The murder of Vicky Hamilton was “a barbaric act, an atrocity” carried out by Peter Tobin on a defenceless 15-year-old who was just trying to get home to see her mother and watch a music show on television, a court was told yesterday.

Frank Mulholland, QC, the Solicitor General, in his closing speech of the trial at the High Court in Dundee, said that what had happened to Vicky in Bathgate, West Lothian, 17 years ago was an “unspeakable horror” that could not be overstated.

“I have searched long and hard in the lexicon to find the words to describe what happened to this poor girl and the best I can find is ‘evil',” he said.

Mr Tobin, 62, denies abducting and murdering Vicky and burying her body parts. He has lodged a special defence of alibi, saying that he was hundreds of miles away when she was abducted on February 10, 1991.

The defence, in its closing submission to the jury, said that there was “not one single, solitary scrap of evidence” that showed Mr Tobin was in Bathgate at the same time as Vicky.

Donald Findlay, QC, for the defence, told the jury that the Crown's case was based upon “quicksand”. It had failed to produce anything which proved that Mr Tobin had met Vicky when she was alive.

Mr Mulholland told the jurors that the case against Mr Tobin was circumstantial and that they should look at the facts in combination. He likened the evidence to a rope. “It is the combination of strands woven together that gives the rope its power and strength.”

Vicky's body had been cut in two with a sharp, non-serrated knife similar to the one found in Mr Tobin's former home - a knife that Mr Tobin acknowledged was probably his.

She was buried in the garden of his former home in Margate, Kent, and the drug amiltriptyline was found in her body. Mr Mulholland said: “I would suggest that the only rational explanation for the presence of such a drug is that someone wanted to render her incapable of resisting.”

Mr Mulholland said that there was DNA evidence from Mr Tobin on Vicky, most likely from semen. “Drugging and penetrating a 15-year-old who was trying to do nothing more than get home to her mum's is, in my submission, evil.”

There was “powerful, powerful evidence on its own” that he was involved in the murder. As well as the knife, Mr Tobin was seen in Bathgate that night at 10.30pm. “So much for the alibi read out to you at the start of the trial,” Mr Mulholland said.

Mr Tobin's fingerprints were found on the wrappings around Vicky's body. “Quite frankly,” Mr Mulholland told the jury, “the presence of these four fingerprints is incapable of having an innocent explanation.”

He said: “It's a comfort, but only a small comfort, that Vicky's body was found and she was finally laid to rest by those who loved her and not at the hands of the person who murdered her.”

Mr Findlaytold the jury that it was facts that mattered - “not a long series of could bes, might bes, maybes or, even worse, ‘consistent with'.”

He said: “Where did Vicky Hamilton meet her death? The fact of the matter is that this many years down the road, and despite a massive police investigation and a trial that has taken these many days, the simple fact is that do we do not know.”

There was no evidence to show where she died, nor when, nor who was there at the time.

As regards Vicky's DNA on the knife, Mr Findlay said: “When she was mutilated she was dead. That knife played no part in her death.” He told the jury: “That she was appallingly treated in death is not the same as saying she was murdered.” Ill-treating someone who was dead, he said, was not a crime in Scots law. With regard to the DNA traces from Mr Tobin on Vicky's body, he told the jury “not to be overly impressed by over-inflated and unsubstantiated gobbledegook”.

The jury is expected to be asked to consider its verdicts this morning.

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