When Charlie Kelly first messaged saying he wouldn’t make it house that night time, his accomplice wasn’t blissful. It was September 6, 2023, a Wednesday, and the 56-year-old, a eager hillwalker, had left the home that he shared with Emer Kennedy in Tillicoultry, close to the Scottish metropolis of Stirling, earlier than she went to work. His plan was to climb Creise, a 1,100-meter-high peak overlooking Glen Etive, the distant Highland valley made well-known by the James Bond movie Skyfall.
The climate was unusually gentle for the season, and Kelly thought he may even have time to “bag” a second Munro, because the Scottish mountains above 3,000 toes are identified. In his day off work as a forensic psychologist for the Scottish Prisons Service, he had been ticking off the peaks steadily. “He had this book he would mark them in,” Kennedy remembers. “But we were due to go on holiday in two and a half weeks, so this was the last Munro he was going to do before the winter set in.”
Hiking wasn’t one thing that Kennedy was significantly eager on herself. When the pair had first met 4 and a half years beforehand, they’d bonded over a shared love of Celtic Football Club, and their “extremely quirky” humorousness. She’d fallen in love with Kelly’s mind—his encyclopedic information of all issues soccer, Robert the Bruce, and Doctor Who. He beloved the truth that she laughed at “his terrible jokes,” she says. But he additionally appreciated the truth that she inspired him in passions they didn’t share. “One of the last things he said to me the night before was, ‘You let me be me,’” she says.
So when Kelly advised her he wouldn’t make it off the hill earlier than dusk, Kennedy was frightened, however she trusted that he knew what he was doing. “Charlie was a very resourceful person,” she says. “At work, he was a trained negotiator, for when prisoners took hostages or went up on the roof. He generally didn’t take risks.” Kelly reassured her that there wasn’t any have to name for assist. He had packed additional meals, had loads of water and sufficient heat garments. He’d simply watch for it to get mild and stroll down.
At work on the Thursday, Kennedy checked her telephone each time she had a break. Kelly had checked in earlier than daybreak and despatched additional cheery messages each time he had reception. At round 8 pm, with the solar beginning to set, he wrote to say his battery was working low, however she needn’t fear: He may see the lights of the Glencoe Ski Center, the place he’d parked his automotive. There was nonetheless loads of daylight left to achieve it, he stated. “It’ll take me about half an hour.” That was the final anybody heard from Charlie Kelly alive.
In the times following Kelly disappearance, Glencoe Mountain Rescue launched what they later described as a “Herculean” search effort, utilizing sniffer canine, quad bikes, a number of helicopters, and drones geared up with infrared and standard digital camera gear. The search concerned professionals from the Coastguard, Police Scotland, and the Royal Air Force, in addition to dozens of extremely skilled volunteers from 10 totally different Mountain Rescue (MR) groups. Often, there have been as many as 50 individuals on the hill at a time. On Saturday, September 9, they discovered his backpack. But after that, nothing.