IT WAS a murder that shocked and repulsed Scotland. The body of a beautiful young Polish woman, found with horrific injuries, dumped under the floorboards of a Glasgow church.

The victim was Angelika Kluk, a languages student, who had come to work in Scotland - a country she had fallen in love with from afar - during her holidays so she could make ends meets at university in Poland.

She spent some happy days in Glasgow before her life was brutally snatched away, aged just 23. Small town girl with dreams and drive to succeed

ANGELIKA KLUK would have been 24 in February.

She was brought up Skoczow, a small rural town in southern Poland, with a population of 26,000, and came from a poor background and broken home.

But Angelika was determined to succeed. She had a sharp intellect and amazing drive, even as a child, and she was a top student, who excelled in languages.

Angelika and older sister Aneta, five years her senior, were brought up by her father, Wladyslaw, a construction worker who had split with their mother when the daughters were young.

Mr Kluk 50, travelled to the UK for the trial and wept as he gave evidence about his daughter's background.

He had battled alcoholism and struggled to bring up his children and hold down a job following the marriage break-up.

Aneta, 28, who also gave evidence, supported Angelika and her father for several years, sending money back from the Netherlands where she moved to work as a nanny after she had left school.

The sisters shared everything as children including a bed. They were similarly determined to beat the odds, travel the world, and make a success of their lives.

"Angelika wanted to be very good, the best, at everything," Aneta said during her evidence at court. "We do things 120% or we don't do them at all."

Following school, Angelika was awarded a paid scholarship to study Scandinavian languages at university in Gdansk, Poland's main port city.

The scholarship, however, was not enough to get by on, and she decided to travel to Scotland - mainly as the country's history had fascinated her - and work during her holidays, where she could also perfect her English.

While in Glasgow in 2005, she arranged a flat for her sister, who still lives in the city, working as a secretary.

In her diary Angelika described in touching detail her time here and her first experiences of luxuries which were at odds with her humble background.

While on a working tour of Scotland, Angelika ate at an upmarket hotel.

She wrote: "I went to the Balmoral Hotel and stayed there ... I had a luxury dinner for the first time in my life. The portions were tiny, as if they were dwarves."

A chance meeting with Peter Tobin, who had been previously convicted for child rape but who was working under a false identity, led to her violent death.

She was staying at the chapel house at St Patrick's Church in Anderston and took on cleaning duties to pay her way.

Tobin had exploited the church's open-door policy and wormed his way into the favour of the parish priest, becoming the church's unofficial handyman.

Tobin arrived around six weeks before the murder and, chillingly, called Angelika his "wee apprentice".

On the afternoon of Sunday, September 24 - just days before she was due to fly back to Poland - he struck.

Angelika had been helping Tobin paint a shed in the garage within the church grounds when he attacked her.

She struggled, but he bound her hands with cable ties, gagged her with insulation tape and stuffed a cloth in her mouth to muffle the screams.

He stabbed her 16 times in the chest, and again elsewhere. He beat her repeatedly about the head with a table leg. Then he raped her.

Tobin wrapped her dead or dying body in a tarpaulin, dragged her into the church, and dumped her down a hatch in the floor near the confessional.

Angelika had first come to Scotland, alone, in summer 2004. She knew no one, had nowhere to stay and no job.

She had been warned London could be unfriendly, even dangerous. But Scotland was said to be safer, and the Highland landscapes, which she had viewed in guide books, reminded her of home.

Her intelligence, looks, and personality would get her by, she thought. And she seemed to enchant men.

That first summer she found work as a cleaner and cloakroom attendant inEdinburgh, staying for around three months.

In summer 2005, she travelled to Glasgow and visited St Patrick's, where many of the city's growing Polish community went to Mass.

During the murder trial, the jury heard of three men she was close to while in Glasgow.They were married Martin Macaskill, with whom she fell in love; Sheriff Kieran McLernan, who gave her golf lessons; and Father Gerry Nugent, priest of St Patrick's.

Angelika became fond of Father Gerry after he offered her a room in the chapel house.

Extracts from her diary read out in court revealed Angelika was religious, but having doubts about Catholicism. She found Father Gerry's unorthodox approach refreshing, debates with him intellectually stimulating.

She became close to the charismatic priest and, while he claimed at the trial to have had a sexual relationship with her in 2005, Angelika's sister Aneta and Angelika's boyfriend Martin Macaskill believe the priest was lying.

What is certain was Angelika's love for married Mr Macaskill, 40, whom she met when she returned to Glasgow in summer 2006.

In her diary, Angelika told of a working trip around Scotland in June, where she met Mr Macaskill.

She was hired as a nanny to look after the children of a Russian family, who paid for a tour around the country.

Mr Macaskill was the chauffeur. The two instantly hit it off, but his wife Anne found out about their affair weeks later. The romance lasted less than three months.

But Angelika wrote in her diary on August 3: "I'm horribly, helplessly, madly, blindly in love with him."

Aware the relationship may not come to anything, she wrote: "I don't want it to be a dream. I want it to be life."

Writing about drinking tea at a hotel with Martin, she said: "I was looking at him with a smile on my face. He was looking at me and for a few seconds we felt we were the richest people in the world."

In September, the day before returning to Scotland from a holiday in Majorca, Mr Macaskill told Angelika he wanted her to be part of his life.

"I am so unbelievably happy," was her reaction. But she and Martin Macaskill were never to meet again. Days later, she was dead.

Angelika was reported missing on the Monday night, September 25. A frantic search that evening involved Aneta, Mr Macaskill, and his wife.

Inexplicably, Father Gerry, a self-confessed alcoholic whose relationship with Angelika had deteriorated since he found out about her relationship with the married man, "did not lift a finger", the court heard.

Tobin, who had claimed he was called Pat McLaughlin, was also there at the time, feigning concern. He was questioned by police, to whom he gave the false name. They believed him, and he fled next day.

The body was found on the Friday by police, who searched the church again after a member of the public spotted a picture of the odd-job man in media coverage, and identified him as Tobin. Tobin was arrested the following day.

In court, Angelika's relationship with Mr Macaskill and her alleged affair with Father Gerry were pored over in detail.

Her friendship with Aberdeen-based sheriff Kieran McLernan, who has a house near Lochwinnoch, Renfrewshire, and occasionally visited St Patrick's Church, was also examined.

He had given Angelika golf lessons on several occasions after she developed an interest in the game.

In court, Tobin claimed a special defence to the rape charge, saying Angelika had consented to sex.

But her open and honest diaries pointed to only one love - Mr Macaskill - and there was never any suggestion of any attraction to the scruffy, unkempt Tobin.

He exercised his right to silence and did not testify at the case, and there were no eye-witnesses and no confessions.

Despite no traces of Tobin being found on the murder weapons, the forensic evidence was sufficiently damning.

Tiny blood spots were found in the garage and medical tests showed Angelika may not have moved again after Tobin raped her, leaving his DNA for investigators to find.

He left a fingerprint on the insulation tape used to gag her and his DNA was found on it. Tobin also left his hand prints on the tarpaulin used to wrap the body.

In the end, the jury of eight women and seven men had no doubt about the evidence presented by prosecution.

Advocate depute Dorothy Bain said the case was "no murder mystery, no whodunnit." It was, she said, an "atrocity against a defenceless young woman".