Peter Tobin's Garden *UPDATED*

(The British media has been consumed with the murder of Meredith Kercher and picking apart the life of one of Meredith's alleged assailants, American college student Amanda Knox. The unfolding story of the buried bodies and Peter Tobin may eclipse that case. No one is better equipped to introduce American true crime readers to Tobin than The True Crime Weblog's British counterpart, True Crime Blog UK. ~ Steve Huff)

The unearthing of human remains in the back garden of a house once occupied by Peter Tobin (pictured) has sparked speculation that the house may yield clues to the fates of other missing women. The old "sandpit" the remains were found in may even turn out to be a mass grave.

Tobin worked as an odd-job man, a jack of all trades who went wherever the work was, regularly adopting different pseudonyms (two of which are known to be Peter Wilson and Pat McLoughlin) in order to conceal his true identity and nefarious past.

Investigations into Tobin's life, movements and activities now stretch back over four decades and, due to his extensive work-related travelling, have taken on a nationwide dimension. It's thought he may be involved in the disappearances and/or murders of 11 (some reports claim up to 15) women and young girls.

The following is a timeline* of murders and disappearances which, according to reports, Tobin may be linked to.

February 1968
Patricia Docker, 25, is murdered after a night out at Glasgow's Barrowland Ballroom.

August 1969
Jemima McDonald, 32, an unmarried mother-of-three, is found dead near her home in Bridgeton. She too had been to the Barrowland Ballroom.

October 1969
Helen Puttock, 29, is murdered. A witness had seen her at the Barrowland Ballroom with a man who called himself John and frequently quoted from The Bible. The murders of Patricia, Jemima and Helen are attributed to the same man, christened "Bible John".

August 1978
Genette Tate, 13, disappears while out delivering newspapers on her bike near her home village of Aylesbeare, Devon.

May 1980
Jessie Earl, 22, disappears from her bedsit in Eastbourne, East Sussex.

October 1986
The bodies of Nicola Fellows and Karen Hadaway, both 9, are found in Wild Park, Moulescoombe, Brighton. They had been raped and strangled. The killings become known as the second of two cases in the UK referred to as the "Babes in the Wood" murders.

June 1988
Louise Kay, 18, disappears from Eastbourne, East Sussex, after visiting a nightclub with friends.

1989
Jessie Earl's skeletal remains are found in bushes on The Downs at Beachy Head, East Sussex.

June 1990
Patsy Morris, 14, from Feltham is found strangled on Hounslow Heath, west London.

February 1991
Vicky Hamilton, 15, disappears from Bathgate, West Lothian, while travelling from her sister's house in Livingston to her home near Falkirk.

August 1991
Dinah McNicol, 18, disappears while hitchhiking from a music festival in Liphook, Hampshire, towards her home in Tillingham, Essex.

November 2007
Police searching for the body of Dinah McNicol in the back garden of a house on Irvine Drive, Margate — a property once occupied by Peter Tobin — find the remains of Vicky Hamilton.

16th November 2007
Police uncover a second body at the house on Irvine Drive.

* This timeline will be updated and added to as necessary.

Looking through online information about the possible victims, one thing stands out: they are all brunettes. This may be a coincidence, or an illusion created by some of the black-and-white photographs, but it was immediately noticeable by me. If the above cases are linked, it would appear the killer had a liking for young, dark-haired women.

It remains to be seen whether Tobin deserves to be entered into the UK's serial killer hall of shame, but the case is already reminiscent of the crimes of Fred West at the infamous 25 Cromwell Street. Tobin looks like he may fit into West's mould (minus the familial aspects, as far as we know): a violent, sadistic sexual predator, the true extent of whose crimes remained hidden for years.

This post will be updated as necessary.

Sources: Wikipedia, The Argus, BBC News (1), (2), (3)

UPDATE 16-NOV-2007: BBC News reports that police have found another body at the house on Irvine Drive. Police believe the remains are those of Dinah McNicol.

Notes: Tips, Donations, Etc.

