Escape From Evil

by Wilson, Cathy

  I think she was finally admitted to hospital on a Monday and by Friday it was over. She was cremated on 22 October 2006 and I thought I would never stop crying. Months of worry and grief and trying to show the good old British stiff upper lip that Grandpa and Granny would have expected finally took their toll. A short while later, Anne and I bought a memorial bench and placed it on Lady’s Mile on Southsea Common, where Granny used to love to walk with her dogs. A lovely plaque remembers her, Grandpa and my darling mum. After thirty years, I no longer feel the need to visit Mum’s crematorium on the anniversary of her death because I can just go and sit on that bench and remember my whole family.

  Granny left a lot of interesting things, which Aunt Anne and I enjoyed sifting through. She had an original hairdryer from the 1950s, which I wanted to keep hold of, as well as more documents about my background. One of them made me catch my breath. It was a hand-drawn poem called ‘Nil Desperandum’. I had to look it up – it means ‘Don’t Give Up’. Mum had written it out for Granny during her last days at Telscombe Cliffs. She’d seen it on the wall in St Peter’s Church and copied it for her mother as her last act of contrition. I don’t know how she held her hand so steady. It was beautiful. I was so glad Granny had kept it and I still have it on my wall now.

  While I was taking a tremendous amount of solace from the words ‘Don’t Give Up’, so were the police. By the time Angelika’s trial had concluded, I was already feeling overwhelmed by a relentless questioning process that had begun weeks earlier. Different police officers kept coming to my house and asking the same questions over and over. That was just about bearable – I understood how important this was. Then, a few months later, they started asking me to go to the station at Cosham because, as they explained, they had a tape-recording unit there. I went along, like a dutiful citizen, but I was puzzled.

  They’ve already solved Angelika’s murder. What can I possibly tell them?

  Then I discovered why they were so keen to keep speaking to me. A psychiatrist who analysed the Angelika case concluded that a murderer who’d disposed of a body so expertly was very unlikely to have started this behaviour in his sixties. This led to the formation of Operation Anagram – a nationwide search for other possible victims of Peter Tobin, based on unsolved missing persons files going back decades. It was hard enough coming to terms with the fact that Peter had done it once. But more? Whatever the experts said, that was impossible, surely?

  Unfortunately, not only was it possible that Peter had committed other murders, I would soon discover he had done them while juggling his life with Daniel and me.

  Operation Anagram’s first move was to search all Peter’s previous addresses and within two months it paid off.

  In November 2007 police found another body, this time in the garden of Peter’s old house in Margate. The discovery of Angelika’s body had been bad enough, but this one was worse. It had been dismembered and buried in separate bin bags.

  Who could do that to a body?

  Faced with crimes of this magnitude, it’s very hard to put yourself in the place of the victim or even their family. The sheer scale of everything, one grotesque revelation after another, is too great for the human brain to process. So you end up focusing on the bits that affect you personally. The body, police said, had been unearthed from under the garden’s old sandpit.

  Daniel used to play in that!

  Suddenly I was overcome by a wave of nausea at the recollection of being impressed by Peter digging the sandpit in the first place. I felt so stupid. He’d only done it to cover his tracks. Yet again, he’d used his son – just as he had in order to claim his victim in the first place.

  DNA tests established the body as that of a young girl from Scotland, Vicky Hamilton, who’d gone missing in the Bathgate area of Scotland in February 1991 – a few months after I’d fled with my son. It was so long ago – thinking of her poor family not knowing what had happened for all this time made me so sad. Learning the facts of her death was even worse.

  After a weekend with her sister in Livingston, Vicky had been trying to make her way back to Falkirk via the bus network. After asking several strangers for directions to her next linking stop, she’d bought a bag of chips and set off. But when the bus pulled in, Vicky had already accepted a lift from a man in a white van. Perhaps she normally wouldn’t have taken the risk with a stranger, but it was snowing and the man’s young son in the seat next to him must have given her a good feeling about him.

