The
peaceful seaside village of Praia da Luz
was the unlikely setting for what turned
out to be the most reported and
discussed missing person case in human
history. The disappearance has also been
one of the most mystifying,
controversial and bitter cases of its
kind in modern times. For me as a
reporter it all started so quietly.
On arrival in the village before 8.30am
on Friday 4th May 2007, I expected to
see some urgent activity. A young
British girl, Madeleine McCann, had gone
missing the previous night. At first I
saw no movement at all. The village was
silent and still. While driving around,
I came across a single police vehicle
parked on the roadside at a junction of
minor roads towards the back of the
village. I parked directly behind it. A
few uniformed police officers were
standing outside a block of holiday
apartments. The only other people in
sight were two women in conversation
close to a corner ground floor
apartment, 5A. As I approached, I
noticed that one of them was clearly
distressed, so much so I guessed she
must be the missing girl's mother, Kate
McCann. Later I learned that the other
woman was a senior social worker on
holiday from England. I overheard Mrs
McCann tell her the police were "doing
nothing" to find her daughter. She
complained that they had not even
questioned people staying in the same
block of apartments. I understood the
social worker to suggest that a
description of the missing child should
be circulated more widely. That prompted
me to introduce myself as an
Algarve-based reporter and say that I
could use contacts to arrange alerts to
be broadcast on an Algarve bilingual
radio station. It had flashed through my
mind that such alerts had been broadcast
when Rachel Charles was reported missing
in the Algarve 17 years earlier. The
social worker then mentioned the British
Consulate. I said I could help there too
as I knew the staff at the Consulate and
had just spoken to one of them on the
phone. Perhaps my offer sounded
disingenuous coming from a total
stranger and a reporter to boot. Anyway,
it was ignored.
As I moved around the village on foot
there was at least one obvious
manifestation of police activity. Police
officers with search dogs on leads were
vigorously combing the vicinity of the
apartments, the area around the village
church, on down towards the seashore and
along the full length of the long
curving beach. It was all being done in
silence.
The tranquillity outside apartment 5A
gradually changed. As the morning and
afternoon wore on, the number of people
arriving on the scene steadily
increased. Curious passers-by mingled
with reporters, photographers, TV
cameramen and staff manning outside
broadcast vans. A mixture of Portuguese,
British and other nationalities, we all
stood around asking each other questions
and wondering what had happened to the
little girl. All these years later, we
are none the wiser. In the days, weeks,
months and years following Madeleine's
disappearance, the few known facts have
been drowned in an ocean of public
confusion created by a combination of
conjecture, conspiracy theories,
distortions, misinformation and lies.
Madeleine's parents have always been
adamant she was abducted from the
apartment. Others think she may have
left the apartment of her own accord in
search of her parents and was later
abducted or met with harm in some other
way. Some are convinced her body was
secretly disposed of after she died
inadvertently in the apartment. The
trouble with all these theories is that
while each can be shown to be a possible
explanation, none is yet backed by solid
evidence that elevates it to one of
certainty. Upon publication of the
latest edition of this book, police in
both Portugal and Britain are
re-investigating the case, giving fresh
hope that the mystery may finally be
solved and that Madeleine, if still
alive, will be returned to her parents.
A breakthrough could come at any moment.
On the other hand it may always remain a
mystery. Meanwhile, let us reflect in a
little more detail on this complex saga
so far.
For the McCann family from Rothley in
Leicestershire the trauma began on the
sixth day of a weeklong holiday. They
were staying in a modest, ground-floor
apartment in a tourist complex. During
initial police questioning the day after
the disappearance, Kate and Gerry McCann
said they had settled Madeleine, aged
three, and her younger twin siblings
into their shared bedroom at 7.30pm. An
hour later, with the children asleep and
leaving the back patio door of apartment
5A closed but not locked, they joined
seven holidaying friends for dinner. As
on previous evenings, they dined in a
poolside restaurant situated at the back
of the apartment. It was a minute or
two's walking distance, about 120
metres, away.
Like Kate and Gerry McCann, four of
their seven friends were medical doctors
and some had children of their own. In
the course of a few parental checks,
Gerry McCann said he went back to
apartment 5A between 9.05pm and 9.10pm
and saw all three of his children sound
asleep. Kate McCann went to the
apartment at 10pm. Madeleine was not
there. Within half an hour of Kate
McCann rushing back to the restaurant to
raise the alarm, members of staff at the
tourist complex where the McCanns and
their friends were staying initiated a
search of the neighbourhood.
Holidaymakers and village residents
joined in. The Guarda Nacional República
(GNR) was alerted and soon had officers
on the scene. Two police search dogs
arrived. Police at first thought
Madeleine may have wandered off, but
Portugal's criminal investigation
service, the Polícia Judiciáia, was
informed after midnight. The
neighbourhood search involved about 60
people on a calm and cloudless night
with a full moon. It went on until about
4.30am.
Jane Tanner, a member of the group of
friends, told police she saw a man with
a child in his arms crossing the road in
front of the McCanns' apartment at about
9.15pm, soon after Gerry McCann's check.
For more than six years this sighting
remained central to the McCanns'
insistence that their daughter had been
abducted. A family on holiday from
Ireland also saw a man carrying a young
child. This was much further away,
closer to the centre of the village, at
10pm.
From the earliest days of the Portuguese
investigation, the McCanns received a
great deal of moral and financial
support. The British Foreign Office
showed remarkable interest. A wealthy
Scottish businessman, Stephen Winyard,
offered a £1 million reward for
information leading to Madeleine's
return. English tycoon Richard Branson
was among those who donated to the Find
Madeleine fund that quickly reached more
than £2.5 million. Football star David
Beckham, then playing for Real Madrid,
held up a Madeleine poster in a
televised appeal in Spain. In seeking
publicity on a grand scale, the McCanns
met with Pope Benedict XVI in Rome at
the end of May and had a photograph of
their missing daughter blessed by him.
