His partner wasn’t happy when Charlie Kelly first texted that he wouldn’t be home that night. September 6, 2023, a Wednesday. The 56-year-old, who loved hiking, had left the house he shared with Emer Kennedy in Tillicoultry, which is near the city of Stirling in Scotland, before she went to work. He was going to climb Creise, a hill that stands 1,100 meters high and has a view of Glen Etive, the remote Highland valley that became famous in the James Bond movie Skyfall.
It wasn’t very cold for the time of year, and Kelly thought he might even have time to “bag” a second Munro, which is Scottish for “high mountain.” His job as a criminal psychologist for the Scottish Prisons Service gave him time to climb peaks in his spare time. Kennedy says, “He had this book he would mark them in.” “But we were going on vacation in two and a half weeks, so this was the last Munro he was going to do before winter.”
Kennedy wasn’t really into hiking herself. They became friends over their love of Celtic Football Club and their “extremely quirky” sense of humor when they met for the first time four and a half years ago. They fell in love with Kelly’s brain and how much he knew about sports, Doctor Who, and Robert the Bruce. She says he loved it when she laughed at “his terrible jokes.” He liked that she supported him in things they didn’t share a love for, though. “He told me one last time the night before, ‘You let me be me,'” she says.
Kennedy was afraid when Kelly told her that he wouldn’t make it off the hill before dark, but she believed that he knew what he was doing. There was a lot that Charlie could do, she says. “At work, he knew how to negotiate because prisoners often took hostages or went up on the roof.” He didn’t take many chances. Her friend Kelly told her she didn’t need to call for help. He had extra food, water, and warm clothes with him. He would just walk down when it got light.
Kennedy checked her phone every time she had a break at work on Thursday. Kelly checked in early in the morning and sent more happy texts whenever he could. Around 8 p.m., when the sun was beginning to go down, he wrote to let her know that his battery was dying. But she didn’t need to worry—he could see the lights of the Glencoe Ski Center, where he had left his car. He said there was still a lot of daylight left to get there. “It will take me thirty minutes.” That was the last anyone heard from Charlie Kelly living.
Glencoe Mountain Rescue started what they later called a “Herculean” search effort in the days after Kelly went missing. They used sniffer dogs, quad bikes, multiple planes, and drones with both regular and infrared cameras. The Coastguard, Police Scotland, the Royal Air Force, and dozens of highly skilled volunteers from 10 different Mountain Rescue (MR) teams all helped with the search. Up to fifty people were often on the hill at the same time. They found his bag on September 9, Saturday. After that, though, nothing.