a hospital in London that a person who looks like Peter Tobin had checked in there calling himself John Kelly and complaining about heart issues.

Could this patient John Kelly really be Peter Tobin? And if so, why, after a week of careful evasion, has he taken the risk of going somewhere as public as a hospital?

We often find with serial killers, the most important thing for them is meeting their own needs. So if he needed hospital treatment for something, he would just go and get it.

But if this patient does turn out to be Tobin, are police ready to charge him with Angelica's killing? The DNA tests of the semen from the crime scene have not yet produced a profile. so police need a different reason to be able to take Tobin back to Scotland.

At this point in the investigation, their DNA results that they're waiting for are not back. However, we want to talk to Peter Tobin, so we just take a different route to get there.

We didn't have the DNA evidence, so I dispatched a team to London. We got a warrant. An arrest warrant because he was a missing sex offender and he didn't comply with his sex offender conditions. So he was arrested on that and brought back to Scotland by uniformed officers.

Finally, police have Peter Tobin in custody. Peter Tobin arrives in Scotland on October 1st, 2006 and is taken in for interrogation.

He just denies it all. He's a very controlling individual. He wants to control the interview and he denies any involvement in that.

But by this stage, police don't need Tobin to confess. Just one day after his arrest, the forensic analysis of the semen from the crime scene provides investigators with a DNA profile.

Now we're in the investigation where we have the DNA results back and it hits on Peter Tobin in the system.

This match alone is virtually irrefutable proof that Tobin is Angelica's killer. But following Tobin's arrest, forensic officers have uncovered even more shocking evidence to be used against him.

When Peter Tobin was arrested, his clothing and.

His personal effects were seized by the police. So we examined a T-shirt that he was wearing. And on the lower front of the T-shirt, we found a mixture of semen, and quite a large amount of DNA that could have come from Angelika Kluk.

We also found blood on his watch.

With such a wealth of forensic evidence, Tobin is swiftly charged with Angelika's murder. But Operation Anagram remains in full force, with detectives determined to prove correct their theory that Tobin has many more victims. Coming up, Peter Tobin goes on trial.

This is the man who murdered Angelica Klug. Police investigating that crime realized that Tobin could also have been behind one of Scotland's longest-running missing persons inquiries.

But are there more victims?

So the why question here is, are we in fact dealing with a serial killer?

On March 23rd, 2007, Peter Tobin goes on trial for the murder of Angelica Kluck. But even in court, Tobin refuses to concede anything.

Even with all the evidence against him, Angelica's blood on his watch, the DNA, I'm not surprised at all that Peter Tobin says, not guilty.

He believes that he is able, by pleading not guilty, to control and manage this situation. This is somebody who believes that he can control the world around him.

As Tobin continues to deny his involvement, the horrific details of Angelica's murder are revealed to the jury.

This is the man who murdered Angelica Klug. Tobin had beaten, raped and stabbed her to death, then concealed her body under the floorboards in this church, just feet from the confessional.

After just three and a half hours of deliberation, the jury returns with a verdict. Tobin is found guilty and is given a life sentence with a minimum term of 21 years. But one question remains.

So the question is, are we in fact dealing with a serial killer?

After he was convicted of Angelica Klux, that's when we went public. He's in prison. He's not going anywhere. He's not going to kill anyone else. So we went over with Operation Anagram and conducted searches and interviewing other people.

And Operation Anagram has a key witness, Kathy Wilson, who had gone to police as soon as she learned of Tobin's connection to Angelica.

She saw Peter Tobin's face, realized his name was out there in connection with this overall investigation.

She went directly to police.

And this busted the whole thing wide open on who Peter Tobin really is.

Kathy Wilson could speak about his behavior and other things about him. And that was really important. And she was what you call a significant witness.

