Corrie McKeague (16 September 1993 – disappeared 24 September 2016) went missing in the early hours of 24 September 2016 in the Bury St Edmunds area of Suffolk, England. Before disappearing, he served as a Royal Air Force Regiment gunner. Despite no remains being found, McKeague was legally declared dead in 2022 after an inquest concluded that he was crushed to death after getting into a commercial waste bin that was then tipped into a bin lorry.
McKeague was last seen, on town centre CCTV footage, entering a cul-de-sac which contained a number of wheelie bins. His mobile phone was tracked by masts along a route between Bury St Edmunds and a landfill site near Barton Mills. Suffolk Constabulary were initially reluctant to search the site for McKeague's remains because a bin lorry that had travelled that route at that time had been estimated to have been carrying a load of only . In March 2017, however, the police discovered that the lorry had a significantly larger weight; more than .
McKeague's disappearance remained under investigation and the case attracted widespread publicity, with the authorities believing that he was crushed to death by the bin lorry and that his remains were somewhere at the Barton Mills landfill site.
Suffolk Constabulary spent more than £2.1 million investigating McKeague's disappearance, making it one of the most expensive missing persons investigations that the force has conducted and, in the words of the police, one that brought unique pressures on the force. The search for McKeague was stood down in March 2018, and an inquest in March 2022 concluded that he had died, after climbing into a commercial waste bin, as a result of "compression asphyxia in association with multiple injuries".
Life McKeague was born in Perth in September 1993 and was raised in Cupar, Fife, before moving to Dunfermline, Fife, Scotland at the age of nine, following his parents' divorce. McKeague and his two brothers, Darroch and Makeyan, were raised by their mother and attended St Margaret’s Primary School and St Columba's High School in Dunfermline. McKeague joined the RAF Regiment in 2013 and was posted to No. II Squadron Royal Air Force Regiment based at RAF Honington after his initial Regiment training at the same base. McKeague was a Senior Aircraftman gunner and medic on the squadron.
In January 2017, April Oliver, aged 21, announced that she was pregnant with McKeague's baby. Neither she nor McKeague were aware of the pregnancy at the time of his disappearance. They had only been dating for five months. Miss Oliver was on a holiday in the United States when McKeague disappeared, but cut the holiday short to return to the UK. On 18 June 2017, Oliver announced that she had given birth to a daughter, Ellie-Louise, on 11 June 2017.
Disappearance
On the night of 23 September 2016, McKeague was out drinking with friends in Bury St Edmunds. He had driven himself to the town with the intention of leaving his car overnight. He separated from his friends in the early hours of 24 September, after leaving the Flex nightclub on St Andrew’s Street South. The doorman at Flex recalls asking McKeague to leave because he was too drunk to stay. He remarked that McKeague was 'no trouble' whatsoever and that they chatted afterwards on the street outside. McKeague was in the Mama Mia's takeaway restaurant, reportedly his usual takeaway restaurant, between 1:15 am and 1:30 am. The last known sighting of McKeague was on CCTV at 3:25 am on Brentgovel Street, walking into the "Horseshoe area" where there were a number of wheelie bins. There was no footage of him ever emerging. CCTV footage also suggested that McKeague had slept briefly in a doorway before waking up and moving on. It is not believed that he intended to walk back to his base, RAF Honington, which is north east of the town along minor unclassified roads.
Nicola Urquhart, his mother, said in a statement dated 3 October 2016, which was released to the public and reported on by Evening Standard, that her son has never walked back to Honington on any previous occasions, and that leaving on his own, getting food and sleeping for a short time were all things McKeague had done in the past.
As he had the weekend off, McKeague was not reported missing until the 26 September (the following Monday) when he failed to report for work. After he was reported missing, the Suffolk Lowland Search and Rescue team (SULSAR) helped the police search the area around Bury St Edmunds and Honington alongside the RAF's own search and rescue teams which were bolstered by searches involving police helicopters.
There was one unconfirmed sighting of McKeague at the back of a sugar factory at Bury St Edmunds at 4:20 am, but police stressed this had been investigated and the person involved was not McKeague. The last authenticated sighting was on CCTV at Brentgovel Street.
Investigation Early theories On the morning of McKeague's disappearance, his Nokia Lumia mobile phone had moved from Bury St Edmunds to Barton Mills, some to the north west, along the corridor of the A1101 road. Phone data indicated that this journey took 28 minutes, which meant that it could not have been carried by someone walking on foot. In October, Suffolk Constabulary seized a bin lorry that was said to have contained his mobile but the line of enquiry led to nothing. It was noted that the bin lorry seized was only carrying a weight of and so could not have been carrying McKeague himself as he weighed around . This led to searches being carried out along the lorry's route between the two towns. The mobile phone was either switched off at 8:00 am, ran out of battery power or was damaged and it was not found.
