Fifty-two-year-old James Keltie was a manager at the Muirton House Hotel in Blairgowrie, Perth and Kinross, Scotland. His wife Agnes was a policewoman at Fife Constabulary, and the couple had three children, aged five, nine, and sixteen.
On January 11th, 1971, a taxi driver named Dave Turpie arrived at the hotel at around eight a.m. to take the children to school, as he usually did. However, on this day, he couldn’t find any of the Keltie children, and set about searching the hotel for them.
Not long afterward, the driver stumbled upon the shocking sight of a bloody James Keltie, bound and gagged, and clad only in an undershirt and briefs, lying in the hotel’s garage. Though he was still alive when discovered, he died on the way to the hospital; the cause of death was a fractured skull. Two iron bars found near the scene were assumed to be the murder weapons, though this could not be established definitively.
Police assumed that James had been attacked at some time past midnight in his bedroom, which he evidently did not share with his wife, and then dragged the eighty feet to the spot where he was found. Although authorities believed the crime looked like a robbery gone wrong, nothing seemed to have been stolen from the hotel other than a few bottles of whiskey. The phone lines had been cut, however, and authorities pointed out that James reportedly was not shy about flashing money around, often buying drinks for his guests and paying for them from a big roll of bills.
There had been a large event at the hotel the evening before, though none of the guests attending the function had stayed in the establishment overnight. Detectives wondered if the killer or killers had been in attendance, but it seemed no leads emerged from this avenue of inquiry.
A few witnesses reported seeing a man in his mid to late twenties wearing a khaki jacket walking near the hotel at around four-forty a.m. on the day of the attack, but this individual was never located. Neither was the driver of a cream-colored car also spotted in the area at around the time of the murder.
Investigators fingerprinted every male over the age of sixteen in the vicinity but still came up empty. There was some uncertainty over whether the killer was a local or perhaps a professional sent there to kill James Keltie specifically.
Though more than fifty years have passed since the vicious crime took place, the case remains open, and police are still hopeful that James Keltie’s killer will be brought to justice.
Crime Immemorial 