  The police didn’t know exactly what had happened to her, but it was obvious Vicky had been horribly hurt and raped before she was killed. When they took apart the house in Robertson Avenue, they found the knife Peter had used to cut her up.

  At first I didn’t make the connection between the dates. It wasn’t unusual for Daniel to have been with his father, after all. Then the penny dropped. By February 1991 we were living in Portsmouth.

  If Daniel was in the van, it must have been the weekend Peter had abducted him!

  Suddenly my brain was racing at the realization. The police were confident that Daniel didn’t see anything happen between Peter and Vicky – maybe he’d been sent to bed – but he must have been in the house with the girl’s dead body for a while.

  And when I flew up on my SAS rescue mission, so must I!

  The police, as you’d hope, reached that conclusion faster than I did. They kept asking the same question:

  ‘When you went back to Bathgate in February 1991 were there any rooms Peter prevented you from going in?’

  Unfortunately, I just did not know. I had too much else going on in my mind. All I could think about at the time was luring Peter back into England.

  ‘I don’t know if I would even have noticed if one of the bedrooms was out of bounds,’ I had to confess.

  Again and again, different officers kept coming back to the same question. ‘Were there any rooms he wouldn’t let you enter?’ and the answer was always ‘No, not that I recall.’ But I could have been wrong. It was later reported at the trial that the Margate family with whom Peter had swapped Robertson Avenue had been denied access to the upstairs when they’d travelled up to view the house. Vicky’s body, police think, was up there awaiting disposal.

  It gives you an insight into the mind of a serial killer, I think, that he could apparently invite people to view his house, forgetting he had a dead body stored upstairs. It was clearly as mundane, in his mind, as misplacing his house keys. He just didn’t see it as wrong.

  The more the police investigated, the more they would come to me with fresh information about my time with Peter. Sometimes I could help them, but most of their questions opened up completely new areas to me. In fact, if I hadn’t known they were talking about me and Peter, I never would have guessed.

  For example, one day they told me that Vicky’s body contained traces of the anti-depressant Amitriptyline.

  ‘Peter used to take that,’ I said, trying as usual to be helpful.

  ‘We know,’ the officer said. ‘And so did you.’

  An outrageous claim!

  ‘No I didn’t! I never had a problem with depression. Nor did Peter, if you ask me. I don’t know why he was always on so much medication.’

  ‘No one’s accusing you of having depression,’ the officer said. But Amitriptyline, he explained, is a powerful sedative.

  ‘Were there any times when you woke up and couldn’t remember falling asleep? Or were awake but not completely in control of your senses?’

  I thought about it. All those nights when I’d curled up next to Daniel, just praying for Peter not to make an advance had usually ended up with me sound asleep. Was it possible he’d drugged me? Is that why I’d slept through so deeply until morning in that really cramped, tiny bed?

  The police were convinced. Peter, apparently, was renowned in Brighton and then Bathgate for his drug-dealing. I tried to say that wasn’t true, but they batted me away.

  ‘We believe it’s correct. There are too many people s
aying it.’

  Who were these people? I was his wife and I hadn’t noticed anything.

  But then, I realized with a chill, I hadn’t noticed anything with my mother either. Had those early days conditioned me never to notice drugs or their effects again?

  As for why they thought I was drugged regularly, they knew for a fact that several times a week Peter was out of the house at night, frequenting casinos and tormenting prostitutes. He’d built up a reputation as a trouble-maker in both areas. In fact, it was a few of the prostitutes who’d initially told the police I’d been drugged. They’d been to my house. They’d seen Peter do it or heard him talk about it.

  I admit, my instinct was to dismiss it as just another preposterous claim. What sort of wife – or mother – wouldn’t notice if their husband was out so often at night? But I did remember women like Lisa coming to the house. And I did remember sometimes being very, very groggy when I watched them with Peter. All those times my head felt cloudy – was that the effect of Amitriptyline or Rohypnol or a similar narcotic kicking in?

