PETER TOBIN

After the attack he’d turned on the gas taps and left the girls for dead, but they survived and bravely gave evidence against him.

In May 2007, he was jailed for 21 years for the murder of Angelika and police began to probe other missing persons cases.

Tobin’s former home in the Bathgate area of West Lothian was searched in connection with the disappearance of teenager Vicky Hamilton, who had gone missing in February 1991. A few weeks after her disappearance, Tobin moved 500 miles to Margate in Kent.

In November 2007, cops found the remains of Vicky buried in the garden of 50 Irvine Road in Margate, where Tobin had lived in 1991. A neighbour recalled seeing him digging a hole so deep he’d asked if he was “off to Australia”. Tobin had said it was a ‘sandpit’.

Police then found the remains of a second girl in the Irvine Road garden – student Dina McNichol, 18, who had gone missing after leaving a music festival in Hampshire in August 1991.

In separate trials, Tobin was sentenced to 30 years for Vicky’s murder and, for Dina’s murder, he received his third life sentence.

David Wilson, professor of criminology at the University of Birmingham and a Tobin expert, said: “He’s been killing in the 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s, and we know he killed after the Millennium. He could be our most prolific serial killer.”