MacRae Murder Mystery

A few folk have suggested that I should write a book and after due consideration I felt that I could be tempted. What would I call it? And the most appropriate title that I can think of might be;

He thanked John Cathcart and welcomed the news that the legendary Les Brown was now taking an interest in the investigation. Les fronted Glasgow's serious crime squad and is now retired and has written two books containing many interesting facts and theories on many solved and unsolved murders. His first book, Glasgow Crimefighter records his rise from constable to Detective Chief Inspector arguing in the High court with the likes of Nicholas Fairburn QC. His second book is out now and would make an interesting Christmas present for a lot of folk. Called. Hard Cases. Les includes Highland murder victims Innes Ewart. Kevin MacLeod and Renee and Andrew MacRae.

I get the distinct impression that the P&J report from young Gordon Macrae ruffled a few feathers and a couple of folk have asked me how do I think that myself and John Cathcart and Les Brown can uncover anything that Northern Con couldn't?. A very fair and reasonable question. There is sadly a great proportion of society that no longer trust any police force.

It all seemed to change after Dixon of Dock Green. Well it did in our house. Along came Z cars, and the public became more informed, and more cynical.

Here are two simple instances of someone talking to me, who would not talk to the police. I will call the first informer Jock Campbell, because that is his name, and I'm sure he will not mind me repeating his report here. Jock phoned me around the Spring of 2006.

I have known Jock and his family for decades and through his landscaping business when he bought bulk peat from me. I would regard Jock as a creditable witness. Here.s what jock had to say. On the Friday afternoon that Renee went missing. Jock had been clear felling trees in the area where the present day Tourist Information centre sits, on what we call the Daviot straight, just south of Bogbain. As he was leaving the site sometime after four PM, Jock noticed Renee's car being driven south.

What drew his attention to the BMW was how slow it was going on such a straight mile with no other traffic present. A male was driving it, as far as Jock could make out in the gloaming. It was not doing forty miles per hour.

I asked Jock how could he be so sure that it was the MacRae BMW and he was adamant that it was because he had been doing a lot of landscaping around MacRae housing schemes and Jock was absolutely sure that it was the MacRae car.

So what?. Well says Jock,. That's what I'm going to tell you.

Over the years I wondered if the police would have been interested. You know, you hear of them not being interested and you.re made to feel like a fool. Anyway, I eventually decided to go and tell them and that would be the matter off my back, so to speak. So I go into the big new police office down at Inshes and I tell someone at the great reception desk that I might have some information about the MacRae murder.Well, it had taken Jock a few years to get this far and he was hoping that his information would be appreciated, to say the least. But what happened next shattered any notion that Jock may have had that the police might care.

.Oh! This is not the place for that sort of thing. the receptionist responded. "No it's nothing to do with us. You will have to go down to Burnett Road and speak to them there. This is Head Office." Well Jock didn't argue but he left the police station muttering, "to-hell-with-that" and went straight home to Culloden.

Not an isolated incident. Because, when Northern Con interviewed road worker Eddie Tocher down in the Board Room of his employers in Perth they spent three and a half hours with him and took a twelve-page statement. They ended by asking Eddie why had he gone to Bogbain with the information and not gone direct to Northern Con.

Eddie replied that he did not know what the police force up in Inverness was like but he was aware that when things were reported to his local force in Fife, nothing seemed to get done. However, he had heard that Bogbain was interested and when he called at the farmhouse he saw that the walls of the farm office were covered in information and maps of the crime scene. Eddie said that he had got the distinct impression that here was somewhere where people were very interested in the matter. The Northern Cons agreed.

Ask me again how I think the public can score where Northern Con failed and I.ll tell you a tale of the time when, had it not been for a chance remark made to me, I believe that Northern Con would have left the matter unsolved, believing that I was the guilty party and I would be left to believe it was an inside job by one of my staff.