  Yes, I had to conclude. There was no other explanation. I didn’t know when he was slipping me the pills or in what sort of quantities or how often. But staring across the interrogation table at Cosham police station, I was forced to admit, ‘He drugged me. That must have been what happened.’

  I couldn’t believe it. Yet another parallel to life with my mother . . .

  When the police in Margate had originally dug up Peter’s sandpit, it wasn’t actually Vicky Hamilton they’d been expecting to find. By trawling through the missing persons lists and re-examining evidence in dozens of old cases, they’d concluded that the man who had picked up a young hitchhiker, Dinah McNicol, on the A3 out of Hampshire in August 1991 had to have been Peter. It was her body they were expecting when they discovered Vicky.

  A week later, however, the dismembered remains of Dinah were dug up as well.

  The way the police had narrowed in on Peter as the likely suspect took a convoluted path. Initially they thought he’d been living in Bathgate when the girl disappeared on Monday 5 August, so they’d dismissed him. Then they learned he’d actually moved to Margate by then, but even so, the A3 wasn’t exactly local to his new home. And then they discovered he used to spend weekends with us in Portsmouth, Hampshire, and the pieces fell into place.

  After two excellent days attending the Torpedo Tour music festival in Liphook, Hampshire, Dinah and her new friend David had decided to hitch home. They didn’t have to wait long at the service station on the A3 before a green car pulled over.

  ‘Where are you going?’ the driver asked in a thick Scottish accent.

  David lived in Redhill, Surrey, so not far around the M25. Dinah, on the other hand, faced a long journey to Tillingham in Essex.

  ‘You’re in luck,’ the man said. ‘I can drop you both off.’

  Like all hitchhikers, David and Dinah would never have got into the car if they’d been at all suspicious. But the child’s booster seat in the back of the car pushed any fears out of their minds.

  By the time David was dropped off at Junction 8 on the M25, however, he seemed really keen for Dinah to get out with him. But the eighteen-year-old wouldn’t think of it. It wasn’t every day a stranger offered to give you a lift almost to your door. And so she stayed in the car and was never seen again until her body was disinterred sixteen years later.

  It made me sick to hear of the small role Daniel and I had played in this poor girl’s unpleasant death. Daniel and I were the reason Peter had been on the A3 that day.

  ‘If he hadn’t come to see us, Dinah McNicol would still be alive.’

  The policeman across the table shook his head. ‘He might not have got Dinah, but he would have found someone. I’m sure of it.’

  Discovering that my ex-husband was a vicious, sadistic ‘serial killer’, as the police were calling him, affected me every single day. I could be washing up, having a shower or driving to view a house and suddenly the realization would hit me and the familiar wave of nausea would wash over me again.

  But coming to terms with the dark side of Peter’s personality was actually easier than coming to terms with some of his other secrets.

  Each time I was interviewed at Cosham, the police produced new revelations. At first I just refused to believe them, like, for example, when I was told the truth about Peter’s illustrious war record.

  ‘Your ex-husband was never in the military, Cathy – and he certainly didn’t see service in Aden.’

  ‘What are you talking about? Everyone knows he did. He’s got the shrapnel to prove it.’

  ‘Has he really, Cathy? Have you actually seen any evidence of it?’

  Of course, I hadn’t. The only time Peter’s war wounds came out was when he used them as an excuse not to do something.

  ‘He never worked on oil rigs,’ the copper continued. ‘He never ran supermarkets or hotels. In fact, as far as we can establish, he has never held down a proper job in his entire life.’

  That wasn’t all. While Peter had admitted to being married once before when I’d asked, in actual fact he had two ex-wives. I prayed that he’d treated them better than he’d treated me, but, as my contact with the police increased, I learnt they’d suffered as well. Both Margaret Mackintosh and Sylvia Jefferies had also known the fury of his fists and the tyranny of his controlling personality, especially in the bedroom. One vile rape using a knife left Margaret close to death and unable to have children. I wonder sometimes if we should form our own support group, but really we all just want to get on with our own lives. Peter’s claimed enough of our time.

