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Madeleine McCann-The Last Hope - Monday 21st May 2012
KATE MCCANN, MOTHER OF MADELEINE: Every night we had dinner at a
nearby tapas restaurant. It was very close to our
apartment. At 10 o' clock, when I went back to check on
the children, which we'd been doing every half hour,
just in case one of them had maybe woken up, I
discovered that Madeleine had been taken.
GERRY MCCANN, FATHER OF MADELEINE: You're just thrown into this
absolute nightmare. Terrifying ordeal; I think the worst
thing that could happen to a parent.
KATE MCCANN: When I imagine somebody lifting Madeleine out of the
bed, and I Madeleine at some point waking up, I just...
so horrific that I just... your brain struggles to
accept it as real.
KERRY O'BRIEN, PRESENTER: Five years on, Madeleine McCann is
still missing. In England, her parents still grieve, and
police are back in the hunt. Welcome to Four Corners.
Reliable data is hard to get, but it's estimated that,
worldwide, something like eight million children
disappear each year, and the United Nations says that at
any one time, close to two-and-a-half million people are
victims of human trafficking - most of them for sexual
slavery. Madeleine McCann was just days away from her
fourth birthday when she disappeared from a Portuguese
coastal resort. The story made headlines around the
globe.
With Britain's tabloid press ramping up pressure, local police
struggled for leads in their search for Madeleine and
her alleged abductor. Before long, in the face of
accusations that they had botched the investigation,
police were pointing the finger at Madeleine's parents,
casting doubts on their story. Eventually, the
Portuguese police closed the case, leaving the parents
to swing in the breeze of public opinion. The parents,
meanwhile, had launched their own private
investigations, and eventually, in the wake of a book
written by Kate McCann, the British Prime Minister,
David Cameron, ordered a new investigation. Some 30
specialist police are on the trail, and expressing
optimism that they can crack the mystery. But they're
going to have to find new evidence strong enough to
force Portuguese police to re-open the case. In the
meantime, if she's still alive, Madeleine will have just
turned nine.
The BBC's Richard Bilton has compiled this report.
[Report - "Madeleine McCann-The Last Hope"]
KERRY O'BRIEN: One of the significant questions related to
Madeleine McCann's disappearance is this: if she was
targeted by child traffickers, what would they have
wanted with a three or four-year-old? Are children
targeted that young? Former senior Scotland Yard
investigator, Jim Gamble, has led the British National
Crime Intelligence Service fight against child sex
abuse, and he was the head of the Child Exploitation and
Online Protection Centre within the UK police, which did
some analysis for the Portuguese police early in the
investigation of Madeleine's disappearance. He
subsequently did a scoping study for a review of the
case in 2009 for the previous Labour government. Jim
Gamble had since got to know the McCann's personally,
and he joins me now from London.
Jim Gamble, let's get one obvious question out of the way,
first-up: from everything you know personally about the
McCanns and the case, do you believe they had anything
to do with Madeleine's disappearance?
JIM GAMBLE, FMR HEAD, CHILD PROTECTION CENTRE (CEOP): If it ever
came out that either of the McCanns were involved in
this, I will be absolutely shocked.
KERRY O'BRIEN: Why do you say that?
JIM GAMBLE: Well, from everything I know about it, it's not that
as a professional police officer they wouldn't have been
first on my list of suspects, because actually, of
course they would - they're the parents, they were
there, they had last access. But having been involved in
the periphery to a greater or lesser degree on different
occasions with this case, having met the McCanns, having
seen their children Sean and Amelie around them, I just
would be shocked. There's nothing which gives me that
feeling; there's no evidence which makes me feel that
they are in any way complicit in the disappearance. But
I'm a human being, you know, and we can err. I'm simply
saying that I would be shocked if either one of them
were proven to be involved in any way in this.
KERRY O'BRIEN: Given the five year time lapse since Madeleine's
disappearance, what do you think the chances are of
finding her, even with such a well-resourced UK police
team?
JIM GAMBLE: Well, I think there's always hope, and nobody should
take away hope from parents who have to get up and look
after their other two small children every day. And
people often talk to be about the statistics and what's
most likely to have become of Madeleine. Jaycee Dugard
turned up after many, many years, having been abducted
from a bus stop near her home. And when we began to look
at the Minute from Madeleine Initiative video, which we
created in CEOP some years back, we looked at a number
of cases where children had gone missing, been abducted,
and many years later were found, or came back
themselves. So, I think there's always hope. As the
years go on, of course, it's harder to sustain that, and
that's one of the reasons I think we all welcomed the
recent Metropolitan Police investigation, and the way
it's breathed new life back into this enquiry.
