Mystery of the man who ‘stabbed himself to death’ and the tainted double life of the girl he loved
THE family squint into the Australian sunshine, a picture postcard of life Down Under. If Candice McGalloway’s expression seems a little strained, it is no doubt from the pressures of new motherhood. Behind the 31-year-old’s smile however, lies a mystery that began almost eight years ago and more than 10,000 miles away. Indeed, Candice McGalloway is not even her real name.
Colin Marr was found dead from a single stab wound on July 10, 2007, after an argument with his fiancée Candice Bonar. The knife pierced the 23-year-old’s heart. Mr Marr’s mother, Margaret, who was on her way to see him at the flat the couple shared in Lochgelly, Fife, and had spoken to him on the phone just 20 minutes earlier, arrived to find police and paramedics outside the house and his fiancée screaming hysterically in the street.
‘I just stood there,’ Margaret Graham told the Scottish Daily Mail this week, remembering the night her son died. ‘I couldn’t believe it. And then the paramedics came out and said, “we couldn’t save him”.’
Miss Bonar told police that after an argument in the flat she turned to leave him and Mr Marr plunged a knife into his own chest. He called out ‘Candice I’ve stabbed myself’, pulled out the knife and fell to the floor, swiftly bleeding to death.
A year later Miss Bonar left Scotland for Australia and changed her name to McGalloway.
She now has a new fiancé, Bradley Humberdross, who with his wide grin and shock of blond hair bears a startling resemblance to Mr Marr.
The couple have a 19-month- old daughter named Bonnie, and live together in Queensland. But Miss Bonar left behind many unanswered questions, and a heartbroken family still searching for answers.
Margaret Graham and her husband, Colin’s stepfather Stuart, have never believed that Mr Marr took his own life that day.
He had too much to live for, they say, and never once showed signs of being suicidal.
Police however, felt differently. Fife Constabulary accepted Miss Bonar’s word that he had killed himself, and said it was an open-and- shut case. There was little forensic work done on the flat, and few door-to-door inquiries made.
Mrs Graham, who spoke to her son on the phone 20 minutes before he died, was not questioned until long after the incident.
Now, after years of relentless campaigning and a fatal accident inquiry (FAI), there has been a breakthrough. Following a damning report by the Police Investigations and Review Commissioner (PIRC) last year, which upheld 14 complaints about Fife Constabulary’s handling of the case, commissioner John McNeill has written to the family.
He explained that a further eight complaints were removed from the report because there had been ‘potential for prejudicing future criminal proceedings’. Essentially they were so damning, they could affect any future trial.
These include the revelation that a now-retired police officer had given evidence at the FAI that was favourable to Miss Bonar and had failed to put forward witness statements about her alleged volatility.
Perhaps most intriguing is the accusation that the officer also failed to pursue the possibility that a third person was present when Mr Marr died.
The retired officer, Detective Inspector Graham Seath, may now face criminal charges.
The development provides the Grahams with a glimmer of hope that someone might one day be held accountable for the shortcomings surrounding their son’s death.
‘We have come to the conclusion that unless the police and the Crown are held to account for the failings they will never deal with it,’ claims Stuart Graham. ‘ They didn’t do the detail because they were so busy trying to frame Colin for his own death. I really would put it as strongly as that.’
According to his mother, Mr Marr was the archetypal cheeky chappie. A keen Dunfermline Athletic fan, he had been working as a mortgage consultant in Livingston, West Lothian, spending weekends with his friends and his fiancée Miss Bonar.
‘He was always smiling,’ Mrs Graham says. ‘ He was a really popular, funny, hard-working young man who had tons of friends. He lit up a room, to be honest.’
‘As you get older you realise how young he was,’ says her husband. ‘He was only 23. He was still a kid, still learning.’
Mr Marr and Miss Bonar were teenage sweethearts who met while working at the local McDonald’s. The pair got engaged and she moved into his Lochgelly flat.
But by July 2007 when Mrs Graham – who was living in America at the time – came home for a visit, cracks had started to appear.
‘Candice was quite controlling, especially if they were out and Colin bumped into old friends, even guys,’ she says.
‘She was very jealous. There was one situation that was really bad, just before they got engaged, where they split up for a few weeks and Colin had gone out with someone from work and Candice phoned her up and was quite vitriolic towards her.’
Certainly, the relationship was not perfect. Mr Marr had an affair with another woman, Roxanne Burns, and Miss Bonar found out about it shortly before he died.
Miss Bonar later told the FAI, which she flew back from Australia to voluntarily attend in 2011, that in the days leading up to his death she had moved out of the flat after learning of the relationship.
She said they had started fighting and that she hit him on the head with her handbag, s o mething s he had already admitted on the night of Mr Marr’s death.
Asked directly at the inquiry if she was responsible for the fatal wound, she said: ‘No.’
