by Odell, Robin
Tobin, a man with a long record of sexual offending had, until this point, successfully eluded the police investigation. He was sentenced to life imprisonment for the murder of Angelika Kluk. Tobin’s background came under intense scrutiny and it was shown that he had a string of offences going back to 1969 when he had been sentenced to fourteen years’ imprisonment for assaulting two teenage girls at his flat in Portsmouth.
Although he had never been considered a suspect in the disappearance of Vicky Hamilton, it was known that he was living in Bathgate at the time. A search was made at his former home and a knife was found hidden in the loft. Tobin had left the Bathgate house in March 1991 and moved to Margate in Kent. It was here in November 2007, in the back garden, that investigators found the remains of Vicky Hamilton. Her dismembered body had been wrapped in plastic sheeting and buried in a two-metre deep hole in the garden filled in with concrete and soil.
Fingerprints found on the plastic sheeting were identified as Tobin’s. Further incriminating evidence was to follow. The dead girl’s purse, which had been found in Edinburgh all those years before, was tested for DNA. Tests showed that Tobin’s young son had chewed on the purse, leaving genetic material that was matched to his father’s DNA. Thus, the clue which the murderer had planted in the belief that it would derail any investigation, came back to haunt him.
If further proof were needed it was provided by the knife found in Tobin’s Bathgate home which had a sliver of tissue adhering to the blade. This yielded sufficient DNA to prove it had been used on Vicky Hamilton.
Tobin was tried for murder in Dundee in December 2008. He was convicted of abduction, rape and murder. Sentencing him to life imprisonment, the judge, Lord Emslie, referred to the way he had desecrated his victim’s body, which he said, “must rank among the most evil and horrific acts”.
For over forty years, Tobin had travelled around the country in his role as a handyman preying on women, immobilizing them with sedatives and committing sexual assaults. He used deception and manipulation to avoid capture. The resolution of Vicky Hamilton’s disappearance owed much to the tenacity of the Lothian and Borders police. They never gave up and eventually got their man. Because of his record, several police forces suspect that Tobin may have been involved in at least four other cases of missing women.
Beauty In The Bath
Cynthia Bolshaw, an attractive divorcee living in Heswell, Merseyside, was found dead in the bath at her home on her fiftieth birthday. “The Beauty in the Bath”, as the press called her, was a lady with many boyfriends as their names in her diary testified.
Cynthia’s diaries contained the names of over 200 men, and it was clear that she lived a sexually active life. In their initial enquiries into her death in 1983, detectives interviewed sixty-four men and took more than a thousand statements.
One of those questioned was John Taft who worked for a double-glazing company. Cynthia asked him to call at the house to provide a quotation for work. They became lovers. In the light of subsequent events, Taft was asked if he had met Cynthia Bolshaw. He denied knowing her. Police enquiries were frustrated by persistent hoax telephone calls and the investigation lost its impetus.
The breakthrough came in April 1999, partly due to advances in testing crime scene DNA, but also to new witness information. A fingerprint voluntarily recorded by Taft in 1983 provided a DNA sample which matched semen traces found in Cynthia Bolshaw’s bedroom. Coupled with this was a statement from Taft’s ex-wife who said that Taft had admitted visiting Cynthia on the day she died.
Taft was arrested and put on trial for murder. The prosecution case was that he had strangled Cynthia and dumped her body face down in the bath. He said he had sex with her but stated she was alive when he left the house. He had asked his wife at the time to lie on his behalf to prevent him being drawn into the murder investigation.
In November 1999, a case that had dragged on for sixteen years was finally concluded when a trial jury, with a majority verdict of ten to two, convicted Taft of murder. He was given a life sentence.
