WHO KILLED COLIN MARR?
He died from a single stab wound. His fiancée says he took his own life. His family claim he was murdered. Could this police file finally point to the truth?
IT was 8.20pm when PC Michelle Murray arrived at 14 Johnston Crescent, a quiet residential street in the Fife town of Lochgelly. Inside, she found a scene of bloody chaos. On the kitchen floor, 23-year-old Colin Marr lay dying, a single knife wound to his chest. His fiancée Candice Bonar stood screaming in the front doorway.
The notes PC Murray jotted down that July night in 2007 are neat and succinct.
‘On arrival at locus [the scene] female occupant said this happened ten minutes ago, he’s been cheating on me and stuck a knife into him the b****r/b*****d.’
This remarkable statement flies in the face of the accepted wisdom over the death of Mr Marr. For the past eight years, Fife Constabulary and Miss Bonar, now 31, have insisted that Mr Marr stabbed himself, distraught that she was leaving him over an alleged infidelity.
Yet this statement, the very first taken by a police officer and only minutes after the incident, at no point states that Mr Marr stabbed himself.
It also differs from what the officer told the Fatal Accident Inquiry (FAI) into Mr Marr’s death in 2011. There, she told Sheriff Principal Alastair Dunlop, QC: ‘No, she had said to me, “He stuck a knife in him”.’
The notes, seen by the Scottish Daily Mail, were submitted in evidence at the FAI. But due to the parameters of the inquiry, Mr Marr’s family’s lawyer was unable to question the discrepancy.
For his mother Margaret Graham and stepfather Stuart Graham, it is another piece of the puzzle they have been trying to solve since that horrifying night. The couple have never accepted that Colin took his own life. They believe he was murdered. ‘We find this statement really damning,’ Mr Graham t old t he Scottish Daily Mail this week. ‘Surely action must be taken.’
So you might think. Yet despite the FAI, a damning report by the Police Investigations and Review Commissioner, which upheld 12 complaints over Fife Constabulary’s handling of the case, and eight years of constant campaigning by hi s family, Mr Marr’s death remains a mystery.
At the conclusion of the FAI, Sheriff Dunlop was unable to determine who had delivered the fatal blow – an outcome he described as ‘ most unsatisfactory’.
At the time, he said it was unlikely the matter r could be reinvestigated,, adding: ‘I doubt whetherr there are any useful lines s of investigation that couldd be pursued.’
Could that now change? ? Evidence is mounting that not only could Mr Marr not have stabbed himself, but that a third person may have been present that night.
There is also increasing concern over how policee behaved during the investigation into the death.
In April this year, itt emerged that a nowretired police officer hadd given evidence at the FAI that was favourable to o Miss Bonar and had failed d to put forward witnesss statements about herr alleged volatility.
Crucially, there was also o an accusation he failed to pursue the possibility that a third person was present when Mr Marr died.
The retired officer, Detective Chief Inspector Graham Seath, may now face criminal charges.
The Crown Office recently told the Grahams its police investigations unit is also considering a probe into Mr Seath’s decision not to carry out door-to-door inquiries in 2009. The police, via Mr Seath, originally blamed the fiscal for this decision. But the Crown says its records do not support this assertion by Mr Seath.
The worry is that police have lied to the Crown.
If there is one person who knows the full truth, it is Miss Bonar. But a year after Mr Marr’s death she left Scotland for a new life in Australia. She has changed her name to Candice McGalloway and lives in Queensland with her fiancé, Bradley Humberdross. They have a daughter and plan to marry.
At 7.53pm on the night of July 10, 2007 Mr Marr was still alive. We know this because he called his mother, who was en route to his flat for dinner. The call lasted less than a minute.
In all Miss Bonar’s later statements to police about what happened that evening, she said Mr Marr stabbed himself. Yet according to PC Murray’s notes, it is not what she told the first officer on the scene.
At 8.14pm a call was received by the Scottish Ambulance Service from a neighbour, whom Miss Bonar had asked to call 999.
This means the stabbing must have taken place within a relatively short period of time – 21 minutes.
It also means, according to the accepted wisdom of the case, that a happy young man looking forward to seeing his mother suddenly decided, on a whim, to stab himself to death.
The couple’s relationship had been unravelling for some time. Teenage sweethearts who had met while working in the local McDonald’s, despite their engagement there had been rows and even a temporary split. The Grahams describe Miss Bonar as controlling and say she could be ‘vitriolic’.
Mrs Graham said her son was aware the relationship was in trouble and that in the days before he died he had told her he was thinking about moving to the US, where she and his stepfather were living at the time.
