Media Mayhem - MCCANN MEDIA NONSENSE OF THE DAY

Verdi wrote:You need to ask, why Kate McCann was chosen to launch two new initiatives to help find missing people when she couldn't be bothered to help find her own missing precious three year old daughter.

Au contraire, she, aided and abetted by 'im indoors, went out of their way to scupper the official Portuguese police investigation.

You also need to find the endless promotional material for Missing People and other agencies on the findmadeleine website (a snip at 37k) which was whooshed like a pair of Portuguese curtains.

The update section of the findmadeleine website used to carry and promote lots of positive fundraising messages loaded with agency logos.

This all disappeared.

It really is a swamp.

'Don't say anything until they've turned off microphone', Gerry warns Kate on Spanish TV

24th October 2007

Gerry McCann warned his wife: "Don't say anything till they've taken off your microphone" as she broke down in tears at the end of an interview on Spanish television.

Kate started sobbing as the 30-minute interview by a Spanish TV presenter drew to a close.

But instead of turning to comfort her, Gerry's immediate reaction was to whisper the warning in extraordinary scenes played out to millions of viewers.

The couple were savaged in a phone vote which accompanied an exclusive interview they gave to late-night programme 360 grados on Spain's Antena 3.

Nearly 70 per cent of the callers said they thought the McCanns were not telling the truth about their daughter's disappearance while only 30 per cent gave the couple their backing.

Gerry nearly stormed out of the television interview after being quizzed over drugging his children.

Sources said Mr McCann was "fuming" at being asked a question that the Spanish interviewer had promised not to pose. Mr McCann stormed out of a previous interview with another Spanish TV channel.

A source said today: "Kate and Gerry were annoyed towards the end of the interview because of the drugs question. Gerry was on the verge of another walkout."


A source close to the McCanns insisted Gerry's warning to Kate followed a question about allegations they had drugged their daughter which the programme makers had been told they could not ask.

The source said: "Kate was very upset she was asked the question and Gerry was furious. "What was said wasn't said because they have anything to hide."

"I don't know how anyone could harm anyone as beautiful as Madeleine."

In her first television interview since she was named as an official suspect in the search for Madeleine, she said she was as confident of finding her daughter alive now as she was on the day she went missing nearly six months ago.

"Maybe even more so," she said. "I think she is possibly being held by someone in their house but I don't know.


"I strongly believe Madeleine is out there and we have to do everything we can."

The 39-year-old GP broke down as she told how her life felt incomplete without her daughter, whose fourth birthday passed shortly after she disappeared.

"I feel sad and I feel lonely and our life is not as happy without Madeleine," she said.

"I feel anxious she is not with us."

The cameras were stopped while she composed herself.

When the interview resumed Mrs McCann revealed how her two-year-old twins Sean and Amelie ask about their big sister.

She said Amelie told her: "Madeleine is coming home to my lovely house and I am going to share my toys with her."

She continued: "They do ask about Madeleine. Madeleine was a big part of their life.

"They are not upset and they are not distressed but they are very much aware she is not there."


Her husband Gerry said: "The hardest thing for me is when they say, 'When is Madeleine coming back home?' and we have to say, 'We don't know but everyone is looking for her'."

Mrs McCann broke down again at the end of the interview when she was asked about the last time she saw her daughter.
Missing: 'I strongly believe she is out there and we have to do everything we can'

Mr and Mrs McCann gave their first television interview to the Spanish channel Antena 3 as they launched a new hotline targeting people in Spain, Portugal and North Africa, appealing to them for clues as to their daughter's fate.


They had been warned by their legal team that they could be prosecuted for talking publicly while still bound by the strict Portuguese secrecy laws.

But their lawyers cleared them to speak last week.

Broadcasters from all over the world, including Oprah Winfrey and Barbara Walters, had asked for the first broadcast interview, but the family wanted to target the Iberian peninsula.

Mrs McCann said: "Somebody knows something. It is not about us. It is about Madeleine.

"We have not even seen her since she was four. She needs our help. She needs her family."


Mr McCann, also 39, added: "We want people to try to help reunite our lovely four-year-old girl with her parents."


The couple said they were confident they would be cleared of any involvement in Madeleine's disappearance.

Mrs McCann declared herself "100 per cent" sure while Mr McCann said he was "much more optimistic" since a new officer, Paulo Rebelo, was appointed to the case.

The consultant cardiologist said: "We have not been charged with anything. Investigations are continuing. The only thing is finding Madeleine."


His wife added: "It really is secondary. I will take anything that is thrown at me."

Mrs McCann defended her and her husband against accusations they had seemed calm and "too cool" in the weeks and months after their daughter vanished.

"We know we are innocent, totally innocent. That is why we are calm. We know each other," she said.

Mr McCann said the couple remained "completely united" and added: "Nothing that has happened to us has come close to upsetting us the way Madeleine going missing did.

"We have our own heartache and grief but we are absolutely determined to help in the search."

He described the last time he saw his daughter, saying: "I was the last to see her. I saw her and thought how beautiful she was, and how lucky I was to be a father of three children."

The couple refused to discuss claims that DNA evidence was found in their apartment and their hire car, and dismissed claims that they sedated their children as "ludicrous".

But Mr McCann said: "We are certainly not scared.

"There is no evidence DNA tests will show anything other than us being completely innocent."

He said the group of friends who were with them in Praia da Luz - the so-called Tapas Nine - knew they were not involved in the disappearance.

He added: "They know we are innocent, absolutely. They will help us. They will clear our names."

Asked if he had any regrets, he replied: "Not from the minute we found Madeleine gone."

Roberto Arce, who interviewed the McCanns for the Spanish television programme 360 Grados, spoke later about the couple's demeanour and emotional state.

"Kate looked prostrate with pain," he said. "Much more depressed than I've ever seen her before. She cried for the first time.
"Gerry looked much happier with the massive campaign that's been put in place to find his daughter."

He added: "The McCanns don't say in the interview there are clues Madeleine - dead or alive - is in Spain.


"But privately they confessed afterwards there are.

"I can't say what they are and I'm not sure they're necessarily more solid than other leads.

"But they maintain there are, in Spain as well as in neighbours like Morocco, but that Spain's involvement in all this is very important."

https://www.standard.co.uk/news/dont-say-anything-until-theyve-turned-off-microphone-gerry-warns-kate-on-spanish-tv-6683183.html
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My apologies for repeating this shear unadulterated tripe - second thoughts, I'm not in the least bit sorry for repeatedly drawing attention to the gross misrepresentation the truth, spewed forth on a daily basis by the UK's mainstream media..

'POISONOUS LIAR':  Top cop who taunted Kate and Gerry has made nearly £350k from Maddie McCann in book and DVD deals



Kate and Gerry McCann are currently challenging Goncalo Amaral at the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg to stop him from cashing in

Nick Pisa - 4th November 2018

AN ex-police chief who cruelly claimed Madeleine McCann’s parents covered up her death has made more than £350,000 from his book and a DVD.

Portuguese cop Goncalo Amaral’s huge earnings from The Truth Of The Lie have been revealed in court documents.

Kate and Gerry McCann are in a legal battle with Amaral at the European Court of Human Rights over the smears.

Amaral cruelly claims Madeleine, abducted aged three from an Algarve holiday apartment in 2007, died in an accident and the McCanns then covered it up.

Kate and Gerry, who have fought a lengthy legal battle to stop Amaral cashing in, are currently challenging him at the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. A source close to them said: “If Goncalo Amaral continues to make these outrageous claims then he will find he has a tough fight on his hands.

“Kate and Gerry are not going to let him get away with what he said about them.”

Amaral’s earnings from the book are revealed in documents filed at the ECHR.

They show he made 342,111 euros from book sales in 2008-2009 and another 40,000 euros from the DVD spin-off.

The book was translated into multiple languages, with more than 180,000 copies printed. There are fears Amaral plans a follow-up.

An injunction against the book, stopping further sales, was issued in 2009 when the McCanns began a libel action against Amaral, who led the initial Portuguese police inquiry into Madeleine’s disappearance.



They won the case in 2015 but the ruling was overturned on appeal — a decision upheld by Portugal’s Supreme Court. Amaral was awarded compensation.

The injunction on the book was also lifted, leading to thousands more sales and even more cash for Amaral. He is said to have made at least £20,000 from interviews with newspapers and TV stations.

The McCanns have gone to the ECHR in a final effort to avoid paying Amaral £750,000 in compensation.
But it could take until 2021 before the judges decide.

The McCanns fear if they lose, Amaral’s payout will wipe away what is left in the fund set up to finance the continuing search for Madeleine.

Sources close to the family also fear Brexit may have an impact — with judges taking “vengeance” over Britain leaving the EU by ruling against them.

In their argument to the ECHR, the McCanns’ legal team describe the pain and emotional agony Kate and Gerry have gone though since Madeleine disappeared during a family holiday in Praia da Luz in May 2007.

They detail the anguish of the couple being absurdly made suspects by the Portuguese police followed by the pain of Amaral’s outlandish accusations.

The lawyers say Amaral’s book “incriminated innocent citizens, accused of terrible crimes they never committed”. It goes on to say they are trying to “protect not only their reputation but that of the child as well”.

They also say Amaral’s book was “extravagant” and “damaged the good reputation” of the McCann family.

Amaral previously argued in his defence that the book’s allegations come from the police investigation.

He was removed as the investigation head in October 2007 and subsequently left the police to write his book.

A source said: “Kate and Gerry still have full confidence the European Court of Human Rights will find in their favour.

“It hasn’t altered their determination to carry on searching for their daughter. They have never given up hope and this case is an awful distraction but they feel compelled to do something.”

The Met Police has spent £11.6million on the hunt for Madeleine. Last month a request was made to the Home Office for a further six months funding.

The McCanns’ Portuguese lawyer Isabel Duarte said: “This will be our final appeal. The basis is the violation of my clients’ fundamental human rights.”

https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/7658444/cop-made-350k-off-maddie-mccann/
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Emotional agony....

VILLAGERS PRAY FOR MADDY

VILLAGERS stand at the crossroads in Rothley at the memorial built to the dead of two world wars and remember a child they hope is still alive.

By
Mirror.co.uk

• 00:00, 12 MAY 2007
  
• Updated07:44, 3 FEB 2012
  

VILLAGERS stand at the crossroads in Rothley at the memorial built to the dead of two world wars and remember a child they hope is still alive.

The black metalwork fence shines with hundreds of yellow ribbons glittering with raindrops. Teddy bears sag with a week's weather in them. Felt-tip pen messages bleed in the wet.

"Dear Maddy, you don't know me, but I am thinking of you," says the sloping scrawl of an intensely concentrating child. "It's a teddy bear for you when you come home, love Olivia xx."

But Madeleine is still missing after a week of frantic searching and television appeals, and the village is numbed and saddened.
A distracted quiet permeates the pubs by the village green and makes the line in the fish and chip shop silent. Inside the newsagents a tiny radio plays up-to-the-minute news bulletins.

Her mother's words ring in the town's ears. "Do not hurt her. Do not scare her. Please let us know where to find Madeleine."
Elsewhere in Britain too, far from Rothley, people keep hoping. No one wants to think of what the end of hope might mean.

At the flower shop opposite the memorial, owner Gwyneth Green is asking people not to buy flowers.

"Flowers are for funerals," she says. "People place them at the site of road accidents. We want to show that Rothley hasn't given up hope."