Must have been about a couple of years after Renee went missing. I had moved my motor workshop business down to Haugh road where we did specialised engine tuning and MOT testing. We still had a little car showroom in Academy St but most of my time was spent around the workshop. We liked to deal in the out of the ordinary and more interesting stuff. If someone wanted to go on an ego trip we were the folk with the Jensen Interceptor. The NSU RO 80. The Mercs, E type Jag and we could supply any make of new car that was not represented in town by a franchise. Saab. Opel. Peugeot. Mazda. Audi. We took the first Mazda home to Inverness from Halifax for a customer who had come in off the street with a single page leaflet from Gairloch wondering if I could get him an eighteen hundred estate. Phone cals found one in Halifax so with a plane ticket to Leeds in the morning and a taxi through to Halifax I was back in Inverness just after midnight. No you did not need to run-in these new Japanese cars and there were no speed cameras on the A9. Oh! Happy days. A week later a neighbour of our Gairloch man came in with a leaflet on a little Mazda estate. Phone call. Plane ticket. Taxi to Halifax, and home again before dawn.

While in Halifax the dealer asked me if I could help him to shift Mazda 1800 cars. He had bought forty-two of them at the dock side and they were all blue and he could give me £200 discount on them. This was decent money in the early seventies so a lot of Mazda motors came north. I started specialising in Audi 100 cars. Wonderful value. Volkswagen standard of paint and finish. Full five seater, while Rover had only got the snug Rover 2000 and a waiting list for a couple of years.

Triumph 2000 was a bit of a tub and of course the Audi had front wheel drive and a massive boot. We hauled new ones from Tayside Motors in Perth and anywhere else that had the right colour in stock for immediate delivery. We took the first Audi 80 into stock, as a real gamble. It was sitting at £1250 and we were wondering who would buy such an expensive two-door car with cross ply tyres and no servo on the brakes. As I was shutting the workshop door to go home and worry about it on the night that it had arrived, the saw doctor, Jock Watt from Holm Mills appeared and as he walked passed the wee white Audi he asked. "Brian, Can you get me one of this things, in red." The rest is history and it costs £1250 for a big service and brake pads on a modern day Audi. Happy days indeed.

Got side tracked there. Well back in seventy-seven or eight, we had a lovely piece of what was termed .heavy metal . A big fuel injected, automatic Opel Commodore Coupe. Metallic gold. In a shade that no paint sprayer would ever like to match.

It had, as they say in the trade .the wheels. a roof .windows and seats. To the uninitiated this might seem nothing unusual because from early days of automobile development cars have had roofs etc. But we are now into a period when added extras were the things that sorted out the men from the boys. The wheels were very expensive alloy wheels. The roof would be a sunroof and at the top of the range it would be an electric roof. Seats would be valour and don.t forget the unmatchable metallic paint was an extra cost.

A big member of Inverness golf club traded it in against a Jag and we were looking for a victim for this rapidly depreciating bit of heavy metal.

It was a showroom car. You see there were always cars that could not be held up to scrutiny in a showroom but this motor was mint. So I don.t know why it landed down around the Haugh workshop on a Friday afternoon.

Anyhow, Ally Nicol, a very promising apprentice was given the job of washing it, probably just something to keep him out of mischief till five o-clock.

The washed car would have been carefully reversed back against the outside wall. The car locked and the key hung up in the control office. Yes, we had a control office, because you have to control the public, and you do not leave ignition keys around.

The control office doubled as a reception office with a counter splitting the two areas. You just cannot control customers enough and do not give me any of your customer care guff. One morning Innes, my right hand man in control of the place decided that someone must have lifted a set of ignition keys that had been left on the reception desk for a few moments during the morning rush. He eliminated everyone in the staff in no time at all and jumped into whatever was handy to pursue a customer who had left to walk home past the Ness Islands. Innes caught up with our man and enquired if he had accidentally lifted a set of keys from our desk. The gent, a perfectly respectable fellow, confessed immediately, but floored Innes by going on to say that he had become aware of keys in his pocket as he had been walking home and after examining them concluded that they were nothing to do with him, and had thrown them into the river Ness. As they say. You could not make it up. If you saw such a scene on the telly you would be wondering who was the stupid scriptwriter. Back to the Opel. The morning after Ally washed it, I got a phone call to my house from Brian Greenlees who at that time was running the Haugh operation for me.

