Charity cyclist's widow ‘will always hate' twins who left him to die

Times

09-08-2025

The widow of a charity cyclist who was killed by a drink driver has spoken for the first time to condemn the 'callous' twin brothers who hid his body in a shallow grave.
Alexander McKellar was speeding when he hit Tony Parsons, 63, and left him to die on the A82 near Bridge of Orchy, Argyll, in September 2017.
In an attempt to cover up the crime, he and his brother Robert retrieved the body and dumped it in a 'dead hole', which was used to dispose of animal carcasses on a remote estate where they worked.
Parsons, a father of two from Tillicoultry in Clackmannanshire, who had served in the Royal Navy, had gone missing during a 104-mile charity bike ride from Fort William back to his home town.
His body remained undiscovered for more than three years until January 2021, after Alexander McKellar led his former girlfriend, Caroline Muirhead, to the burial site and she tipped off police.
Parsons's widow, Margaret, 68, has told of her devastation at his death and her hatred for the twins for leaving her with a 'life sentence'. In the BBC documentary Murder Case: The Vanishing Cyclist, she said: 'When they get out of jail they are going to go back to life as if nothing's happened. They are going to get on with it, they're going to enjoy themselves.
'I can't do that. I can't do that because Tony is not here. They are not the ones that are left with a life sentence — I am — because that is what they've done.
'They just wanted to protect themselves. They could have phoned for somebody. They could have phoned an ambulance, they could have phoned the police — they could have even done it anonymously — but they didn't.
'They took Tony, they buried him, they left me and my kids and grandkids for three and a half years not knowing where Tony was. There has been no remorse, absolutely nothing from them at all. To be honest I hate the both of them, I really do and I am still angry. It won't go away.
'I loved Tony because he was kind, he made me happy. He looked after me all these years and I'm lost without Tony.'
Alexander McKellar, now 33, admitted a charge of culpable homicide at the High Court in Glasgow in 2023 and was jailed for 12 years. He and his brother, who was sentenced to five years and three months in jail, also admitted attempting to defeat the ends of justice. Their actions were described in court as 'callous and cowardly'.
Parsons's son, Mike Parsons, a police officer, told the documentary that he considered what happened to his father to be murder despite the twins' pleas to the lesser charges.
He said: 'The outcome of what would have happened — how long it would have taken an ambulance to get there — is irrelevant. If you know that you have hit somebody and you can see they are still alive, any basic human instinct says you need to try and get help.
'To willingly go down a course of action whereby you are letting somebody die, that to me is murder. Our opinion will always be the same — they have murdered my dad and they have taken him away from us.'
The filmmakers were given unprecedented access to the police investigation and the court proceedings for the two-part documentary. Cameras were allowed into the High Court in Glasgow to film the hearings where the McKellars entered their guilty pleas and were sentenced.
Murder Case: The Vanishing Cyclist will be available on BBC iPlayer from Tuesday and will also be shown on the BBC Scotland channel.