NEED TO KNOW
- Dr. Caroline Muirhead fell madly in love with Alexander McKellar after meeting on Tinder in 2020.
- But shortly before their wedding, he confessed he had been involved in a horrific crime.
- Caroline’s dilemma is explored in the new Netflix crime series Should I Marry A Murderer.
- She worked with the Scottish police to solve the case of the ‘Vanishing Cyclist.’
- But helping police jail her fiancé took a terrible toll on Caroline.
How well do you know the person you love?
This is the unsettling question being asked in the new Netflix crime doc, Should I Marry A Murderer? – which tells the story of Dr Caroline Muirhead, a Scottish woman who found herself at the centre of a murder case just as she was preparing to get married.
“Imagine you fall in love with someone who made you feel accepted, wanted, seen, who made you feel whole and loved and special – and you are just so happy,” Caroline, 34, says in the two-part documentary, which premieres on April 29.
“And then they say to you, ‘I’ve done a horrible, horrible thing.’. Something so vile, it flips your entire world upside down.”
Caroline, who worked as a forensic pathologist, met Alexander McKellar on the dating app Tinder in 2020.
They got engaged shortly afterwards.
On a whim before the wedding, Caroline asked her fiancé a simple question: was there anything about his past she needed to know?
Unbelievably, he answered with a confession to a crime that was so disturbing it rocked Caroline to her core.
What followed was not just the collapse of a once-strong relationship, but the unravelling of a long-hidden murder.
“I was in shock, frozen almost,” Caroline said of the moment in a trailer for the two-part series.
McKellar’s answer had to do with Tony Parsons.
Tony, a 63-year-old former Royal Navy submariner and charity cyclist, had vanished in 2017 after being struck in a hit-and-run on a remote stretch of road in Scotland.
For years, his disappearance baffled authorities, who gave the case the haunting nickname ‘The Vanishing Cyclist’.
In truth, McKellar was responsible for Tony’s death.
Instead of seeking help after the collision, McKellar and his twin brother Robert concealed the crime, burying Tony’s body in a shallow grave and continuing with their lives as if nothing had happened.
It wasn’t until years later, during McKellar’s relationship with Caroline, that the secret finally surfaced.
And so she faced an unimaginable dilemma.
“To remain in love, you have to keep this secret that you know is going to destroy you,” she muses in the documentary.
“But if you reveal it, then you destroy everything. I mean, what would you do?”
Ultimately, Caroline made a decision that would bring long-awaited answers for Tony’s distraught family.
After being shown the remote burial site by McKellar, Caroline secretly notified the police and worked to gather evidence against her then-fiancé, including discreetly dropping a Red Bull can as a marker at the spot where Tony was buried.
This enabled authorities to later locate his remains.
Without Caroline’s actions, Tony’s body may never have been recovered.
But the horrifying ordeal took a toll.
Caroline has said that her mental health has been “shattered” and that she’s been “left unable to work”.
Her former fiancé was sentenced to 12 years in prison in 2023 after admitting to culpable homicide.
His brother was also jailed.
