Bodies in the Back Garden--True Stories of Brutal Murders Close to Home

by Cawthorne Nigel

  When Poland acceded to the European Union in May 2004, she headed west with thousands of other students. While most were drawn to the bright lights of London or Manchester, she headed straight for Scotland. She found a bed in a hostel in Edinburgh and got a job as a cloakroom attendant and cleaner.

  At the end of the summer, she returned home to Poland and came back to Scotland the following year. This time she went to Glasgow where she found an early-morning job as an office cleaner and an afternoon job as a chambermaid, and a flat in the Anderston district, just five minutes’ walk from St Patrick’s. After mass one day, she introduced herself to Father Gerry Nugent who ran the ‘open doors policy’ for the needy.

  A few weeks later, her landlord asked her to leave. She asked Father Nugent if he knew anyone who might rent her a room. He invited her to stay in one of the rooms in the chapel house. This invited gossip. There had been rumours about him before. A good-looking man, it had been said that he had had an affair with a married woman. And in 1993, the Archdiocese of Glasgow received a call from a woman who said he had sexually assaulted her.

  Now 62, Father Nugent gave Angelika the money to make a tour of Scotland and he used his credit card to buy her a £1,500 laptop so she could stay in touch with her family via email. They became close. They would exchange a hug before they retired to their separate beds. Then came a kiss on the cheek … and soon their beds were separate no longer.

  The affair was also carried on in public. They would go swimming together and she would be seen walking around in just a sheer robe that left little to the imagination in front of him.

  At the end of the summer, she returned to her studies in Poland. The following year, she again visited Scotland, and Father Nugent. It was as if she had never been away.

  She got a job as a nanny to a wealthy Russian family. There she met Martin MacAskill, the 40-year-old owner of a chauffeuring business. They soon became lovers. As MacAskill was married, they made love in the chapel house. Soon, she was madly in love with him.

  When Father Nugent found contraceptives in her bedroom, he became jealous. In her diary, Angelika condemned his drunken petulance. Then, through a text she had sent to Martin’s phone, his wife Anne found out about the affair. Anne flew to Majorca to contemplate the future of their 12-year marriage and Martin went after her.

  At St Patrick’s, Angelika had become Tobin’s ‘little apprentice’. She liked to help him out and they had become firm friends. On Sunday, 24 September 2006, just a few days before she was due to return to Poland again, she was helping him paint a shed that they had built in the garage. She needed the company. Father Nugent barely spoke to her and she had not seen Martin for ten days. By then, Tobin had been working at St Patrick’s for about two months and had been dreaming of having sex with Angelika ever since he had arrived.

  After a tea break, they returned to the garage. Almost immediately, Tobin clubbed her on the back on the head. As she lay on the floor, she raised her hand to fend off the next blow. It broke one of her fingers. Six more blows to the head followed, splitting open the scalp to show the shattered skull below. She was now bleeding and unconscious. He bound her wrists, shoved a piece of cloth in her mouth and held the gag in place with strips of yellow insulating tape. Then he raped her.

  Angelika then came round and tried to fend him off. He grabbed a knife and stabbed her 19 times; 16 of the wounds were in her chest and at least 10 were delivered in a frenzy.

  He lay her body on some plastic sheeting and a bin-liner they had used to prevent paint splashing on the floor. Earlier, he had discovered a hatch under a rug outside the confessional box. It gave access to the maze of water pipes that ran under the floor. He dragged her there, opened the hatch and dropped her down. Covering her with the plastic sheet, he closed the hatch and replaced the rug. He returned to the garage to clean up. Then he went back to the chapel house to take a shower and get rid of his trousers which were soaked with Angelika’s blood.

  Martin MacAskill started phoning Angelika’s mobile which was now in Tobin’s possession. When he got no reply, he became worried.

  The following morning, church volunteer Marie Devine arrived to find the shed was still not finished. Tobin complained that his apprentice had not turned up. Then Martin arrived. When he could not find Angelika, he called her sister Aneta who was also in Glasgow. Together, they searched Angelika’s room. Nothing was missing, except her mobile phone.

