Authors: Cathy Wilson
The next twenty-four hours were hideous. I was convinced Peter would be looking to recreate past glories. I didn’t dare leave the house once. Even with all my security in place, I still found my greatest ally was the TV. Sky News had updates running like ticker tape across the bottom of the screen and I couldn’t drag myself away. Every TV in the house was tuned to a different station, in case I missed some detail. I had the radio on too. I knew nothing would change while I stared at the screen, but I couldn’t stop watching. Not until the monster was caught.
Once the media publicity kicked in, Peter – or Pat – was actually picked up very quickly. He’d checked himself into a London hospital, complaining of heart difficulties. I think he must have thought doctors are too busy to read newspapers. Someone recognized him instantly and called the police. He had no heart trouble at all. At last I could turn off the TV. I wouldn’t be seeing him ever again.
Or so I thought. The police investigating Angelika Kluk’s murder kept me informed throughout. When the case finally went to trial in Edinburgh in 2007, I couldn’t help following its progress in the news. It was so macabre, but I couldn’t ignore any little detail. To my knowledge, Daniel didn’t read a single headline. He just wasn’t interested. I’d told him the truth about his father the day we’d seen Peter’s image on TV, but a year later Daniel hadn’t asked another question. That was his way of dealing with things and I respect that.
I, on the other hand, needed closure. I didn’t want to miss a scrap of the evidence that was finally going to see Peter put away for good.
Then, one day in May, a police officer rang.
‘Cathy, I thought you would want to know, it’s nearly over. The judge gives his verdict tomorrow.’
‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘I’ll be up on the next flight. I’m not missing this for the world.’
I didn’t know where that spur-of-the-moment decision had come from. Before that conversation, I’d had no desire to ever set eyes on that murdering piece of filth ever again. But the moment I heard D-Day had arrived, I knew I had to be part of it. Unfortunately, Tim and I had broken up in July 2006, after ten happy years. There was no fault on either side; it was just another relationship that had run its natural course. But we were still friendly, so I didn’t hesitate to ring him: ‘Do you fancy a trip to Edinburgh?’
‘Lovely. When?’
‘Now. Pack a bag – the flight leaves in an hour.’
I’d received the news at three. By six, Tim and I were on a plane. It was the first time I’d flown to Scotland since I’d been blackmailed into returning to Bathgate. It was the same man responsible this time. The difference was, I wasn’t scared. I knew I was going to see him get his comeuppance at last.
The next morning a police car picked us up from the hotel. Two spaces had been reserved in the gallery. We were in the top row. Angelika Kluk’s family were at the bottom. I felt so desperately sorry for them, but they were so proud, so impressive. They all held hands, giving each other strength even though they’d had to endure hearing every horrific detail of their beloved Angelika’s death and God knows what personal revelations about her life from a defence team struggling to find anything to justify their client’s actions.
Standing directly in front of them but facing the opposite way was Peter, the accused, in his protective glass box.
As soon as I saw the back of his head, I started shaking uncontrollably. I’d seen the same couple of grainy pictures of Peter on TV so many times over the last six months, but nothing had seemed real up to now. The headlines and accusations were so far beyond the parameters of normal expectation that I couldn’t easily process them and it may as well have been a story about a different person. That’s the effect a saturation of TV news has. If I hadn’t made the journey to Edinburgh, I’d have felt like I was living in
The Truman Show
. But here we were, in the same room, and the man who’d shared my bed for three years was about to be convicted of murder.
The closer the judge got to his conclusion, the more uncontrollably I shook. Tim clutched my hand, but I was a bundle of nervous energy, rocking in fear that the unthinkable might happen. That was when I noticed the court was packed with armed policemen, all with their eyes trained on the gallery. If there was even the slightest chance Peter would get off, they needed to be able to assert control over a dissenting crowd. And one of them had come to stand right next to me.
At that point, I just wanted to shout out at Peter, ‘Turn round! Turn round! I need you to know I’m here.’ But I didn’t dare, not with the automatic weapon a foot from my head.
Finally the judge gave the verdict. Peter was guilty and was going down for a minimum of twenty-one years. Just as in 1994, I felt numb. I wanted it to mean more, but it didn’t. The man in the dock had already stolen so many emotions from me, I didn’t have any left to waste on him now.
TWENTY-ONE
It was nice that Tim and I could put aside our differences to fly up to Scotland together. Another relationship, however, had ended permanently. In October 2006, shortly after Peter’s arrest, my grandmother had died.
It was hard enough saying goodbye to Grandpa. Granny, however, had been the rock in my life for as long as I could remember. She was the one who’d secretly delivered meals without Grandpa noticing when I was a child. She was the one who’d taken on Mark and friends with no thought to her own safety. She’d lent me money to start a business and had given me the deposit for a house. I couldn’t have got by without her. I almost even forgave her that infernal old-fashioned hairstyle that had made me the laughing stock of Longhill School. Almost . . .
Seeing her succumb to Hodgkin’s lymphoma – a type of cancer – was heartbreaking, but at least I knew about her diagnosis almost as soon as she did, unlike the way Grandpa preferred to do things. Ever since Granny had been on her own, I’d always popped round once or twice a week and done her shopping. As time went by, she began to rely on me more and more. In her last three months, I was there every day. For the last month, it was a couple of times a day. By the time I managed to persuade the doctors that she needed to be hospitalized, I’d been virtually nursing her. She couldn’t stand, she couldn’t walk, she could barely eat. I knew the end was close, but until then I needed to be strong for her. Gran had supported me through so much. Now it was my turn to pay her back.