KERRY O'BRIEN: What's your basis for saying "it's breathed new
life"? Because, because my next question is, why the
British police would succeed where the Portuguese police
failed, given that at least the Portuguese had a fresh
trail to try and follow.
JIM GAMBLE: Well, I don't think it's so much where the Portuguese
police failed. The investigation in the early days was
complex, as these investigations are, but it was
complicated by the fact that it covered such a vast
geography. And none of us - you know, the British, the
Portuguese, or others - were very good in those early
days, because it's not something we do very often. And
what happened because of that was that information would
be held in different places, and perhaps shared in
different ways. Now, with the Metropolitan Police and
the level of competence that they have, and experience
in these complex investigations, they bring something
new to the table. I think there is a willingness within
Portugal to have a look at anything the Metropolitan
Police find that's fresh, and critically, what I believe
the men are doing is bringing together the disparate
pieces of information that perhaps sat elsewhere in the
UK or in Portugal, and, for the first time, aggregating
it in a way that all of that information can be
interrogated at a single point.
KERRY O'BRIEN: What did you and your team highlight in your
scoping study of the study, as areas for fresh
attention?
JIM GAMBLE: Well, without going into too much detail, what we
identified was that the information was all over the
place. That the fact that a number of difference
agencies had very enthusiastically and appropriately
helped in their own ways, having itself created a
difficulty because there was a lack of coherent
leadership, I believe, at different times throughout the
investigation - that's simply from the UK perspective.
At the very beginning of this investigation, everybody,
including myself and CEOP, rushed to help. And because
we don't deal with this type of cases, thankfully, on a
day-by-day basis, and we were learning as we went along,
so I think there were little pots of information, and
some big pots of information, that could have been dealt
with better. So we identified that, recognised it. We
also identified a number of other areas, and a number of
other anomalies, where perhaps some of the other
information that would have been available, and had been
captured, but never properly interrogated. And as the
Metropolitan Police are going through a life
investigation now, I think it would probably be
unhelpful of me to go into any greater detail on that.
KERRY O'BRIEN: Can you understanding why David Cameron did
eventually reopen the case?
JIM GAMBLE: Well, I'm glad you used the word "eventually". I am
thrilled that he, you know, prompted the new review by
the Metropolitan Police, but the report which we put in,
which highlighted all of the anomalies that are
currently being discussed, and have been discussed for
some time. That was on that government desk as they came
in to par. The home secretary had it, and it's
unfortunate that it took an open letter from Gerry
McCann, on the front of a national newspaper, to prompt
David Cameron to do this. But maybe he was unaware that
the home secretary already had a report highlighting
these issues, but it shouldn't take the plea of a parent
in a desperate circumstance to get the prime minister to
do the right thing. But now that he's done it,
absolutely fantastic. With his backing behind it, I
think it has more hope than it ever had before.
KERRY O'BRIEN: What was your reaction to the book that came out
from the former leader of the Portuguese investigation,
particularly when essentially the finger was being
pointed at the McCanns?
JIM GAMBLE: Well, first of all, I think it was unprofessional,
and secondly, I think it was unhelpful. The fact that
this individual perpetrates a view that is clearly his -
that the McCanns are guilty, or suggests that the
McCanns are guilty of this offence - that's troublesome
from a number of issues. That's an issue for a court to
decide, and secondly, when a professional police
officer, when someone with the access to information
that that role would suggest that individual has, starts
going down one specific line, it takes our eye off the
broader picture. It stops being looking, because they
believe, "Well, there's no point, we know who did it".
Now, I'm aware of cases myself that I'll not go into in
detail here, where because certain individuals have
assumed that one person was guilty, the real person, the
real culprit, when free for many, many more years than
they actually should have, simply because everyone said,
"Well, there's no point. We know who did it, we can't
prove it, so let's carry on with our day jobs". I think
what he's done is foolish.
KERRY O'BRIEN: Now, if I understand your position correctly, if
you had been conducting an investigation like this,
you'd have started with the parents and taken a very
quick look and either established there was something
suspicious, or you'd have ruled them out and moved on.