  Tobin remained calm throughout this, telling a friend who asked what all the fuss was about, that Martin’s girlfriend had gone missing.

  Aneta wanted to call the local hospitals; Martin called the police. Two constables arrived an hour later. They searched the premises and took statements from everyone there, including handyman Pat McLaughlin.

  Early the following morning, Tobin collected his meagre possessions and left. He lay low in the centre of Glasgow and, that night, took a bus to Edinburgh. Although Father Nugent noticed that his handyman was missing, he knew he had a heart condition that might have been aggravated by Angelika’s disappearance.

  Everyone joined in the search for Angelika. Meanwhile, the police wanted to interview the missing handyman, thought to be the last person to have seen Angelika, and issued a photograph of him.

  In a renewed search of the church and its surrounds, they found a table leg with Angelika’s blood on it and several blood-soaked towels. In the bin, they found a pair of jeans with the left knee covered with more of Angelika’s blood. It was only that Friday that one of the forensics team stumbled across the hatch in front of the confessional. Opening it, they found her body, still bound and gagged. And in a bin-liner on top of her body, they found a bloodstained kitchen knife.

  Back in Paisley, Cheryl McLachlan had seen the handyman’s picture on the TV news. She phoned the police and told them that the man they were calling Pat McLaughlin was, in fact, Peter Tobin.

  DNA from semen found within Angelika’s body matched that from skin fragments found inside the discarded jeans. Fingerprints and palm-prints were found on the plastic sheeting and the bin-liner; more fingerprints were found on the yellow insulation tape wrapped around Angelika’s head. They were all from the same person – Peter Tobin – for whom the police had been searching since the attack on Cheryl McLachlan in Paisley. As a registered sex offender, he was also wanted for failing to inform the authorities of his whereabouts.

  By then, Tobin was in London and was now calling himself James Kelly. Having previously feigned a heart complaint when in difficulties, he now presented himself at the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery in Queen Square complaining of chest pains and weakness down the left side. The doctors could find nothing wrong with him and soon suspected that both the symptoms and the name were fictitious.

  In the morning, the patient was attended by a male nurse, who stared hard at his face. He returned a few minutes later in a police uniform.

  ‘I knew you were the police,’ said Tobin. ‘I am relieved you are here.’

  ‘Are you …?’ said PC Alan Murray.

  ‘Peter Tobin? Yes. You have been looking for me,’ Tobin said.

  Later, specks of Angelika’s blood were found on his watch. Even so, Tobin pleaded not guilty when he appeared in the High Court in Edinburgh the following March.

  During the six-week trial, Tobin denied raping and murdering the young woman and claimed that she had consented to having sex with him. His defence counsel, Donald Findlay QC, drew the jury’s attention to Ms Kluk’s relationship with former parish priest Father Gerry Nugent and married chauffeur Martin MacAskill. Findlay accused Father Nugent and witness Matthew Spark-Egan, an alcoholic who had been sitting at the back of the church drinking when Angelika’s body was being dragged to its resting place, of being involved in the young woman’s death.

  Father Nugent was later convicted of contempt of court for his evasive answers during the trial and was forced to resign as a parish priest. He became a drunken recluse and died of a heart attack
in 2010.

  The jury of eight women and seven men took just under four hours to convict Tobin. The judge, Lord Menzies, described Tobin as ‘an evil man’ and sentenced him to life, saying he should serve a minimum of 20 years. He told the killer, ‘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. To bind her hands, gag her so tightly that her face was misshapen when her body was found, to rape her, beat her about the head repeatedly with a table leg fracturing her skull, stab her repeatedly about her chest and body, and then drag her through the church and dump her body under the floorboards as so much rubbish – all this shows utter contempt and disdain for the life of an innocent young woman with her whole life ahead of her.’

