By Brian Smith and Maura Bowman

THERE IS no evidence that Falkirk schoolgirl Vicky Hamilton met the man accused of murdering her, “while she was alive,” the jury at the High Court in Dundee was told yesterday.

In his closing speech, after four weeks of evidence, defence QC Donald Findlay said the Crown had failed to provide evidence of how, where or when Vicky had met her death.

The court had earlier heard what happened to Vicky described as “a crime of almost unspeakable horror,” as Solicitor General Frank Mulholland asked them to hold, beyond reasonable doubt, that Peter Tobin was the man responsible.

Mr Findlay told the jury what had happened to Vicky was “horrendous” and that they could not shy away from that, but it had nothing to do with assessing the facts.

They were not under a moral obligation to make somebody pay for what had happened, said Mr Findlay.

“This is a court of justice, not a court of revenge,” he added.

The court has heard evidence that Vicky disappeared after boarding a bus to Bathgate from Livingston, where she had spent the weekend with her sister.

Witnesses said she asked for directions to the stop where she was to catch a second bus home to Falkirk.

She was not seen alive again and her body was found last year, buried in the back garden of a house in Margate.

Mr Findlay said it was not known how Vicky left the centre of Bathgate—who, or how many people, she left with, or where she ended up that night.

He asked if Vicky was still alive at midnight on the night she disappeared and again supplied the answer, “We don’t know.”

Mr Findlay suggested there was no evidence to show what actually did happen to Vicky, “after she stopped her strange wanderings around Bathgate.”

Furthermore, Mr Findlay went on, “There is not a single, solitary scrap of evidence that puts Peter Tobin in the centre of Bathgate at or about that time and there is no way round that for the Crown.”

He recalled that a witness had spoken of seeing Tobin outside a pub in the centre of Bathgate later that evening and said it would be dangerous to assume the witness could not be mistaken.

Mr Findlay said it was being suggested that Tobin had somehow induced or conned Vicky into leaving the centre of Bathgate with him and going to, “let us assume,” 11 Robertson Avenue—his home at the time.

There would have to have been a vehicle because no one could seriously suggest he carried her up the road, said Mr Findlay.

He would then somehow have to get Vicky Hamilton from the vehicle into his house, “and not a soul sees it happen,” despite the area being overlooked by neighbours’ windows.

Mr Findlay also queried how Tobin could have forced her to take drugs in the first place.

There was no evidence of any injuries to her face to suggest that she was forced to swallow anything, he told the jury.

Mr Findlay said the “massive problem” in the Crown case was the lack of evidence linking Tobin to Vicky in Bathgate on the night she disappeared.

Indeed, if the witness’s identification of Tobin was mistaken, there was no evidence putting him in Bathgate at all on the night of Vicky’s disappearance.

He said the Crown case was to suggest that Vicky had been killed and cut in half at Robertson Avenue, yet forensic teams had been unable to find any trace of the eight pints of blood or body fluids that would have been released in the house.

If she had not been killed there, it meant someone had taken the knife the Crown said had been used to cut her body back to Robertson Avenue.

That, he said was a “bizarre” proposition, unless someone had put the knife in the loft of the house, in a place where it could be found.

He asked jurors not to be over-impressed by the “unsupported, unsubstantiated gobbledegook” of forensic scientists.

Fingerprints on a moveable object only said there had been contact with that object, no more. DNA from the swabs, even if it was Peter Tobin’s, did not say he had killed Vicky Hamilton.

Of the presence of Peter Tobin’s son’s DNA on Vicky Hamilton’s purse, counsel said, “The Crown made no attempt to say that the relationship between (the boy) and that purse has any connection whatsoever with the circumstances of the death of Vicky Hamilton.”

Mr Findlay suggested that there was not, “a single scrap of evidence that Peter Tobin met Vicky Hamilton when she was alive.”

If that was correct, that alone was, “an end to the charge of murder.”

The charge of mutilating and disposing of the body after death, he said, was wholly dependent on the jury being satisfied Peter Tobin was guilty of murder.