At the beginning of January, 2008, I will remove the PayPal donation button you see at the top of the left-hand column. Hopefully, it will not return.

A lot of work goes into the original content you get here at the True Crime Weblog, and I'm proud of that work. As a result, you frequently get details of the crime stories you're interested in before they're available anywhere else. That's why, for instance, a TV station from a major metropolitan area like Detroit's WXYZ might take notice and link this blog in one of their online articles.

I do it for the same reasons I've always done it -- immense curiosity, a need to learn about the human condition, write about it -- and I do it for the readers. For folks who e-mail me with a link to some already well-covered crime story still hoping I'll weigh in, because they know they frequently learn about new developments in a story here first.

The True Crime Weblog is not a paying gig, it's my own thing. It's permanent, it will stick around for the forseeable future. I loathe asking for donations, tips, what have you, but sometimes I have to. I have reason to believe (partly due to some of the good news I've had lately) that by the beginning of 2008 I will no longer feel the need to do that, so that's why I've set that deadline for removing the donation button.

One reader who sent a pretty generous donation a while back said something that made my day in explaining why she sent it: "It's like paying PBS. It's hours of interesting news and information that needs to be supported."

Well, it ain't PBS, of course, but I'll take the compliment.

Please consider this an informal pledge drive.

That said, this is the only blog entry I'll post about it. I may put a note below the blog's title, but that will only stay up for two weeks at most.

Whether you send a tip or donation of any amount or not, accept my thanks, as always, for reading. I'm humbled every day by reader responses and participation here, and can never adequately express my gratitude.

Of Mysteriously Murdered Girls

They could be sisters.

One girl, had she lived, would be in her 40s. The other would still be 11. She'd still be riding her bike around town. Just a kid.

I have written before about Marcia Trimble, and how her disappearance and unsolved murder in 1975 influenced the writing I do now. How the crime seemed to affect my hometown, Nashville, and my generation.

Constantine, Michigan is much, much smaller than Nashville, Tennessee. Even the Nashville of 1975 was 10 times the size of Constantine.

On Thursday, November 8, Jodi Parrack was riding her bicycle home in Constantine when someone apparently snatched her.

She was quickly reported missing, and unlike Marcia Trimble, who was missing for more than a month, Jodi was quickly found.

Her mother found the girl's body in the Constantine Cemetery just before 11 that night. There were no outward signs of how she died. She simply lay in the graveyard dead, not far from her silver bike.

Early reports of Jodi's death were vague. Only today did police declare that the girl was indeed murdered. They warned parents in the area to stay alert.

The thing is, parents in the area had been on alert for a while. There'd been reports in the area for weeks of mysterious vehicles following kids as they walked to school. One source reported to the True Crime Weblog that they'd even escorted their kids to school a few times out of worry over the mysterious vehicle(s). This source didn't live in Constantine, but they did live nearby.

The same source had been in Brownies and Girl Scouts with Marcia Trimble. She'd lived in the same neighborhood as Marcia.

I knew that the mystery of Jodi Parrack's death was troubling me for all the normal reasons -- how does a little girl just vanish, only to end up dead in a cemetery hours later? If the murder was sexual, why was it so hard to determine prior to autopsy whether or not the girl was the victim of a homicide?

But there was something else, too. Today it hit me, and I found the color photo of Marcia Trimble to compare with Jodi's photo.

As coincidences go it may not even be all that unusual, but it still raised gooseflesh on my arms. I sent my comparison to my source, the woman who'd been a girl with Marcia in Brownies and Girl Scouts, who now was a parent living in the same area as Jodi Parrack. She wrote back: "[Seeing] the pictures side by side – unbelievably scary. It took me a bit to realize what was troubling [. . .] Saturday I had my assistant's two girls (4 and 9). We went down to the park near our house. There were a few kids out but every parent was watching unbelievably close."

Every death is individual, and murder is committed for a variety of reasons. The connections between Marcia then and Jodi now are simple coincidence -- about the same age, both popular, well-liked girls who disappeared about the same time of day. The resemblance between the two may be more a matter of camera angles and light than actual appearance.