She shakes her head remembering the shy little girl that sometimes came in with her mother. "We're still hoping in here," she adds.

Next door at the Royal Oak, landlady Valerie Armstrong is cutting yellow ribbons. She has cut hundreds of them and every morning the basket is empty.

"We thought the ribbons were the best message for the family," she says. "They're a way to show them out in Portugal how much everyone's thinking of them every minute of the day. Some people have tied them to their doorknockers or the garden fence. Yellow is such a hopeful colour."

The pub had planned to hold a quiet birthday party for Madeleine today, with a slice of cake for well-wishers. After consulting the family, the party has been cancelled.

"We're waiting for Maddy to come home, and have her party then," Valerie says, tidying tables where the MoCanns often come for Sunday lunch. "We want her to be at her own party. We want her home."

Yesterday, Madeleine's photograph in the papers in her Everton shirt recalled two little Soham girls in Manchester United tops.
Her mother Kate has the haunted look of Sara Payne, who lost her daughter a few summers since.

But still this is a village wedded to stubborn hope.

Rothley is the kind of place built on certainties, where rosy-cheeked children still have the sort of childhood long gone in the inner-cities.

The High Street is a series of neat little shops and the redbrick houses are draped in wisteria.

The council houses on the hill are clean and spacious with tended lawns.

Eight miles north of Leicester, the road sign for Rothley has a Knight Templar with St George's Cross.

Madeleine is a middle-England child stolen. No one tears their hair or weeps loudly. People bite their lip and move politely along.
And while the nation debates at arm's length her parents' decision to leave their three children alone 40 yards from where they ate their evening tapas, Rothley refuses to sit in judgement.

Their hell is enough.

"I have a three-year-old myself," says Jenny Ball, 30, tying a ribbon to the fence. "My teenage daughter is devastated and so is my partner. The fathers here are affected as bad as the mothers. We were on holiday just before it happened. All you can think is: It could have been us."

Of all the dangers the McCanns might have feared for their children - scraped knees at the swings, the hazard of a speeding car or a bully in the playground, they could not have thought of this.

THAT someone would want to take their daughter enough to violently lever open windows and smother her cries. A girl in Marks & Spencer pyjamas innocently asleep in her bed.

Tonight at 6.30pm, some of the villagers will send their prayers to Madeleine at a 14-hour vigil at St Teresa's in Birstall, the sister church to Sacred Heart where the McCanns go to church. Others will come again to the memorial to stand among the toys and ribbons.

Today, Rothley takes its solace in remembering the Madeleine it knew. An adorable girl with a big smile who was due to start school later this year. The daughter of the friendly cardiologist and the clever lady doctor. A child so desperately wanted that they had IVF to conceive her.

In yesterday's dripping rain, the heat of the Algarve seemed a long way away. The McCanns' pain is in a foreign country. And every parent in Rothley goes to bed thinking the same thing: there but by the grace of God.

https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/villagers-pray-for-maddy-474288

Saturday 12th May 2007

Gerry and Kate McCann, who once thought that they might never have children, had perfect lives until the unthinkable happened

 


 

The media resented the McCanns muscling in on their private terrain

My former sketchwriting colleague, Simon Hoggart, has a maxim he would cite when any of us parliamentary sketchwriters were tempted to showcase a genuinely and intentionally funny MP.

Matthew Parris


_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

                                                                  

Humorous journalists, Simon would warn, had no business giving a platform to would-be jokers in the world of politics. Humour was our trade not theirs. We should never laugh with them: only at them. In our sketchwriters’ guild it should be a union rule not to encourage competition from unpaid amateurs. ‘We make the jokes around here.’

In an altogether darker and sadder way, I wonder whether, in their relationship with the news media, this is the mistake Kate and Gerry McCann have made. As with humour, so perhaps with pathos. The couple have seemed (though for the most understandable of motives) to be trying to orchestrate the pathos. But we do the pathos around here.

For I have sensed almost from the start of this whole, sick business an undercurrent of resentment towards these parents on the part of a British media which has not quite warmed to the thing we feed on. It is our job to exploit, to use, victims among the general public. We do not, however, quite like to be used by them. This could explain a certain relish (laced of course with generous protestations of sympathy) in the press and broadcasters’ treatment of the woes that now beset the couple as they face accusations from the Portuguese police.

Without believing in any of the latest accusations, there will still be some among whom there persists a curious feeling that the couple had it coming. The truth is that for some time the world of professional journalism has found the couple just a little bit irritating. The reason is that they have appeared to have been marketing their own tragedy. And it is we who market tragedy around here.

The irritation is well-hidden, of course, and would be universally and emphatically denied. But behind the pictures of Mrs McCann holding that almost inevitable pink cuddle-cat — pictures the press corps have actively encouraged and been happy enough to frame and project on to front pages everywhere — I have often enough heard from colleagues a sotto-voce cluck of disapproval: how come that cat’s always in shot?

Journalists who well know how to insinuate a soft toy into a story about a tragic couple get unnerved when the tragic couple steal a march on them and do so themselves — or seem to. Journalists and camera people delighted to catch an impromptu and tender moment as a grieving mother carries and cuddles her sleeping toddler feel almost cheated when these pictures are handed to them on a plate. When the McCanns publish their own blog on the web, a print media with appetite enough for the leaked email or private letter is unsure whether or how to republish.


Journalists well-versed in the techniques of creating ‘news pegs’ to give a flagging story ‘new legs’ become faintly disapproving when the individuals they are covering appear to have taken that process into their own hands and to be news-pegging and new-legging with some aplomb. Journalists skilled in ferreting out relatives, friends, friends of relatives and relatives of friends in order to introduce new voices into a narrative are somewhat taken aback when the victims at the centre of their story give the impression of doing the job for them — and all but handing out contact details for ‘today’s family friend’. When what might have been a private visit to the Pope was made very public (to the satisfaction, no doubt, of a media-savvy Vatican too) there were plenty to wonder, in private, who was using whom.

Thus (I believe) Kate and Gerry McCann have proved too helpful for their own good; too knowingly aware of where the media are coming from and what they want; and too artful and resourceful in providing it. The McCanns have proved unwisely media-wise.

It is easy to see why they did it. First, because they could: their careers and education equipped them to handle the news media on their own terms, and told them (as all media courses for non-journalist professionals now teach) how to keep ‘control’ of the story, and ‘manage’ its ‘development’. It seems, too, that at the outset they were offered advice by one or more friends in the media, and took it.

Second, they did it because they were persuaded, or persuaded themselves, that their overriding concern must be to place and keep the story of their daughter’s disappearance at the centre of world attention, putting as wide a public as possible on the alert for any trace of her, making her face recognisable worldwide, and — in short — enlisting half of humanity in her search. It’s a perfectly defensible strategy, though an alternative approach (to cool rather than inflame a story) can be defended too, and the media’s unquestioning assumption that all publicity was self-evidently to the good could be seen as self-serving.

Self-serving or not, it chimed with the strategy Madeleine’s parents had chosen; not much else was happening in the world; and the whole thing went stratospheric. The faint sense of disgust that many in the media (and perhaps among the public too) now feel is not unmixed with self-loathing. And the fact that Mr and Mrs McCann have almost seemed to be egging us on gives us someone else to blame.

We should not blame them. But we should see in their latest and perhaps last miseries a lesson. So slick has the modern media become at manufacturing and nurturing a story, so wise has so much of the public become in the media’s ways, and so uncomfortable are we all beginning to feel about the process, that any sensible individual caught up in sensational news of any sort would be ill advised to be too smart about it. The world knows how to recognise news management, and it leaves a nasty taste. What fragile self-esteem we journalists have as journalists is best flattered by leaving us to pull the strings on the puppets in our play. We don’t like it when the puppets pull back, and I don’t think our readers do either.

So if the media spotlight should fall upon you, innocent bystander, and you should wish to manage the news to your best advantage, here’s a tip. Don’t try to manage it at all. Or if you must, don’t let it show.

The Spectator - 12th September 2007

Pictured: The innocent father who was key suspect in Maddie investigation for SIX YEARS until he was cleared by his daughter's 'frilly pyjamas'

• Mystery Briton even posed in clothes he wore that night to prove innocence
  
• DCI Redwood described his decision to come forward as 'revelation moment'
  
• He'd been seen carrying daughter by Jane Tanner, a friend of Gerry and Kate
  
• Little girl had distinctive frilly pyjamas that he also brought to Scotland Yard
  
• Turned investigation on its head and moved kidnapping from 9.15pm to 10pm
  

Martin Robinson - 15th October 2013


A British father considered the prime suspect in the Madeleine McCann kidnapping for six years blew open the case after coming forward to police with his child's distinctive frilly pyjamas.



The mystery man's involvement was ruled out after detectives realised he was taking his own two-year-old daughter home from a crèche and had not snatched Maddie.



He even agreed to be pictured in the clothes he wore in Praia da Luz, on May 3, 2007, to prove he was the man in the police sketch previously seen as key to cracking the case.


His two-year-old's pink pyjamas, which were described by one of the McCann's closest friends, were also brought to Scotland Yard to help prove his innocence.







DCI Andy Redwood, the Met officer leading the investigation, described it as a 'revelation moment' and completely changed when they thought Madeleine was kidnapped.



The Metropolitan Police last night confirmed it had ruled out a sighting of the man previously seen near the McCanns’ Portuguese apartment.


Jane Tanner, a close friend of Kate and Gerry, previously told officers she saw a dark-haired man carrying away a child wearing pink floral pyjamas at 9.15pm on May 3, 2007.



One of the so-called ‘Tapas Seven’, Miss Tanner had been dining with the McCanns in a nearby restaurant when their daughter went missing.


But this has been found not to involve Madeleine.


The revelation has shifted detectives’ focus on to a later sighting at 10pm when an Irish family reported seeing a man walking towards the beach carrying a blonde girl in pyjamas.


She appeared to be in an uncomfortable position with her head slumped against him.


DCI Redwood said: 'Our focus in terms of understanding what happened on the night of May 3 has now given us a shift of emphasis. We are almost certain that the man seen by Jane Tanner is not Madeleine's abductor.



'It takes us through to a position at 10pm when we see another man who is walking towards the ocean, close by to the apartment, with a young child in his arms.'


Today it was revealed the police may have made a major breakthrough in the hunt for Madeleine after more than 1,000 people came forward with fresh information and several named the same man as the prime suspect.


The three-year-old's disappearance was reconstructed in a dramatic BBC Crimewatch appeal last night and Scotland Yard has today hailed a 'truly unprecedented' response.



Detectives believe a suspect seen carrying a child 500 yards from the McCanns’ holiday apartment was the kidnapper who struck just before her mother went to check on her children.




This means Kate McCann may have missed the abduction of her daughter by a matter of minutes on May 3, 2007.

Last night several tourists who were in Praia da Luz that night have come forward, and crucially two have named the same person.


https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2460669/Madeleine-McCann-kidnapping-innocent-British-father-mistaken-key-suspect.html

Verdi wrote:

Pictured: The innocent father who was key suspect in Maddie investigation for SIX YEARS until he was cleared by his daughter's 'frilly pyjamas'

• Mystery Briton even posed in clothes he wore that night to prove innocence
  
• DCI Redwood described his decision to come forward as 'revelation moment'
  
• He'd been seen carrying daughter by Jane Tanner, a friend of Gerry and Kate
  
• Little girl had distinctive frilly pyjamas that he also brought to Scotland Yard
  
• Turned investigation on its head and moved kidnapping from 9.15pm to 10pm
  

Martin Robinson - 15th October 2013


A British father considered the prime suspect in the Madeleine McCann kidnapping for six years blew open the case after coming forward to police with his child's distinctive frilly pyjamas.



