Renee MacRae (born Christina Catherine MacDonald, February 1940)[1] was a Scottish woman who disappeared on 12 November 1976, together with her 3-year-old son Andrew.

She dropped elder son Gordon at her estranged husband's house and turned south on to the A9, in the direction of Perth, apparently to visit her sister in Kilmarnock.

According to Steventon, "Renee was completely besotted by Bill", and he had told her that he had a job with Texaco in Shetland and had found a house where they could live.

[5] The revelation of MacRae's four-year affair with MacDowell led senior officers to admit that the case was "mired in a sea of deceit and untruthfulness from its start.

Convinced it was a sign of corpses, Cathcart continued digging, but was told by a superior officer to stop as the bulldozer they were using had to go back to the contractors due to short funds.

In 2004, Chief Constable Ian Latimer launched a cold case review, which led to £122,000 being spent on an excavation of Dalmagarry quarry in August.

[7] In recent years speculation has focused on the bodies having been buried under the A9, which was in the middle of a major programme of upgrading at the time of the disappearance.

[4] However, a spokeswoman for Northern Constabulary said that after studying aerial photographs taken by the Royal Air Force during the construction of the A9, they were satisfied the bodies were not buried under the road.

[10] MacDowell had always been reluctant to speak to the media in the decades since the disappearance, but broke his silence in a 2004 interview and insisted that he did not kill MacRae.

[11] A week after the disappearance, MacDowell walked into Inverness police headquarters to make a voluntary statement, but his wife dragged him out of the building and nothing was said ever again.

[14] Statements were read from witnesses in the case who had since died,[15] including a man named Dennis Tyronney, who had told police that MacDowell had offered him £500 to kill Renee and Andrew MacRae in an acid attack.