Escape From Evil - Cathy Wilson [135]
Who could do that to a body?
Faced with crimes of this magnitude, it’s very hard to put yourself in the place of the victim or even their family. The sheer scale of everything, one grotesque revelation after another, is too great for the human brain to process. So you end up focusing on the bits that affect you personally. The body, police said, had been unearthed from under the garden’s old sandpit.
Daniel used to play in that!
Suddenly I was overcome by a wave of nausea at the recollection of being impressed by Peter digging the sandpit in the first place. I felt so stupid. He’d only done it to cover his tracks. Yet again, he’d used his son – just as he had in order to claim his victim in the first place.
DNA tests established the body as that of a young girl from Scotland, Vicky Hamilton, who’d gone missing in the Bathgate area of Scotland in February 1991 – a few months after I’d fled with my son. It was so long ago – thinking of her poor family not knowing what had happened for all this time made me so sad. Learning the facts of her death was even worse.
After a weekend with her sister in Livingston, Vicky had been trying to make her way back to Falkirk via the bus network. After asking several strangers for directions to her next linking stop, she’d bought a bag of chips and set off. But when the bus pulled in, Vicky had already accepted a lift from a man in a white van. Perhaps she normally wouldn’t have taken the risk with a stranger, but it was snowing and the man’s young son in the seat next to him must have given her a good feeling about him.
The police didn’t know exactly what had happened to her, but it was obvious Vicky had been horribly hurt and raped before she was killed. When they took apart the house in Robertson Avenue, they found the knife Peter had used to cut her up.
At first I didn’t make the connection between the dates. It wasn’t unusual for Daniel to have been with his father, after all. Then the penny dropped. By February 1991 we were living in Portsmouth.
If Daniel was in the van, it must have been the weekend Peter had abducted him!
Suddenly my brain was racing at the realization. The police were confident that Daniel didn’t see anything happen between Peter and Vicky – maybe he’d been sent to bed – but he must have been in the house with the girl’s dead body for a while.
And when I flew up on my SAS rescue mission, so must I!
The police, as you’d hope, reached that conclusion faster than I did. They kept asking the same question:
‘When you went back to Bathgate in February 1991 were there any rooms Peter prevented you from going in?’
Unfortunately, I just did not know. I had too much else going on in my mind. All I could think about at the time was luring Peter back into England.
‘I don’t know if I would even have noticed if one of the bedrooms was out of bounds,’ I had to confess.
Again and again, different officers kept coming back to the same question. ‘Were there any rooms he wouldn’t let you enter?’ and the answer was always ‘No, not that I recall.’ But I could have been wrong. It was later reported at the trial that the Margate family with whom Peter had swapped Robertson Avenue had been denied access to the upstairs when they’d travelled up to view the house. Vicky’s body, police think, was up there awaiting disposal.
It gives you an insight into the mind of a serial killer, I think, that he could apparently invite people to view his house, forgetting he had a dead body stored upstairs. It was clearly as mundane, in his mind, as misplacing his house keys. He just didn’t see it as wrong.
The more the police investigated, the more they would come to me with fresh information about my time with Peter. Sometimes I could help them, but most of their questions opened up completely new areas to me. In fact, if I hadn’t known they were talking about me and Peter, I never would have guessed.
For example, one day they told me that Vicky’s body contained traces of the anti-depressant Amitriptyline.
‘Peter used to take that,’ I said, trying as usual to be helpful.
‘We