Lifers

by Geoffrey Wansell

  One killer in particular seems to have had a total disregard for the consequences of his monstrous actions. He is the Scottish-born murderer Peter Tobin, now aged sixty-nine, who was certainly not deterred from killing by the possibility of a prison sentence, whole life or otherwise. He has been convicted of three murders but is suspected of committing many more, possibly as many as forty.

  A lean, short man with brown eyes and a sharp nose, Tobin served ten years of a fourteen-year sentence in prison for the double rape of two fourteen-year-old girls in 1993, and was released in 2004. His first murder conviction came just three years later, in 2007, when he was sentenced to life with a minimum of twenty-one years for the rape and murder of twenty-three-year-old Polish student Angelika Kluk in Glasgow in 2006.

  Some time later, skeletal remains of two further young women – who had originally gone missing in 1991– were discovered in the garden of a house Tobin had lived in at the time in Margate, Kent. Tobin was convicted in December 2008 of the murder of fifteen-year-old Vicky Hamilton, and his minimum sentence was increased to thirty years. Then again, he was convicted in December 2009 of the murder of eighteen-year-old Dinah McNicol, and a whole life term was imposed.

  Tobin was born in Johnstone, Renfrewshire, the second of eight children, but was a problem a child, so much so that in 1953, at the age of seven, he was sent to an approved school, and later served time in a young offenders’ institution. By the age of twenty-four he had been convicted of burglary and forgery in England and sent to prison for a short period. Then, in 1970, he moved to Brighton, Sussex, with his seventeen-year-old girlfriend Margaret Louise Robertson Mountney, a clerk and typist, whom he married on 6 August that year. They separated after a year and she divorced him in 1971.

  Two years later, again in Brighton, Tobin married a local nurse, thirty-year-old Sylvia Jefferies, with whom he had a son and daughter, although his daughter died shortly after her birth. That marriage lasted until 1976, when his wife left with their son, and the couple divorced. Tobin then had a relationship with Cathy Wilson, aged sixteen, who gave birth to his son in December 1987. Tobin married her in Brighton in 1989, when she was seventeen. In 1990, they moved to Bathgate, West Lothian, but she left him later that year.

  All three women give similar accounts of falling for a ‘charming, well-dressed psychopath’ who turned violent and sadistic during their marriages. In May 1991 Tobin moved to Margate, Kent, and then, in 1993, to Havant, Hampshire. By that time, however, he had already killed two teenagers and buried their naked bodies in the garden of his small terraced house at 50 Irvine Drive in Margate.

  It was while he was living in Havant that Tobin attacked two fourteen-year-old girls on 4 August 1993. They had asked if they could wait in his house until one of his neighbours returned. He agreed but then held them both at knifepoint and forced them to drink a mixture of strong cider and vodka before sexually assaulting and raping them. Tobin then stabbed one of the two, whilst his young son was watching. Clearly determined to kill them, he turned on the gas and left them to die – but they survived.

  Tobin went on the run, using one of the twenty or more aliases that he had come to use over the years, and staying with a religious group in the Midlands. It was only when he returned to Brighton that he was caught by the police. On 18 May 1994, Tobin entered a plea of guilty to the rape charges at Winchester Crown Court and received a fourteen-year prison sentence. He was released in 2004, at the age of fifty-eight, and he returned to his native Renfrewshire in Scotland, and the town of Paisley.

  Using the false name of ‘Pat McLaughlin’ – to avoid the authorities discovering that he was on the Sex Offenders’ Register – Tobin started working as a church handyman at St Patrick’s Church in Anderston, Glasgow, early in 2006. An arrest warrant had been issued in the previous November after he had moved from Paisley without notifying the police, but that was not discovered until he became a prime suspect in a murder at the church.

