Prosecution Exhibit 1: 'madeleine' - What's in the book?
The Complete Mystery of Madeleine McCann™ :: Books on the Madeleine McCann case :: Kate McCann's book, Prosecution Exhibit 1: 'madeleine'
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Re: Prosecution Exhibit 1: 'madeleine' - What's in the book?
by littlepixie 13.05.11 23:14
Can I just say a big Thank You to Tony for giving us a summary of the book so quickly.
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Re: Prosecution Exhibit 1: 'madeleine' - What's in the book?
by ufercoffy 13.05.11 23:21
littlepixie wrote:Can I just say a big Thank You to Tony for giving us a summary of the book so quickly.
Ditto
Glad I didn't buy it though
____________________
Whose cadaver scent and bodily fluid was found in the McCann's apartment and hire car if not Madeleine's?
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CHAPTER 18
by Tony Bennett 14.05.11 11:52
SUMMARY AND CRITIQUE
Chapter 18 ‘The Fightback Begins’
p. 261
Dr Kate - first day back home in Rothley: “…we needed to clear our names, comprehensively and quickly, before we could continue the search for Madeleine on any effective level. While suspicions remained among the authorities and the public that we had somehow been involved in our daughter’s disappearance, fewer people were going to be looking for her”.
Dr Kate: “The media coverage was absolutely huge, driven, it seemed, by the ‘ultimate twist’: the parents who were conducting an international campaign now rumoured to be suspected of hiding their own daughter’s body. It was despicable given that the basis for the stories was simply untrue”.
p. 262
Dr Kate: “Over the next few weeks our days would be filled with ’phone calls, e-mails and meetings, interspersed with hours holed up in the study in front of computer screens, researching and gathering information. We worked 16-hour days and frequently fell into bed at 2am. We rarely left the house…”
Dr Kate: “We were [sometimes] able to squeeze on a short, head-clearing run or spirit-boosting visit to the local church”.
The McCanns had four main issues to deal with:
They immediately contacted their GP, bearing in mind the ‘wild’ stories appearing in the press about Dr Kate’s ‘fragile mental state’, ‘inability to cope’ and ‘hyperactive children’. These stories, says Dr Kate, were ‘complete bullshit’.
Dr Kate: “Not once had our GP been contacted for any information about us, nobody asked him if we were well and healthy, whether he’d ever had any concerns about us or if we were on any medication; the police had not sought access to our medical notes…”
p. 263
The McCanns asked to see someone from Social Services. A Social Services manager and a child protection officer came round. Dr Kate: “I could tell they felt uncomfortable about having to subject us to this sort of scrutiny”. They ‘went through various formalities’ and were ‘totally professional’. Dr Kate does not disclose whether specific child protection procedures were followed e.g. putting the twins’ names on the Child Protection Register.
The police visited within 24 hours; sensor alarms were fitted in their home, the McCanns were given personal alarms, their back fence was increased in height, making it 12 feet high…Control Risks Group ‘sent a technical expert to check on our ’phone lines and rooms for any bugging devices’.
The media camped outside the house for two days, then retreated to the end of the cul-de-sac.
p. 264
Dr Kate: “…the frustrating necessity to shore up our defences not only distracted us from the search for Madeleine, it also robbed us of time with the twins”.
“The twins were both a little unsettled at night…”
Tuesday 11 September: A telephone ‘conference call’ between the McCanns and Michael Caplan Q.C., Angus McBride and Justine McGuiness… “Justine and Angus would visit the editors of the main tabloid newspapers and Angus would explain to them that there was absolutely no evidence to support our involvement in Madeleine’s disappearance”, but…“Angus and Justine’s action seemed to make next to no difference…”.
The press referred to a ‘100% DNA match’ pf samples with Madeleine’s DNA> Dr Kate: “Even if this had been true (which it turned out it wasn’t), it was perfectly feasible that Madeleine’s DNA could have been in the car for entirely innocent reasons…[or] the DNA [could have been] mine, Gerry’s, Sean’s or Amelie’s, since Madeleine inherited her DNA from Gerry and me (as have the twins), she possesses strands common to us all…”
p. 265
They had many letters of support from ‘people who could see through the lies and speculation’.
The lawyers suggested getting hold of the Renault Scenic, ‘left with a friend in Portugal’ for a ‘full forensic screen’.
Angus McBride flew out the same day to Portugal to talk to Carlos Pinto de Abreu, ‘Bob Small paid us a call’…“We knew he cared about us, about Madeleine, and about justice”. But Dr Kate was ‘exasperated’ that Bob Small kept saying he was ‘constrained by my position’, and wrote in her diary: “Very frustrating. You wonder, if the shit really hits the fan, who will actually put their necks out and stand up for us?”
p. 266
Dr Kate began a ‘detailed chronological account’ of ‘all our movements from 3 May to 7 September’, especially ‘filling in gaps in the first three weeks’…“I worked on this almost solidly for the next three weeks”.
Dr Kate: “I also contacted Foreign Office officials and consular staff to confirm details of all our meetings with them”.
Dr Kate: “My journals were so comprehensive, covering everything down to the most insignificant and boring incidents you can imagine, that by the time I had finished I was able to account for what we did and where we were at virtually ant given time over the whole four months. I would have put Sherlock Holmes out of a job, if I say so myself…[but] it was a travesty I’d had to produce it at all”.
Dr Kate: “Since 4 may, practically every step we’d taken outside our mark Warner apartment or the villa had been followed on TV by the entire world. How could we possibly have secretly hidden our daughter’s body, in such a safe place that it hadn’t been discovered, and then removed it (if our hiding place was that good, I wonder why would we have bothered), transport it in our Renault Scenic (which we hadn’t hired until 27 May) and buried her elsewhere - all without our media stalkers noticing a thing? It simply wasn’t feasible”. (COMMENT: The McCanns managed to throw off their ‘media stalkers’ for the trip to Huelva).
p. 267
Dr Kate: “…by the time I went to bed at night I often felt close to exploding with exasperation”.
An extract from Dr Kate’s diary:
”Gerry’s had a few tough days…was upset earlier on today…he seems very stressed…What have we done to deserve this? Immoral, inhumane, a total injustice. I don’t know how the Portuguese police sleep at night. Madeleine, nobody here…is going to stop looking for you…”
“By this time Gerry was deep into his next task: researching the validity of responses produced by blood and cadaver dogs”. She quotes a ‘US lawyer’ who cast doubt on their ability, claiming that cadaver dogs had ‘an abysmal performance’. The lawyer’s report (dated 1996) says: “…with respect to residual odour. The dog-handler teams performed significantly worse than if the handlers had simply flipped a coin to speculate as to the presence of residual odour at each location”.
p. 268
Dr Kate quotes from another report, dated 1990, which says:
“Almost all erroneous alerts originate not from the dog but from the handler’s misinterpretation of the dog’s signals. A false alert can result from the handler’s conscious or unconscious signals given by them to lead a dog where the handler suspects evidence to be located”.
Wednesday 12 September: Dr Kate says that this was the date they were first contacted by lawyer Edward Smethurst (COMMENT: I suspect that there is quite a lot left out of this book about the precise sequence of events relating to Edward Smethurst and Brian Kennedy).
Smethurst said he worked for Brian Kennedy, who is said to have said: “I can no longer sit idly by and watch…I want to step in and help the McCanns financially”.
A meeting was held with Brian Kennedy and Edward Smethurst at the offices of Kingsley Napley (where Michael Caplan Q.C. and Angus McBride were also based. Angus McBride drove up to Rothley to fetch the McCanns down to this meeting (!) Brian was “Much younger than I was expecting…relaxed, personable…from Edinburgh, married with five children, a self-made man who had started out as a window-cleaner...” He asked for an account of what happened on 3 May then said: “OK, that’s enough, I’ve always believed you…”
p. 269
Brian Kennedy said we must get the allegations against us out of the way and then we would be able to concentrate on finding Madeleine. Dr Kate: “I wanted to cry. Well, actually, I did cry. Here was somebody, at long last, who could see through all this rubbish and the damage it was doing”.
Dr Kate: “Discussions between ourselves, Brian and Ed, our lawyers and representatives from Control Risks continued through the afternoon”.
Let’s see who was attending those discussions:
1) Gerry McCann
2) Dr Kate
3) Brian Kennedy
4) Edward Smethurst
5) Michael Caplan QC
6) Angus McBride
7) and 8) Probably at least two staff from Control Risks Group.
A high-powered group. What did they talk about? This was Friday 14 September.
Dr Kate: “Everyone had agreed that it would be a great help to have Clarence Mitchell back on board to take care of media liaison, communications and public relations. We knew he was keen to rejoin us in spite of the government’s edict. Within three days, Clarence had resigned from the civil service and was back in the fold, his salary generously taken care of by Brian. We were absolutely delighted - as, incidentally, were the many little old ladies who wrote to tell us that they were sleeping much better since the return of that nice ‘Mr Mitchell’.”
p. 270
The children asked questions about where Madeleine was. One day, Sean, whom Dr Kate now calls ‘Seany’, “was wandering around the house telling anybody within earshot: ‘We can’t find Madeleine’.”
p. 271
Dr Kate recalls memories of Madeleine in the nursery school, at Stonehurst Farm and around the home etc. She cries.
Thursday 20 September: Dr Kate: “Gerry and I travelled to London again to meet no fewer than five lawyers” - Michael Caplan QC, Angus McBride, Edward Smethurst, Carlos Pinto de Abreu, and Rogerio Alves, another Portuguese lawyer, who was ‘President of the Portuguese Bar’ (barristers’ association).
(NOTE: Edward Smethurst was subsequently to be described as ‘The McCanns’ co-ordinating lawyer’. The cost of this meeting, including paying for the time and expense of travelling from Portugal, must have been tens of thousands of pounds).
p. 272
It was agreed that Carlos Pintu de Abreu would represent Gerry while Rogerio Alves would represent Dr Kate. They decided to ‘petition the prosecutor, asking to be informed of the evidence against us’. The McCanns would:
Dr Kate: “The meticulous record of events in my journals enabled us to account for every journey we made in the Renault Scenic, taking us to within a few kilometres of the much publicised ‘unexplained mystery mileage of the McCanns’ hire car’ which, of course, was no a mystery at all”.
p. 273
Then McCanns also supplied a list of witnesses they thought should be interested. The witnesses included the McCanns’ relatives, their ‘Tapas 7’ friends, their GP and staff at Madeleine’s nursery school.
Dr Kate: “Trisha and Sandy [Cameron]’s testimony would, you’d have thought, been particularly relevant to the hypothesis that we had ‘stored’ Madeleine’s body, since they were with us the whole time’ (NOTE: Trisha and Sandy Cameron did not go on the Huelva trip).
Dr Kate: “Brian Kennedy arranged for Jane tanner to see an FBI-accredited forensic sketch artist [NOTE: Melissa Little] to try to create an image of the man she saw carrying a child on 3 May”. A forensic team had been despatched from the U.K. to carry out a full forensic search of the Renault Scenic (NOTE: And the cost of this?)
Dr Kate: “…on 24 September, a forensic scientist from Control Risks came to take samples of hair from Sean, Amelie and myself”. (NOTE: See how often Control Risks Group is mentioned in Dr Kate’s account).
Dr Kate: “On the night Madeleine was taken, you may remember, Gerry and I had been very concerned that Sean and Amelie had hardly moved in their costs, let alone woken up, despite the commotion in the apartment (NOTE: When the McCanns, their friends and staff from Mark Warners were trampling all over the ‘crime scene’ contaminating the evidence).
Dr Kate: “…we had always suspected that all three children might have been sedated by the abductor. We mentioned this to the police that night and several more times in the following weeks, but no testing of blood, or hair, which could have revealed the presence of drugs, had ever been done”.
p. 274
The McCanns provided samples of hair from the twins and Dr Kate, because: “I was fed up with the constant insinuations that I took tranquillisers, sleeping pills or any medication, for that matter”. They lost “loads of hair”…”I cried as I heard the scissors in their baby-blond hair. I felt angry that the children had to go through this further insult…I cursed the abductor and the PJ…all the hair samples produced negative results. Whilst this didn’t totally exclude the possibility that the children had been sedated…it meant nobody else (including the PJ and the media) could prove otherwise. It also confirmed that I didn’t ‘abuse’ sedative medication. It is sad that we had to go to such lengths to demonstrate this; sadder still that such tests weren’t carried out at the time”.
Dr Kate then recites 7 hostile news headlines, among many.
p. 275
Dr Kate: “Angus McBride paid a second round of visits to newspaper editors, this time with Clarence. Michael Caplan Q.C. had write to the Chief Constable of Leicestershire [Matt Baggott] asking him to intervene. On 17 September, the Chief Constable wrote to newspapers and broadcasters urging restraint, to little effect. On 8 October, he sent a further letter, again making it clear that much of the media coverage simply had no foundation and that rumour appeared to have taken precedence over due diligence”.
Dr Kate then has a paragraph on her feelings: “…nights that were the worst…my brain would wander unbidden down black and terrifying avenues, I struggled constantly to think nice thoughts…the demons had me in their grip and would torture me mercilessly with images too frightening and painful to share…”
Paragraphs on the McCanns’ ‘sex life’ follow. “My sexual desire plummeted to zero…I was unable to permit myself any pleasure, whether it was reading a book or making love with my husband, and [there was] revulsion stirred up by my fear that Madeleine had suffered the worst fate we could imagine: falling into the hands of a paedophile. When she was first stolen, paedophiles were all we could think about, and it made us sick, ate away at us”.
p. 276
Dr Kate: “The idea of a monster like this touching my daughter, stroking her, defiling her perfect little body, just killed me, over and over again…it’s probably not surprising that even the thought of sex repulsed me. I would lie in bed, hating the person who had done this to us…I hated him. I wanted to kill him. I wanted to inflict the maximum possible pain on him for heaping all this misery on my family. I was angry and bitter…”
Dr Kate: “I worried that if I couldn’t get our sex life back on track our whole relationship would break down…I knew there were only two solutions: bringing Madeleine back or conquering my mental block. Since the first was not within my control, it was up to me to try to train my mind and my thought processes. So that is what I applied myself to doing”.
p. 277
Dr Kate refers to the children climbing into their bed during the night.
She then refers to Madeleine’s ‘star chart’, which she explains as follows:
“For a few weeks around the end of 2006 and the beginning of 2007, Madeleine had gone through a phase of coming through to our room before morning. We’d generally been very disciplined about taking her straight back to her own bed. I’d helped her make a reward chart, still pinned on the kitchen wall today, on which we’d stuck a star for every night she stayed tucked up. When she’d earned enough stars, she’d be allowed a special treat”. She said the PJ referred to it as a ‘punishment chart’.
p. 278
25 September: Dr Kate: “…we heard that a little blonde girl resembling Madeleine had been spotted with a group of Moroccan peasants. We received a photograph, taken by a Spanish tourist, in which the child was being carried on a woman’s back…a contingent of press had already jumped on the ’plane to Morocco to try to track down ‘Madeleine’. In the meantime, CEOP were using special IT techniques to improve the resolution of the photograph, then facial-recognition software to try to establish whether or not the child could be Madeleine Brian Kennedy called us later that evening to ask if we would like him to fly out to Morocco to find out for certain…we weren’t sure if this was either necessary or wise, but…off Brian went on his plane to northern Morocco.” (NOTE: There are major question marks about the provenance of this photograph and the precise sequence of events which led to its publication on the front page of almost every British newspaper. We will say more about this on our website in due course).
p. 279
Dr Kate: “The following day, we learned that the little girl was not Madeleine”.
On October 2. Goncalo Amaral was removed from the Portuguese investigation into Madeleine’s disappearance by Alipio Ribeiro: Dr Kate: “The reason for his removal, it was said, was that he had made controversial remarks about the involvement of the British authorities in the investigation”.
Dr Kate says that four months later, “Ribeiro would remark in an interview that the PJ’s decision to make us arguidos had been ‘too hasty’ Finally, we thought, someone in authority was showing common sense and decency”.
Chapter 18 ‘The Fightback Begins’
p. 261
Dr Kate - first day back home in Rothley: “…we needed to clear our names, comprehensively and quickly, before we could continue the search for Madeleine on any effective level. While suspicions remained among the authorities and the public that we had somehow been involved in our daughter’s disappearance, fewer people were going to be looking for her”.
Dr Kate: “The media coverage was absolutely huge, driven, it seemed, by the ‘ultimate twist’: the parents who were conducting an international campaign now rumoured to be suspected of hiding their own daughter’s body. It was despicable given that the basis for the stories was simply untrue”.
p. 262
Dr Kate: “Over the next few weeks our days would be filled with ’phone calls, e-mails and meetings, interspersed with hours holed up in the study in front of computer screens, researching and gathering information. We worked 16-hour days and frequently fell into bed at 2am. We rarely left the house…”
Dr Kate: “We were [sometimes] able to squeeze on a short, head-clearing run or spirit-boosting visit to the local church”.
The McCanns had four main issues to deal with:
- protecting our children
- ensuring the safety of our family
- preparing our defence with lawyers
- trying to stop the press publishing lies.
They immediately contacted their GP, bearing in mind the ‘wild’ stories appearing in the press about Dr Kate’s ‘fragile mental state’, ‘inability to cope’ and ‘hyperactive children’. These stories, says Dr Kate, were ‘complete bullshit’.
Dr Kate: “Not once had our GP been contacted for any information about us, nobody asked him if we were well and healthy, whether he’d ever had any concerns about us or if we were on any medication; the police had not sought access to our medical notes…”
p. 263
The McCanns asked to see someone from Social Services. A Social Services manager and a child protection officer came round. Dr Kate: “I could tell they felt uncomfortable about having to subject us to this sort of scrutiny”. They ‘went through various formalities’ and were ‘totally professional’. Dr Kate does not disclose whether specific child protection procedures were followed e.g. putting the twins’ names on the Child Protection Register.
The police visited within 24 hours; sensor alarms were fitted in their home, the McCanns were given personal alarms, their back fence was increased in height, making it 12 feet high…Control Risks Group ‘sent a technical expert to check on our ’phone lines and rooms for any bugging devices’.
The media camped outside the house for two days, then retreated to the end of the cul-de-sac.
p. 264
Dr Kate: “…the frustrating necessity to shore up our defences not only distracted us from the search for Madeleine, it also robbed us of time with the twins”.
“The twins were both a little unsettled at night…”
Tuesday 11 September: A telephone ‘conference call’ between the McCanns and Michael Caplan Q.C., Angus McBride and Justine McGuiness… “Justine and Angus would visit the editors of the main tabloid newspapers and Angus would explain to them that there was absolutely no evidence to support our involvement in Madeleine’s disappearance”, but…“Angus and Justine’s action seemed to make next to no difference…”.
The press referred to a ‘100% DNA match’ pf samples with Madeleine’s DNA> Dr Kate: “Even if this had been true (which it turned out it wasn’t), it was perfectly feasible that Madeleine’s DNA could have been in the car for entirely innocent reasons…[or] the DNA [could have been] mine, Gerry’s, Sean’s or Amelie’s, since Madeleine inherited her DNA from Gerry and me (as have the twins), she possesses strands common to us all…”
p. 265
They had many letters of support from ‘people who could see through the lies and speculation’.
The lawyers suggested getting hold of the Renault Scenic, ‘left with a friend in Portugal’ for a ‘full forensic screen’.
Angus McBride flew out the same day to Portugal to talk to Carlos Pinto de Abreu, ‘Bob Small paid us a call’…“We knew he cared about us, about Madeleine, and about justice”. But Dr Kate was ‘exasperated’ that Bob Small kept saying he was ‘constrained by my position’, and wrote in her diary: “Very frustrating. You wonder, if the shit really hits the fan, who will actually put their necks out and stand up for us?”
p. 266
Dr Kate began a ‘detailed chronological account’ of ‘all our movements from 3 May to 7 September’, especially ‘filling in gaps in the first three weeks’…“I worked on this almost solidly for the next three weeks”.
Dr Kate: “I also contacted Foreign Office officials and consular staff to confirm details of all our meetings with them”.
Dr Kate: “My journals were so comprehensive, covering everything down to the most insignificant and boring incidents you can imagine, that by the time I had finished I was able to account for what we did and where we were at virtually ant given time over the whole four months. I would have put Sherlock Holmes out of a job, if I say so myself…[but] it was a travesty I’d had to produce it at all”.
Dr Kate: “Since 4 may, practically every step we’d taken outside our mark Warner apartment or the villa had been followed on TV by the entire world. How could we possibly have secretly hidden our daughter’s body, in such a safe place that it hadn’t been discovered, and then removed it (if our hiding place was that good, I wonder why would we have bothered), transport it in our Renault Scenic (which we hadn’t hired until 27 May) and buried her elsewhere - all without our media stalkers noticing a thing? It simply wasn’t feasible”. (COMMENT: The McCanns managed to throw off their ‘media stalkers’ for the trip to Huelva).
p. 267
Dr Kate: “…by the time I went to bed at night I often felt close to exploding with exasperation”.
An extract from Dr Kate’s diary:
”Gerry’s had a few tough days…was upset earlier on today…he seems very stressed…What have we done to deserve this? Immoral, inhumane, a total injustice. I don’t know how the Portuguese police sleep at night. Madeleine, nobody here…is going to stop looking for you…”
“By this time Gerry was deep into his next task: researching the validity of responses produced by blood and cadaver dogs”. She quotes a ‘US lawyer’ who cast doubt on their ability, claiming that cadaver dogs had ‘an abysmal performance’. The lawyer’s report (dated 1996) says: “…with respect to residual odour. The dog-handler teams performed significantly worse than if the handlers had simply flipped a coin to speculate as to the presence of residual odour at each location”.
p. 268
Dr Kate quotes from another report, dated 1990, which says:
“Almost all erroneous alerts originate not from the dog but from the handler’s misinterpretation of the dog’s signals. A false alert can result from the handler’s conscious or unconscious signals given by them to lead a dog where the handler suspects evidence to be located”.
Wednesday 12 September: Dr Kate says that this was the date they were first contacted by lawyer Edward Smethurst (COMMENT: I suspect that there is quite a lot left out of this book about the precise sequence of events relating to Edward Smethurst and Brian Kennedy).
Smethurst said he worked for Brian Kennedy, who is said to have said: “I can no longer sit idly by and watch…I want to step in and help the McCanns financially”.
A meeting was held with Brian Kennedy and Edward Smethurst at the offices of Kingsley Napley (where Michael Caplan Q.C. and Angus McBride were also based. Angus McBride drove up to Rothley to fetch the McCanns down to this meeting (!) Brian was “Much younger than I was expecting…relaxed, personable…from Edinburgh, married with five children, a self-made man who had started out as a window-cleaner...” He asked for an account of what happened on 3 May then said: “OK, that’s enough, I’ve always believed you…”
p. 269
Brian Kennedy said we must get the allegations against us out of the way and then we would be able to concentrate on finding Madeleine. Dr Kate: “I wanted to cry. Well, actually, I did cry. Here was somebody, at long last, who could see through all this rubbish and the damage it was doing”.
Dr Kate: “Discussions between ourselves, Brian and Ed, our lawyers and representatives from Control Risks continued through the afternoon”.
Let’s see who was attending those discussions:
1) Gerry McCann
2) Dr Kate
3) Brian Kennedy
4) Edward Smethurst
5) Michael Caplan QC
6) Angus McBride
7) and 8) Probably at least two staff from Control Risks Group.
A high-powered group. What did they talk about? This was Friday 14 September.
Dr Kate: “Everyone had agreed that it would be a great help to have Clarence Mitchell back on board to take care of media liaison, communications and public relations. We knew he was keen to rejoin us in spite of the government’s edict. Within three days, Clarence had resigned from the civil service and was back in the fold, his salary generously taken care of by Brian. We were absolutely delighted - as, incidentally, were the many little old ladies who wrote to tell us that they were sleeping much better since the return of that nice ‘Mr Mitchell’.”
p. 270
The children asked questions about where Madeleine was. One day, Sean, whom Dr Kate now calls ‘Seany’, “was wandering around the house telling anybody within earshot: ‘We can’t find Madeleine’.”
p. 271
Dr Kate recalls memories of Madeleine in the nursery school, at Stonehurst Farm and around the home etc. She cries.
Thursday 20 September: Dr Kate: “Gerry and I travelled to London again to meet no fewer than five lawyers” - Michael Caplan QC, Angus McBride, Edward Smethurst, Carlos Pinto de Abreu, and Rogerio Alves, another Portuguese lawyer, who was ‘President of the Portuguese Bar’ (barristers’ association).
(NOTE: Edward Smethurst was subsequently to be described as ‘The McCanns’ co-ordinating lawyer’. The cost of this meeting, including paying for the time and expense of travelling from Portugal, must have been tens of thousands of pounds).
p. 272
It was agreed that Carlos Pintu de Abreu would represent Gerry while Rogerio Alves would represent Dr Kate. They decided to ‘petition the prosecutor, asking to be informed of the evidence against us’. The McCanns would:
- submit their own information
- submit a detailed and full account of their movements from May to September 2007
- submit a record of all their trips in the Renault Scenic
- submit the findings of Gerry’s research on the unreliability of bloodhounds and cadaver dogs.
