If Hell does exist then surely it has a new inmate today

IT is only in the movies that the killer, on their deathbed, wants to open up and confess to other crimes they may have committed, perhaps to make peace with their maker. That’s a kind of film cliché that, in my experience, doesn’t exist in reality. Murderers take their secrets to the grave. It is their final act of control and it is a way that they live on, because everyone then wants to debate them after their death.

And, of course, it is difficult, if not impossible, to get any definitive answers at that point. Peter Tobin conformed to the pattern of many of the serial killers I have worked in connection with – being deliberately uncommunicative.

Tobin never spoke about the murders he committed and he certainly never spoke about the other murders he was suspected of having committed.

However, there is no doubt there are other deaths that look like he is probably the perpetrator. Those would include Jessie Earl, for example, and Pat Docker, the first of the Bible John victims. These are only the ones we are aware of in terms of historic links having been made between Tobin and potential victims – but there are certainly more.

The key thing about Tobin is that he was a very calculating, geographically transient killer. He travelled the country, making it very difficult to pin down exactly which victims might be connected to him. He was constantly on the move.

Having said this, my main thoughts on learning of his death are with the families of his victims.

That is really what I believe we should concentrate on right now rather than engage in a debate about other murders he may have committed. These are unlikely to lead anywhere at this time.

Way back in 2010, I wrote a book regarding Tobin and my belief that he is Bible John, pictured, the Glasgow serial killer of the 1960s.

But thinking about that would not be my major focus at the moment. I am thinking about the families of those victims that we know he did kill.

The families of every victim I have spoken to or worked with react in individual and unique ways.

Quite clearly, a lot of them want answers which he did not give when he was alive. Some of the families I have worked with have found their own ways of bringing closure in terms of what has happened to them and to their loved ones, ways which aren’t dependent on the reaction of the perpetrator.

It is about them being able to take back some control.

And I would also suggest that, while I am not a religious person, if Hell does exist, it will today have a new inmate, because Tobin was inherently evil in a secular sense.

He repeatedly killed, he never showed any remorse, he displayed vicious sadism within many elements of his criminal activity and he consistently abused trust.

We saw that in particular in relation to Angelika Kluk, whom he worked alongside at the church where she was working as a cleaner.

In keeping with this pattern of abuse of trust, he offered a lift to another of his victims, Dinah McNicol, when she and her boyfriend were hitchhiking.

He abused his victims and never showed an ounce of remorse. I believe, in the secular sense in which I mean it, that Tobin truly was evil.