When Charlie Kelly was the first to send the message that he wouldn’t be coming home that night, his partner wasn’t cheerful. It was Wednesday, September 6, 2023, and the 56-year-old, an avid mountain walker, had left the home he shared with Emer Kennedy in Tillicoultry, near the Scottish town of Stirling, before she went to work. His plan was to climb Creise, an 1,100-meter peak overlooking Glen Etive, the remote Highland valley made eminent by the James Bond film Downpour.
The weather was unseasonably delicate and Kelly thought he might even be able to ‘bag’ a second Munro, as the Scottish mountains above 900 meters are known. In his time away from work as a forensic psychologist for the Scottish Prison Service, he consistently achieved top results. “He had this book where he marked them off,” Kennedy recalled. “But we were going on holiday in two and a half weeks, so this was Munro’s last appearance before winter arrived.”
Hiking wasn’t something Kennedy particularly enjoyed. When the pair first met four and a half years earlier, they bonded over their shared love of Celtic Football Club and their “extremely quirky” sense of humor. She fell in love with Kelly’s brain – his encyclopedic knowledge of football, Robert the Bruce and Doctor Who. He liked 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 myself,’” she says.
So when Kelly told her he wouldn’t be down the hill before shadowy, Kennedy became worried, but she trusted that he knew what he was doing. “Charlie was a very resourceful person,” he says. “At work, he was a trained negotiator, because when prisoners took hostages or went to the roof. He generally didn’t take risks.” Kelly assured her there was no need to call for aid. He packed extra food, had plenty of water and enough sultry clothes. He’ll wait until it clears up and goes away.
On Thursday at work, Kennedy checked her phone while she was taking a break. Kelly checked in before dawn and sent more cheerful messages at each reception. Around 8 p.m., as the sun was starting to set, he texted that his battery was running low, but she needn’t have worried: he could see the lights of Glencoe Ski Resort, where he parked his car. He added that there was still plenty of daylight left to reach it. – It’ll take me about half an hour. That was the last anyone heard of Charlie Kelly alive.
Days after Kelly’s disappearance, Glencoe Mountain Rescue launched what it later described as a “Herculean” search operation that used sniffer dogs, ATVs, multiple helicopters and drones equipped with infrared and conventional cameras. Specialists 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, took part in the search. There were often up to 50 people on the hill at the same time. On Saturday, September 9, his backpack was found. But then nothing.