25 years since Vicky Hamilton went missing
She last seen at a bus stop following a visit to her big sister’s house.
The schoolgirl’s face became one of the most recognisable in Scotland as police launched one of the biggest missing person investigations the country has ever seen.
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Hide AdThe last sighting of the 15-year-old Redding youngster was at a bus stop across from Bathgate police station eating a bag of chips on February 10, 1991 as she waited for the bus back to Falkirk after visiting sister Sharon Brown in Livingston.
She never returned home to parents Michael and Janette who, along with her two sisters and brother, endured 16 years of not knowing what had happened to her – a state of unbearable uncertainty which ripped the family apart.
Janette didn’t live to see the body being found, or justice when her daughter’s murderer was convicted.
She passed away almost two years after Vicky went missing, desperately clinging to hope that she would be reunited with the youngster again.
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Hide AdVicky’s remains were found buried in the back garden of a house in Margate, Kent on November 13, 2007 where evil predator Peter Tobin had lived. She was found alongside another of the killer’s victims Dinah McNicol.
Tobin was convicted of abducting, raping and murdering Vicky in December 2008 and was sentenced to life in prison.
Tobin, who was 61 at the time, lived in the Falside area of Bathgate when he abducted Vicky. His sick and twisted ways were uncovered in 2006 after he murdered Polish student Angelika Kluk and hid her body under the floorboards of a Catholic church in Glasgow where they both worked. He was sentenced to life in 2007 for Angelika’s murder and another life sentence for Dinah’s in 2009.
Following the conviction for Vicky’s murder in December 2008, a statement released by her siblings Sharon (37), Lindsay Brown (24) and Lee Brown (24), said: “Vicky was much more than a girl who was abducted and killed by a stranger, or the girl on a ‘missing’ poster.
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Hide Ad“Our sister was a warm, clever, generous girl who shared many happy years with us. We will always remember Vicky as she lived, not as she died.”
Guilty after less than three hours’ deliberation
In December 2008 a jury of 12 women and three men took just two hours and 28 minutes to send child killer Peter Tobin to jail for life for the abduction and murder of Vicky Hamilton.
The 62-year-old monster had sat impassively in the dock throughout his 21-day trial at the High Court in Dundee and led away in handcuffs with the cheers of “yes” from tragic Vicky’s family sitting in the public gallery ringing in his ears.
Minutes after the unanimous verdict was announced, Lord Emslie told him: “Abducting and killing a child on her way home from a happy weekend with her sister and then desecrating her body must rank among the most evil and horrific acts that any human being could commit.
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Hide Ad“This was a vulnerable teenager who needed help home, but instead fell into your clutches and you brought her short life to an end in a disgusting and degrading way.”
Tobin, who was already serving life for the rape and murder of Polish student Angelica Kluk, stared straight ahead as the trial judge added: “Once again you have shown yourself to be unfit to live in a decent society. No one will ever know what fear and torment Vicky Hamilton went through before she died, but the agony you caused to her family was made infinitely worse by your calculating and entirely self interested attempts to conceal what you had done.
“You already have an appalling record for sexual and violent crimes. It is hard for me to convey the loathing and repulsion ordinary people will feel for what you have done.
“After a lengthy trial in which you conceded nothing, you have now been convicted as a result of your own mistakes as revealed by painstaking and highly skilled police and forensic work.”
Lord Emslie said that, if the law had allowed, he would have added the 30 years to the end of the 21 years Tobin was already serving.