Mr Marr was not, say his family and friends, suicidal. He had no financial problems, and had an active social life. His funeral was so packed, some mourners couldn’t get in the door.
Mrs Graham says that he was aware the relationship was in trouble, and knew it might not work out.
In the days before he died he had told his mother he was already thinking about an alternative future. ‘ He said to me, “Och Mum, if this goes belly up I’ll maybe just get a trip out [to America] with you. I said, “Of course, that’s fine”.’
Suicide by stabbing yourself is extremely rare. Suicide by a single stab wound is even rarer, as those attempting it will often make a tentative test wound first.
Pathologist Professor Anthony Busuttil told the 2011 FAI ‘this wound is much more likely to have been inflicted by another person’.
His colleague, Professor Michael Green, said: ‘ The site of the wound and the fact it passed through bone means you cannot exclude homicide. I would not be happy to dismiss this
‘Busy trying to frame Colin for his own death’
‘Wound more likely inflicted by another person’
as a self-inflicted wound. I lean towards homicide.’
There is also the issue of the blood spatter.
Miss Bonar’s father James Bonar, a butcher, gave evidence at the FAI that he saw what appeared to be signs of blood having spurted onto the ceiling.
He stated that he had cleaned this up, and it was never subjected to forensic examination. The Grahams say that they have consulted forensic experts on the subject who had told them that if there had been blood on the ceiling, it was ‘impossible to come from Colin doing it himself ’ because of the direction the knife would have had to be removed in. The FAI, however, said any findings based on this evidence would be entirely speculative and ‘casts no useful light on the central issue in the case’.
There are other troubling question marks, however.
A neighbour later told police that she thought she had heard three voices in the flat around the time of Mr Marr’s death.
At the inquiry, Miss Bonar stated that her uncle, David Glencross, was on the scene before the police, but the FAI heard that all three calls she made to her uncle David’s house were made after the police arrived, a discrepancy that has never been clarified.
Mr Glencross repeatedly refused to make a police statement.
In a development that has caught the Grahams’ eye, another of the complaints removed from the PIRC report because there had been ‘potential for prejudicing future criminal proceedings’ involved a failure by Mr Seath to investigate the possibility of a third person being present. Approached at his home in Fife this week by the Mail Mr Seath said that he did not wish
to speak about the case. Miss Bonar stated that she was at the house at 7.30pm. But Mrs Graham says that when she spoke to her son at 7.53pm, just 20 minutes before his death he was fine, and did not mention that Miss Bonar was in the house.
‘He said, “Just come into the house”,’ she says. ‘ Why would he have done that?’
She cannot believe that a man who was about to take his own life would have told his mother to walk into a scene of such horror. ‘It’s taken us eight years and we’ve had all this from the beginning,’ says Mrs Graham.
‘ Nobody’s l i stened to us and nobody is accountable. And that, for me, it breaks my heart – that a human life is just not important enough. They’d rather protect the system.’
It has been a difficult road for the Grahams. The pair gave up their jobs in order to pursue the case fulltime, and have been hit by constant brick walls and rejections.
They hired a private detective at one point, and have sunk much of their lives and their finances into trying to get justice.
‘There are times when I just want to pretend that my life is normal,’ says Mrs Graham.
‘And then Stuart will start talking about knives and blood spatter and it just brings it all back home. It is a difficult life for us.’
Meanwhile, Miss Bonar’s life on the other side of the world goes on, as she prepares to marry her fiancé and embraces motherhood.
She works as an environmental health officer for the local council, and drives a Porsche Boxster with a personalised number plate reading CANDCE. There are trips to the swimming pool, and visits from family back in Scotland.
In one picture the young family sit astride a jetski, smiles wide, arms around each other.
Contacted this week at her home in Toowoomba, Queensland, she did not comment.
Her fiancée, Mr Humberdross, appears to live a simple life in the Aussie outback. His Facebook page is littered with statements about being ‘as sore as the roo we tried to kill’, and even displays a photograph of a dead wild pig which he boasts he caught ‘ on foot’.
Yet there is no doubting his love for his fiancée a nd daughter. Under one picture of the three of them he writes ‘ That’s my wee f amily so beautiful xxx’. The Grahams are aware of Miss Bonar’s new life and her new partner’s resemblance to their dead son. They have chosen not to look at those pictures.
‘I don’t do it,’ says Mrs Graham. ‘For the ease of living our life we need to not think about her life. You have to draw a line. There’s no point in us going down routes that are going to make us emotionally disturbed. We’re emotionally disturbed as it is with what’s happened. I can’t go down a road that’s going to make me embittered.’
But they will not give up on searching for justice. Mrs Graham says the fight will continue, and they remain hopeful that one day, someone will be held accountable for their son’s death.
‘All we’ve ever wanted to do,’ she says, ‘was get to the truth.’