Sex offender found guilty of schoolgirl's murder

Convicted sex offender Peter Tobin was sentenced to life in prison yesterday after being found guilty of the murder of a teenage girl who disappeared in 1991.

The remains of 15-year-old Vicky Hamilton were found last year at Mr Tobin's former house in Kent, 16 years after she went missing from Bathgate in West Lothian.

A jury at the High Court in Dundee found Mr Tobin guilty after less than three hours' deliberation following a month-long trial, the Press Association reported.

Ms Hamilton's father Michael shouted "rot in hell" as Mr Tobin was told he would serve a minimum of 30 years.

Mr Tobin, 62, snatched, sexually assaulted and killed Ms Hamilton before cutting her body in two and burying it in his garden.

She had been waiting for a bus in Bathgate town centre to go home to her mother in Redding, near Falkirk, after visiting her sister.

Experts told the trial that bruising found on her body suggested she met a violent death. Judge Lord Emslie told Mr Tobin: "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".

The former handyman had left Ms Hamilton's purse near Edinburgh's main railway and bus stations to fool police into thinking she had run away from home.

Mr Tobin is already serving a life sentence for the rape and murder of Polish student Angelika Kluk, 23, whose body was found underneath the floorboards of a Glasgow church in 2006.

Following that conviction police had searched Mr Tobin's old home in Bathgate and discovered in the attic a knife carrying a piece of Ms Hamilton's skin.

Police then dug up the garden of a house in Margate where Mr Tobin had moved a month after Ms Hamilton's death, discovering her body wrapped in two plastic bags.

After the trial Ms Hamilton's sister Lyndsay Brown said the verdict had brought an end to a "17-year nightmare".

"Vicky was much more than a girl who was abducted and killed by a stranger or a girl on a missing poster," she said. "Our sister was warm, clever, a generous girl who shared many happy years with us.