By Jane Hamilton
Author, and former Daily Record crime reporter
When 23-year-old Angelika Kluk stopped answering text messages in late September 2006, it was her boyfriend who first raised the alarm.
Angelika had come from Poland to Glasgow to study and practise her English. She was volunteering and living at St Patrick’s Church in Anderston, helping out where she could; cleaning, assisting, making herself useful inside a parish community that had welcomed her.
She was reliable, friendly and in regular contact with the people closest to her. She didn’t just disappear.
When police went to the church to make enquiries, they quickly realised something else was wrong.
The handyman who worked there, a middle-aged man known to staff and parishioners, was also missing.
He had been using the name Pat McLaughlin.
Within days, the picture darkened. McLaughlin was not who he claimed to be. He was a convicted sex offender with a long criminal past.
His real name was Peter Tobin.
Then came the discovery that changed everything. Angelika’s body was found hidden beneath the floor of the church, concealed in a shallow void near the confessional. She had been brutally attacked.
By the time she was found, Tobin was already gone, having done what he had repeatedly done throughout his life. He ran.
There was no arrest at the scene. No immediate sense of resolution. Instead, police were dealing with a murder investigation and a suspect who had vanished.
But he wouldn’t be hidden for long – Tobin turned up at a London hospital claiming he was suffering a heart attack. A staff member recognised him from the media coverage and police swooped in.
That detail about his temporary disappearance is often softened by hindsight now, but at the time it shaped the entire case.
This was not a story that arrived neatly packaged. It was fragmented, urgent and unsettling, and for those of us covering it, it was immediately clear there was more here than a single crime.
Long before Peter Tobin was convicted of murder, police officers and journalists across Scotland and beyond were quietly trying to work out who he really was. Not to sensationalise him, but to understand who he was, and whether the life he had lived made sense if this truly was the first time he had killed.
It didn’t.
Before Tobin went on trial for Angelika Kluk’s murder, I interviewed his wife and son.
At that stage, nobody knew what he would later turn out to be.
He was accused of murdering one young woman and the pressure in newsrooms was intense.
Everyone wanted the story first. Everyone wanted the angle no-one else had. It was competitive, fast, and driven by urgency rather than reflection.
Those interviews were dramatic, because the situation was dramatic. A man suspected of killing a young woman had vanished, then been arrested, and the people closest to him were suddenly at the centre of a case attracting national attention.
There was emotion, shock, confusion and fear, and there was also the unspoken understanding that whatever came out of those conversations could change the direction of the story overnight.
At that point, it was about understanding who this man was, how he had been living, and whether there was anything in his past that explained what had just happened.
We weren’t looking for a serial killer. We were looking for a motive, a backstory, a reason that would make sense of one brutal crime.
Only later did it become clear that those early conversations contained something else entirely.
They were about dates, addresses, moves, jobs that began and ended abruptly, years that didn’t quite explain themselves.
When you laid it all out, Tobin’s life didn’t look chaotic. It looked deliberately mobile. A man who arrived, embedded himself just long enough to be trusted, then uprooted and started again somewhere else.
What was already on record was disturbing enough. Tobin had a long history of serious sexual violence.
In England in 1993, he was convicted of a horrific sex attack against two young girls. He went to prison and served 10 years. We would later discover his childhood was dominated by petty crimes and borstal.
That pattern repeated itself over years.
Tobin offended. He was caught. He was punished. He was released. He relocated.
Much of this happened before the digital age, before national databases, before instant information-sharing between police forces.
Records were paper-based. Intelligence was local. A man could cross a regional boundary, change his name, take a new job, and effectively become someone else unless there was a very specific reason to look deeper.
That wasn’t failure on anyone’s part. It was reality.
By the time Angelika Kluk disappeared in 2006, Tobin had lived in multiple parts of the UK under a string of aliases.
He took manual jobs that gave him access and anonymity. He placed himself in environments where trust was assumed and scrutiny was low. Ordinary communities where nobody expected danger to arrive wearing a friendly face.
When Tobin was eventually arrested in England and brought back to Scotland, the trial that followed focused on Angelika Kluk. The jury heard about her final hours. They heard about the violence inflicted on her.
The guilty verdict delivered justice for Angelika but it did not explain who Peter Tobin really was.
That understanding came later, and it came brutally so.
When police searching the garden of a former Tobin address in Kent uncovered the remains of 15-year-old Vicky Hamilton, who had disappeared in 1991, the story shifted overnight.
When the remains of Dinah McNicol, another teenage girl who vanished the same year, were found nearby, the shift became irreversible.
Tobin was no longer just the man who murdered Angelika Kluk. He was a serial killer whose violence stretched back across generations, across borders, through an era when movement itself made you hard to trace.
Operation Anagram was launched to examine whether Tobin could be responsible for other unsolved murders and suspicious deaths dating back decades.
“It’s not just a book about Tobin’s crimes. It is about how crime was investigated in a pre-digital world, how offenders could move almost invisibly across the country, and how understanding often arrived years after the damage was done”
David Threadgold, SPF chair
This was not about blame, or rewriting history, or criticising investigations carried out with limited tools.
It was about looking again with information and technology that simply did not exist when those crimes were first investigated.
For police, that meant re-opening old files, revisiting long-closed cases, and re-examining movements and timelines that could only now be seen clearly.
For families, it meant living once more with uncertainty, hope and fear in equal measure, knowing that answers might finally come, but also knowing that many never would.
For journalists, it meant returning to stories most people would rather leave buried.
This is where my new book, Hunting Shadows, sits.
The book is written from my perspective as a crime reporter who lived this story as it unfolded, who spoke to people close to Tobin before a verdict was ever delivered, and who watched the picture change over years as new discoveries forced old assumptions to be reconsidered.
It’s not just a book about Tobin’s crimes. It is about how crime was investigated in a pre-digital world, how offenders could move almost invisibly across the country, and how understanding often arrived years after the damage was done.
It is also a tribute to the journalists who do this kind of work.
The reporters who dig when there is nothing immediate to publish. The ones who keep notebooks for years. The ones who knock on doors, sit with grief and discomfort, and keep going long after public attention has moved elsewhere, not because they enjoy the darkness, but because someone has to bear witness to it.
It hasn’t been written to stir unpleasant memories or to sensationalise suffering.
It is written to document, to explain, and to learn.
Tobin was not exposed by one dramatic breakthrough. He was exposed because people in different roles, police officers, journalists, investigators, refused to stop looking.
Peter Tobin died in prison in October 2022, serving three life sentences for murder. He was never tried for every crime he may have committed, and no amount of investigation will now change that.
What remains is the record. Where he lived. When he moved. Who crossed his path. What was known at the time and what could only be understood years later, once the picture was finally laid out in full.
That is why this story still matters.
Not because it offers neat conclusions, but because it shows how crime really works over long periods of time, how dangerous men do not always arrive fully formed, and how understanding often comes slowly, through persistence rather than revelation.
Tobin did not operate in the shadows because people weren’t looking. He operated because he lived in an era when movement itself was enough to break the trail.
Hunting Shadows is my account of covering that story as it happened and for the following two decades. It shows why difficult cases cannot simply be boxed up and forgotten once a verdict is returned.
Stories such as these are revisited because memory matters, because context matters, and because turning away from uncomfortable truths has never made anyone safer.
Peter Tobin may be dead.
The questions raised by his life, and by the time he lived in, are not. He left behind questions that may never be fully answered, and victims whose stories may never be known.
Hunting Shadows will be published on February 26 by Mirror Books and is available now for pre-order.
“As a journalist, I could not understand why politicians and much of the media showed such little interest in what was happening”