Corrie McKeague was 23, a gunner with No 2 Squadron of the RAF Regiment, stationed at RAF Honington about ten miles north of Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk. He had grown up in Fife, and his mother, Nicola Urquhart, was a serving officer with Police Scotland. On Friday September 23, 2016 he drove into Bury with friends from the base for a night out.
What happened
By the small hours he was very drunk. A doorman asked him to leave the Flex nightclub after midnight; he bought food at a pizza takeaway on St Andrew’s Street North, and at about 1:20 am he slid down against the doorway of an electrical shop on Brentgovel Street and slept there for nearly two hours. At 3:25 am on Saturday September 24 a CCTV camera recorded him standing up, looking around and walking into a loading and refuse area behind the shops known locally as the Horseshoe. It had one way in and one way out, and no camera recorded him leaving. He was wearing a pink Ralph Lauren shirt and light-colored trousers.
He was reported missing on Monday September 26 when he failed to appear for a parade. His phone’s last signals showed it moving from Bury to Barton Mills, about 12 miles away, in under half an hour, a route and timing that matched a Biffa bin lorry which had emptied the Horseshoe’s commercial bins at about 4:20 am.
The investigation
Suffolk Police seized the lorry in October 2016. The waste company told them the bin collected from the Horseshoe had weighed 11 kg, far too little to contain a man, and the bin theory was set aside. Officers instead traced 31 people and four vehicles seen near the yard, searched woodland between Barton Mills and Honington, and briefly arrested a 26-year-old man on suspicion of perverting the course of justice before releasing him without charge. His mother, who had pushed for a landfill search from the start, said publicly that the weight made no sense.
In March 2017 the force announced that the weight data had been wrong. The company billed per collection rather than by weight and had, in Detective Superintendent Katie Elliott’s words, made a genuine mistake; the load was in fact more than 100 kg, later refined to 116 kg, against a typical 20 to 30 kg on that route. The search of the Milton landfill near Cambridge began the same week. Over the following 20 weeks officers sifted about 6,500 tonnes of waste by hand, then a further 1,400 tonnes in a second phase from October 2017. Nothing was found. The operation cost more than £2.1 million, the most expensive in the force’s recent history, and the government contributed £800,000 toward the bill. In March 2018 Suffolk Police said there were no realistic lines of inquiry left and passed the file to its cold-case team, stating that the evidence still pointed to the lorry and the landfill.
The explanations
The family split over the official theory. Mrs Urquhart accepted that her son had left the yard in the bin but argued for years that someone else must have been involved, and in 2018 said the raw weight data she had been shown was inconsistent and had either been manipulated or misreported. His father, Martin McKeague, accepted earlier that his son had died by accident. Online, the case drew a crowd of amateur theories: that he had walked out of the yard unseen, gone absent without leave, or been attacked. Suffolk Police tested the first by checking whether a person could leave the Horseshoe without appearing on camera and concluded he could not.
The inquest, held before a jury at Suffolk Coroner’s Court in Ipswich over two weeks in March 2022, heard that he was a heavy sleeper when drunk, had slept under bin bags on a previous night out and had once slept in a bin, and that the bins in the yard had ineffective locks and were not properly checked before being tipped. A forensic pathologist said that in a compacting lorry he would have been crushed quickly.
Where it stands
On March 22, 2022 the jury returned a narrative conclusion: Corrie McKeague died at about 4:20 am on September 24, 2016 in Bury St Edmunds of compression asphyxia with multiple injuries, having climbed into a commercial waste bin that was tipped into a lorry, his judgment impaired by alcohol. His mother said the family now believed the verdict completely. The senior coroner, Nigel Parsley, wrote to the bin-lorry manufacturer, the waste company and the British Standards Institute about viewing panels and bin locks. His body has never been recovered; police believe it lies in the Milton landfill. A daughter was born to his girlfriend in June 2017.