Mr Graham said: ‘We’d bought a bed settee so we could stay with them when we were home, but we couldn’t stay because you can’t sit and watch arguments like that. It was already an argumentative relationship.’
Mrs Graham added: ‘I was worried
their relationship wasn’t as sound as it should be.’
The suggestion that a third person may have been present at Mr Marr’s flat on the night in question is an intriguing one. One neighbour told police that, at around the time of his death, they heard three voices in the flat.
PC Murray, to whom Miss Bonar made her initial statement, told the FAI that at the time she first spoke to her she was with someone else, possibly a man. She said: ‘I believe Candice Bonar may have been outside the property with another person, who may have been male. I can’t remember who that other person was.’
A work friend of Miss Bonar’s, Lorraine Ferguson, told the inquiry that she saw her afterwards, saying: ‘Candice said she gave Colin mouth-to-mouth, then ran outside. She made mention that one of her uncles was there.’
At 8.23pm, Miss Bonar made a call to the home of her uncle, David Glencross, in Ballingry. It is almost four-and-a-half miles from Johnston Crescent. It is unclear why she placed the call. It is also unclear when Mr Glencross arrived at the scene.
At the FAI, Mr Glencross said he ‘took about ten minutes max to get to Colin’s house’. This would have placed him arriving at 14 Johnston Crescent at 8.33pm, 13 minutes after the arrival of PC Murray.
Yet in a police interview in July 2009, Miss Bonar said Mr Glencross was there ‘before youse’, referring to the police officer who f i rst attended at 8.20pm.
When this was put to him at the inquiry, Mr Glencross was initially unable to explain it. But after it was suggested to him that Miss Bonar had probably meant he was the first member of the family to arrive, he agreed.
Mr Glencross repeatedly refused to make a police statement. He could not be contacted by the Scottish Daily Mail this week and is believed to be working abroad.
By the time Mr Marr’s mother arrived at the flat, expecting to have dinner with her son before returning to the US, it was all over. Police were outside the house. Miss Marr was there too, still screaming.
‘I just stood there,’ Mrs Graham said. ‘I couldn’t believe it. And then the paramedics came out and said, “We couldn’t save him”.’
KILLING yourself with a stab wound is extremely rare. Suicide by a single stab wound is even rarer, as those attempting it almost always make a tentative test wound first.
Pathologist Professor Anthony Busuttil told the inquiry: ‘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 as a self-inflicted wound. I lean towards homicide.’
The position of the ‘blood spatter’ from the wound also raises questions.
Miss Bonar’s father James, a butcher, gave evidence at the FAI that he saw what appeared to be signs of blood having spurted onto the ceiling. He said he had cleaned this up and it was never subjected to forensic examination.
The Grahams have consulted forensic experts on the subject, who said that if there had been blood on the ceiling, it was ‘ impossible to come from Colin doing it himself ’ because of the direction in which the knife would have had to be removed.
But the inquiry said any finding based on this evidence would be entirely speculative and that it ‘casts no useful light on the central issue in the case’.
Miss Bonar appeared voluntarily at the FAI. Asked directly if she had been responsible f or the f atal wound, she said: ‘No.’
I contacted Miss Bonar in April this year, when the revelations about Mr Seath emerged. I wanted to know if she felt a criminal prosecution would be the right course of action, so many years later, and if she had anything to say about the night in question.
She told me: ‘I wish I could put my memories, thoughts and emotions of that awful, life- devastating evening onto a huge screen for everyone to see.’
But after the Scottish Daily Mail published an article listing some of Fife Constabulary’s failings and examining her account of that night, Miss Bonar responded furiously.
She was angry, not about the remaining unanswered questions over Mr Marr’s death, but that her Australian fiancé’s name and photograph had been published.
In June, she posted a picture on her Facebook page with the saying: ‘Sometimes, the prettiest smiles hide the deepest secrets.’
LAST month marked the eighth anniversary of Mr Marr’s death. For the Grahams, it was a particularly hard one to bear, as it came on the eve of Mr Graham’s son Callum’s wedding.
While the rest of their children continue to grow, follow careers, marry and have children, Mr Marr will forever remain 23 years old, frozen in time as the cheeky young chappie his mother says ‘always lit up the room’.
The Grahams, who moved back to Fife from the US shortly after Colin died, have given up their jobs to devote themselves full-time to the fight for justice. It has been a long and lonely road.
‘Eight years it’s taken us to get to this point,’ said Mrs Graham.
‘But we’ve had this from the beginning; nobody has listened to us and nobody is accountable. And that, for me, it breaks my heart. That a human life is j ust not important.’