Peter Tobin

Peter Britton Tobin (27 August 1946 – 8 October 2022) was a Scottish convicted serial killer and sex offender who served a whole life order at HM Prison Edinburgh for three murders committed between 1991 and 2006.

Police also investigated Tobin over the deaths and disappearances of other young women and girls.

Peter Tobin was born in Johnstone, Renfrewshire, Scotland, on 27 August 1946, the youngest of eight children to Daniel and Marjorie (who went by Margaret) Tobin.

He had four older sisters and three older brothers.

Tobin was a difficult child and in 1953, aged 7, he was sent to an approved school.

He reportedly joined the French Foreign Legion but later deserted.

Tobin was diagnosed as a psychopath by a senior psychologist and it was thought he might be connected with the Bible John murders of the late-1960s, although police eventually ruled him out of those murders.

Tobin reportedly claimed in prison to a psychiatrist of having murdered 48 people.

Tobin moved to Brighton, Sussex, England, where he married his 17-year-old girlfriend, Margaret Mountney, a clerk and typist, in August 1969.

Tobin later served a sentence in a borstal and in 1970 was convicted and imprisoned in England for burglary and forgery.

They separated after a year and she divorced him in 1971.

In 1973, Tobin married a local nurse, 30-year-old Sylvia Jefferies.

The couple had a son named Ian later that year and a daughter named Claire in 1975, the latter of whom died soon after birth.

This second marriage lasted until 1976, when Sylvia left with their son.

Tobin then had a relationship with Cathy Wilson; the couple married in 1989, with a son named Daniel born later that year.

In 1990, they moved to Bathgate, West Lothian, Scotland.

Wilson left Tobin in 1990 and moved back to Portsmouth, Hampshire, England, where she had grown up.

All three wives later gave similar accounts of falling for a charming, well-dressed psychopath who turned violent and displayed a sadistic streak during their marriages.

Remains of two teenagers who went missing in 1991 were subsequently found at his former home in Margate, Kent.

In May 1991, Tobin moved to Margate, Kent, and, in 1993, to Havant, Hampshire, to be near his younger son.

Tobin served 10 years in prison for the rape, buggery and indecent assault of two girls in 1993, following which he was released in 2004.

On 4 August 1993, Tobin attacked two 14-year-old girls at his flat in Leigh Park, Havant, after they went to visit a neighbour who was not at home.

They stopped at Tobin's flat and asked if they could wait there.

After holding them at knife-point and forcing them to drink strong cider and vodka, Tobin sexually assaulted and raped the girls, stabbing one of them whilst his younger son was present.

He then turned on the gas cooker without lighting it and left them for dead, but they both survived the attack.

To avoid arrest, Tobin went into hiding and joined the Jesus Fellowship, a religious sect in Coventry, under a false name.

He was later captured in Brighton after his blue Austin Metro car was found there.

On 18 May 1994, at Winchester Crown Court, Tobin entered a plea of guilty and received a fourteen-year prison sentence.

He had assumed the name of "Pat McLaughlin" to avoid detection, as he was still on the Violent and Sex Offender Register following his 1994 convictions for rape and assault.

In 2004, Tobin, then 58 years old, was released from prison and returned to Paisley in Renfrewshire.

An arrest warrant had been issued for Tobin in November 2005 after he moved from Paisley without notifying the police, but he was not discovered until he became a suspect in the murder of 23-year-old Angelika Kluk at the church.

Three years after his release, he was sentenced to life with a minimum of 21 years for the rape and murder of Angelika Kluk in Glasgow in 2006.

In September 2006, Tobin was working as a church handyman at St Patrick's Church in Anderston, Glasgow.

She was last seen alive in the company of Tobin on 24 September 2006, and is thought to have been attacked by him in the garage attached to the presbytery.

Kluk was beaten, raped and stabbed, and her body was concealed in an underground chamber beneath the floor near the confessional in the church.

Forensic evidence suggested that she was still alive when she was placed under the floorboards.

Police found her body on 29 September, and Tobin was arrested in London shortly afterwards.

In May 2007, he received a further thirty-month sentence for breaching the terms of the register.

Kluk, a student from Poland, was staying at the presbytery of St Patrick's Church, where she worked as a cleaner to help finance her Scandinavian studies course at the University of Gdańsk.

Tobin was convicted of the murder of Vicky Hamilton in December 2008, resulting in his minimum sentence being increased to 30 years, and of the murder of Dinah McNicol in December 2009, resulting in a whole life order.