He asked if I had had the Opel out the previous night. No I did not. .Well it.s in a hell of a mess, the drivers door is bashed in and the whole boot lid and back panel is wrecked.. I would come down right away. It was in a hell of a mess but beside that fact was the mystery of who done it? The ignition key was still hanging in the control office. Checking the fuel gauge showed that there was more petrol in it than when Ally had washed it. Intrigue, concern and imagination went into overdrive.

Who had been able to get access to the key, and put it back in its proper place? Had the car been used for some specific criminal activity and placed back in the Haugh to incriminate me and the staff? In those days I had a deep respect for the British police force so I left Brian to call the police while I set off for Aberdeen with the family to visit the Steam Rally at Hazlehead. I had confidence in Northern Con.

Keen to find out what Northern Con could have found in my absence, I phoned Brian that evening. .Ach! The police think it.s an inside job so they are coming down to interview us all on Tuesday.. Said Brian. Monday was a Bank holiday. I was not amused and had no hesitation in dismissing the police theory. I had absolute faith in every last one of my team and the police were talking nonsense.

By Tuesday the trail would be dead. No. This was no damn use. This called for action. I went down to the garage and fitted trade plates on the beat up Opel. I would conduct my own enquiries. I drove it round to MacRae& Dick in Strothers Lane, which was the only late night, and twenty-four hour petrol service in town at that time. No the attendants did not remember seeing the Opel the previous night. I called at the taxi ranks and got the same result. I went home. Brian had got the feeling that the police had Ally down as a chief suspect but I dismissed that as utter rubbish.

Sunday mid morning I got a phone call from Northern Con. They had a lead on the Opel mystery. Could I go down to their police station immediately?

This was magic. I was ushered into an interview room and sat down to be hit with news that the police had received a report from someone who had seen me driving the car. Yes. The driver had a beard and there was no doubt that Macgregor was the driver.

I was flabbergasted, as they say. The plot was deepening. If someone was trying to incriminate me in something they had maybe gone to great lengths with a false beard.

I did not take any offence against the allegation and indeed I laughed and said that I could see where they were coming from. They were fishing.. No they were not,. They said, and they did not take lightly to my sense of humour.. OK. Where is your eyewitness., I challenged. Oh! The witness wasn.t available. Aye! Aye! That would be right, I suggested. But the big guys were serious and they were getting wild. They reckoned that I had gone on the drink, bashed the car and put it back to claim insurance.

That did not stack up I said because who in their right mind would risk being seen driving the bashed car back to the Haugh.. Where were you Friday night?. They wanted to know. Around eight I had called round to a customer in Green Drive that had a faulty flasher unit on their Audi 100.. I had changed the flasher unit from the Audi that I had been using for the weekend, so they could give me some sort of alibi.

On the way home I had waved to Dennis McLaughlin, car sales manager at that time with the Inverness Motor Company. They phoned home to my wife to ask her what car I had been using on Friday night but she hadn.t a clue because in those days I simply drove anything from stock that was licensed and had some petrol showing on the gauge.

They began to get really angry saying that if I confessed then that would be the end of it but if I didn.t, then they would throw the book at me.

I could still not get angry because I could understand their position. I was bemused. I kept saying..Let's see your eye witness.

At last they relented and said that the eyewitness would be available for speaking to around mid afternoon and I could go home. This was even more intriguing. They were not bluffing. They really did have an eyewitness.

I can.t have been too worried, because after lunch I fell asleep till wakened by the phone ringing around three o-clock. . This is Northern Con here Mr MacGregor. Just to say that our eyewitness says it was Saturday night that he saw the Opel going through Inverness.. There was no apology and I did not make an issue of the matter and I was assured that Northern Con would be on the case on Tuesday.