The mystery man's involvement was ruled out after detectives realised he was taking his own two-year-old daughter home from a crèche and had not snatched Maddie.



He even agreed to be pictured in the clothes he wore in Praia da Luz, on May 3, 2007, to prove he was the man in the police sketch previously seen as key to cracking the case.


His two-year-old's pink pyjamas, which were described by one of the McCann's closest friends, were also brought to Scotland Yard to help prove his innocence.







DCI Andy Redwood, the Met officer leading the investigation, described it as a 'revelation moment' and completely changed when they thought Madeleine was kidnapped.



The Metropolitan Police last night confirmed it had ruled out a sighting of the man previously seen near the McCanns’ Portuguese apartment.


Jane Tanner, a close friend of Kate and Gerry, previously told officers she saw a dark-haired man carrying away a child wearing pink floral pyjamas at 9.15pm on May 3, 2007.



One of the so-called ‘Tapas Seven’, Miss Tanner had been dining with the McCanns in a nearby restaurant when their daughter went missing.


But this has been found not to involve Madeleine.


The revelation has shifted detectives’ focus on to a later sighting at 10pm when an Irish family reported seeing a man walking towards the beach carrying a blonde girl in pyjamas.


She appeared to be in an uncomfortable position with her head slumped against him.


DCI Redwood said: 'Our focus in terms of understanding what happened on the night of May 3 has now given us a shift of emphasis. We are almost certain that the man seen by Jane Tanner is not Madeleine's abductor.



'It takes us through to a position at 10pm when we see another man who is walking towards the ocean, close by to the apartment, with a young child in his arms.'


Today it was revealed the police may have made a major breakthrough in the hunt for Madeleine after more than 1,000 people came forward with fresh information and several named the same man as the prime suspect.


The three-year-old's disappearance was reconstructed in a dramatic BBC Crimewatch appeal last night and Scotland Yard has today hailed a 'truly unprecedented' response.



Detectives believe a suspect seen carrying a child 500 yards from the McCanns’ holiday apartment was the kidnapper who struck just before her mother went to check on her children.




This means Kate McCann may have missed the abduction of her daughter by a matter of minutes on May 3, 2007.

Last night several tourists who were in Praia da Luz that night have come forward, and crucially two have named the same person.


https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2460669/Madeleine-McCann-kidnapping-innocent-British-father-mistaken-key-suspect.html

And this father was supposed to be Totman?

Gerry McCann: ‘our princess prayer for Madeleine’

John Follain and Jon Ungoed-Thomas
November 4 2007, 12:00am, The Sunday Times

THE father of Madeleine McCann spoke of his distress yesterday, six months after her disappearance, and said he hoped "she is being treated like a princess".

Gerry McCann wrote in his internet diary: "It is so painful for us simply being separated, but all the more distressing when we have to speculate about the situation Madeleine finds herself [in].

"We have no idea whether she is suffering but we have to hope and pray that she is being treated like a princess, as she deserves."

Last night he and his wife Kate attended prayers and a vigil for Madeleine at the church of St Mary and St John near their home in Rothley, Leicestershire. Scores of local people attended.

Rob Gladstone, the vicar, said: "Everyone has been shocked and it's a way for the community to express their support." There were also vigils in Kate McCann's home city of Liverpool and Praia da Luz, the town in Portugal where Madeleine disappeared in May. Friends of the family were praying for her in Glasgow.


Earlier in the day, the McCanns released a new photograph of their daughter on a Shetland pony as part of a fresh appeal for her safe return.

"Madeleine is a beautiful little person who deserves a loving and happy life," said Kate McCann.

It has emerged that a Portuguese teacher told police she believed she spotted the missing girl at Barcelona airport a few weeks after her disappearance. The report is expected to be examined by the McCanns' own investigators at the Spanish agency Metido 3.

While Portuguese detectives continue to work on the theory that the McCanns may have been involved in their daughter's disappearance, the couple believe it is most likely she is in Spain, Portugal or north Africa, where there have been several suspected sightings.


It emerged last week that the McCanns' legal team had only recently been told of the Barcelona link.

If Madeleine is not found soon, reports of her being seen around the world are likely to emerge for years to come. Senior investigators say the most likely scenario is that she is dead.

The McCanns have been dismayed by reports last week that tests had proved their daughter's body had been in their hire car.


Clarence Mitchell, the couple's spokesman, said the police had not given details about the test and it was understood analysis was continuing.


Results from the DNA testing will be crucial if the police are to pursue the theory that the McCanns could have been involved.

Inconclusive tests would be likely to lead to the inquiry being scaled down.

The McCanns want to ensure police continue to pursue the abduction theory. The inquiry has three official suspects, the McCanns and Robert Murat, an expatriate Briton in Praia da Luz.

They said I killed her

In the weeks after Madeleine McCann was abducted, Kate McCann tells of her terror as police declared her a suspect and offered her a deal to confess

Kate McCann
May 15 2011, 1:01am, The Sunday Times


We had a call from one of the girls at the children’s nursery school. “Guess what,” she said. “Madeleine’s here! She’s been here for a couple of days. She’s fine.” We rushed to the nursery immediately. And, sure enough, there was our Madeleine. She looked beautiful, just as I remembered her. I ran over to her, my face split by the widest smile, the tears running down my cheeks, and just held her and held her and held her.


Although I was dreaming, I could feel her. It was as if parts of my body that had been hibernating for four months suddenly began to stir. I could sense the cold, dark days lifting as I luxuriated in warmth and light. And Madeleine was holding me, her little arms wrapped tightly round me, and it felt so good. I could smell her. I could feel her with every one of my senses as I soaked up this heavenly moment. My Madeleine. I wanted to stay like this for ever.


And then I woke up. Ice began to course through my body, driving out every endorphin and remnant of warmth. I didn’t understand. What was happening? How could this be? I could still feel her! A heavy boot connected with my stomach and the ache in my chest was worse than I’d ever known it. I was struggling for breath, almost as if I were being strangled. Please, God, don’t let her go! Stay with me, Madeleine. Please stay with me. Don’t go — stay with Mummy. Please, sweetheart, hold on. I love you so much.

I started to cry. The crying built into seismic sobs. I thought I was going to die. I’d been with her. And then she was gone.

Again.


That night, September 1, 2007, was the first time I had dreamt about Madeleine in the four months since she had vanished from our holiday apartment in the Algarve. It was far more painful than anything that had occurred in real life since the night she was taken.


The newspapers in both Portugal and the UK churned out endless damning pieces that were at best speculative and mostly complete fabrications Yet real life itself had become like some kind of endurance course run by sadists. The newspapers in both Portugal and the UK churned out endless damning pieces that were at best speculative and mostly complete fabrications.
We were living in a luxury penthouse with a swimming pool! We drank 14 bottles of wine on the night that Madeleine was abducted! A syringe containing a tranquilliser had been found in our apartment on the night! It was all so offensive and unjust.
Within days we would even be fearing the prospect of jail. How had our campaign to find Madeleine led to this nightmare?
I think it was on the Tuesday evening, May 8, five days after Madeleine’s abduction, that Gerry had an extraordinary spiritual experience.


While we were praying privately at Nossa Senhora da Luz — we had been given a key to the church so that we could go there whenever we wished — he suddenly became aware of a long tunnel with light at the far end of it.

He felt himself enter the tunnel and, as he went deeper inside, it became wider and brighter. He had never known anything like this before and he immediately interpreted it as a sign urging us to do absolutely everything within our power to find Madeleine ourselves.


His “vision” — I don’t know what else to call it — had a huge impact on Gerry. It laid the foundations of our organised campaign to find our daughter.

One of the offers of help that came in during those first few weeks was from Danie Krugel, a former South African police officer, who claimed to have combined DNA and satellite tracking technology to develop a device that could be used to locate missing persons. At the time we were in too much turmoil to pay attention to anything so esoteric, but a friend of Danie arrived in Praia da Luz in late May and virtually pleaded with me to take up his offer.

Desperation does strange things to people. We’re scientists and we don’t believe in hocus-pocus or crackpot inventions. How on earth can a machine use a single hair to locate somebody anywhere in the world? It makes no sense to us now and it didn’t then. But we wanted so badly to find Madeleine that we didn’t need to know how it worked.


Danie was prepared to bring his machine over from South Africa to find Madeleine for us. In late June we raised this tentatively with the men in charge of the police investigation — Luis Neves, head of the DCCB, the Portuguese equivalent of the Serious Organised Crime Agency, and Guilhermino Encarnacão, the director of the Algarve Policia Judiciaria (PJ). They seemed surprisingly amenable.

The story temporarily took a different turn when a Portuguese newspaper published what was probably the first article openly to cast doubt on our version of events. It raised suspicions about our characters and about our potential involvement in Madeleine’s disappearance.


It was apparent that, with coverage of our campaign having reached saturation point, the press was exploring different angles.

No longer was it about finding our lovely missing daughter: it was becoming the Kate and Gerry show.


We signalled to the media that we would be withdrawing from the spotlight and running the campaign more quietly. Yet the papers still seemed to require a daily photograph of us, and the continued presence of the photographers encouraged the journalists to stay to write pieces to accompany the photographs, even though there was nothing much to be written.

This was no doubt the background to a lot of the ludicrous tales that now appeared. The lack of new fuel for the machine also meant that a lot of the knocking pieces in the Portuguese press were promoted to the front pages in the UK.
There were also pleasant surprises, however, such as this letter:

Dear McCanns,
I have a house in P da L, been ashamed of the intrusion to your lives by our media ... and if you would care to come to lunch/dinner at any time before Wednesday next, do ring and let me know.
I cook decent meals.
Sincerely, Clement Freud

I’m embarrassed to admit that Gerry and I thought it was a hoax; more embarrassing still, while we were vaguely aware of Sir Clement, we had to have our memories refreshed before we could place him exactly. He wore so many hats — humorist, MP, chef, gourmet, gambler, press columnist, advertiser of dog food, radio and TV personality.


Sir Clement invited us to lunch the following day. He was 83 by then, but his intellect was still razor-sharp (he was appearing on the demanding Radio 4 panel game Just a Minute right up to his death in 2009). I’m usually very intimidated by people with brains the size of planets, but Clement was incredibly warm, funny and instantly likeable.

His opening words were: “Can I interest you in a strawberry vodka?” It was midday. I hesitated for a split second, rapidly trying to work out if he was joking. His expression, as always, was deadpan.


Not wanting to appear unsociable, I responded: “Er, okay, then. That would be nice.”

The lunch he prepared for us was bloody marvellous: watercress and egg salad followed by a chicken and mushroom risotto. He cheered us up with his lugubrious wit.

There was another invitation a few days later from one of the detectives, Ricardo Paiva, and his wife, to dinner at their apartment. It made us feel that they genuinely cared about us and, more important, about Madeleine.


In mid-July, Danie Krugel and his “matter orientation system” arrived in Praia da Luz. It might come to nothing — we knew that — but anything was better than the sense of stagnation we felt was beginning to seep into the investigation.

