Tuesday, April 24, 2018

End of the Missing Scotsman Story

Back in mid-Feb, I essayed a piece about a missing Scottish guy in Hamburg.  The basic story here is that this guy (Liam Colgan) had come to Hamburg to party it up with some other guys before his marriage.  Somewhere on the evening of 10 Feb, the group lost track of Liam.  He disappeared.  Folks will agree that he'd had a fair bit of alcohol, and some folks suggested that he banged his head maybe, and just walked away. 

A major search went on for weeks around Hamburg.  Cops yesterday had the fire department out in a particular area of the harbor, and they ended up finding a corpse.  They've ID'ed the body as Liam, although the DNA test is not complete and may be another couple of weeks.  What the cops say....based on a best-guess situation.....the body has been in the water for weeks. 

The NDR network (public TV from Hamburg) reported most of this story.

His license and personal stuff are still on him....so there's no possibility of being robbed and dumped in the water.  My personal guess is that he drank a good bit....wandered around, and ended up falling in the harbor.  I suspect that for weeks, the cops have been feeling that the harbor was the likely end of this story.  If he'd been walking around....someone would have reported him. 

If you'd walked around Hamburg over the past month, you would have noticed thousands of leaflets and posters up.....pictures of Liam.  Everybody in the city knew his face and were mindful of the search going on.

How this epic saga ends?  The sad thing to the story is that the guy was fixed up to be married within a week or two after this bachelor's weekend out, and his finance is now set to show up to a funeral for a guy who just had a bit too much to drink.  It is a fitting story for a Scottish love ballad. 

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