Not Getting Away With It
On 30 October 1975, teenaged Martha Moxley and some friends visited the Skakel home after an evening of pre-Halloween partying. The fifteen-year-old girl left the house to return home but did not make it. Her body was found the next day under trees at her family home. She had been beaten to death with a golf club and stabbed with a piece of wood from the splintered shaft. Michael Skakel, then fifteen years old, and his brother, Thomas, aged seventeen, were suspects. The Skakel boys were from a prominent family in Bell Haven, Connecticut, and had influential connections to the Kennedys; Robert F. Kennedy Jr was his cousin. It was later suggested that they were spirited away from the scene to mislead investigators.
Little progress was made with police enquiries. Meanwhile, Michael Skakel entered a clinic dealing with mental health and alcohol abuse problems. It was later alleged that during one of these sessions he blurted out an admission that he had killed Martha Moxley. His life moved on and in due course he became a skier and settled down to married life in Palm Beach in an exclusive community with his wife, son and father.
In a sensational development in January 2000, police charged Skakel, then aged thirty-nine, with the Moxley murder. He claimed he was not guilty and a legal question arose as to the procedure that would be used to consider the charge. In 1975, he had been dealt with in juvenile court and his lawyers argued that the new charge should be dealt with in the same way. The implication of this was that the juvenile court was presided over by a single judge with no jury present and no evidence heard, whereas the Superior Court carried more severe penalties in the event of a guilty verdict.
In February 2001, it was decided that his case would be heard in State Superior Court for a trial lasting two months. The prosecutor described how Martha Moxley had met her death by being beaten with a golf club so furiously that the club broke apart. The case had finally come to court thanks to the campaigning efforts of the dead girl’s mother.
The golf club was traced to the Skakel home but there were no eyewitnesses to the crime and no linking forensic evidence. It was stated that Michael Skakel had confessed to the crime on several occasions. Testimony was given to that effect by some of his contemporaries back in the 1970s at the rehabilitation clinic. Evidence was given that he had said, “I’m going to get away with murder. I’m a Kennedy.”
The court’s guilty verdict surprised some legal experts because there was no forensic evidence linking Skakel to the crime. Skakel did not give evidence but after his conviction, he broke down and protested his innocence with several references to God. The judge sentenced him to twenty years to life subject to appeals.
“. . . Such Wickedness”
A murderous priest defied all attempts to persuade him to confess, even when dramatically confronted in court with his victim’s skull. “Now confess your sin,” commanded the judge.
Franz Riembauer was a wayward cleric who failed to practise what he preached. He looked after the faithful in his various livings in the Black Forest region of Germany, but also had a secret life filled with his mistresses and offspring.
In 1805 Riembauer was the village priest in Lauterbach where he lodged with a farmer and his family. When the farmer died, the priest continued to live in the farmhouse with his widow and two daughters. In the summer of 1807, he took the eldest daughter, Magdalena, with him to Munich for several months. While there, the young woman gave birth, an event which excited the gossips back home.
A further source of rumour concerned the disappearance of a young woman, Anna Eichstäder who was employed by a neighbouring priest, who visited Riembauer. When she did not return to her village after several days, questions were asked and Riembauer’s response was to deny that she had made the visit.
The following year, Riembauer took the living in a neighbouring village, accompanied by the widow and her two daughters who could not bear to be separated from him. Tragedy followed when, in quick s
uccession, both the widow and Magdalena died after brief illnesses, leaving teenaged Katherina as the sole survivor of the farming family. The priest offered her the position of cook but she declined and left to find domestic work in another parish.
While the tongues wagged about the turn of events, no one dreamed of thinking bad thoughts about the priest until Katherina decided to speak up. She first confided in her new parish priest, claiming that she had seen Riembauer kill Anna Eichstäder and, now that her mother and sister were also dead, she was the only person who knew what had happened. The clergyman advised her to keep quiet to avoid scandal.
But Katherina had a story to tell and she related it to another priest. She went further than before, accusing Riembauer of fraud and of poisoning her mother and sister. The cleric wrote to Riembauer in Latin advising him of the accusations in coded language. Finally, in 1813, Katherina took her story to the magistrates who told her that at the age of seventeen, she was too young to give sworn evidence.
