Tobin's first victim: a 15-year-old schoolgirl

Schoolgirl Vicky Hamilton was Peter Tobin's first known murder victim.

Tobin was convicted of murdering the 15-year-old following a trial at the High Court in Dundee in December 2008. A judge imposed a life sentence with a minimum recommendation of 30 years.

Vicky's father, Michael, shouted "rot in hell" as Tobin was sentenced and told he would be 92 years old before he could be considered for release.

Prosecutor Frank Mulholland QC told jurors Vicky's murder was "a barbaric act" and an "atrocity".

The teenager's remains were unearthed by police in a shallow grave in the back garden of Tobin's former home in Margate, Kent, in November 2007.

Jurors were told her bisected body - badly decomposed by that stage - had been wrapped in layers of plastic bin bags "like a Russian doll" and buried 3ft beneath the surface under a layer of concrete.

Tobin abducted Vicky in Bathgate, West Lothian, on the evening of February 10 1991.

She was waiting for a bus in the town centre to take her home to her mother in Redding, Stirlingshire, after visiting her sister Sharon in Livingston, West Lothian.

Tobin preyed on her nervousness and lured her to his home in Bathgate.

He drugged her with the sedative Amitriptyline, strangled her, carried out a serious sex attack and murdered her.

Tobin then tried to cover his tracks by hiding Vicky's body and getting rid of some of her clothing and belongings.

He cut her body in two, wrapped it in a curtain and bin bags, and stashed the knife in his loft.

Tobin left the schoolgirl's purse near Edinburgh's main railway and bus stations to fool police into thinking she had run away from home.

The following month, he moved to Margate, taking the schoolgirl's body with him in his van.

Vicky's sister, Lindsay Brown, who is in her mid 20s, said Tobin's conviction was the end of a "17-year nightmare".

"We are hoping we can now move on as a family and start to remember Vicky as the loving sister she was before she was so tragically and cruelly taken from us," she said.

"Vicky's abduction also robbed us of our mum, Janette, who never came to terms with the fact Vicky never came home that night and who died of a broken heart two years later, never knowing what happened to her daughter."