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There are some truly amazing women in the world. The fact that this thought most often crosses my mind when I am watching a true crime documentary and hearing about the female victims of men’s crimes and learning how much suffering they endured while raising children, holding down jobs, keeping friends and parents happy and safe from knowledge that would upset or endanger them is so bleak that I’m going to put it away lest rage overwhelm me for good.
Let us focus instead on another name to add to the list of extraordinary women, again brought to public attention by the terrible act of a man she knew. The three-part Netflix series Should I Marry a Murderer? tells the story of pathologist Caroline Muirhead who, at the age of 29, meets and falls in love with a Scottish farmer she meets on Tinder. His name is Sandy McKellar.
She was just out of a bad relationship and Sandy seems like a sanctuary, even if he does become “dark” after a lot to drink, and his twin brother Robert warns her at a party that his brother’s “not right in the head”. He’s open, affectionate, loves her ebullience, loves her. He proposes after a whirlwind romance and she accepts. Her parents and friends are muted in their enthusiasm, but, as Caroline recalls thinking at the time, “What’s the worst that could happen?” Which was probably the point at which the slumbering giant of the Netflix true-crime commissioning department started snuffling at the air and rising towards consciousness.
Once the engagement was announced, Sandy confessed to a hit-and-run accident in his truck three years before, killing a cyclist called Tony Parsons. He and his passenger, Robert, then buried the body in a peat bog on the estate Sandy worked for and told no one. Caroline goes to the police. They ask her to try to find out where exactly the body is, otherwise they will never find it on the vast estate. She does, and marks it with a Red Bull can. She maintains her facade to give the police time to dig up and identify the body. The police promise her that her identity as a key witness will be kept secret. The body is identified, the twins are arrested and Caroline is told to cut contact with them.
But if she does that, they will almost certainly work out it was she who turned them in. So she continues the relationship, in a state of terror that leads her to turn to drink and drugs and eventually to a near breakdown. But she keeps funnelling new information to the police, including the revelation that Parsons had not in fact been killed outright. The twins left him hidden by the side of the road to get tools and a change of clothes and by the time they came back, he was dead. Then they moved and buried him.
Again, she feels she cannot safely leave. She stays with Sandy, gathering more evidence for the police – recording pertinent conversations and putting herself in greater danger at every turn.
Are the police grateful? Do they protect her with every possible means at their disposal, including those to which she is legally entitled? Do they provide her or her parents with extra security when asked? No. What about later on when she begs for help, knowing she is becoming dependent on drink and drugs, and losing her grip on reality? No. And when they burst in to arrest the men for the second time, does a detective – unaware that Caroline was still living with Sandy – make sure not to shout “What the fuck, Caroline? You’re our witness!” No.
More shocking than the police neglect and stupidity is the lack of comprehension – at times seeming to border on outright contempt – that David Green, head of homicide and major crime, Scotland 2019-23 appears to exhibit towards the woman who handed them the case on a platter. “I would have run a mile,” he sniffs, regarding her return to Sandy in the absence of any other protection. And he stands by the decision not to provide that protection. The relationship had not been a lengthy one, he explains – and she was “a highly intelligent, fully qualified doctor”. I was not aware that the Hippocratic oath protects you from the wrath of a murderous fiance, but I bow to Mr Green’s evidently superior knowledge. There is also the magisterially dismissive defence counsel Brian McConnachie KC who seems to think somewhat less of her for breaking under the pressure. “The whole circumstances in which she did not deal with things in a manner in which people would expect her to, take away, I think, from any sympathetic view I might feel about her.”
We should rename the true crime genre: “The catalogue of ways misogynists and the patriarchy have set up this world to hurt, humiliate and destroy us” – but I get that it’s probably not going to catch on. Catchier alternative suggestions on a postcard to the usual address, please. In the meantime – Caroline, you are amazing.
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Should I Marry a Murderer? is on Netflix now.
