Shooting and stabbing rampage that shocked the quiet island of Skye

It was a tragedy that robbed a family of a husband and father and shocked scattered communities across the quiet, picturesque Isle of Skye.

Finlay MacDonald murdered his brother-in-law John MacKinnon and attempted to murder his own wife Rowena and married couple John and Fay MacKenzie in a rampage that has left deep scars in the memories of those living on the island.

Families have been torn apart by MacDonald’s shooting and stabbing rampage, with lasting ramifications for those who live and work on Skye.

MacDonald was sentenced to life with a minimum term of 28 years after being found guilty of the attacks at the High Court in Edinburgh on Friday.

“Something precious was ripped apart that day,” said Reverend Gordon Mathieson, the minister of the Sleat & Strath Free Church at the time of the incident.

“The feeling that best described what had happened that day was betrayal that something precious – family and community and bonds of brotherhood – had just been shattered by what had happened.”

What happened in the attack on August 10, 2022?

MacDonald, a father-of-four, embarked on a violent rampage after seeing messages on his wife’s phone in which she told a friend she was planning to leave him.

He subsequently stabbed Rowena, 34, repeatedly at the family home in Tarskavaig, leaving her with two punctured lungs.

Finlay and Rowena Macdonald on their wedding day. Facebook

MacDonald stabbed Rowena nine times – her screams alerting their children, who watched as their father continued the attack.

MacDonald then targeted his sister’s husband, John MacKinnon, by shooting the 47-year-old dead in his kitchen in the village of nearby Teangue.

From there, he drove to the mainland village of Dornie, Wester Ross, and targeted John and Fay MacKenzie.

Witnesses told the trial that MacDonald blamed osteopath Mr MacKenzie for “ruining his life” with treatment he received for a bad back.

MacDonald was followed to Dornie by two police cars but officers were told not to stop him. In the end, MacDonald shot both John and Fay but they survived the attack.

‘No level of preparation can help with this’

Reverend Mathieson said there was an enormous sense of shock that such horror could happen where they live.

“This is not something you can prepare for,” he told STV News. “No level of preparation can help with this. In terms of the community, the folk I felt mostly for were the girls working in the shop.

“The shop, the post office, the filling station, is the place where everyone meets, that’s where you run into people, and for the two, three, four days after the event, that was all anybody was speaking about, and the team at the shop were at the forefront of that.

“Sleat is a really busy tourist area as well and because it became national news instantly, tourists coming through were all talking about it as well and wondering how people were doing, what was happening.”

MacDonald lodged a special defence against murder – claiming his “ability to determine or control his conduct was substantially impaired by reason of abnormality of mind”, and a judge said he could be convicted of an alternative charge of culpable homicide if the jury believed his defence of diminished responsibility.

The court heard MacDonald has been diagnosed with autism, however prosecutor Liam Ewing KC told the jury “he was fully in control of and able to determine his actions”.

This was shown, he said, by the “targeted, controlled behaviour” he displayed after stabbing his wife “nine times” in their family home on Skye on the morning of August 10, 2022.

Court told police failed to stop MacDonald before second shooting

The court heard that police officers who tailed MacDonald failed to stop him before he carried out another shooting.

The officers following in two marked police cars in the west of Scotland were instructed not to intervene by an inspector at a control room more than 100 miles away in Dundee and to wait for specialist firearms officers to arrive from Inverness.

Sergeant Christopher Tait, 36, estimated they followed the suspect for about seven or eight miles from the Isle of Skye to the village of Dornie in Ross-shire.

Tait, who was a constable at the time, said he was initially called to a stabbing on the island at Tarskavaig but received an update that there had been a shooting.

Tait told the High Court in Edinburgh that he was passed information about a car belonging to MacDonald and said: “I spotted the accused’s vehicle going past me.”

He did a three-point turn, contacted his control room and began to follow the Subaru Impreza before he was joined by a police inspector in another car.

The officers followed the suspect over the Skye Bridge to the mainland and on to Dornie where the driver sped up before stopping at a house.

Tait said he saw the driver at the top of a driveway holding a firearm, aiming through a window of the house and opening fire.

The gunman went into the house and Tait and his colleague ran up the driveway and shouted for him to drop his weapon. They tasered the suspect and found an injured man and woman inside the house.

Tait said he had his blue lights and siren on when he initially passed the Subaru and turned to begin following, but they were then switched off.

