When Charlie Kelly He sent the first message saying he wouldn’t be home that night, his partner wasn’t happy. It was Wednesday, September 6, 2023, and the 56-year-old, passionate hiker, had left the house he shared with Emer Kennedy in Tillicoultry, near the Scottish city of Stirling, before she left for work. Their plan was to climb Creise, a 1,100-metre-high peak overlooking Glen Etive, the remote Highland valley made famous by the James Bond film. Fall from the sky
The weather was unseasonably mild, and Kelly thought he might even have time to “bag” a second Munro, as Scottish mountains over 3,000 feet are known. In his spare time as a forensic psychologist for the Scottish Prison Service, he had been constantly marking peaks. “I had a book where I marked them,” Kennedy recalls. “But we were going on holiday in two and a half weeks, so this was the last Munro I was going to do before winter came.”
Hiking was not something Kennedy particularly enjoyed. When the couple met four and a half years earlier, they bonded over their shared love of Celtic Football Club and their “extremely quirky” sense of humour. He had fallen for Kelly’s brain: his encyclopedic knowledge of all things football, Robert the Bruce and Doctor Who. He loved the fact that she laughed at “his terrible jokes,” he says. But he also appreciated the fact that she encouraged him in passions they didn’t share. “One of the last things he said to me the night before was, ‘Let me be me,’” she says.
So when Kelly told him he wouldn’t make it down the hill before nightfall, Kennedy worried, but trusted that he knew what he was doing. “Charlie was a very resourceful person,” he says. “On the job, he was a skilled negotiator, when prisoners took hostages or went up to the roof. “I generally didn’t take risks.” Kelly assured him that there was no need to ask for help. I had packed extra food, had plenty of water, and enough warm clothing. I would just wait for dawn and go down.
At work Thursday, Kennedy checked her phone every time she had a break. Kelly had checked in before dawn and sent more cheerful messages every time she had reception. Around 8 p.m., as the sun was beginning to set, he wrote to tell her that the battery was dying, but she needn’t worry: she could see the lights of the Glencoe ski resort, where he had parked his car. car. There was still plenty of daylight left to get there, he said. “It will take about half an hour.” That was the last time anyone heard of Charlie Kelly alive.
In the days after Kelly disappeared, Glencoe Mountain Rescue launched what they later described as a “Herculean” search effort, using sniffer dogs, ATVs, multiple helicopters and drones equipped with infrared and conventional cameras. The search involved professionals from the Coast Guard, Police Scotland and the Royal Air Force, as well as dozens of highly trained volunteers from 10 different Mountain Rescue (MR) teams. There were often up to 50 people at a time on the hill. On Saturday, September 9, they found his backpack. But after that, nothing.