When Charlie Kelly the first announcement that he wouldn’t be home tonight, his partner wasn’t happy. It was Wednesday September 6, 2023, and the 56-year-old, keen on the hills, had left the house he shared with Emer Kennedy in Tillycultree, near the Scottish town of Stirling, before she went to work. His plan was to climb Craze, an 1,100m peak overlooking Glen Itive, the remote Highland valley made famous by the James Bond film Skyfall.
The weather was unusually mild for the season and Kelly thought there might even be time to ‘load’ a second Munro, as Scottish mountains above 3,000ft are known. In his absence from work as a forensic psychologist with the Scottish Prison Service, he was constantly reporting highs. “He had this book where he noted them down,” Kennedy recalled. “But we had to go on holiday in two and a half weeks, so this was the last Munro he was going to do before winter came.”
Hiking was not something that Kennedy herself was particularly fond of. When the couple first met four-and-a-half years ago, they bonded over a shared love of Celtic football club and their “extremely quirky” sense of humour. She had fallen in love with 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,” she says. But he also appreciated the fact that she encouraged him in passions they did not share. “One of the last things he said to me the night before was, ‘Let me be me,'” she says.
So when Kelly told her she wouldn’t be able to get off the hill before nightfall, Kennedy was worried, but she trusted he knew what he was doing. “Charlie was a very resourceful person,” she says. “On the job, he was a trained negotiator when prisoners were taking hostages or climbing onto the roof. He generally didn’t take risks. Kelly assured her that she didn’t need to call for help. He had packed extra food, plenty of water and plenty of warm clothes. He would just wait until it was light and head down.
At work on Thursday, Kennedy checked his phone whenever he had a break. Kelly had checked in before dawn and sent new cheerful messages when he had a reception. Around 8:00 p.m., as the sun began to set, he wrote that his battery was dying, but she needn’t have worried: he could see the lights of Glencoe Ski Center, where he had parked his car. There was still plenty of daylight to get to him, he said. “It will take me about half an hour.” That was the last anyone heard of Charlie Kelly alive.
In the days after Kelly’s disappearance, Glencoe Mountain Rescue began what they later described as a “Herculean” search, using sniffer dogs, four-wheelers, multiple helicopters and drones equipped with infrared and conventional camera equipment. The search involved professionals from the Coastguard, Police Scotland and the Royal Air Force, as well as dozens of well-trained volunteers from 10 different Mountain Rescue (MR) teams. There were often 50 people on the hill at once. On Saturday, September 9, they discovered his backpack. But then nothing.