I later learned that the eye witness had been an off duty policeman through in Inverness from Dingwall.

By Monday I had got word to Ally Nicol that police were keen to talk to him. Ally appeared in my garden asking . What.s the crack?. I told him to go and see Con and sort them out. Ally returned to say that they had alleged that he took the Opel to impress some bird. Ally said he didn.t need an Opel to impress any bird. He had an Avenger, with go faster mudflaps. Ally was indignant. I cut the grass.

Tuesday morning had a buzz in the control office. As Peggy did the cashing up for the banking I kept going over the intrigue with anyone who would listen.

With her head still down and counting cash, Peggy muttered that she had heard that my car had been in Dingwall, on Friday night. I wanted to know more. No no , Peggy could not afford to comment any further and refused point blank to expand. The phone rang with Northern Con saying they were coming down to interview my staff. .Hold on for a while. I said, because we have a lead on the thing ourselves.

Well we leaned on Peg and at last we got the nickname of a barmaid in the Tryst who could maybe help. Tryst barmaid was reluctant to comment but eventually gave me the nickname of someone else worth speaking to. I phoned Con. Did the name mean much to them? Seems it did and I heard no more from them until around mid evening while I was gardening. I must say, that while writing this, I find it hard to believe that I ever did so much gardening. Anyway this was Con phoning to say that our suspect had been apprehended in York and a policeman was just catching a train to take him home.

It seems the guy was a teenager who had found the passenger door unlocked. Had found a spare key in the glove box that we had known nothing about and had gone for a spin. He had crashed the car in Harbour Rd and I can only suppose that he had crashed it into reverse so that it reversed back into a metal fence post at the gas works.

Ok. But why did the chap risk driving the bashed car all the way back through town to the Haugh garage ?
Had I not been fortunate to get a snippet of information from Peg, would the mystery have been unsolved?
Would I have been left to believe that maybe a member of my staff was not trustworthy?
Would my staff have been left to believe that I had gone on the drink and was claiming insurance?
There was no point in an insurance claim because the car had been left unlocked.
So the heavy metal was left in a corner of the garage for over a year or so until a resourceful sort of enthusiast made me an offer that I couldn.t refuse and at the end of the day I became the victim of the great golden Opel.

The moral of the story seems to suggest that nobody should sit back and trust or depend on any police force, or indeed any other public service to look after our interests.

But we strayed from the MacRae case a bit and while sidetracked Les Brown has got me gathering information on the background of the case.

Who benefited from the Insurance claim for the burnt out BMW?
Who benefited from any Life Insurance Policy?
What sort of divorce settlement would Renee and her Lawyer have expected to claim.? What happened to cash in Renee.s Bank accounts?
According to Public Records her husband.s business lost £496,000 trading in 1976.

MacRae Builders issued 13,750 shares of £1 each for a cash price of £8 per share .

The money was then used to prop up the company for another year. It would seem that someone must have done a valuation in that period at £8 a share which would of course value Renee.s husband.s shares at approximately £400,000 at that time. Would this suggest Renee might be looking for £200,000 settlement when her lawyer got her act together?

Public records show that Renee.s husband spent £21,750 buying 4Cradlehall Park for her in June 1976 and sold it in 1977 for £6,750 profit..

According to young Gordon MacRae he has seen nothing from his mother.s estate. Two Bank books were found to have been emptied keeping him in Boarding school. There is speculation that a Life Insurance Policy went missing with a firm of solicitors but has now become available and sits unclaimed.

Who knows what happened to the Insurance on the BMW but it was probably insured with MacRae Builders?

It was kept in storage for nearly thirty years before Northern Con asked Renee.s sister for her permission for the Police to dispose of it. Why did they ask Morag?

After going over these facts Les suggested that he would now know where to look and who to speak to if I get bumped off.

The tribute paid to the memory of Renee MacRae at Dalmagarry Farm to mark thirty years of grieving by her son Gordon.

As good cop Sgt John Cathcart started to enjoy his retirement and spending more time on the banks of the Ness waiting to hook the big one he often thought back to his involvement in the MacRae case back in seventy six.