Dr Kate: “The meticulous record of events in my journals enabled us to account for every journey we made in the Renault Scenic, taking us to within a few kilometres of the much publicised ‘unexplained mystery mileage of the McCanns’ hire car’ which, of course, was no a mystery at all”.
p. 273
Then McCanns also supplied a list of witnesses they thought should be interested. The witnesses included the McCanns’ relatives, their ‘Tapas 7’ friends, their GP and staff at Madeleine’s nursery school.
Dr Kate: “Trisha and Sandy [Cameron]’s testimony would, you’d have thought, been particularly relevant to the hypothesis that we had ‘stored’ Madeleine’s body, since they were with us the whole time’ (NOTE: Trisha and Sandy Cameron did not go on the Huelva trip).
Dr Kate: “Brian Kennedy arranged for Jane tanner to see an FBI-accredited forensic sketch artist [NOTE: Melissa Little] to try to create an image of the man she saw carrying a child on 3 May”. A forensic team had been despatched from the U.K. to carry out a full forensic search of the Renault Scenic (NOTE: And the cost of this?)
Dr Kate: “…on 24 September, a forensic scientist from Control Risks came to take samples of hair from Sean, Amelie and myself”. (NOTE: See how often Control Risks Group is mentioned in Dr Kate’s account).
Dr Kate: “On the night Madeleine was taken, you may remember, Gerry and I had been very concerned that Sean and Amelie had hardly moved in their costs, let alone woken up, despite the commotion in the apartment (NOTE: When the McCanns, their friends and staff from Mark Warners were trampling all over the ‘crime scene’ contaminating the evidence).
Dr Kate: “…we had always suspected that all three children might have been sedated by the abductor. We mentioned this to the police that night and several more times in the following weeks, but no testing of blood, or hair, which could have revealed the presence of drugs, had ever been done”.
p. 274
The McCanns provided samples of hair from the twins and Dr Kate, because: “I was fed up with the constant insinuations that I took tranquillisers, sleeping pills or any medication, for that matter”. They lost “loads of hair”…”I cried as I heard the scissors in their baby-blond hair. I felt angry that the children had to go through this further insult…I cursed the abductor and the PJ…all the hair samples produced negative results. Whilst this didn’t totally exclude the possibility that the children had been sedated…it meant nobody else (including the PJ and the media) could prove otherwise. It also confirmed that I didn’t ‘abuse’ sedative medication. It is sad that we had to go to such lengths to demonstrate this; sadder still that such tests weren’t carried out at the time”.
Dr Kate then recites 7 hostile news headlines, among many.
p. 275
Dr Kate: “Angus McBride paid a second round of visits to newspaper editors, this time with Clarence. Michael Caplan Q.C. had write to the Chief Constable of Leicestershire [Matt Baggott] asking him to intervene. On 17 September, the Chief Constable wrote to newspapers and broadcasters urging restraint, to little effect. On 8 October, he sent a further letter, again making it clear that much of the media coverage simply had no foundation and that rumour appeared to have taken precedence over due diligence”.
Dr Kate then has a paragraph on her feelings: “…nights that were the worst…my brain would wander unbidden down black and terrifying avenues, I struggled constantly to think nice thoughts…the demons had me in their grip and would torture me mercilessly with images too frightening and painful to share…”
Paragraphs on the McCanns’ ‘sex life’ follow. “My sexual desire plummeted to zero…I was unable to permit myself any pleasure, whether it was reading a book or making love with my husband, and [there was] revulsion stirred up by my fear that Madeleine had suffered the worst fate we could imagine: falling into the hands of a paedophile. When she was first stolen, paedophiles were all we could think about, and it made us sick, ate away at us”.
p. 276
Dr Kate: “The idea of a monster like this touching my daughter, stroking her, defiling her perfect little body, just killed me, over and over again…it’s probably not surprising that even the thought of sex repulsed me. I would lie in bed, hating the person who had done this to us…I hated him. I wanted to kill him. I wanted to inflict the maximum possible pain on him for heaping all this misery on my family. I was angry and bitter…”
Dr Kate: “I worried that if I couldn’t get our sex life back on track our whole relationship would break down…I knew there were only two solutions: bringing Madeleine back or conquering my mental block. Since the first was not within my control, it was up to me to try to train my mind and my thought processes. So that is what I applied myself to doing”.
p. 277
Dr Kate refers to the children climbing into their bed during the night.
She then refers to Madeleine’s ‘star chart’, which she explains as follows:
“For a few weeks around the end of 2006 and the beginning of 2007, Madeleine had gone through a phase of coming through to our room before morning. We’d generally been very disciplined about taking her straight back to her own bed. I’d helped her make a reward chart, still pinned on the kitchen wall today, on which we’d stuck a star for every night she stayed tucked up. When she’d earned enough stars, she’d be allowed a special treat”. She said the PJ referred to it as a ‘punishment chart’.
p. 278
25 September: Dr Kate: “…we heard that a little blonde girl resembling Madeleine had been spotted with a group of Moroccan peasants. We received a photograph, taken by a Spanish tourist, in which the child was being carried on a woman’s back…a contingent of press had already jumped on the ’plane to Morocco to try to track down ‘Madeleine’. In the meantime, CEOP were using special IT techniques to improve the resolution of the photograph, then facial-recognition software to try to establish whether or not the child could be Madeleine Brian Kennedy called us later that evening to ask if we would like him to fly out to Morocco to find out for certain…we weren’t sure if this was either necessary or wise, but…off Brian went on his plane to northern Morocco.” (NOTE: There are major question marks about the provenance of this photograph and the precise sequence of events which led to its publication on the front page of almost every British newspaper. We will say more about this on our website in due course).
p. 279
Dr Kate: “The following day, we learned that the little girl was not Madeleine”.
On October 2. Goncalo Amaral was removed from the Portuguese investigation into Madeleine’s disappearance by Alipio Ribeiro: Dr Kate: “The reason for his removal, it was said, was that he had made controversial remarks about the involvement of the British authorities in the investigation”.
Dr Kate says that four months later, “Ribeiro would remark in an interview that the PJ’s decision to make us arguidos had been ‘too hasty’ Finally, we thought, someone in authority was showing common sense and decency”.
Tony Bennett- Investigator
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Re: Prosecution Exhibit 1: 'madeleine' - What's in the book?
by Anon 14.05.11 13:41
Tony Bennett wrote:The police visited within 24 hours; sensor alarms were fitted in their home, the McCanns were given personal alarms, their back fence was increased in height, making it 12 feet high…Control Risks Group ‘sent a technical expert to check on our ’phone lines and rooms for any bugging devices’.
The McCann's were suspects in the death and concealment of their daughter...why were they given personal alarms, sensor alarms, high fences etc? Who paid for all this? What/who were they being protected from? Do other criminals get this sort of protection? They had more protection than they gave their children. They didn't have personal alarms or a high fence to protect them.
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Join date : 2010-10-31
Re: Prosecution Exhibit 1: 'madeleine' - What's in the book?
by Guest 14.05.11 13:55
Anon wrote:Tony Bennett wrote:The police visited within 24 hours; sensor alarms were fitted in their home, the McCanns were given personal alarms, their back fence was increased in height, making it 12 feet high…Control Risks Group ‘sent a technical expert to check on our ’phone lines and rooms for any bugging devices’.
The McCann's were suspects in the death and concealment of their daughter...why were they given personal alarms, sensor alarms, high fences etc? Who paid for all this? What/who were they being protected from? Do other criminals get this sort of protection? They had more protection than they gave their children. They didn't have personal alarms or a high fence to protect them.
And why would you worry about bugging devices. It is normally only the police that would do that sort of thing, if inside the house,(he says rooms) newspapers and the like wouldn't have access. So why would you think they would do that?
Guest- Guest
Re: Prosecution Exhibit 1: 'madeleine' - What's in the book?
by Guest 14.05.11 14:04
The involvement of CRG is important. The company was apparently retained as part of a “crisis management” team by Bell Pottinger on behalf of Mark Warner. Some CRG specialist were probably in Luz before 13th May 2007 but Mr Farrow is the ex-head of the Economic Crime Unit in the City of London Police and Mr Keenan an ex-Superintendent from the Metropolitan Police with specialist fraud and investigative experience.
So why would those out to protect the image of Mark Warner, be also out to ensure that the McCann's were not being bugged?
So why would those out to protect the image of Mark Warner, be also out to ensure that the McCann's were not being bugged?
Guest- Guest
CHAPTER 19
by Tony Bennett 14.05.11 15:11
SUMMARY AND CRITIQUE
Chapter 19 ‘Action on Three Fronts’
p. 280
Dr Kate discusses the need to appoint private investigators: “Once we were declared arguidos, it became frighteningly clear to us that [the PJ] were no longer looking for Madeleine. What they were looking for now, it seemed, was a conviction”.
p. 281
Dr Kate: “We had no option but to launch our own investigation”.
Dr Kate: “We knew nothing about private investigators…We pictured a smart, intuitive lone operator, scornful of authority, who somehow always manages to see what everyone else has missed and never fails to get his man”.
Dr Kate: “Venturing into unfamiliar territory [i.e. the world of private investigators] of any sort is never easy, and exploring the field of private investigation has been a total minefield for us. We were approached by many firms and individuals in several countries, all claiming to have the relevant expertise…How do you choose?”
p. 282
There is a lot of vague waffle about the investigation teams they have chosen…”…we have continued to review our progress and explore new strategies and options…often someone with something extra to bring to the search will come along…we change or add to the team to keep the search moving forward…the time and energy it takes to brief a new team is immense. Just bringing them up to speed is an exhausting and emotional process”.
Metodo 3 is discussed, with (not very convincing) reasons given why they were chosen.
p. 283
There is more waffle about how difficult it is to choose the ‘right’ investigators and how naïve and inexperienced they were in all this, then comes this:
Dr Kate: We have no doubt that Metodo 3 made significant strides, but unfortunately, in mid-December, one of their senior investigators [NOTE: Actually their boss, Francisco Marco!) gave an overly optimistic interview to the media. He implied the team were close to finding Madeleine and declared that he hoped she would be home by Christmas Gerry and I did not pay much heed to these bullish assertions”.
COMMENT: The McCanns were content for these utterly false, bogus claims to be recycled on front pages by British tabloids. Metodo 3 even had the effrontery to claim that they ‘knew Madeleine was alive’, that they ‘knew where Madeleine is’ and that their men were ‘closing in on the abductors’.
Besides that, Dr Kate claims that ‘Metodo 3 made significant strides’. But that claim is utterly contradicted by the plain fact that after the McCanns have used at least seven private investigation teams, and spent millions of pounds of public money, and after the expiry of four years, neither they, nor their lawyers, nor their advisers, nor their private investigators, can give any of us even one usable fact about who the alleged abductor might have been and where (if anywhere) he took Madeleine. The whole world has been asked to search for Madeleine, yet apart from two contradictory accounts of a person said to be carrying a child on the evening of 3 May (one man is said to have had ‘long black hair’, the other ‘short brown hair’), we have nothing.
Dr Kate McCann refers to Metodo 3’s lies about knowing where Madeleine is and falsely boasting that she would be ‘home by Christmas’ as “a glitch” (p. 283).
Dr Kate: “That glitch apart, Metodo 3 worked very hard for us and, just for the record, their fees were very low: most of the money they were paid was for verified expenses…we maintain good relations with Metodo 3 today. We had the sense that they genuinely cared about Madeleine’s fate…”
COMMENT: The McCanns’ accounts show that they paid Metodo 3 a lump sum of £250,000 for about six months’ work. Dr Kate in her book has totally ducked the involvement of Metodo 3 in financing a strange lawyer from Madeira, Marcos Aragao Corriea, to search the Arade Dam for Madeleine’s remains, an issue we cover in detail on our website: see John Whitehouse’s article: ‘The McCanns’ Private Investigators: We Investigate”.
There's not much else about their private investigations, though Kevin Halligen gets a mention.
Dr Kate writes (p. 283):
"We had one particularly bad experience with a man named Kevin Halligen (or Richard, as we knew him). Halligen was the CEO of a private-investigation foirm calld Oakley International which was hired by Madeleine's Fund for six months from the end of March 2008..."
She then refers to three 'phases' of the Halligen investigation, saying only that during the third phase, "...we began to have concerns".
Later (p. 284), she admits:
"Several months later, one of the investigators subcontracted by Oakley contacted us to demand paymet for his services. We had already settled Oakley's bill for this work months before, but apparently the company had not paid him. He was not the only one...We were upset..."
There is no mention whatsoever by Dr kate of any attempt by either the McCanns or by the Find Madeleine Fund to sue Halligen for his obviously fraudulent conduct.
p. 283
Dr Kate claims: “The first and second phases of the contract [with Oakley International] ran fairly smoothly; they had put in place systems to gather, collate, prioritise and follow up the information coming in as a result of appeals Gerry and I made around the first anniversary of Madeleine’s abduction. There is lttlle doubt that at that stage progress was being made”.
COMMENT: Again, what ‘progress’? Kevin Halligen and his Oakley International achieved precisely nothing. We must also remember that the fraudster and con-man Halligen and his essentially one-man band ‘Oakley’ outfit were falsely described by the McCanns’ reputation manager Clarence Mitchell as ‘the big boys of international private investigations’. That now seems like a calculated lie by Mitchell.
p. 284
Brushing aside the ‘Madeleine home by Christmas’ ‘glitch’ by Metodo 3 and the utterly disastrous and wasteful employment of Kevin Halligen, Dr Kate sails bravely on with: “For the most part, though, our experiences with independent investigators have been good”, once again ignoring the fact that, collectively, these highly-paid investigators have yielded precisely nil information of any use.
The arrival of Dave Edgar
Dr Kate now refers obliquely to the appointment of former Detective Inspector Dave Edgar (and his colleague Arthur Cowley) to head up their investigation. In other places, the McCanns say this came about in November 2008; please see articles on our website about Dave Edgar, notably the recent one (May 2011) again filed by our John Whtehouse.
Dr Kate writes: “Our current tried and tested team has more or less been in place, with a few modifications, since October. It is spearheaded by a former police officer…” [Dave Edgar].
There is then a paragraph puffing up the quality and expertise of their private investigation team, which once again we say has brought no results whatsoever of any practical value. Dr Kate: “…there is input from strategy advisers and specialists in various fields as required, enabling us to recruit the best-qualified people available to handle particular tasks…it’s a system with which we have made encouraging progress”.
p. 285
There’s a paragraph about Gerry and his work at Glenfield Hospital. Dr Kate: “Almost every evening, after the kids are in bed, he is at his computer or on the ’phone meeting the demands of his other job: continuing the campaign to find Madeleine”.
The next paragraph gives rather convoluted explanations as to why she ‘could not’ go back to work herself…“…I’m sure some of my patients would undoubtedly find it awkward dealing with me”.
Dr Kate: “…handling the mail is virtually a full-time job, and some projects, such a analysing the PJ files once they were released to us, have involved months of work”.
p. 286
Dr Kate talks about preparations for Christmas: “One morning in November, Amelie talked incessantly about her sister on the way to nursery, ‘Madeleine’s getting a big teddy bear for Christmas’…I was quite tearful…it was the mention of Christmas that tipped me over the edge”.
Dr Kate: “…O switched on the TV…and caught a review of next morning’s paper...I was confronted by Madeleine’s face on the front page of a tabloid beneath a headline screaming: ‘SHE’S DEAD’. I got little sleep after that. I thought I would never be able to stop crying. The pain was crippling”.
Later, Amelie said: “Mummy, Madeleine’s coming…Santa’s going to give her a big cuddle then bring her to Mummy’.
The McCanns went to relatives in Yorkshire and Scotland over Christmas. In Scotland, Amelie arranged the beds: “Girls together. Mummy, Amelie and Madeleine. I’ll save this place here for Madeleine’.
Dr Kate: “We had hoped that the judicial secrecy restrictions would be lifted early in 2008, giving us access to the police files…”
p. 287
On 8 January there was a newspaper headline: ‘IT WAS HER BLOOD IN PARENTS’ HIRE CAR’…“How could the press be so heartless?”
The McCanns had consulted Adam Tudor of Carter-Ruck in 2007; now they consulted him again after some lurid headlines and ‘three completely untrue stories’ in the Daily Express.
p. 288
Carter-Ruck took on the case on a ‘no-win no-fee’ basis which “certainly made our decision a lot easier”. The Express Group “finally conceded that their stories were untrue”. They paid £550,000 to the Find Madeleine Fund. The McCanns had cited over 100 libellous articles in their claim against the Express Group.
There is then a homily on how the press should behave responsibly.
p. 289
The McCanns list their four main benefactors and helpers:
The McCanns later got more damages from Associated Newspapers. The amount paid is not disclosed by Dr Kate. The ‘Tapas 7’ got £375.000. Robert Murat got £600,000 from four newspaper groups and then even more from SKY TV.
Dr Kate: “Adam Tudor and his colleague Isabel Hudson continue to do a vast amount of work for us, without payment, most of it quietly, behind the scenes. They have given us invaluable advice, for example, in our attempts to deal with the widespread defamatory material circulating on the internet. We have taken action against one or two websites, but it has proved almost impossible to get this stuff removed from some of them, particularly those hosted in the U.S.A…You could spend your whole life doing nothing but trying to shut down crank websites with little prospect of success”.
p. 290
The next few pages details the McCanns attempts to get linked to various ‘Missing Children’ campaigns, such as the proposed E.U.-wide ‘Amber Alert’ system. Dr McCann calls them CRAs - ‘child rescue alerts systems’.
Dr Kate: “It had always been part of our plan for the future of the Find Madeleine campaign to use our resources, and the attention focussed on us, to try to save other children and their families from the same nightmare…As a result of the unprecedented publicity surrounding our case, Madeleine’s image had become almost iconic, the face that represents all missing children”.
p. 291
There’s a paragraph about the ‘massive scale’ of the problem of missing and trafficked children - and a slew of statistics: “What is not in doubt is that the available statistics underestimate the scale of the problem”.
pp. 292-5
The next three pages discuss the E.U. Amber Alert system and the McCanns’ appearance at the European Parliament to campaign for its adoption across the European Union. Dr Kate writes (p. 298): “The media presence at the press conference that followed was impressive. We were told there hadn’t been such a turn-out since Prince Charles and the Dalai Lama had appeared at the parliament”. Dr Kate then gets quite worked up about the lack of E.U. action about the problem of missing children and writes in her diary on 1 March: “Unbelievable! I feel so angry with Europe and thus so-called European ‘Union’! We need to start demanding. We need information: everyone who was in Praia da Luz for a start”.
p. 295
Dr Kate: “If Madeleine’s abductor was a sex offender or a child trafficker, for example, the chances are that he would have offended before. I cast my mind back to what the British consul had told me in the police station in Portimao that first day about the reports there had been of intruders getting into bed with children. I needed to know more about this”.
Dr Kate spoke to the retired British consul on the Algarve who gave details of a meeting with tour operators in August 2006 when a minor spate of child molestations had occurred.
pp. 296-7
Dr Kate: It was believed that this offender (or offenders) watched for patterns and routines in a family’s behaviour, establishing ‘weaknesses’ in the security of the apartment and determined in advance where parents and children slept. Cold shivers ran down my spine as it hit home that this might have applied to us”.
Dr Kate: “I pressed the former British consul on what happened afterwards. Had there been an investigation? Had anybody been convicted? He wasn’t sure, but thought that an immigrant construction worker had been arrested and released pending trial, which was likely to take place some years down the line. Unbelievable!”
Dr Kate describes her visit to Washington with Gerry at the end of March. They met with Ernie Allen at the National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children, then with Jeff Sedgwick, Assistant Attorney General and national Amber Alert Co-ordinator. They also met Ed Smart, father of Elizabeth Smart, who was notoriously abducted in very controversial and mysterious circumstances. A year later, Elizabeth Smart was in London and came up to spend a Saturday afternoon with the McCann family. Elizabeth was ‘amazingly well-adjusted…a real survivor, body and soul. I hope with all my heart that the same is true of our Madeleine”.
p. 298
The chapter concluded with the arrival of the PJ to be present while Leicestershire Police carried out s-called ‘rogatory’ interviews with the McCanns, their ‘Tapas 7 friends, and certain other witnesses.
“While we were finishing lunch [in Brussels], Clarence had a ’phone call from a Spanish journalist who told him that he’d been given what appeared to be witness statements made by Gerry and me to the Portuguese police…he was interested on Madeleine’ comment to us on the morning of the day she disappeared: ‘Why didn’t you come when Sean and I creid last night?’ I don’t think I need to remind anyone how I have been tortured by this question since the moment Madeleine was taken from us…As Clarence relayed this conversation with the journalist, I could feel my anger and frustration building. Not again! How many of the leaks would we have to bear before this whole nightmare was over? Needless to say, Clarence was besieged by calls from the media…The news of our efforts in Brussels would be spiked and replaced by ‘MADELEINE LEFT ALONE TO CRY; or whatever attention-grabbing headlines took the fancy of the sub-editors. I don’t remember many occasions when I’ve been as angry as I was that day…How had this information come to be released -completely illegally, I might add - today of all days ,when Gerry and I were trying to do something positive for child protection?…We were gutted…As we’d feared, the day’s McCann story changed and the media ran with the leaks from our statements”.
p. 300
Dr Kate: “We were determined not to let our frustration at this injustice get to us”. She explains that they lobbied until by September 2008 they had got the signatures of 418 MEPs in the European Parliament supporting the declaration in support of an E.U.-wide Amber Alert missing child system. Dr Kate: “We were relieved and delighted. We knew that this was no more than one small step in achieving our aim, but it had been a shot in the arm of a frustratingly slow bureaucratic process…”
Chapter 19 ‘Action on Three Fronts’
p. 280
Dr Kate discusses the need to appoint private investigators: “Once we were declared arguidos, it became frighteningly clear to us that [the PJ] were no longer looking for Madeleine. What they were looking for now, it seemed, was a conviction”.
p. 281
Dr Kate: “We had no option but to launch our own investigation”.
Dr Kate: “We knew nothing about private investigators…We pictured a smart, intuitive lone operator, scornful of authority, who somehow always manages to see what everyone else has missed and never fails to get his man”.
Dr Kate: “Venturing into unfamiliar territory [i.e. the world of private investigators] of any sort is never easy, and exploring the field of private investigation has been a total minefield for us. We were approached by many firms and individuals in several countries, all claiming to have the relevant expertise…How do you choose?”
p. 282
There is a lot of vague waffle about the investigation teams they have chosen…”…we have continued to review our progress and explore new strategies and options…often someone with something extra to bring to the search will come along…we change or add to the team to keep the search moving forward…the time and energy it takes to brief a new team is immense. Just bringing them up to speed is an exhausting and emotional process”.
Metodo 3 is discussed, with (not very convincing) reasons given why they were chosen.
p. 283
There is more waffle about how difficult it is to choose the ‘right’ investigators and how naïve and inexperienced they were in all this, then comes this:
Dr Kate: We have no doubt that Metodo 3 made significant strides, but unfortunately, in mid-December, one of their senior investigators [NOTE: Actually their boss, Francisco Marco!) gave an overly optimistic interview to the media. He implied the team were close to finding Madeleine and declared that he hoped she would be home by Christmas Gerry and I did not pay much heed to these bullish assertions”.
COMMENT: The McCanns were content for these utterly false, bogus claims to be recycled on front pages by British tabloids. Metodo 3 even had the effrontery to claim that they ‘knew Madeleine was alive’, that they ‘knew where Madeleine is’ and that their men were ‘closing in on the abductors’.
Besides that, Dr Kate claims that ‘Metodo 3 made significant strides’. But that claim is utterly contradicted by the plain fact that after the McCanns have used at least seven private investigation teams, and spent millions of pounds of public money, and after the expiry of four years, neither they, nor their lawyers, nor their advisers, nor their private investigators, can give any of us even one usable fact about who the alleged abductor might have been and where (if anywhere) he took Madeleine. The whole world has been asked to search for Madeleine, yet apart from two contradictory accounts of a person said to be carrying a child on the evening of 3 May (one man is said to have had ‘long black hair’, the other ‘short brown hair’), we have nothing.
Dr Kate McCann refers to Metodo 3’s lies about knowing where Madeleine is and falsely boasting that she would be ‘home by Christmas’ as “a glitch” (p. 283).
Dr Kate: “That glitch apart, Metodo 3 worked very hard for us and, just for the record, their fees were very low: most of the money they were paid was for verified expenses…we maintain good relations with Metodo 3 today. We had the sense that they genuinely cared about Madeleine’s fate…”
COMMENT: The McCanns’ accounts show that they paid Metodo 3 a lump sum of £250,000 for about six months’ work. Dr Kate in her book has totally ducked the involvement of Metodo 3 in financing a strange lawyer from Madeira, Marcos Aragao Corriea, to search the Arade Dam for Madeleine’s remains, an issue we cover in detail on our website: see John Whitehouse’s article: ‘The McCanns’ Private Investigators: We Investigate”.
There's not much else about their private investigations, though Kevin Halligen gets a mention.
Dr Kate writes (p. 283):
"We had one particularly bad experience with a man named Kevin Halligen (or Richard, as we knew him). Halligen was the CEO of a private-investigation foirm calld Oakley International which was hired by Madeleine's Fund for six months from the end of March 2008..."
