On this day in 2006

Student Angelika Kluk was last seen alive with serial killer Peter Tobin. Five days later, he was arrested, after her body was found beneath the floor of the Glasgow church where she had been lodging. She had been stabbed. This ended a killing spree that had cost at least three lives. Two further bodies were found at a property where he had lived in Margate, Kent.

Tobin’s early life

Tobin was born in Renfrewshire in 1946 and had been in trouble with the police from a young age. In the early 1990s, he moved to Margate, and then to Hampshire, where he assaulted and tried to kill two girls.

He fled, and the Liverpool Echo of 7 August 1993 reported that “a nationwide manhunt is under way for a 46-year-old man wanted for questioning by police following allegations by two young teenage girls of false imprisonment and rape… doctors were so concerned about the condition of one of the girls, aged 14, that she was admitted to intensive care in hospital.”

When caught, he was tried, found guilty, and imprisoned for fourteen years. He was released after ten years.

Earlier killings

Unknown to police at the time was the fact that Tobin had apparently killed at least once by then. Teenager Vicky Hamilton had gone missing in Falkirk two years before Tobin had attacked the girls in Hampshire and, in 2007, when he was already under arrest for the murder of Angelika Kluk, police found Hamilton’s remains – and those of Dinah McNicol, who had disappeared in 1991 – in the garden of Tobin’s former Margate home.

Tobin was already serving a 21-year sentence for the murder of Angelika Kluk when, in 2008, he was convicted of murdering Vicky Hamilton, and was sentenced to a minimum of 30 years in prison. In 2009 he was similarly convicted of the murder of Dinah McNicol and his term became a full-life sentence. The jury had taken just 13 minutes to find him guilty.

Following his conviction for McNicol’s murder, the BBC reported, on 16 December 2009, that “Tobin is alleged to have claimed 48 victims in prison boasts and police are looking at the possibility that he might be ‘Bible John’, the man thought to be responsible for the deaths of three women in Glasgow in the late 1960s.”

 

...and on this day in 2002

Set in Shieldinch, a fictional district in Glasgow, each episode of the BBC Scotland drama River City initially ran for 30 minutes. This was extended to a full hour in 2007. It is filmed at the BBC’s studios in Dumbarton and set on the fictional Montego Street, with its health centre, cafe, and the Tall Ship pub.