News

Peter Tobin, Convicted of Three Murders, Dies in Edinburgh Hospital at 76

Serving life for killing Angelika Kluk, Vicky Hamilton and Dinah McNicol, he died under guard after police made a last, failed attempt to learn of other victims.

Published

Illustration: a Victorian stone hospital building on a rainy Scottish street

Peter Tobin died on Saturday, October 8, 2022, in a ward of the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh, under guard, a month after a fall in his prison cell had put him in hospital for the last time. He was 76. He was serving life for the murders of Angelika Kluk, Vicky Hamilton and Dinah McNicol, and in the days before he died detectives had made one more attempt to get him to talk about anyone else. He gave them nothing.

"Recent attempts to encourage him to do the right thing and share any knowledge he may have which could assist the police were unsuccessful," said Detective Chief Superintendent Laura Thomson, head of major crime at Police Scotland. "While we have no current lines of investigation into Peter Tobin, we welcome any information in relation to his activities."

The three women he was convicted of killing had been young. Vicky Hamilton was 15 when Tobin abducted her in Bathgate, West Lothian, as she waited for a bus on the evening of February 10, 1991. Dinah McNicol was 18 when she vanished that August while hitchhiking home to Tillingham, Essex, after a music festival. Their remains were found 17 years later, buried in the garden of his former home in Margate, Kent. Angelika Kluk, a 23-year-old Polish student, was raped and murdered in Glasgow in September 2006, and her body was hidden under the floor of the church where Tobin worked as a handyman under the name Pat McLaughlin.

It was the Kluk inquiry that opened the rest. Detectives on that case noticed that Tobin had been living in Bathgate when Vicky disappeared, and the trail of his old addresses led them south to Margate. He was convicted of murdering her at the High Court in Dundee in 2008 and of murdering Dinah at Chelmsford Crown Court the following year, when he was ordered to spend the rest of his life in prison. He never admitted any of it.

Police long believed there were other victims. He had lived under at least 40 aliases and had 150 cars, and a Scottish investigation, Operation Anagram, combed through unsolved murders and disappearances for links to him before it was scaled down in 2011. David Swindle, the former Strathclyde Police detective who led it, said Tobin had taken his secrets with him.

Vicky Hamilton's family asked people not to mark his death. In a statement on Facebook, they said they would be remembering Vicky, "her laughter, her smile," and not the man who killed her. "We will not be celebrating any passing but instead will be remembering Vicky, Angelika and Dinah along with any other victims, and we respectfully ask for others to do the same."

What the record later established, and where the first reports differ. Because Tobin died in legal custody, a fatal accident inquiry was mandatory. Its determination, issued by Sheriff Matthew Auchincloss in Edinburgh on October 3, 2024, found that he fell in his cell at HMP Edinburgh on the evening of September 8, 2022, had hip surgery at the Royal Infirmary the next day and never left the hospital. A nurse practitioner pronounced him dead at 5:35 a.m. on October 8, after an officer guarding him raised the alarm at about 4:55. The cause was bronchopneumonia, with the hip fracture, vascular disease and prostate cancer. The sheriff found that prison staff had handled the fall appropriately and that his hospital care had been appropriate. Reports on the day of his death said he had been taken to hospital on the Wednesday before he died. The determination dates his admission to September 2022, and the 6:04 a.m. time in the Police Scotland statement was when officers attended, not the time of death. The determination dates the three convictions to 2006, 2008 and 2009; other accounts place the Kluk verdict in May 2007.

Sources

In the Archive