A Night On St Ninian Drive
Why Did The Trail From Ross MacGillivray’s House Lead Towards A Canal?
At about 12.10am on 12 November 2023, police were called to a house on St Ninian Drive in Inverness. Inside, they found 36-year-old Ross MacGillivray with serious injuries. He was pronounced dead a short time later.
The investigation quickly extended beyond the property. Two men had reportedly entered at around 10.20pm the previous evening and left shortly after midnight. Detectives wanted to establish where they had gone, who had accompanied them and what had happened during the interval.
The route they were examining led towards the Caledonian Canal. A woman might have been travelling with the men. Those movements offered a starting point, but they did not explain what had taken place inside the house. For that, investigators would have to compare the physical evidence with accounts given by someone who had been there.
The case would eventually expose an important distinction between responsibility for a fatal attack and responsibility for concealing its aftermath. Understanding that distinction requires following the evidence carefully, particularly where a witness’s account begins to conflict with records created before police arrived.
The Man Behind The Address
Ross’s family described someone whose place in their lives could not be conveyed by a crime-scene photograph. Their public tribute remembered an affectionate husband and father, loved by relatives and friends. They ended with a more personal expression: “We love you to the moon, the stars, Jupiter and Mars.”
Such statements are brief because families are speaking publicly at a moment when almost everything is private: grief, unanswered questions and the practical consequences of a sudden death. They are not comprehensive biographies. Their value lies in preserving something that a criminal investigation can otherwise obscure—the person existed before the case.
Ross and his wife, Samantha MacGillivray, had become estranged earlier in 2023, although they continued to see each other. They had three children together. Their separation therefore did not mean a complete end to contact or shared responsibilities.
That continuing connection helps explain why a simple picture of two entirely separate lives would be misleading. Relationships can remain entangled after separation through children, visits, possessions and unfinished disagreements. None of those circumstances, by itself, explains violence.
There is also an essential qualification to Samantha’s place in this story: although she was subsequently accused of murder, the Crown accepted her not-guilty plea to that charge. Her conduct must not be described as a murder conviction by implication. The investigation into what she said and did is important, but it has to be told within that established legal boundary.
The central question is therefore broader than who was present. It is how investigators separated different people’s actions when the available accounts did not initially provide a dependable explanation.
The First Search Focused On Two Men
In the days after Ross’s death, police appealed for information about two men seen around the property. Their descriptions included clothing, approximate heights and distinguishing features. One was reported to have worn a blue puffer jacket and white trainers; the other a dark waterproof jacket and grey-and-black trousers.
These were practical details intended to prompt recognition. A neighbour might not know a person’s name but might remember an unfamiliar coat, a conversation or someone passing a camera. Detectives were asking the public to connect ordinary observations with a specific place and time.
By 15 November, Detective Chief Inspector Martin MacDougall was publicly renewing that appeal. Police maintained a substantial presence locally, with specialist investigators working alongside divisional officers. He acknowledged the concern caused by the level of violence and encouraged residents to approach officers with information.
An appeal of this kind also reveals how incomplete the early picture was. Investigators were seeking identities and movements, rather than presenting a finished account of motive and responsibility. The public could see a cordon and hear that a murder inquiry had begun, but neither supplied the missing explanation.
The distinction matters when looking backwards. Once names become familiar, it is easy to imagine that police always knew whom they were looking for. At the beginning, a description had to become an identification, an identification had to be checked, and an apparent association had to be tested against evidence.
A person being near a house is one fact. Establishing what that person did inside it is another. The inquiry needed to move between those levels without treating them as interchangeable.
A Route Through Inverness
Police believed the men had travelled on foot towards the canal and had been in the St Valery Avenue area at approximately 12.20am. They appealed for dashcam recordings, private CCTV and doorbell footage that might help establish their movements.
The timing gave those requests a focus. Officers were not asking residents to interpret an entire weekend. They were asking whether a short passage through familiar streets had left an observable trace.
For a camera owner, an apparently uneventful recording could place someone at a junction or show whether people were walking together. For investigators, that could connect one observation with another. A route begins to emerge through separate fragments rather than a single uninterrupted recording.