Three days later there was a body blow. Danie reported to the police that his machine had recorded a “static signal” from an area around the beach, the implication being that Madeleine was most likely to be dead and buried there.

I wasn’t sure how much more I could take. Each piece of bad news, regardless of how real or plausible it was, invariably plunged me into despair. There would be endless tears, out-of-control hysteria and feverish sessions of prayer.

Sniffer dogs had discovered traces of her blood in our holiday apartment, it was claimed MONDAY, July 23, was when the warning sirens should have started to sound. On the phone Ricardo Paiva sounded strange, distant. Danie’s report had given them a bit of a jolt, he told me. Just over a week later the police wanted to come over to the villa we were renting to shoot some video footage of our clothes and possessions. They said the forensics people would take these away and return them the following day.


I was devastated at what they took: all of our clothes, my Bible (my friend Bridget’s Bible, to be precise), Madeleine’s Cuddle Cat and my diaries. Why my diaries? Obviously not for any forensic purpose. My journals were full of personal thoughts and messages to Madeleine. I felt violated.


On August 6 I was pushing our twins, Sean and Amelie, in their double buggy when we were suddenly ambushed by a horde of journalists and TV cameras. Portuguese voices were firing questions at me and the mood was suddenly hostile.


It emerged that there had been stories in some of the Portuguese papers that morning suggesting that Gerry was somehow involved in Madeleine’s disappearance. Sniffer dogs had discovered traces of her blood in our holiday apartment, it was claimed. It was insinuated that she had died there and her body had been dumped in the sea.

At our next meeting with Luis Neves and Guilhermino Encarnacão, they looked serious and cold. There had been a “shift” in the investigation, they said. They had always been optimistic that Madeleine was alive, but now things had changed. Gerry was asked to leave the room. I was on my own and afraid.

Tell us about that night, they said. Tell us everything that happened after the children went to bed. I gave them every detail I could remember, as I had before, but this time they responded by just staring at me and shaking their heads. I was reeling with confusion, disbelief and panic. What the hell was going on?

Neves stated bluntly that they didn’t believe my version of events. It didn’t “fit” with what they knew. Didn’t fit? What did they know? I began to wail hysterically, drawing breath in desperate gasps.


They persisted. I was becoming more and more distressed and more and more scared. I wanted Gerry. Still they pushed me. They proposed that when I’d put Madeleine to bed that night, it wasn’t actually the last time I’d seen her. But it was. It was! I was in no doubt that they were trying to make me say I’d killed Madeleine or knew what had happened to her.

On and on it went. They tried to convince me I’d had a blackout. My denials, answers and pleas fell on deaf ears. This was their theory and they wanted to shoehorn me into it, end of story. At last they seemed to decide that the interview was over. They told me I could ring them any time, day or night, to give them the information they were waiting for.


A few days later Ricardo Paiva came to see us. His tone was sombre as he told us about the two springer spaniels that had been brought out to Portugal by the British police to assist in the search. Keela, who could alert her handler to the tiniest trace of blood, had done so in our holiday apartment. Eddie, trained to detect human remains, had indicated that somebody had died there.

The police appeared to be telling us, on the say-so of a dog, that someone had definitely died in the apartment and it must have been Madeleine. Yet supposing she had been killed — and we think this extremely unlikely — she must have been taken out of the apartment within minutes. Did they really believe that a dog could smell the “odour of death” three months later?

To me, as Madeleine’s mother, it didn’t have to make sense at the time. The merest suggestion from Ricardo that it was even possible she had been killed in that flat was like a knife being twisted into my chest.

Gerry had been talking for some while about going home. He felt we could achieve just as much there for the Madeleine campaign, and the media attention would quieten down a bit.


We had always said we would not leave without Madeleine, and I still felt that to do so would be to abandon her. With matters taking a turn for the worse, there was even more reason to stay. If we didn’t, it would feel as if we were caving in to the bullying tactics of the media and the PJ. We were beginning to suspect there was an agenda to force us out of the country and take the pressure off the police.

Finally, and very reluctantly, I agreed at the end of August to set a date for our departure: Monday, September 10. I began putting surplus toys into big bags for local orphanages. The villa was heaving with toys, teddies and games sent by kind-hearted members of the public.

I was going through the children’s DVDs when I came across Madeleine’s favourite, Barbie: The Princess and the Pauper. She loved that film, and she loved the two main characters, the princess and the poor village girl. If it was an Erika day, she’d say: “Mummy, you pretend to be Anneliese and I’ll be Erika.” The next day our roles would be swapped. I could see Madeleine now, with her pink princess blanket over her head, the corners pulled together under her chin like a headscarf, singing “If I was a girl like you . . .”

Thursday, August 30 should have been Madeleine’s big moment: her first day at school. She’d been so looking forward to this. It was an awful day. Every hour, I’d see her standing there in her new uniform, smiling at me. I cried, I prayed and I held my husband and children tightly.


Clement Freud called Gerry next day. “Is it true, Gerry?” he said, without preamble.

“What’s that, Clement?”

“That you’re close to a breakdown and needing medication?”

Very funny.

“I have a lot of empathy with the Express, though, you know,” he went on.

For a split second Gerry thought he was serious. “Why’s that?”

“Well, you see, we both suffer from poor circulation.”


On Monday, September 3 Ricardo told us that the PJ wanted to “interrogate” me and Gerry separately. We should bring our lawyer with us to the police station, he said.

Gerry smelt a rat. “Isn’t it unusual for witnesses to be questioned with their lawyer present?”

We were not going to be questioned as witnesses, Ricardo finally admitted. We would be arguidos — suspects.


I began to shake and cry. I shouted at Ricardo: “What are you doing? Why are you doing this? I can’t believe what’s going on! This is ridiculous. It’s despicable.”

What kind of country was this? While the PJ were going down this track, leading the media and public to believe we were responsible for our daughter’s disappearance, who was looking for Madeleine?

My immediate worry was Amelie and Sean. If this farce continued in the same vein, and we ended up being formally accused of doing something to Madeleine, people were going to start calling for the twins to be taken away from us. I could feel the panic building up inside me.


Our plans for the evening went out of the window. We cancelled dinner with Clement Freud and made frantic phone calls. But at 9.50pm I rang Clement. “Come on round,” he said. “It’ll be nice to see you. But you’ll have to forgive my night-time attire.”

We found Clement watching a cookery programme, dressed in his nightshirt. It was so ordinary and comforting, a bit like going to see your grandad after a horrible day at school. He gave me one of his looks and a giant glass of brandy, and managed to get a smile out of me with his greeting: “So, Kate, which of the devout Catholic, alcoholic, depressed, nymphomaniac parts is correct?”


His response to our catalogue of horrors was merely to raise an eyebrow. Clement had this way of making everything seem a little less terrible. When he heard about the dogs, he remarked laconically: “So what are they going to do? Put them on the stand? One bark for yes, two for no?” He was right, of course; it was ridiculous.


The urge to say what I thought about some of their vile and ridiculous insinuations was hard to suppress A couple of hours later, fortified by our brandies (it was my first taste of the stuff), some useful snippets of advice and several amusing anecdotes, we left our friend feeling quite a bit better than we had when we’d arrived.


On the eve of my next interview with the police I got myself ready — clothes out, shower, hair wash, even a DIY leg wax. It sounds daft now but I knew that it would help if I felt confident and good about myself.


The Algarvian wind was wild and menacing overnight, howling eerily, sweeping around the walls of the villa and battering the shutters.


Gerry and I got up at 8am to find a posse of Portuguese journalists and cameramen camped outside. Yet an inner strength and calmness I hadn’t expected to find began to take over.

Carlos Pinto de Abreu, our lawyer, was waiting for me inside the police station. He’d already had a long discussion with Luis Neves. It wasn’t looking good, he said.

The interview started at 2.55pm. The atmosphere was quite amenable, but it was 12.40am by the time it was over, partly because of long breaks when Carlos talked alone with the PJ officers. I was asked to return next day.

Back at our villa in the early hours, Carlos told us there was a great deal we needed to discuss. The PJ had a lot of “evidence” against us.


First he cited video footage of the sniffer dogs. Next came the matter of a crumpled page the police said they had discovered in my borrowed Bible. It seemed this was felt to be highly significant because the passage on that page, in 2 Samuel 12, dealt with the death of a child. I knew nothing about any pages being crumpled, let alone in which part of the Bible.

The fact that I had asked to see a priest on the night of Madeleine’s disappearance was also seen as evidence of guilt. What? “Don’t people in Portugal talk to priests in times of need?” Apparently not. They only called for a priest when they wanted their sins to be forgiven. Good grief. This was definitely not the faith with which I was familiar.


A witness claimed to have seen Gerry and me carrying a big black bag and acting suspiciously. This was absolute nonsense, but “evidence” of this kind came down to one person’s word against another. And it appeared that, as far as the PJ were concerned, our word counted for little.

“If you were Portuguese,” Carlos said, “this would be enough to put you in prison.”


The only conclusion I could draw was that we’d been framed. I could see that Gerry was starting to crack.


Then came the best bit. Carlos announced what the police had proposed. If we, or rather I, admitted that Madeleine had died in an accident in the apartment, and confessed to having hidden and disposed of her body, the sentence I’d receive would be much more lenient: only two years, he said, as opposed to what I’d be looking at if I ended up being charged with homicide.


My incredulity turned to rage. How dare they suggest I lie? How dare they expect me to live with such a charge against my name? And, even more important, did they really expect me to confess to a crime they had made up, to falsely claim to the whole world that my daughter was dead, when the result would be that the whole world stopped looking for her?

“You need to think about it,” Carlos insisted. “It would only be one of you. Gerry could go back to work.”

I was speechless. The incentive to accept this “offer” seemed to be that if we didn’t agree to it, the authorities could or would go after us for murder, and if we were found guilty, we might both receive life sentences. Was this what it came down to? Confess to this lesser charge or risk something much worse?


Gerry was distraught now. He was on his knees, sobbing, his head hung low. “We’re finished. Our life is over,” he kept saying over and over again. The realisation that we were at the mercy of an incomprehensible criminal justice system had hit him hard.

There was a phrase Carlos must have used about 20 times: “This is the point of no return.” I could feel myself shaking. He was a man with three daughters of his own. “Do you want me to lie? What would you do, Carlos? If one of your daughters was missing, and this happened to you, what would you do? Would you confess to a crime you hadn’t committed, knowing full well it would mean everyone would stop searching for her?”

“I’d consider it, yes.”

My anger and ferocious maternal instinct began to permeate Gerry’s despair. He was regaining his composure, his powers of reason and his fighting spirit. “They’ve got nothing!” he fired at Carlos. He began pointing out the many flaws in the PJ’s “evidence” and the complete absence of any logic. “This should be your job, not ours!” he said.


Trisha and Eileen, Gerry’s sister and mother, were staying with us to help in the move back to England. Disturbed by the noise, they appeared from their room. Gerry and I made it very clear to them that if we didn’t return from the police station the next day, they should take the children out of the country as soon as possible.

It was almost 5am when we finally got to bed. After a measly two hours’ sleep we got up and braced ourselves for the next round with the police. I remained calm. Before leaving, I embraced the children tightly and told them: “I love you.” Please God, I’d be back doing the same thing that evening.

MY interrogation began with an explanation of my changed status as arguida. Then they started. What had I seen and heard after entering our holiday apartment at 10pm on May 3, 2007 (when I discovered that Madeleine had vanished)? Who called the police? At what time? Who contacted the media?