Donald Findlay KC, for the defence, asked him why and he replied: “I was instructed by the control room.”

He said the control room was in Dundee and he was told firearms officers were travelling from Inverness.

Focus switches to gun legislation in Scotland

In the trial, experts spoke about MacDonald’s undiagnosed autism and personality disorder.

But on balance they concluded the 41-year-old would have still known right from wrong and been able to control his behaviour.

But some want to know how MacDonald, who some in the community thought was unfit for a gun licence, was still granted one.

Former SNP Westminster leader Ian Blackford, who served as MP for Ross, Skye and Lochaber, wrote to the Scottish Affairs Committee in the aftermath of the shooting and asked them to study current gun laws.

And as islanders sought answers, the horror prompted a parliamentary debate with a focus on gun legislation.

“I really wanted this to be a wake-up call,” Blackford told STV News. “The simple fact of the matter is, when I looked into the statistics at that time, there were 60,000 gun licences in the whole of Scotland, and 150,000 in Wales and England, and 25% of those licences are in the Highlands.

“I think when you realise these statistics, for anyone to assume these things won’t happen in rural communities in the Highlands and Islands, I think frankly, they’re kidding themselves.

“My goodness, it was an enormous event for everyone in Skye but particularly for people in Sleat.

“Nobody really imagined we would face a situation like this – a number of serious stabbings, threat to life and, of course, somebody died as a consequence of the actions that took place that day.

“It has really shocked the whole community, and of course you’re talking about communities where everybody knows each other, close-knit communities, close-knit families, so it’s not just about the events of the day, it’s about the effect it has had on the community ever since then.

“It’s important we get the sense of closure with the court case. But not just that, that we learn appropriate lessons about keeping people in all our communities safe from this kind of thing.

Tight-knit communities in state of utter disbelief

The total resident population of Skye’s Sleat peninsula is about 750, scattered across just over a dozen villages.

“The families involved in the incident were both local families,” Reverend Mathieson told STV News.

“They were quite a big family, the MacKinnons, they were very well known, and Lyn Anne’s family – again they were quite well known.

John MacKinnon was murdered by his brother-in-law. Police Scotland

“The MacDonalds, they were quite a big family in Tarkasvaig, they had a big extended family in the community.

“John had six kids under 20, Finlay and Rowena had four. Between them, they had ten kids in the primary school, so a very well-known, well-connected family in the community and both families were very well-liked.

“The community on Sleat runs essentially from anything south of Broadford down to the ferry at Armadale, and then further south down to Aird, so that’s a roundabout 14-mile stretch.

“There are villages scattered throughout it, and then there are three of villages over on the other side (of Sleat) on a loop road – including Tarkasvaig, where Finlay and Rowena lived.”

The home that Finlay MacDonald shared with his wife Rowena and their children. STV News

“The day of the shootings, two of my colleagues lived on the mainland and travelled into Sleat every morning for work and it was really through their network of connections in and around Lochalsh, in Dornie, where John and Fay lived, that word started to come through that there had been some kind of major incident over in Dornie, that there was huge growing police response – there was helicopters and all sorts of things coming and going.

“About half an hour later, one of the staff at Armadale Stores, the community shop at Sleat Community Trust, came through and said there had been a shooting in Sleat, that John MacKinnon had been shot dead and that presumably it had been his brother-in-law, Finlay, that had shot him.

“At that point, I switched from having my Sleat community trust development officer hat on to being minister in the community, and Lyn Anne, John’s wife, was a member in my church. I knew them really well so immediately went to see if I could help, but with a great sense of trepidation hearing that something had happened on the mainland.

“Finlay was known to me, and I immediately suspected that something had happened involving John Don and Fay because Finlay had a real animosity towards John Don and had expressed that previously.

“Finlay and Rowena, they have four kids the same ages as my own in school – same with Lyn Anne and John MacKinnon, their kids were the same ages as us as well.

“My last memory of John was in fact meeting with him a week before the shooting and they were going off as a family together down to Glasgow, laughing about going away together, it was just an ordinary relationship with them.”

Councillor John Finlayson said: “I think it’s just about coming to terms with the seriousness of the incidents that took place, there will be people who are still struggling to come to terms with the severity of what happend.

“I don’t think that we can dismiss that after two years, things are over and forgotten because they certainly are not.”