However, a route does not automatically reveal the relationships within a group. People walking together may be cooperating, following instructions or experiencing pressure that a camera cannot capture. Footage can establish visible conduct while leaving its meaning open.
That is why an accompanying woman mattered as a line of inquiry rather than an immediate answer. Her identity, connection to the men and explanation for being with them all required examination.
The original appeals were therefore about more than locating two individuals. They sought evidence capable of testing the sequence outside the house independently of anyone’s recollection. That independence would become particularly important once investigators had to decide which parts of the accounts they were receiving could be trusted.
What The Canal Could Establish
The canal was not merely a direction mentioned in witness appeals. Police cordoned off a section of it, and investigators recovered items from the area.
At the November press conference, MacDougall was careful about what those discoveries meant. Although material had been retrieved, he said there was nothing at that stage indicating that a weapon was among it. He also said officers were still examining whether Ross knew the men they were trying to trace.
That qualification prevents a misleading image of detectives immediately finding a murder weapon and solving the case. Recovering an object and understanding its evidential value are separate steps. Its location may be suspicious, but its connection to a particular person or incident still needs to be demonstrated.
Clothing, for example, can matter for several different reasons. It may help identify what someone was wearing, connect an account with a recording or preserve material associated with an assault. Those are possibilities investigators can examine; they are not interchangeable conclusions.
The same caution applies to removal. An item being absent from a house does not, by itself, establish who removed it or why. A stronger explanation requires links between the original location, the person handling it and the place where it ended up.
In Ross’s case, the investigation was beginning to span two environments: the property where he had been found and the route taken afterwards. Understanding their relationship would be necessary to distinguish the violence itself from subsequent actions affecting the evidence.
This is an easily overlooked feature of concealment investigations. What happens after an attack may leave its own trail, with different witnesses, objects and opportunities for verification.
The Account From Inside The House
Samantha’s account placed her in the kitchen with Ross when two men entered through an unlocked back door. She said Ross was chased into the hall and assaulted while she remained in the kitchen.
According to the prosecution’s later account in court, she claimed the men forced her to leave with them and made her contact the emergency services. She described being frightened and asked officers about her husband.
She also denied having known the men beforehand. That denial gave investigators a proposition they could check beyond the events of the night itself.
There are several different kinds of statement within that account. Where someone says they were standing is a claim about location. What they say they saw is a claim about observation. Whether they already knew another person is a claim about a relationship extending into the past.
Those distinctions affect how an account can be tested. A witness might genuinely have a limited view of an assault while still being able to give accurate information about who was present. Conversely, an apparently detailed account of the scene does not guarantee honesty about prior contact.
An emergency call can also contain both useful information and inaccuracies. It may direct police to the correct address even when the caller’s explanation is incomplete. The fact that someone summoned help cannot settle every question about their earlier or later conduct.
Nor can distress resolve those questions. Emotion may be genuine, mixed or difficult to interpret. Investigators need evidence that addresses a statement’s content, rather than relying on whether the speaker appears to behave as an observer expects.
Here, the most testable issue was not the precise appearance of fear. It was whether the supposed strangers really were strangers.
An Ordinary Booking Became Relevant
Court reporting identified a detail with none of the obvious drama of the crime scene: a phone associated with Leon Headey had previously been used to book taxis from the property under the name Samantha.
Investigators also established apparent contact between Samantha and Headey in the weeks before Ross’s death. Those records challenged the suggestion that there was no prior connection.
A taxi booking is significant because it is created for an everyday purpose. At the time, it exists to arrange transport. Later, its combination of a telephone number, name and address may help investigators examine a claim about familiarity.
Its value depends on precision. A booking made through a phone does not automatically prove who held the device, who entered the details or who travelled. It cannot establish participation in an assault simply because it links people socially.
Nevertheless, a record can be highly relevant without proving the entire case. If an account rests on the absence of any previous connection, documented contact changes the questions that need answering.
The appropriate next step is to establish the nature of that contact. Was there an innocent explanation? Was the account mistaken, incomplete or deliberately false? Did other records support the same interpretation?
