When Charlie Kelly First a message and said he would not get home that night, his partner was not happy. It was September 6, 2023, a Wednesday, and the 56-year-old, an avid Hillwalker, had left the house that he shared with Emer Kennedy in Tillicoultry, near the Scottish city of Stirling, before she went to work. His plan was to climb Creise, a 1,100 meter high peak overlooking Glen Etive, the remote Highland Valley made famous by the James Bond film Skyfall.
The weather was unusually mild for the season, and Kelly thought he might even have had time to “pack” a second Munro, because the Scottish mountains are known above 3000 feet. In his spare time as a forensic psychologist for the Scottish prison service, he had steadily checked the tops. “He had this book in which he would mark them,” Kennedy recalls. “But we would go on holiday in two and a half weeks, so this was the last Munro he was going to do before the winter started.”
Walking was not something that Kennedy was particularly enthusiastic for himself. When the couple had met for the first time four and a half years earlier, they had a connected love for the Celtic Football Club and their “extremely idiosyncratic” sense of humor. She had fallen in love with Kelly’s brain – his encyclopedic knowledge of all things football, Robert de 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:” You let me be me, “she says.
So when Kelly told her that he would not come from the hill for falling the evening, Kennedy was worried, but she trusted that he knew what he was doing. “Charlie was a very resourceful person,” she says. “At work he was a trained negotiator, because when prisoners took hostages or went on the roof. He generally took no risks.” Kelly reassured her that it was not necessary to ask for help. He had packed extra food, had a lot of water and enough warm clothing. He would just wait until the light became and walks down.
At work on Thursday, Kennedy checked her phone when she had a break. Kelly had checked in before the dawn and sent further cheerful messages when he had reception. Around 8 p.m., with the sun that started to undergo, he wrote to say that his battery was low, but she doesn’t have to worry: he could see the lights of the Glencoe Ski Center where he had parked his car. There was still a lot of daylight left to achieve it, he said. “It takes me about half an hour.” That was the last one to hear from Charlie Kelly alive.
In the days after Kelly’s disappearance, Glencoe Mountain Rescue launched which she later described as a “Herculean” search effort, using sniffer dogs, quads, several helicopters and drones equipped with infrared and conventional camera equipment. The search concerned 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. Often there were no fewer than 50 people on the hill at the same time. They found his backpack on Saturday 9 September. But nothing after that.