I think she was finally admitted to hospital on a Monday and by Friday it was over. She was cremated on 22 October 2006 and I thought I would never stop crying. Months of worry and grief and trying to show the good old British stiff upper lip that Grandpa and Granny would have expected finally took their toll. A short while later, Anne and I bought a memorial bench and placed it on Lady’s Mile on Southsea Common, where Granny used to love to walk with her dogs. A lovely plaque remembers her, Grandpa and my darling mum. After thirty years, I no longer feel the need to visit Mum’s crematorium on the anniversary of her death because I can just go and sit on that bench and remember my whole family.
Granny left a lot of interesting things, which Aunt Anne and I enjoyed sifting through. She had an original hairdryer from the 1950s, which I wanted to keep hold of, as well as more documents about my background. One of them made me catch my breath. It was a hand-drawn poem called ‘Nil Desperandum’. I had to look it up – it means ‘Don’t Give Up’. Mum had written it out for Granny during her last days at Telscombe Cliffs. She’d seen it on the wall in St Peter’s Church and copied it for her mother as her last act of contrition. I don’t know how she held her hand so steady. It was beautiful. I was so glad Granny had kept it and I still have it on my wall now.
While I was taking a tremendous amount of solace from the words ‘Don’t Give Up’, so were the police. By the time Angelika’s trial had concluded, I was already feeling overwhelmed by a relentless questioning process that had begun weeks earlier. Different police officers kept coming to my house and asking the same questions over and over. That was just about bearable – I understood how important this was. Then, a few months later, they started asking me to go to the station at Cosham because, as they explained, they had a tape-recording unit there. I went along, like a dutiful citizen, but I was puzzled.
They’ve already solved Angelika’s murder. What can I possibly tell them?
Then I discovered why they were so keen to keep speaking to me. A psychiatrist who analysed the Angelika case concluded that a murderer who’d disposed of a body so expertly was very unlikely to have started this behaviour in his sixties. This led to the formation of Operation Anagram – a nationwide search for other possible victims of Peter Tobin, based on unsolved missing persons files going back decades. It was hard enough coming to terms with the fact that Peter had done it once. But more? Whatever the experts said, that was impossible, surely?
Unfortunately, not only was it possible that Peter had committed other murders, I would soon discover he had done them while juggling his life with Daniel and me.
Operation Anagram’s first move was to search all Peter’s previous addresses and within two months it paid off.
In November 2007 police found another body, this time in the garden of Peter’s old house in Margate. The discovery of Angelika’s body had been bad enough, but this one was worse. It had been dismembered and buried in separate bin bags.
Who could do that to a body?
Faced with crimes of this magnitude, it’s very hard to put yourself in the place of the victim or even their family. The sheer scale of everything, one grotesque revelation after another, is too great for the human brain to process. So you end up focusing on the bits that affect you personally. The body, police said, had been unearthed from under the garden’s old sandpit.
Daniel used to play in that!
Suddenly I was overcome by a wave of nausea at the recollection of being impressed by Peter digging the sandpit in the first place. I felt so stupid. He’d only done it to cover his tracks. Yet again, he’d used his son – just as he had in order to claim his victim in the first place.
DNA tests established the body as that of a young girl from Scotland, Vicky Hamilton, who’d gone missing in the Bathgate area of Scotland in February 1991 – a few months after I’d fled with my son. It was so long ago – thinking of her poor family not knowing what had happened for all this time made me so sad. Learning the facts of her death was even worse.
After a weekend with her sister in Livingston, Vicky had been trying to make her way back to Falkirk via the bus network. After asking several strangers for directions to her next linking stop, she’d bought a bag of chips and set off. But when the bus pulled in, Vicky had already accepted a lift from a man in a white van. Perhaps she normally wouldn’t have taken the risk with a stranger, but it was snowing and the man’s young son in the seat next to him must have given her a good feeling about him.
The police didn’t know exactly what had happened to her, but it was obvious Vicky had been horribly hurt and raped before she was killed. When they took apart the house in Robertson Avenue, they found the knife Peter had used to cut her up.
At first I didn’t make the connection between the dates. It wasn’t unusual for Daniel to have been with his father, after all. Then the penny dropped. By February 1991 we were living in Portsmouth.
If Daniel was in the van, it must have been the weekend Peter had abducted him!
Suddenly my brain was racing at the realization. The police were confident that Daniel didn’t see anything happen between Peter and Vicky – maybe he’d been sent to bed – but he must have been in the house with the girl’s dead body for a while.
And when I flew up on my SAS rescue mission, so must I!
The police, as you’d hope, reached that conclusion faster than I did. They kept asking the same question:
‘When you went back to Bathgate in February 1991 were there any rooms Peter prevented you from going in?’
Unfortunately, I just did not know. I had too much else going on in my mind. All I could think about at the time was luring Peter back into England.
‘I don’t know if I would even have noticed if one of the bedrooms was out of bounds,’ I had to confess.
Again and again, different officers kept coming back to the same question. ‘Were there any rooms he wouldn’t let you enter?’ and the answer was always ‘No, not that I recall.’ But I could have been wrong. It was later reported at the trial that the Margate family with whom Peter had swapped Robertson Avenue had been denied access to the upstairs when they’d travelled up to view the house. Vicky’s body, police think, was up there awaiting disposal.
It gives you an insight into the mind of a serial killer, I think, that he could apparently invite people to view his house, forgetting he had a dead body stored upstairs. It was clearly as mundane, in his mind, as misplacing his house keys. He just didn’t see it as wrong.
The more the police investigated, the more they would come to me with fresh information about my time with Peter. Sometimes I could help them, but most of their questions opened up completely new areas to me. In fact, if I hadn’t known they were talking about me and Peter, I never would have guessed.
For example, one day they told me that Vicky’s body contained traces of the anti-depressant Amitriptyline.