Mystery swirls after RAF gunner Corrie McKeague, 23, vanishes off face of the earth near terror snatch site
Mother's despair as hero son's disappearance in the dead of night baffles cops and every phone call is agony
EVERY ring of her telephone is agony for mum Nicola Urquhart.
She is desperate for a call to tell her that her missing son, RAF gunner Corrie McKeague, has turned up safe and well.
It is three weeks since Corrie, 23, left his RAF base at Honington, Suffolk, and vanished on a night out with pals in Bury St Edmunds.
His disappearance is as baffling as it is worrying, with one RAF source saying it was “as if he has been abducted by aliens”.
But a defiant Nicola said: “We are not giving up. People do not just disappear into thin air.”
There have been a number of lines of inquiry.
Had a recent break-up led him to go awol or harm himself? Was he hit by a car? Did he fall into a river on his way back to base? Did he accept a lift from strangers and come to harm?
Or was he kidnapped by terrorists? After all, the town is just 35 miles from RAF Marham where two Middle Eastern men tried to abduct an airman in July.
You can never rule it out completely but in 15 years in the police I have never known terrorists who took someone and then kept it secret
Nicola
All Nicola knows is that someone out there has the answer.
Through her own job as a police liaison officer, Nicola, from Dunfermline, knows the value of staying focused and keeping her son’s name in the public spotlight.
The 47-year-old said: “Sometimes my job is an absolute blessing, other times it is horrific. I know things I don’t want to know. I know how things work and know the things that can happen.
“You can never rule it out completely but in 15 years in the police I have never known terrorists who took someone and then kept it secret.
“I don’t think Corrie is dead. Like any parent, there are theories that go through your mind but when I put my police head on there is nothing I want the police to look at that they’re not already looking at.”
On Thursday Nicola endured the torment of knowing a body had been found and the unbearable wait for a call to confirm it was NOT Corrie.
Police were out on the streets of Bury St Edmunds last night and into the early hours of this morning, quizzing revellers and Saturday market traders.
SAC Corrie was in good spirits as he finished his weekly duties and prepared for a night on the town on September 23.
He spoke on the phone to brother Darroch, 21, who said: “He had no problems whatsoever. You could not have picked a happier conversation between me and him.”
He had booked flights to spend Halloween in Dunfermline and was arranging for Darroch, a butcher, to travel south last weekend to meet his RAF friends.
Corrie joined the No2 Squadron three years ago. He split from girlfriend Chloe Fox last year but Nicola insisted: “There was genuinely no relationship issue, especially with Chloe who is a lovely girl.
“Corrie is a young boy who was very happily single and doing what 23-year-old boys do.”
On the Friday he went missing he was wearing white jeans, a pink Ralph Lauren shirt and suede Timberland boots. He left his beloved puppy Louell in his room then drove his blue BMW nine miles to meet his mates.
Corrie joined his friends in the Flex nightclub but left well before closing time, slightly unsteady through drink, and headed for something to eat.
He was seen on CCTV at 1.20am, eating a takeaway as he meandered past a pub, stopping briefly to pick up something from the road.
Two men in the footage were eliminated from the inquiry. Investigators know Corrie told at least one person that he planned to walk the nine miles back to RAF Honington and that he went nowhere near his car.
Other, unreleased footage shows Corrie sleeping in a doorway before getting up again at 3.23am. The trail ends there.
Nicola said: “The boys that were with him are not responsible for him. Corrie does the same thing every time he goes out. He is an absolute creature of habit and will leave on his own.
“He will get food and may have a sleep before he goes home. Nothing in his behaviour was even remotely unusual and the boys he was with would not have been able to stop him.”
Nicola said he did not regularly walk the long distance back to his base but had done so in the past.
She added: “What was absolutely out of character is that he wouldn’t contact one of us, his girlfriends or the boys from the base. He would get in touch with somebody.”
Scene . . . centre of Barton Mills, village near where Corrie's phone was last detected
His disappearance was reported when he did not turn up for work on the following Monday morning.
So out of character was it that the RAF immediately reported him to police as a missing person, rather than filing him as awol.
Police know from phone records that Corrie had his Nokia Lumia 435 handset on him at 3am as he sent a picture to his friend.
