A former neighbour of serial killer Peter Tobin has said they believe his missing victims could have been buried in a local cabbage field.
The Edinburgh prisoner was confirmed to have died last month in hospital while serving a whole life sentence for the murders of three women, Vicky Hamilton, Dinah McNicol and Angelika Kluk.
Failing to confess the location of other suspected victims before his death, an ex-neighbour of Tobin has now said others could be located at a cabbage field close to the garden where he left his known victims.
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Claiming that she had seen him taking a wheelbarrow filled with "waste" to the field and a nearby garage, the neighbour has told police about his unusual activities during his stay in Margate, Kent.
Tobin murdered Vicky and Dinah in 1991, and buried their bodies in the garden of his home in Margate’s Irvine Drive.
Speaking to the Record, the neighbour said: “I thought Peter Tobin was creepy, a weirdo. He was always out late, often at about 11.30pm. We’d hear him before we’d see him – the haunting squeal of his wobbling wheelbarrow and shuffling steps along the alleyway.
"There was an alley that led from his back garden, via a gate, to empty garages. It was just a few minutes' walk but you could see Tobin struggled with the weight of the wheelbarrow at times. We sometimes saw him tipping the contents of his wheelbarrow into a cabbage field but one night when a friend and I were out walking the dogs, we saw him close to the derelict garages.
“He was hunched over his wheelbarrow, meticulously tucking the tarpaulin around his load. As we neared him, the dogs started going crazy, barking and jumping towards the wheelbarrow, trying to pounce on whatever was beneath the tarpaulin.
“I thought, ‘What the hell is he doing with that wheelbarrow at this time of night?’ My friend started chatting to Tobin. She asked him, ‘What are you up to, Pete? What’s in the wheelbarrow?’ He cackled and said he was ‘getting rid of some mud’ from his garden and ‘picking up some hardcore for my pool’. I steered my friend and the dogs away. Tobin freaked me out.”
The woman said her blood “ran cold” when Tobin’s two known teenage victims were found in 2007, wrapped in bin bags in a makeshift grave in the back yard of the Irvine Drive house. She said she had heard Tobin excavating the chest-deep hole in his garden.
The neighbour said: “When those two girls were found in his garden, I couldn’t believe it – I’d heard him digging that grave. I’d seen him digging elsewhere on the estate and thought, ‘Oh my God, I lived a stone’s throw away from a serial killer.’ There was a lot of speculation about other young women missing. I was worried he had killed other girls and buried them in the area.”
She said she had directed police to specific locations where she had seen Tobin lurking with his shovel and wheelbarrow. The derelict garage compounds were bulldozed in 2006 to make way for new homes but the cabbage field still exists and has not been developed.
Both Essex and Kent Police confirmed they are aware of the former resident’s claims. Recalling the summer of 1991 – when Tobin buried Vicky and Dinah in his back garden – the neighbour said Tobin “shovelled, scraped and banged about for weeks” in the back garden of his home.
Our source, who was in her mid-20s when she lived near Tobin’s house on the Millmead Estate, said: “I walked past 50 Irvine Drive most days and, for a few weeks, in late summer 1991, all you could hear was a hell of a racket coming from the back garden. The sound of a shovel plunging into dirt and the harsh noise of smashing concrete. Crashing, banging, scraping.
“Tobin seemed to be labouring forever – and he wasn’t exactly discreet. He told locals he was digging a pool in his garden, although he told others he was building a sandpit for his son. The running joke on the estate was that Peter Tobin was ‘digging for Australia’.”
Tobin moved to Margate in March 1991, after arranging a house swap with a family who were keen to return to West Lothian. A month previously, he had abducted Vicky from a Bathgate bus stop. He drugged, raped and butchered the schoolgirl.
He then bundled her mutilated body – wrapped in a curtain and bin bags – into his car and drove her more than 400 miles south to Margate. Five months later, he struck again, this time snatching Dinah as she hitched a lift home from a music festival in Liphook, Hampshire. Tobin doped Dinah, from Essex, with the painkiller amitriptyline and throttled her.
He put the girls’ bodies in the grave he dug in his garden then filled the hole with soil and concrete. The neighbour said Tobin had once asked her to “pop in for a drink”. He also routinely lured teenagers into his home, plying them with booze, she claimed.
She added: “No way was I going to step foot inside Tobin’s home. There were always teenage girls, and lads, loitering outside his house, sitting on the bin cupboard. Tobin’s house was a drinking den. The people outside were always drunk.
“Sometimes you’d see Tobin standing on his front doorstep, staring. You could never see inside his house as the curtains were always drawn.”
She added: “It terrifies me to think how close I lived to a serial killer, and to know he was digging graves for those two young women.”
Tobin died, chained to a hospital bed in Edinburgh, on October 8 – three years after being diagnosed with cancer. He was 76. His ashes were scattered at sea.
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