  Angelika Kluk, a twenty-three-year-old student from Skoczow, near Krakow, was staying at the church’s presbytery where she was working as a cleaner to help finance her course at University of Gdanńsk. She was last seen alive in Tobin’s company on 24 September 2006, and is believed to have been attacked in the garage next to the presbytery. Angelika was beaten, raped and stabbed before her body was concealed in an underground chamber under the floor near the confessional. The forensic evidence later suggested that Tobin had buried her there while she was still alive. The police discovered her body five days later, after she had been reported missing. By that time Tobin had disappeared. He was finally arrested in London where he had been admitted to hospital under a false name, suffering from a fictitious complaint.

  Tobin’s trial at the High Court of Justiciary in Edinburgh began on 23 March 2007 before Judge Lord Menzies. He flatly denied raping or murdering Angelika Kluk, claiming instead that she had consented to have sex with him. ButTobin was found guilty of rape and murder, and was sentenced to life imprisonment, to serve a minimum of twenty-one years.

  Sentencing him, Lord Menzies described him as ‘an evil man’. He told Tobin, ‘In the course of my time in the law I have seen many bad men and I have heard evidence about many terrible crimes which have been committed but I have heard no case more tragic, more terrible than this one. The advocate-depute describes what you did to Angelika Kluk as an atrocity and that word aptly describes what you did to this young woman. Any case of rape is serious. Any case of murder is serious. But what you did to Angelika Kluk was inhuman.’

  In the wake of Tobin’s arrest for the murder of Kluk, Strathclyde Police launched Operation Anagram, led by Detective Superintendent David Swindle, who believed that Tobin might well have been a serial killer with other teenage girls or young women as his victims. It was the Anagram team that first searched Tobin’s house in Bathgate, Scotland, and then his house in Margate, Kent where, in June 2007, they discovered the remains of two more young women.

  On 12 November 2007 the police confirmed that one of the sets of remains belonged to fifteen-year-old schoolgirl Vicky Hamilton, who had last been seen on 10 February 1991 as she waited for her bus home to Redding, near Falkirk. She had been visiting her older sister in Livingston and was waiting to change buses in Tobin’s home town of Bathgate. The last sighting of her had been while she was eating chips on a bench in the town centre. The autopsy of her remains confirmed that she had been drugged, raped and strangled, only for her body to be cut in half and buried wrapped in bin bags.

  Tobin was charged with Hamilton’s murder and his trial began in November 2008, at the High Court in Dundee, Scotland. Once again, Tobin flatly denied the charge, but the prosecution case was overwhelming. It depended on, in particular, eyewitness testimony of his suspicious behaviour and forensic evidence of the DNA and fingerprints left on a dagger found in his Bathgate house, as well as on Vicky’s purse and the sheeting in which her body had been wrapped before being buried in the garden at 50 Irvine Drive.

  On 2 December 2008, Tobin was convicted of Vicky Hamilton’s abduction and murder. Passing sentence, Judge Lord Emslie told Tobin, ‘Yet again you have shown yourself to be unfit to live in a decent society. It is hard for me to convey the loathing and revulsion that ordinary people will feel for what you have done … I fix the minimum period which you must spend in custody at thirty years. Had it been open to me I would have made that period run consecutive to the twenty-one year custodial period that you are already serving.’

  Tobin returned to Saughton Prison in Edinburgh, but he was to return to court again within a year
– for his third murder trial within three years.

  Just a week after the police had identified the remains of Vicky Hamilton they revealed that the second set of remains in the garden of 50 Irvine Drive belonged to eighteen-year-old Dinah McNicol, who had also gone missing in 1991, although not from Bathgate but from near Reigate in Surrey on 5 August that year. It is believed that Tobin gave her a lift in his car as she hitchhiked back from a music festival in Hampshire. She was certainly never seen again, although regular withdrawals from her bank account were made over the following months from cash machines along the south coast of England. McNicol’s remains confirmed that she too had been drugged, raped and strangled before her body was buried, like Hamilton’s, wrapped in bin bags.

