Helen Archer | On 18, Mar 2025

BBC Scotland has been quietly developing quite the solid back catalogue in true crime, with sensitively rendered looks at historical cases, in the main led by director Matt Pinder, the man behind both the Murder Trial and The Hunt for… series. His newest contribution, The Hunt for Peter Tobin, continues his exploration of some of the country’s worst historical crimes, and is handled with typical empathy.

While the title might suggest that the two-part documentary concentrates on the police investigation into the serial killer and sex offender, it is, in fact, so much more than that. It begins with the disappearance of 15-year old Vicky Hamilton, who went missing on a freezing February evening, while waiting for a bus to take her to her home in the small village of Redding, in central Scotland. It was a vanishing which impacted the wider population, due in no small part to the school photo issued from the police in their effort to find her – as Kaye Adams points out here, it could have been any schoolgirl of the time.

The programme segues into Dinah McNicol’s disappearance, just a few months later, as the 18-year-old went missing after accepting a lift back from a music festival in Hampshire in August 1991. While Dinah’s father is seen in older footage, as he joins the search for her, he is not interviewed for this programme. Instead, Pinder relies on interviews he gave over the years in an attempt to keep her name and image in people’s minds.

This includes clips from an episode of 1990s TV talk show Lowri – presented by Lowri Turner – which feature both Vicky’s older sister and Dinah’s father, sitting almost side-by-side, divided by an aisle, in which they talk about the girls’ disappearances – completely unaware of how intertwined their cases were. Both speak about the devastating impact not knowing what had happened to them had on their lives, and is intercut with footage of what was then a new charity, The National Missing Persons Helpline, and some of the initiatives used to help those looking for loved ones.

While Vicky and Dinah’s cases went cold for years, the second episode moves us forward to 2006, and the disappearance of Angelika Kluk, a 23-year-old Polish student who was working and living in St Patrick’s Church in Glasgow’s Anderston area. Five days after last being seen with the church’s handyman – who was soon revealed to be Peter Tobin, going under an assumed name – her body was found under the floorboards of the church. A national manhunt began, and Tobin’s past – of violence, and serious sexual assaults – was revealed. A search of one of his previous properties, in Margate, uncovered both Vicky and Dinah, buried in his garden.

While Tobin is the titular character of the series, he is, to the documentary’s credit, given short shrift. Instead, what lingers is the unbearable pain of not knowing what happened to a loved one, epitomised in Dinah’s father’s hope, before her remains were identified, that she was one of those found buried. It is better to know their fate than it is to be forever left wondering – even if that fate is as dark as Dinah’s. Vicky’s mum died, not long after her daughter disappeared, a husk of herself as she turned to alcohol to self-medicate and refused to leave the house. Vicky’s younger sister, who is interviewed at length for this documentary, describes the way in which their lives were turned upside down after Vicky was taken – losing Vicky, then their mum, having to move from what was a once-happy home to a different town, a name change, the loss of friends and everything they had known.

Those ripple effects of one man’s evil, spiderwebbing into every aspect of so many peoples’ lives – including the journalists, police, and the forensic investigator who had to wedge her body under the St Patrick’s Church floorboards to gather as much evidence from Angelina Kluk’s body as possible – is conveyed so perceptively in this victim-centred documentary, that it should be the standard for all true crime programming.

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