As a sergeant with Northern Constabulary police force at the time that Renee and her son Andrew went missing, John had been sent up to Dalmagarry on the Tuesday following their disappearance to comb the area with a squad of eight officers. By mid morning he was joined by senior police officers and held a conference in the lay-by just along the Ruthven road. The previous day police had become aware that just up and over the hill from where they were standing sat a quarry that was being used for dumping waste material from the new A9 construction work. Machine operators landscaping the now disused quarry had offered to stop their work if it would help with the investigation but senior officers involved in the search on the Monday declined the offer saying that the work could continue. John was concerned with such a decision but let the matter rest.

On Wednesday morning, John was directed to take his squad down to Fort George to search around the army rifle range for clues. What clues?

Nobody to this day has been able to suggest why such a valuable squad was sent on such a wild goose chase. What connection did Renee have with anybody in the Army?

So while the fish kept out of John's way in the Ness, his mind often drifted back to some other strange events that had thwarted his investigation. They say that the best measure of assessing job satisfaction can be found on reflecting on how often one thinks about the job while not being paid to do so. I don't mean worrying about the job, but just allowing the grey matter to work on some detail. Yes, that's it. Job satisfaction is thinking about the job when you are not being paid to do so.

John often thought about how different things might have been had his superior officers just allowed him one more day of the use of a digger that had been brought into the quarry to search for bodies when the police force had realised the initial mistake that they had made. Towards the end of a weekend search of the quarry John and the machine operator got a distinct smell of something rotten. They stopped using the machine and started digging with hand tools but found nothing by the end of their shift. First thing on Monday John reported his findings to his boss but was utterly shocked to be told that the search was off. The machine was off hire because of constraints on costs. There was no arguing. Arguing would only prejudice promotion or indeed might prejudice ones wish to stay in the force.

Many other fishermen had to listen to John's doubts and disappointment in the investigation until one day someone urged him to go to the papers with the story. Time and again the power of the British free press are responsible for investigative journalists turning up important clues and solving crimes where the police had been defeated. John wasn't so sure. His story might embarrass the police force. There were still reunions, retirement parties and Burn.s suppers to attend. This could prejudice any hope that he might hold for reciting Tam-o-shanter to a captive audience. It was all a bit risky. He spoke to one or two journalists and they urged him to go public with the information.

Well how do you measure a man? The measure of a man is truth, without which there is no other virtue. So john would go to the press. But at the last moment, he had another hesitation. Should he not do the decent thing and consult Renee.s husband Gordon MacRae, just to see what his angle on the case might be. Gordon listened as John spelt out the detail and his disappointment that he was not allowed to work on with the digger at Dalmagarry. What did Macrae think about involving the press?

Macrae suggested that he had a better idea. He had plenty diggers around his construction firm. At the time Renee went missing Macrae's were the king pin in the construction industry around Inverness, employing 630 men. MacRae would send one of his diggers up to Dalmagarry to dig wherever John felt it was necessary. MacRae had friends in high places. He would contact his friends in the Forestry Commission to borrow a little forestry van for John to use running back and fore to the quarry investigation. This way the investigation would be kept a secret.
John was surprised, to say the least and sat back to wait for the action to begin. John is still waiting.

So what happened to the MacRae action plan? The reader will have to ask MacRae. John phoned the MacRae office, countless times. Left messages for Gordon MacRae to ring him back, but to this day, absolutely nothing.

If Gordon had honoured his offer to John would the public purse have been spared the £240,000 that Northern Coonstabulary spent in and around Dalmagarry in 2004? John still waits for his line to tighten on the banks of the Ness and often thinks that if Renee's killer keeps getting away with it, it is maybe because Northern Con are using the wrong bait or fishing in the wrong pool. Is someone still thwarting the investigation?

Recent reports marking the fact that it is now thirty years since Renee MacRae went missing with her son Andrew on 12-11-06, coincided with a report from The General Register Office for Scotland that no death certificate can be found in their archives for Christina Catherine MacRae Last known address. 4 Cradlehall Park Inverness 1976.