  On 1 September 2008, before the conclusion of the Hamilton trial, Tobin was accused of the killing of Dinah McNicol, and another murder trial was ordered. It began on 14 December 2009 at Chelmsford Crown Court, and again Tobin pleaded not guilty – but on this occasion his defence team offered no evidence and after deliberating for just thirteen minutes the jury found him guilty of murder.

  Sentencing Tobin, Mr Justice Calvert-Smith told him, ‘This is the third time you have stood in the dock for murder. On all three occasions the evidence against you was overwhelming. Yet even now you refuse to come to terms with your guilt.’ He went on to say that Tobin’s refusal to cooperate with police meant that Miss McNicol’s family ‘knew nothing about the circumstances of her death’. The judge then sentenced him to a whole life term of imprisonment – to be served in a Scottish prison. Tobin stood impassively in the dock as the sentence was passed, not a trace of emotion or remorse on his face.

  Had Tobin been tried in Scotland a whole life sentence would not have been given, as in 2001 the Scottish Assembly decided that a minimum term must always be designated when a life sentence is imposed, to bring Scottish law into line with the European Convention on Human Rights. In practice, the Scottish courts have stuck to a principle that no minimum term for a life sentence should be longer than fifty years. But as Tobin had committed the murder of Dinah McNicol in England, and been tried in England, he was subject to English law.

  Tobin had a long record of abusing his partners. After his three convictions for murder, the mother of one of his sons and the last of his three wives, Cathy Wilson, detailed the abuse she suffered at his hands. ‘It was totally revolting,’ she explained in 2009. ‘He was very threatening and capable of extreme violence. I hated him.’ Yet, like Bellfield, Tobin’s partners often stayed with him in spite of the abuse they suffered. He could be charming at one moment and chillingly violent the next.

  The police remain convinced that Tobin killed several other young women during his career, yet, in spite of the continued efforts of Operation Anagram, which has been run down in recent years, they have not been able to prove it conclusively. There is no question that Tobin moved around the country repeatedly, using a vast array of false names, and he himself is alleged to have boasted in prison that he has as many as forty other female victims. One thing is certain, however: the prospect of a whole life sentence did not deter him in the slightest.

  That is also clearly true in the case of the only person in Britain to have received not one but two separate whole life terms of imprisonment – one for two murders and an attempted murder in 2003 and 2004, and the other for a single murder, though one of the highest-profile ones in recent history, the killing of Surrey teenager Milly Dowler in March 2002.

  On Tuesday 26 February 2008, Levi Bellfield, a former nightclub bouncer and wheel clamper, then aged thirty-nine, was sentenced to a whole life term by Mrs Justice Rafferty at the Central Criminal Court in Old Bailey for the murders of Amelie Delagrange, aged twenty-two, and Marsha McDonnell, aged nineteen, and the attempted murder of eighteen-year-old Kate Sheedy.

  Mrs Justice Rafferty told him – though Bellfield was not in the dock to hear her as he had refused to leave his cell, ‘You have reduced three families to unimagined grief. What dreadful feelings went through your head as you attacked and, in two cases, snuffed out a young life is beyond understanding.’ She went on, ‘Aggravating features are the chronicle of violence directed towards lone, vulnerable young women during the hours of darkness and substantial premeditation and planning.’

  Just three years later, on 23 June 2011, the bull-necked, muscle-bound Bellfield was given exactly the same whole life term by Mr Justice Wilkie for the murder of thirteen-year-old Milly Dowler, again at the Central Criminal Court, and once again he was not in the dock to hear the sentence being passed as he had refused to leave his cell.

  Mr Justice Wilkie described Bellfield as a ‘cruel and pitiless killer’ who had subjected the bright-eyed teenager to ‘what must have been a terrifying ordeal for no other reason than she was at the wrong place at the wrong time,’ and in doing so ‘he had robbed her of her promising life, he had robbed her family and friends of the joy of seeing her grow up.’ The judge went on, ‘He treated her in death with total disrespect, depositing her naked body without even the semblance of a burial, in a wood, far away from home, vulnerable to all the forces of nature, thereby, as he clearly intended, causing her family the appalling anguish for many months of not knowing what had become of her.’

