Thirty-year-old banker Alistair Wilson lived with his wife Veronica and their two children in the town of Nairn, Scotland, about seventeen miles east of Inverness. Alistair seemed by all accounts to have a completely normal existence until 2004, when he unwittingly became the victim of one of the country’s most mysterious and infamous unsolved murders.
It was around seven p.m. on the evening of November 28th, 2004, when someone rang the doorbell of the Wilson family home. Veronica went to answer it, but the person at the door wasn’t anyone she recognized. She would later describe the man as wearing a dark blue jacket, dark-colored jeans, and a baseball cap. The stranger asked for her husband Alistair by name, and Veronica went to fetch him.
A few minutes later, Alistair returned from the front door and showed his wife a blue envelope the stranger had given him. The envelope had the name Paul written on the front, but was completely empty. Befuddled, Alistair then walked back to the front door, perhaps to ask the man what the cryptic envelope might signify.
However, after her husband had left the room, Veronica heard three gunshots in quick succession. She ran to see to Alistair, but he had crumpled to the floor, obviously terribly wounded. The stranger was nowhere to be seen. Emergency services were called and Alistair was rushed to the hospital, but he succumbed to his injuries later that evening.
Later investigation into the bizarre murder revealed that the weapon used to kill Alistair Wilson was a somewhat unusual German firearm, a 1930s Haenel Suhl pocket pistol. Though police released this information to the public in the hopes that someone would recognize the distinctive gun, no concrete leads ever emerged.
More than a decade after the crime, in 2022, law enforcement announced that they believed the motive behind the murder might have been a land dispute that Alistair had been involved in at around the time he was killed. Evidently, a hotel across the street from the Wilson home was constructing a decking area, and Alistair had objected to it. The individual who owned the hotel, police confirmed, was not a suspect, but they hypothesized that someone involved in the construction of the deck might have been.
In 2023, investigators further stated that it was likely two perpetrators had carried out the crime, and that they suspected one local individual who had done some prison time for various drug offenses. As of this writing, they have not named this suspect or the theorized second person, but it appears that the inquiry is still ongoing.
Crime Immemorial 