  After Tobin was found guilty of murdering Angelika Kluk, his third wife Cathy Wilson told the Glasgow-based Sunday Mail, ‘Some people are saying he should hang, but I don’t think so. There shouldn’t be a quick fix for him. He should suffer in prison for as long as possible in the worst prison the authorities can put him into. He is truly evil personified.’

  The police revealed that, during the investigation, they had found Tobin had used 38 SIM cards in his travels up and down the country. They feared that he might have killed many times before and they began Operation Anagram to re-examine cold cases. Essex Police took a fresh look at the disappearance of Dinah McNicol in 1991, while Strathclyde Police discovered that Vicky Hamilton had disappeared in Bathgate when Tobin had been living there. In all, he was thought to have killed at least 12 women.

  Searching Tobin’s previous homes yielded a number of pieces of women’s jewellery; the fear was that these might be trophies he had kept from his many victims. But the cases of Vicky Hamilton and Dinah McNicol remained top of their list.

  When interviewed at Fraserburgh Police Station on 21 July 2007, after Vicky’s DNA had been found in his Bathgate home, Tobin denied knowing her and refused to help locate her body.

  A new appeal was launched for information concerning Dinah McNicol. Then came a knock on the door of 50 Irvine Drive. Mark Drage, his girlfriend Nicola Downing and her four children, who had lived there peacefully for 12 years, were obliged to move out to a nearby hotel, while their modest three-bedroom terrace house was stripped of its contents.

  Two days later, a team of forensic archaeologists scanned the 30-ft back garden with ground-penetrating radar, looking for earth that had been disturbed. It took them just 12 hours before they identified a suspicious patch next to the garden shed. Under a layer of concrete and chalk they found two black plastic bin-liners; one of them had been penetrated by a root. Inside were more bags enclosing a young woman’s body that had been cut in two at the waist. She had been bound. The lower half had been buried in a kneeling position, while the upper half had the hands and arms crossed over her face.

  Also found in the grave were more lengths of cord, a white bra, a sweatshirt and a red polo shirt. There were also two rings on her fingers that were likely to prove useful in identifying her. Nevertheless, the body was still thought to be that of Dinah McNicol, and her father Ian gave the first reaction to the discovery:

  ‘Considering the short time the investigation has been reopened, I think this development is absolutely fantastic,’ he said. ‘Hopefully, they will be able to put an end to it, either way … 99 per cent of me thinks she has been murdered but there’s just that 1 per cent that doesn’t know. I want to die in peace knowing what happened to my daughter.’

  Acting on that 1 per cent, a missing-persons charity issued a picture of what Dinah might look like if she was still alive at what would be her current age of 34.

  The newspapers quickly tied the body in the back garden to Peter Tobin, who was known to have been wanted in connection with at least 12 unsolved murders. Neighbours were shocked. David Martin told the BBC, ‘The first thing you realise about Peter Tobin is how normal he is. He’s not something that crawls out of the woodwork, even if that’s what appears at a later stage. No, he’s absolutely normal – like talking to your best mate or someone down the pub.’

  Others thought there was something unsettling about him. Former neighbour Laura Harris said she was ‘freaked out’ by the discovery. ‘My mum and dad have lived here for 25 years, but I moved out six years ago,’ she said. ‘This sort of thing happens to other people. It’s awful what has happened and we’ve lived next door to it for all those years. I remember Tobin … I used to think he was creepy. He wouldn’t have been living in the house any longer than two years. He lived there alone, but his son used to visit at weekends. The scary part of it is he offered to babysit me and my sister when we were younger. My mum wasn’t having any of it because we didn’t know him.’

  Although one body had been found, work in the back garden of 50 Irvine Drive did not stop. The soil was shovelled into bags so that it could undergo further forensic testing later. Meanwhile, TV cameras mounted on cherry-pickers (hydraulic cranes with railed platforms, for raising and lowering people) filmed the goings on in the back garden, while one enterprising young lad whose bedroom overlooked the excavation began renting it out to the curious at £10 a time.