Who killed Marcia? In 1979 Nashville thought the answer was near. Then a young man who'd bragged of killing the girl was acquitted for lack of evidence. In the 21st Century his DNA proved beyond a doubt that Jeffery Womack didn't kill Marcia Trimble.

Who killed Jodi Parrack?

The pool of suspects may be smaller in Constantine than it was in Nashville. At least one registered sex offender lives on Peachtree Lane there in Constantine, spitting distance from the cemetery where Jodi was found and not much further from her home.

But cops may have already eliminated most local sex offenders, as it is pretty common to simply go down the local list and talk to each offender when a crime like this occurs.

At the moment, Jodi's death remains a mystery.

My and my friend's responses to Jodi's image, to her tragedy, prove that we carry ghosts with us wherever we go. They are like bells in our hearts, tuned to certain frequencies, and they ring sometimes when we were on the verge of believing we were no longer haunted.

There are greater, longer-lasting tragedies spinning out from crimes like this. For in 29, 30 years, there may be someone out there who once knew Jodi Parrack writing out their memories because they have once again seen a young face in the news, the word "murdered" or "vanished" beside it. Memories of a funny, spunky girl who glittered, for a time, and then was too soon gone.

Source: WSBT.com.

Monday Morning Quickies

-- There's some more "Fresh Intelligence" up at RADAR Online. It's about an Anchor, a Madam, and a Captain.

**UPDATE TO THE ABOVE** John Cook at RADAR completely disposes of the rumor about the Madam and the Anchor here: "Donaldson's Digits: Wrong Number."

It's not mentioned by RADAR, but blogger Joseph Cannon has something to say about the source for the Sam Donaldson/DC Madam story here. Worth noting.

Long story short, as far as I know, Sam Donaldson's clean.

-- I'm no longer a contributor to Corey Mitchell's In Cold Blog. But it's a cool situation, not a frosty one. I've simply got too much to do now, and Corey understood that. I wanted to be able to give ICB original content, exclusives, but I couldn't.

-- African Americans vanish. Latinos disappear. The blogosphere screams in specious indignation when a "missing white woman" story like Stacy Peterson's makes and then dominates the news. But I think that along with people of color, missing men in general, even missing white men, also get short shrift in news coverage. A little boy vanishing is usually a major news story, and should be. Teen males who disappear cause concern. But it sometimes seems to me (admittedly, being a man, I may have a bias here) that men 18 and older disappear and very few news outlets outside of local TV want to cover the story.

I've actually discussed this issue with a producer from a major TV news magazine. My guess was -- and still is -- that there is a subconscious perception on the publics' part that males are often the authors of their fates. That through misadventure or bullheaded choice, men are more likely to have vanished of their own accord. The producer agreed with me.

I think there are logical reasons for this perception. Men sometimes do just say "to hell with it" and walk away from everything. Men (of all colors and creeds) still don't know how to deal with mental illness, with depression or bipolar disorder.

But that doesn't make it right. Every missing person matters, regardless of their color, regardless of their gender.

That's why I have to point out that local (to me) boy Justin Gaines, age 18, is still missing.

Justin vanished after leaving one of his favorite Gwinnett County GA haunts late on November 1, 2007. Friends and family have searched, cell phone pings have been attempted -- still, no sign of Justin.

There are message board discussions about Justin's disappearance, other blogs with a more local focus are covering the mystery, and Justin's family has put together a website as well:

http://www.justingaines.com/

It seems like the guy just dropped off the face of the earth.

That just doesn't happen. Someone knows where Justin Gaines is, what happened to him. They need to speak up. It's obvious both from the response to my previous entry about the young man and from other discussions on the Web that Justin was well-loved, had many friends, and was incredibly important to a number of people.

If you are here in the North Georgia area and following Justin's case, keep an eye on his site, as it seems to be updated pretty regularly. Again: JustinGaines.com.