  Not only did the prospect of a whole-life term not deter him, I would argue that Bellfield specifically sought to carry out his brutal killings with the aim of becoming one of Britain’s most notorious killers.

  That conclusion is the result of spending two years studying his case and its implications for a biography I wrote called The Bus Stop Killer. Bellfield did not ‘kill for company’ as the gay former policeman Dennis Nilson did before him; Bellfield killed for power and control over women and the fame it brought him. He killed not for fear of the consequences, but to prove he could get away with it, and he relished the notoriety that came in its wake.

  There was a profound degree of callousness in Bellfield’s murders. They were cowardly, brutal attacks on defenceless young women, often at night, which he committed at random, while stalking the streets of south-west London looking for his prey – young women with blonde hair. Bellfield killed them by hitting them repeatedly on the head with a blunt instrument, probably a hammer, and doing so from behind so that they did not see him. They were crimes that he could treasure in the darkness of the night, giving him a perverted sense of his own importance, and which would also mean that his name would be on the nation’s lips – if only for the period of his trials.

  There is a vanity about Bellfield that is impossible to ignore; his is an ego so deeply depraved that it insinuates itself into everything and everyone he meets. The more I studied him the more I became convinced of it. I sat through every day of his trial for the murder of Milly Dowler, and he became ever more like a poisonous toad sitting on the toadstool of the dock, constantly inflating his bull-like neck and vast shoulders, glorying in his reputation for his wicked, ugly crimes: a man who truly deserves to be called evil.

  At six feet one inches in height and twenty stone in weight, Bellfield is a vast man, whose hair is close cropped, making it look as though his head is slightly too small for his body. His dark-brown eyes are dead and cold, but somehow there is always a glacial smirk on his face as though he knows a joke that no one else is party to.

  Bellfield practised the art of seduction at nightclubs he worked at in west and south-west London, always on the lookout for a young blonde woman who might fall for his ‘Jack-the-lad’, west-London patter. But he did not restrict his interest to this. He also drove around the sub
urbs of west London, searching for teenagers standing at a bus stop, intent on persuading them to join him in his van.

  Astonishingly, his boastful, lecherous approach did not put off the young girls he targeted. One reported later, for example, ‘Levi made me feel special, a grown up. He was very nice to me.’ It was one reason he escaped detection for a decade or more.

  One of Bellfield’s many vehicles was a white Toyota Previa that he called his ‘shagging wagon’. It came complete with blacked-out windows, purple neon lights, a mattress with an orange quilt and – perhaps significantly – several pairs of handcuffs. This giant, pasty-faced man would offer any girl foolish enough to accept his offer of a lift in the wagon a can of Red Bull or a glass of Malibu ‘just to get us started’, and before they knew it the effects of the date-rape drug GHB would render them defenceless.

  Marsha McDonnell was just nineteen years of age when she had the misfortune to encounter Bellfield on one of his forays across the suburbs of west London late at night. Just over five feet five inches in height, and weighing a little over nine stone, she lived with her parents in Hampton. Marsha was working in the Bentall Centre in Kingston in her gap year when Bellfield happened upon her.

  Just after midnight on Tuesday 4 February 2003, Marsha was on her way home after seeing a film at a local cinema. Bellfield had spotted her on the Number 111 bus from his car, and watched as she got off at the stop near her parents’ house in Priory Road. He then circled around and waited for the teenager to walk towards him. Shortly before 12.20 am he hit her three times on the head from behind with a blunt instrument and ran off, leaving her for dead, barely fifty yards from her own front door. Marsha died forty hours later from her injuries, in spite of the doctors’ best efforts.