Sister of missing woman appeals to killer Tobin

Nicola Stork, 44, said her family had been through a living "hell" not knowing the fate of her sister Louise Kay, 18, who disappeared on June 23 1988.

Louise had been to a nightclub with friends in Eastbourne, East Sussex, and was last seen dropping off a friend at 4.30am in her father's Ford Fiesta.

With the announcement that Sussex Police were this month searching two of Tobin's former homes 25 miles away in Brighton, Mrs Stork hoped closure would come.

But last night, detectives said that searches at one of the properties where the Scots handyman lived in the 1980s, in Station Road, Portslade, had found no fresh evidence.

As officers now concentrate their efforts on the second address, in Marine Parade, Brighton, Mrs Stork called on 63-year-old Tobin to acknowledge whether he was responsible for her sister's killing or not.

Speaking from her home in Eastbourne, Mrs Stork said: "I know it's not going to happen but I would say to him, 'Give us some sort of closure to the last 22 years of hell'."

She believed Tobin was deliberately withholding information as a sign of power over the families of missing loved ones.

Mrs Stork said news that no crime had been linked to the Portslade address had caused her to feel a mixture of "disappointment and relief".

Sussex Police said their efforts were continuing in Marine Parade where it is believed Tobin was a hotel caretaker or handyman in the late 1980s.

Work to excavate a well in the garden started yesterday and it is expected archaeologists from University College London and Home Office scientists will use ground-penetrating radar.

Police from Operation Anagram, an exercise being conducted by forces across the UK, are convinced Tobin claimed more victims as he lived across Britain under different names and trawled the motorways for vulnerable female hitch-hikers.

Tobin is serving three life sentences for killing Angelika Kluk, Vicky Hamilton and Dinah McNicol.

The itinerant serial killer lived in several towns and may have owned more than 100 vehicles and used 40 aliases.