Gerry travelled to Washington courtesy
of Branson's Virgin Atlantic airline and
visited the National Centre for Missing
and Exploited Children, the Justice
Department, Capitol Hill and the White
House.
By then, police had questioned and
declared Robert Murat an arguido
(suspect). Jane Tanner had claimed she
was almost certain Murat was the man she
saw carrying a child. Although insisting
he had spent the evening with his mother
in her house a short distance from
apartment 5A, Murat became the subject
of wild rumours and false newspaper
speculation. International media
coverage reached new heights four months
later, in September, when Kate and Gerry
McCann were also declared arguidos.
Clarence Mitchell, who had earlier spent
a month with the McCanns as a
representative of the Foreign and
Commonwealth Office, relinquished his
position as director of the media
monitoring unit at the British
government's Central Office of
Information to become the McCanns'
official spokesperson.
Among the obstacles confronting the
Portuguese police was the ever-pressing
presence of the media. Their constant
demand for news was complicated by a
Portuguese law that forbids the police
from openly discussing or divulging any
aspects of a criminal investigation.
Article 86 of the penal code amounts to
a gagging order on releasing anything
that might prejudice a case. As the
investigation wore on, this lack of
information frustrated reporters faced
with editors' demands for sensational
stories. In the absence of official
statements and verifiable advice,
certain newspapers indulged in an orgy
of innuendo, speculation, grossly
inaccurate and even fictitious
reporting. 'Leaks' from the Portuguese
police to the Portuguese press were
repeated and sometimes embellished in
mass-circulating British tabloids. Some
of the papers were eventually taken to
task for defamation and obliged to pay
large sums in damages.
The lead detective in the investigation,
Gonçalo Amaral, looked into the
likelihood of abduction but found no
evidence to substantiate the McCanns'
insistence that their daughter had been
kidnapped. He came to suspect that Kate
McCann had lied in claiming that an
intruder had opened the front window and
jemmied the shutter in the children's
bedroom. He thought the parents might
have invented the abduction story as a
cover-up after Madeleine died
inadvertently in the apartment, perhaps
from an overdose of a sedative or a
fall. This theory seemed to be supported
by traces of blood and cadaver odours
found by two specialist dogs brought out
from the UK. The traces were found in
the apartment and in the boot of a car
hired by the McCanns.
Five months into the investigation,
Gonçalo Amaral's involvement suddenly
ended when he was dismissed from the
case for imprudently alleging that
police in Britain were biased towards
the McCanns. Then, in July 2008 after 14
months of probing with no conclusive
breakthrough, the Polícia Judiciária
wrapped up their final report.
Portugal's attorney general lifted the
arguido status on all three suspects and
formally archived the case.
In 2011 at the behest of the McCanns,
Prime Minister David Cameron and Home
Secretary Theresa May asked the
Metropolitan Police Service to review
the vast amount of documentation from
the original Portuguese investigation,
as well as the results of inquiries made
by a succession of private investigators
hired by the McCanns. After two years,
the Met upgraded its review to a
full-scale investigation. Five months
later, in October 2013, the Portuguese
authorities ordered a re-opening of
their own investigation and went to work
on new evidence they had uncovered. This
occurred while a civil libel action was
in progress in Lisbon in which the
McCanns were suing Gonçalo Amaral over a
book he had written, A Verdade de
Mentira (The Truth of the Lie).
The McCanns had accepted £550,000 in
2008 from Express Newspapers in
compensation for scores of defamatory
articles in the Daily Express, Daily
Star and their Sunday sister titles.
Robert Murat was awarded £600,000 in
libel damages from Express Newspapers,
Associated Newspapers, the Mirror Group
and News Group Newspapers. In
compensation for Amaral’s book and a TV
documentary based on it, the McCanns
demanded €1.2 million.
The McCanns said the Portuguese police
had been "very open" with them at the
beginning of the original investigation.
Three months down the line they still
had "a very good working relationship."
Things hit rock bottom in September 2007
on being declared official suspects.
Faced not only with deep parental
anguish over the loss of their daughter,
Kate and Gerry McCann now had to cope
with the humility of being publicly
suspected of being the cause of her
disappearance. Kate's mother Susan Healy
was widely quoted as saying that the
pressure on her daughter was so great,
"I don't know how long she will hold on
for... I don't know if any human can
take such pressure." She added: "Kate is
an only child. If it was me, I'd die.
But she can't let herself get so low.
She has to think of her family, of Gerry
and the twins."
Amaral sank to a low ebb as well. With
pent up frustrations over what he
regarded as bias by the UK authorities
and non-cooperation by the McCanns, he
resigned from the police service and
became the target of insults in the
British press. His marriage broke down,
he moved away from his daughter in
Lisbon, grieved over the death of both
his mother and father, and lost weight
through illness. Soon after the 2013
start of the Scotland Yard
investigation, the Jane Tanner sighting
of a man carrying a child outside the
McCanns' apartment became irrelevant
when the man was publicly identified as
an innocent father carrying his own
child home from a crèche on the complex.
The other sighting by an Irish family
took on much greater significance with
the simultaneous publication of two
e-fit images produced by a team of
ex-MI5 private investigators employed by
the McCann's Find Madeleine fund after
the Portuguese authorities had shelved
their investigation five years earlier.
Publication of the e-fit images along
with televised appeals for information
resulted in thousands of phone calls and
emails. With international public
interest in the case elevated to its
2007 heights, the Portuguese police
re-opened their investigation to run
both alongside and in conjunction with
the British police. |
