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The newly released photofit
in the Maddy McCann case |
For nearly thirty years, Crimewatch has
been a regular part of the schedule of
the BBC’s main channel, BBC1. By using
video reconstructions of unsolved
crimes, and accepting help and advice
from the UK’s police forces, it has
contributed to the conviction of over
one hundred major criminals, including
murderers and rapists.
These days, Crimewatch no longer has a
monthly slot, but it can still pull in a
large audience. The October 14th
edition, including a 25-minute report on
the mysterious disappearance of
3-year-old Madeleine McCann during a
family holiday in Portugal six years
ago, attracted over 6.5 million viewers,
along with a mass of publicity before
and after transmission.
The occasion of the programme was the
decision by Scotland Yard to present the
main findings of its renewed efforts –
involving a 37-strong investigative team
– to find the child, prompted by an
assurance given by Prime Minister David
Cameron to Madeleine’s parents, Gerry
and Kate, that the closing of the
Portuguese investigation into the case
would not be allowed to be the final
word.
The programme item was curiously inept.
Real footage of the McCann family was
constantly intercut with shots of (not
very) lookalikes: confusing and
distracting at the same time. Towards
the end, there was reference to a search
for a number of long-haired men who had
been seen hanging around the apartment
block in the holiday resort: yet the
only video the “reconstruction” managed
to offer was of several men with
close-cropped heads.
Much of the publicity the programme
attracted centred on new electronic
photofits that featured prominently in
the programme. They had been generated
in the course of interviews with an
Irish family, the Smiths, who had also
been on holiday in the Praia da Luz
resort where the McCanns and some
friends of theirs had gathered in April
2007.
Attentive viewers might have been
puzzled as to how the Irish witnesses
were able to provide such detailed
images, six years after the event. We
were not told. The interview with the
detective leading the Scotland Yard
inquiry did not touch on the subject.
The next day, October 15th, the Daily
Express – part of the newspaper group
owned by Richard Desmond which has paid
out over half a million pounds to the
McCanns in compensation for libellous
stories about Madeleine’s disappearance
– noted that these photofits were
actually five years old, but had never
been released publicly.
On October 27th, we learned more. The
Sunday Times
claimed that the photofits had actually
been compiled in 2008 by a team of
private investigators hired by the Find
Madeleine Fund, which had been set up by
the McCanns. The investigation had cost
£500,000, and had been led by Henri
Exton, a former head of MI5 undercover
operations. But the company Exton had
worked for, Oakley International, had
fallen out with the McCanns.
Ostensibly, the dispute was over money,
but the McCanns also imposed a ban on
any publicising of the contents of the
Exton report. According to the Sunday
Times, it had contained criticisms of
the evidence provided by the friends of
the McCanns, and by the McCanns
themselves, even raising the possibility
that Madeleine might have died after
wandering out of the family’s rented
apartment through unsecured doors.
Over the years, the McCanns have issued
seven different photofits, including one
provided by their friend Jane Tanner,
who thought she saw a man carrying a
child at about 9.15 on the evening
Madeleine disappeared. Exton discounted
this sighting, and thought the Smith
sighting, at about 10 pm, was the most
significant. Yet the McCanns, despite
passionately pursuing the quest to find
their lost child, chose never to issue
the Smith photofit.
The Scotland Yard team has now satisfied
itself that the Tanner sighting can be
excluded, agrees that the 10 pm timeline
is the correct one and regards the Smith
photofit as the most promising lead:
five years after the McCanns themselves
suppressed all this information,
according to the Sunday Times.
Whatever their reasons for doing so, the
McCanns are not accountable to the
public, despite Gerry’s regular lectures
on how the press in general should
behave, and why a Royal Charter version
of the Leveson recommendations is needed
to keep newspapers honest and
straightforward in their reporting.
The story in the Sunday Times also
indicated that the Exton report included
a section in which the father of the
Smith family, Martin Smith, noted that
his observation of how Gerry McCann used
to carry Madeleine on his shoulder
reminded him of the man he saw carrying
a child at 10 pm on the night Madeleine
disappeared. He does not think the man
actually was Gerry, but it is not hard
to work out why the leader of the
Portuguese inquiry concluded that the
McCanns were implicated in the
disappearance. The McCanns are suing him
for libel, and both the Portuguese
police and Scotland Yard are satisfied
they had no part in the disappearance,
but fear of inciting more press
speculation in the UK may explain the
decision to suppress the entire Oakley
report.
It is hard to believe that the
Crimewatch team was ignorant of this
history. It would have been incredibly
unprofessional of them not even to ask
how and when Scotland Yard had obtained
the “new” photofits. The programme
referred to the Irish family, and a
“fresh” investigation, but the absence
of any reference to “new” photofits
strongly suggests that Crimewatch knew
the background perfectly well.
Does this matter? Crimewatch occupies an
uneasy space between entertainment and
information. Its brief is undoubtedly
one of public service, but it is not in
the business of journalism. No
journalist would go out of his way to
mislead the public in the way this
edition of Crimewatch managed to do.
The essence of Crimewatch is complicity:
close co-operation with the police and
the purported victims of crime, to the
point of eliminating anything awkward
that might get in the way of that joint
endeavour. The Sunday Times quoted a
source close to the McCanns as saying
that release of the original Oakley
investigation might have distracted the
public from their objective of finding
their child. Yet the bottom line of this
story is that the parents deliberately
withheld, for five years, the photofits
that Scotland Yard now says are the most
important evidence in the search for the
supposed culprits. For any journalist,
that would have been at least as
important a fact to reveal to the public
as the photofits themselves.
Yet the most important area of
journalism in the UK – the BBC, which
accounts for over 60% of all news
consumption – has remained silent on the
revelations in the Sunday Times. Even
the BBC website, with over 900 stories
related to the disappearance over the
years, has not found room for that
startling information (though you can
find links to the Daily Star’s website,
which repeated much of the Sunday Times
material on October 28th). It would be
dismaying if some kind of misguided
loyalty to the non-journalists at
Crimewatch was inhibiting the 8,000 BBC
staff who work in its news division.
It is, of course, just possible that
Crimewatch was itself duped by the
McCanns: but I doubt it. Instead, the
editor chose to join the McCanns in
trying to dupe the public. Neither
option shows the BBC in a good light.
Whatever the failings over the two
Newsnight items – the untransmitted one
on Jimmy Savile, the transmitted one
that libelled Lord McAlpine – no-one can
argue that there was any definite
intention to mislead the public. Sadly,
the same cannot be said of October’s
Crimewatch. |
