Tobin found guilty of girl's murder

LONDON (Reuters) - Convicted sex offender Peter Tobin was sentenced to life in prison on Tuesday after being found guilty of the murder of a teenage girl who disappeared in 1991.

The remains of 15-year-old Vicky Hamilton were found last year at Tobin's former house in Kent, 16 years after she went missing from Bathgate in West Lothian.

A jury at the High Court in Dundee found Tobin guilty after less than three hours' deliberation following a month long trial, the Press Association reported.

Hamilton's father Michael shouted "rot in hell" as Tobin was told he would serve a minimum of 30 years.

Tobin, 62, snatched, sexually assaulted and killed Hamilton before cutting her body in two and burying it in his garden.

She had been waiting for a bus in Bathgate town centre to go home to her mother in Redding, near Falkirk, after visiting her sister.

Experts told the trial that bruising found on her body suggested she met a violent death.

Judge Lord Emslie told Tobin: "Abducting and killing a child on her way home from a happy weekend with her sister and then desecrating her body must rank among the most evil and horrific acts that any human being could commit."

The former handyman had left Hamilton's purse near Edinburgh's main railway and bus stations to fool police into thinking she had run away from home.