Christina “Renee” MacRae was 36, separated from her husband Gordon, a building contractor, and living with their two sons at Cradlehall on the edge of Inverness. On Friday November 12, 1976 she put an overnight bag and a pushchair in her blue BMW, dropped nine-year-old Gordon at his father’s house and drove south on the A9 with three-year-old Andrew. She had said she was going to her sister’s in Kilmarnock. Her friend Valerie Steventon knew otherwise: Renee was going away for the weekend with William MacDowell, her lover of five years, who worked as an accountant for her husband’s firm and was Andrew’s father.
What happened
The car was seen parked near the Meallmore Hotel at about eight that evening. Roughly two hours later it was reported ablaze in a lay-by at Dalmagarry, some twelve miles south of Inverness. When police reached it the BMW was burned out and empty. Traces of blood in the boot matched Renee and Andrew. Neither of them, nor the pushchair, has been seen since.
The first inquiry, by the Northern Constabulary, produced witnesses but no bodies. One account described a man dragging something like a dead sheep near the car; another placed a man with a pushchair on the road by the old Dalmagarry quarry. Eight months in, the detective sergeant running the search, John Cathcart, was excavating the quarry when he hit a smell he took for decomposition; by his later account a senior officer stopped the dig because the hired bulldozer was due back. The inquiry was wound down within two years. MacDowell admitted the affair, denied involvement and said nothing more for decades.
The investigation
A 2004 television documentary prompted the Chief Constable to order a cold case review, and in August that year the Dalmagarry quarry was excavated for three weeks at a cost of £122,000. It yielded crisp packets, men’s clothing and rabbit bones. Leanach quarry near Culloden was searched in October 2018. In September 2019, with the review complete, MacDowell, by then 77 and living in Penrith in Cumbria, was arrested and charged with both murders and with attempting to defeat the ends of justice.
He stood trial at the High Court in Inverness in September 2022. The Crown, led by Alex Prentice KC, presented what it called a compelling circumstantial case: the affair and the planned weekend; MacDowell’s alibi that he had been at the Mercury Motor Inn and home by half past eight, undermined by his wife’s statement that he came in after a television program that finished at 10:15; evidence that the boot floor of his own car was removed and burned two days after the disappearance; and the testimony of a man who said MacDowell had once offered him £500 to carry out an acid attack. MacDowell lodged a special defense of alibi and incrimination and blamed Gordon MacRae, whom police had long since eliminated. After three weeks the jury convicted him on September 29, 2022 of both murders and the attempt to defeat justice.
The next day Lord Armstrong sentenced him to life imprisonment with a punishment part of thirty years, twenty-seven for the murders and three for disposing of the bodies and the child’s belongings, with a concurrent six years on the third charge. The judge said the killings had been premeditated, planned and carried out in the most calculating way, and that they were in effect executions. MacDowell abandoned an appeal and died in prison on February 15, 2023, aged 81, without admitting anything or disclosing where Renee and Andrew lie.
The explanations
For forty-six years the case fed theories ranging from flight abroad to a second lover to police incompetence, and the 1977 abandoned dig at Dalmagarry became a Highland grievance in its own right. The trial answered the central question. What it could not answer is where the bodies are. Dalmagarry and Leanach quarries have been searched; the ground along the A9 has been rebuilt by road works since the 1970s; and the one man who knew is dead.
Where it stands
The verdict is true: Renee and Andrew MacRae disappeared exactly as the old post described, and a court has since established that they were murdered. The case is solved in law and open in fact. Police Scotland still asks anyone with information about the location of the remains to come forward.