A year later, she finally gave a sworn account of what she had witnessed. She claimed that Riembauer admitted killing Anna Eichstäder, mother of his child, because she had demanded money from him. Incredulous magistrates visited the old farmhouse where they discovered Anna’s buried remains.
Meanwhile, the wily priest had moved to another village and, when questioned, claimed that Katherina’s family had killed Anna and, of the other allegations, he said, “Only a vicious tongue could utter such wickedness.” Nevertheless, Riembauer was taken into custody pending further enquiries which revealed a trail of indiscretions, mistresses and illegitimate offspring.
Eight years after Anna Eichstäder met her death, Riembauer answered murder charges at the Superior Court in Munich. When the judge confronted him in court with Anna’s skull and demanded that he confess, he replied, “I was compelled to kill her. Therefore I cannot regard my action as a crime. My conscience is clear.” He claimed the witnesses were corrupt and he talked about the purity of his soul.
Finally, in 1830, twelve years after he was arrested, Riembauer was found guilty of murder and sentenced to indefinite confinement. Many believed he was fortunate to escape death by hanging.
Disposal Tips Online
In May 2000, twenty-one-year-old Lucie Blackman travelled to Japan and took a job at a bar in the Roppongi district of Tokyo. Two months after her arrival in the country, Lucie disappeared. She told a friend that she was going out on a drive with a male companion.
Largely due to the persistence of the missing girl’s family, Japanese police investigators intensified their efforts to find out what had happened to Lucie Blackman. Their enquiries led to Jogi Obara, a forty-seven-year-old property developer. When questioned, he admitted meeting Lucie although he denied any knowledge of her disappearance.
In February 2001, the dismembered body of Lucie Blackman was found buried at a seaside location within yards of Obara’s apartment. The body had been cut into eight pieces and the head embedded in a cement block.
Obara came under close scrutiny and it was discovered that he had many secrets. Videos retrieved from his various apartments showed him sexually assaulting women who had been drugged into insensibility. One of these was an Australian woman who had died in Tokyo in 1992.
Investigators found that Obara had embarked on a shopping expedition at the time of Lucie’s disappearance, buying supplies of cement and items such as scissors, hammers and a chainsaw. His computer records showed that he had searched the internet for information about the disposal of bodies.
Under questioning, Obara admitted spending the evening with Lucie Blackman before she went missing. He was arrested in April 2001 and charged in connection with her disappearance and death. He protested his innocence and used his inherited wealth to fund a vigorous defence campaign.
In October 2003, he was charged with abduction, rape resulting in death, and disposal of a body. At his trial in April 2007, he was acquitted on the most serious charge linking him to the death of Lucie Blackman on the grounds of insufficient evidence. He was, though, convicted of multiple attacks on other women and manslaughter and given a life sentence. In accordance with Japanese law, some of the surviving victims of his assaults accepted condolence payments from him.
Prosecutors decided to appeal against Obara’s acquittal of the charges relating to Lucie Blackman and the case was heard by appeal judges in Tokyo in December 2008. The allegation was made that he had caused her death by drugging her as a prelude to rape. The court took the view that this could not be proved. The judgment was that Obara was guilty of kidnapping, mutilating and abandoning the young woman’s body.
Lucie Blackman’s parents welcomed the judgment which, though it partly reversed earlier court verdicts, did not alter Obara’s situation. He will continue to serve the life sentence imposed on him in 2007.
Truckload Of Bones
A so-called survivalist, Leonard Lake built a system of underground bunkers in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada. A former US marine, Lake had a pathological hatred of women and shared his fantasies with another former marine, Charles Ng, the son of wealthy parents in Hong Kong. Between them, they were suspected of killing twenty-six victims of both sexes, including children.
In 1985 Ng was spotted shoplifting in San Francisco and he made off in a car driven by Lake. The police followed and Lake was arrested. In the confusion, Ng had managed to escape. Shortly after being taken into custody, thirty-nine-year-old Lake took his own life by swallowing cyanide pills.