For legal reasons, Carlos had advised me not to answer any of the questions put to me. The urge to say what I thought about some of their vile and ridiculous insinuations was hard to suppress.

Ricardo Paiva played a more prominent role, which did nothing to maintain my equilibrium. This was the man who had invited us to his home for dinner. Our children had played with his son.


“The twins were restless in the UK so you sedated them?” he was saying. “In the UK you were trying to give Madeleine to a family member? You get stressed and frustrated with the kids?” I knew exactly where this line of questioning was going and I refused to rise to it.

Now Ricardo was giving me his spiel about the dogs. “These dogs have a 100% success rate,” he said. “Two hundred cases and they’ve never failed. We have gone to the best laboratory in the world using low-copy DNA techniques.” His emphasis suggested this was the gold standard. I just stared at him, unable to hide my contempt. What did he know about low-copy DNA? I was so tempted to ask him to elaborate.

Ricardo started the video player. I saw the dogs going into the apartment, one at a time, with the handler, PC Martin Grime.

Each dog ran around having a good sniff. At one point the handler directed them to a spot behind the couch in the sitting room, close to the curtains. He called the dogs over to him to investigate this particular site. The dogs ultimately “alerted”. I felt myself starting to relax a little. This was not what I would call an exact science.


The film show continued. Now we were in an underground garage where eight or so cars were parked, including our rented Renault Scénic. It was hard to miss: the windows were plastered with pictures of Madeleine. One of the dogs ran straight past our car, nose in the air, heading towards the next vehicle. The handler stopped next to the Renault and called the dog. It obeyed, returning to him, but then ran off again. Staying by the car, PC Grime instructed the dog to come back several times and directed it to certain parts of the vehicle before it eventually supplied an alert by barking.

Each time a dog gave a signal, Ricardo would pause the video and inform me that blood had been found in this site and that the DNA from the sample matched Madeleine’s. He would stare at me intently and ask me to explain this.
I remember feeling such disdain for him. Under my breath I found myself whispering: “F****** tosser, f****** tosser.” This quiet chant somehow kept me strong, kept me in control. This man did not deserve my respect. “F****** tosser . . .”


Gerry wasn’t back from his interrogation until 1.30am. Ricardo had told him that they had recovered Madeleine’s DNA from inside the hire car, using the “best forensic scientists in the world”. When Gerry asked to see the DNA report, Ricardo became quite flustered, waving PC Grime’s document in the air and saying: “It is the dogs that are important!”

At that point Gerry began to feel a lot better. He realised that no one could have planted forensic evidence to implicate us because — despite what we had been led to believe by the PJ and the newspaper headlines — there wasn’t any such evidence. They had no proof that Madeleine was dead. All they had was the signal of a dog trying to please its instructor.

(In fact, as we learnt 11 months later when the PJ files were released, the full report from the UK Forensic Science Service, sent to them before they interrogated us, had concluded that the DNA results were “too complex for meaningful interpretation”. There was no evidence whatsoever that Madeleine was dead.) Nonetheless, on the drive home from the police station it had become clear to Gerry that Carlos believed charges were likely and that we might have to stay in Portugal. The preparation of a case like this could take years. If the charge was murder, rather than the lesser crime of hiding a body, we might even be remanded in custody for all that time.

Only one or two were unable to resist the temptation to ask that inane question: “How are you both feeling?” The prospect of being separated from Sean and Amelie, holed up in jail unable to prepare our defence properly, was terrifying. Gerry was seriously considering sneaking us into a car and driving us all across the border to Spain. It would have been crazy. The whole world would have thought we were guilty, and maybe that was what the police were hoping we’d do.


Thankfully, we resisted the urge to flee. Late the following afternoon, Saturday, September 8, we were notified that Luis Neves and Guilhermino Encarnacão had declared us “free” to leave the country whenever we wished. Thank you, God. On the advice of the lawyers, we decided to get out the next day.

Every journalist in town, it seemed, tried to book a seat on our flight. The majority of them respected our need to be left alone. Only one or two were unable to resist the temptation to ask that inane question: “How are you both feeling?”
So how were we feeling? We were going home without Madeleine. I’m her mother and I’m leaving her behind. My heart ached as it was torn away from my last geographical link with my little girl.

A Special Branch officer drove us home to Rothley. At last we pulled into our cul-de-sac and the media throng assembled there sprang into action. I hadn’t seen our house since we’d left for our holiday, full of excitement, that April morning. We lifted our sleeping babies out of the car, took a few deep breaths and headed towards the front door.

A short while later I went upstairs to Madeleine’s bedroom. I needed to feel her close. I didn’t go in; I just let my eyes wander round the shocking pink walls and up to the stars on her ceiling, over her teddies and dolls, and then to her bed. I could almost see her there, lying on her side in a foetal position, her little head resting gently on the pillow with her fine, blonde hair spread out artlessly behind. “Lie with me, Mummy.”

Kate McCann 2011
Extracted from Madeleine by Kate McCann, published by Bantam Press at £20. findmadeleine.com



https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/they-said-i-killed-her-g36c0wm2d3v

Former police chief reveals shock new theory on Madeleine McCann disappearance

The ex-cop became the boss of Portugal’s missing children agency in the same year the three-year-old disappeared

Alan Selby
James RodgerAdvanced Content Writer

• 19:00, 24 APR 2017
  

A former police chief claims Madeleine McCann was bundled away to caves three miles from the resort where she disappeared.

The little girl was snatched and taken to a warren of caves nearby that have never been searched, Portuguese investigator Paulo Pereira Cristovao suggested.

The ex-cop became the boss of Portugal’s missing children agency in the same year the three-year-old disappeared.
And he believes human error is to blame for the failure to find the missing Midlands girl.



Speaking a decade after Maddie vanished, Mr Cristovao told the Sunday Mirror: "I think this case has lots of mistakes – from many persons, from many situations, from the police and maybe from the government.

“At the end of the day we all forgot one person - Madeleine McCann.”

The three-year-old had been holidaying with her parents Kate and Gerry and two younger siblings when she vanished from the Ocean Club complex in Praia da Luz, on May 3, 2007.

Since then, UK police have spent more than £11 million on the investigation into the missing Midlands girl.

Mr Cristovao’s theory is that Madeleine could well have been taken to caves in the tiny beach town of Burgau, three miles along the coast.

Ahead of the 10th anniversary of Madeleine’s disappearance, the former officer said: “I put myself in the role of someone who knew nothing about the streets or the region. Where would I put the body of a girl?

“I stood at the Ocean Club apartment door – to the right is the town of Portimao. There are lots of people there, lots of buildings.

“If I had kidnapped her that’s not the way I’d want to go. I would want to go left, and find the first side road. I put my car on that road, and I went straight to Burgau. It’s a nearby beach, with a lot of rocks with caves.

“It’s a good place to put somebody. As far as I know the police never went there, because you would need divers.

“In a case where you hear theories like aliens and gypsies kidnapping Madeleine, I think this is as good as all the others. We’ve heard theories so stupid over these 10 years. When we don’t understand something, we complicate it.

“I think sometimes – always – the best solution is the simple solution.”

Mr Cristovao left the police to head up Portugal’s Association for Missing Children the year Maddie vanished. He later wrote a book about the case.

Now, discussing her disappearance for the first time in nearly a decade, he has laid out the errors he thinks set the investigation on the road to failure.

Instead of old-fashioned legwork, he believes there was too much focus on outlandish theories and behavioural profiles in the first hours and days.

He said: “The most important thing was starting an investigation on Madeleine – where is she? – instead of starting an investigation because the mother looks like this, or the father looks like that, or the mother won’t cry, or the father won’t cry.

“When Madeleine disappeared, we had 12 other missing children – three or four in the Madeira islands, the rest on the mainland.

“The money we spent on Madeleine was a million times more than all the others put together.

“I don’t know if it was pressure from government or the media, but it was the most expensive investigation in the history of Portugal – by far.”

Ten years ago, Mr Cristovao claimed the McCanns had been neglectful to leave their children alone as they dined nearby.

But he insists he does not believe Kate and Gerry, from Rothley, Leicestershire, are behind her death.

https://www.coventrytelegraph.net/news/uk-world-news/former-police-chief-reveals-shock-12933455
...................

Looks a bit sneeky !

The enigmatic 'Hugh' that Kate McCann remembers so affectionately in her autobiography 'madeleine', necessitates an airing of this late Telegraph report.  I make no apology for the repetition..

Madeleine McCann: 'I listened for 15 seconds and knew they were innocent’

A wealthy British businessman was moved to help search for Madeleine McCann after her parents Kate and Gerry became suspects

By Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan
7:05AM BST 10 Sep 2014

Gerry and Kate McCann never ceased doing what they could to move forward the investigation – which they saw as stalled – into Madeleine’s disappearance. They held, always, to the belief that their daughter could still be alive.

When they returned to the UK from Portugal in September 2007, Gerry insisted it did not mean they were giving up their search for her. ''As parents we cannot give up on our daughter until we know what has happened.”

Three days later, someone who was to be of great and lasting assistance to them got in touch. Brian Kennedy, a wealthy British businessman, had been following events as they unwound in Portugal and wanted to help.

“I was incredulous,” he told us. “I’d been losing all hope and faith in human nature. I had been asking myself, 'How is this possible?’ [Kate] is grieving. My instincts were telling me there was a great injustice being done. I called my lawyer and said, 'I want you to reach out to these poor folks and see if we can help them’.”

Kennedy, the Scottish-born, Cheshire-based son of a window cleaner, then aged 47, had leapfrogged from trainee accountant to a management role in a kitchen-equipment company, then to the mobile-phone business, double-glazing and plastics. By 2007 his net worth as head of his company, Latium Enterprises, was said to be £250 million.


An experiment with retirement had driven him “nuts” and he was back in the business fray. When he began talking about trying to help the McCanns, friends and colleagues told him not to get involved, that his intervention would end in tears. “What,” he recalled someone saying, “if the parents turn out to be guilty?”

“I remember replying, 'What happens if they’re innocent?’ Can you imagine the horror of losing your daughter… and then the world turning against you and accusing you of being responsible for her murder? Is it not bad enough, the terror, the agony they are going through? I could understand it – I’ve got five kids. I told my lawyer, 'If you feel they’re innocent, then we’ll get behind them and help them’.”

His lawyer made contact with the McCanns and they met Kennedy in London. “Within 15 seconds of listening to Kate,” he said, “I made a decision, using all the emotional intelligence one builds up over many years. I was 100 per cent convinced of their total innocence. I told them that, one, we would find a top Portuguese lawyer to defend them, and get them off as arguidos [the McCanns had been designated “named suspects” by the Portuguese authorities days before they returned to England].

Two, we’d do everything in our power to influence the public’s perspective and views. And, three, we’d support them in setting up some private investigators … The Portuguese police had stopped investigating. It was urgent to get some other guys on to it.”

Top-level legal help was found in Portugal. At Kennedy’s bidding and at his expense, Clarence Mitchell – a government adviser who had previously acted as the McCanns’ spokesman in Praia da Luz, the holiday resort from where Madeleine had disappeared – quit his Whitehall job and came back on-board.

