Willie McRae Investigations

Welcome to the 6th post in my series in which I take a detailed and critical look at the death of Willie McRae. In the 5th post we, looked in great detail at all possible roadside features which could be close to the crash site, saw the sites themselves in aerial and streetview mode, checked if the Bunloyne dam was visible from the various roadside features, saw old video of the two sites, saw that there is no physical evidence to tie the Coutts site to the actual crash site, saw the only physical evidence which indicates that the official site is the crash site, showed that only Coutts himself of the witnesses claims his site to be correct, saw how the official and Coutts site came to be and posed two major questions (unanswered so far) Let’s start with those two questions, How can this be? [that the police photos don’t put an end to the speculation about the site] and How could anyone seeing the car in that position [on the side of the large layby at the official site] ever be in any...

These 2 clips alone show confusion.  Was the gun found on Sunday or Monday (7th or 8th April)?  Late last year an FOI asked 3 simple questions of the police, when were photographs taken? when was the car removed? when was the post-mortem carried out? None was answered. There is so much about the McRae case we don’t know.  So much about when events happened. When? Today, therefore, we’re going to look at ‘ when ’ by using the best material available - the released police records – and we’ll mark the few fixed points in time.  In Part 8 we’ll continue looking at ‘when?’ We’ll not be able to give specific answers to any of the three questions above but we shall know considerably more about ‘when’. Before I start on the times it's important to show where the police material can be accessed.  There are 3 sources: Northern Constabulary (2005) They first released information in 2005 but that is now only available through the web archive here .   Included in this i...

In Part 7  we used police documents to find specific times at which certain events happened.  Then I estimated for other untimed events, the earliest (or latest) times at which they could have happened. Here we look at McRae’s car and place some untimed events in their logical place. There are 10 car events, There are a lot of gaps and, ideally, we’d put definite times against all but, unfortunately, that’s not possible.  All is not lost though. Let’s see what we can manage. Why?  What’s the point of this? When I started reading up on this case I was faced with articles which stated that the car was moved on this day or that; that the gun was found on that day or this and I had no reference, no framework, against which I could check. I ‘m trying to produce that reference so that with any piece of evidence we can check to find how the evidence fits. We’ll look again at 3 police documents, each of which was used in Part 7, - Annex A - McRae B syn - McRae O Vehicle Repo...