This is where investigative progress often differs from a dramatic fictional revelation. One record does not explain everything. Instead, it makes a previously offered explanation harder to maintain and directs attention towards another part of the relationship.
The booking was important because it could be compared with a specific denial. Its force came from that comparison, not from any inherent suspiciousness in taking a taxi.
The Investigation Reached Beyond The Highlands
Two men were arrested and charged in November 2023. Craig Hayden, from Alness, and Leon Headey, from Liverpool, appeared at Inverness Sheriff Court on 20 November.
The allegations included restraining Ross and repeatedly striking him. Separate allegations concerned interference with evidence, including the removal of clothing and other items. At that appearance, they made no plea and were remanded in custody. Those were accusations before the court, not findings produced by a completed trial.
The inquiry continued beyond those first appearances. In July 2024, Police Scotland announced that a 32-year-old woman had been arrested and charged in the Portsmouth area. Officers in Hampshire had acted on behalf of the Scottish force, and she was due to appear at Inverness Sheriff Court.
The distance between Inverness and Portsmouth could easily become a dramatic detail in its own right. But an arrest location is not an explanation for why someone travelled there. Without evidence establishing that purpose, geography should remain geography.
The more substantial point is the duration of the investigation. The first arrests did not conclude every question about everyone connected with the events. Different aspects of a case can develop at different speeds, and evidence sufficient to pursue one person may not yet resolve another person’s position.
Public reporting also changes as proceedings move forward. Early articles describe suspicions and charges. Later court accounts may contain agreed facts or admissions. Reading them without attention to their dates can produce a composite story in which allegations are mistakenly treated as established from the beginning.
Ross’s case requires the opposite approach: keeping each development at the stage it had actually reached.
The Violence Required A Precise Account
The allegations eventually placed before the High Court described a restrained victim subjected to repeated physical violence. Earlier indictment reporting also referred to water being poured over his head and the use of blunt instruments.
Those additional details belonged to the allegations as reported at that stage. They should not be silently transferred into a final reconstruction unless the later record establishes them. A charge can be broader than the account ultimately admitted or proved.
The subsequent court reporting described Ross being punched, kicked and stamped on. His clothing had been removed, and his wrists and ankles were bound with orange twine.
Prosecutor Graeme Jessop KC acknowledged an important limit: the exact sequence and duration of the violence were unknown. That leaves no sound basis for assigning a precise number of minutes to the assault or narrating a blow-by-blow progression.
Restraint is a material part of the account because it concerns the victim’s ability to move and protect himself. But even that does not authorise a writer to invent the moment it was applied, the order of injuries or what Ross could perceive at each stage.
Likewise, the presence of several forms of violence does not establish which individual action caused which injury. A reconstruction may be secure about the overall attack while remaining unable to allocate every physical consequence.
This is not a reason to describe the assault vaguely. The documented acts are specific and severe. It is a reason to distinguish precision from imagined completeness.
The public record can establish that a man was subjected to fatal violence without supplying the full medical report, every scene photograph or an uninterrupted account of his final movements. Respecting those limits preserves what the evidence actually tells us.
A Story Can Be Disproved In Parts
By the time the case approached its conclusion, investigators were dealing with questions that required different answers.
Who had been inside the house? What physical actions had occurred? What had been removed afterwards? Which statements were accurate? Each question overlapped with the others, but none could safely replace them.
That separation is particularly important when someone has lied. Discovering a false statement gives a reason to reassess credibility. It does not make every possible accusation true. Investigators still need evidence connecting the person to the particular conduct under consideration.
There is a similar distinction between recognising another person and sharing their intentions. Previous contact can disprove a claim of unfamiliarity without establishing an agreement to kill. Leaving together may be relevant to cooperation afterwards without proving identical participation beforehand.
The strongest way to understand this case is therefore to resist a single label covering everyone involved. Presence, knowledge, violence and concealment are different matters. A reliable account needs to identify where the evidence places each person rather than turning proximity into guilt.
This also explains why a criminal case can reach a definite outcome while leaving parts of the narrative incomplete. The law does not require a cinematic reconstruction of every second before responsibility can be established. Equally, a definite outcome does not give later storytellers permission to fill the remaining gaps.
