Police are said to be considering searching properties in Brighton once occupied by suspected serial killer Peter Tobin.

Three homes in the city are to be searched by officers investigating 16 unsolved murders, according to national newspapers.

Forensic specialists have so far been concentrating their hunt on the house in Margate, Kent, where Tobin moved to in 1991.

The remains of two teenage girls, Dinah McNicol and Vicky Hamilton, have been unearthed in the garden.

Police have already searched properties in Bathgate, West Lothian, and Southsea, Portsmouth, Hampshire, where Tobin lived after leaving Brighton.

Their investigation could now turn to three addresses where Tobin, who is serving a life sentence for the murder of a 23yearold Polish student in Glasgow, is known to have lived between 1969 and 1989.

His first known address was in a house opposite St Nicholas' Church in Dyke Road, Brighton, in 1969.

The present owner has said officers could find it difficult as the house has been changed radically since the Sixties and the garden built over.

Four years later, he moved to a bedsit in Regency Square. The house has a small patio to the rear, while an underground car park, built in 1969, lies to the front of the building.

His third known address in 1989, was a groundfloor flat in Chadborn Close, on the Bristol estate.

On The Argus website, a former neighbour, James Terry, said it gave him "the shivers" to think he used to sit and talk to Tobin. Tobin's third wife, Cathy Wilson, was just 16 when they met in a Brighton pub in 1986.

When the couple later moved to Bathgate in Scotland, Tobin kept her a prisoner in the house.

She only escaped after saving £25 from housekeeping money for a bus ticket back to Brighton, where her family lived.

She told a national newspaper her former husband was "evil personified". "He was violent on almost a daily basis.

He would push me against walls or put his hands round my neck for the simplest of things."

Did you know Peter Tobin when he lived in Brighton? Leave your comments below, email news@theargus.co.uk or call the newsdesk on 01273 544519.