Was the hiker found dead in his tent murdered?
Two sleeping bags. A shallow grave in a remote wood. And a former police officer’s fears over a ten year mystery
THE fear that haunted Bill Randall most was that his son Nicholas had given up on life, that he had grown weak and now lay dead or dying in a remote wood.
The Edinburgh father said as much in a TV appeal in 2006, screened to mark the first anniversary of the day his son had walked out of his family home and disappeared into the Scottish wilds with a sleeping bag.
‘I would love to see him again to hug and kiss him,’ said the tormented father. He never did.
Instead he and his wife Esme suffered two more years of agony before a discovery by forestry workers in Argyll brought the cruellest confirmation of his fears.
They found a human skeleton inside a tent pitched in Auch Forest near Bridge of Orchy – and, days afterwards, police revealed they were the remains of Nicholas Randall. There were ‘no suspicious circumstances’.
The three-year mystery of the depressed hiker who had wandered off into the hills was apparently over – its ending as bleak as it was perhaps inevitable. But this week, almost a decade after the grim find, a fresh mystery has formed around the case. A former police officer has raised serious doubts over his colleagues’ investigation, suggesting it was perfunctory in the extreme and that they were far too quick to rule out foul play.
The evidence found in and around the tent that day in 2008 was highly suspicious, says former PC Kenny McKechnie. Indeed, it could point to murder.
Why, he asks, did Strathclyde Police not spend more time examining the items found in the tent along with Mr Randall’s remains? There were, says Mr McKechnie, two sleeping bags, a holdall and two rucksacks filled with clothes which appeared to belong to two different people.
Who had been in the tent with Mr Randall? And why, if he had been alone, was there a used condom found inside his sleeping bag? Might it carry traces of DNA which could help identify a second person?
MR McKechnie said: ‘I suspect that it was fairly easy to come to a conclusion and then not bother doing any inquiry. I just know it should have been investigated because, at least back in 2008, there was the possibility to find something out.’
That possibility disappeared, he said, when police ‘incinerated’ the evidence in the belief it was no longer required. In doing so, had they just destroyed their only chance of discovering what really happened to Nicholas Randall?
It was on Monday, April 25, 2005 that Mr Randall left his parents’ home in Edinburgh’s Hillview shortly after having breakfast. His mother thought it was a good sign that her son was going out. He had been signed off his job as a town planner in Aberdeen for weeks due to stress and had suffered bouts of depression for years before he was eventually diagnosed with bipolar disorder.
But at a wedding that weekend he had seemed brighter, engaging with other guests more readily than his parents had expected – and now he was off out, mostly likely into Edinburgh city centre, his mother thought.
Her son did head for the city centre. He bought a sleeping bag for £90 in the Tiso outdoors shop in Rose Street. But that was the last confirmed sighting of the troubled young man who in happier times had played flute in a ceilidh band.
He also withdrew £500 from a cash machine in Edinburgh’s West End. It was the last time his bank account was ever used. For two-and-a-half months there was no trace of him or the silver Audi A2 he had been driving.
Then, in early July, the car was found in the Glen Nevis waterfall car park in Lochaber, leading police to the conclusion he was living in the hills and wild camping at night. He was an experienced hillwalker who with his childhood friend Garry Walker had bagged dozens of Munros, and they spoke of climbing all 284.
But by the time Mr Walker bagged his final one, his friend had been missing for two years. At the time Mr Walker, an internationally renowned orchestral conductor, said: ‘Nick hated being on his own but, because of his depression, he also felt he was a burden to everyone – especially his parents – so he probably thought it would be easier for everyone if he disappeared. As if we’d just carry on.’
In the first six months there were reasons for cautious optimism. Walkers in Glen Tilt in Perthshire had spoken to a hiker answering Mr Randall’s description. There was another possible sighting at nearby Blair Castle caravan park where a walker had asked if he could pitch a tent but left after being told it would cost £5.
The owner said he looked just like the pictures of missing Mr Randall in the papers. Then the sightings petered out and his parents had to confront the likelihood that their son was dead.
‘He just couldn’t take any more worry and responsibility, I think,’ said his mother. ‘Everything was a problem to him. From being somebody who was always on the go, always rushing off to play in the band, he just gradually lost interest in everything. He didn’t even return phone calls.’
Mr Randall was clearly suffering from mental health issues at the time of his disappearance. But is it possible that investigators were too quick to conclude these led to his death, whether through suicide or misadventure? Did they ignore clear evidence suggesting criminality?
