Scotland's most prolific serial killer has gone to the grave without revealing the true number of lives he took.
Evil Peter Tobin spent his final days chained to a hospital bed riddled with cancer while continuing to deny closure to the families of those police believe he tortured and murdered.
As his death was announced on Saturday, the full extent of his violence may never be known.
Tobin had been receiving round-the-clock nursing care at HMP Edinburgh in between trips to hospital. It is believed he was taken to the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh on Wednesday after his condition deteriorated, before subsequently passing away.
READ MORE: Serial killer Peter Tobin dies in jail
The 76-year-old monster was serving three life sentences for the murder of 15-year-old Scots schoolgirl Vicky Hamilton, Polish student Angelika Kluk, 23, in Glasgow, and Dinah McNicol, 18, in Essex.
Operation Anagram, which was headed by former detective David Swindle, looked at more than 1000 leads on Tobin, tracked down over 40 places where he had lived, and delved into any links they could find with unsolved murders or missing women in those areas.
They narrowed the list to nine unsolved crimes and missing person cases that they believed involved Tobin, who was originally from Johnstone in Renfrewshire.
READ MORE: Glasgow Crime Stories: The murder of Angelika Kluk and killer Peter Tobin
But despite pleading with the psychotic killer to give closure to their families, he refused to ever speak about the cases.
Two stood out – the deaths of Jessie Earl, in 1980, and Louise Kay, in 1988, in Eastbourne, Sussex, where Tobin had been living at the time, but there wasn’t enough evidence to charge him.
Mr Swindle says we will never know the true extent of Tobin’s horrendous crimes.
He exclusively told the Glasgow Times: “This was an individual who took pleasure in torturing and murdering vulnerable women.
“There’s no doubt in my mind that he’s responsible for many more murders, but as I feared he would, he’s taken his secrets to the grave with him.
“I always hoped that he might find a shred of decency as he neared the end of his life to do the correct thing, but this shows he was someone who was incapable of showing any remorse, right until his last breath.
“He never cared about his victims or their families. He was a calculated murderer who ultimately only ever thought about himself, right until the very end.
“I don’t think he was ever capable of humanity. Tobin never wanted to reveal the true extent of his crimes, it was all about the power and control it gave him.
“He only ever cared about himself and none of his victims or their relatives ever mattered.
“He never once showed an ounce of regret and that continued right to his dying day.”
After an early conviction in the late 1960s for fraud, Tobin was sentenced in 1994 to 14 years in prison for a brutal attack on two 14-year-old girls in Hampshire where he forced them to take drugs at knifepoint before raping one and sexually assaulting the other.
He served 10 years in prison and was added to the sex offenders register, and on his release in 2004 moved to Paisley. By the following year, Scottish police had lost track of him and he was posing as a homeless handyman called Pat McLaughlin when, in September 2006, he raped and murdered Angelika Kluk at Glasgow’s St Patrick’s Church in Anderston where she lived and worked.
Mr Swindle led the police investigation into Tobin and discovered numerous aliases, that he used 38 different mobile phone sim cards and travelled extensively throughout the UK in the year before her murder.
Every police force in the country was alerted that he might have killed before, prompting an urgent re-examination of unsolved cases.
In June 2007, Tobin's old house in Bathgate was searched in connection with the disappearance of 15-year-old schoolgirl Vicky, who had gone missing on February 10, 1991.
Another former home in Margate was searched and the bodies of Vicky and Dinah were found in the garden.
In December 2008, Tobin was convicted of Vicky's murder at the High Court in Dundee where he was given a second life sentence.
Dinah was just 18 when she was last seen on August 5, 1991, leaving a music festival in Liphook in Hampshire. She accepted a lift from Tobin and was never seen again.
As part of the inquiries, police were especially interested in tracing the owners of jewellery found at his residences.
He had long been talked about in connection with the Bible John murders in Glasgow, but Mr Swindle said he could find no evidence linking him to the crimes of the notorious serial killer, who took the lives of three women in the 1960s.
He now goes to the grave leaving a trail of familes who will never get the answers the crave or likely never know what happened to their cherished loved ones.
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