She then refers to three 'phases' of the Halligen investigation, saying only that during the third phase, "...we began to have concerns".
Later (p. 284), she admits:
"Several months later, one of the investigators subcontracted by Oakley contacted us to demand paymet for his services. We had already settled Oakley's bill for this work months before, but apparently the company had not paid him. He was not the only one...We were upset..."
There is no mention whatsoever by Dr kate of any attempt by either the McCanns or by the Find Madeleine Fund to sue Halligen for his obviously fraudulent conduct.
p. 283
Dr Kate claims: “The first and second phases of the contract [with Oakley International] ran fairly smoothly; they had put in place systems to gather, collate, prioritise and follow up the information coming in as a result of appeals Gerry and I made around the first anniversary of Madeleine’s abduction. There is lttlle doubt that at that stage progress was being made”.
COMMENT: Again, what ‘progress’? Kevin Halligen and his Oakley International achieved precisely nothing. We must also remember that the fraudster and con-man Halligen and his essentially one-man band ‘Oakley’ outfit were falsely described by the McCanns’ reputation manager Clarence Mitchell as ‘the big boys of international private investigations’. That now seems like a calculated lie by Mitchell.
p. 284
Brushing aside the ‘Madeleine home by Christmas’ ‘glitch’ by Metodo 3 and the utterly disastrous and wasteful employment of Kevin Halligen, Dr Kate sails bravely on with: “For the most part, though, our experiences with independent investigators have been good”, once again ignoring the fact that, collectively, these highly-paid investigators have yielded precisely nil information of any use.
The arrival of Dave Edgar
Dr Kate now refers obliquely to the appointment of former Detective Inspector Dave Edgar (and his colleague Arthur Cowley) to head up their investigation. In other places, the McCanns say this came about in November 2008; please see articles on our website about Dave Edgar, notably the recent one (May 2011) again filed by our John Whtehouse.
Dr Kate writes: “Our current tried and tested team has more or less been in place, with a few modifications, since October. It is spearheaded by a former police officer…” [Dave Edgar].
There is then a paragraph puffing up the quality and expertise of their private investigation team, which once again we say has brought no results whatsoever of any practical value. Dr Kate: “…there is input from strategy advisers and specialists in various fields as required, enabling us to recruit the best-qualified people available to handle particular tasks…it’s a system with which we have made encouraging progress”.
p. 285
There’s a paragraph about Gerry and his work at Glenfield Hospital. Dr Kate: “Almost every evening, after the kids are in bed, he is at his computer or on the ’phone meeting the demands of his other job: continuing the campaign to find Madeleine”.
The next paragraph gives rather convoluted explanations as to why she ‘could not’ go back to work herself…“…I’m sure some of my patients would undoubtedly find it awkward dealing with me”.
Dr Kate: “…handling the mail is virtually a full-time job, and some projects, such a analysing the PJ files once they were released to us, have involved months of work”.
p. 286
Dr Kate talks about preparations for Christmas: “One morning in November, Amelie talked incessantly about her sister on the way to nursery, ‘Madeleine’s getting a big teddy bear for Christmas’…I was quite tearful…it was the mention of Christmas that tipped me over the edge”.
Dr Kate: “…O switched on the TV…and caught a review of next morning’s paper...I was confronted by Madeleine’s face on the front page of a tabloid beneath a headline screaming: ‘SHE’S DEAD’. I got little sleep after that. I thought I would never be able to stop crying. The pain was crippling”.
Later, Amelie said: “Mummy, Madeleine’s coming…Santa’s going to give her a big cuddle then bring her to Mummy’.
The McCanns went to relatives in Yorkshire and Scotland over Christmas. In Scotland, Amelie arranged the beds: “Girls together. Mummy, Amelie and Madeleine. I’ll save this place here for Madeleine’.
Dr Kate: “We had hoped that the judicial secrecy restrictions would be lifted early in 2008, giving us access to the police files…”
p. 287
On 8 January there was a newspaper headline: ‘IT WAS HER BLOOD IN PARENTS’ HIRE CAR’…“How could the press be so heartless?”
The McCanns had consulted Adam Tudor of Carter-Ruck in 2007; now they consulted him again after some lurid headlines and ‘three completely untrue stories’ in the Daily Express.
p. 288
Carter-Ruck took on the case on a ‘no-win no-fee’ basis which “certainly made our decision a lot easier”. The Express Group “finally conceded that their stories were untrue”. They paid £550,000 to the Find Madeleine Fund. The McCanns had cited over 100 libellous articles in their claim against the Express Group.
There is then a homily on how the press should behave responsibly.
p. 289
The McCanns list their four main benefactors and helpers:
- Brian Kennedy
- Edward Smethurst
- Richard Branson
- Stephen Winyard.
The McCanns later got more damages from Associated Newspapers. The amount paid is not disclosed by Dr Kate. The ‘Tapas 7’ got £375.000. Robert Murat got £600,000 from four newspaper groups and then even more from SKY TV.
Dr Kate: “Adam Tudor and his colleague Isabel Hudson continue to do a vast amount of work for us, without payment, most of it quietly, behind the scenes. They have given us invaluable advice, for example, in our attempts to deal with the widespread defamatory material circulating on the internet. We have taken action against one or two websites, but it has proved almost impossible to get this stuff removed from some of them, particularly those hosted in the U.S.A…You could spend your whole life doing nothing but trying to shut down crank websites with little prospect of success”.
p. 290
The next few pages details the McCanns attempts to get linked to various ‘Missing Children’ campaigns, such as the proposed E.U.-wide ‘Amber Alert’ system. Dr McCann calls them CRAs - ‘child rescue alerts systems’.
Dr Kate: “It had always been part of our plan for the future of the Find Madeleine campaign to use our resources, and the attention focussed on us, to try to save other children and their families from the same nightmare…As a result of the unprecedented publicity surrounding our case, Madeleine’s image had become almost iconic, the face that represents all missing children”.
p. 291
There’s a paragraph about the ‘massive scale’ of the problem of missing and trafficked children - and a slew of statistics: “What is not in doubt is that the available statistics underestimate the scale of the problem”.
pp. 292-5
The next three pages discuss the E.U. Amber Alert system and the McCanns’ appearance at the European Parliament to campaign for its adoption across the European Union. Dr Kate writes (p. 298): “The media presence at the press conference that followed was impressive. We were told there hadn’t been such a turn-out since Prince Charles and the Dalai Lama had appeared at the parliament”. Dr Kate then gets quite worked up about the lack of E.U. action about the problem of missing children and writes in her diary on 1 March: “Unbelievable! I feel so angry with Europe and thus so-called European ‘Union’! We need to start demanding. We need information: everyone who was in Praia da Luz for a start”.
p. 295
Dr Kate: “If Madeleine’s abductor was a sex offender or a child trafficker, for example, the chances are that he would have offended before. I cast my mind back to what the British consul had told me in the police station in Portimao that first day about the reports there had been of intruders getting into bed with children. I needed to know more about this”.
Dr Kate spoke to the retired British consul on the Algarve who gave details of a meeting with tour operators in August 2006 when a minor spate of child molestations had occurred.
pp. 296-7
Dr Kate: It was believed that this offender (or offenders) watched for patterns and routines in a family’s behaviour, establishing ‘weaknesses’ in the security of the apartment and determined in advance where parents and children slept. Cold shivers ran down my spine as it hit home that this might have applied to us”.
Dr Kate: “I pressed the former British consul on what happened afterwards. Had there been an investigation? Had anybody been convicted? He wasn’t sure, but thought that an immigrant construction worker had been arrested and released pending trial, which was likely to take place some years down the line. Unbelievable!”
Dr Kate describes her visit to Washington with Gerry at the end of March. They met with Ernie Allen at the National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children, then with Jeff Sedgwick, Assistant Attorney General and national Amber Alert Co-ordinator. They also met Ed Smart, father of Elizabeth Smart, who was notoriously abducted in very controversial and mysterious circumstances. A year later, Elizabeth Smart was in London and came up to spend a Saturday afternoon with the McCann family. Elizabeth was ‘amazingly well-adjusted…a real survivor, body and soul. I hope with all my heart that the same is true of our Madeleine”.
p. 298
The chapter concluded with the arrival of the PJ to be present while Leicestershire Police carried out s-called ‘rogatory’ interviews with the McCanns, their ‘Tapas 7 friends, and certain other witnesses.
“While we were finishing lunch [in Brussels], Clarence had a ’phone call from a Spanish journalist who told him that he’d been given what appeared to be witness statements made by Gerry and me to the Portuguese police…he was interested on Madeleine’ comment to us on the morning of the day she disappeared: ‘Why didn’t you come when Sean and I creid last night?’ I don’t think I need to remind anyone how I have been tortured by this question since the moment Madeleine was taken from us…As Clarence relayed this conversation with the journalist, I could feel my anger and frustration building. Not again! How many of the leaks would we have to bear before this whole nightmare was over? Needless to say, Clarence was besieged by calls from the media…The news of our efforts in Brussels would be spiked and replaced by ‘MADELEINE LEFT ALONE TO CRY; or whatever attention-grabbing headlines took the fancy of the sub-editors. I don’t remember many occasions when I’ve been as angry as I was that day…How had this information come to be released -completely illegally, I might add - today of all days ,when Gerry and I were trying to do something positive for child protection?…We were gutted…As we’d feared, the day’s McCann story changed and the media ran with the leaks from our statements”.
p. 300
Dr Kate: “We were determined not to let our frustration at this injustice get to us”. She explains that they lobbied until by September 2008 they had got the signatures of 418 MEPs in the European Parliament supporting the declaration in support of an E.U.-wide Amber Alert missing child system. Dr Kate: “We were relieved and delighted. We knew that this was no more than one small step in achieving our aim, but it had been a shot in the arm of a frustratingly slow bureaucratic process…”
Tony Bennett- Investigator
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CHAPTER 20
by Tony Bennett 14.05.11 19:21
SUMMARY AND CRITIQUE
Chapter 21 ‘ The Good, the Bad and the Mad’
This chapter is all about the ‘Good’ (those who support and back us’ and the ‘Bad’ and ‘Mad’ (those who are either evil or lunatics because they do not believe our story and in some cases campaign against us).
The Madeleine Foundation and myself come in for criticism, as was to be expected, on pages 311 and 312. There are several hostile references, but Dr Kate can bear to mention by name neither The Madeleine Foundation nor myself.
On page 311, she writes:
"...there are the publicity-seekers, like one group set up by a man who had the gall to use our daughter's name in the title of his nasty little organisation. He and his cohorts prey on vulnerable families who have experienced tragedy. We are not the first to be targeted and, sadly, we probably won't be the last".
She continues:
"...this bunch have been more of a nuisance than anything else. The only time their activities have seriously distressed me was when they leafleted our village just before Sean and Amelie were due to start primary school". She adds how a lady in the village knocked on her door and handed her 'the offensive pamphlet'.
She goes on:
"Apparently, this had been delivered to all the houses in Rothley except ours and handed out in the village during the day".
Next she says: "This incident grieved me more than I would have expected. Up to that point, this man's activities had always been confined to the internet and therefore, presumably, to like-minded individuals. Now he was spreading them in the community and, worse still, in our community. I knew most of the villagers were behind us..."
On page 312:
"...I feared that any unpleasant gossip might poison the atmosphere at the twins' new school and create problems for them at this crucial time. How could someone do this to two four-year-olds?"
She continues that she logged a formal complaint about the leafleting with Leicestershire Police but that they didn't do anything about it.
Then she mentions the threat of legal proceedings against me, pointing out that I paiod £400 court costs to them. She writes:
"..he undertook not to repeat his allegations. It hasn't made a great deal of difference. He is still going around insinuating that we were involved in Madeleine's disappearance, only now he is just being slightly more careful about how he says it".
Well, back to the beginning of the chapter, p. 301:
p. 301
Wednesday 27 February 2008, 1am: Dr Kate and Gerry are awoken…”the room appeared to be shaking…a photograph of Madeleine toppled over on my chest of drawers…I prayed for our safety. With the occasional death threat turning up in our morning mail, it is perhaps not surprising that our first instinct was to think we were being attacked…” It was an earth tremor. Dr Kate: “I started to cry as we hugged each other, fear and then relief giving way to a deep sadness at what our life had become”.
p. 302
Dr Kate: “…we know the British police considered aspects of the investigation to be substandard and we honestly don’t think they believed we were involved in Madeleine’s disappearance, Comments made to us privately by several officers (including the most senior ones) confirmed this …”
At the foot of the page is a tortuous explanation of why the McCanns and their friends refused to have anything to do with a proposed reconstruction of events on 3 May 2007, the day Madeleine was reported missing. The excuses for not attending include: ‘Our friends were a bit baffled…wanted more details about the purpose…they were suspicious…it might strengthen a flimsy case against us…worries about a media furore blowing up...there was no answer to the question: How could it actually help us to find Madeleine?’”
p. 303
The events around the first anniversary of Madeleine’s disappearance are discussed…”Our aim was to relaunch the search for our daughter by appealing to the public directly for as much information as possible about her disappearance…the U.K. police were simply passing on all leads they received to the PJ without sharing anything with us or our independent investigators…a dedicated ’phone line had been set up for this purpose, which people could call anonymously and confidentially”.
COMMENT: The availability of the telephone line was flatly contradicted by the manager of lJet, a company based in Virginia, U.S.A., which was contracted by the McCanns, Brian Kennedy and Kevin Halligen to handle ’phone calls during 2008 to the McCanns’ confidential hotline. The iJet manager said that he had taken details of the callers, but that neither the McCanns nor those who were paying me followed up any of the voice-mail messages left on that ’phone line.
Dr Kate: “The correspondence [about the reconstruction] grew more brusque…it began as a request but began to sound more like as summons. Some people wanted to take legal advice…In the end there was no quorum and the plan was abandoned”.
COMMENT: For reasons only they can explain, the McCanns and their ‘Tapas 7’ friends refused to attend a reconstruction that might have shed light on what happened to Madeleine that night.
p. 304
On 3 May 2008 the McCanns attended church services in Rothley and Liverpool to mark the anniversary of Madeleine’s disappearance, while some relatives attended a similar service in Praia da Luz. Dr Kate says that people were asked to remember Madeleine at 9.15pm, the moment she was abducted.
COMMENT: The wrong time was put on the publicity at the time because many people were told to remember Madeleine at 9.45pm.
Dr Kate: “The Archbishop of York, Dr John Sentamu, wrote a special prayer for Madeleine and urged everyone to redouble their efforts to pray for her safe return”.
Monday 12 May - Madeleine’s 5th birthday. Dr Kate: “If I’d known on her fourth birthday that she wouldn’t be back with us for this one, either, I’m sure I’d have gone under”.
p. 305
Dr Kate describes what happened on Madeleine’s birthday - they had a ‘tea party’, with “presents going into Madeleine’s room to await her return”. Madeleine’s best friend Sofia, who shares the same birthday, was also there. Dr Kate: “The children sometimes borrow toys [from Madeleine’s room] to play with but they always return them for Madeleine”.
Dr Kate then talks about the massive amount of mail they get: “There were periods in the first year when we had to go to the post office day after day to collect several crates of letters…the volume we have received over the past four years is absolutely staggering - and we still get a bundle almost very day”. Post is sorted into:
“The ‘Well-wishers’ box is always by far the fullest, I’m glad to say. The ‘Nasty’ pile has never been huge…The nonsensical letters destined for the ‘Nutty’ box, though, have arrived fairly consistently. We have seen the best and the worst of mankind in our postbag…we have experienced behaviour and attitudes so offensive and cruel that we would never have believed they existed, [but] the goodness that lies within the vast majority of people has shone through it all”.
p. 306
On this page Dr Kate talks effusively about all the well-wishing letters and present she received and how the teddy bears etc. were distributed to local schools and charities such as ‘Operation Christmas Child’, who took some toys to Belarus (White Russia).
p. 307
On this page we learn about a separate group called ‘Helping to Find Madeleine’, says Dr Kate: “A group made up primarily of working Mums (and a few Dads) from around the world who badly wanted to help…”
There is more about other support groups.
Dr Kate: “We’ve had people put money for the Fun in our hands on trains, in car parks, and in the supermarkets; cabbies who tells us to donate their fare. Such warmth and compassion is another trigger for tears”.
COMMENT: One wonders how a cabbie who donates his fare is dealt with in the accounts of the Find Madeleine Fund?
Dr Kate: “Amelie and Sean [have been] puzzled when faced with a mother who is smiling and crying at the same time. ‘Are they happy tears, Mummy?’, they ask anxiously.
pp. 308-9
There is appreciation for ‘the wealthy and successful who have come to our aid’, with a special mention for Brian Kennedy: Dr Kate: “…his friends and business associates tried to discourage him from getting involved with us, ‘just in case’, but neither his generosity and passion nor his faith and trust in us have ever faltered”.
There is then two pages of discussion about mentally ill people, psychics and visionaries. Dr Kate writes in some detail about various psychiatric problems, then goes on: “Within days of Madeleine’s disappearance, several people with major psychiatric problems made their way over to Praia da Luz and somehow managed to get to see Gerry and me”. Also, worryingly, “Some afflicted by conditions such as schizophrenia and bipolar disease appear to have become fixated on Madeleine and her plight”.
This is of course one of the many consequences, many of them adverse, about the excessive publicity given to this one case. As is well known, many people get fixated on celebrities, sometimes with dangerous consequences; it is only necessary to mention the example of John Lennon. The McCanns have also become celebrities.
p. 309
Dr Kate: “On our return to the U.K., we had a number of such callers turn up on our doorstep, along with assorted psychics and visionaries. Sometimes I would open the door and immediately wish I hadn’t…”
p. 310
Various nasty, ‘poison pen’ type letters are discussed and quoted from. These nasty letters “almost pushed us over the edge”.
Dr Kate then moves on to the internet: “The internet has provided individuals like this with a largely unregulated opportunity to set up websites and forums and blogs where they can share their bile and hate with other faceless, anonymous lowlife, all locked away in their bedrooms talking to each other online…I learnt to ignore it and pity these people”
pp. 311-2
There then follow the passages quoted earlier about The Madeleine Foundation, where Dr Kate groups us under the heading: ‘Publicity-seekers’.
p. 312
Then Dr Kate moves on to ‘time-wasters’ who “falsely claim to know where Madeleine is”. They “hinder the rearch”
p. 313
Finally there is an attack on: “people in positions of trust, the very people who ought to be acting in Madeleine’s best interests. Unfortunately, there have been a few of them”.
Clearly piqued by some who do not completely tow the McCann line, Dr Kate writes: “There are journalists and ;criminologists’ I could name whose interest in Madeleine has far less to do with recovering an abducted child than with profiting form her misfortune”.
That seems to be more than a nod in the direction of Mark Williams-Thomas, a self-styled criminologist who has often pontificated on the Madeleine McCann case.
Dr Kate concludes this chapter: “You wonder what drives some of these people. Avarice? The need to feel important? Or perhaps something lacking in their lives? Perhaps they are consumed by a sense of worthless and hatred”..
COMMENT: She evidently does not consider the possibility that some just might be interested in the case because they genuinely doubt the McCanns’ claim of abduction (which their reputation manager Clarence Mitchell conceded is only a ‘working hypothesis)’and believe they have good reason for doing so.
Chapter 21 ‘ The Good, the Bad and the Mad’
This chapter is all about the ‘Good’ (those who support and back us’ and the ‘Bad’ and ‘Mad’ (those who are either evil or lunatics because they do not believe our story and in some cases campaign against us).
The Madeleine Foundation and myself come in for criticism, as was to be expected, on pages 311 and 312. There are several hostile references, but Dr Kate can bear to mention by name neither The Madeleine Foundation nor myself.
On page 311, she writes:
"...there are the publicity-seekers, like one group set up by a man who had the gall to use our daughter's name in the title of his nasty little organisation. He and his cohorts prey on vulnerable families who have experienced tragedy. We are not the first to be targeted and, sadly, we probably won't be the last".
She continues:
"...this bunch have been more of a nuisance than anything else. The only time their activities have seriously distressed me was when they leafleted our village just before Sean and Amelie were due to start primary school". She adds how a lady in the village knocked on her door and handed her 'the offensive pamphlet'.
She goes on:
"Apparently, this had been delivered to all the houses in Rothley except ours and handed out in the village during the day".
Next she says: "This incident grieved me more than I would have expected. Up to that point, this man's activities had always been confined to the internet and therefore, presumably, to like-minded individuals. Now he was spreading them in the community and, worse still, in our community. I knew most of the villagers were behind us..."
On page 312:
"...I feared that any unpleasant gossip might poison the atmosphere at the twins' new school and create problems for them at this crucial time. How could someone do this to two four-year-olds?"
She continues that she logged a formal complaint about the leafleting with Leicestershire Police but that they didn't do anything about it.
Then she mentions the threat of legal proceedings against me, pointing out that I paiod £400 court costs to them. She writes:
"..he undertook not to repeat his allegations. It hasn't made a great deal of difference. He is still going around insinuating that we were involved in Madeleine's disappearance, only now he is just being slightly more careful about how he says it".
Well, back to the beginning of the chapter, p. 301:
p. 301
Wednesday 27 February 2008, 1am: Dr Kate and Gerry are awoken…”the room appeared to be shaking…a photograph of Madeleine toppled over on my chest of drawers…I prayed for our safety. With the occasional death threat turning up in our morning mail, it is perhaps not surprising that our first instinct was to think we were being attacked…” It was an earth tremor. Dr Kate: “I started to cry as we hugged each other, fear and then relief giving way to a deep sadness at what our life had become”.
p. 302
Dr Kate: “…we know the British police considered aspects of the investigation to be substandard and we honestly don’t think they believed we were involved in Madeleine’s disappearance, Comments made to us privately by several officers (including the most senior ones) confirmed this …”
At the foot of the page is a tortuous explanation of why the McCanns and their friends refused to have anything to do with a proposed reconstruction of events on 3 May 2007, the day Madeleine was reported missing. The excuses for not attending include: ‘Our friends were a bit baffled…wanted more details about the purpose…they were suspicious…it might strengthen a flimsy case against us…worries about a media furore blowing up...there was no answer to the question: How could it actually help us to find Madeleine?’”
p. 303
The events around the first anniversary of Madeleine’s disappearance are discussed…”Our aim was to relaunch the search for our daughter by appealing to the public directly for as much information as possible about her disappearance…the U.K. police were simply passing on all leads they received to the PJ without sharing anything with us or our independent investigators…a dedicated ’phone line had been set up for this purpose, which people could call anonymously and confidentially”.
COMMENT: The availability of the telephone line was flatly contradicted by the manager of lJet, a company based in Virginia, U.S.A., which was contracted by the McCanns, Brian Kennedy and Kevin Halligen to handle ’phone calls during 2008 to the McCanns’ confidential hotline. The iJet manager said that he had taken details of the callers, but that neither the McCanns nor those who were paying me followed up any of the voice-mail messages left on that ’phone line.
Dr Kate: “The correspondence [about the reconstruction] grew more brusque…it began as a request but began to sound more like as summons. Some people wanted to take legal advice…In the end there was no quorum and the plan was abandoned”.
COMMENT: For reasons only they can explain, the McCanns and their ‘Tapas 7’ friends refused to attend a reconstruction that might have shed light on what happened to Madeleine that night.
p. 304
On 3 May 2008 the McCanns attended church services in Rothley and Liverpool to mark the anniversary of Madeleine’s disappearance, while some relatives attended a similar service in Praia da Luz. Dr Kate says that people were asked to remember Madeleine at 9.15pm, the moment she was abducted.
COMMENT: The wrong time was put on the publicity at the time because many people were told to remember Madeleine at 9.45pm.
Dr Kate: “The Archbishop of York, Dr John Sentamu, wrote a special prayer for Madeleine and urged everyone to redouble their efforts to pray for her safe return”.
Monday 12 May - Madeleine’s 5th birthday. Dr Kate: “If I’d known on her fourth birthday that she wouldn’t be back with us for this one, either, I’m sure I’d have gone under”.
p. 305
Dr Kate describes what happened on Madeleine’s birthday - they had a ‘tea party’, with “presents going into Madeleine’s room to await her return”. Madeleine’s best friend Sofia, who shares the same birthday, was also there. Dr Kate: “The children sometimes borrow toys [from Madeleine’s room] to play with but they always return them for Madeleine”.
Dr Kate then talks about the massive amount of mail they get: “There were periods in the first year when we had to go to the post office day after day to collect several crates of letters…the volume we have received over the past four years is absolutely staggering - and we still get a bundle almost very day”. Post is sorted into:
- Information/for follow-up
- Well-wishers
- Psychics/dowsers/visions
- Nasty
- Nutty.
“The ‘Well-wishers’ box is always by far the fullest, I’m glad to say. The ‘Nasty’ pile has never been huge…The nonsensical letters destined for the ‘Nutty’ box, though, have arrived fairly consistently. We have seen the best and the worst of mankind in our postbag…we have experienced behaviour and attitudes so offensive and cruel that we would never have believed they existed, [but] the goodness that lies within the vast majority of people has shone through it all”.
p. 306
On this page Dr Kate talks effusively about all the well-wishing letters and present she received and how the teddy bears etc. were distributed to local schools and charities such as ‘Operation Christmas Child’, who took some toys to Belarus (White Russia).
p. 307
On this page we learn about a separate group called ‘Helping to Find Madeleine’, says Dr Kate: “A group made up primarily of working Mums (and a few Dads) from around the world who badly wanted to help…”
There is more about other support groups.