Kathy Wilson is interviewed by officers from Operation Anagram on several occasions and for many hours. During these interviews, she explains that she had left Tobin more than 15 years ago. But could information from her past life with him help police with their investigation now? Cathy tells police that after fleeing Tobin's Bathgate home in 1990, she established a new life for herself on England's south coast. But within six months, Tobin had managed to re-establish contact.

I agreed to let Peter come down from Scotland and that we would talk, we would walk along the beach.

He was really... really trying to get me to come back to him.

But too much had happened and my awareness was that there was no circumstances I would be allowed to live my life again. If I even considered going back with him. So I was pretty strong on that point. But I did say I don't want to stop me seeing Daniel at all.

It might seem really hard to comprehend why Kathy would have given him contact, given everything that he'd done. As some memories possibly started to become less powerful for her, maybe the desire for her son to have a father was greater than the desire to keep him away.

By early 1991, Peter Tobin was paying regular visits to Kathy and Daniel. Eventually, she allows Tobin to spend an afternoon alone with their son.

I was so desperate for Daniel to have both parents that I've done some things really that are quite ridiculous if you look at them from outside.

Tobin had promised to return Daniel that same afternoon, but when evening comes, there's no sign of either of them and panic starts to set in for Kathy.

By 6.30, I was immediately in full panic mode. I know he's with his father, but he should be home. It was late in the evening when I got a phone call from him to say that he'd gone back up to Scotland and that I would never see him or my son again. He said, I'm going to leave the country first thing in the morning, and that's it.

You're not seeing either of us again.

Kathy's act of conciliatory kindness backfires when Peter Tobin takes that child and essentially kidnaps him back to Scotland.

Kathy, of course, is reeling.

She goes to the police. Well, the police can't do anything because he's the legal father. It's a civil matter. It's a child custody case.

Desperate, Kathy turns to the courts for help.

I was in court at 9 o'clock the following morning.

The judge said, well, all I can offer you at the moment is I can give you sole custody. Unfortunately, I can only make it valid in England.

Cathy has only one choice.

She needs to find a way to get Daniel back across the border from Scotland to England if she's going to make that decree take effect.

So I decided to hatch a plan. I was 17 years old and absolutely petrified. I phoned Peter and I said, you win.

I'm coming up.

Less than a year after having escaped from Tobin's Bathgate home, Kathy is heading back with no idea of the horrors that await her.

And for three days and nights, I had to do whatever it was that he wanted me to do.

Took me three days of hell, actually. Three days of hell.

In 1991, Peter Tobin kidnapped his two-year-old son, Daniel, taking him hundreds of miles away from his mother, Kathy, across the Scottish border to a town called Bathgate. Kathy knows that her only chance to save her son is to get Tobin to bring him back to England, where she can regain custody. But that involves Kathy returning to Scotland.

I was quite convinced that when I got up there, he would punish me for leaving him. This was his first opportunity to be back in control. And it was in the family house. And I had absolutely no idea if I was going to come home alive.

Kathy's plan is to try to convince Tobin that they could get back together if he is willing to move to England with her.

And for three days and nights, I had to do whatever it was that he wanted me to do. to prove to him that I was going to be going back with him again if he was to deign to move further south with me. And that involved very uncomfortable sex in very uncomfortable places, repeatedly, angrily.

It was disgusting.

He would want to perform in front of Daniel, who was obviously only a child.

But he did that.

Because he was testing me to see if I was really prepared to give it a go.

And I passed the test. Took me three days. Of hell, actually. Three days of hell.

Kathy's plan works. After three days, Tobin agrees to drive them all back south. And once back in Portsmouth, court bailiffs step in to return Daniel to Kathy. 16 years later, Kathy tells investigators from Operation Anagram the horrifying story.

For me, what she went through, you could never imagine that. You could never imagine it. This is a woman that was, I call her the living victim. She survived.

Although tragic, Kathy's story has confirmed a key address and a date for Operation Anagram. Could Tobin's presence in Bathgate in 1991 be the information investigators need to connect Tobin to another murder?

