VICKY Hamilton's smiling face, framed by dyed black bobbed hair, has gazed silently out at the world from her school photograph for more than 16 years.
As thousands of police officers across numerous forces searched for her, that image appeared on newspaper pages and milk cartons, accompanying appeals for information.
Yesterday, by which time she had been presumed dead for longer than she was al
ive, her remains were found in a garden hundreds of miles from her home.
The last time Vicky was seen alive was at 5:45pm on Sunday, 10 February, 1991 - she was 15 years old and sitting on a bench in Bathgate eating chips.
She had been visiting her sister, Sharon, four years her senior, in Livingston, and her journey home to Redding, near Falkirk, involved two buses.
She managed the first part of the trip. What prevented her completing the second was to form the focus of an intensive investigation involving 7,000 police officers in its first year alone - divers, horses, dogs and helicopters were also drafted in.
Her last known moments were reconstructed and an appeal went out on the BBC's Crimewatch. There was a suggestion she could be in Edinburgh, after her purse was found at the city's main bus station. All leads came to nothing. Taxi drivers were questioned, and Lothian and Borders Police issued posters with Vicky's school picture, asking "Have you seen this girl?".
There were calls wishing to help, but with them came the vicious rumours - among them prostitution in London - but Vicky's mother never believed them. "You know inside what your daughter is capable of," Janette Hamilton said at the time. "Vicky is a very, very nice person. She wouldn't put me through hell."
She never lived to see her belief that her daughter was dead vindicated.
She struggled with her grief for almost two years, making repeated pleas for information about her missing daughter. But in early 1993, aged 41, she died from, as her older daughter put it, "a broken heart".
After the funeral, Vicky's father, Michael Hamilton, said: "If Vicky was alive, she would have been at her mother's funeral. There is no way she would have missed it."
He had seen his former wife three months before she died, and the physical ache of her loss was apparent.
Years on, the strain would also take its toll on him. Earlier this year, he told how the past 12 months had seen his emotional wounds torn open, as police launched a murder inquiry. Since last November, another address has been dug up, and there have been DNA findings. Peter Tobin, 61, has been charged in connection with Vicky's disappearance.
The schoolgirl with the wide smile will never get the chance to tell what happened to her after she got off that bus in Bathgate. But now, with the discovery of her remains, perhaps her story will somehow be told.
The full article contains 492 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