Dr Kate: “We’ve had people put money for the Fun in our hands on trains, in car parks, and in the supermarkets; cabbies who tells us to donate their fare. Such warmth and compassion is another trigger for tears”.
COMMENT: One wonders how a cabbie who donates his fare is dealt with in the accounts of the Find Madeleine Fund?
Dr Kate: “Amelie and Sean [have been] puzzled when faced with a mother who is smiling and crying at the same time. ‘Are they happy tears, Mummy?’, they ask anxiously.
pp. 308-9
There is appreciation for ‘the wealthy and successful who have come to our aid’, with a special mention for Brian Kennedy: Dr Kate: “…his friends and business associates tried to discourage him from getting involved with us, ‘just in case’, but neither his generosity and passion nor his faith and trust in us have ever faltered”.
There is then two pages of discussion about mentally ill people, psychics and visionaries. Dr Kate writes in some detail about various psychiatric problems, then goes on: “Within days of Madeleine’s disappearance, several people with major psychiatric problems made their way over to Praia da Luz and somehow managed to get to see Gerry and me”. Also, worryingly, “Some afflicted by conditions such as schizophrenia and bipolar disease appear to have become fixated on Madeleine and her plight”.
This is of course one of the many consequences, many of them adverse, about the excessive publicity given to this one case. As is well known, many people get fixated on celebrities, sometimes with dangerous consequences; it is only necessary to mention the example of John Lennon. The McCanns have also become celebrities.
p. 309
Dr Kate: “On our return to the U.K., we had a number of such callers turn up on our doorstep, along with assorted psychics and visionaries. Sometimes I would open the door and immediately wish I hadn’t…”
p. 310
Various nasty, ‘poison pen’ type letters are discussed and quoted from. These nasty letters “almost pushed us over the edge”.
Dr Kate then moves on to the internet: “The internet has provided individuals like this with a largely unregulated opportunity to set up websites and forums and blogs where they can share their bile and hate with other faceless, anonymous lowlife, all locked away in their bedrooms talking to each other online…I learnt to ignore it and pity these people”
pp. 311-2
There then follow the passages quoted earlier about The Madeleine Foundation, where Dr Kate groups us under the heading: ‘Publicity-seekers’.
p. 312
Then Dr Kate moves on to ‘time-wasters’ who “falsely claim to know where Madeleine is”. They “hinder the rearch”
p. 313
Finally there is an attack on: “people in positions of trust, the very people who ought to be acting in Madeleine’s best interests. Unfortunately, there have been a few of them”.
Clearly piqued by some who do not completely tow the McCann line, Dr Kate writes: “There are journalists and ;criminologists’ I could name whose interest in Madeleine has far less to do with recovering an abducted child than with profiting form her misfortune”.
That seems to be more than a nod in the direction of Mark Williams-Thomas, a self-styled criminologist who has often pontificated on the Madeleine McCann case.
Dr Kate concludes this chapter: “You wonder what drives some of these people. Avarice? The need to feel important? Or perhaps something lacking in their lives? Perhaps they are consumed by a sense of worthless and hatred”..
COMMENT: She evidently does not consider the possibility that some just might be interested in the case because they genuinely doubt the McCanns’ claim of abduction (which their reputation manager Clarence Mitchell conceded is only a ‘working hypothesis)’and believe they have good reason for doing so.
Tony Bennett- Investigator
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Re: Prosecution Exhibit 1: 'madeleine' - What's in the book?
by Wendy 14.05.11 19:30
“The ‘Well-wishers’ box is always by far the fullest, I’m glad to say. The ‘Nasty’ pile has never been huge…"
Why the need for police protection, personal alarms, high fences etc?
Why the need for police protection, personal alarms, high fences etc?
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Re: Prosecution Exhibit 1: 'madeleine' - What's in the book?
by Lara 14.05.11 21:49
Comments of a mother who has followed this case since day 1....
The next paragraph gives rather convoluted explanations as to why she ‘could not’ go back to work herself…“…I’m sure some of my patients would undoubtedly find it awkward dealing with me”.
No kidding..............................
On page 312:
"...I feared that any unpleasant gossip might poison the atmosphere at the twins' new school and create problems for them at this crucial time. How could someone do this to two four-year-olds?".............
(Sits on hands)
Wednesday 27 February 2008,
1am: Dr Kate and Gerry are awoken…”the room appeared to be shaking…a photograph of Madeleine toppled over on my chest of drawers…I prayed for our safety. With the occasional death threat turning up in our morning mail, it is perhaps not surprising that our first instinct was to think we were being attacked…” It was an earth tremor. Dr Kate: “I started to cry as we hugged each other, fear and then relief giving way to a deep sadness at what our life had become”......
(I see dead people)
“The ‘Well-wishers’ box is always by far the fullest, I’m glad to say. The ‘Nasty’ pile has never been huge…The nonsensical letters destined for the ‘Nutty’ box, though, have arrived fairly consistently. We have seen the best and the worst of mankind in our postbag…we have experienced behaviour and attitudes so offensive and cruel that we would never have believed they existed, [but] the goodness that lies within the vast majority of people has shone through it all”.
(A nod's as good as a wink to a blind bat :D)
Dr Kate then moves on to the internet:
“The internet has provided individuals like this with a largely unregulated opportunity to set up websites and forums and blogs where they can share their bile and hate with other faceless, anonymous lowlife, all locked away in their bedrooms talking to each other online…I learnt to ignore it and pity these people”
(Don't you wish we were "all locked away in their bedrooms talking to each other online"…) Well we wont ignore or pity you, trust me.
Dr Kate concludes this chapter:
“You wonder what drives some of these people. Avarice?
(Greed? No hun we have got our kids with us, we might not be rich or have a 'god' complex, but we can sleep at night) The need to feel important? ( don't make me laugh,) Or perhaps something lacking in their lives? ( hmmmmmmmmm not my child, funny that, I like to look after my babies )
Perhaps they are consumed by a sense of worthless and hatred”.
Is this for real? lmao. Hatred maybe, because you are full of
. No one in their right mind would leave 3 babies alone while they went out on the lash
, You are insane.
https://youtu.be/3EHJjpXii9o
The next paragraph gives rather convoluted explanations as to why she ‘could not’ go back to work herself…“…I’m sure some of my patients would undoubtedly find it awkward dealing with me”.
No kidding..............................
On page 312:
"...I feared that any unpleasant gossip might poison the atmosphere at the twins' new school and create problems for them at this crucial time. How could someone do this to two four-year-olds?".............
(Sits on hands)
Wednesday 27 February 2008,
1am: Dr Kate and Gerry are awoken…”the room appeared to be shaking…a photograph of Madeleine toppled over on my chest of drawers…I prayed for our safety. With the occasional death threat turning up in our morning mail, it is perhaps not surprising that our first instinct was to think we were being attacked…” It was an earth tremor. Dr Kate: “I started to cry as we hugged each other, fear and then relief giving way to a deep sadness at what our life had become”......
(I see dead people)
“The ‘Well-wishers’ box is always by far the fullest, I’m glad to say. The ‘Nasty’ pile has never been huge…The nonsensical letters destined for the ‘Nutty’ box, though, have arrived fairly consistently. We have seen the best and the worst of mankind in our postbag…we have experienced behaviour and attitudes so offensive and cruel that we would never have believed they existed, [but] the goodness that lies within the vast majority of people has shone through it all”.
(A nod's as good as a wink to a blind bat :D)
Dr Kate then moves on to the internet:
“The internet has provided individuals like this with a largely unregulated opportunity to set up websites and forums and blogs where they can share their bile and hate with other faceless, anonymous lowlife, all locked away in their bedrooms talking to each other online…I learnt to ignore it and pity these people”
(Don't you wish we were "all locked away in their bedrooms talking to each other online"…) Well we wont ignore or pity you, trust me.
Dr Kate concludes this chapter:
“You wonder what drives some of these people. Avarice?
(Greed? No hun we have got our kids with us, we might not be rich or have a 'god' complex, but we can sleep at night) The need to feel important? ( don't make me laugh,) Or perhaps something lacking in their lives? ( hmmmmmmmmm not my child, funny that, I like to look after my babies )
Perhaps they are consumed by a sense of worthless and hatred”.
Is this for real? lmao. Hatred maybe, because you are full of
. No one in their right mind would leave 3 babies alone while they went out on the lash, You are insane.
https://youtu.be/3EHJjpXii9o
____________________
Cogito ergo sum
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Re: Prosecution Exhibit 1: 'madeleine' - What's in the book?
by Cheshire Cat 14.05.11 21:59
So Kate is saying that BK arrived on the scene in September 2007?Tony Bennett wrote:SUMMARY AND CRITIQUE
Wednesday 12 September: Dr Kate says that this was the date they were first contacted by lawyer Edward Smethurst (COMMENT: I suspect that there is quite a lot left out of this book about the precise sequence of events relating to Edward Smethurst and Brian Kennedy).
That is when the news broke about his backing:
"In September 2007, millionaire businessman and Jehovah's Witness, Brian Kennedy, was revealed as the McCanns mystery benefactor"
But wait a minute! Listen to what Brian Kennedys in-house PR man, Dave Swanton, has to say on the subject:
Stockport County Supporters Messageboard: Archived Message
[ Stockport County Supporters Messageboard | Message Archive ]
Re: Cheshire Sport to buy County and appoint Gannon?
Posted by DaveSwanton on 15/1/2010, 3:48 pm, in reply to "Re: Cheshire Sport to buy County and appoint Gannon?"
I would also like to add that BK donates hundreds of thousands of pounds to charity every year, he is a Christian, has worked in the soup kitchens in this area with his sons and daughters.
He was also working with the McCann's team months before it hit the press and this was by mistake as BK wanted NO publicity at all from his involvement. I know because as his Media and PR Manager he gave me STRICT instructions that he didn't want it known.
Cheshire Cat- Madeleine Foundation
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KEY SIGHTINGS (pp. 370-6)
by Tony Bennett 14.05.11 22:12
SUMMARY AND CRITIQUE
Appendix: ‘KEY SIGHTINGS’ (pp. 370 to 376)
This extraordinary section of the book purports to tell us who the McCanns are still looking for.
‘SIGHTINGS 1 AND 2
The emphasis is primarily on:
1) Jane Tanner man/’Bundleman’ and
2) Martin Smith man.
Despite the fact that one was (allegedly) seen by Jane Tanner carrying a child at precisely 9.15pm and the other by Martin Smith at around 9.50pm to 9.55pm about a quarter-of-a-mile away, Dr Kate in her book seriously suggests that this is the same man. It must be a fairly unusual abductor who steals a child at between 9.10pm and 9.15pm and is then seen the best part of an hour later still wandering around the streets carrying the same child for all the world.
That in itself is contrary to all reason.
But on top of that, Dr Kate makes the following statement: “The similarities [between the two sightings] speak for themselves”. Well, actually, they don’t. For a start, Jane Tanner’s man had long black hair while Martin Smith’s man had ‘short brown hair’. That is a very significant difference.
On top of that we have all the inconsistencies and changes of story in Jane Tanner’s account (which of course Dr Kate doesn’t mention in her book), from which we may safely deduce that her account is fantasy, fabrication in fact.
‘ANOTHER SIX SIGHTINGS: 3 TO 8 ‘
Then, set over several pages, is an impressive table of what are said to be six other ‘sightings’ in the area of men lurking near the McCanns’ apartment by ‘four different ‘independent’ witnesses’.
There is a cautious note by Dr Kate: “The individual may not be the same in all cases”.
There are said to be five reports of a ‘suspicious male’, with three reports placing him standing by a small car park and two further reports having him being ‘observed on the access path’ near Apartment 5A.
SIGHTINGS 3 AND 4
…are said to be by a young girl on two occasions, 8am on 30 April and then again on 2 May. He was ‘ugly, disgusting even’, and appeared to be watching Apartment 5A.
SIGHTINGS 5 AND 6
…are said to be of a man loitering on 29 April between 8am and 9am and again on 2 May of the same man ‘looking over in the direction of 5A’, described as ’very ugly with pitted skin’. This is said to have ’unnerved’ the female witness.
SIGHTING 7
…is said to be of a man ‘staring fixedly towards Apartment 5A on either 2 or 3 May
SIGHTING 8
…is the sighting by Mrs Fenn’s niece (although her name isn’t given in the article) of ‘ man coming out of a first floor apartment’ and ‘behaving suspiciously.
These sightings are all claimed to be ‘highly relevant’ to the McCanns’ private investigation team.
Appendix: ‘KEY SIGHTINGS’ (pp. 370 to 376)
This extraordinary section of the book purports to tell us who the McCanns are still looking for.
‘SIGHTINGS 1 AND 2
The emphasis is primarily on:
1) Jane Tanner man/’Bundleman’ and
2) Martin Smith man.
Despite the fact that one was (allegedly) seen by Jane Tanner carrying a child at precisely 9.15pm and the other by Martin Smith at around 9.50pm to 9.55pm about a quarter-of-a-mile away, Dr Kate in her book seriously suggests that this is the same man. It must be a fairly unusual abductor who steals a child at between 9.10pm and 9.15pm and is then seen the best part of an hour later still wandering around the streets carrying the same child for all the world.
That in itself is contrary to all reason.
But on top of that, Dr Kate makes the following statement: “The similarities [between the two sightings] speak for themselves”. Well, actually, they don’t. For a start, Jane Tanner’s man had long black hair while Martin Smith’s man had ‘short brown hair’. That is a very significant difference.
On top of that we have all the inconsistencies and changes of story in Jane Tanner’s account (which of course Dr Kate doesn’t mention in her book), from which we may safely deduce that her account is fantasy, fabrication in fact.
‘ANOTHER SIX SIGHTINGS: 3 TO 8 ‘
Then, set over several pages, is an impressive table of what are said to be six other ‘sightings’ in the area of men lurking near the McCanns’ apartment by ‘four different ‘independent’ witnesses’.
There is a cautious note by Dr Kate: “The individual may not be the same in all cases”.
There are said to be five reports of a ‘suspicious male’, with three reports placing him standing by a small car park and two further reports having him being ‘observed on the access path’ near Apartment 5A.
SIGHTINGS 3 AND 4
…are said to be by a young girl on two occasions, 8am on 30 April and then again on 2 May. He was ‘ugly, disgusting even’, and appeared to be watching Apartment 5A.
SIGHTINGS 5 AND 6
…are said to be of a man loitering on 29 April between 8am and 9am and again on 2 May of the same man ‘looking over in the direction of 5A’, described as ’very ugly with pitted skin’. This is said to have ’unnerved’ the female witness.
SIGHTING 7
…is said to be of a man ‘staring fixedly towards Apartment 5A on either 2 or 3 May
SIGHTING 8
…is the sighting by Mrs Fenn’s niece (although her name isn’t given in the article) of ‘ man coming out of a first floor apartment’ and ‘behaving suspiciously.
These sightings are all claimed to be ‘highly relevant’ to the McCanns’ private investigation team.
Tony Bennett- Investigator
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Re: Prosecution Exhibit 1: 'madeleine' - What's in the book?
by Tony Bennett 14.05.11 22:30
If Dave Swanton is correct, then Dr Kate McCann's account of her first-ever meeting with Brian Kennedy is a well-crafted lie. A possible way of reconciling the two accounts is if Dr G McCann, Clarence Mitchell and Brian Kennedy were all in cahoots well before September, but Dr Kate McCann only actually met him at that September meeting. Dr Kate McCann represents that it was an out-of-the-blue call by Edward Smethurst, frequently 'called to the bar' at the Elephant and Castle, that set up the Kennedy meeting.Cheshire Cat wrote:So Kate is saying that BK arrived on the scene in September 2007?Tony Bennett wrote:SUMMARY AND CRITIQUE
Wednesday 12 September: Dr Kate says that this was the date they were first contacted by lawyer Edward Smethurst (COMMENT: I suspect that there is quite a lot left out of this book about the precise sequence of events relating to Edward Smethurst and Brian Kennedy).
That is when the news broke about his backing:
"In September 2007, millionaire businessman and Jehovah's Witness, Brian Kennedy, was revealed as the McCanns mystery benefactor"
But wait a minute! Listen to what Brian Kennedys in-house PR man, Dave Swanton, has to say on the subject:Stockport County Supporters Messageboard: Archived Message
[ Stockport County Supporters Messageboard | Message Archive ]
Re: Cheshire Sport to buy County and appoint Gannon?
Posted by DaveSwanton on 15/1/2010, 3:48 pm, in reply to "Re: Cheshire Sport to buy County and appoint Gannon?"
I would also like to add that BK donates hundreds of thousands of pounds to charity every year, he is a Christian, has worked in the soup kitchens in this area with his sons and daughters.
He was also working with the McCann's team months before it hit the press and this was by mistake as BK wanted NO publicity at all from his involvement. I know because as his Media and PR Manager he gave me STRICT instructions that he didn't want it known.
Tony Bennett- Investigator
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Re: Prosecution Exhibit 1: 'madeleine' - What's in the book?
by lj 15.05.11 0:42
That in itself is contrary to all reason.
But on top of that, Dr Kate makes the following statement: “The similarities [between the two sightings] speak for themselves”. Well, actually, they don’t. For a start, Jane Tanner’s man had long black hair while Martin Smith’s man had ‘short brown hair’. That is a very significant difference.
Well now Tony, that man was still on the streets because he had a haircut in the mean time, duh!!
____________________
"And if Madeleine had hurt herself inside the apartment, why would that be our fault?" Gerry
http://pjga.blogspot.co.uk/?m=0
http://whatreallyhappenedtomadeleinemccann.blogspot.co.uk/
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CHAPTER 21 [pages 314 to 331] and 'SIGHTINGS' APPENDIX
by Tony Bennett 15.05.11 12:08
SUMMARY AND CRITIQUE
Chapter 22 ‘Closing the Case’ [pages 314 to 331]
Analysis of this Chapter is now complete
p. 314
Dr Kate: “As the summer of 2008 approached, the investigation into Madeleine’s abduction remained classified…It was like trying to live our lives in purgatory”.
The McCanns ‘took a break’ at the end of June although, “It did not feel right at all to go on holiday without Madeleine…”
Dr Kate: “…fourteen unbelievably harrowing and stressful months had passed since she was taken and we wwere running on empty. We owed it to Sean and Amelie, and we owed it to Madeleine to be physically and mentally fit to go on looking for her. We needed peace and quiet…” They visited Auntie Norah in Vancouver.
p. 315
The holiday went well, but “the solitude emphasised the yawning gap in our family…” Their attempt to keep their holiday secret failed after a journalist pretending to be ‘Detective Constable Johnson’ ’phoned them.
Dr Kate mentions the Wardship hearing in the High Court: “As nobody else was now searching for [Madeleine], we wanted our own investigators [NOTE: Kevin Halligen at the time!] to have the chance to check this material [the PJ files] for any relevant leads”. Dr Kate explains how shocked they were that ‘the U.K. authorities’ vigorously opposed the McCanns’ application for the PJ’s documentation and statements to be released to them.
p. 316
In his statement to the Court, the Assistant Chief Constable of Leicestershire Police wrote: “While one or both of them may be innocent, there is no clear evidence that eliminates them from involvement in Madeleine’s disappearance”. Dr Kate: “We were completely staggered. No evidence to eliminate us?…that line stuck in our heads as ‘guilty until proven innocent’.” Dr McCann said they made ‘a tactical retreat’ to ‘accept a smaller amount of information’: “Having to withdraw was quite galling…”
COMMENT: In fact it was a major defeat and setback for the McCanns. They were only allowed to see less than 1% of what was in the PJ files (see contemporary press reports).
Dr Kate: “The 81 items disclosed to us included trivial details that our family had passed on to the police in the first place”.
Goncalo Amaral retired from the police on 30 June.
p. 317
The PJ investigation was ‘archived’ on Monday 21 July on the instructions of the Portuguese Attorney General. Dr Kate: “There was no evidence to suggest that Madeleine had come to serious harm and no evidence to implicate Gerry, me or Robert Murat in what had happened to her”. The McCanns heard the decision at 4.30pm “from a French news agency via SKY News and BBC News 24.
Dr Kate: “It may sound odd, but in some ways we were glad the investigation had been closed”. The PJ issued a short statement: “The official investigation continues,. All credible lines of enquiry will be pursued”, But, says Dr Kate: “…we had been receiving messages from concerned people who had tried to pass on information to the police, only to be told, ‘The child is dead’.”
p. 318
Dr Kate: “I could appreciate that not being an arguida was preferable to being an arguida…Gerry and I were in a better position than we had been the day before”.
Dr Kate: “It was…a public acknowledgement that the Portuguese authorities had nothing to implicate us in Madeleine’s disappearance, just as we’d always insisted”.
The PJ released most of their files to the McCanns, and their lawyers ‘wasted no time’ in examining them.
Dr Kate: “Amaral and his chums had evidently been poised to take full advantage of the long-awaited lifting of judicial secrecy. Now they really went to town: we had staged a kidnap, or Madeleine had died in our holiday apartment and we had hidden he body; we had influence the British police…and so on…Amaral was talking more and more…and turning up on TV chat shows…it was incessant…It is impossible to convey…just how difficult this smear campaign was both to withstand and to counter”.
p. 319
Dr Kate: “…if people were taken in by Amaral’s theories, they were going to think there was no point in looking for Madeleine…We are quite sure that Amaral’s posturing has reduced our chances of finding her. Why on earth would a former police officer want to convince the world that a missing child was dead - with no evidence whatsoever to support his claim?”
Amaral was doing it “to cash in on our misfortune. It just beggars belief”.
Dr Kate: “I spent many days in tears, sobbing at the injustice being done to Madeleine by the very people who should have been helping her. There were times when I felt so incensed by the conduct of Amaral and his friends I thought I simply wouldn’t get through the pain and anger”. Dr Kate in a long paragraph expresses frustration that no-one in Portugal seemed able to stand up to him and stop him: “Perhaps Amaral had tapped into some kind of national subconscious desire for this to all just go away. The country was already reeling from a child-abuse scandal involving Casa Pia…”
p. 320
Goncalo Amaral launched his book on 24 July 2008, three days after the Attorney General’s report. Dr Kate: “For this to have been possible, confidential information relating to the investigation would have to be passed to his publishers…well in advance of the lifting of judicial secrecy…[his book] repeated his theories, dressed up with fabrication and speculation. What it failed to include was any evidence…or any details that didn’t suit his story”.
In her diary, Dr Kate asks God for a sign that He is still there.
Dr Kate explains how they thought about taking legal action against Amaral’s book at the time, but didn’t because: “We did not want to be diverted from our own investigation…For the moment we hoped the fuss would die down and Amaral would let up”.
The McCanns investigate the files. Dr Kate: “While struggling to cope with all this, I had a task of Herculean proportions facing me: combing through the 5,000 or so pages of documentation contained in the case files that had been presented to the prosecutor and received by our lawyers on 31 July”. The McCanns were “pleasantly surprised by the prosecutor’s conclusions and by how emphatic he was about the lack of any evidence to suggest either that Madeleine was dead or that we were involved in her disappearance”.
p. 321
Dr Kate: “For several months we’d been concerned that if the case was closed, it might be closed in a way that left a dark cloud of suspicion hanging over us, so this came as a big relief”.
Dr Kate: “Four days later, the files were released to the media. DVDs containing [various personal details] were being dished out to any journalist who asked for a copy…All those months we’d spent begging for scraps of information about what might have befallen our daughter ad now here was the whole lot being distributed to every Tom, Dick or Harry. There is a big difference between what is in the public interest and what is of interest to the public, and surely when it comes to the dissemination of official police records it is the former that should prevail. It meant we had to seek advice on preventing identity theft and other fraud”.
Dr Kate: “Naturally the media were going to be scouring the files for ‘juicy’ stories and angles, without thought for the consequences for people who had tried to help the investigation”.
Dr Kate: “Witnesses would be frightened off [by the release of all this confidential information]. It was crazy, and yet another blow to our chances of finding Madeleine”.
COMMENT: This is really rich, coming from the McCanns. After all, it was their own man, Brian Kennedy, who according to an article by Mark Hollingsworth in the Evening Standard in August 2009 explain how Kennedy’s men intimidated some witnesses so badly that they were scared of giving evidence to the PJ enquiry, a claim that neither the McCanns nor Kennedy has ever challenged. He did not sue the paper for libel. That is a matter which we have, in writing, asked Leicestershire and Cheshire Police to investigate, but hey have refused to do so.
p. 322
Dr Kate spent ‘six months’ “scrutinising” the PJ files: “…it would be a painful as well as time-consuming labour”. Dr Kate: “The majority of the material was in Portuguese, so one of our first jobs was to find a company to translate it into English. Ultimately, the entire file would be translated, at a cost to Madeleine’s Fund of almost £100,000”.
In her diary, 9 August, Dr Kate writes: “Feeling a bit unsettled and agitated this evening. Going through the files brings back the emotion, desperation and uncertainty…I have a slight flicker of hope that maybe something will emerge soon - but I’m just too scared to go there”.
