Search resumes at Peter Tobin's home for possible victims

Behind bars: Peter Tobin
12 April 2012

Police searching for possible victims of serial killer Peter Tobin will today resume their hunt for clues at one of his former seaside homes.

Officers and forensic archaeologists took a break at the weekend from scouring the property at Marine Parade in Brighton, East Sussex.

But the teams were set to return at 8am today in an effort to shed more light on Tobin's past.

The operation began on July 12, with a search at a second nearby property in Station Road, Portslade, where 63-year-old Scots handyman Tobin lived in the late 1980s.

It is believed he claimed more victims as he lived across Britain under different names and trawled the motorways for vulnerable female hitch-hikers.

Detectives from Sussex Police said the search teams analysed "literally every shovelful of earth or concrete" from the Portslade address during their nine days there.

Ground-penetrating radar was used to map out any unusual fluctuations in the ground within the garden and the property itself.

And officers using harnesses braved precarious conditions to investigate a Victorian well in the garden which was excavated to a depth of 10ft.

A Victorian soakaway was also discovered in the basement, but police announced the property was "unconnected to any criminality linked to Peter Tobin".

Tobin is serving three life sentences for killing Angelika Kluk, Vicky Hamilton and Dinah McNicol.

Due to illness, he missed another appearance at the Court of Appeal in Edinburgh last week to challenge his sentence for killing Vicky.

He was told last December he would die in jail after he was convicted of strangling 18-year-old Miss McNicol.

Tobin was already serving life terms for the murders of 15-year-old Vicky and Ms Kluk, 23.

Police discovered the remains of Vicky and Miss McNicol buried in the garden of a house in Margate, Kent, to which Tobin moved in March 1991.

Operation Anagram, a national exercise being conducted by police forces across the UK, was set up to identify issues of concern relating to the killer.

At the start of the searches in East Sussex, police said their work behind flats in Marine Parade and a hairdressing salon in Portslade could last a month.

The Station Road hairdressing salons were once a cafe, Ye Olde Tea-room, run by Tobin in 1988 with Cathy Wilson, who later became his wife and with whom he had a son.

Neighbours recall Tobin doing a substantial amount of DIY on the property as he converted it from a junk shop and cleared the garden.

Marine Parade is now a large housing association block of flats which backs on to a small area of grass and concrete paving.

Investigators refused to go into detail about why police were targeting the two properties or what cases they may be linked to.

Police responsible for the inquiry are believed to have narrowed down their review of unsolved murders and disappearances linked to Tobin to nine cases.

These may include the murders of art student Jessie Earl, 22, whose body was found in 1989, and Louise Kay, 18, whose body was never found after she vanished after a night out in Eastbourne in 1988.

There are several other possible cases, including law student Pamela Exall, 22, who vanished in Norfolk in 1974, schoolgirl Patricia Morris, 14, who went missing in Essex in 1980, and Suzanne Lawrence, 14, last seen in Essex in 1979.

Other cases include the murders of three women in Glasgow in 1968 and 1969 by a figure nicknamed "Bible John", and the deaths of schoolgirls Karen Hadaway, 10, and Nicola Fellows, nine, in Brighton in October 1986.

Detectives attempted to speak to Tobin in prison about the latest developments but he refused to talk to them, and they remain keen to unravel further details of his life, particularly where he lived in 1977 and 1978.

Police said Tobin used several aliases, mostly variations of the same name, during around two decades in Brighton from 1969 when he lived at homes in Dyke Road, Regency Square, Eastern Street and Chadborn Close.

The search teams included members of the Home Office's scientific support branch and officers from the Metropolitan Police as well as Sussex Police experts and archaeologists from University College London.

The itinerant serial killer lived in several other towns and cities, including Glasgow, and Havant, Hampshire. Police said he may have owned more than 100 vehicles and used 40 aliases.

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