By Gemma Fraser
Head of content
Vicky Hamilton’s disappearance from the West Lothian town of Bathgate shook not only the local community, but the whole country.
Although initial hopes were that the young girl had gone off with a friend, or got lost on her way home and would soon be found, it quickly became clear that her disappearance was more sinister.
However, it wasn’t for another 16 years that the truth was discovered – that Vicky had been abducted and killed by serial killer Peter Tobin on the night of February 10, 1991, and then transported to a house in Kent where she was buried in the back garden.
The former West Lothian divisional commander at the time, Tom Wood, recalls the night of Vicky’s disappearance as though it happened yesterday – largely due to the “bitterly cold” weather conditions which made the subsequent search even more difficult.
Speaking to 1919, Wood – who held the rank of chief superintendent – revealed that had Tobin been on the police radar, he may have been caught before he had time to move Vicky’s body down south.
As detectives carried out door-to-door searches in Bathgate – interviewing more than 7,000 people and taking 4,000 statements – Tobin moved the body from his home in Robertson Avenue before the police arrived to question him and search his property.
He then went on to kill 18-year-old Dinah McNicol from Essex, who was last seen alive on August 5, 1991, and 23-year-old Angelika Kluk in Glasgow in 2006 – though it is believed there could be other unknown victims of Tobin.
But at the time of Vicky’s disappearance in 1991, Tobin was not known to Scottish police.
Tom Wood, former West Lothian divisional commander
Recalling the night she went missing, Wood said: “The thing about Vicky Hamilton was that right from the start there was no delay – there’s often a delay when you start looking for mispers – but there wasn’t in Vicky’s case because the circumstances of her going missing were so suspicious right from the start.
“First of all, Vicky wasn’t a runaway sort of girl, she wasn’t a girl who had ever done that before. She had no history of that.
“The second thing was that on February 10, 1991, it was bitterly, bitterly cold, a lot of ice on the roads round about where she was in Bathgate – it really was like Siberia. And so the thought of running away at that time would have been extremely remote. It was a case of keeping yourself warm.”
Vicky had been visiting her sister in Livingston and had to change buses in Bathgate to continue her journey home to Redding, near Falkirk.
But Vicky never made it onto her connecting bus.
“In the early evening on February 10 she was seen waiting at the bus stop eating chips,” recalled Wood. “Because of the weather, public transport was badly disrupted so she was there, bitterly cold in a bitterly cold place and she simply disappeared.
“She never made it home. Because of her nature and because of the circumstances and the time of year it was, immediately we were very suspicious that something had happened.
“The very early efforts were to try and search any areas that she might have gone to shelter or to try and make her way home, and if she had tried to make her way home, we thought that she might have been overcome by hypothermia.”
CID became involved as the inquiry escalated amid the possibility that Vicky had been abducted.
It was at this point that the door-to-door searches began – but with such a large area to cover, Tobin soon became aware of what was happening and that he too would be visited by the police.
Tom Wood, former West Lothian divisional commander
“There was a history of that in the force, a lot of us had had experience of abduction cases with the Caroline Hogg/Susan Maxwell case, with the World’s End case, so there was an awareness of the risk of abduction and how to deal with it and how any delay was crucial to it,” said Wood.
“Once we had done what physical searches we could do, we then started to do house-to-house round about the area she was last seen, starting from the centre, working out and visiting every house and searching every house, and every outbuilding of every house.
“It took quite some time because Bathgate is a reasonably sized town. Of course, subsequently, a long time later, when Tobin was arrested, we found out that he had been living not too far from the abduction site of Vicky and that immediately after he had abducted and murdered her he had kept her body in his house, and he had then moved the body.
“We always suspected, in hindsight, that when he learned that we were searching houses, that’s when he moved the body.”
When asked if Tobin could have been caught during the initial inquires made after Vicky’s disappearance, Wood said there was no reason to suspect him at the time.
“The first thing you do is you ask yourself whether there was anything you could have done to short-circuit it; did we miss anything? And the answer was no because he wasn’t on the radar,” he explained.
“If someone’s not on the radar, if someone has no convictions whatsoever it’s very, very difficult.
“You question and question and re-question everything that you’ve done and the systems you’ve put in place. As things go on like this, there’s always a seed of doubt that comes about – is there some angle that you’ve missed, is there somebody that you’ve missed.”
Wood says he was relieved for the family that they had “closure” when Vicky’s body was eventually found – though Vicky’s mother never got to find out what happened to her daughter as she died just two years after her disappearance.
On November 30, 2007 – almost 17 years after she went missing – she was finally laid to rest.