Now, if I understand it correctly, the Portuguese were
kind of the other way around. It took them some time to
suddenly develop the view that the McCanns might have
been suspicious.
JIM GAMBLE: Well, I think that's a fair assessment. When we
carried out the scoping review, in order to be fair,
what we did was, we said, "Let's take a sleepy seaside
town somewhere in the UK, and imagine that, you know,
late in the evening, a couple had come to us who didn't
speak English as their first language, and who were
Portuguese and said, 'Look, our child has gone
missing'". I think what we accepted immediately is we
would have faced a complicated scenario similar to that
which the Portuguese did. You're not sure whether the
child has simply walked away or been taken away, and it
does take a period of time to get that information
together, so there were clearly difficulties, and we
would all face those. In the immediate aftermath, the
systematic approach is what is key, and certainly as
professional detectives, we use the phrase "clear the
ground beneath your feet". Look at that which is
immediately in front of you first of all. And the only
difference between the Portuguese and myself would have
been that the first suspects that I would have looked at
would have been the parents.
KERRY O'BRIEN: Given what you know about child abduction, if this
was an abduction, what are the most likely
possibilities?
JIM GAMBLE: Well, you can start from someone who has perhaps lost
a child, the balance of their mind may be disturbed, and
they take someone else's child to replace theirs - to
meet an emotional need that they have. And then move to
the sexual predator, who perhaps would target a child,
engage that child, capture them and abuse them - and
we've seen that happen around the world. And then you
come to the point of the actual trafficker - someone
that would perhaps target a particular child for sale
into a specialist or particular market somewhere else
around the world. And these things happen, and whilst we
can look at the statistical analysis of the likelihood
of children still being alive, alive after each of those
scenarios, there is always the exception to the rule -
Jaycee Dugard is a good example of a child who was
actually abducted and abused, and still alive today.
KERRY O'BRIEN: If Madeleine was the target of professional child
traffickers, is it at all common, or is it unusual for
somebody that young to be targeted?
JIM GAMBLE: No, I don't think it's uncommon for someone that
young to be targeted. But, I mean, in our experience, a
Western child being targeted and abducted by child
traffickers, is very, very rare, because the publicity
that surrounds it is so massive. I mean, we often hear
the argument, "Why so much attention for one little
girl, when so many go missing?" It's a very complicated
set of circumstances, missing children, but the kids
that go missing because they've been abducted - abducted
by someone other than a parent in a parental dispute -
they're rare. That's why, if you come to the UK, we'll
be able to talk about Holly and Jessica, we'll be able
to talk about Milly Dowler, we'll be able to talk about
Madeleine McCann - because those cases are so rare, they
strike a chord with every parent, that you never ever
forget the names of the children or the incident
involved. So the cases are rare, but it's not unusual
for traffickers to target particular children for
particular clients.
KERRY O'BRIEN: Is there anything to suggest that this was the
work of professional criminals?
JIM GAMBLE: Well, first of all, I'm not privy to information in
the current investigation, so I really wouldn't be
comfortable speculating about that.
KERRY O'BRIEN: What do you think the odds are that we will ever
know what has happened to Madeleine McCann?
JIM GAMBLE: I believe in my lifetime we will find out what
happened to Madeleine McCann. I believe, in all of these
cases, someone is looking over their shoulder somewhere.
The person that did this knows, and they'll be concerned
that other people around them might also know. And
relationships change over a period of time, and if the
person that did this ever watches your program, ever
watches this interview on YouTube or on the television,
they need to know that someone suspects them somewhere,
and it's only a matter of time until they come forward
with that information, with that hint, with that degree
of suspicion which will finally turn the spotlight on
them. I believe we'll find out who did this, and I
believe the person involved in it would be better coming
forward now and doing the right thing. It's never too
late for the person who did this to come forward and
give Gerry and Kate the peace of knowing what has
happened to their daughter.
KERRY O'BRIEN: Jim Gamble, thank you very much for talking with
us.
JIM GAMBLE: Thank you.
KERRY O'BRIEN: Next week on Four Corners, a hard look in a new
phenomenon in the Australian workforce that's come from
the massive mining boom - the syndome of the fly in, fly
out or drive in, drive out worker. We look at who's
winning and who's losing. Join us then, but for now,
goodnight.
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