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Peter Tobin Is Found Guilty of Murdering Dinah McNicol, 18, and Given a Whole-Life Term for His Third Killing

McNicol vanished while hitchhiking home from a music festival in 1991. Her body was found 16 years later in the garden of Tobin's former home in Margate.

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Illustration of press photographers behind barriers outside an English crown court on a December afternoon. Not an actual scene from the case.

Dinah McNicol, 18, vanished while hitchhiking home from a music festival in August 1991, and her body was not found for 16 years. On December 16, 2009, Peter Tobin was convicted of her murder.

A jury at Chelmsford Crown Court took 13 minutes, after a trial of two and a half days, to find Tobin, 63, guilty of kidnapping, drugging and murdering her. Mr Justice Calvert-Smith gave him a whole-life term; he was already serving life with a minimum of 30 years. The jury heard that Tobin picked up McNicol, of Tillingham, Essex, in his car and drugged her with a sedative he had been prescribed, and that he later used her cash card to take more than £2,000 from her account. Her body was found in November 2007 in the garden of his former home at 50 Irvine Drive, Margate, Kent, a few meters from the remains of Vicky Hamilton. "After all these years, we at last know the truth and justice has prevailed," said Sara Tizard, Dinah's half-sister.

It was Tobin's third murder conviction, after those for Vicky Hamilton, 15, abducted in Bathgate, West Lothian, in February 1991, and Angelika Kluk, 23, a Polish student killed in a Glasgow church in 2006. Under Operation Anagram, led by Sussex Police Assistant Chief Constable Robin Merrett, police released images of 37 pieces of jewelry found in Tobin's possession and said forces would pursue 1,400 outstanding lines of inquiry. More than a dozen unsolved murders had been re-examined, though officers stressed there was no immediate evidence linking him. Tobin appealed against his sentence in 2010 but later dropped the appeal.

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