'Most horrible aspect of the Renee MacRae tragedy was what happened to her son Andrew,' says former newspaper owner who reported on events at the time
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Former Inverness Courier owner Stuart Lindsay recalls reporting the Renee and Andrew MacRae mystery over the years.
I have a son the same age as Andrew MacRae. He’s 49, a happy family man with sons of his own, successful, leading a full and interesting life, the very life brutally denied the missing boy.
That was always for me the most horrible aspect of the Renee MacRae story. We sometimes hear of people being hurt, even killed, in passionate affairs, but the cold-blooded murder of a three-year-old is a different matter and I never reported this story without mentioning and remembering Andrew.
It started very quietly for me on the morning of Monday, November 15, 1976. On my way to work I called for petrol at Mackenzie’s garage in Tomnahurich Street and the late manager, George Gunn, who listened to the police radio as a pastime, told me Renee MacRae’s car had been found on fire on Friday night and she and her three-year-old were missing. The late George Black, then police/press liaison officer, told me she was believed to be away for the weekend and expected back that afternoon.
Before going home that evening, I phoned the police again and heard she had not returned and there was intense police activity at Dalmagarry which I soon saw for myself. A reporter for the Glasgow Herald at the time, I covered every development for weeks, months and years, for the Glasgow Herald and the Evening Times, and honestly never thought I would see last week’s conclusion.
Police from all over the country were pulled in, frogmen teams searching rivers and lochs. Police, soldier and civilian volunteers in their hundreds scoured open countryside. An RAF Canberra reconnaissance aircraft filmed a huge surrounding area in infra-red looking for disturbed ground. Meantime, detectives were quietly checking on the activities of everyone closely involved in Renee MacRae’s life.
Everything drew a blank, the mountain of circumstantial detail accumulated not amounting as far as the prosecuting authorities were concerned at the time to evidence of a crime, although Chief Constable Donald Henderson candidly confessed he thought they had been murdered.
Eight days after the disappearance, at a now-routine police press conference, a sharp-eyed colleague picked out the name of William MacDowell from a policeman’s background briefing paper as the name of Mrs MacRae’s boyfriend – he was never mentioned at the press conference. Outed by Renee’s closest friend, he was company secretary at Hugh MacRae & Sons builders, a lucrative position which supported a fancy new house with stables on Nairnside.
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When we arrived on his doorstep, MacDowell kept us outside the farm gate access but admitted the affair, said his wife was standing by him and volunteered information that he did not think Renee was dead. He said a secret code they had when she wanted to make contact – she would ring off after two rings – had happened twice since the disappearance. This was the first evidence for eight days that Renee and Andrew might be alive. “Have you told the police this?” I asked. “No,” he said. “It must have slipped my mind.” Right. From that moment MacDowell was my main suspect.
Whatever the satisfaction taken from these verdicts now, and they reflect enormous credit on the cold case review teams, and the prosecutors, my thoughts are with the original hard-working police teams – no computers, no DNA, no mobile phone data or surveillance camera footage, and frankly no luck – whose posthumous evidence finally had its conclusive day in court.
