Scotland's serial killers: ex-detective sheds new light on them

Read more: Glasgow cop who snared serial killer Peter Tobin leads team helping crime victims abroad
And he has the expertise to enlighten audiences which are enthralled by true crime investigations and how killers are caught. 
Tobin was serving a life sentence for raping and murdering Polish student Angelika Kluk, 23, and hiding her body under the floor of a Glasgow church in 2006 when he died in Edinburgh Royal Infirmary. 
The killer, who was in his mid-70s, was also serving life terms for the murders of 15-year-old schoolgirl Vicky Hamilton from Redding, near Falkirk, in 1991, and 18-year-old Dinah McNicol the same year.
Through his expert-led investigations of high-profile murder cases over the past 30 years and laterally catching Tobin for the murder of Ms Kluk, Vicky Hamilton and Dinah McNicol, Mr Swindle has been able to build a picture of a serial killer.
He took part in the first-ever CrimeCon north of the Border, which was held in Glasgow in September, when he spoke about cases he has been involved with and his current role in helping the families of victims who have died abroad.

Peter Tobin was convicted of the murders of Angelika Kluk, Vicky Hamilton and Dinah McNicol (Image: PA)
The interest and fascination in true crime and those involved in investigating continues to grow.
And it has now prompted Mr Swindle to embark on a new series of talks next year after being approached by a promotions team who were eager to bring his intriguing talks to a larger audience.
It has led to The Makings Of A Murderer tour with Mr Swindle embarking on programme of 30-plus dates next year across the UK.
“It has taken off very quickly and there are more than 30 dates planned, including a major event in Aberdeen in March and also London,” Mr Swindle said.
“It will be a structured event from the senior detective’s perspective of what is a serial killer, what their behaviour is, the tell-tale signs of a serial killer, how they get caught, and relating it my own experience going back to previous cases. In the police I was dealing with live investigations. Since I left the force, I have been doing TV work, researching and commenting on serial killers and I am looking at it not as a talking head, but as an expert in criminal investigations.
“The programme will cover the common traits in serial killers, how did the police investigations run in the cases, and have the perpetrators killed any other people?”

Tobin’s past
IT was his gut instinct when he was brought in to investigate the death of Ms Kluk that he felt Tobin must have struck before. It is what led to Operation Anagram being set up to look into the life of Tobin.Operation Anagram helped piece together a timeline of Tobin’s movements and relationships over decades in a bid to determine whether he was responsible for other unsolved crimes.
It uncovered connections which helped convict him of the murders of Dinah McNicol, from Essex, and Vicky Hamilton. Their bodies were found in the garden of Tobin’s former home in Margate. He was convicted at a later trial.

Read more: Plaque unveiled in memory of brave Glasgow firefighter
Operation Anagram went nationwide with police forces across the UK involved in the operation investigating the possibility of Tobin’s connection to other crimes. “One of the phrases that I use is cunning, controlling, conniving and, I hate to say it, clever. Sadly, to get away with killing and continue to do it and not get caught, there is an element of being clever,” saidMr Swindle, who runs his own specialist investigations business Victims Abroad.
“If you look at Tobin, who was in a way clever and conniving, it all equally applies to him. Tobin is dead and it doesn’t make any difference to what he has done or what he has done that we don’t know about. 
“We always hope that one day we might find out. We might never find out, but for me and the victims’ families, when Tobin died it brought it all back.
“With regard to whether he has taken his secrets to the grave, I would always hope that someone may speak out. Sadly, there is a lot of speculation,which can happen when there is a convicted killer and everyone comes out of the woodwork to say they are responsible. 
“I have never gone that way with Tobin. I have always stood back and said that with Tobin, we know he killed three women and I suspect that he killed other women, but it is unfair to victims’ families for them to think that because of someone speaking about it, there’s something new.”

Scottish monsters
MR Swindle plans to go into detail about some of the country’s most notorious serial killers, three of which had Scottish links. Both Tobin and Ian Brady were born in Scotland and when Fred West married his first wife Catherine “Rena” Costello in 1962, the couple’s first home was on Hospital Street in Coatbridge.

David Swindle will embark on a new tour next year (Image: David Swindle)
They later moved to Savoy Street in Glasgow’s Bridgeton and then to Maclellan Street in Kinning Park with their two daughters, though eldest Charmaine was not West’s biological child. West drove a Mr Whippy ice cream van for a living. Rena later lived alone on Arden Street in Maryhill and worked as a ticket collector on the buses. Rena, her daughter Charmaine and good friend Anne McFall were killed by Fred and Rosemary West in 1967.
Tobin was born in Johnstone, Renfrewshire, in 1946. Described as a difficult child by 1953, aged seven, he was sent to an approved school. He reportedly joined the French Foreign Legion but later deserted.
Brady started life as the illegitimate son of a tearoom waitress, born in the Glasgow Gorbals on January 2, 1938.
Ian Stewart Brady would never learn who his father was and was soon fostered out by his mother, Margaret Stewart.
Even as a young child he displayed the sadistic streak which later in life resurfaced in a much more terrifying manner.
“There seems to be a real fascination about serial killers, but for every one of these killers there is a victim and a family trying to live with what happened. I ask my audiences: what does a serial killer look like? They just look like anyone else – you or me. That is the big thing. When you look at cases retrospectively and what they have done, people say ‘I always thought there was something funny about him’.”

Kirsty Maxwell died while on holiday in 2017 (Image: Newsquest)
While his talks focus on past crimes, a large part of his work is trying to help families that are still fighting for justice today.
He has been working with the family of Kirsty Maxwell from Livingstone, West Lothian, who died in mysterious circumstances while on a hen party in Benidorm in 2017.

Parents’ agony
AS part of his podcast series, Swindle’s Search For The Truth, Kirsty’s grieving parents Brian and Denise Curry have spoken out in the hope that they will still find out the truth.
However, now Mr Swindle and colleagues who work with him have taken their appeal one step further and have produced a Spanish podcast in the hope that they can reach more people.
“What I learned in the police is never giving up and what I learned latterly with Tobin ... I am applying that to what I am doing now with Kirsty’s family. If there are lines of inquiry, then we need to target people who have information who are out there. I thought a Spanish podcast, which wasn’t easy to do, was the next step.
“We are looking for people to share the Spanish version to get people who might be able to help us to listen to it. The answers lie in Benidorm and partly in the UK. We have had a number of issues in Spain so the natural progression is to get this out there. It is something totally different.”
Investigator Eva Navarro worked on the podcast and believes it is a way to bring the case to a Spanish audience.
“This wasn’t just about translating the podcast which had already been made – we had to get over anything being lost in translation to make this relevant to someone listening,” she said. “There are a lot of different nationalities of people employed in the tourist industry in Benidorm, but they do tend to speak Spanish and we really hope this podcast will help.”

To find out more go to www.entertainers.co.uk/show/the-makings-of-a-murderer