When Charlie Kelly first messaged saying he wouldn’t make it home that night, his partner wasn’t happy. It was September 6, 2023, a Wednesday, and the 56-year-old, a keen 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 time to “bag” a second Munro, as the Scottish mountains above 3,000 feet are known. In his time 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 something that Kennedy was particularly keen on herself. When the pair had first met four and a half years previously, they’d bonded over a shared love of Celtic Football Club, and their “extremely quirky” sense of humor. She’d 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 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 told her he wouldn’t make it off the hill before nightfall, 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, 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 need to call for help. He had packed extra food, had plenty of water and enough warm clothes. He’d just wait for it to get light and walk down.
At work on the Thursday, Kennedy checked her phone whenever she had a break. Kelly had checked in before dawn and sent further cheery messages whenever he had reception. At around 8 pm, with the sun starting to set, he wrote to say his battery was running low, but she needn’t worry: He could see the lights of the Glencoe Ski Center, where he’d parked his car. There was still plenty of daylight left to reach it, he said. “It’ll take me about half an hour.” That was the last anyone heard from Charlie Kelly alive.
In the days following Kelly 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 and conventional camera equipment. 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 as many as 50 people on the hill at a time. On Saturday, September 9, they found his backpack. But after that, nothing.