When police searched Lake’s property in California, they found a house of horror which one of the investigators likened to a Nazi death camp. Human remains were found in three mass graves. They contained decomposing remains of two men, the headless body of a woman, a body stuffed into a sleeping bag and what the police described as a “truckload of bones”. A shed was used as a torture chamber, equipped with handcuffs, whips and a one-way mirror. Videotapes were found featuring both Lake and Ng humiliating and torturing female victims. Lake was preparing to confront Armageddon by stocking bunkers with food and weapons. He planned to breed a new race from female sex slaves. Ng was last seen boarding a bus heading across the US/Californian border to Toronto. He kept out of the clutches of the police for several months but, in December 1985, he was arrested in Calgary while attempting robbery. He was convicted of armed robbery and given a four-and-a-half-year prison sentence. He spent his time resisting extradition to the US, but was returned to California to face charges of conspiring to kill twelve people, including two children.
The trial in Orange County lasted four months, involved over 100,000 pages of evidence and cost $14 million. Ng employed delaying tactics, endlessly complaining about procedure and hiring and firing lawyers. He attempted to dissociate himself from Lake’s fantasies and denied having anything to do with the killings. Some of the videos shot in the bunker told their own story, although he continued to try to talk himself out of involvement. When he went on to the witness stand to defend himself he declared that he too was a victim. He explained that some of the behaviour seen on the videotapes was just bluff.
In February 1999, the trial jury convicted thirty-eight-year-old Ng of eleven murders and in a separate sitting, recommended the death penalty. It had taken fourteen years to bring Ng to justice but he finally ended up on death row. Prosecutors believed he and Lake may have murdered more than twenty people. His lawyers thought he sealed his fate when he decided to take the witness stand.
No Hiding Place
Justice caught up with Brian Field thirty-three years after he had murdered when a combination of chance and advances in DNA technology enabled a link to be established between victim and attacker.
Fourteen-year-old Roy Tuthill, who lived near Dorking in Surrey, in the UK, went missing in April 1968 on his way home from school. He was last seen alive attempting to hitch a lift. Three days later, his body was found in a copse near Chessington. He had been strangled and sexually assaulted. His attacker had folded the b
oy’s clothing and placed it over his body.
The police search for the attacker produced no immediate results. But, in 1972, suspicions began to form around Brian Field, an itinerant farm machine repairer. He was jailed for attacking and indecently assaulting a teenage boy in Scotland. This flagged up an amber warning for Surrey Police and Field was questioned about Roy Tuthill’s death. No action resulted from this interview and Field went on to offend again in 1986 when he attempted to abduct two teenage boys. They escaped and Field was jailed for four years.
The breakthrough in the police investigation came by chance in 1999 when Field was routinely stopped on suspicion of driving under the influence of drink. New powers enabled the police to take a DNA sample from anyone convicted of a crime and check it on the DNA national database. Field’s DNA matched that found on Roy Tuthill’s clothing over thirty years previously.
Field eventually confessed to the Surrey murder and he was sent for trial at the Old Bailey in November 2001 where he was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment. Mr Justice Gordon said that, “advances in modern science techniques should stand as a warning that there is no hiding place for sexual and violent criminals”.
Killer Abroad
Volker Eckert was a truck driver who travelled the motorways of Europe trawling for women to murder. Over a period of thirty years, he killed at least thirteen times.
He was arrested in Cologne on 17 November 2006, after his truck was found in a car park at a football stadium in northern Spain. When the vehicle was checked out by the local police it was found to contain the body of a young woman. In the driving cab were incriminating photographs and a length of rope.
Eckert’s admission that he was responsible for six killings triggered police investigations throughout Europe and revealed a trail of death. It became evident that he had killed his first victim when he was a mere fourteen years of age. It was only when he qualified as a truck driver in 1999 that he perfected his modus operandi, regularly crossing borders, picking up his victims, killing them and dumping their bodies elsewhere.