Kennedy prefers not to reveal how much he spent on helping the McCanns, beyond saying that there were “substantial” outgoings – principally legal and media-related costs. Stephen Winyard, the owner of Stobo Castle Spa, in Peebleshire, and Sir Richard Branson also contributed. However, it was Madeleine’s Fund – the not-for-profit company established to find her in 2007, the board of which Kennedy’s then lawyer joined – that would, in time, deal with the cost of private investigators, once that effort went into high gear.

Present at Kennedy’s first meeting with the McCanns in London were representatives of Control Risks, a firm specialising in security and crisis management. It had already sent detectives to Portugal to see the couple right after Madeleine’s disappearance, at the expense of an anonymous donor whose identity has never been revealed.

Kate McCann had not enjoyed that first encounter. One of the Control Risk operatives was a mysterious figure who introduced himself only as “Hugh”. He was one of the many former intelligence officers the company employed, and a main part of his role now was as a potential kidnap negotiator. Kate, already distraught, had not liked the James Bond atmosphere he brought with him. Besides, there would never be anybody other than hoaxers with whom to negotiate.

As the McCanns’ renewed use of Control Risks began to be mentioned in the press, noises of disapproval came from Portugal. “You cannot have private detectives intervening in criminal cases,” sniffed Carlos Anjos, head of the Polícia Judiciária’s union.

The McCanns resolved to go ahead, motivated by advice Gerry had noted during a research trip to the US earlier that summer.
A document issued by the US Justice Department for use by parents of missing children, The Family Survival Guide, recommended considering using private detectives if they could “do something better or different than what is being done by law enforcement”. Given what they saw as the fiasco of the Portuguese police probe, the McCanns nurtured that hope.


“I had no experience at all with private detectives,” Kennedy remembered. “But the way you run a business is all about surrounding yourself with people who understand industries that you don’t understand.” He initially hired two former Metropolitan Police detectives, and in late September decided to follow up a rumour that Madeleine might have been sighted in Morocco. Kennedy and the detectives, who flew out aboard his private jet, hired a Moroccan tourist guide to accompany them to the mountain village where it was reported the missing girl might be. She was not there, but the guide – promised a reward – subsequently spoke of having travelled vast distances circulating Madeleine’s picture. “If I find her,” he said, “I will be rich. I have been promised I will never have to work again – maybe a million pounds.”

“I suppose,” Kennedy said later “we had been looking for low-hanging fruit. After a few weeks, though, we decided we needed to go about it in a very professional way.”

Brian Kennedy had set a potentially useful process in motion. Months earlier, the Portuguese police had produced a poor drawing of the man the McCanns’ friend, Jane Tanner, had seen carrying a child near the holiday apartment in which the McCanns had been staying on the night Madeleine vanished. Now, in England, a British forensic sketch artist took on the job of extracting more and relevant information from Tanner. This fresh image got major media coverage – raising the possibility of new leads.

Kennedy then cast around for suitable private investigators to hire, and picked Método 3, a Spanish company. The agency’s claims included having located 23 missing children and teenagers. Given that it was not legitimate for investigators to work for the McCanns in Portugal while the police probe was still under way, it was hoped that Método 3 – with its knowledge of the region and its connections in Spain – might prove effective.

It seemed, briefly, that the private detectives could also rebuild bridges with the Portuguese Polícia Judiciária. At the request of the head of Spain’s anti-kidnapping unit, two PJ officers met Método 3 operatives. But the points the private detectives raised did not interest the Portuguese.

Método 3 followed up on a vast number of potential openings in the hunt for Madeleine. Nothing tangible resulted, but they made some startling statements that kept the case in the public eye. “We are 100 per cent sure,” their boss, Francisco Marco, told the American network CBS, “that she is alive. We know the kidnapper. We know who he is and how he has done it.” On the BBC’s Panorama programme, he said: “We are very close to finding the kidnappers.” Then, in early December, he announced:

“We believe she is in an area not very far from the Iberian peninsula and North Africa. And we have a fairly certain idea who she is with.”

No facts emerged, however, to back up these claims. According to The Daily Telegraph, a source close to the McCanns said the couple had begun to think “they might have been sold a pup”. A veteran Spanish police detective was derisive. Método 3 would solve the case, he said, “cuando las ranas crecen los pelos” – “when frogs grow hair”.

As the months slipped by, the McCanns made a move they were to regret. A contract was agreed with Oakley International, a US-based company described by a source close to the couple as being apparently “absolutely the best, but extremely secretive”. Oakley was said to employ former FBI, CIA and US Special Forces personnel. It was reportedly agreed that Madeleine’s Fund would pay the company £500,000 under a three-stage contract – with more to come should Madeleine be found alive.

The McCanns and Kennedy at first got the impression that Oakley was doing its job. Its investigators appeared to be collating and following up information that came in as a response to the parents’ appeals, and were conducting covert interviews in Portugal.

But it later emerged that hundreds of calls to a dedicated hotline were never checked by Oakley. Tapes of interviews conducted in Portugal were said to be useless, involving people irrelevant to the case. Specialists used by Oakley began to find that their bills went unpaid. An undertaking to deliver satellite images of Praia da Luz on the night of May 3, 2007, when Madeleine had disappeared, resulted only in pictures grabbed from Google Earth. With little or no real progress, and as funds continued to haemorrhage, Brian Kennedy called time.

Oakley’s boss Kevin Halligen, it turned out, was a fraud. After his involvement in the Madeleine case, Halligen was arrested in the UK in connection with charges relating to a trading company fraud, and extradited to the United States. He was convicted there on the fraud matter, then deported to Europe.

“The Oakley episode went sort of sweet and sour,” Kennedy told us. “There were genuine guys breaking their back, trying to make a breakthrough. The lion’s share was spent on the investigation, despite what the newspapers say… [But] it all ended in tears.”

It was a major setback, but Kennedy and the McCanns did not give up. On the recommendation of the head of Manchester’s Serious Crime Squad, they went on to hire an experienced former senior police officer, David Edgar. He put in much arduous, systematic work – and held the fort until 2011, when, following an appeal to David Cameron, Scotland Yard began investigating. The dossier the McCanns’ private detectives had gathered was passed to the Yard, and its probe continues today – as Operation Grange.

Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan


https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/madeleinemccann/11077525/Madeleine-McCann-I-listened-for-15-seconds-and-knew-they-were-innocent.html

Madeleine McCann parents 'will not use fund'



By Caroline Gammell in Praia da Luz, Gordon Rayner and Emma Henry
12:41PM BST 12 Sep 2007

Madeleine McCann's parents have said they will not use the £1 million fund donated by the public to help pay for their defence.

But today their family spokesman David Hughes said: "They have decided not to seek to use those funds for their legal support."

The decision came hours after a family friend revealed that the dossier of evidence against the McCanns is 4,000 pages long and could take the judge it has been passed to weeks to read.

Police in Portugal are said to be confident that charges will soon be brought against Kate and Gerry McCann after public prosecutor Jose Cunha de Magalhaes e Meneses yesterday ordered the file to be handed over.

Detectives believe they have enough material to justify charging one or both parents with the "accidental" killing of their four-year-old daughter Madeleine and presented their findings to a public prosecutor in Portimao.

In the latest twist, the prosecutor almost immediately passed the file to an "instructional judge" to seek approval for any further action to be taken. This could include charges being brought, or may simply be a request for further searches or more interviews.

The friend of the McCanns, citing a number of legal sources, said the family had been advised that the prosecutor is probably either seeking further guidance from the judge or applying for the authority to carry out more searches.

Legal experts said the judge is likely to make his decision within 10 days.

A source close to the inquiry said: "The police are confident they have shown the McCanns have a case to answer and they believe charges will now follow."

The McCann family remained defiant, with Gerry's sister Philomena saying that if the couple are charged "it will give them the chance to clear their name".



In other developments:

• Police prepared to dig up recently-laid roads in the resort town of Praia da Luz to search for Madeleine's body.
• A "substantial amount" of Madeleine's hair was said to have been found in the boot of the McCanns' hire car.
• Sources claimed that forensic evidence pointed to Madeleine's body being hidden in the car's spare wheel well.
• Gerry McCann said his and his wife's suffering was "beyond description".

The public prosecutor, Jose Cunha de Magalhaes e Meneses, may already have decided if the McCanns have a case to answer.
A Portuguese lawyer, Artur Rego, said the speed with which Mr Meneses had passed the 10-volume dossier to the judge made it unlikely that he had recommended charges at this stage.

But, he said, the prosecutor may have prepared the case in advance and was waiting for the final papers before making his recommendations."

It appears increasingly likely that any case is likely to hinge on forensic evidence allegedly found in a Renault Scenic hired by the McCanns 25 days after Madeleine's disappearance.

• Questions remain over 'blood traces'
  
• Police blamed for catalogue of errors
  
• Full coverage: The search for Madeleine McCann
  
  

It was claimed that a large quantity of Madeleine's hair was found under the boot liner, next to the spare wheel, leading police to believe that her body may have been hidden there.

The amount of hair was said to be sufficient to convince police that it could only have got there directly from Madeleine's body, rather than by "secondary transfer" from her clothes or Cuddle Cat toy.

Bodily fluids said to have been found in the car showed signs of decomposition, it is alleged, leading police to believe that Madeleine is dead.

There were also reports that toxicology tests on the samples in the car may have led to the suspicion that Madeleine was drugged and speculation that she may have been accidentally given an overdose of a sedative.

As official suspects, the McCanns are prevented by Portuguese law from speaking out in their own defence but have dismissed as "ludicrous" the suggestion that they could be to blame for Madeleine's disappearance.

Their supporters have pointed out that they had neither the motive nor the opportunity to kill Madeleine or hide her body. They say that the police hypothesis that they hid her body for 25 days before transporting it in the car under the noses of the world's media is plainly impossible.

Portuguese police are understood to have eliminated as suspects every other driver who hired the Renault between May 3 and May 28, when the McCanns rented it from Budget.

Police in Praia da Luz said they had been put on standby to dig up roadworks filled in shortly after Madeleine went missing as part of a fresh search for a body.

Several roads within a short walk of the McCanns' Ocean Club apartment had been dug up at the time of their holiday. When Madeleine vanished there was speculation that she could have wandered off and fallen into a hole, or that an abductor could have disposed of her body in the roadworks.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1562898/Madeleine-McCann-parents-will-not-use-fund.html

Kate and Gerry McCann named as suspects



Gerry McCann emerges from the police station


By Caroline Gammell and Gordon Rayner - 8th September 2007

Kate and Gerry McCann could be charged with the "accidental" killing of their daughter Madeleine after Portuguese police challenged them directly whether they were behind the toddler's disappearance.

In an extraordinary twist, Mrs McCann's family said detectives now believed she caused the four-year-old's death in their holiday apartment, then hid the body before returning a month later to dispose of it.

Shortly after midnight, Mr McCann emerged from the police station with his lawyer Carlos Pinto de Abreu who read out a short statement.

He said: "Kate and Gerry McCann have today both been declared arguidos with no bail conditions and no charges have been brought against them. The investigation continues."

Mr McCann stared straight ahead as his suspect status was announced and refused to answer questions from awaiting journalists. A crowd which had been attending a concert in the town square earlier listened to the announcement and several people gasped audibly.


A family spokesman David Hughes said Mr McCann had been asked the same questions as his wife but he refused to comment on when the couple would return to Britain. Mr McCann was driven away in a silver Audi to return to his wife.

