When Charlie Kelly he first sent a message saying he wouldn’t be coming home that night, that his partner wasn’t happy. It was September 6, 2023, a Wednesday, and the 56-year-old, a keen hiker, had left the house he shared with Emer Kennedy in Tillicoultry, near the Scottish town of Stirling, before heading to the work. His plan was to climb Creise, a 1,100 meter peak overlooking Glen Etive, the remote Highland valley made famous by the James Bond film. Skyfall.
The weather was unseasonably mild, and Kelly thought he might even have time to “bag” a second Munro, as the Scottish mountains above 3,000 feet are called. In his spare time as a forensic psychologist for the Scottish Prison Service, he had regularly recorded spikes. “He had this book that he wrote them down in,” Kennedy recalled. “But we had to go on vacation in two and a half weeks, so this was the last Munro he was going to do before winter came.”
Hiking was not something Kennedy particularly enjoyed. When the pair first met four and a half years previously, they bonded over a shared love of Celtic Football Club and their “extremely quirky” sense of humor. She had fallen in love with Kelly’s brain, his encyclopedic knowledge of all things football, Robert the Bruce and Doctor Who. He liked the fact that she made fun of “his terrible jokes,” she said. But he also appreciated the fact that she encouraged him in passions that 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 him he wouldn’t leave the hill until after dark, Kennedy was worried, but she trusted he knew what he was doing. “Charlie was a very resourceful person,” she says. “At work, he was a skilled negotiator, when prisoners took hostages or climbed onto the roof. In general, he didn’t take risks. Kelly reassured her that there was no need to call for help. He had packed extra food, plenty of water and enough warm clothes. He would just wait until it was light and come down.
On Thursdays at work, Kennedy checked her phone every time she had a break. Kelly had checked in before dawn and sent more happy messages each time he received reception. Around 8 p.m., as the sun began to set, he texted her to say her battery was low, but she needn’t have worried: he could see the lights of Glencoe Ski Centre, where he had parked his car. There was still enough daylight to reach it, he said. “It will take me about half an hour.” That was the last time anyone heard of Charlie Kelly alive.
In the days following Kelly’s disappearance, Glencoe Mountain Rescue launched what they later described as a “herculean” search effort, using sniffer dogs, quad bikes, multiple helicopters and drones equipped with infrared cameras and conventional. The search involved professionals from the Coastguard, Police Scotland and the Royal Air Force, as well as dozens of highly trained volunteers from 10 different mountain rescue (MR) teams. Often there were up to 50 people on the hill at a time. On Saturday September 9, they found his backpack. But after that, nothing more.