For Ross’s family, those gaps concerned events of overwhelming personal importance. For readers, acknowledging them is part of treating the case as a real death rather than a puzzle designed to deliver perfect closure.
What The Admissions And Sentences Established
In October 2025, Craig Hayden and Leon Headey admitted murdering Ross MacGillivray. Their guilty pleas established responsibility for the fatal assault.
Police Scotland’s account also identified the subsequent disposal of items at the Caledonian Canal. It said the men had left the Inverness area for Aberdeen, where they were arrested. Samantha admitted attempting to defeat the ends of justice through her involvement in the aftermath; police described assistance with disposing of evidence and deliberately false statements.
The resolution therefore involved two distinct kinds of criminal responsibility. Hayden and Headey admitted the killing. Samantha’s accepted plea concerned obstructing justice, and the Crown accepted her not-guilty plea to murder.
That distinction is not a minor qualification to a more dramatic story. It is the outcome the story must accurately convey. Describing her as a convicted murderer would be wrong, even where reporting uses strong language about her conduct.
On 27 November 2025, the High Court in Edinburgh imposed life sentences on both men. Hayden’s punishment part was 17 years and two months; Headey’s was 17 years and seven months. Samantha received a sentence of one year and nine months for attempting to defeat the ends of justice, with court reporting identifying the removal of items including Ross’s blood-stained clothing.
The punishment parts are minimum periods before consideration for release, not fixed dates on which the men must leave prison. Under the Scottish system, the Parole Board must consider whether continued imprisonment remains necessary to protect the public. Release is not automatic, and a person released from a life sentence remains on licence for life.
At sentencing, Hayden’s counsel said the events had not been planned in advance and expressed his client’s remorse. Headey’s counsel referred to remorse recorded in a report prepared for the court. Those submissions formed part of mitigation; they did not displace the admitted responsibility for murder.
Renewed attention came in October 2026 through reporting on BBC Scotland’s Highland Cops. That coverage described recovered messages, CCTV and police suspicions of a drugs-related motive. It also reported a fractured skull. These are later reported details, rather than a published post-mortem report or a new judicial finding.
A reported motive should remain separate from what the convictions establish. A possible dispute does not explain every decision made during an attack, and an investigator’s interpretation is not a substitute for the precise offence of which someone was convicted. Searches for subsequent developments found no reported reversal of the murder convictions as of 27 October 2026.
The court’s conclusions answer the central questions of responsibility, but they cannot restore the person whose death began the investigation. Lord Scott considered victim impact statements from Ross’s mother and brother and recognised the permanent damage inflicted on the family.
The canal trail had mattered because evidence was being moved away from the house. The earlier records had mattered because they allowed statements to be checked. Together with the admitted facts, they made it possible to distinguish the attack from the effort to obscure it.
For the family, however, the end of proceedings did not mark the end of the consequences. Ross’s absence continued beyond the police inquiry, beyond the sentence and beyond the renewed interest of a television audience. His children and relatives were left to live with a loss that the court could acknowledge but could never repair.
Sources
Police Scotland: Two Plead Guilty To Murder Of Ross MacGillivray In Inverness — Official account of the admissions, arrests and evidence disposal.
Sky News: Fresh Appeal Over Ross MacGillivray’s Death — Contemporary reporting of the initial timeline and movements under investigation, 15 November 2023.
The Press And Journal: Police Examine A Possible Drugs Link — Early reporting on canal recoveries and the limits of police knowledge.
The Press And Journal: Court Account Of Statements And Prior Contact — Reporting on the witness account, taxi bookings and evidence handling, 24 October 2025.
The Press And Journal: Guilty Pleas And Accepted Not-Guilty Plea — Establishes the distinction between the charges and their outcomes.
The Press And Journal: Sentencing At The High Court — Sentences, mitigation and the prosecution’s stated reconstruction limits, 27 November 2025.
Scottish Sentencing Council: Life Sentences Explained — Authoritative explanation of punishment parts, parole and life licences.
The Scottish Sun: Reporting On The Highland Cops Documentary — Secondary reporting of the documentary’s additional investigative material in October 2026; the programme itself was not independently viewed.
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