Murderer of Polish student is linked to 10 other deaths

Police believe that a man jailed for raping and murdering a Polish student last year could be responsible for up to 10 other deaths around the UK after a skeleton has been found in his back garden.

The grim discovery came as police searched the home of Peter Tobin, 60, who was found guilty of murdering 23-year-old Angelika Kluk and burying her body, bound and gagged, beneath a church in September 2006. Investigators now believe that Tobin – who was convicted of a separate sex attack on two girls in 1994, and has a history of violence towards women – may be behind a series of other murders since the 1960s.

The remains, found in a child's sand-pit at Tobin's former terrace house in Margate, are believed to be those of 18-year-old Dinah McNicol who disappeared on 4 August 1991 while hitchhiking from a music festival in Hampshire.

"I want an ending, be it happy or unhappy," said Ms McNicol's father, Ian, yesterday. "Ninety-nine per cent of me thinks she has been murdered but there's just that 1 per cent that doesn't know."

As well as the search at the house in Margate, a wider investigation led by Essex police is causing a number of forces to re-open the cases. Tobin has already been charged with the disappearance of Vicky Hamilton, who went missing in the same year as Ms McNicol. Another case being revisited is that of Genette Tate, who was 13 when she was last seen in Devon in 1978.

Tobin's three former wives have described him as "evil" and a sadistic "monster" who raped them, tried to kill them, assaulted them and was regularly abusive. His second wife, Sylvia Jefferies, who married Tobin in 1973, told the Scottish media: "He should swing for what he has done. He is evil."

Tobin was sentenced to at least 21 years in jail after his conviction by a jury at the High Court in Edinburgh in May for Ms Kluk's murder.