It was claimed that police had offered Mrs McCann a "deal" of a two-year jail sentence if she confessed and told them where the body was.

The astonishing developments followed the discovery of blood in a car the McCanns hired four weeks after Madeleine's disappearance 128 days ago, which police believe proves Mrs McCann killed Madeleine.

The allegation was dismissed as "ludicrous" by Mrs McCann's husband Gerry, while her parents said the police investigation had become "a joke".

Mrs McCann was declared a formal suspect, or "arguida" by police, who spent a second day questioning her in the Algarve town of Portimao before releasing her without charge five hours later.

Mrs McCann has been warned by her lawyer Carlos Pinto de Abreu to be prepared for the fact she might now be arrested and charged.

A family spokeswoman, Justine McGuinness, revealed that Mrs McCann had been asked outright if she had killed her daughter, and was "shocked and angry" at the allegation, which she emphatically denied.



Miss McGuinness said: "They believe they have evidence to show that in some way she's involved in the death of her daughter, which of course is completely ludicrous.

"They have suggested that blood has been found in a hire car that they hired 25 days after Madeleine was taken. How on earth could you hide a body for that long? We are in a hot climate.

"When this was put to Kate she was very taken aback. It was the first time she had heard the allegation and she actually swore at police."

Mr McCann's sister, Philomena, later revealed the plea bargain offered by detectives.

She said: "They tried to get Kate to confess to having accidentally killed Madeleine by offering her a deal through her lawyer, which was 'if you say you killed Madeleine by accident and then hid her and then disposed of the body, then we can grant you a two-year jail sentence or even less. You may get off because people feel sorry for you'."

According to one report, the police asked Mrs McCann, a doctor, whether she had sedated her daughter, leading to speculation that detectives think she may have accidentally given Madeleine an overdose.

Mr McCann, 39, expressed his own frustrationin his blog on the Madeleine campaign website, saying: "We will fight this all the way."

Police had told Mrs McCann before she went for questioning that they had 22 "difficult" questions to put to her further to the information she had given them during 11 hours of questioning on Thursday.

Whistles and jeers mingled with shouts of support as she arrived at the police station today carrying Madeleine's favourite toy, cuddle cat.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1562417/Kate-and-Gerry-McCann-named-as-suspects.html

BRAVERY: Mrs Fenn challenged intruder

David Pilditch in Praia da Luz - 18th August 2007

A British widow has come forward with new information which could help Portuguese detectives solve the mystery of Madeleine McCann’s disappearance, the Daily Express can reveal.

Ex-pat Pamela Fenn, who is in her 70’s, has told police she has three "bombshell" clues she believes could be vital to the inquiry.

In the weeks before Madeleine disappeared Mrs Fenn scared off an intruder who had apparently let himself into her apartment with a key.

It was one of a series of similar crimes reported to Portuguese police.

In a second development Mrs Fenn's niece reported seeing a man who matched the description of a suspect peering into the McCanns holiday apartment around the time Madeleine went missing.

And she revealed vital details of the movements of Madeleine's parents, Kate and Gerry, and their holiday friends in the run up to the night of May 3 - when Madeleine vanished.

Even though she lives in the apartment directly upstairs the police had never tried to get in touch with her.

Incredibly Mrs Fenn, who lives in the apartment directly above the flat the McCanns were staying in, was never interviewed by Portuguese police, it was claimed yesterday.

It was only when a team of British officers were called in to help carry out a major review of the case that the information was acted on.

Now Mrs Fenn will be formally interviewed for the first time by Portuguese detectives at police headquarters in Portimao on Monday morning.

Her niece, who has not been named, will also give a sworn testimony next week, after she was asked to fly to Portugal from Britain.

The Daily Express can reveal they are among a series of witnesses will be called in to give statements in the light of new evidence which has emerged.

Detectives are preparing to swoop on new suspects after a breakthrough in a major new line of inquiry.

Investigators are now working on the theory Madeleine, four, died inside the holiday apartment where her family were staying.

A police source told The Daily Express: "Next week we will be taking statements from several witnesses.

"We want to clarify details which may be relevant to the new line of inquiry in the light of the facts we have found."

Mrs Fenn has told police how she scared off an intruder she found in her apartment in the Ocean Club complex in Praia da Luz in the weeks leading up to Madeleine's disappearance.

There was no sign of a break-in and police believe he may have used a key to get in through the front door.

The terrified mother was watching TV in the evening and went to investigate a noise coming from her bedroom.

Mrs Fenn, who has lived in Praia da Luz for a number of years, discovered a man scrambling out of the window.

She tried to grab his ankle but he escaped. She reported the incident to police but did not believe anything was taken.

Mrs Fenn told how she had a niece from Britain staying with her in the week the McCanns were on holiday there.

Her niece, who has now been interviewed by detectives in Britain, spotted a suspicious looking man hanging around the McCanns' apartment around the time Madeleine disappeared.

She told the officer the man matched the description of a suspect seen by Jane Tanner one of the McCanns' holiday friends.

Miss Tanner reported seeing the man rushing away from the apartment with a child wrapped in a blanket under his arm.

A second witness spotted the man minutes later rushing past the church in the resort and heading to the sea front.

The dark-haired man was wearing white trousers and a dark jacket.

Mrs Fenn also told police that two nights before Madeleine disappeared she heard a child crying in the McCanns' apartment.

Her screams carried on from around 10.30pm to 11.45pm until family members returned from a night out.

A friend of Mrs Fenn told The Daily Express last night: "She is an elderly lady who is quite nervous and was very shaken up after the break-in.

"She was surprised that neither the police nor the McCanns had approached her for information before.

"Even though she lives in the apartment directly upstairs the police had never tried to get in touch with her to ask her if she saw or heard anything the night Madeleine disappeared.

"The first time a police officer spoke to her was when the British officers with sniffer dogs knocked on her door and searched her apartment.

"She told an officer what she knew and now she has been asked to make a formal statement.

"Portuguese officers have told her they will pick her up at 10am on Monday and drive her to police headquarters in Portimao.

"On the night she found an intruder she was sitting at home watching TV when she heard a noise in her bedroom.

"She went to investigate. The man must have heard her coming and was scrambling out of the window. She just saw the back of his head and arm and she tried to push him out of the window.

"She was shaking with fear and called the police. There was no sign of a break in and she thought he must have somehow come in through the front door.

"She now thinks the information may prove significant in the investigation.

"Her niece who lives in England was staying with her when the McCanns were on holiday.

"When details of a suspect were released a few weeks later the niece remembered she had seen a man fitting the description hanging around in the street outside the McCanns' apartment.

"He was acting suspiciously and appeared to be looking into the window of the apartment. She has given a statement to police in Britain.

"Mrs Fenn says that two nights before Madeleine disappeared one of the children in the apartment was constantly screaming from around 10.30pm to 11.45pm.

"She was crying out for her dad and nobody answered until somebody returned.

"She remembers the times because she was talking to a friend back home on the phone and she was watching the news at 10.30pm.

"On the night Madeleine disappeared the first she knew of it was when there was a commotion downstairs.

"She looked over the balcony and saw the child's mother. She was in a state of panic. She was repeatedly saying 'We've let her down. We've let her down.'

"All the people in their group were running in and out of the apartment. She asked someone if she should call the police and was told it had already been done."

Last night Mrs Fenn refused to reveal details of her evidence.

Under Portugal's strict secrecy laws witnesses are banned from speaking publicly about details of an on-going investigation.

But when she answered the door at her apartment yesterday she said: "I will speak to the police on Monday."

Last night a Portuguese police source claimed officers had already been given statements by Mrs Fenn and her neice.

A police source said: "We have already spoken to them but they will be re-interviewed because of the new evidence we have.

"They are among a number of witnesses who we will talk to next week. They include employees from the Ocean Club."

Police in Portugal are still awaiting the results of forensic tests carried out on two samples of blood found in the McCanns' holiday apartment.

The source said friends of Madeleine's parents who were on holiday with them when their daughter disappeared could also be questioned.

The source said: "It is possible the McCanns friends will be brought in again but not will not happen before we have received the results of the forensic tests.

"The results of the blood tests are important but the investigation does not hinge solely on them.

"The blood is just another clue that could help us in the investigation. If there are four or five major clues that is stronger than just two or three."

Asked why the police had not carried out their weekly update meeting with the McCanns.

The couple reportedly asked for urgent showdown talks after reports were leaked to newspapers that police now believe Madeleine is dead.

Senior police chiefs later confirmed they are now working on that theory.

The source said: "It is not the McCanns who decide when we meet.

"We do that only when there is relevant information to tell them."

A second holidaymaker told police an intruder used a key to enter her Ocean Club apartment just three weeks before Madeleine went missing.

The Scottish woman said that on the first night of her stay in Portugal,she and a friend returned to the flat to find their belongings and £500 worth of foreign money had been taken.

The woman said: "It was in the same block as the one where the little girl was taken from.

"The police were called that night. They told us that someone with a key had got into the flat. There’s no proof of that, but that was their opinion as there was nothing else disturbed. No broken windows, no forced entry."

[Link no longer available.  Acknowledgement pamalam at gerrymccanns blog and Nigel Moore of mccannfiles]

NickE wrote:So, the intruder entered through the door and jumped out through a window on the second floor?


Yeah.

Well, that's apparently how the abductor abducted isn't it?  Admittedly not the second floor but the ground/first floor.  Enter through the patio door .... exit through the bedroom window. There's a common theme here - who wrote the script?

A forum member (no names mentioned but you know who you are) gave me a slap on the wrist more than once for not taking press reports too seriously when quotes are used.  In fairness I guess not all quotes are fictitious - it's trying to differentiate between what might be true and what might be a mis-quote, as the likelihood of knowing hovers around zero I take it all with Siberian salt mine.

If Mrs Fenn's apartment was "directly" above the McCann's appartment, I would take that to mean that she lived on the first floor - not the second floor of the block.   And, frankly, I can quite believe that any burglar in a bedroom hearing someone heading towards the bedroom door, would almost certainly head for the only other means of escape - the window.   Even if there was nothing outside, drainpipe or shrubbery on the wall, a drop from the first floor is often  relatively safe for a fit person.  If the alternative was a police cell, I would think a burglar might well take the chance.

It does surprise me that the Portugese police didn't give more weight to her evidence though.

Pamela Fenn's statement is under discussion here Franco99, if your interested..

https://jillhavern.forumotion.net/t8885-mrs-fenn-s-statement?highlight=pamela+fenn

Maddy's parents leave for Vatican



By Richard Edwards and Fiona Govan in Praia da Luz
12:01AM BST 30 May 2007

The parents of Madeleine McCann last night said an emotional farewell to their two-year-old twins as they left Portugal together for the first time since their daughter's disappearance to visit the Pope.

Almost four weeks after Madeleine was abducted, Gerry and Kate McCann flew to Rome after receiving a formal invitation from the Vatican.

Mrs McCann carried with her a small photograph of Madeleine which she will present to Pope Benedict XVI at a general audience in St Peter's Square today.

For the 38-year-old mother, a devout catholic, it is a visit of conflicting emotions.

Clarence Mitchell, a spokesman for the family, said: "This is for them a very important spiritual visit, albeit in the most appalling of circumstances. The tone will be private, serious and sombre."

Mr and Mrs McCann left their apartment in the Algarve resort of Praia da Luz yesterday afternoon, kissing goodbye to their twins, Sean and Amelie. They hope to be back in time tonight to put them to bed.

