The airman vanishes...
The hunt for the missing Corrie McKeague continues without success
Fortean Times has occasionally reported mysterious disappearances, some of which later turn out to have sinister explanations. For example, Lucy Partington vanished on 29 December 1973 while waiting at a bus stop in Cheltenham [ FT6:3]. Twenty years later, we learned that the 21-year-old student, a cousin of Martin Amis, had been picked up by Fred and Rosemary West, murdered and buried under their brothel-cum-abattoir in Gloucester. And in 1996 we reported the disappearance of two teenagers, An Marchal and Eefje Lambrecks, after attending a hypnotism show in Blankenberge, Belgium [ FT93:10]. They later turned out to be victims of the Belgian serial killer Marc Dutroux [ FT95:14, 98:24].
At 3.24am on Saturday, 24 September 2016, a CCTV camera recorded airman Corrie McKeague, 23, walking into an alley in Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk. It was the last that anyone saw of him. McKeague, from Dunfermline, Fife, was posted to RAF Honington, Suffolk, in October 2013, and later became a gunner and team medic in No 2 Sqn, RAF Regiment. On the night he was last seen, he joined friends at the So Bar on Langton Place in Bury St Edmunds, about nine miles (14km) from their air base. They joined in a song with musician Nick Lowe, who said McKeague was “quite a regular” in all of the local bars. He is 5ft 10ins (1.78m) tall, of medium build, with short light brown hair, and that night was wearing a light-pink Ralph Lauren shirt, white jeans and a pair of brown suede Timberland boots. At 11.30 the group headed to the Wetherspoon Corn Exchange pub, and later to the Flex nightclub on St Andrew’s Street, a minute’s walk away. Here, doorman Will Hook said McKeague had “consumed enough alcohol” to draw attention to himself and “amicably” agreed to leave at 1am.
He bought a kebab and chips from Pizza Mamma Mia, where he seemed “happy” and played rock, paper, scissors with a stranger. He took a nap for about two hours in a doorway of electrical store Hughes on the corner of Brentgovel Street and St John’s Street, and at 3:08am forwarded a photo to a friend from his phone. He turned right into a loading bay area, known as the “Horseshoe”, behind Greggs, at 3:24am. The area is closed off by buildings and the rooftops have been searched and analysed by police. It has been proven that an individual cannot leave the area on foot without being seen on CCTV, but McKeague was not caught on camera again.
When he didn’t turn up to parade on 26 September, RAF Honington reported his disappearance to police. The base would ordinarily report a serviceman AWOL, but McKeague’s disappearance was completely out of character. One suggestion was that he might have been in one of the bins at the “Horseshoe” area, which was then taken to a landfill site. On 4 October it was revealed that hours after he was last seen his Microsoft Lumia 435 mobile phone was tracked moving 12 miles (19km) away to Barton Mills, where there is a landfill site. Police searched a refuse lorry after finding its route matched the movements of the device, but the weight of the lorry’s load was 15kg (33lb) – too light to have contained McKeague. As a result, the lorry was released and the landfill site not searched. The phone has still not been found.
Two weeks after McKeague’s disappearance, his girlfriend April Oliver, 21, discovered she was expecting his child, something the airman was not aware of. The pair had met via a dating website and had been together for about five months. Miss Oliver said she was on holiday in America when McKeague went missing, but returned to the UK as soon as she heard the news.
By the end of December, the hunt for the airman had taken more than 6,000 hours and cost over £26,000. Thousands of frames of CCTV footage had been trawled through. The Find Corrie Facebook page quickly gained more than 80,000 followers and there was a huge campaign on Twitter to locate him. On 6 January, a team of private investigators, paid for by online crowd funding, began inquiries on behalf of the family to complement the Suffolk Police investigation.
Later in January it emerged that in 2014 McKeague had joined the Fab Swingers website and had posted messages expressing a desire to meet both male and female couples aged between 18 and 60. His interests included adult parties, blindfolds, dogging, role-play, threesomes and voyeurism. His mother, Nicola Urquhart, later admitted that her son’s girlfriend April also had an account on the website, and that they were both seeing other people. Whether this had any bearing on the airman’s disappearance is anyone’s guess. At the time of writing, police have started to excavate a 26ft (8m)-deep landfill site at Milton just north of Cambridge, which they say could take until the end of April. Since the last known location of McKeague’s phone was 15 miles (24km) away in Barton Mills, the reason for this dig is unclear. www.suffolk.police.uk/news/ missing-persons/corrie-mckeague; BBC News, 28 Dec 2016; BBC News, 9 Jan; D.Telegraph, 19 Jan; Sunday Mirror, 22 Jan’ D.Mirror, 13 Feb 2017.