Whatever happened to her after she was dead was not a crime in Scots law, he argued.

“She was dead when she was bisected, dead when her body was put in polythene bags. This is not a crime, however appallingly dreadful, disgusting, that may be.”

Addressing the jury earlier, solicitor general Frank Mulholland QC reminded jurors of the 17-year nightmare endured by her family.

“The Crown case is that Peter Tobin is the person responsible for this nightmare,” he said.

Mr Mulholland told the jury, “To abduct, drug, sexually assault and murder a 15-year-old girl who was doing nothing more than trying to get home to her mother’s was a crime of almost unspeakable horror.”

He suggested it was “a barbaric act—an atrocity,” which was compounded by Tobin’s “tantalising” tactic of leaving the teenager’s purse at St Andrew Square in Edinburgh, in a devious bid to make it appear Vicky had run away from home, with the obvious effect that would have on her family.

Swabs were taken from both sides of the purse and a DNA profile was obtained which provided a match to Peter Tobin’s son.

The solicitor general argued there was only a five-day window during which Tobin’s son could have come into contact with the purse and the finding of his DNA on it suggested that Tobin had either given it to the three-year-old to play with or allowed him access to the purse.

“How did he have the purse?” Answering his own question, Mr Mulholland said, “He took it from Vicky.”

He continued, “How did he take it?” The solicitor general again answered his own question, “When he murdered Vicky Hamilton.”

Mr Mulholland then turned to the knife found in the loft of Tobin’s home in Bathgate.

He suggested this was “powerful” evidence on its own that Peter Tobin was responsible for her murder and described the admission to police by Tobin that it was probably his knife as “damning.”

A piece of material found on the knife was, in the opinion of a forensic scientist, skin, which DNA analysis gave a one in more than one billion chance of coming from a woman not related to Vicky. Mr Mulholland suggested this proved that the skin on the knife was Vicky Hamilton’s.

Vicky’s body was found wrapped in bin bags, like the layers of a “Russian doll,” as one witness described it, he continued.

From one of the inside bags wrapping the upper part of her body, experts found four of Peter Tobin’s fingerprints, a fact “incapable of having an innocent explanation.”

He said the fingerprints not only linked Peter Tobin to Margate, but also to the disposal of the body.

Mr Mulholland pointed out that the body was found naked from the waist down, wholly inconsistent with any notion of death by natural causes, he suggested.

None of the witnesses who saw Vicky in Bathgate spoke of her being under the influence of anything and in fact she was described as “an ordinary teenager—a quiet and polite girl,” he said.

He said it was clear following the discovery of Vicky’s remains that she had been drugged with a medication which Tobin had been prescribed for some time.

He had also received treatment for an overdose of the drug.

“I would suggest the only rational explanation for the presence of such a drug, sedative, is that someone wanted to overcome her resistance,” said Mr Mulholland.

“Someone wanted to render her defenceless and do her harm.”

Vicky’s remains also provided further evidence against Peter Tobin in relation to the swabs taken from an intimate area.

The Crown accepted the external swab produced a partial profile which could have come from one in 114 of the population and the internal swab produced a profile which matched Peter Tobin and could have come from one in 34,000 other than and unrelated to Peter Tobin.

He told the jury that forensic scientists had to look at such results in isolation but jurors could look at them in the context of all the other evidence and, Mr Mulholland said, they were thus, highly significant.

They could hold in these circumstances that the profile recovered from the swabs was Peter Tobin’s and the implication of this, he described as “evil.”

He reminded the jury that the family with whom Tobin was trying to arrange a house swap, from Bathgate to Margate, spoke of no one being in on two occasions, and when they did find someone home they could not look around the house.

No one was suggesting that this family had anything to do with Vicky Hamilton’s disappearance.

“The only other person with a connection between the two houses is Peter Tobin,” Mr Mulholland said.

In conclusion, he told jurors, the file on Vicky Hamilton’s disappearance had never been closed by police.

He said, “I invite you to finally close this file and hold that ...Peter Tobin, beyond reasonable doubt, killed Vicky Hamilton.”

The trial continues.