With the absence of a death certificate the National Archives of Scotland say that they cannot supply a Confirmation and Copy of Inventory. Strange circumstances, or not?

This maybe begs some questions as to how Renee's son Gordon could ever benefit from her estate without a death certificate.

What law firm represented Renee.s interests during her separation from Gordon Macrae?

Did the absence of a death certificate present a problem to anyone when Renee's husband re married?

Renee's son Gordon continues to receive victim support counselling from Northern Constabulary but after a recent DNA test the police force has refused to confirm whether or not the result is compatible with the test taken from Renee's husband Gordon Macrae.

These are some simple points, only the tip of an iceberg, that relatives and friends of the victims of this thirty-year-old crime are asking themselves.

Michael MacKenzie's widow has returned from holiday but has been unable to remember details of the alleged Morris sighting. However her son clearly remembers his father.s comments from 1976 and seems to remember that it may have been a small estate car.

Retired Glasgow crimefighter Detective Chief Inspector Les Brown's new book containing some details of Bogbain involvement in the MacRae mystery landed on farmer's desk last week inspiring farmer to phone Les and ask him to write a whole book on Renee.

Les is currently busy on the Shirle McKie finger print mystery but I think he is hooked. If anyone has any information that might interest this most successful detective then call Bogbain in the first instance.

Interesting phone call out of the blue from a young relative of Bill McDowell. Small world indeed to find out that Bogbain was in the High school in the fifties with Bill.s brother. I remember him as a very well respected pupil of 3G. Of course! In those days most folk were respected.

Formal request lodged with Chief Constable Mr Ian Latimer for more specific details of Insurance Policy. How was it meant to benefit Andrew and Gordon?

Press & Journal report on DNA testing and how ex Glasgow Detective Chief Inspector, the legendary Les Brown, has offered to assist Bogbain with a private investigation and gather material for a book on the murder case.

The Editor
Inverness Courier
Dear Sir MacRae Murder

May I please be allowed to clarify a very serious error in your report on the Renee MacRae murder investigation Courier 25-8-06?

You stated that Northern Constabulary officers went over to Dublin to interview former A9 road workers to support the claim from the police that the Dalmagarry rail bridge was not built when Mrs MacRae went missing.

In actual fact, the officers went to Dublin to put pressure on the operator of the Ground Penetrating Radar equipment and to get him to sign a statement along the lines that having viewed photographs supplied by the RAF and Northern Constabulary, he would now agree that his scan is discredited. The operator stands by the fact that he detected three anomalies within a two-metre depth of the A9 surface at a point that was identified to the police for investigation on the very evening that the Nairn banker was shot.

How has it taken Northern Constabulary so long to come up with an allegation that the bridge did not exist in 1976? If they have such clear evidence, then why put pressure on the radar operator to support their allegations?

Mr Eddie Tocher, who alleges that he found A9 road foundation work disturbed on the morning after Mrs Macrae went missing was shown the aerial photographs earlier this year when police travelled to Glenrothes where they attempted to use the photographs to discredit his statement. Eddie argued that the film was taken from an obscure angle. That the road work was screened by trees in the photograph. He stands by the signed statement that he sent to the Procurator Fiscal last year. I understand that Northern Constabulary obtained a copy of my CD of the radar scan, while making their Dublin enquiries but they have not come forward with any record of a forensic analysis of it. Why not?

Readers interested in viewing the radar scan result can find it on www brianmacgregor.com

The public have not been provided with evidence from the police that the bridge did not exist in 76.

Since it has been proved that no weapons of mass destruction existed yet authority took us to war, it is maybe sad, but excusable that the British general public no longer trust those in authority who issue press releases and we have to rely on good quality investigative journalism and a free press to know what is going on. We need accurate reporting, so I hope Editor that you will see some merit in my correction of your report.

Yours sincerely Brian MacGregor
Cc www brianmacgregor.com