Police spent £1m in search for bodies of mum and toddler murdered by ex 40 years ago

dailyrecord.co.uk:

Police spent almost £1million searching for the body of a mum and her three-year-old son who were murdered by her lover over 40 years ago.Renee MacRae, 36, and her son Andrew disappeared in November 1976 and the pair's remains have never been found.Last September Renee’s former lover William MacDowell, now 81, was convicted of their murder at the High Court in Inverness and given a life sentence.Figures from Police Scotland show £902,251 was spent between 2018 and last year on the MacRae probe.

Operation Abermule was set up in 2018 to solve the murder and to discover the resting place of the pair’s bodies.Much of the search centred on a quarry in Culloden.

The biggest single cost was £288,765 in overtime for the police officers and £340,547 to hire specialist search equipment.A further £74,410 was spent on food and drink for the investigators.

Renee’s disappearance is one of the longest missing person cases in Scottish criminal history.MacDowell, then 35, had been having an affair with Renee, who was his boss’s wife.