“We definitely did all we could and I can honestly sleep at night knowing there was nothing I physically could have done any different.”

It is 10 years since Nicola Urquhart’s son, Corrie Mckeague, disappeared on 24 September 2016 after a night out in Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk. For the months and years that followed, she embodied a mother’s love and determination to find the truth: to never give up.

The RAF gunner’s body has never been found but he was officially declared dead in 2022, when an inquest ruled he had died after climbing into a commercial waste bin before it was tipped into a waste lorry.

Nicola is composed and reflective as she recalls when her son went missing. He had just turned 23 and within months would become a dad.

She says her son would be forever in her thoughts, but adds: “I’ve given myself closure; my son is dead.”

She spoke to the BBC after what would have been Corrie’s 33rd birthday and ahead of the 10th anniversary of his disappearance.

She says she last saw her son when she went for a birthday meal with him at Cheers in Bury St Edmunds, adding he was a “social hand grenade” who “really did live every moment at a hundred miles an hour”.

A decade on, she says there is “never an end” to losing somebody but it is about “managing each day”.

“Every time I drive up a road, as I’m driving I still look at the verges, I can’t stop myself,” says Nicola.

“The anniversary is difficult, but we will still try to be positive about it and the universe makes us remember it and generally in a really nice way.

“We are fine, but that is a conscious, deliberate effort to be fine because it would be a disservice to his memory if we just shut down and didn’t make the best of our lives.

“In every single way that you can think, there is not one day, one decision, that doesn’t go by without Corrie being at the forefront of it,” she adds.

Airman Corrie, who was based at RAF Honington in Suffolk, had enjoyed a night out drinking when he was thrown out of a nightclub and became separated from his friends.

He then went to buy burgers, a kebab and chips, with CCTV captured at 01:20 BST showing him clutching a takeaway as he staggered through the town.

After sleeping in a shop doorway for an hour, Corrie disappeared from the view of cameras on Brentgovel Street at 03:25 into an area known as the Horseshoe. He was never seen again.

What followed was a huge search and rescue mission, which cost Suffolk Police more than £2m, captivated the country and fuelled conspiracy theorists.

It culminated in the excavation of a landfill site at Milton, Cambridgeshire, which lasted several months but found nothing.

On 22 March 2022, after nearly six years of speculation, inquest jurors provided an explanation for Corrie’s disappearance.

Delivering a narrative conclusion they said he died at about 04:20 BST as a result of “compression asphyxia in association with multiple injuries”.

These injuries, they ruled, were suffered after Corrie, from Dunfermline, Fife, had climbed into a commercial waste bin – something he had used before as somewhere to sleep – before it was tipped into a refuse truck.

During the inquest, Suffolk Coroner’s Court heard that 30 tonnes of force was exerted during each compaction cycle in the back of a bin lorry and so the chances of someone surviving were “slim“.

While Nicola, a former Police Scotland sergeant, accepts the final judgement, she says only she could truly decide when she could achieve a sense of closure.

“No one thing externally can give me closure. The only thing that can give me closure is myself saying, have I done everything I can?” she says.

“We definitely did all we could and I can honestly sleep at night knowing there was nothing I physically could have done any different.”

Corrie’s nine-year-old daughter Ellie, who was born nine months after he went missing, has also been a blessing, Nicola says.

She adds her son lives on through her “lovely, happy and well-behaved” granddaughter.

“She’s just like her dad, it’s frightening; she looks so much like him, she’s got his mannerisms, she’s adorable, athletic, sporty,” she says.

“It’s so lovely having a little mini Corrie to remind us of him, she is the very best of him, and she’s a very lucky little girl, in some respects, with the family that she’s got.

“It is fantastic having Ellie in our lives – it genuinely is just a little bit of Corrie.”

Nicola says Corrie’s family are doing “so many little things” to ensure Ellie is constantly reminded of her dad in the best and most “positive way”.

They include going to the Cenotaph in London on Remembrance Day every year and enjoying her dad’s favourite activities, such as going to watch Wicked the Musical.

One day, Nicola adds, Ellie will be presented with a special gift that once belonged to her car-loving dad Corrie.

“[Corrie’s brother] Darroch got his MG car that was on the base and spent a lot of time trying to get the car back on the road again,” adds Nicola, who lives in Scotland.

“The car is going to Ellie – whether it will still be running when she can drive, I do not know, but she’s going to be the one that has his car.

“She’s got a father figure, who is her dad, and he’s fantastic, but she also knows exactly who Corrie is and who Corrie’s family are,” she says.

In the years that followed Corrie’s disappearance, Nicola and his family were critical of Suffolk Police and how it had initially handled the investigation.

They accused the force of failing to follow up lines of inquiry, withholding information from the family and ruling out third party involvement early on.

After the inquest, however, Nicola said officers “genuinely privately apologised to each and every” member of the family with “tears in their eyes” and later stated the police “got it right”.

The same cannot be said, she claimed, for Biffa, the waste management company which owned the bin in which it was believed Corrie found himself.

It initially told police the weight of the bin was 11kg (1st 10lbs), and therefore not heavy enough to contain a person, but it was later recorded as 116kg (18st 3lbs).

One of the recommendations that came out of the inquest was that locks should be put on large public bins to prevent anybody from being able to get into them.

“My biggest regret and the thing that causes us the longest lasting distress is Biffa and how they made us feel at the time with what they did and didn’t do,” she said.

“But more importantly, they’ve not learned their lessons – every time I come to Bury St Edmunds the bins behind where he went missing are still unlocked.

“Is it possible he went in the back of a bin and ended up in the landfill? Because of Biffa, we will never know what happened to Corrie and that upsets me.”

Suffolk Police said its thoughts were with Corrie’s family and friends on the 10th anniversary of his disappearance.

“As we have explained previously, the active inquiry into Corrie Mckeague’s disappearance is now closed,” a spokesperson said.

“Unless any new, realistic and credible information becomes available then the investigation remains complete.

“Currently, there remains no information available that changes the status of the investigation.”

The RAF said its “thoughts and sympathies” remained with the “family, friends and colleagues of Corrie Mckeague”.

Biffa issued a statement that said the safety of the public and employees remained its highest priority.

“Our teams undertake regular training and refresher programmes, and we have introduced additional warning signage on bins to discourage people from entering them,” it said.

“While no action can undo the tragedy experienced by Corrie’s family, we remain committed to learning from the findings of the inquest and working collaboratively across the waste management sector to improve safety.”

Additional reporting by Cleah Hetherington

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