According to Mr McKechnie, who was working as a family liaison officer in 2008, no explanation for the apparent presence of two people’s belongings in the tent was ever sought. He said: ‘I don’t have an explanation for it because, as far as I’m aware, it was never investigated. I don’t understand that. There was nothing I saw in any of the paperwork to suggest anyone ever looked into that.’
Mr McKechnie, who now works in the oil industry in Aberdeen, says a colleague asked him to help retrieve something for the Randall family from their son’s belongings which had been taken to a police production store.
IT was just as a favour to someone – another officer who was involved in it,’ Mr McKechnie explained. ‘And we went and looked through the property and, at the time, I just thought: “This is wrong. We’re looking through rucksacks and it doesn’t square with what we’ve been told this is”.’
The condom in Mr Randall’s sleeping bag also posed questions. Mr McKechnie said: ‘We raised it at the time – there was an email sent at the time – and we just thought “We’re contaminating a crime scene,” so we stopped.’
Mr McKechnie pursued the matter no further in 2008, conscious that interfering with other officers’ cases could lead to animosity between colleagues. He said it was not until several years later when
he was training police recruits at Tulliallan in Fife that he returned to the case – and was astonished to learn none of the loose ends had been addressed. Under ‘cause of death’ there was just one word: ‘Unascertained.’
He said: ‘I was trying to start using the case as a training aid. I went and got a lot of things relating to it. I was looking for good photographs where you could show how to preserve a crime scene and, it sounds strange, but I actually had students looking at the photographs and saying, “Well, there’s clearly two people, so what happened? It doesn’t tie with what you’re telling us”.’
There was another troubling dimension to the case – apparently never investigated. A year before Mr Randall’s body was found, an off-duty officer had stumbled on a pit which resembled an empty shallow grave.
Mr McKechnie said: ‘He didn’t report it for days as I think he was a bit embarrassed. When Nicholas was found, a lot of cops thought it was connected.’
Was it possible a killer had dug the trench for Mr Randall but then decided not to bury him?
‘The road between the spots was quiet, so it would have been easy to move a body,’ said the former PC. Then in 2014, a year after Strathclyde Police was merged into the nationwide Police Scotland, Mr McKechnie left the force on bad terms. He said: ‘I left for a lot of reasons – this was just one of them. I didn’t believe in Police Scotland any more, certainly not the way I believed in the police when I joined in 1993. I handed back my long service medal and they wouldn’t even talk to me.’
Later, under the pen-name Robert Moon, he wrote a book, Playing the Grey Man, the ‘fictional’ account of a Scottish police officer who had become disillusioned and broken by his job.
On its opening page, he wrote: ‘My thanks to every downtrodden, sh*t upon, bullied, harassed and overworked cop: thanks for keeping me going. I genuinely don’t know how you keep doing the job I couldn’t do any longer.’
There is, then, clearly simmering resentment on Mr McKechnie’s part for his former employers. But going public with his concerns over the investigation into Mr Randall’s death was not simply an act of revenge, he says.
‘I feel in particular the family deserve to be told the truth and they weren’t at the time. I just always felt the family should have been told there was two people’s property there.’
WHATEVER Mr McKechnie’s motive, his revelations raise disturbing questions. Were any efforts made to trace the ‘second person’ in the tent? The Mail put that to Police Scotland but was given no answer.
We also asked if the condom was DNA tested, what became of the items retrieved from the tent, what Mr Randall’s next of kin were told about the items found in the tent and was the possible shallow grave angle investigated. These questions were not answered either.
In a statement, Detective Superintendent Calum Young said: ‘A thorough investigation was carried out into the death of Nicholas Randall by a team led by a detective inspector and included forensic specialists and a postmortem examination.
‘A report was sent to the procurator fiscal in 2008. There was no information at the time to suggest the death was suspicious. Should anyone have any information about the death, I would ask them to call the police at Dumbarton on 101 and it will be followed up.’
At home in Edinburgh this week, Mr Randall’s parents declined to discuss the case. They have not done so in the years since the discovery in Argyll killed off any lingering hope they might see their only child again.
Likewise Mr Randall’s friend Garry Walker prefers not to comment on the new developments.
Meanwhile, public confidence in the integrity of the police investigation is left at an awkward impasse.
The skeletal remains of a beloved son were discovered 47 miles away from the spot where his car was found parked many months earlier. What had happened to him between one location and the other? Had he met someone? If so, were they somehow connected with his death?
In the absence of any reopening of the inquiry, there are just two versions of Mr Randall’s demise to believe.
That it was grim, tragic and nonsuspicious – or that, for reasons best known to the police, it was never properly investigated at all.