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Police searching dump are braced for grim discovery
POLICE said yesterday they expect to find Corrie McKeague’s body in a rubbish dump they are searching. The hunt for the missing Scots RAF man moved to a landfill site this week. Speaking from the dump, Detective Superintendent Katie Elliott said: “I have a high level of confidence we will find him.” Corrie, 23, went missing after a night out in Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk, six months ago. It is feared he ended up in a bin that was emptied on to a refuse truck and taken to the dump. Corrie’s phone signals linked him to the lorry’s trip to the landfill site. But police ruled out the possibility that he was on the lorry because a waste management firm told them the load only weighed 11kg. That has now been found to have been a mistake and the load actually weighed 110kg. Elliot said police had no regrets over their investigation. She added: “I think we’ve conducted the investigation methodically throughout.
“We’ve resourced it, we’ve had specially trained detectives working through the information. We’ve checked and re-checked and our priority right the way through has been to find Corrie.”
Some 60 tons of rubbish from a 920sq metre patch of the dump in Milton, Cambridgeshire, has been sifted through by specially trained officers since Monday.
Corrie’s heartbroken mum Nicola Urquhart, 48, of Dunfermline, has for months been clinging on to hope that her boy is alive.
But she is now bracing herself for the worst.
She said: “There’s just no way realistically that Corrie was not in the bin.
“Regardless of how he’s ended up in there, I cannot get my head around how he’s ended up in landfill.
“I don’t understand how the process has allowed him to get to landfill. It was the one thing that was giving me hope that he was still alive.”
Corrie, who had been out with friends, was last seen alone on CCTV at 3.25am near an area of Bury St Edmunds known as the “horseshoe”.
Less than an hour after that, a bin lorry belonging to Biffa made a collection in the area.
The firm told police the rubbish weighed less than 2st.
But police found out much later that the figure was way out.
A 26-year-old man was arrested on suspicion of perverting the course of justice over the discrepancy in the lorry’s load weight. But police say it was a “genuine mistake” and he faces no further action.
Elliott said it was “sobering” when she received a call telling her the true weight of the load.
She added: “We are where we are because we’ve worked carefully through extensive information in this major investigation.”
If Corrie was in the bin, it’s not known whether he was alive when it was emptied and the load thrown into the lorry.
The search of the dump, which is 10 miles from Corrie’s RAF base, by officers from the Suffolk and Norfolk forces could take up to 10 weeks and cost £500,000.
The size of the task is enormous. There are 8000 tons of rubbish on the site in piles up to 26ft tall.
There are 10 officers working 10 hour days from 8.30am, sifting through each layer of rubbish in a large, crater-like section Corrie is believed to be in, which is marked off by posts in the ground.
Dressed in white overalls and yellow hi-visibility jackets, officers have been using rakes and poles to pick through each mound.
Corrie’s dad Martin, 48, from Cupar, Fife, and wife Trisha, 54, were distraught when they visited the site this week.
The airman’s girlfriend April Oliver, 21, is due to give birth to their child in late spring or early summer.
Corrie didn’t know she was pregnant when he went missing on September 24.
Earlier in the search, his family arranged for a team of crowdfunded private investigators to help look for him.
Volunteers also joined in the hunt.