A FORMER neighbour of the man accused of murdering Vicky Hamilton told a jury yesterday she had seen him on the night the schoolgirl disappeared.
Peter Tobin has stated in an alibi defence that he was hundreds of miles from Bathgate, West Lothian, but Wendy Love, 38, said she caught a glimpse of him in the town centre as she made her way to a disco.
Mrs Love explained that her attention had
been attracted by a shout from across the street and she turned round and noticed someone she knew. "It was Mr Tobin … I am not 100 per cent it was Peter Tobin, but I am 80 per cent," she stated.
Tobin, 62, is charged with abducting, sexually assaulting and murdering Vicky, 15, on 10 February, 1991. She vanished while changing buses in Bathgate on her way home to Redding, near Falkirk, from a weekend at her sister's house in Livingston. Tobin says that between 5pm and midnight on 10 February he was in the Portsmouth area in the south of England and travelling to Scotland, not arriving in Edinburgh until 6:30am the following day.
Tobin also denies a second charge of concealing Vicky's body, cutting it in two and transporting and burying the parts, which were discovered last year in a garden in Margate, Kent.
Mrs Love, a confectioner, of Armadale, West Lothian, told the High Court in Dundee that she had lived in Robertson Avenue, Bathgate, while Tobin stayed in the next house, initially with his wife and son. Later, as she understood it, the mother and child left, and she would speak to Tobin from time to time.
She recalled a night out to celebrate a friend's 20th birthday. It was Sunday, 10 February. Mrs Love said that when asked previously to identify the year, she had been unclear as she could not remember whether the friend had been older or younger than her, but she was now satisfied the friend had been born in 1971, so the year was 1991.
A group of five or six friends had been in a pub in Bathgate town centre, and they were intending to go on to a disco. It was around 10:30pm, and people were leaving pubs. Mrs Love said she was standing across the street from a bar. "There was a whole lot of people, just standing there because the pub was coming out. I just heard somebody shouting, 'Oi', from across the road. A friend asked who had shouted, and I said, 'It's just my next-door neighbour'. That was the end of the discussion," said Mrs Love.
She confirmed to the prosecutor, Frank Mulholland, QC, the Solicitor-General for Scotland, that she had seen the person's face, although for only "a split second" and while other people were around him.
"I knew the person across the road. One of my friends asked who it was and I just said, 'My neighbour', because I did not have much to do with him. It could have been Peter Tobin or somebody outside the pub that shouted," said Mrs Love.
Asked if she was sure it had been Tobin, she replied: "I am not 100 per cent it was Peter Tobin, but I am 80 per cent."
Mrs Love said the person was wearing a leather biker's jacket and she knew that Tobin owned a motor bike and a biker's jacket.
The trial continues.