  The new versions of Peter’s life came so thick and fast that, after a while, they ceased to shock and I became resigned to the fact that everything I ever knew was almost certainly wrong.

  Gradually, though, as 2007 progressed, I realized the police were telling me less and asking the same questions again and again. I kept saying, ‘I’ve told you this. Can’t you check your notes?’ But then I’d turn up again the following week and a new officer would try again. The sessions went on all day – they started as soon as the patrol car arrived to pick me up and didn’t finish until I was dropped off again ten or twelve hours later.

  It was so taxing, but I think I could have coped if I’d felt we were getting somewhere. In fact, so many of their questions seemed totally pointless. Once a deputation from Scotland flew down to my house just to show me a purse.

  ‘Do you recognize this?’

  ‘I can’t say. I’m thirty-nine; I’ve had plenty of purses. It could be one of mine.’

  That was the wrong thing to say.

  ‘Well, is it or isn’t it?’

  ‘I don’t know. I’ve lost loads over the years. I can’t remember them all.’

  I thought that would be the end of it, but the policeman in charge had another idea.

  ‘Where’s your son?’

  ‘He’s at college.’

  ‘Can you get him back?’

  ‘What, now?’

  ‘Yes, now. If it’s not too much trouble.’

  Daniel was only at Portsmouth Uni, but he still had to leave a lecture halfway through.

  ‘Is everything all right, Mum?’ he asked as soon as he stepped into the room.

  Before I could answer, one of the coppers showed him the purse.

  ‘Do you recognize this?’

  It was ridiculous. The poor boy hadn’t even had a chance to take his coat off. Like me, he had zero recollection of it. Sensing the futility of their errand, the lead policeman said, ‘What if I told you we found it at your father’s house in Margate?’

  Daniel shrugged. ‘I was three when he lived there. What do you remember from when you were three?’

  On another occasion, a couple of detectives arrived clutching a photo album. When they opened it up, I couldn’t believe it. Each page just had pictures of black sacks.

  ‘This has got to be a joke,’ I said.

  ‘It’s no joke,
Cathy. We need to know if you recognize any of these sacks.’

  I managed to keep a straight face long enough to get through it. Then Daniel was summoned yet again.

  ‘Do you recognize this?’ they asked, pointing to a particular photo.

  ‘It’s a black sack.’

  ‘Have you ever seen it before?’

  ‘I’ve no idea – it’s a black sack.’

  ‘Where do you think you would find one of these?’

  I think they wanted him to say something like ‘In Dad’s shed in Margate.’ But Daniel answered how he saw it.

  ‘Where would I find one? Underneath the sink probably.’

  I had to laugh. It was all so preposterous, I had no choice.

  By 2008 I seemed to be always either playing host to a houseful of plods from various stations all over the country or being chauffeured down to Cosham twice a week.

  I’m sure if I’d had a proper 9–5 job I’d have put a stop to it earlier, but because I was self-employed, I could always make time, even though it was really taking its toll. I’d always gone out of my way to downplay my links to Peter Tobin, but eventually I’d had enough. I was out with a group of girlfriends one night and I just flipped and told them everything. It was such a relief to get it off my chest and we shared a lot of tears that night. At the end of it, though, one of my friends remembered what had triggered my meltdown.

  ‘You need to see a solicitor about the number of these interviews,’ she advised. ‘I bet it’s not right.’

  I took her advice, and I’m so glad I did. ‘You don’t have to put up with this,’ the solicitor said right at the start.

  ‘But they’re the police – you can’t not answer their questions.’

  ‘That’s absolutely true. But you’re under no obligation to keep answering them.’

  Not answering had never even occurred to me. It must have been my grandparents’ respect for authority rubbing off.