  The day after the discovery, the officer in charge of the investigation announced that the body the police had found in the back garden probably was not that of Dinah McNicol. The rings and clothes found with her did not match anything Dinah was wearing on the day she went missing. For Dinah’s father, it was a setback. ‘It’s another poor girl,’ he said. ‘My family hoped it was Dinah so we could finally put her at rest. But it’s not finished. They’re looking to see if it’s another Fred West. They think there might be other bodies there. They thought it might be Dinah because her cash card was used in Margate.’

  Over the years, there had been a number of false alarms. ‘Any time there comes on the TV or the radio something about a body being found, I think, “Oh my God, no”,’ Dinah’s father said. ‘But now I am getting on a bit. I would like to die knowing where she is. For the sake of Dinah and her mother, we would all like a conclusion.’

  That afternoon, Lothian and Borders Police confirmed that the body belonged to Vicky Hamilton and they already had a man under arrest. It was clear that the man was Peter Tobin. After he made a brief appearance at Linlithgow Sheriff Court, Vicky’s father Michael Hamilton, who had fought to keep the case in the public eye for 16 long years, hammered on the side of the prison van and yelled, ‘Die, you bastard!’

  His brother Eric issued a statement that read: ‘All I can say is that Mike is happy the long road is nearly at an end. We just want peace and to put Vicky where she belongs.’

  Later that day, the police announced that they had found a second body. This time, the jewellery and clothing did match those of Dinah McNicol and the identity of the corpse was confirmed by dental records and DNA profiling soon after. Although the horrific circumstances of her death were also revealed, Ian McNicol responded to the news with dignity: ‘The 1 per cent has gone now … we can actually have her remains, put her remains next to her mother’s, actually have time to mourn and get on with life.’

  Since the disappearance of Dinah, he had been trying to shield the other two young children he had been bringing up single-handed. At one time, he feared she may have been a victim of Fred West.

  When Tobin went on trial for the murder of Vicky Hamilton in November 2008, he claimed to have been in the Portsmouth area when she disappeared, but witnesses reported seeing him Bathgate. After four weeks of evidence, it took the jury of nine women and three men less than two-and-a-half hours to find him guilty.

  Sentencing him to life with a tariff of at least 30 years, the judge said, ‘This was a
vulnerable teenager who needed help on her way home, but instead she fell into your clutches and you brought her short life to an end in a disgusting and degrading way. No one will ever know what fear and torment Vicky Hamilton went through before she died. But the agony you caused to her family was made infinitely worse by your calculating and entirely self-interested attempts to conceal and avoid detection for what you had done. After a lengthy trial in which you conceded nothing, you have now been convicted as a result of your own mistakes … Abducting and killing a child on her way home from a happy weekend with her sister and then desecrating her body must rank among the most evil and horrific acts that any human being could commit.’

  Vicky’s sister said, ‘We are glad this 17-year nightmare has finally come to an end. There were many times when we thought this day wouldn’t come. We are hoping we can now move on as a family and start to remember Vicky as the loving sister she was before she was so tragically and cruelly taken from us. Vicky’s abduction also robbed us of our mum, Janette, who never came to terms with the fact Vicky never came home that night and who died of a broken heart two years later, never knowing what happened to her daughter. We take comfort in the knowledge that Mum and Vicky have been looking over us and giving us the strength needed to cope during these difficult times.’

  At his trial for the murder of Dinah McNicol in December 2009, Tobin instructed his counsel not to offer any defence. However, he pleaded not guilty, so the prosecution had to take the time and trouble to prove its case. Given the evidence, this was not too difficult. On the first day of the trial, the jury were told that Tobin was a convicted paedophile who had already been sentenced to life for the murder of Vicky Hamilton, whose body had been found next to Dinah’s in Tobin’s back garden.

  In his closing statement, the prosecutor, William Clegg QC, told the jury, ‘Did a stranger arrive at 50 Irvine Drive to find that the occupier had conveniently dug a hole and then dumped her body in it? And of all the gardens in the south-east of England, the murderer of Dinah McNicol happens to select the garden of another murderer who had already buried his victim there? If this were not so serious, it would be ludicrous.’