One focus of the investigation was whether someone had given a lift to McKeague as he was walking back to his base. His mother stated that Corrie would have accepted a lift if offered to him, as he would offer a lift if he was driving and saw someone walking on their own. She also appealed for anyone who might have given him a lift to come forward, even if something untoward had happened. Police believed that McKeague was not in Bury St Edmunds. Superintendent Katie Elliott stated in an interview to Forces TV with Nicola Urquhart that there could have been third party involvement and that the police would not rule anything out.
The investigation also covered parts of the Hollow Road Industrial Estate in Bury St Edmunds and Great Livermere, a small village close to RAF Honington on McKeague's supposed route back to his base. Along with the British Transport Police, the Suffolk Constabulary searched along railway lines in the area and some of the roads were closed to enable thorough searches. In November 2016, a stretch of the eastbound carriageway of the A14 road, was closed between junctions 44 & 45 (Moreton Hall and Rougham) to search for McKeague.
On 10 October, a dismembered and burned body was found in a suitcase off the A628 road near Tintwistle in Derbyshire. Initial investigations led police to state that the body was that of a white man under the age of 50. A DNA analysis, however, later proved negative and Derbyshire Constabulary confirmed that the body was not that of McKeague. The body was later confirmed to be Yang Liu, a 36-year-old financial investor. His acquaintance Ming Jiang was convicted of his murder in May 2017.
CCTV evidence and searches In November 2016, it was revealed that in the two hours between 3:00 am and 5:00 am on the morning of 24 September 2016, 39 people could be seen on the same CCTV camera as the last one to record McKeague's last movements. Despite repeated inquiries and appeals, 23 of these people could not be identified. Suffolk Constabulary installed a 'pod' at a Christmas Fair in Bury St Edmunds, between 24 and 25 November 2016, and the public were encouraged to visit the pod to help establish the identities of the 23 people. By 4 December, 13 had been positively identified.
In December 2016, of woodland between Barton Mills and RAF Honington was searched by volunteers and staff from the Suffolk Lowland Search and Rescue Team. The search area, previously not examined, centred on the King's Forest area, with the possibility that McKeague had been hit by a vehicle on his way home. The area was declared officially cleared by the end of 17 December. Urquhart said that she had prepared herself mentally for finding her son's body.
Urquhart statement and mobile phone In December 2016, Urquhart publicly went on record as saying that Suffolk Constabulary were not properly investigating her son's disappearance. The appeal fund raised in Corrie's name had attracted funds of more than £50,000 by the end of December 2016 and Urquhart was considering hiring a private investigator to pursue lines of inquiry which she believed the police had failed to follow. Suffolk Constabulary defended their actions stating "We are very focused on finding Corrie. Although it is a missing persons inquiry, we have given it the same resources as a major investigation. We have not ruled out any possibility." Urquhart postponed hiring an investigator after Suffolk Constabulary agreed to investigate an incident where three men had been seen, on 25 September, setting fire to a car. The police later said that there was no link between the car fire and McKeague's disappearance. In the same interview, Urquhart described her son as a "social hand grenade" and that he would have been happy to get into a stranger's car.
In January 2017, the back of a mobile phone was found close to where the last signal from McKeague's phone was detected. However, as the part contained "no essential components", such as a SIM card or any electronic parts, the police said it would be impossible to link it with the disappearance and that no further analysis would be performed. However, police announced they were examining McKeague's activities on swinger websites. His family had provided Suffolk Constabulary with his username for at least one site.
Landfill search In February 2017, police started searching the landfill previously identified as being the last place his mobile phone was located when it connected to a tower. This was in the belief that McKeague had slept in a bin in the Horseshoe area and had been crushed to death when the bin lorry collected the contents of the bin and transported them to the landfill site. While Suffolk Police stated that McKeague had gone and slept in a bin in the Horseshoe area, his family said that they did not believe this version of events. They point to the fact that he was proud of his appearance and if necessary, he could have gone and slept in his car which was not very far away.
The search was planned to cover to a depth of and was expected to take ten weeks. On 13 February, McKeague's mother announced that a £50,000 reward, offered for information about her son, was to be withdrawn if nobody came forward in the following week. By May 2017, it was revealed that search had cost Suffolk Police £1 million and that it might take longer than the estimated 10 weeks. This makes the case one of the most expensive missing person enquiries that the Suffolk Police have ever dealt with. By May, they had sifted through of waste.
On 1 March, a 26-year-old man was arrested on suspicion of attempting to pervert the course of justice. He was not the driver of the bin lorry nor a relative of McKeague. On 7 March, the suspect was released and the police stated that they believed he had genuinely made a mistake and that the charge had been dropped. In conjunction with this, police revealed that an error had been made in the calculations of the weight of the bin lorry and that it was close to . Urquhart stated on Facebook that "This can really, devastatingly, only mean one thing".