Should I Marry a Murderer?

Some secrets are too dangerous to keep. Some truths are too important to bury.

When Dr. Caroline Muirhead, a Scottish forensic pathologist, matched with a man on Tinder in 2020, she believed she had finally found the partnership she had been looking for. He was warm, steady, and attentive. Their relationship deepened quickly, and before long she was engaged and planning a future she felt she had earned.

Then came the confession.

What her fiance told her on an ordinary evening shattered everything she believed about the man she loved and placed her at the center of one of Scotland's most haunting unsolved cases. A charity cyclist had vanished without explanation in 2017. A family had spent three years without answers. And the man who had asked Caroline to marry him knew exactly where the truth was buried.

Should I Marry a Murderer? is the full account of a case that gripped Scotland and eventually reached a global audience. It is the story of a woman caught between love and conscience, between the life she had built and the truth she could not ignore. It is the story of what it costs to do the right thing when the right thing requires you to dismantle everything you were planning to keep.

Drawing on the public record of a real criminal case, this book examines the mechanics of romantic deception, the specific vulnerabilities of modern digital dating, and the extraordinary courage required to act on conscience under conditions of genuine personal risk. It follows the full arc of the story, from the first Tinder match to the courtroom, from the confession to the conviction, from the silence that lasted three years to the moment one woman decided the silence had gone on long enough.

For readers of true crime who want more than the crime itself, this book offers the human story beneath the headlines. It asks the questions that cases like this one demand. How well do we really know the people we love? What does modern dating make visible, and what does it allow to stay hidden? And when we discover that the person beside us is not who we believed them to be, what do we owe to the truth?

Tony Parsons went out to cycle for charity one day in 2017 and never came home. This is the story of how the truth about what happened to him finally found its way into the light, and the woman who carried it there.