Criminal was offered £500 to kill mum and son and douse them with acid, court told
‘Could be in my favour moneywise’
He asked me if I would kill someone. I said I wouldn’t stoop that low, not for a mill [million]. He wanted me to douse them in acid. He said it was the wife and bairn – Alleged contents of letter read to court yesterday
A CONVICTED criminal was offered more than £500 to kill Renee and Andrew MacRae by the man now on trial for their murders, a court heard yesterday.
Dennis Tyronney wrote to police 29 years later saying he had been asked to kill the housewife and her three-year-old son and ‘douse them in acid’ but had ‘refused point-blank’.
He identified the man he spoke to in the summer of 1976 as William MacDowell and said he had told him he ‘would not stoop that low’.
MacDowell, 80, is charged with murdering Mrs MacRae and Andrew in November 1976 and with attempting to defeat the ends of justice by disposing of their bodies and other belongings.
Detective Chief Inspector Brian Geddes told the High Court in Inverness yesterday that Mr Tyronney had given a statement saying television coverage of the case had given him the ‘creeps’.
He had added: ‘I might be a lot of things but I won’t be a killer.’
In a letter to Northern Constabulary in 2005, he described being approached by a man who he assumed worked at building firm Hugh MacRae and Company, in Inverness, which was co-owned by Mrs MacRae’s estranged husband Gordon and where MacDowell was company secretary.
Mr Tyronney, who has since died, told police the man knew he had been in jail, and wrote: ‘He wanted to see me alone that night to talk and it could be in my favour moneywise.’
He added: ‘He asked if I would kill someone else. I said I would not stoop that low – not for a mill [million]. He wanted me to douse them in acid. I refused point-blank. He said it was the wife and bairn.’
Mr Tyronney thought initially that the man he had spoken to was Gordon MacRae, but after seeing him a few weeks later, he concluded ‘it was not the man’.
He realised MacDowell was the man he had spoken to when he saw newspaper photographs of him, the court heard.
In a later statement to police, Mr Tyronney said: ‘He said I would get £500 but that was only part of the payment. But £500 would be upfront. He told me not to say anything or my life would be in danger.’
Mr Tyronney said the man, who he identified as MacDowell, would arrange the materials, though there was a discrepancy between the letter and the statement about the timing of the encounter.
Murray Macara, KC, representing MacDowell, asked Mr Geddes if his client was the ‘sole focus’ of the latest police investigation into the disappearance of Mrs MacRae and her son, and was told that a number of avenues were investigated.
Mr Geddes said the investigation was to find the bodies and identify the killer. Despite extensive inquiries, the search had come to nothing.
The jury heard how journalists went to question MacDowell a week after the mother and son disappeared, having seen a police briefing paper identifying him as Mrs MacRae’s lover.
Retired Glasgow Herald reporter Stuart Lindsay, 78, told the court that MacDowell had said he ‘didn’t think they were dead’ because their secret code of letting the phone ring twice then hanging up ‘had happened twice since her disappearance’.
MacDowell, of Penrith, Cumbria, has denied all the charges and lodged special defences of alibi and incrimination.
The trial, before Lord Armstrong, continues.
‘Didn’t think they were dead’