So Kathy Wilson provides some critical information about an address that she lived with Tobin in 1991. And at the same time, there is a missing person case that develops very nearby with a girl named Vicki Hamilton.

Vicki Hamilton was a 15-year-old schoolgirl who had suddenly disappeared without a trace in 1991.

This case became one of the biggest missing person cases in Scottish history.

I remember it being all over the news.

I remember her picture being on milk cartons and picture being on the local bus station.

So I remembered it very clearly.

The only evidence that was ever developed in Vicki Hamilton's disappearance was her purse found at a bus station that appeared to have been discarded at that location.

Now, 16 years after her disappearance, police have established that Peter Tobin, the convicted murderer and pedophile, was living only a few miles from where Vicki Hamilton had last been seen. Investigators immediately searched Tobin's former Bathgate residence.

Police stripped the house back to exactly how it had been when Tobin lived there.

Loding and Borders Police searched the house where Tobin lived in Bathgate. and they found a knife in the attic.

And they uncover a knife that still has particles of human skin on the knife itself.

Could these skin particles be the first step in proving that Peter Tobin is a serial killer? Immediately, forensic officers are tasked with obtaining a DNA profile from the knife. And when the results come back, it is exactly as investigators had feared.

Human tissue, human blood.

On this knife comes back to Vicki Hamilton. That is a paradigm shift in the investigation. That is a big change right there.

Police are now convinced Peter Tobin is responsible for Vicki Hamilton's murder, but they need more.

So here's the dilemma that they face, even with this great, great evidence. At this point in time, they don't have a body, although they've got a pretty good indication here that something nefarious has happened.

To Vicki Hamilton.

Can the fact that Tobin hid the knife in a former home offer investigators a lead?

The fact that he has just discarded the knife in the attic of this house would appear to be, you know, something quite shocking, really. And I think perhaps this could be down to his arrogance.

So he's keeping trophies. He's keeping weapons.

So these are all little mementos that he keeps, and he keeps them in his house.

Could Tobin have hidden vital evidence or maybe even bodies in other homes he had lived in? It's now critical investigators assemble a detailed picture of Tobin's previous addresses. But building a timeline is easier said than done.

Tobin is moving all over the country. All sorts of different addresses, different locations, different areas. He's changing his name. He's trying to continue to throw that fog out there to muddy up who he is and where he is.

Now, Kathy Wilson can help investigators track Tobin's movements for the 15 years they were together. Just how many victims will investigators uncover? Kathy Wilson has helped investigators place Peter Tobin in Bathgate, Scotland in 1991, the same time and place that schoolgirl Vicki Hamilton went missing. Thanks to Kathy, police found a knife with Vicki's DNA on it at Tobin's former address. But where is Vicki's body? Could Tobin's former homes harbor other secrets? Could there be more victims?

So with all of my intensive questioning with the police, they'd got all the previous addresses we'd lived at together, because some of them were just flitting addresses which no one would have known about. And they started systematically searching them, basically.

As police begin searching properties, they also look into unsolved missing persons files and come across the case of 16-year-old Dinah McNichol, who went missing after hitchhiking home from a music festival in southern England in 1991.

Ina McNichol went missing at the Lip Hook Festival. She was thumbing a lift with her boyfriend. A Scottish man picked him up. A nice Scottish man in a car that spoke to her.

Midway through their hitchhike journey, Dinah's friend exited the vehicle. leaving Dinah to continue her journey alone with this unidentified Scottish driver. Could that driver have been Peter Tobin?

So in the case of Dinah McNichol, a missing person case for 16 years, there's been no evidence of where she went, and the only evidence that they have is use of her debit card or ATM card after she was missing.

Could the locations where Dinah's card had been used to withdraw money reveal the path of her journey?

So starting to piece it all together, her bank card had been used all the way through the route there. There had been withdrawals on it to take it out.