His phone remained in Bury St Edmunds until around 4am, according to signal records, and can be traced moving 14 miles away to Barton Mills, near the RAF base at Mildenhall, at a speed which suggests it must have been in a vehicle.
A private bin lorry heading that way at the time was traced but there was no sign of Corrie’s Nokia, or its frayed black case.
Officers admitted he could have jumped on the back of the lorry to hitch a lift and could have injured himself when jumping off to complete his journey on foot.
It is equally possible he could have willingly, or unwillingly, got in another vehicle which is why, so far, he has not been spotted on CCTV leaving the town on foot. His family believe it is possible someone stole or picked up his phone and threw it away after realising it was of little value.
We really need the public to come forward. Somebody must have seen him
Nicola
Either way, the device was disconnected from its network in the area at around 8am.
If Corrie did accept a lift, Barton Mills would not have been an obvious destination, while the most direct route to Honington on foot would have been on an A-road and country lane.
That leaves the possibility he could have been hit by a car or fell into one of the many waterways along the route. So far, a search operation involving police helicopters, dogs, RAF personnel and the Suffolk Lowland Search and Rescue team has failed to find any sign of him.
Cheryl Hickman, 41, landlady of the 17th Century Bull Inn at Barton Mills, organised thousands of leaflets to be printed for the search.
She said: “We have distributed 16,000 but may have to get more done. I have not met Corrie’s mum but my heart goes out to her.”
Concerned . . . Mum Nicola is refusing to give up on the search for her son
Martin McKeague, dad to Corrie and his brothers, has been in Bury St Edmunds while Nicola, who has remarried, said she would soon return to Scotland with Darroch and eldest son Makeyan, 25, before it becomes “harder to leave”.
She said: “We really need the public to come forward. Somebody must have seen him after 3.24am. Somebody might have given him a lift and is afraid to come forward thinking they have done something wrong, but they have not.
It sounds ridiculous but if anyone could show up after three or even six weeks and say, ‘You will not believe what happened to me!’ it would be Corrie
Nicola
“They have helped him. If something happened to him after that. . .
“It sounds ridiculous but if anyone could show up after three or even six weeks and say, ‘You will not believe what happened to me!’ it would be Corrie.
“If you can think it, Corrie will have done it.
“He’s been hit by a car, he’s fallen out of windows and there’s never been a scratch on him.
“He bounces back every single time.”
- Police are keen to speak to anyone who was in Bury St Edmunds on the night of September 23/24. Anyone with information that may assist is urged to call the Suffolk Police incident room on 01473 782019.
SEARCH ON FOR 250,000
THOUSANDS of young men like Corrie go missing every year. The Missing People charity says around 250,000 are reported missing in the UK every year, more than half of them under 18. Here, we look at some of the cases:
CHAD GIBSON, 32, last seen December 19, 2015.
Chad went missing after a pre-Christmas night out in St Austell, Cornwall. In August this year mum Sharon, 53, was told police had found his body but a month later, after planning his funeral, she was told that further DNA tests showed it was NOT him. She said: “I have been grieving for someone else’s son. That person also has a mother.”
KHALID MOHAMUD, 15, last seen September 23, 2016.
Khalid was reported missing from his South London home the same night Corrie disappeared. The troubled youngster was the subject of a search in March but he is now back on Missing People’s database.
MARTIN JOYCE, would now be 45, last seen 1999.
Greater Manchester Police this month started digging up a disused pub in a search for the missing dad of one.
Martin vanished after dropping his sister and brother off at a relative’s house. His family believed he might have gone to Ireland, where he had family links, or to Scotland to deal with the death of his dad and brother.
MATTHEW GREEN, 32, last seen 2010.
Matthew had fallen into a spiral of cannabis and drink after being wrongly accused of rape, then disappeared from his home in Sittingbourne, Kent, after telling his parents he was on his way to meet friends in London.
Jim Green, 64, and wife Pauline, 63, were contacted out of the blue by police in May this year to say Matthew had been found in a psychiatric hospital in Spain.
They were told authorities were concerned about his welfare and one of the names he gave was his real one, which came up on a missing persons database.
He initially refused to see his parents but they were later reunited in the hospital where he is being treated.