Today marks one year since Bill MacDowell was convicted of the murders of Renee and Andrew MacRae, 46 years after they were last seen.
Justice took a long time to arrive for the long-suffering family.
More than 16,000 days, in fact.
But as both the family and the police have repeatedly underlined, the work is not done.
They will only truly feel the case is closed once they discover Renee and Andrew’s remains.
And to this day, that work is continuing.
Conviction came just months before death
MacDowell died in February.
He had served barely four months of a life sentence which had a minimum term of 30 years.
His demise was no surprise, given the warnings issued by his legal team.
MacDowell had been described as a “walking dead man” in court.
His wife Rosemary detailed his liver and kidney problems and said he already had a DNR (do not resuscitate) order set up.
In the context of this case, there are two ways of looking at his death.
On one hand, it seems grossly unfair that he was able to live the overwhelming majority of his life as a free man before he had to face trial for his horrific crimes.
On the other, it’s surely a good thing that the police and Crown were able to nail down their case before he died.
Re-investigation proves a major success for Police Scotland
Detective Chief Inspector Brian Geddes was appointed to a lead a major reinvestigation into the case in 2018.
It did not seem to be an unusual move at the time.
Since Police Scotland’s formation in 2013, the new national force was very keen to flex the muscles of its major investigations team.
Its message to the public was that this was the best way to pool its resources to allow dedicated teams to focus on the country’s biggest cases.
Undoubtedly, they will point to the breakthrough in this case as an example of that.
And it gives hope that other historic unsolved cases may be cracked one day.
How the Crown built the case against MacDowell
When the news broke of MacDowell’s arrest in September 2019, most people’s minds cast back to Leanach Quarry.
The year before, DCI Geddes outlined his team’s plans to drain the quarry in the hope of finding the bodies.
The Covid pandemic and MacDowell’s declining health nearly caused the police’s chances of securing a conviction to slip through their fingers.
Even the death of the Queen pushed things back a day. The court was closed again for her funeral shortly after.
Looking back at the timeline of MacDowell’s death now, it’s clear that every day mattered.
When the case finally began at the High Court in Inverness on September 13, 2022 everyone was anxious to hear what the big breakthrough was.
But it never arrived.
There wasn’t a new smoking gun. A fresh piece of standout evidence that made this an open and shut case.
However, what the Crown did have was a long, long sequence of circumstantial evidence ready to be neatly tied together by prosecutor Alex Prentice KC.
A ‘blood-curdling scream’
The opening day of the trial concluded with a statement from the late Eva MacQueen.
She had heard a “blood-curdling scream” close to the Dalmagarry lay-by, where Renee’s car was found ablaze on the night she disappeared.
Dozens of witnesses came and went in the days that followed.
Some struggled to remember what they had said and mainly referred to the statements they gave to police decades earlier.
Others recounted their memories of the time in painstaking detail, offering the impression that it had never been far from their mind.
Slowly but surely, the Crown was building a case that was starting to shift the perception that MacDowell did not commit these murders from unlikely to impossible.
The emotive testimony of Renee’s sister, Morag Govans, hammered home the message that at its heart, this case was about a family who had been left bereft.
A mother who many people loved and cared about and a young child who never had the chance to grow up.
The confrontational appearance of Rosemary MacDowell left the impression that there was indeed something to hide and 15 days after it started, the jury retired to consider its verdict.
Investigators were quietly confident they had their man. But the unpredictability of jury trials meant no one could comfortably relax.
They returned the next day to deliver the verdict.
On September 29, 2022, Bill MacDowell was found guilty of both murders.
Will the remains of Renee and Andrew MacRae ever be found?
The courtroom was dramatic in the aftermath.
There were gasps, cries of relief and many tears were shed.
After 46 years, justice had finally been done.
Rumours and theories of what really happened to Renee and Andrew had filled the air above plenty of Inverness barstools over the years.
The case is written through the Highland capital like a stick of rock.
So many people held on to their memories of events, that while considered individually, may have seemed insignificant.
But when put together helped finally piece together a resolution to one of Scotland’s longest-running mysteries.
Police are continuing to search for the remains of Renee and Andrew.
After everything they’ve been through to get here, who would bet against them unravelling the whole thing?
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