Dr Kate: “I waded through the documents doggedly”.
p. 323
Dr Kate says how concerned they both were at the revelation of all the sexual crimes being committed against children in the Algarve, in a passage that will win her no new friends in that part of Portugal. She highlights “”…the five cases of British children on holiday being sexually abused in their beds while their parents slept in another room”.
Then: “In three further incidents, children encountered an intruder in their bedrooms, who was presumably disturbed before he had the chance to carry out an assault. I guessed these were the reports that Bill Henderson…had told me about”.
Dr Kate explains how these “had occurred within an hour’s drive of Praia da Luz” (probably meaning they were anything up to 40 miles away). Some of these crimes “hadn’t even been recorded by the authorities”…parents had come forward with their accounts “after Madeleine’s disappearance…in the belief that there could be a link between what had happened to their children ands what had happened to [Madeleine].”
Dr Kate: “It broke my heart to read the terrible accounts of these devastated parents and the experiences of their poor children”.
Dr Kate: “…there was a familiar thread running through them…the parents had called the police; they hadn’t felt that the crime was taken seriously…statements were often not taken; DNA and fingerprint evidence was frequently not sought. In most instances there was no sign of a break-in. I cried for hours after reading a letter of complaint from one mother to the GNR regarding the sexual abuse of her daughter and the lack of proper attention by the authorities. The final line in particular has haunted me ever since: ‘It is difficult to see with this lack of investigation or interest how a profile of this man can be built up. It did not appear to us that there was any great incentive or determination to fund the offender and bring him to justice…Furthermore, it could all have been so much worse…indeed this man could go on to do much worse to another child if he’s not stopped now’.”
Dr Kate: “Six months later, our beloved Madeleine was grabbed from her bed”.
p. 324
But she then acknowledges: “Of course, none of the children were abducted and these crimes may be completely unrelated to what happens to Madeleine...What these cases do demonstrate, however, is that British tourists in holiday accommodation were being targeted…”
Then: “It is so hard not to scream from the rooftops about how those crimes appear to have been brushed under the carpet. The authorities have known about them for a long time and yet the perpetrators, as far as the families are aware, remain free”.
There are then still more strictures about how the bad the police in Portugal and elsewhere are at investigating and addressing children being molested. These criminals “must be tracked down and punishd…”
p. 325
Dr Kate days that Paulo Rebelo “tried to make up for some of the initial inadequacies by checking back for anything that had been overlooked. But the discovery of each missed opportunity was another twist of the knife in my chest”.
In checking the PJ files, Dr Kate: “…found the receptionist’s note in the Ocean Club staff message book explaining that we wanted to book the Tapas restaurant for the rest of the week because we were leaving our children alone in our apartments. I was dismayed. This was a glaring green light to a child-taker - and yet no mention is made of it in the files until December 2007!…I could only conclude that its relevance had not been appreciated by the police”.
COMMENT: This is extraordinary. Dr Kate is claiming that it was the receptionist’s note that may have caused the damage rather than one of her group openly saying to reception: “We’re leaving our children on our own all evening”. What did she expect? Surely the receptionist was only doing her job by noting (a) the fact that they wanted to book the Tapas restaurant and (b) the reason for the request, which I think was somewhat unusual as I read elsewhere that such bookings were not normally made. Did the person from the McCanns’ group who made the booking not realise that it was risky to explain that, to quote Dr Kate’s own words: “We were leaving our children alone in our apartments”? Did that person add: “It’s OK, we’ve made arrangements to check our children regularly on the half-hour”? All the blame is put by the McCanns on the receptionist making a faithful note of the reason for the request to book the Tapas restaurant. It does not seem to have occurred to Dr Kate how risky it was for them to have publicly advertised to the receptionist that, quote: “We are leaving our children alone in our apartments”.
Dr Kate goes on to criticise:
Dr Kate: “Night after night, I read of depraved individuals, British paedophiles, Portuguese paedophiles, Spanish, Dutch and German paedophiles, and of the horrific crimes they’d committed. The police went to visit some of them, looked around their apartments, and recorded merely, ‘No sign of the minor’. Was that enough to eliminate these vile characters from the enquiry?...No description, no photograph, no alibi., no DNA. Just ‘no sign of the minor’.”
p. 326
“It’s difficult not to criticise, and I know I’m a bit of a perfectionist, but honest to God, when your child has been stolen, surely you are entitled to expect more than this. Much more”
There is then a passage dealing with now wrong the recollection of witnesses can be, and she gives one example: “A member of staff at…the Millennium restaurant…said she saw us there every morning having breakfast with the children. She described in detail what a nice family we were and what a lovely relationship we had with Madeleine …but we weren’t there. We had breakfast in the Millennium only once, on our first morning…As I read these statements, it became slightly less baffling to me that Robert Murat and the witnesses who said they saw him on the night Madeleine was taken could all be so certain of their conflicting recollections”.
COMMENT: Conveniently making an excuse for three of her ‘Tapas 7 ‘ friends being so absolutely certain that they saw Robert Murat hanging around the Ocean Club the evening Madeleine was reported missing, even to the extent of confirming this at a confrontation between Murat and them at Portimao Police Station on 11 July 2007.
Dr Kate: “…I was finding testimony [in the PJ files] from witnesses claiming they had seen us in places where we hadn’t been or doing things we’d never done…these inaccurate reports…”
p. 327
Dr Kate says: “At regular intervals Gerry and I met up with Brian Kennedy to discuss progress…”
She doesn’t say where these meetings were. And by this statement she proves conclusively, as we have said many times, that Brian Kennedy has been running the private investigations all along and must tale responsibility, along with the McCanns, for the choices made to engage Metodo 3 and Kevin Halligen. Brian Kennedy is also implicated in hoodwinking the press into believing that his chosen man Dave Edgar, who has apparently been heading the investigation for over two years, ran a thriving private investigations business called ‘Alpha Investigations Group’. He did not.
Dr Kate says that their search of the files showed no evidence that Madeleine was dead- and they learn that most child sex offenders who kill their victims dispose of the body close to the abduction site; this “…increased the chances that she had been removed from the area and in many ways gave us more hope that she was alive”.
COMMENT: Yet in September 2009 Dave Edgar gave interviews maintaining that he was ‘convinced’ that Madeleine was being held ‘in a prison lair’ in the ‘lawless hills’ around Praia da Luz.
p. 328
Dr Kate now discusses the sightings of individuals in the week or two before Madeleine was reported missing. I’ve dealt with this in the Appendix Dr Kate has written on the ‘Sightings’, so won’t repeat that here. She refers to: “…the man and child seen by Jane Tanner…and the similar sighting 45 minutes later by the family from Ireland…To me the similarities seem far more significant than any discrepancy in timing…I am staggered by how alike they are, almost identical in parts. As a lawyer once said to me: ‘One coincidence, two coincidences - maybe they’re still coincidences. Any more than that and it stops being coincidence’. Who knows why there was a 45-minute gap between the two sightings, or where this man might have been in between?…There is nothing normal about stealing a little girl from her bed, so why should his subsequent actions be predictable?”
p. 329
There is then a passage about Robert Murat, based on all that she had read about him in the PJ files. Dr Kate: “I came across nothing that could be classified as hard evidence against him”.
COMMENT: The McCanns know fine well that Robert Murat lied at least 17 times when interviewed by police on 14 May 2007 about his movements between 1 and 4 May, changing his story when re-interviewed by police on 10 and 11 June. Of course, Dr Kate makes no mention of this.
Dr Kate: “I still despair at the lengths to which certain elements of the PJ were prepared to go to try to unearth some sort of evidence to use against us”.
p. 330
There is a long paragraph about the photos of Madeleine that were released on the night Madeleine was reported missing. Dr Kate: “…the posters had been run off, on the night of the abduction, by Amy Tierney, the Mark Warner duty manager, using her own Kodak paper and her own Kodak printer”. There is no explanation of why the McCanns could only find ah old photo of Madeleine to use that night and why the so-called ‘last photo’ was not available to download that very night. As we have suggested elsewhere, there are god reasons to doubt whether Amy Tierney is telling the whole truth. Also, nowhere in the book does Dr Kate explain why there are so few photos of Madeleine taken by them and their group of friends that week.
There is then a passage explaining how British police officers Mark Harrison and dog-handler Martin Grime and Forensic Science Service expert John Lowe all “had no evidence against us”. Mark Harrison is quoted as saying that the alerts of the cadaver dogs must be corroborated by ‘other supporting physical evidence’. Martin Grime says the same, in different words.
p. 331
On this page, Dr Kate reproduces the conclusions of John Lowe’s report, concluding with the words: “In my opinion therefore this result is too complex for meaningful interpretation/inclusion”.
Dr Kate then repeats what she’s said earlier - that even if it could be proved that it was Madeleine’s DNA, there are reasonable explanations for it being found there.
She then complains: “All of this information had been given to the PJ before they interrogated us in September 2007. Yet they chose to ignore it and declared us arguidos regardless”.
Appendix: ‘KEY SIGHTINGS’ (pp. 370 to 386)
This extraordinary section of the book purports to tell us who the McCanns are still looking for.
‘SIGHTINGS 1 AND 2
The emphasis is primarily on:
1) Jane Tanner man/’Bundleman’ and
2) Martin Smith man.
Despite the fact that one was (allegedly) seen by Jane Tanner carrying a child at precisely 9.15pm and the other by Martin Smith at around 9.50pm to 9.55pm about a quarter-of-a-mile away, Dr Kate in her book seriously suggests that this is the same man. It must be a fairly unusual abductor who steals a child at between 9.10pm and 9.15pm and is then seen the best part of an hour later still wandering around the streets carrying the same child for all the world.
That in itself is contrary to all reason.
But on top of that, Dr Kate makes the following statement: “The similarities [between the two sightings] speak for themselves”. Well, actually, they don’t. For a start, Jane Tanner’s man had long black hair while Martin Smith’s man had ‘short brown hair’. That is a very significant difference.
On top of that we have all the inconsistencies and changes of story in Jane Tanner’s account (which of course Dr Kate doesn’t mention in her book), from which we may safely deduce that her account is fantasy, fabrication in fact.
‘ANOTHER SIX SIGHTINGS: 3 TO 8 ‘
Then, set over several pages, is an impressive table of what are said to be six other ‘sightings’ in the area of men lurking near the McCanns’ apartment by ‘four different ‘independent’ witnesses’.
There is a cautious note by Dr Kate: “The individual may not be the same in all cases”.
There are said to be five reports of a ‘suspicious male’, with three reports placing him standing by a small car park and two further reports having him being ‘observed on the access path’ near Apartment 5A.
SIGHTINGS 3 AND 4
…are said to be by a young girl on two occasions, 8am on 30 April and then again on 2 May. He was ‘ugly, disgusting even’, and appeared to be watching Apartment 5A.
SIGHTINGS 5 AND 6
…are said to be of a man loitering on 29 April between 8am and 9am and again on 2 May of the same man ‘looking over in the direction of 5A’, described as ’very ugly with pitted skin’. This is said to have ’unnerved’ the female witness.
SIGHTING 7
…is said to be of a man ‘staring fixedly towards Apartment 5A on either 2 or 3 May
SIGHTING 8
…is the sighting by Mrs Fenn’s niece (although her name isn’t given in the article) of ‘ man coming out of a first floor apartment’ and ‘behaving suspiciously.
These sightings are all claimed to be ‘highly relevant’ to the McCanns’ private investigation team.
Chapter 22 ‘Closing the Case’ [pages 314 to 331]
Analysis of this Chapter is now complete
p. 314
Dr Kate: “As the summer of 2008 approached, the investigation into Madeleine’s abduction remained classified…It was like trying to live our lives in purgatory”.
The McCanns ‘took a break’ at the end of June although, “It did not feel right at all to go on holiday without Madeleine…”
Dr Kate: “…fourteen unbelievably harrowing and stressful months had passed since she was taken and we wwere running on empty. We owed it to Sean and Amelie, and we owed it to Madeleine to be physically and mentally fit to go on looking for her. We needed peace and quiet…” They visited Auntie Norah in Vancouver.
p. 315
The holiday went well, but “the solitude emphasised the yawning gap in our family…” Their attempt to keep their holiday secret failed after a journalist pretending to be ‘Detective Constable Johnson’ ’phoned them.
Dr Kate mentions the Wardship hearing in the High Court: “As nobody else was now searching for [Madeleine], we wanted our own investigators [NOTE: Kevin Halligen at the time!] to have the chance to check this material [the PJ files] for any relevant leads”. Dr Kate explains how shocked they were that ‘the U.K. authorities’ vigorously opposed the McCanns’ application for the PJ’s documentation and statements to be released to them.
p. 316
In his statement to the Court, the Assistant Chief Constable of Leicestershire Police wrote: “While one or both of them may be innocent, there is no clear evidence that eliminates them from involvement in Madeleine’s disappearance”. Dr Kate: “We were completely staggered. No evidence to eliminate us?…that line stuck in our heads as ‘guilty until proven innocent’.” Dr McCann said they made ‘a tactical retreat’ to ‘accept a smaller amount of information’: “Having to withdraw was quite galling…”
COMMENT: In fact it was a major defeat and setback for the McCanns. They were only allowed to see less than 1% of what was in the PJ files (see contemporary press reports).
Dr Kate: “The 81 items disclosed to us included trivial details that our family had passed on to the police in the first place”.
Goncalo Amaral retired from the police on 30 June.
p. 317
The PJ investigation was ‘archived’ on Monday 21 July on the instructions of the Portuguese Attorney General. Dr Kate: “There was no evidence to suggest that Madeleine had come to serious harm and no evidence to implicate Gerry, me or Robert Murat in what had happened to her”. The McCanns heard the decision at 4.30pm “from a French news agency via SKY News and BBC News 24.
Dr Kate: “It may sound odd, but in some ways we were glad the investigation had been closed”. The PJ issued a short statement: “The official investigation continues,. All credible lines of enquiry will be pursued”, But, says Dr Kate: “…we had been receiving messages from concerned people who had tried to pass on information to the police, only to be told, ‘The child is dead’.”
p. 318
Dr Kate: “I could appreciate that not being an arguida was preferable to being an arguida…Gerry and I were in a better position than we had been the day before”.
Dr Kate: “It was…a public acknowledgement that the Portuguese authorities had nothing to implicate us in Madeleine’s disappearance, just as we’d always insisted”.
The PJ released most of their files to the McCanns, and their lawyers ‘wasted no time’ in examining them.
Dr Kate: “Amaral and his chums had evidently been poised to take full advantage of the long-awaited lifting of judicial secrecy. Now they really went to town: we had staged a kidnap, or Madeleine had died in our holiday apartment and we had hidden he body; we had influence the British police…and so on…Amaral was talking more and more…and turning up on TV chat shows…it was incessant…It is impossible to convey…just how difficult this smear campaign was both to withstand and to counter”.
p. 319
Dr Kate: “…if people were taken in by Amaral’s theories, they were going to think there was no point in looking for Madeleine…We are quite sure that Amaral’s posturing has reduced our chances of finding her. Why on earth would a former police officer want to convince the world that a missing child was dead - with no evidence whatsoever to support his claim?”
Amaral was doing it “to cash in on our misfortune. It just beggars belief”.
Dr Kate: “I spent many days in tears, sobbing at the injustice being done to Madeleine by the very people who should have been helping her. There were times when I felt so incensed by the conduct of Amaral and his friends I thought I simply wouldn’t get through the pain and anger”. Dr Kate in a long paragraph expresses frustration that no-one in Portugal seemed able to stand up to him and stop him: “Perhaps Amaral had tapped into some kind of national subconscious desire for this to all just go away. The country was already reeling from a child-abuse scandal involving Casa Pia…”
p. 320
Goncalo Amaral launched his book on 24 July 2008, three days after the Attorney General’s report. Dr Kate: “For this to have been possible, confidential information relating to the investigation would have to be passed to his publishers…well in advance of the lifting of judicial secrecy…[his book] repeated his theories, dressed up with fabrication and speculation. What it failed to include was any evidence…or any details that didn’t suit his story”.
In her diary, Dr Kate asks God for a sign that He is still there.
Dr Kate explains how they thought about taking legal action against Amaral’s book at the time, but didn’t because: “We did not want to be diverted from our own investigation…For the moment we hoped the fuss would die down and Amaral would let up”.
The McCanns investigate the files. Dr Kate: “While struggling to cope with all this, I had a task of Herculean proportions facing me: combing through the 5,000 or so pages of documentation contained in the case files that had been presented to the prosecutor and received by our lawyers on 31 July”. The McCanns were “pleasantly surprised by the prosecutor’s conclusions and by how emphatic he was about the lack of any evidence to suggest either that Madeleine was dead or that we were involved in her disappearance”.
p. 321
Dr Kate: “For several months we’d been concerned that if the case was closed, it might be closed in a way that left a dark cloud of suspicion hanging over us, so this came as a big relief”.
Dr Kate: “Four days later, the files were released to the media. DVDs containing [various personal details] were being dished out to any journalist who asked for a copy…All those months we’d spent begging for scraps of information about what might have befallen our daughter ad now here was the whole lot being distributed to every Tom, Dick or Harry. There is a big difference between what is in the public interest and what is of interest to the public, and surely when it comes to the dissemination of official police records it is the former that should prevail. It meant we had to seek advice on preventing identity theft and other fraud”.
Dr Kate: “Naturally the media were going to be scouring the files for ‘juicy’ stories and angles, without thought for the consequences for people who had tried to help the investigation”.
Dr Kate: “Witnesses would be frightened off [by the release of all this confidential information]. It was crazy, and yet another blow to our chances of finding Madeleine”.
COMMENT: This is really rich, coming from the McCanns. After all, it was their own man, Brian Kennedy, who according to an article by Mark Hollingsworth in the Evening Standard in August 2009 explain how Kennedy’s men intimidated some witnesses so badly that they were scared of giving evidence to the PJ enquiry, a claim that neither the McCanns nor Kennedy has ever challenged. He did not sue the paper for libel. That is a matter which we have, in writing, asked Leicestershire and Cheshire Police to investigate, but hey have refused to do so.
p. 322
Dr Kate spent ‘six months’ “scrutinising” the PJ files: “…it would be a painful as well as time-consuming labour”. Dr Kate: “The majority of the material was in Portuguese, so one of our first jobs was to find a company to translate it into English. Ultimately, the entire file would be translated, at a cost to Madeleine’s Fund of almost £100,000”.
In her diary, 9 August, Dr Kate writes: “Feeling a bit unsettled and agitated this evening. Going through the files brings back the emotion, desperation and uncertainty…I have a slight flicker of hope that maybe something will emerge soon - but I’m just too scared to go there”.
Dr Kate: “I waded through the documents doggedly”.
p. 323
Dr Kate says how concerned they both were at the revelation of all the sexual crimes being committed against children in the Algarve, in a passage that will win her no new friends in that part of Portugal. She highlights “”…the five cases of British children on holiday being sexually abused in their beds while their parents slept in another room”.
Then: “In three further incidents, children encountered an intruder in their bedrooms, who was presumably disturbed before he had the chance to carry out an assault. I guessed these were the reports that Bill Henderson…had told me about”.
Dr Kate explains how these “had occurred within an hour’s drive of Praia da Luz” (probably meaning they were anything up to 40 miles away). Some of these crimes “hadn’t even been recorded by the authorities”…parents had come forward with their accounts “after Madeleine’s disappearance…in the belief that there could be a link between what had happened to their children ands what had happened to [Madeleine].”
Dr Kate: “It broke my heart to read the terrible accounts of these devastated parents and the experiences of their poor children”.
Dr Kate: “…there was a familiar thread running through them…the parents had called the police; they hadn’t felt that the crime was taken seriously…statements were often not taken; DNA and fingerprint evidence was frequently not sought. In most instances there was no sign of a break-in. I cried for hours after reading a letter of complaint from one mother to the GNR regarding the sexual abuse of her daughter and the lack of proper attention by the authorities. The final line in particular has haunted me ever since: ‘It is difficult to see with this lack of investigation or interest how a profile of this man can be built up. It did not appear to us that there was any great incentive or determination to fund the offender and bring him to justice…Furthermore, it could all have been so much worse…indeed this man could go on to do much worse to another child if he’s not stopped now’.”
Dr Kate: “Six months later, our beloved Madeleine was grabbed from her bed”.
p. 324
But she then acknowledges: “Of course, none of the children were abducted and these crimes may be completely unrelated to what happens to Madeleine...What these cases do demonstrate, however, is that British tourists in holiday accommodation were being targeted…”
Then: “It is so hard not to scream from the rooftops about how those crimes appear to have been brushed under the carpet. The authorities have known about them for a long time and yet the perpetrators, as far as the families are aware, remain free”.
There are then still more strictures about how the bad the police in Portugal and elsewhere are at investigating and addressing children being molested. These criminals “must be tracked down and punishd…”
p. 325
Dr Kate days that Paulo Rebelo “tried to make up for some of the initial inadequacies by checking back for anything that had been overlooked. But the discovery of each missed opportunity was another twist of the knife in my chest”.
In checking the PJ files, Dr Kate: “…found the receptionist’s note in the Ocean Club staff message book explaining that we wanted to book the Tapas restaurant for the rest of the week because we were leaving our children alone in our apartments. I was dismayed. This was a glaring green light to a child-taker - and yet no mention is made of it in the files until December 2007!…I could only conclude that its relevance had not been appreciated by the police”.
COMMENT: This is extraordinary. Dr Kate is claiming that it was the receptionist’s note that may have caused the damage rather than one of her group openly saying to reception: “We’re leaving our children on our own all evening”. What did she expect? Surely the receptionist was only doing her job by noting (a) the fact that they wanted to book the Tapas restaurant and (b) the reason for the request, which I think was somewhat unusual as I read elsewhere that such bookings were not normally made. Did the person from the McCanns’ group who made the booking not realise that it was risky to explain that, to quote Dr Kate’s own words: “We were leaving our children alone in our apartments”? Did that person add: “It’s OK, we’ve made arrangements to check our children regularly on the half-hour”? All the blame is put by the McCanns on the receptionist making a faithful note of the reason for the request to book the Tapas restaurant. It does not seem to have occurred to Dr Kate how risky it was for them to have publicly advertised to the receptionist that, quote: “We are leaving our children alone in our apartments”.
Dr Kate goes on to criticise:
- delays in door-to-door enquiries
- not following up when there was no response to a knock at the door: “as far as I could tell they didn’t get a second visit”
- witness statements were ‘extremely vague and brief’, “crying out for what seemed blindingly obvious and essential questions to be asked and answered”
- ‘sketchy’ statements from Ocean Club staff
- some Ocean Club staff not interviewed at all.
Dr Kate: “Night after night, I read of depraved individuals, British paedophiles, Portuguese paedophiles, Spanish, Dutch and German paedophiles, and of the horrific crimes they’d committed. The police went to visit some of them, looked around their apartments, and recorded merely, ‘No sign of the minor’. Was that enough to eliminate these vile characters from the enquiry?...No description, no photograph, no alibi., no DNA. Just ‘no sign of the minor’.”
p. 326
“It’s difficult not to criticise, and I know I’m a bit of a perfectionist, but honest to God, when your child has been stolen, surely you are entitled to expect more than this. Much more”
There is then a passage dealing with now wrong the recollection of witnesses can be, and she gives one example: “A member of staff at…the Millennium restaurant…said she saw us there every morning having breakfast with the children. She described in detail what a nice family we were and what a lovely relationship we had with Madeleine …but we weren’t there. We had breakfast in the Millennium only once, on our first morning…As I read these statements, it became slightly less baffling to me that Robert Murat and the witnesses who said they saw him on the night Madeleine was taken could all be so certain of their conflicting recollections”.
COMMENT: Conveniently making an excuse for three of her ‘Tapas 7 ‘ friends being so absolutely certain that they saw Robert Murat hanging around the Ocean Club the evening Madeleine was reported missing, even to the extent of confirming this at a confrontation between Murat and them at Portimao Police Station on 11 July 2007.
Dr Kate: “…I was finding testimony [in the PJ files] from witnesses claiming they had seen us in places where we hadn’t been or doing things we’d never done…these inaccurate reports…”
p. 327
Dr Kate says: “At regular intervals Gerry and I met up with Brian Kennedy to discuss progress…”
She doesn’t say where these meetings were. And by this statement she proves conclusively, as we have said many times, that Brian Kennedy has been running the private investigations all along and must tale responsibility, along with the McCanns, for the choices made to engage Metodo 3 and Kevin Halligen. Brian Kennedy is also implicated in hoodwinking the press into believing that his chosen man Dave Edgar, who has apparently been heading the investigation for over two years, ran a thriving private investigations business called ‘Alpha Investigations Group’. He did not.
Dr Kate says that their search of the files showed no evidence that Madeleine was dead- and they learn that most child sex offenders who kill their victims dispose of the body close to the abduction site; this “…increased the chances that she had been removed from the area and in many ways gave us more hope that she was alive”.