But when investigators check the location of the withdrawals, they don't point to the direction of Dinah's home. Instead, they show the card was used in Brighton and another town several hours south of where Dinah lived.

What's interesting about the usage of this.

ATM card that McNichol had is that it is being traced back to a.

Town called Margate.

And crucially, Margate is one of the locations that Kathy Wilson has told investigators Peter Tobin once lived.

Tobin moved to Margate after living in Bathgate, and he lived in a house there. This was in 1991, and this became really interesting to the police in their investigation.

With Margate now a possible place of interest, police go back to Cathy. Could Tobin have hidden anything there?

And I suppose he was only there a little while. It wasn't very long.

But that was the property that we're next on to. but they obviously thought it was quite a good candidate of a place where someone might be.

On November 14th, 2007, police arrive at Peter Tobin's former home in Margate.

Well, they get down there, they're going to search for more evidence, and one of the neighbours conveys the fact that there's a lot of strange going on over there because they remember when Tobin was there.

His next-door neighbour told quite an intriguing story. about how he discovered Tobin digging in the back garden one day and just.

Said, what are you doing?

Tobin was digging a huge hole in the garden. And he remembers the size of it. Tobin was down there, and it was above his head. And he was saying that it was a sandpit.

This was way deeper than it needed to be for a child's sandpit. So this was something that stood out as significant for that neighbour, and it would have got the police thinking.

There was sufficient there to suspect Perhaps Dana was concealed in that and got them.

Well, that immediately sets them into searching the area of the sand pit, which they do, and they discover a body. It's not the body that they expected or were looking for.

If the body isn't Dinah McNichols, whose is it?

I can remember to this day what I was doing when I got the phone call. They say that they had found a body. And I thought that body was Dinah. I said, no, it's Vicki Hamilton. And they could tell by the clothing and everything that it was Vicki Hamilton. I thought, right, this is unbelievable.

But could Dinah McNichol also be buried here?

And then eventually they dig into the garden and they find McNichol buried in the garden.

For swindle the discovery is proof of what he has long suspected that tobin is a serial killer but there can be no sense of celebration.

Vicky hamilton and dynamic nicole endured horrendous sadistic attacks there was gagging there was beans There was rape. What they had gone through, we'll never imagine. No one can ever imagine what happened to these young women.

With bodies, weapons and an emerging timeline, the case against Tobin seems strong. But all this really does is link the girls to Tobin's properties. can Swindle find irrefutable evidence that directly proves Peter Tobin is their killer?

So a decision is made to go back and re-examine evidence that had been gathered.

When Vicky Hamilton went missing, part of the missing person investigation resulted in them recovering Vicky Hamilton's purse at the bus station in Edinburgh. And that purse was retained. With the advancement of technology, they managed to identify the DNA on that purse.

Will the DNA on the purse conclusively link Tobin to Vicki Hamilton?

Everyone's excited that this is going to be Peter Tobin, and it's not.

But here's the hook.

The DNA profile is so close to Peter Tobin that it could not be anything other than a family member, a relative.

Immediately, police head back to Kathy Wilson and her son Daniel. Could familial DNA be the forensic smoking gun? In late 2007, officers from Operation Antigram uncovered the bodies of Vicki Hamilton and Dinah McNichol, buried in a home previously owned by convicted murderer Peter Tobin. For his former wife, Kathy Wilson, the latest revelations of Tobin's brutality are hard to process.

I've now accepted that this is the person he is, I think. But the revelations that keep coming out about this man just don't stop. There's no end to it.

Dinah's hands and feet had been bound, her mouth gagged to stop her screaming. The 18-year-old's body gave up few secrets when dug from Tobin's garden nearly two decades after she disappeared. The body of Vicky Hamilton had been found alongside that of Dinah McNichol.

The girls were dismembered, so if you ever doubted at any point that this was his first murder up in Scotland, you could quite clearly see now that he's a very capable of really obscene, disgusting, gruesome kind of acts. He'd just abandoned them. and moved on to someone else. He really has no remorse in his body at all.

