'Please be Dinah': The heartbreaking wish of a missing girl's father

A BBC Scotland journalist has recalled the haunting moment the father of missing Dinah McNicol was told police had found a body in a garden.

Home Affairs correspondent David Cowan was in Ian McNicol's living room in Tillingham, Essex, in November 2007 when a colleague rang the bell to inform him of the grim discovery.

Days earlier the body of Vicky Hamilton – who went missing in Bathgate, West Lothian, in 1991 – was found in the grounds of convicted killer Peter Tobin's former home in Margate, Kent.

When asked about the latest development at the search site Mr McNicol gave a response that has stayed with Cowan.

He told him: "Please be Dinah."

The second body was later confirmed to be the teenager, who was 18 when she vanished in 1991, after hitchhiking home to Essex from a dance music festival in Hampshire.

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