COMMENT: Yet in September 2009 Dave Edgar gave interviews maintaining that he was ‘convinced’ that Madeleine was being held ‘in a prison lair’ in the ‘lawless hills’ around Praia da Luz.
p. 328
Dr Kate now discusses the sightings of individuals in the week or two before Madeleine was reported missing. I’ve dealt with this in the Appendix Dr Kate has written on the ‘Sightings’, so won’t repeat that here. She refers to: “…the man and child seen by Jane Tanner…and the similar sighting 45 minutes later by the family from Ireland…To me the similarities seem far more significant than any discrepancy in timing…I am staggered by how alike they are, almost identical in parts. As a lawyer once said to me: ‘One coincidence, two coincidences - maybe they’re still coincidences. Any more than that and it stops being coincidence’. Who knows why there was a 45-minute gap between the two sightings, or where this man might have been in between?…There is nothing normal about stealing a little girl from her bed, so why should his subsequent actions be predictable?”
p. 329
There is then a passage about Robert Murat, based on all that she had read about him in the PJ files. Dr Kate: “I came across nothing that could be classified as hard evidence against him”.
COMMENT: The McCanns know fine well that Robert Murat lied at least 17 times when interviewed by police on 14 May 2007 about his movements between 1 and 4 May, changing his story when re-interviewed by police on 10 and 11 June. Of course, Dr Kate makes no mention of this.
Dr Kate: “I still despair at the lengths to which certain elements of the PJ were prepared to go to try to unearth some sort of evidence to use against us”.
p. 330
There is a long paragraph about the photos of Madeleine that were released on the night Madeleine was reported missing. Dr Kate: “…the posters had been run off, on the night of the abduction, by Amy Tierney, the Mark Warner duty manager, using her own Kodak paper and her own Kodak printer”. There is no explanation of why the McCanns could only find ah old photo of Madeleine to use that night and why the so-called ‘last photo’ was not available to download that very night. As we have suggested elsewhere, there are god reasons to doubt whether Amy Tierney is telling the whole truth. Also, nowhere in the book does Dr Kate explain why there are so few photos of Madeleine taken by them and their group of friends that week.
There is then a passage explaining how British police officers Mark Harrison and dog-handler Martin Grime and Forensic Science Service expert John Lowe all “had no evidence against us”. Mark Harrison is quoted as saying that the alerts of the cadaver dogs must be corroborated by ‘other supporting physical evidence’. Martin Grime says the same, in different words.
p. 331
On this page, Dr Kate reproduces the conclusions of John Lowe’s report, concluding with the words: “In my opinion therefore this result is too complex for meaningful interpretation/inclusion”.
Dr Kate then repeats what she’s said earlier - that even if it could be proved that it was Madeleine’s DNA, there are reasonable explanations for it being found there.
She then complains: “All of this information had been given to the PJ before they interrogated us in September 2007. Yet they chose to ignore it and declared us arguidos regardless”.
Appendix: ‘KEY SIGHTINGS’ (pp. 370 to 386)
This extraordinary section of the book purports to tell us who the McCanns are still looking for.
‘SIGHTINGS 1 AND 2
The emphasis is primarily on:
1) Jane Tanner man/’Bundleman’ and
2) Martin Smith man.
Despite the fact that one was (allegedly) seen by Jane Tanner carrying a child at precisely 9.15pm and the other by Martin Smith at around 9.50pm to 9.55pm about a quarter-of-a-mile away, Dr Kate in her book seriously suggests that this is the same man. It must be a fairly unusual abductor who steals a child at between 9.10pm and 9.15pm and is then seen the best part of an hour later still wandering around the streets carrying the same child for all the world.
That in itself is contrary to all reason.
But on top of that, Dr Kate makes the following statement: “The similarities [between the two sightings] speak for themselves”. Well, actually, they don’t. For a start, Jane Tanner’s man had long black hair while Martin Smith’s man had ‘short brown hair’. That is a very significant difference.
On top of that we have all the inconsistencies and changes of story in Jane Tanner’s account (which of course Dr Kate doesn’t mention in her book), from which we may safely deduce that her account is fantasy, fabrication in fact.
‘ANOTHER SIX SIGHTINGS: 3 TO 8 ‘
Then, set over several pages, is an impressive table of what are said to be six other ‘sightings’ in the area of men lurking near the McCanns’ apartment by ‘four different ‘independent’ witnesses’.
There is a cautious note by Dr Kate: “The individual may not be the same in all cases”.
There are said to be five reports of a ‘suspicious male’, with three reports placing him standing by a small car park and two further reports having him being ‘observed on the access path’ near Apartment 5A.
SIGHTINGS 3 AND 4
…are said to be by a young girl on two occasions, 8am on 30 April and then again on 2 May. He was ‘ugly, disgusting even’, and appeared to be watching Apartment 5A.
SIGHTINGS 5 AND 6
…are said to be of a man loitering on 29 April between 8am and 9am and again on 2 May of the same man ‘looking over in the direction of 5A’, described as ’very ugly with pitted skin’. This is said to have ’unnerved’ the female witness.
SIGHTING 7
…is said to be of a man ‘staring fixedly towards Apartment 5A on either 2 or 3 May
SIGHTING 8
…is the sighting by Mrs Fenn’s niece (although her name isn’t given in the article) of ‘ man coming out of a first floor apartment’ and ‘behaving suspiciously.
These sightings are all claimed to be ‘highly relevant’ to the McCanns’ private investigation team.
Tony Bennett- Investigator
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CHAPTER 22: 'Standing Up For The Truth' (!!)
by Tony Bennett 15.05.11 13:17
SUMMARY AND CRITIQUE
Chapter 22 ‘Standing Up For The Truth’
p. 332
The weekend of 13 and 14 September: A persistent caller jumped over the fence into the back garden, tried to get in through the patio doors, then threw a large ceramic plant pot through the window of cousin Anne-Marie’s car. Sean and Amelie call him: ‘The man with the poorly head’.
On the Sunday, extracts of Dr Kate McCann’s diary (seized by the PJ and then handed back to her) were published in the News of the World, which she says came as complete shock to her. Although she accepts that “it was presented in a sympathetic way”, she claimed it was based on a translation from her English into Portuguese and then translated back into English again, so some of it was inaccurate. She gives two examples of inaccurate re-translations.
p. 333
She says that a judge on 27 June 2008 had ordered the destruction by the police of all copies of the diary made by the PJ. She cannot understand, then, how copies reached the News of the World.
Dr Kate’s diary entry 17 September 2008: “I feel like climbing into a hole and staying there. Sometimes it just feels like we are getting tested beyond all limits…I am clinging to my hope that the good God I have always believed exists and that somehow and at some point, he will bring Madeleine back to us”. The News of the World agreed to compensate Dr McCann for this breach of privacy. She does not say whether this compensation was paid into the Find Madeleine Fund or not.
p. 334
She says she contacted Ernie Allen in the U.S.A. in October 2008 to ask if he could help produce an age-progressed image of Madeleine. Dr Kate: “…we were still receiving photographs of blonde toddlers from concerned members of the public asking, ‘Could this be Madeleine?’ We needed to remind everyone that the little girl we were looking for had grown”. He found Glenn, “a patient and understanding forensic artist”. He used “sophisticated computer software, even seeking advice from a forensic anthropologist…”.
Dr Kate: “The first picture of ‘Madeleine, aged six, arrived without warning via email in mid-December. I was devastated. Caught unawares, I could not stop crying…”
Dr Kate: “IT…smacked me in the face with the cruel realisation that I didn’t actually know what my little girl was like any more”.
p. 335
Dr Kate: “…with the help of many more photographs of Madeleine, pictures of Gerry and myself at the same age and a lot of feedback and suggested amendments from me, we arrived at an acceptable or ‘close enough’ resemblance”.
But, the finished picture “looked too American and, though she is pretty, if I’m really honest, I think Madeleine is prettier. Maternal bias again”.
Dr Kate then explains how Goncao Amaral was “still parading his unsavoury theories” and how their legal team began to discuss the probelm.
“We had first talked on the ’phone to Isabel Duarte on 29 November. She was very understanding and sounded nice…to receive sympathy from someone in Portugal was like stepping into a warm bath”.
p. 336
On 7 April 2009 the newspaper Publico,“one of the most respected newspapers in Portugal and well regarded by the country’s opinion-formers”, published ‘pro-Amaral' article. This, says Dr Kate, “was a worrying development”.
Dr Kate then mentions the Channel 4 documentary-with-reconstruction, which we know as the ‘Mockumentary’, which Dr Kate says was “at last, a reconstruction that people would see”. She stayed at home with Sean and Amelie although “I desperately wanted to return to Praia da Luz when the time was right”. The press claimed that “disgruntled workers blamed us for redundancies at the Ocean Club” and “made much of Gerry being ‘heckled’ in Praia da Luz, suddenly forgetting that the world was in economic crisis”, adding that contrary to these reports, “In fact, maybe two people in a good-sized crowd shouted something at [Gerry]. Those holding pictures of Madeleine…didn’t warrant a mention”.
pp. 336-7
Dr Kate: “I’ve always been considered quite a gentle person but those attacks [in the press] stirred up terrible emotions in me. It was as if my whole body was trying to scream but a tightly screwed-on lid was preventing the scream from escaping. Instead I was just howling internally. My punch bag certainly came in handy at times”
p. 337
On 20 April the McCanns decided to sue Amaral, following the press article sympathetic to Amaral in Publico.
The McCanns then went on Oprah Winfrey: “This time we had our age-progressed image to publicise, and the global reach of Oprah’s massively popular show would give us a fantastic opportunity to stamp this on the worldwide public consciousness…this interview was a huge deal. Oprah has more than once been described as the most influential woman in the world. Certainly when she speaks, as they say across the Atlantic, America listens. I was overcome by nerves”.
pp. 337-8
Dr Kate: “Getting ready for the interview on the day was an event in itself. A choice of clothes and shoes had been brought to our hotel…I had my make-up and hair done by two lovely ladies (if only I could look like that every day!)…I was completely I in awe of Oprah…We were so grateful we wanted to hug her. In fact I’m sure we did hug her”….My nervousness intensified, partly because of the enormity of it all, and partly because I knew how important this was for Madeleine…her age-progressed picture would be seen by millions”.
p. 338
On 12 May 2009, on what would have been Madeleine’s 6th birthday, Dr Kate met Isabel Duarte: “I’d been reluctant to spend this emotional day in a meeting but our options were limited…” Dr Kate was very impressed with Isabel: “…pocket dynamo, tiny, attractive, immensely feisty, strong, intelligent, compassionate…you could see the desire for justice burning brightly in her”.
Duarte suggested injuncting Amaral’s book and DVD documentary and then suing him for libel: “It was an inspiring meeting”. Isabel looked Dr Kate in the eye and said: “Today is a very important day for your daughter”.
The next paragraph explains how Amaral was given an 18-month suspended prison sentence “in connection with a case in which three of his officers were accused of torture”. Dr Kate tells her readers about the case of Joana Cipriano, selectively telling us (a) that no body was found (b) that three officers were accused of torture and (c) that Joana’s moth and uncle “claimed they had been tortured into confessing. She concludes this paragraph as follows:
”The officers concerned were cleared but the jury found that Amaral had falsified statements relating to the torture case. His conviction was upheld in the Supreme Couirt inMarch 2011. Joana’s mother is still in jail”.
Dr Kate is not quite right in saying that this decision was made by ‘a jury’, It was in fact a panel of 43 judges and four jurors.
Anyone reading that paragraph would think that a monstrous injustice had been done to Joana’s mother and uncle, whereas in fact both freely confessed to the brutal murder of Joana after she caught them in bed together and they each received sentences of 16 years.
p. 339
Dr Kate goes on to attack Amaral: “Falsifying statements? It was difficult to understand why anyone would believe the theories of a police officer found guilty of such malpractice. While co-ordinating the investigation into Madeleine’s disappearance, Amaral had been an arguido (suspect). How on earth had he come to be put in charge of an enquiry into the disappearance of another missing child?”
Dr Kate now explains how their ‘lead investigator’ [Dave Edgar] had ’phoned on 22 May to explain that ‘a British tabloid’ would be publishing an article the following day about convicted British paedophile Raymond Hewlett having been at Tavira, on the Algarve, southern Portugal, at the time Madeleine had disappeared: “The proximity of Tavira on the Algarve to Praia da Luz and the fact that this man was a paedophile ticked all the boxes for the redtop papers, and they jumped on the story”.
Dr Kate: We were exasperated. We now knew that there had been hundreds of paedophiles on the Algarve at that time and, if God forbid, one of them had been involved, Hewlett seemed a less likely candidate than a lot of others. He was in his sixties, for a start, much older than the man seen by Jane [Tanner] …”
Nevertheless: “We were desperate for somebody to investigate Hewlett, not because we thought he had anything to do with taking Madeleine but because we wanted to eliminate him from the inquiry…My main worry was that Hewlett, who had terminal throat cancer, would die before anyone took an official statement from him. Then the media would take the line that it was probably him, game over, Madeleine was dead, and we would be left with an uphill struggle to prevent this theory from becoming established”.
These are very deceptive comments by Dr Kate. She and the McCann Team have in fact persistently suggested that Hewlett was connected in some way to Madeleine’s disappearance and they even gave credence to that ridiculous story (in the Sun, 1 September 2010) about Hewlett on his deathbed writing a letter to his estranged son Wayne about knowing the gypsy gang leader who ‘stole’ Madeleine to order. The Sun even published the story after Wayne was said to have ‘burnt’ the letter, thus removing any possibility of substantiating whether any such letter was in fact ever written.
p. 340
Dr Kate: “Sometimes it seemed as if we spent as much time trying to clear the path for our investigation as we did actually investigating…It was so frustrating”.
Dr Kate records that their investigators could not speak to him “unless we paid him to do so” and that Hewlett died a few months later.
On 27 August the case of Jaycee Lee Dugard was publicised. She had been abducted at the age of 11 by a sex offender and was found 18 years later, being kept in an outbuilding in the garden. Whilst conceding that for Jaycee Lee this had been “a tragedy”, Dr Kate goes on: “[Her] experience underlines how children can be hidden for many years and still found alive. This was a positive day not only for Jaycee, but for Madeleine and all missing children…None of us must give up on these children”.
pp. 340-1
Dr Kate now remarks on the “byzantine” workings of the Portuguese legal system in relation to their attempted injunction against Amaral’s book, giving a history of six separate decisions, the first three of which were:
(1) their claim was rejected because ‘the damage [from the sales of Amaral’s book and the viewing of the DVD] had already been done’
(2) they appealed and their appeal was successful; the case was reinstated
(3) they got an injunction against the book and the DVD, after a five-day hearing, on 8 September 2009.
p. 341
The decision was:
Amaral appealed. The McCanns flew out to Portugal on 10 December for the first day of the hearing of his appeal: “Gerry and I felt it was…essential for us to attend to represent Madeleine. She needed somebody to be there for her. She was the victim in all this, not Gonclao Amaral”.
In her diary for 10 December, Dr Kate writes: “Not sure how I feel about seeing Mr Amaral - for the fist tie ever, I hasten to add!…that man has caused us so much upset and anger because of how he treated my beautiful Madeleine...he deserves to be miserable and feel fear”.
pp. 341-2
Dr Kate explains how the McCanns had been warned of a possible protest against them, but: “If we backed out, the bullies would have won. We’d come here for Madeleine, and we had no intention of letting her down…In the event, this ‘demonstration’ consisted of two middle-aged women, friends of Goncalo Amaral”.
p. 342
Dr Kate criticises Amaral for never having met her: “It is extraordinary that he could have said and written so many awful things about a person he had never met”.
Then there is a description of him: “He had obviously spruced himself up in recent months. The moustache, gold chain and bulging tummy familiar to me from unflattering newspaper photographs were nowhere to be seen. Now he was sporting a smart haircut, new suit and hat and - an intriguing touch - a diamond earring”.
Dr Kate: “I clutched my wooden holding cross tightly as he walked past…here was the person entrusted with finding our little girl…but then had failed her…by speaking out in a way that in effect hindered other people, ourselves included, from finding her. I couldn’t stop staring at him. It was as if I were trying to look in side his head. If the intensity of a stare could penetrate bone, I’m sure I would have managed it. What made this man tick...How did he manage to sleep at night?”
She says that Luis Neves was also in court: “…but he would not look at me. I was disappointed in him disappointed in myself, too, for putting my faith in him”.
p. 343
Dr Kate talks about herself in Portugal: “Gerry and I were able to seek solace at Nossa Senhora da Luz (the church), I spent time at my rocks on the beach and we caught up with friends. To this day I still return quietly to Luz from time to time to feel Madeleine close to me”.
In the court room, “…Amaral’s cronies greeted him with much sycophantic back-slapping…[it] made me distinctly uncomfortable”.
She recounts the proceedings:
Jose de Magalhaes e Menezes “gave an objective account, reiterating that here was no evidence either that Madeleine was dead or that Gerry and I were involved…”
Ricardo Paiva “…remained quite calm…[but] contradicted himself during his testimony…he believed Goncalo Amaral’s assertion[s]…”
Dr Kate: “The most disturbing thing about this is that it is Paiva who, to this day, received any information about Madeleine coming in to the Portuguese police. If this is what he believes, we have a real concern that he may not be considering such information objectively”.
pp. 343-4
Dr Kate encounters Amaral on the court room steps as she is going to the ‘ladies’: “…our shoulders briefly came within a foot of each other”.
p. 344
At the end of the first day’s session “The press were poised outside like vultures”.
COMMENT: It’s O.K. if the press and media (the Sun, the News of the World, Oprah Winfrey, BBC TV etc.) are recycling the McCanns’ take on their stories, but now the press are ‘vultures’.
The following morning: “Gerry gave a few pertinent statements to the media assembled outside the court in an attempt to redress the balance of the coverage of the previous day’s proceedings.
Dr Kate: “I had to laugh when I saw the front-page headline for the next day’s Daily Express: the arrestingly original ‘MCCANN FURY’. I’ve lost count of the times I’ve been driving along, seen that headline on a newsagent’s board and wondered to myself what we were [supposed to be] furious about now. I suppose it just fits the page nicely”.
COMMENT: In fact Gerry McCann had been very defensive and hostile to the media; impatient and angry.
Dr Kate repeats the claim that “Gerry had to leave towards the end of the second day because of work commitments…Fiona kindly agreed to fly out and join me”.
The first two days had “…highlighted the injustices heaped in Madeleine, provoking a lot of anger, exasperation and hurt…”
Dr Kate: “As soon as Fiona and I sat down on the plane [home], everything hit me full in the face: Madeleine, who she is, what I miss, the injustice, our life. I started to cry and couldn’t stop, I was just exhausted by it all”.
p. 345
Dr Kate and Gerry fly separately to Lisbon for the final, fourth day of the injunction appeal - 10 February 2010. On the plane she meets a ‘nice gentleman’ from Porto who support the McCanns.
Dr Kate: “I’ve wished so often to be able to plead with [the Portuguese people]: ‘Don’t believe what has been written about us; please don’t listen to gossip and reckless speculation. We are good people and we love our children dearly. Please give us a chance and help us find our daughter’.”
Dr Kate lists the witnesses who gave evidence in the morning. Then, in the afternoon: “…we returned to the courtroom for the summing-up of each of the lawyers. This was a horrible experience and one which, stupidly, I wasn’t prepared for. The summaries of the defence appear to be focussed more on attacking Gerry and me personally … Amaral’s lawyer also seemed intent on turning it into a U.K.-versus-Portugal battle…”
p. 346
Dr Kate: “…clearly the defence [i.e. Amaral’s team] were trying to incite the Portuguese people and keep public opinion on their side. It was ridiculous and unfair”.
Dr Kate: “I was totally drained by the time we boarded the plane”. They arrived back in Rothley at 2am.
Dr Kate writes in her diary: “I love you, Madeleine. We will keep fighting, regardless of how many battles we have to face…”
On February 18 the McCanns learnt that they had won their appeal; Goncalo Amaral’s book was still banned: “Thank goodness for some sanity…”
On 1 March Amaral was grilled on TV by an aggressive journalist, Miguel Sousa Tavares. Dr Kate expresses delight that “at last the tough questions crying out to be asked of him for two years [were being asked]…”
But on 19 October the Portuguese Appeal Court had reversed the decision of the Lisbon Court on18 February. It was “a bolt from the blue…WE hadn’t even been aware that another judgment was about to be made, and neither was our lawyer. This broadside just came from nowhere. How many appeals was Amaral going to be allowed? How could other judges come along and overturn a decision made by three courts before them?
p. 347
Dr Kate now refers to Amaral’s “poisonous allegations”. There was “more waffle about the injunction contradicting the constituion of Portugal and undermining democracy by prohibiting free speech. Does this mean that a person could go out and start accusing their next-door neighbour of being a serial killer? As I understand freedom of speech, it does not equate to freedom to slander and libel someone with impunity”.
Dr Kate: “It was impossible to comprehend. I felt utterly beaten…”
A sixth decision in the case this year rejected the McCanns’ appeal against the unbanning of Goncalo Amaral’s book. Dr Kate cannot bring herself to mention that it was the Portuguese Supreme Court that made that decision nor that it was their own appeal which had been rejected. Shea dds: “We plan to appeal this latest decision…”, though she does not say how, as this was the final court of appeal in Portugal. Perhaps she means to the European Court of Human Rights?
Dr Kate then mentions the Wikileaks leak of a communication by the U.S. Embassy in Portugal about “…a meeting that [occurred] on 21 September between Alex Ellis, the British Ambassador in Portugal and Alfred Hoffman Jr, the outgoing U.S. Ambassador, in which Ellis tells Hoffman that the British police ‘developed the current evidence against Madeleine’s parents’.
Dr Kate responds:
the cable was three years old
what it contained “didn’t amount to much”
it just refers to “dogs that barked in our apartment and near our car”
“…the British officers did not actually develop evidence as such, because there was no evidence to develop”
it was “old news”
we didn’t pay it much attention
it created “no more than a ripple for a day or so”.
p. 348
But, “to our dismay, the Portuguese press, galvanised by Goncalo Amaral, lapped it up. Off he went on another round of the interview circuit…It was absolutely soul-destroying”.
Dr Kate: “What probably galls me the most about Amaral’s interviews is the way he presents himself as a person who, perhaps above all others, really wants to find Madeleine and get to the bottom of her fate. I cannot begin to express how much this outrages me…There is nobody in the world more desperate than Gerry and me to find our daughter…”
She continues by referring to “the disgraceful slurs thrown at us…How many more times will they be pushed down the throats of the Portuguese public?”
Finally: “Goncalo Amaral has been convicted of falsifying statements and co-ordinated investigations into the disappearance of two little girls, neither of whom has been found. Why is this man being allowed a platform, from which to peddle his absurd and offensive ideas?”
Chapter 22 ‘Standing Up For The Truth’
p. 332
The weekend of 13 and 14 September: A persistent caller jumped over the fence into the back garden, tried to get in through the patio doors, then threw a large ceramic plant pot through the window of cousin Anne-Marie’s car. Sean and Amelie call him: ‘The man with the poorly head’.
On the Sunday, extracts of Dr Kate McCann’s diary (seized by the PJ and then handed back to her) were published in the News of the World, which she says came as complete shock to her. Although she accepts that “it was presented in a sympathetic way”, she claimed it was based on a translation from her English into Portuguese and then translated back into English again, so some of it was inaccurate. She gives two examples of inaccurate re-translations.
p. 333
She says that a judge on 27 June 2008 had ordered the destruction by the police of all copies of the diary made by the PJ. She cannot understand, then, how copies reached the News of the World.
Dr Kate’s diary entry 17 September 2008: “I feel like climbing into a hole and staying there. Sometimes it just feels like we are getting tested beyond all limits…I am clinging to my hope that the good God I have always believed exists and that somehow and at some point, he will bring Madeleine back to us”. The News of the World agreed to compensate Dr McCann for this breach of privacy. She does not say whether this compensation was paid into the Find Madeleine Fund or not.
p. 334
She says she contacted Ernie Allen in the U.S.A. in October 2008 to ask if he could help produce an age-progressed image of Madeleine. Dr Kate: “…we were still receiving photographs of blonde toddlers from concerned members of the public asking, ‘Could this be Madeleine?’ We needed to remind everyone that the little girl we were looking for had grown”. He found Glenn, “a patient and understanding forensic artist”. He used “sophisticated computer software, even seeking advice from a forensic anthropologist…”.
Dr Kate: “The first picture of ‘Madeleine, aged six, arrived without warning via email in mid-December. I was devastated. Caught unawares, I could not stop crying…”
Dr Kate: “IT…smacked me in the face with the cruel realisation that I didn’t actually know what my little girl was like any more”.
p. 335
Dr Kate: “…with the help of many more photographs of Madeleine, pictures of Gerry and myself at the same age and a lot of feedback and suggested amendments from me, we arrived at an acceptable or ‘close enough’ resemblance”.
But, the finished picture “looked too American and, though she is pretty, if I’m really honest, I think Madeleine is prettier. Maternal bias again”.
Dr Kate then explains how Goncao Amaral was “still parading his unsavoury theories” and how their legal team began to discuss the probelm.
“We had first talked on the ’phone to Isabel Duarte on 29 November. She was very understanding and sounded nice…to receive sympathy from someone in Portugal was like stepping into a warm bath”.
p. 336
On 7 April 2009 the newspaper Publico,“one of the most respected newspapers in Portugal and well regarded by the country’s opinion-formers”, published ‘pro-Amaral' article. This, says Dr Kate, “was a worrying development”.
