Peter Britton Tobin was born in Johnstone, Renfrewshire, on August 27, 1946, and was sent to a residential school at seven. He married three times and was violent to all three wives, and moved constantly around Britain, living in at least forty addresses. In 1994 he was convicted of raping and assaulting two fourteen-year-old girls in Hampshire and served ten years, and on release he registered as a sex offender and then absconded.
In 2006 he was working as a handyman at St Patrick's Roman Catholic church in Anderston, Glasgow, under the name Pat McLaughlin, having given the priest a false history. On September 24 he murdered Angelika Kluk, a twenty-three-year-old Polish student who was working at the church over the summer, and hid her body in an underfloor chamber beside the confessional. He then drove south and was arrested a week later in London under an assumed name.
He was convicted of her murder in May 2007. Strathclyde Police then set up Operation Anagram to map every address he had occupied since the 1960s. In November 2007 officers digging at 50 Irvine Drive in Margate, Kent, a house he had rented in 1991, found the remains of two teenagers who had disappeared that year: Vicky Hamilton, fifteen, last seen at Bathgate in West Lothian, and Dinah McNicol, eighteen, last seen hitchhiking in Hampshire. He was convicted of both, in 2008 and 2009, and given a whole-life order.
Operation Anagram examined a long list of unsolved killings against him, including the Bible John murders of three women in Glasgow between 1968 and 1969, for which he was a persistent candidate in the press. Nothing was established, and the police closed the operation without further charges. He died of natural causes at the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh on October 8, 2022, aged seventy-six, and no relative claimed the body.