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Missing Vicky: Detectives will dig up Tobin’s garden

THE former home of the convicted murderer Peter Tobin is to be searched by police from Monday as part of an investigation into the disappearance of the Falkirk schoolgirl Vicky Hamilton 16 years ago.

Forensic officers from Lothian and Borders Police will also dig up the garden at the property in Bathgate, West Lothian.

Tobin is serving a life sentence for the rape and murder of the Polish student Angelika Kluk, 23, in Glasgow last year.

He lived in Bathgate at the time Vicky, 15, vanished in 1991 while she was waiting for a bus. She had changed buses in Bathgate while travelling from Livingston, where she had been visiting her sister, to her home near Falkirk.

Michael Hamilton, Vicky’s father, last night said: “We welcome this move 100 per cent. Hopefully, they are going to find something to prove Tobin was involved. It would give us great peace of mind.

“But we will now have to wait and see what the police can tell us. It is good to have Vicky’s case back in the limelight and I’m quite happy that the police have started doing something.”

The case was reopened last November and police are planning to speak to Tobin in jail.

Officers were at the property last week to speak to the current residents, as well as others living in the street.

The Scotsman understands that a full-scale search of the property will begin on Monday.

Police will also interview Tobin’s former wife, Cathy Wilson, who shared the West Lothian home at the time.

Mr Hamilton last week said he wanted to visit Tobin to ask him whether he killed his daughter.

Tobin was convicted of murdering Ms Kluk in September last year then dumping her body underneath St Patrick’s Church in Anderston, Glasgow. He will serve 21 years before being eligible to apply for parole.

Tobin received a further 30-month sentence for breaching the terms of the sex offenders’ register.

It emerged after his trial that Tobin, 60, had been on the run for almost a year before he killed Ms Kluk.

Tobin vanished from his Paisley home in October 2005 following an incident involving a young woman.

Officers found him 11 months later, but by that time he had killed Miss Kluk and hidden her mutilated body under the floor of the church.

Vick Hamilton’s disappearance sparked one of Scotland’s biggest missing-person inquiries.

More than 7,000 people were interviewed, 4,000 statements taken and 12,000 documents seized. Despite that, officers have found no trace of her.

Last year, Bert Swanson, who heads the serious-crime review unit at Lothian and Borders Police, revealed that the case was being re-examined and treated, for the first time, as a murder inquiry.

Mr Swanson said that advances in DNA techniques might provide a vital clue to the identity of the killer, adding that Vicky’s black leather purse - which was found close to the St Andrew Square bus station in Edinburgh 11 days after she went missing - would undergo DNA analysis.