Dr Kate then mentions the Channel 4 documentary-with-reconstruction, which we know as the ‘Mockumentary’, which Dr Kate says was “at last, a reconstruction that people would see”. She stayed at home with Sean and Amelie although “I desperately wanted to return to Praia da Luz when the time was right”. The press claimed that “disgruntled workers blamed us for redundancies at the Ocean Club” and “made much of Gerry being ‘heckled’ in Praia da Luz, suddenly forgetting that the world was in economic crisis”, adding that contrary to these reports, “In fact, maybe two people in a good-sized crowd shouted something at [Gerry]. Those holding pictures of Madeleine…didn’t warrant a mention”.
pp. 336-7
Dr Kate: “I’ve always been considered quite a gentle person but those attacks [in the press] stirred up terrible emotions in me. It was as if my whole body was trying to scream but a tightly screwed-on lid was preventing the scream from escaping. Instead I was just howling internally. My punch bag certainly came in handy at times”
p. 337
On 20 April the McCanns decided to sue Amaral, following the press article sympathetic to Amaral in Publico.
The McCanns then went on Oprah Winfrey: “This time we had our age-progressed image to publicise, and the global reach of Oprah’s massively popular show would give us a fantastic opportunity to stamp this on the worldwide public consciousness…this interview was a huge deal. Oprah has more than once been described as the most influential woman in the world. Certainly when she speaks, as they say across the Atlantic, America listens. I was overcome by nerves”.
pp. 337-8
Dr Kate: “Getting ready for the interview on the day was an event in itself. A choice of clothes and shoes had been brought to our hotel…I had my make-up and hair done by two lovely ladies (if only I could look like that every day!)…I was completely I in awe of Oprah…We were so grateful we wanted to hug her. In fact I’m sure we did hug her”….My nervousness intensified, partly because of the enormity of it all, and partly because I knew how important this was for Madeleine…her age-progressed picture would be seen by millions”.
p. 338
On 12 May 2009, on what would have been Madeleine’s 6th birthday, Dr Kate met Isabel Duarte: “I’d been reluctant to spend this emotional day in a meeting but our options were limited…” Dr Kate was very impressed with Isabel: “…pocket dynamo, tiny, attractive, immensely feisty, strong, intelligent, compassionate…you could see the desire for justice burning brightly in her”.
Duarte suggested injuncting Amaral’s book and DVD documentary and then suing him for libel: “It was an inspiring meeting”. Isabel looked Dr Kate in the eye and said: “Today is a very important day for your daughter”.
The next paragraph explains how Amaral was given an 18-month suspended prison sentence “in connection with a case in which three of his officers were accused of torture”. Dr Kate tells her readers about the case of Joana Cipriano, selectively telling us (a) that no body was found (b) that three officers were accused of torture and (c) that Joana’s moth and uncle “claimed they had been tortured into confessing. She concludes this paragraph as follows:
”The officers concerned were cleared but the jury found that Amaral had falsified statements relating to the torture case. His conviction was upheld in the Supreme Couirt inMarch 2011. Joana’s mother is still in jail”.
Dr Kate is not quite right in saying that this decision was made by ‘a jury’, It was in fact a panel of 43 judges and four jurors.
Anyone reading that paragraph would think that a monstrous injustice had been done to Joana’s mother and uncle, whereas in fact both freely confessed to the brutal murder of Joana after she caught them in bed together and they each received sentences of 16 years.
p. 339
Dr Kate goes on to attack Amaral: “Falsifying statements? It was difficult to understand why anyone would believe the theories of a police officer found guilty of such malpractice. While co-ordinating the investigation into Madeleine’s disappearance, Amaral had been an arguido (suspect). How on earth had he come to be put in charge of an enquiry into the disappearance of another missing child?”
Dr Kate now explains how their ‘lead investigator’ [Dave Edgar] had ’phoned on 22 May to explain that ‘a British tabloid’ would be publishing an article the following day about convicted British paedophile Raymond Hewlett having been at Tavira, on the Algarve, southern Portugal, at the time Madeleine had disappeared: “The proximity of Tavira on the Algarve to Praia da Luz and the fact that this man was a paedophile ticked all the boxes for the redtop papers, and they jumped on the story”.
Dr Kate: We were exasperated. We now knew that there had been hundreds of paedophiles on the Algarve at that time and, if God forbid, one of them had been involved, Hewlett seemed a less likely candidate than a lot of others. He was in his sixties, for a start, much older than the man seen by Jane [Tanner] …”
Nevertheless: “We were desperate for somebody to investigate Hewlett, not because we thought he had anything to do with taking Madeleine but because we wanted to eliminate him from the inquiry…My main worry was that Hewlett, who had terminal throat cancer, would die before anyone took an official statement from him. Then the media would take the line that it was probably him, game over, Madeleine was dead, and we would be left with an uphill struggle to prevent this theory from becoming established”.
These are very deceptive comments by Dr Kate. She and the McCann Team have in fact persistently suggested that Hewlett was connected in some way to Madeleine’s disappearance and they even gave credence to that ridiculous story (in the Sun, 1 September 2010) about Hewlett on his deathbed writing a letter to his estranged son Wayne about knowing the gypsy gang leader who ‘stole’ Madeleine to order. The Sun even published the story after Wayne was said to have ‘burnt’ the letter, thus removing any possibility of substantiating whether any such letter was in fact ever written.
p. 340
Dr Kate: “Sometimes it seemed as if we spent as much time trying to clear the path for our investigation as we did actually investigating…It was so frustrating”.
Dr Kate records that their investigators could not speak to him “unless we paid him to do so” and that Hewlett died a few months later.
On 27 August the case of Jaycee Lee Dugard was publicised. She had been abducted at the age of 11 by a sex offender and was found 18 years later, being kept in an outbuilding in the garden. Whilst conceding that for Jaycee Lee this had been “a tragedy”, Dr Kate goes on: “[Her] experience underlines how children can be hidden for many years and still found alive. This was a positive day not only for Jaycee, but for Madeleine and all missing children…None of us must give up on these children”.
pp. 340-1
Dr Kate now remarks on the “byzantine” workings of the Portuguese legal system in relation to their attempted injunction against Amaral’s book, giving a history of six separate decisions, the first three of which were:
(1) their claim was rejected because ‘the damage [from the sales of Amaral’s book and the viewing of the DVD] had already been done’
(2) they appealed and their appeal was successful; the case was reinstated
(3) they got an injunction against the book and the DVD, after a five-day hearing, on 8 September 2009.
p. 341
The decision was:
- All unsold copies of the book must be removed from shops and warehouses across Europe
- They must be deposited with the McCanns’ lawyer, Isabel Duarte.
Amaral appealed. The McCanns flew out to Portugal on 10 December for the first day of the hearing of his appeal: “Gerry and I felt it was…essential for us to attend to represent Madeleine. She needed somebody to be there for her. She was the victim in all this, not Gonclao Amaral”.
In her diary for 10 December, Dr Kate writes: “Not sure how I feel about seeing Mr Amaral - for the fist tie ever, I hasten to add!…that man has caused us so much upset and anger because of how he treated my beautiful Madeleine...he deserves to be miserable and feel fear”.
pp. 341-2
Dr Kate explains how the McCanns had been warned of a possible protest against them, but: “If we backed out, the bullies would have won. We’d come here for Madeleine, and we had no intention of letting her down…In the event, this ‘demonstration’ consisted of two middle-aged women, friends of Goncalo Amaral”.
p. 342
Dr Kate criticises Amaral for never having met her: “It is extraordinary that he could have said and written so many awful things about a person he had never met”.
Then there is a description of him: “He had obviously spruced himself up in recent months. The moustache, gold chain and bulging tummy familiar to me from unflattering newspaper photographs were nowhere to be seen. Now he was sporting a smart haircut, new suit and hat and - an intriguing touch - a diamond earring”.
Dr Kate: “I clutched my wooden holding cross tightly as he walked past…here was the person entrusted with finding our little girl…but then had failed her…by speaking out in a way that in effect hindered other people, ourselves included, from finding her. I couldn’t stop staring at him. It was as if I were trying to look in side his head. If the intensity of a stare could penetrate bone, I’m sure I would have managed it. What made this man tick...How did he manage to sleep at night?”
She says that Luis Neves was also in court: “…but he would not look at me. I was disappointed in him disappointed in myself, too, for putting my faith in him”.
p. 343
Dr Kate talks about herself in Portugal: “Gerry and I were able to seek solace at Nossa Senhora da Luz (the church), I spent time at my rocks on the beach and we caught up with friends. To this day I still return quietly to Luz from time to time to feel Madeleine close to me”.
In the court room, “…Amaral’s cronies greeted him with much sycophantic back-slapping…[it] made me distinctly uncomfortable”.
She recounts the proceedings:
Jose de Magalhaes e Menezes “gave an objective account, reiterating that here was no evidence either that Madeleine was dead or that Gerry and I were involved…”
Ricardo Paiva “…remained quite calm…[but] contradicted himself during his testimony…he believed Goncalo Amaral’s assertion[s]…”
Dr Kate: “The most disturbing thing about this is that it is Paiva who, to this day, received any information about Madeleine coming in to the Portuguese police. If this is what he believes, we have a real concern that he may not be considering such information objectively”.
pp. 343-4
Dr Kate encounters Amaral on the court room steps as she is going to the ‘ladies’: “…our shoulders briefly came within a foot of each other”.
p. 344
At the end of the first day’s session “The press were poised outside like vultures”.
COMMENT: It’s O.K. if the press and media (the Sun, the News of the World, Oprah Winfrey, BBC TV etc.) are recycling the McCanns’ take on their stories, but now the press are ‘vultures’.
The following morning: “Gerry gave a few pertinent statements to the media assembled outside the court in an attempt to redress the balance of the coverage of the previous day’s proceedings.
Dr Kate: “I had to laugh when I saw the front-page headline for the next day’s Daily Express: the arrestingly original ‘MCCANN FURY’. I’ve lost count of the times I’ve been driving along, seen that headline on a newsagent’s board and wondered to myself what we were [supposed to be] furious about now. I suppose it just fits the page nicely”.
COMMENT: In fact Gerry McCann had been very defensive and hostile to the media; impatient and angry.
Dr Kate repeats the claim that “Gerry had to leave towards the end of the second day because of work commitments…Fiona kindly agreed to fly out and join me”.
The first two days had “…highlighted the injustices heaped in Madeleine, provoking a lot of anger, exasperation and hurt…”
Dr Kate: “As soon as Fiona and I sat down on the plane [home], everything hit me full in the face: Madeleine, who she is, what I miss, the injustice, our life. I started to cry and couldn’t stop, I was just exhausted by it all”.
p. 345
Dr Kate and Gerry fly separately to Lisbon for the final, fourth day of the injunction appeal - 10 February 2010. On the plane she meets a ‘nice gentleman’ from Porto who support the McCanns.
Dr Kate: “I’ve wished so often to be able to plead with [the Portuguese people]: ‘Don’t believe what has been written about us; please don’t listen to gossip and reckless speculation. We are good people and we love our children dearly. Please give us a chance and help us find our daughter’.”
Dr Kate lists the witnesses who gave evidence in the morning. Then, in the afternoon: “…we returned to the courtroom for the summing-up of each of the lawyers. This was a horrible experience and one which, stupidly, I wasn’t prepared for. The summaries of the defence appear to be focussed more on attacking Gerry and me personally … Amaral’s lawyer also seemed intent on turning it into a U.K.-versus-Portugal battle…”
p. 346
Dr Kate: “…clearly the defence [i.e. Amaral’s team] were trying to incite the Portuguese people and keep public opinion on their side. It was ridiculous and unfair”.
Dr Kate: “I was totally drained by the time we boarded the plane”. They arrived back in Rothley at 2am.
Dr Kate writes in her diary: “I love you, Madeleine. We will keep fighting, regardless of how many battles we have to face…”
On February 18 the McCanns learnt that they had won their appeal; Goncalo Amaral’s book was still banned: “Thank goodness for some sanity…”
On 1 March Amaral was grilled on TV by an aggressive journalist, Miguel Sousa Tavares. Dr Kate expresses delight that “at last the tough questions crying out to be asked of him for two years [were being asked]…”
But on 19 October the Portuguese Appeal Court had reversed the decision of the Lisbon Court on18 February. It was “a bolt from the blue…WE hadn’t even been aware that another judgment was about to be made, and neither was our lawyer. This broadside just came from nowhere. How many appeals was Amaral going to be allowed? How could other judges come along and overturn a decision made by three courts before them?
p. 347
Dr Kate now refers to Amaral’s “poisonous allegations”. There was “more waffle about the injunction contradicting the constituion of Portugal and undermining democracy by prohibiting free speech. Does this mean that a person could go out and start accusing their next-door neighbour of being a serial killer? As I understand freedom of speech, it does not equate to freedom to slander and libel someone with impunity”.
Dr Kate: “It was impossible to comprehend. I felt utterly beaten…”
A sixth decision in the case this year rejected the McCanns’ appeal against the unbanning of Goncalo Amaral’s book. Dr Kate cannot bring herself to mention that it was the Portuguese Supreme Court that made that decision nor that it was their own appeal which had been rejected. Shea dds: “We plan to appeal this latest decision…”, though she does not say how, as this was the final court of appeal in Portugal. Perhaps she means to the European Court of Human Rights?
Dr Kate then mentions the Wikileaks leak of a communication by the U.S. Embassy in Portugal about “…a meeting that [occurred] on 21 September between Alex Ellis, the British Ambassador in Portugal and Alfred Hoffman Jr, the outgoing U.S. Ambassador, in which Ellis tells Hoffman that the British police ‘developed the current evidence against Madeleine’s parents’.
Dr Kate responds:
the cable was three years old
what it contained “didn’t amount to much”
it just refers to “dogs that barked in our apartment and near our car”
“…the British officers did not actually develop evidence as such, because there was no evidence to develop”
it was “old news”
we didn’t pay it much attention
it created “no more than a ripple for a day or so”.
p. 348
But, “to our dismay, the Portuguese press, galvanised by Goncalo Amaral, lapped it up. Off he went on another round of the interview circuit…It was absolutely soul-destroying”.
Dr Kate: “What probably galls me the most about Amaral’s interviews is the way he presents himself as a person who, perhaps above all others, really wants to find Madeleine and get to the bottom of her fate. I cannot begin to express how much this outrages me…There is nobody in the world more desperate than Gerry and me to find our daughter…”
She continues by referring to “the disgraceful slurs thrown at us…How many more times will they be pushed down the throats of the Portuguese public?”
Finally: “Goncalo Amaral has been convicted of falsifying statements and co-ordinated investigations into the disappearance of two little girls, neither of whom has been found. Why is this man being allowed a platform, from which to peddle his absurd and offensive ideas?”
Tony Bennett- Investigator
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Re: Prosecution Exhibit 1: 'madeleine' - What's in the book?
by ufercoffy 15.05.11 13:33
Thank you Tony
I'm also looking forward to PeterMac's summary and critique from a policeman's point of view
I'm also looking forward to PeterMac's summary and critique from a policeman's point of view
____________________
Whose cadaver scent and bodily fluid was found in the McCann's apartment and hire car if not Madeleine's?
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Re: Prosecution Exhibit 1: 'madeleine' - What's in the book?
by lj 15.05.11 14:03
Thank you, Tony, what an inmense work you've done.
____________________
"And if Madeleine had hurt herself inside the apartment, why would that be our fault?" Gerry
http://pjga.blogspot.co.uk/?m=0
http://whatreallyhappenedtomadeleinemccann.blogspot.co.uk/
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Re: Prosecution Exhibit 1: 'madeleine' - What's in the book?
by HotlipsHealy 16.05.11 17:51
I've been reading this before I decided to join. This is such a useful summary of the book! Thank you for your hard work.
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Re: Prosecution Exhibit 1: 'madeleine' - What's in the book?
by lj 16.05.11 18:15
I tell you, Kate is one sick puppy. She seems to be able to find new lows when everyone thinks it a not possible anymore. You're a hero Tony, don't forget to take an extra long bath and plan a vacation after this.
____________________
"And if Madeleine had hurt herself inside the apartment, why would that be our fault?" Gerry
http://pjga.blogspot.co.uk/?m=0
http://whatreallyhappenedtomadeleinemccann.blogspot.co.uk/
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Re: Prosecution Exhibit 1: 'madeleine' - What's in the book?
by ROSA 17.05.11 0:47
A very helpful book full of Lies & deception ( kate's new versions of her old lies)
Incriminating new information that could nail the mccanns
Kate mccanns mental status and much much more......
Incriminating new information that could nail the mccanns
Kate mccanns mental status and much much more......
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CHAPTER 23 (final Chapter) - pages 349-369
by Tony Bennett 18.05.11 8:11
I have now completed the summary and critique of Chaper 22, on page 6 of this thread, and now add an analysis of the final Chapter, Chapter 23. I've now added comments on the book from page 178 to the end.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
SUMMARY AND CRITIQUE
Chapter 23 ‘Adapting to our New Life’
p. 349
Dr Kate says that on 4 May 2007 she changed from being Dr Kate Helay to being ‘Kate McCann’…“I’d become a different person…”
The next paragraph is about Madeleine becoming known as ‘Maddie’; Dr Kate: Madeleine would be the first person to correct anyone who makes the mistake of a shortening her name. I’m not Maddie. I’m Madeleine’. And quite right too…the press know what her name is and yet to this day they insist on calling her Maddie or Maddy. I find it quite disrespectful”.
Dr Kate: “We have all changed from the people we were. Gerry’s family miss their fun and gregarioius ‘baby’ brother…[he is now] a much more serious sibling who is always busy and usually exhausted. I’m certainly not as laid-back as I was…I’ve become more cynical…a little spark that used to be within me is missing”.
p. 350
There are then some paragraphs about the feelings of Dr Kate and Dr Gerry and how their life has changed. There is “the solid relationship between Gerry and me”, “…how lucky Gerry and I were to have found each other...I do feel lucky…The fact that we’re still together and doing OK is…quite an achievement…The statistics show that most marriages subjected to such traumatic experiences break down”.
But: “…Gerry was functioning much sooner than I was. I felt a tinge of resentment that he was managing to operate and I wasn’t; sometimes I found it almost offensive…On other days I would feel a failure for not being capable of doing as much for Madeleine as I could…I was consumed by my own grief [and] simply couldn’t give anything.
p. 351
Dr Kate: “Madeleine is there in my head all the time. Either I am consciously thinking about her or some reflex brings her into my mind, whatever I am talking about or doing…I know that being preoccupied and consumed isn’t helpful, either to her or to me”.
Dr Kate: “The awful sense of Madeleine’s fear I once experienced every waking hour has, however, eased a little. What remains is a lasting awareness of the terror she would’ve felt in the disorienting moment she first opened her eyes to find herself with a stranger. I cannot imagine this will ever fade completely”.
Dr Kate: “It was a long time before I was able to allow myself to take any real pleasure in anything. I couldn’t watch television, read a book, listen to music or follow the football, as I might have done to relax in my old life. I couldn’t go out to the cinema or out for a meal. I couldn’t browse in the shops…How could I possibly take pleasure in anything without my daughter?”
p. 352
Dr Kate: “Gerry…was able to switch off from time to time and I’m sure that was a great help to him. I felt guilty for his sake that I couldn’t do the same”.
There is a lot more about Gerry’s feelings and her feelings.
Examples:
“There’s something particularly distressing about seeing a strong man reduced to a heap, crying like a baby…”
He was crying while sitting with Sean and Amelie watching Madeleine and Gerry’s favourite episode of ‘Dr Who’.
“Occasionally…I’ve longed for a chance to…even just to feel Gerry’s arm around my shoulder, but he simply hasn’t had the strength”.
p. 353
“Gerry’s worst days don’t usually coincide with mine...”
“I took a cognitive approach to getting our sexual relationship back on track…It seems to have worked”.
Dr Kate: “…I was gradually, very gradually, able to allow myself some pleasure and relaxation in general…it certainly took well over a year…Just acknowledging this slow personal ‘improvement’, however, brings a wave of guilt over me. My life is weighed down with guilt: Guilt for what happened to Madeleine, guilt at surviving this whole horror, guilt that our family…have had to experience any of it, guilt for not being quite the person or wife I once was…guilt about talking even five minutes for myself. Perhaps being a mother and a Catholic is a double whammy when it comes to guilt”.
p. 354
And then: “…the knowledge that I am a stronger and more able woman that I was a couple of years ago helps me to shake of a little of that guilt: I recognise this as a postive development, for Gerry, for Sean and Amelie, and for Madeleine”.
On 10 December the McCanns went to a Golf Society dance; they danced and Dr Kate “actually enjoyed it. It felt a little strange but I wasn’t consumed with guilt as is often the case in these situations. Gerry looked really happy, almost glowing. It felt good to share some smiles and laugher with my lovely husband”.
Dr Kate then explains how their ‘Tapas 7’ friends “live with the additional trauma of having been with us when the abduction took place…”
p. 355
Dr Kate says that some of her friends have suffered major problems in their lives, such as family bereavements and cancer, but “…sometimes our depleted reserves of time and strength have prevented us from doing as much as we would have wanted [to help them]”. Another paragraph discusses their feelings towards their friends and their friends’ feelings towards them.
p. 356
Just as Alan Pike predicted, the McCanns have lost some old friends but also made new ones. People’s reactions to them are discussed in another paragraph. Some find it all “too painful to bear”.
“One of the big changes in our life has been the loss of our anonymity – something I’d always taken for granted…Cynics will argue that we ‘courted’ the media (God, how I detest that expression)”.
p. 357
Dr Kate: “Every decision we have made in the last four years, and every encounter with the press, has been undertaken in Madeleine’s interest, not ours”.
Dr Kate continues that”…Our relationship with the media remains finely balanced and uneasy”. There are many comments emphasising how the press is necessary so that the public can be reached and help ‘continue the search for Madeleine’ and to enable them to “publicise requests for information related to any new developments in our investigation”.
COMMENT: Like being seen wandering behind a couple in Dubai, like looking for an Australian-speaking ‘Victoria Beckham-lookalike’, and like looking for a gypsy gang leader in Portugal who was collecting European children for wealthy North African families and once had a drinking session with now-dead paedophile Raymond Paedophile who on his deathbed wrote a letter (delivered by a ‘mystery man’) to a son who hated him and from whom he’d been estranged for 20 years or more and whose son then burnt the letter before deciding to speak to the Sun about its contents.
Dr Kate: “Engaging with the media is like riding a tiger”.
There is then a long paragraph about how Dr Kate feels ‘very self-conscious in public places’ and how she now finds shopping: “…a trial. When I have to do it, I fly in and out as quickly as possible”.
p. 358
She once went shopping and was “feeling exposed [with] tears welling up. A colleague suddenly grabbed her by the arm and said: ‘Kate, you look so scared. Hold your head up. You have nothing to feel bad about’. I worried that if people saw me smile or laugh, they’d think it was inappropriate. After all, I thought it inappropriate myself”.
Dr Kate: “I even worried about silly things like shoppers spotting me buying groceries in Marks and Spencer or Sainsbury’s and frowning on me for not going somewhere cheaper like Aldi and putting the pennies saved into Madeleine’s Fund”.
Then she was also afraid when Sean and Amelie were having tantrums and Dr Kate would worry about what people would think of how she handled them: “I was unsure how I should react…In my old life there would probably have been a few stern words…Now, though, with everyone watching me, I didn’t feel I could speak firmly to them in public, let alone raise my voice”.
p. 359
A couple of paragraphs deal with how Sean reacted when taken for swimming lessons. Initially he cried buckets, screaming: ‘I want my Mummy’. But after a few lessons, he was fine and has learnt how to swim.
Some people are very kind: “It is heartening and comforting when shoppers come up to me in the supermarket and say: ‘How are you, Kate? We’re all behind you’.”
p. 360
There is more about visiting psychics and mediums, one of whom knocked on the McCanns’ door as they were having Christmas dinner; others just drop by and say: ‘I thought we’d call in on you while we were travelling this way’. Dr Kate: “…some of their actions can be a little disconcerting”.
Dr Kate: “I feel much more vulnerable than I did four years ago, particularly as a parent”…I’d never, ever considered the possibility that a man night steal my baby from her bed. Since that night my anxieties for Sean and Amelie have escalated. I’ve worried more about accidents, illness and, not surprisingly, about whom they are in contact with”.
Dr Kate: “I’ve worried about the future, about the children going off to university…I don’t want them to go. I want to hang on to them and keep them close and safe…”
COMMENT: Yet she spends a fair amount of time away from them…going to meetings, doing interviews, attending conferences with lawyers, court hearings, visiting the Hubbards in Praia da Luz regularly, and so on.
Dr Kate has “spoken to Alan Pike about my fears…”
Dr Kate: “As advised by the experts, we’ve tried always to be open with Sean and Amelie and to answer all their questions truthfully as they arise”. She explain that Amelie “…became preoccupied with the idea that Madeleine might have run away…” The McCanns countered this by “…explaining the abduction to the children in the simplest and least frightening way we could…somebody had wanted her and taken her away”.
