Caroline Muirhead tells her extraodinary story in a new three part Netflix series
Caroline Muirhead has been to hell and back after her fiance told her his worst secret he’d been hiding for years(Image: Courtesy of Netflix)
It is the worst nightmare for anyone who has fallen head over heels during a romance. “Imagine you fall in love with someone who made you feel accepted, feel seen, who made you feel whole and loved and just special, and you are just so happy. And then they say to you, I’ve done a horrible, horrible thing.” Caroline Muirhead is looking back on a time in her life she can never forget and which almost left her broken. She met Alexander “Sandy” McKellar and they were soon spending every spare moment together in the Auch Estate in the southern Highlands of Scotland.
Their whirlwind romance in 2020, filled with partying and country pursuits, led to an engagement within just weeks and a future that felt certain. But Sandy then told Caroline a secret she didn’t want to hear.
“It was something so vile, it flipped my entire world upside down,” she says, looking visibly pained to be thinking back to the moment on a new Netflix series. After taking her phone off her and saying he loved and trusted her, Sandy admitting whilst driving over the limit close to the Scottish estate where he lived he had “hit a cyclist” and the man had “flown over the car”.
When Caroline asked her fiancé if the man managed to survive, Sandy replied: “He was hit at high speed. There’s no way he was alive. Chillingly admitting he had buried him, Sandy added: “He’s right beneath your feet when you shoot your clay pigeons.”
The man Sandy had killed was cancer survivor Tony Parsons, 63, from Clackmannanshire in Scotland, who had vanished into thin air in 2017 after setting out on a 100-mile charity bike ride across the country in September 2017.
Caroline was then forced into an unthinkable position. Stay loyal to the man she loves – or risk everything by telling the truth? “I knew I had to hand in the man I loved,” she says.
The story then gets stranger and more complicated as Caroline didn’t immediately tell police and allowed Sandy to meet her parents. Soon after this, she did tell the police everything, and felt “like a rat” as she continued to speak to Sandy and inform the cops who then arrested him and his twin brother Robert, who had been in the car too.
“I thought that would be the end of it,” Caroline says. But it was just the beginning as the story continues to get weirder and darker. The brothers were released without charge, and amazingly did not suspect Caroline of being the informer, presuming someone on the Estate with suspicions had grassed them up.
But rather than stay away, and without police protection 24/7, pathologist Caroline decided to continue to see Sandy and managed to mark the Parsons’ grave in the Scottish highlands. As their relationship became more twisted and the pair got heavily into drink and drugs in the covid lockdown, she also recorded a drunken confession from her boyfriend on another occasion when he lived in her Glasgow flat.
She states she did not feel she got enough support or advice from the police at this stage, but her actions do look bizarre at times. Incredibly, even after the body of Mr Parsons was found in January 2021, and her boyfriend knew she was to blame for his arrest, Caroline and Sandy still continued to see each other.
By this time, Sandy has also admitted Mr Parsons didn’t die at the scene, and they had waited for him to die, changing cars and their clothes before burying him a day later, after finishing work.
Justifying why she continued to see Sandy, she says: “I was so broken and feeling as if no one would ever want to be with me. Sandy would send little photos or little videos saying ‘oh my gosh, I miss you so much’.
“I had handed him in and ruined his life. He should hate me. It made me feel loved, made me feel wanted, and that feeling of being treated well when you’ve not been, you cling on to it so strongly. I still had that toxic draw when he would message me.
“As mad as it may sound, people can’t just turn your affection off for someone even though they’ve done a terrible thing.” Around this time she recorded another conversation in which they discussed Tony Parsons, and Sandy told Caroline: “F*** stupid c*** shouldn’t have f***ing been there.”
Finally In December 2021, the twins were rearrested. They attempted to plead guilty to causing death by dangerous driving but were instead charged with murder. However Caroline was due to give evidence against her ex-fiance and broke down and failed to appear at the opening day of the trial. She instead went to the Scottish Highlands convinced she could find more evidence as she lost touch with reality and struggled to cope.
The next day when proceedings resumed, the Crown accepted a reduced plea of culpable homicide. Alexander “Sandy” McKellar was sentenced to 12 years in prison, brother Robert was jailed for five years and three months.
Sandy admitted culpable homicide, while both brothers pled guilty to defeating the ends of justice. Judge Lord Armstrong said the brothers had caused Mr Parsons’ family “devastating loss and emotional ongoing harm”. He added: “I suspect no sentence will ever be regarded as sufficient.”
Caroline has moved on now and says of Sandy: “He did take an innocent man’s life. So for me he is a coward and a killer.” She is living by the coast, is receiving psychiatric support and trying to move forward with a new partner.
Caroline, is likely to see some criticism for her behaviour and brave openness in the documentary, is pushing for greater protection for witnesses. She says: “When I came forward in December 2020, I trusted that the system would stand by me and keep me safe when I was at my most vulnerable but that wasn’t my experience. I hope by speaking out and sharing what happened to me, we can start an honest conversation about greater protection for victims and witnesses and why a far deeper understanding of mental health within the police and court system is so desperately needed.
“All too often the impact of trauma and abuse is overlooked or dismissed entirely and this means people like me are being left high and dry to pick up the pieces alone. This has to change. It is vital that services take a trauma-informed approach to witnesses, ensuring staff are both trained to recognise trauma responses and are able to provide appropriate support.
“Making the documentary with Netflix meant revisiting the darkest of times and none of that was easy. But it has also been a cathartic experience and for the first time in several years, I now have hope for the future and the freedom to begin the next chapter of my life.”
* Should I Marry A Murderer? Launches on Netflix on April 29.
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