Mystery of a missing dad solved after six years because of a Red Bull can
The body of a dad who went missing in 2017 was discovered and justice has been served – thanks to a can of Red Bull.
Tony Parsons, a retired naval officer, was partway through a 104-mile charity bike ride to raise money for a cancer research charity, having successfully been treated for prostate cancer, when he disappeared.
The 63-year-old was ‘in good spirits’ when he left the house on September 29, 2017, his wife of 43 years, Margaret, recalled – but he was never seen again.
He was last spotted by a lorry driver at about 11.30pm that night, after which he ‘vanished into thin air’, the MailOnline reports.
Extensive police searches were unsuccessful in finding either Tony or his bicycle, and the case remained a missing person inquiry.
His wife and children were devastated by the loss of their dad – but the investigation was kickstarted back into action after police received a phone call in November 2020.
The woman, who has since asked that her identity remains a secret, told police she’d started a relationship with a farm worker called Alexander McKellar.
As things progressed, she asked her boyfriend if there was anything about his past that might affect their future together – and she was not expecting his answer.
Alexander admitted that three years earlier he had fatally mown down a cyclist on a remote Highland roadside late at night while drunk at the wheel.
His twin brother, Robert, had been with him, he told her, and panic-stricken, the pair had decided not to seek help but instead to dispose of the body.
At his girlfriend’s request, Alexander then took her to the desolate peat bog where Tony’s body lay.
She came up with an ingenious way to help police find the correct spot: she dropped an empty can of Red Bull as a marker.
In January 2021, the area was excavated, and Tony’s body was recovered.
The discovery brought closure of a sort for Tony’s grieving widow and their two children, Michael, 48, and Victoria, 41, but the story has only now come to light as the 31-year-old McKellar twins appeared in court last week.
Alexander denied murder but pleaded guilty to the lesser charge of culpable homicide at the High Court in Glasgow.
Along with Robert, whose denial of murder was accepted by the court, he also admitted to attempting to ‘defeat the ends of justice’ by burying Mr Parsons and his belongings.
Both are due to be sentenced in three weeks, just a month before Tony’s family prepare to mark the sixth anniversary of his disappearance.
‘When he said goodbye and set off on his charity cycle from Fort William that Friday, none of us expected it to be the last time we would be able to see or speak to him,’ his son, Michael, said this week in a statement released by Police Scotland.
‘As you can imagine, not knowing what has happened to someone, and then the devastating news that we were provided, has taken its toll on all of us as a family.
‘Throughout the six years since he went missing, and then the subsequent criminal investigation, we had been left with many unanswered questions and it has been heartbreaking for each and every member of the family being unable to get these answers.’
Tony planned to cycle from Fort William back to his home in Tillicoultry in a two-day journey.
He took a break for a coffee at the Bridge of Orchy Hotel – and in a twist of fate the McKellar twins were drinking heavily in that same bar.
Tony decided to continue his cycle at about 11.30pm, and the twins left the bar at the same time.
Alexander was driving drunk, and says he was distracted by oncoming headlights when he struck something at the side of the road.
When the twins stopped and realised they’d hit Tony, they started to panic. Neither called for help or did anything to try and save him.
Tony was still alive at this point, although a pathologist who examined his body told the court he’d sustained ‘extensive injuries’ and would have been unlikely to survive.
Instead the McKellars jumped back into their pick-up truck to hide it nearby before returning in a different vehicle, taking Tony’s body and hiding him in the woods.
A few days later they returned and moved his body to another, more remote location. They buried it in a pit used by local farmers to dispose of animal carcasses.
They told neighbours their truck had been damaged because they hit a deer.
A year later, police received an anonymous letter advising them to look into ‘the twins’.
It revealed the brothers had been at the hotel at the same time as Mr Parsons – and to this day, they do not know who sent the letter.
Yet when officers spoke to the McKellars, they got nowhere: on raising the subject of the cyclist, they were asked to leave, and they had no evidence to pursue an inquiry further.
It has been a long road to justice, after what DI Fraser Spence of Police Scotland’s major investigation team called the brothers’ ‘brutal and uncaring actions’.
‘These men left the family of Mr Parsons distraught, not knowing what had happened to him for many years,’ he said.
Roger Jones, an old friend of Tony’s, had stronger words, believing Alexander should not have been allowed to plead guilty to culpable homicide, which, under Scottish law, carries a lesser punishment than a murder charge.
‘I’m disgusted by the whole thing,’ he said this week. ‘The fact is, these two guys just basically let him die and then tried to cover it up. I feel as though they got away with murder — both of them.’
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