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Archive Notes


Between December 2014 and August 2015 I investigated the death in 1985 of lawyer and SNP politician, Willie McRae.   All my work was published on my blog  "calumcarr on .... whatever" which is now closed.

This work is now republished here.

My writing did not cover the entire case but it is a very detailed study over 36 posts.

I have checked to ensure links are still live and have corrected obvious spelling mistakes. Almost certainly, I will have missed some mistakes and created new mistakes for which I apologise. Other than these very minor changes, the posts are republished here as they were originally posted.

The work is presented here in chronological order.   Unfortunately, to achieve this, the original publishing dates have been removed and all comments lost.

In preparing the posts for the archive I have come across the occasional error of logic, where a conclusion may be incorrect. I have left these untouched so the posts read as did the originals. If I ever restart the blog, I would hope to address these errors.


COPYRIGHT
Copyright over all articles is retained by me, CalumCarr.

Please feel free to reproduce extracts provided you attribute the words and images to me taking into account the provisos shown for each post.  

If you wish to use more than one half of any article then contact me for permission at calumsblogATgmailDOTcom.

Popular posts from this blog

Part 1: Introduction

Willie McRae: born 18 May 1923; died 7 April 1985 This we know for certain but much else in his life and death is open to conjecture. What is fact or fiction? Truth or lies? Openness or obfuscation? Will we ever know? Probably not but in this series – may be 1 post or 20 posts depending on my enthusiasm – I want to look back and review his story.  The best way to ensure I keep going with my review is to write and post as I go on.   You, my readers, are key to my continuing! I must have read about Willie in the 80s but I only became aware of him on Sunday past when the Sunday Express published a story more than 24 years after his death. [ Original source ; archived source ] Of course, we note the very important, … it was claimed last night. There’s nothing definite here but you can start to see that McRae’s life might not be straightforward. Within the rest of the article there is more. So here we have claims that he was killed: - by drug smugglers - by security services...
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Part 17: Post Mortem and Forensics

How did Willie McRae die? What would the post mortem examination uncover? What would forensic analysis yield? Only two official documents refer to the post mortem in any detail although two others mention it or a finding [the latter two can be read here and here ]. The two which give detail are the first page of the Lord Advocate’s 1990 letter to Nicholas Fairbairn and Annex A (part of FOI response to Steven Semple).   The relevant parts of each document are shown below: the letter first followed by Annex A. These documents are full of observations, conclusions and more and so, in Table 1, I label key words in the order in which they appear as observations, reasoning, conclusions, view and fact. TABLE 1 – Observations, Reasoning, Conclusions, Fact and View I debated with myself about the first three observations.  Were they observations or facts? They were observed during the post mortem and so I leave them as observations. The two observations listed in the Lord Advoc...
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