COMMENT: Not an easy task, explaining how a ‘monster’ took their sister from her bed one night.
p. 361
The children “…dealt with this new knowledge in a very matter-of-fact way: a naughty man had stolen their sister and now what we must do was find her. As they grow up, we continue to respond to everything they ask us carefully but honestly”.
Dr Kate: “…hand on heart, Sean and Amelie today are incredibly happy children, remarkably well adjusted, well rounded and emotionally in tune. We are so proud of them...In the years to come, I am sure they will find some solace in the fact that their Mum and Dad did everything in their power to find their big sister”.
Then follows some more paragraphs on her religious views.
Dr Kate says she’s doubted God’s existence and “been angry with Him. I’ve shouted out loud and on occasion I’ve hit things (I’m afraid even the church pews have had the odd thumping!)”.
She continues: “What I do wrestle with…is the inexplicable fact that despite so many prayers, almost total global awareness, and a vast amount of hard work, we still do not have an answer”.
p. 362
Dr Kate: “Millions have prayed [for Madeleine]. So if Madeleine is alive, why hasn’t God brought her back to us?…surely He could lead us to the truth and put a stop to the terrible anguish of not knowing?…how long do we have to wait?”
She continues: “How can so much suffering and injustice be heaped upon one family? It is said that God only gives you a cross He knows you can bear. Well, I’m afraid this cross has been far too heavy for far too long. For now, though, at least, my anger towards Gpd seems to have subsided…”
Dr Kate: “Darwin’s theories and chance don’t cover it for me…I believe in Him…”
Dr Kate: “I sometimes end up having serious words with God about His slow progress…Maybe I just need to be patient and trust Him”.
Dr Kate: There is one thing of which I am confident: I believe wherever Madeleine is, God is with her”, but…
Dr Kate: “Gerry has certainly struggled over the last year with his faith…he still believes in God [but] is no longer convinced of the power of prayer. In his words: ‘If prayer worked, we would’ve had Madeleine back a long time ago’.”
p. 363
Dr Kate: “Gerry has always believed that everyone possesses God-given talents which we should use to the best of our ability…”
The next paragraph explains how what has happened to Madeleine has “greatly increased public awareness…”
But not, says Dr Kate, public awareness of the risks of leaving very young, highly vulnerable children on their own.
No, for Dr Kate, what has happened to Madeleine has raised awareness of “…the whole issue of missing, abducted and exploited children”. There follows a list of the ‘missing children’ organisations that they have “tried to support”.
She refers to the celebrity bash they had at Richard Branson’s Rooftop Restaurant in Kensington on the 1000th day since Madeleine was reported missing. It raised £45,000; half for ‘Madeleine’s Fund’ and the other half for ‘Missing People’ and ‘Missing Children Europe’.
Dr Kate emphasises how organisations have benefited from their campaigning: “In the wake of our 2008 campaign calling for a co-ordinated Europe-wide child alert rescue system, the Eiropean Parliament dedicated one million euros to fund projects aimed at developing interconnected child rescue alerts”. There is more about how these ‘child rescue’ schemes have developed, for example: “The U.K.’s new nationally co-ordinated child rescue alert was launched on International Missing Children’s Day, 25 May, 2010”.
p. 364
Dr Kate speaks of her hopes that “…national governments will demonstrate the will to protect our children, and acknowledge their moral obligation to do so”.
COMMENT: Unfortunately, she says nothing about the need to tighten laws to discourage parents from leaving young children on their own.
Then: “Sean and Amelie often talk about how their sister might escape, how we could rescue her and what they would do to the ‘naughty man’ who stole her”.
A long paragraph thanks Leicestershire Police and Jim Gamble, former Head of CEOP, for their help. Then: “…a harsh fact remains. Since July 2008, there has been no police force anywhere actively investigating what has happened to Madeleine. We are the only people looking for her”.
Dr Kate then says she wants police forces across Europe to have “a more joined-up approach” to finding missing children. It happens, she says, in “crimes involving drugs, money-laundering and terrorism”, but not missing children.
p. 365
Dr Kate then develops the case for “An independent investigative review…”
She asks: “Who is the man Jane Tanner saw carrying a child?” and “Who is the man seen watching the apartment in the days before?” and “Have all those in the vicinity of the Ocean Club that spring…been eliminated on solid grounds?”
And: “There are still people who have not been interviewed”.
p. 366
Dr Kate: “There are lessons to be learned for the future, in terms of both the handling of crimes against children and the treatment we have received from the authorities…”
And: “…the perpetrator of this monstrous crime remains at large…[he] has been anonymous for far too long”.
Then: “We are still pressing the British and Portuguese governments to do more, or at least something”. She discloses that former Labour Home Secretary asked CEOP to carry out a ‘scoping exercise’ to establish whether a review could be of benefit. It was delivered to the Home Office in March 2010. She adds: “Although we have not seen it, it has been widely reported that it highlights some deficiencies in the investigation and hence areas that merit further attention”.
She explains that she has also met current Home Secretary Theresa may and “we have written to her several times”, but: “Currently we do not know whether we are any further forward”. She refers to their online petition in support of a review and whinges that they are “at a loss to understand” why the government and police have not agreed to a review and “why our request for such a review has gone unanswered”.
p. 367
The first paragraph on this page complains that “Crucially, we do not have access to all of the information that has come in to the inquiry”.
COMMENT: The McCanns claim that they want access to those witness statements and documents that the PJ have withheld in order to trace evidence of a possible abductor. Others suggest that it is because the McCanns want to know what the PJ has on them, in order to defend themselves against what might be incriminating evidence against them in those files.
Dr Kate says that these hidden PJ files are just “gathering dust”.
Then: “Madeleine is still alive until someone proves otherwise…there is no evidence whatsoever to suggest she has come to any harm, other than as a result of being separated from her family”.
Another paragraph lists the “many examples if abducted children being recovered years later”. They include:
Carlina White, stolen from hospital and traced 23 years later
Shaun Hornbeck, abducted when 10 and “recovered four years later”
Crystal Anzaldi, “snatched” at 14 months and “found” seven years later
Stephen Stayner, “kidnapped at seven, escaped from his abductor seven years later”
Jaycee Lee Dugard, who spent 18 years with her abductor (aged 11 to 29) before being found.
Dr Kate asks: “How many more children are out there waiting to be found?” Bolstered by this hope, we have moved forward”.
p. 368
Dr Kate: “We love [Madeleine] beyond words. We will never give up on her. We will not allow our story to end here”.
Dr Kate appeals for information…”If you know what has happened to her or where she is now, please open your heart and let us know. It is never too late to do the right thing”.
She closes by giving a PO Box to write to and the ’phone number of the investigation hotline - the very same telephone number used in 2008 by callers to the number and whose calls, according to the Director of Virginia. U.S.A.-based company iJet, were not followed up, indeed were totally ignored, by the McCanns and their advisers.
p. 369 is titled “A Call to Action” and asks people to “write to the Home Secretary and Prime Minister urging the British and Portuguese authorities to commission a joint, independent and comprehensive review of Madeleine’s case”.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
SUMMARY AND CRITIQUE
Chapter 23 ‘Adapting to our New Life’
p. 349
Dr Kate says that on 4 May 2007 she changed from being Dr Kate Helay to being ‘Kate McCann’…“I’d become a different person…”
The next paragraph is about Madeleine becoming known as ‘Maddie’; Dr Kate: Madeleine would be the first person to correct anyone who makes the mistake of a shortening her name. I’m not Maddie. I’m Madeleine’. And quite right too…the press know what her name is and yet to this day they insist on calling her Maddie or Maddy. I find it quite disrespectful”.
Dr Kate: “We have all changed from the people we were. Gerry’s family miss their fun and gregarioius ‘baby’ brother…[he is now] a much more serious sibling who is always busy and usually exhausted. I’m certainly not as laid-back as I was…I’ve become more cynical…a little spark that used to be within me is missing”.
p. 350
There are then some paragraphs about the feelings of Dr Kate and Dr Gerry and how their life has changed. There is “the solid relationship between Gerry and me”, “…how lucky Gerry and I were to have found each other...I do feel lucky…The fact that we’re still together and doing OK is…quite an achievement…The statistics show that most marriages subjected to such traumatic experiences break down”.
But: “…Gerry was functioning much sooner than I was. I felt a tinge of resentment that he was managing to operate and I wasn’t; sometimes I found it almost offensive…On other days I would feel a failure for not being capable of doing as much for Madeleine as I could…I was consumed by my own grief [and] simply couldn’t give anything.
p. 351
Dr Kate: “Madeleine is there in my head all the time. Either I am consciously thinking about her or some reflex brings her into my mind, whatever I am talking about or doing…I know that being preoccupied and consumed isn’t helpful, either to her or to me”.
Dr Kate: “The awful sense of Madeleine’s fear I once experienced every waking hour has, however, eased a little. What remains is a lasting awareness of the terror she would’ve felt in the disorienting moment she first opened her eyes to find herself with a stranger. I cannot imagine this will ever fade completely”.
Dr Kate: “It was a long time before I was able to allow myself to take any real pleasure in anything. I couldn’t watch television, read a book, listen to music or follow the football, as I might have done to relax in my old life. I couldn’t go out to the cinema or out for a meal. I couldn’t browse in the shops…How could I possibly take pleasure in anything without my daughter?”
p. 352
Dr Kate: “Gerry…was able to switch off from time to time and I’m sure that was a great help to him. I felt guilty for his sake that I couldn’t do the same”.
There is a lot more about Gerry’s feelings and her feelings.
Examples:
“There’s something particularly distressing about seeing a strong man reduced to a heap, crying like a baby…”
He was crying while sitting with Sean and Amelie watching Madeleine and Gerry’s favourite episode of ‘Dr Who’.
“Occasionally…I’ve longed for a chance to…even just to feel Gerry’s arm around my shoulder, but he simply hasn’t had the strength”.
p. 353
“Gerry’s worst days don’t usually coincide with mine...”
“I took a cognitive approach to getting our sexual relationship back on track…It seems to have worked”.
Dr Kate: “…I was gradually, very gradually, able to allow myself some pleasure and relaxation in general…it certainly took well over a year…Just acknowledging this slow personal ‘improvement’, however, brings a wave of guilt over me. My life is weighed down with guilt: Guilt for what happened to Madeleine, guilt at surviving this whole horror, guilt that our family…have had to experience any of it, guilt for not being quite the person or wife I once was…guilt about talking even five minutes for myself. Perhaps being a mother and a Catholic is a double whammy when it comes to guilt”.
p. 354
And then: “…the knowledge that I am a stronger and more able woman that I was a couple of years ago helps me to shake of a little of that guilt: I recognise this as a postive development, for Gerry, for Sean and Amelie, and for Madeleine”.
On 10 December the McCanns went to a Golf Society dance; they danced and Dr Kate “actually enjoyed it. It felt a little strange but I wasn’t consumed with guilt as is often the case in these situations. Gerry looked really happy, almost glowing. It felt good to share some smiles and laugher with my lovely husband”.
Dr Kate then explains how their ‘Tapas 7’ friends “live with the additional trauma of having been with us when the abduction took place…”
p. 355
Dr Kate says that some of her friends have suffered major problems in their lives, such as family bereavements and cancer, but “…sometimes our depleted reserves of time and strength have prevented us from doing as much as we would have wanted [to help them]”. Another paragraph discusses their feelings towards their friends and their friends’ feelings towards them.
p. 356
Just as Alan Pike predicted, the McCanns have lost some old friends but also made new ones. People’s reactions to them are discussed in another paragraph. Some find it all “too painful to bear”.
“One of the big changes in our life has been the loss of our anonymity – something I’d always taken for granted…Cynics will argue that we ‘courted’ the media (God, how I detest that expression)”.
p. 357
Dr Kate: “Every decision we have made in the last four years, and every encounter with the press, has been undertaken in Madeleine’s interest, not ours”.
Dr Kate continues that”…Our relationship with the media remains finely balanced and uneasy”. There are many comments emphasising how the press is necessary so that the public can be reached and help ‘continue the search for Madeleine’ and to enable them to “publicise requests for information related to any new developments in our investigation”.
COMMENT: Like being seen wandering behind a couple in Dubai, like looking for an Australian-speaking ‘Victoria Beckham-lookalike’, and like looking for a gypsy gang leader in Portugal who was collecting European children for wealthy North African families and once had a drinking session with now-dead paedophile Raymond Paedophile who on his deathbed wrote a letter (delivered by a ‘mystery man’) to a son who hated him and from whom he’d been estranged for 20 years or more and whose son then burnt the letter before deciding to speak to the Sun about its contents.
Dr Kate: “Engaging with the media is like riding a tiger”.
There is then a long paragraph about how Dr Kate feels ‘very self-conscious in public places’ and how she now finds shopping: “…a trial. When I have to do it, I fly in and out as quickly as possible”.
p. 358
She once went shopping and was “feeling exposed [with] tears welling up. A colleague suddenly grabbed her by the arm and said: ‘Kate, you look so scared. Hold your head up. You have nothing to feel bad about’. I worried that if people saw me smile or laugh, they’d think it was inappropriate. After all, I thought it inappropriate myself”.
Dr Kate: “I even worried about silly things like shoppers spotting me buying groceries in Marks and Spencer or Sainsbury’s and frowning on me for not going somewhere cheaper like Aldi and putting the pennies saved into Madeleine’s Fund”.
Then she was also afraid when Sean and Amelie were having tantrums and Dr Kate would worry about what people would think of how she handled them: “I was unsure how I should react…In my old life there would probably have been a few stern words…Now, though, with everyone watching me, I didn’t feel I could speak firmly to them in public, let alone raise my voice”.
p. 359
A couple of paragraphs deal with how Sean reacted when taken for swimming lessons. Initially he cried buckets, screaming: ‘I want my Mummy’. But after a few lessons, he was fine and has learnt how to swim.
Some people are very kind: “It is heartening and comforting when shoppers come up to me in the supermarket and say: ‘How are you, Kate? We’re all behind you’.”
p. 360
There is more about visiting psychics and mediums, one of whom knocked on the McCanns’ door as they were having Christmas dinner; others just drop by and say: ‘I thought we’d call in on you while we were travelling this way’. Dr Kate: “…some of their actions can be a little disconcerting”.
Dr Kate: “I feel much more vulnerable than I did four years ago, particularly as a parent”…I’d never, ever considered the possibility that a man night steal my baby from her bed. Since that night my anxieties for Sean and Amelie have escalated. I’ve worried more about accidents, illness and, not surprisingly, about whom they are in contact with”.
Dr Kate: “I’ve worried about the future, about the children going off to university…I don’t want them to go. I want to hang on to them and keep them close and safe…”
COMMENT: Yet she spends a fair amount of time away from them…going to meetings, doing interviews, attending conferences with lawyers, court hearings, visiting the Hubbards in Praia da Luz regularly, and so on.
Dr Kate has “spoken to Alan Pike about my fears…”
Dr Kate: “As advised by the experts, we’ve tried always to be open with Sean and Amelie and to answer all their questions truthfully as they arise”. She explain that Amelie “…became preoccupied with the idea that Madeleine might have run away…” The McCanns countered this by “…explaining the abduction to the children in the simplest and least frightening way we could…somebody had wanted her and taken her away”.
COMMENT: Not an easy task, explaining how a ‘monster’ took their sister from her bed one night.
p. 361
The children “…dealt with this new knowledge in a very matter-of-fact way: a naughty man had stolen their sister and now what we must do was find her. As they grow up, we continue to respond to everything they ask us carefully but honestly”.
Dr Kate: “…hand on heart, Sean and Amelie today are incredibly happy children, remarkably well adjusted, well rounded and emotionally in tune. We are so proud of them...In the years to come, I am sure they will find some solace in the fact that their Mum and Dad did everything in their power to find their big sister”.
Then follows some more paragraphs on her religious views.
Dr Kate says she’s doubted God’s existence and “been angry with Him. I’ve shouted out loud and on occasion I’ve hit things (I’m afraid even the church pews have had the odd thumping!)”.
She continues: “What I do wrestle with…is the inexplicable fact that despite so many prayers, almost total global awareness, and a vast amount of hard work, we still do not have an answer”.
p. 362
Dr Kate: “Millions have prayed [for Madeleine]. So if Madeleine is alive, why hasn’t God brought her back to us?…surely He could lead us to the truth and put a stop to the terrible anguish of not knowing?…how long do we have to wait?”
She continues: “How can so much suffering and injustice be heaped upon one family? It is said that God only gives you a cross He knows you can bear. Well, I’m afraid this cross has been far too heavy for far too long. For now, though, at least, my anger towards Gpd seems to have subsided…”
Dr Kate: “Darwin’s theories and chance don’t cover it for me…I believe in Him…”
Dr Kate: “I sometimes end up having serious words with God about His slow progress…Maybe I just need to be patient and trust Him”.
Dr Kate: There is one thing of which I am confident: I believe wherever Madeleine is, God is with her”, but…
Dr Kate: “Gerry has certainly struggled over the last year with his faith…he still believes in God [but] is no longer convinced of the power of prayer. In his words: ‘If prayer worked, we would’ve had Madeleine back a long time ago’.”
p. 363
Dr Kate: “Gerry has always believed that everyone possesses God-given talents which we should use to the best of our ability…”
The next paragraph explains how what has happened to Madeleine has “greatly increased public awareness…”
But not, says Dr Kate, public awareness of the risks of leaving very young, highly vulnerable children on their own.
No, for Dr Kate, what has happened to Madeleine has raised awareness of “…the whole issue of missing, abducted and exploited children”. There follows a list of the ‘missing children’ organisations that they have “tried to support”.
She refers to the celebrity bash they had at Richard Branson’s Rooftop Restaurant in Kensington on the 1000th day since Madeleine was reported missing. It raised £45,000; half for ‘Madeleine’s Fund’ and the other half for ‘Missing People’ and ‘Missing Children Europe’.
Dr Kate emphasises how organisations have benefited from their campaigning: “In the wake of our 2008 campaign calling for a co-ordinated Europe-wide child alert rescue system, the Eiropean Parliament dedicated one million euros to fund projects aimed at developing interconnected child rescue alerts”. There is more about how these ‘child rescue’ schemes have developed, for example: “The U.K.’s new nationally co-ordinated child rescue alert was launched on International Missing Children’s Day, 25 May, 2010”.
p. 364
Dr Kate speaks of her hopes that “…national governments will demonstrate the will to protect our children, and acknowledge their moral obligation to do so”.
COMMENT: Unfortunately, she says nothing about the need to tighten laws to discourage parents from leaving young children on their own.
Then: “Sean and Amelie often talk about how their sister might escape, how we could rescue her and what they would do to the ‘naughty man’ who stole her”.
A long paragraph thanks Leicestershire Police and Jim Gamble, former Head of CEOP, for their help. Then: “…a harsh fact remains. Since July 2008, there has been no police force anywhere actively investigating what has happened to Madeleine. We are the only people looking for her”.
Dr Kate then says she wants police forces across Europe to have “a more joined-up approach” to finding missing children. It happens, she says, in “crimes involving drugs, money-laundering and terrorism”, but not missing children.
p. 365
Dr Kate then develops the case for “An independent investigative review…”
She asks: “Who is the man Jane Tanner saw carrying a child?” and “Who is the man seen watching the apartment in the days before?” and “Have all those in the vicinity of the Ocean Club that spring…been eliminated on solid grounds?”
And: “There are still people who have not been interviewed”.
p. 366
Dr Kate: “There are lessons to be learned for the future, in terms of both the handling of crimes against children and the treatment we have received from the authorities…”
And: “…the perpetrator of this monstrous crime remains at large…[he] has been anonymous for far too long”.
Then: “We are still pressing the British and Portuguese governments to do more, or at least something”. She discloses that former Labour Home Secretary asked CEOP to carry out a ‘scoping exercise’ to establish whether a review could be of benefit. It was delivered to the Home Office in March 2010. She adds: “Although we have not seen it, it has been widely reported that it highlights some deficiencies in the investigation and hence areas that merit further attention”.
She explains that she has also met current Home Secretary Theresa may and “we have written to her several times”, but: “Currently we do not know whether we are any further forward”. She refers to their online petition in support of a review and whinges that they are “at a loss to understand” why the government and police have not agreed to a review and “why our request for such a review has gone unanswered”.
p. 367
The first paragraph on this page complains that “Crucially, we do not have access to all of the information that has come in to the inquiry”.
COMMENT: The McCanns claim that they want access to those witness statements and documents that the PJ have withheld in order to trace evidence of a possible abductor. Others suggest that it is because the McCanns want to know what the PJ has on them, in order to defend themselves against what might be incriminating evidence against them in those files.
Dr Kate says that these hidden PJ files are just “gathering dust”.
Then: “Madeleine is still alive until someone proves otherwise…there is no evidence whatsoever to suggest she has come to any harm, other than as a result of being separated from her family”.
Another paragraph lists the “many examples if abducted children being recovered years later”. They include:
Carlina White, stolen from hospital and traced 23 years later
Shaun Hornbeck, abducted when 10 and “recovered four years later”
Crystal Anzaldi, “snatched” at 14 months and “found” seven years later
Stephen Stayner, “kidnapped at seven, escaped from his abductor seven years later”
Jaycee Lee Dugard, who spent 18 years with her abductor (aged 11 to 29) before being found.
Dr Kate asks: “How many more children are out there waiting to be found?” Bolstered by this hope, we have moved forward”.
p. 368
Dr Kate: “We love [Madeleine] beyond words. We will never give up on her. We will not allow our story to end here”.
Dr Kate appeals for information…”If you know what has happened to her or where she is now, please open your heart and let us know. It is never too late to do the right thing”.
She closes by giving a PO Box to write to and the ’phone number of the investigation hotline - the very same telephone number used in 2008 by callers to the number and whose calls, according to the Director of Virginia. U.S.A.-based company iJet, were not followed up, indeed were totally ignored, by the McCanns and their advisers.
p. 369 is titled “A Call to Action” and asks people to “write to the Home Secretary and Prime Minister urging the British and Portuguese authorities to commission a joint, independent and comprehensive review of Madeleine’s case”.
Tony Bennett- Investigator
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That book!
by Guest 29.05.11 10:09
No wonder J K Rowling was quick to deny that she had any input in Kate's book. I hope that she is also now questioning whether it was a good idea to give the McCanns any sort of support in the past.
Guest- Guest
Re: Prosecution Exhibit 1: 'madeleine' - What's in the book?
by PeterMac 29.05.11 11:27
Indeed.Marian wrote:No wonder J K Rowling was quick to deny that she had any input in Kate's book. I hope that she is also now questioning whether it was a good idea to give the McCanns any sort of support in the past.
Rowling writes fantasy, understood by everyone, or one hopes by almost everyone, as untrue but permitted because it comes under the umbrella of 'fantasy fiction for children'.
Katey is purporting to write truth, or at least a 'version of the truth', but it is seen by everyone, or almost everyone, as a distortion of things that have been said or written before, even by Katey herself. She does not have the defence of 'fantasy fiction'.
PeterMac- Investigator
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Re: Prosecution Exhibit 1: 'madeleine' - What's in the book?
by HotlipsHealy 29.05.11 11:35
Is it enough to get her in for questioning to find out why she and Gerry have so many versions of the truth? Their first version buggered up the investigation and their second version is taking the piss and making them money. It's just not right.
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Re: Prosecution Exhibit 1: 'madeleine' - What's in the book?
by Atilliator 04.06.11 2:59
There are two words that come to mind when reading page 129: own goal. I mean, especially in the light of the statement of Mrs Gaspar, one wonders what the writer was thinking of. BTW, although Kate McCann is credited as author, she might not have written that particular sentence.
I think page 129 is going to cost the McCanns a lot of credibility. I for one find that sentence totally inappropriate. It's going to turn a lot of people off.
I think page 129 is going to cost the McCanns a lot of credibility. I for one find that sentence totally inappropriate. It's going to turn a lot of people off.
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Re: Prosecution Exhibit 1: 'madeleine' - What's in the book?
by PeterMac 04.06.11 7:28
I am still astonished that the proof readers and lawyers let it through in that form. There are many other ways in which the same thing could have been implied. And to insist that she wants the alleged predatory Pae*** and Madeleine, and the twins to read it is almost beyond belief.
I wonder what the Old Age Pensioners who gave so much money and have now been conned again into buying the book in the belief that it will help the search, think of it.
I wonder what the Old Age Pensioners who gave so much money and have now been conned again into buying the book in the belief that it will help the search, think of it.
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Kate's vivid imagination
by Guest 04.06.11 9:34
Does anyone know if any of our illustrious media (not just The Sun) actually quoted the stomach-churning piece on page 129 and, if so, were there any letters in response?
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Re: Prosecution Exhibit 1: 'madeleine' - What's in the book?
by Guest 04.06.11 10:07
Marian wrote:Does anyone know if any of our illustrious media (not just The Sun) actually quoted the stomach-churning piece on page 129 and, if so, were there any letters in response?
Hi Marian, I don't think one newspaper has quoted it, and who can blame them. It was carefully edited out.
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Re: Prosecution Exhibit 1: 'madeleine' - What's in the book?
by Guest 04.06.11 10:09
Welcome to Attilliator
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The Complete Mystery of Madeleine McCann™ :: Books on the Madeleine McCann case :: Kate McCann's book, Prosecution Exhibit 1: 'madeleine'
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