They took more than a minute outside their apartment to kiss and wave goodbye to the twins, picking them up in turn and hugging them closely, stroking their hair and talking quietly to them.

Mr McCann wiped away a tear as he walked towards the waiting car, arm-in-arm with his wife. The twins are being left in the care of their aunt, Trish Cameron, and her husband, Sandy.

Mr Mitchell said: "They have decided not to take Sean and Amelie because they think it may be too much for them.

"They are being properly cared for in a safe environment. The kids might find the whole thing a bit stressful and they are not sure it is fair to put them through it. They stick to their normal daily routine in Portugal.

"If they were a little bit older I think Gerry and Kate probably would take them."

It emerged last night that a British child psychologist is due to fly to Portugal this week in an attempt to talk to the twins. It is hoped the expert may be able to coax out information about the night of Madeleine's disappearance. Sean and Amelie were in their cots in the same room as their four-year-old sister when she was taken.

The visit to Rome is the first time Mr an Mrs McCann have left Portugal as a couple and they intend to use it as a "template" for other trips as they continue their campaign to raise worldwide awareness about Madeleine.

They also plan trips to Madrid, Berlin and Amsterdam, where they intend to meet children's charities and government ministers with a portfolio for child welfare.

Sir Philip Green, the British billionaire retail tycoon, has loaned his private jet to the McCanns for their visit to Rome. Mr Mitchell said: "They are travelling around Europe for a reason: to help bring back Madeleine."

They have emphasised that they do not want to be seen as a "celebrity couple" and only accepted Sir Philip's "kind" offer for practical reasons, and so that they could get back to see the twins as soon as possible.



Mr and Mrs McCann were greeted in Rome by the British ambassador to the Holy See, Francis Campbell, and stayed at his residence. This morning they will attend a General Audience at the Vatican. It is believed the Pope will refer to Madeleine "prominently" during prayers. As many as 40,000 people are expected to gather in St Peter's Square.

Once the main part of the audience has finished, he is introduced to around 25 carefully selected people.

As honoured guests, Kate and Gerry McCann will sit in the front row, known as the prima fila, normally reserved for heads of state and dignitaries. The Pope will speak to them in English and may also invite them to a private audience afterwards.

Meanwhile detectives in Portugal investigating the disappearance of Madeleine faced renewed criticism yesterday when it emerged they had released conflicting accounts of the witness description of a man seen carrying a child outside the McCanns' holiday apartment at around the time Madeleine went missing.

It is understood that the witness, who had become friends with the McCanns during their holiday, told detectives that the man she had seen was around 5ft 7in but in a press conference given last Friday police issued a description of a man some three inches taller.

A police spokesman told Portuguese media the man they were looking for was around 1m 70cm (about 5ft 7in), but the English language description issued at the same time put his height at 5ft 10in. It is believed that an "administrative error" in converting measurements from metric to imperial led to the mistake.

"The police have made a mistake," a family source said yesterday. "It seems the details were lost in translation. What has happened is that police have given out the description of quite a tall man when they should have been talking about someone relatively short."

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/1553065/Maddys-parents-leave-for-Vatican.html



Holier than thou beyond belief..

https://jillhavern.forumotion.net/t15366-holier-than-thou#389318

Police identify Madeleine suspect


Gerald and Kate McCann: desperation and despair


By Nick Britten
12:01AM BST 05 May 2007

Portuguese police have identified a suspect over the kidnapping of British toddler Madeleine McCann, who was snatched from a holiday appartment on Thursday night.

At a press conference today, Guilhermino Encarnacao, director of the judicial police in the Faro region, said he has an artist's impression of the suspect and remains hopeful that the little girl is still alive.

However, he refused to disclose any more information for fear of endangering Madeleine's life. [not a good marketing ploy]

Gerald and Kate McCann, who were dining just 200 yards away [as the crow flies]  when the kidnapping occurred, yesterday appeared before the media to make a desperate appeal for their daughter's safe return.

Mr McCann’s voice cracked with emotion as he said [reading from a script] : “Words cannot describe the desperation and despair we are feeling as parents of our beautiful daughter Madeleine.

“We request that anyone who has any information relating to her disappearance, however trivial, come forward and help us get her back safely.

“Please, if you are holding Madeleine, let her come home to her mummy and daddy, her brother and sister.”

Mr McCann and his wife, clutching a pink teddy bear [both of them?], then asked for their privacy to be respected before returning inside.

On the night of Madeleine's disappearance Mrs McCann, 39, a GP, made regular half-hourly checks on her children in their room. But when she returned to the ground floor apartment at 10pm, the door was open, the window had been forced and Madeleine was gone.

The other children, two-year-old twins Amelie and Shaun, were still asleep in their cots. Mrs McCann broke down screaming. An immediate search was launched, but the abductor is believed to have escaped through the complex’s main entrance [that's a new one on me].

Last night the family were still hoping that Madeleine, who like her siblings was conceived through IVF, would be found safe and well. But they began to fear the worst.

Trish Cameron, Mr McCann’s sister, said she received a telephone call from her 39-year-old brother, a consultant cardiologist, who was "hysterical and crying his eyes out" [a lot of noise but no tears].

She said: "They had put the kids to bed at 7pm and checked on them every half an hour as they had dinner nearby with the rest of the party. Gerry said the window was open, the shutters broken and the door, which had been locked, hanging open [like the story - hanging by a thread].

"Kate came screaming back to the group crying, 'They've taken her, they've taken her'. Gerry was crying and roaring like a bull [yikes!] .

"Obviously someone has been watching them, watching the children, seeing where they stayed and seeing they were left alone. It just doesn't bear thinking about [this is true].

"They can't have children naturally so, being IVF babies, they were extra special [an extra special baby - like almost perfect?].
She added: "Gerry and Kate are excellent parents and very protective of their children. In hindsight, yes, they wish they hadn't left them alone, but it's hard when you're on holiday [what is?].

"The complex was quite open and it looked like anyone could wander in or out." [the apartment was situated outside the OceanClub complex - next!]

She said Madeleine had blonde hair and blue eyes, with a distinguishing feature of her right pupil "running down into the iris of her eye" [a fleck]. The toddler was wearing white pyjamas [so say David Payne] when she went missing.

Madeleine's great uncle today described how much the little girl, a keen fan of Dr Who [Dr Who?], was looking forward to her holiday.

"Madeleine is a lovely little girl, an intelligent, bright child," [add charismatic] he added

Jon Corner, a close friend of Mrs McCann and godparent of the twins, said she telephoned him in the middle of the night distraught.

He said: "She just blurted out that Madeleine had been abducted. She told me, 'They have broken the shutter on the window and taken my little girl.'

"They had left the apartment locked while they were having their meal, but when they went back the last time they saw the damage.

"First they saw one of the window shutters had been forced, and then they saw the door was open and the bed was empty - and Madeleine was gone.

"Obviously [well, obviously!] Kate was incredibly upset when she phoned. I have spoken to her since, and she is still [still - well obviously] completely devastated - as we all are for them.

The McCanns, from Rothley, Leics, travelled out last Saturday with a group of friends, all of whom have young children, for a week-long stay at the Mark Warner Ocean Summer Club in Praia da Luz, on the Algarve, renting a two-bedroom apartment with private patio [private?  was it?].

The couple, who are Roman Catholics and regular churchgoers [see holier than thou], were enjoying dinner at a nearby tapas restaurant with the four other couples. The adults regularly checked on the children.

Around 70 staff and holidaymakers joined the search around the complex and on the nearby beach [the McCanns and their friends didn't].

John Hill, the complex manager, said: "It was a very emotional and very frantic night [well obviously] and everyone did a fantastic job of getting involved and trying to search the area.

"As you can imagine, Madeleine's parents are distraught and not doing very well at all." He said the company offered baby sitting services but "for whatever reason, they were not being used" [mmmm  for whatever reason] He added the locks on the apartment doors were "quite sophisticated. " [a sophisticated lock eh?  there's a novelty]

Members of the McCann family have flown out to Portugal to help with the search.

Mr and Mrs McCann met when they were medical students in Scotland and became close while travelling in New Zealand. They were married nine years ago in Mrs McCann's home town of Liverpool.

They lived in Glasgow for a while and as Mr McCann's career took off they moved to Queniborough, Leics, in 2000, when he began working at the Glenfield hospital in Leicester, a leading heart specialist centre.

Mr McCann, one of five siblings, was placed on secondment to Holland for two years, where the twins were conceived.

They returned to the Midlands in 2004 and moved into their current five-bedroom detached home last summer.

Mrs McCann works one and a half days a week at a surgery in Melton Mowbray, Leics, and spends the rest of the time looking after the children [with a lot of help].

Tracey Horsfield,32, a neighbour, said: "They are delightful people, a normal, very caring family. They are extremely protective of the children and would never let them be alone [yet they claim they did!].

"They idolised them and this is the last thing you would have thought would have happened to them."

The couple would have paid around £1,500 for their week-long stay in an area popular with British holidaymakers.

Ocean Club, near Lagos, boasts that visitors will enjoy "privacy in numerous villa-style accommodations dotted throughout an independently-working village".

The company's brochures also claim the atmosphere is so relaxed and exclusive that "you're as likely to pass a local as another tourist" [aha, so it was a local that done it].

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/1550667/Police-identify-Madeleine-suspect.html

Madeleine McCann investigator claims her kidnappers are being protected

Rozina Sabur - 27th March 2017

Madeleine McCann's kidnappers are being protected, the detective who led a search for her has claimed.

Following Kate McCann's 10th Mother's Day without her daughter, Dave Edgar, a retired detective inspector, has revealed the findings of the three-year investigation he led.

Mr Edgar believes that a child sex gang are the most likely suspects for the abduction and has called for the abductors' confidants to come forward with information.

Three-year-old Madeleine disappeared from her parents' holiday apartment in Praia Da Luz, Portugal in 2007, but Mr Edgar believes she may still be alive.  She would now be nearly 14 years old.

Her parents, Kate and Gerry, were having dinner with friends nearby when the toddler went missing and Portuguese police initially regarded them as suspects.

The former detective, who spent 30 years with the Royal Ulster Constabulary and Cheshire Police, has worked on a number of high-profile murder cases such as Shafilea Ahmed, whose parents were convicted of her murder.

"I was looking at everything and that would include them,” he told the Mirror.

“If I found any evidence against Kate and Gerry I would have given it to the police immediately. Kate and Gerry would expect no less. But I found no shred of evidence.

“We obviously look at all factors – motive, preparation, opportunity – and there was absolutely nothing.”

Mr Edgar believes the kidnap was a planned operation by a lone kidnapper or a gang, and says whoever committed the crime will have confessed to either a friend or relative.

Mr Edgar handled the investigation for three years with donations from a search fund and handed his files over to the Metropolitan Police when they took over the hunt in 2011.

He has kept in touch with the investigation and hopes a new appeal could solve the mystery behind Madeleine's disappearance.

Mr Edgar also holds hope of finding the culprits, claiming whoever was responsible will have struck again.

“It’s the type of crime they cannot help themselves, certainly if it was sexually motivated,” he said.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/03/27/madeleine-mccann-investigator-claims-kidnappers-protected/
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Kidnappers being protected? Bit of a fawkes-pas there - unless it's a euphemism for something more sinister in Flintshire speak.

Ace Adventurer rides again - what a