Not a single bit.

When we have crimes like these, we need to remember that survivors who are living with the impact of it, the trauma is everlasting.

I think probably the underlying thought that I had was that I'd got away. Then I started to wonder how I'd got away and what had I done differently to make me get away. But the bottom line was that I had got away, but I should be dead. And the only conclusion I came from all of that overthinking, which I still believe now, is the reason he didn't kill me is because I gave him a son. And something about having a son changed his view of me.

If Daniel had saved his mother's life, could he now also help convict his father? If the DNA found on Vicki Hamilton's purse is Daniel's, it'll be the key to securing Tobin's conviction. But is this Daniel's DNA?

Daniel provided his DNA samples to be compared, and that was confirmed that that was his DNA that was on that purse. Tobin's son, Daniel, a three-year-old boy.

It's the definitive link to Tobin that investigators had been desperate for.

It links the purse, it links Vicky to the purse, it links the son to be there, and it links Tobin. So it was all part of a chain of evidence.

Knowing that it was Daniel's DNA that was a crucial piece in the police jigsaw of building the crime up And it made us feel quite proud that we were able to help in some kind of way.

The case against Tobin is now irrefutable. And in 2008 and 2009, while he's in jail, he's placed on trial for the murders of Vicki Hamilton and Dinah McNichol, finally to be revealed as the serial killer he is. At trial, Tobin continues to deny all charges against him. And in court, he sits impassively, never looking up. That is, until it's time for Kathy Wilson to testify.

Now all of a sudden, when Kathy Wilson was giving evidence, his behavior changed. And you could tell he was still infatuated, and he's staring at her and looking at her.

With Kathy's testimony and a wealth of evidence against him, Tobin is convicted of both murders. Sentenced to life in prison with no possibility of parole, the court has recognized the danger he would pose should he ever be released.

Today's verdict confirms Peter Tobin as one of Britain's most prolific criminals, a man who, motivated by sexual desire, is now known to have murdered at least three women.

Peter Tobin is a predator. That is who he is. He is always on the lookout for vulnerabilities, for prey.

The kind of murders that we've seen from Tobin are not outbursts, but they are an absolute integral part of his personality. So it's inevitable that given the opportunity, if not incarcerated, this is somebody, this is a personality that will continue to commit these kinds of crimes. until the dying day.

Tobin was convicted of three murders, but has he been held accountable for all of his crimes?

So here is always the unanswered question at the end of an investigation involving a serial killer, even when it's successful like this one.

Was, is, are there more? Are there more bodies?

Are there more victims out there that we just don't know about and may never know about?

In prison, he has boasted of killing 48 women, and officers working on Operation Anagram are trying to establish if the serial killer is telling the truth.

In the years following Tobin's convictions, Operation Anagram continued to investigate Tobin's links to dozens of other potential murders.

Is there any way that you can assist us? Father doesn't know where she is, her family, we don't know. Sorry, I can't help you.

We have no men.

As I say, I've never met her.

But despite Tobin's bragging to fellow prisoners about committing 48 murders, no other definitive evidence was ever found. But thanks to Operation Anagram, some sense of closure is possible for the families of some of Tobin's victims.

I'm proud of what I did setting up Operation Anagram because we would never have known what happened to these young women. But I'm disappointed that we haven't found out other people that he killed.

I have a feeling he's sitting in a prison cell now, not concerning himself with the impact he's had on anyone's life, mine or Daniel's or any of the other people that he's attacked and hurt. I think he's merciless and with no compassion at all. So when I think back about my times with Peter all those years ago and the horrible things he made me endure and the horrible way I was treated and the cruelness that he showed me, I can say with hand on heart that one good thing did come out of that, and that was to have my son Daniel.

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Serial Killer Documentary - The Peter Tobin Story

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