The people who have helped the McCanns

Sharon published this in 'Publications' last night: [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]


WE HELPED THE MCCANNS!

sharonl | Published yesterday at 23:42

[ Note: These purported messages, from 50 people who helped the McCanns in one way or another are interpretations, based on information in the public domain. Some of them include an element of irony and satire.  Where quotations are in inverted commas, these are actual quotes from the people concerned. Otherwise, their statements are not meant to be taken literally, though we believe they reflect realities – MMRG, December 2017 ]

Part  1 of 10

 

1  CLARENCE MITCHELL, former head government spin doctor
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Hi! I’m Clarence Mitchell. I’ve been the McCanns’ paid public relations officer for over 10 years. They’ve paid me hundreds of thousands of pounds for that! So I’m very grateful to them. Before working for the McCanns, I was Tony Blair’s top media adviser, as Head of the Media Monitoring Unit. As I once told a Spanish newspaper, my role for Blair and for the McCanns was ‘to control what comes out in the media’. I’ve put hundreds of stories into the British media about the McCanns, but you’d never know it as the articles featuring these stories describe me as ‘a family pal’, ‘a source close to the family’, ‘a source close to the police’ and all sorts of similar descriptions. The chief Portuguese police federation representative, Carlos Anjos, once said of me: “He lies with as many teeth as he has in his mouth”. How unfair!


2   KEVIN HALLIGEN, fraudster
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"Hello there. I’m Kevin Halligen, but I have used lots of aliases in my life. I was also known as Richard Halligen when I worked on the McCann case.  I’m an Irishman, born in Dublin. From 2009 to 2013 I spent three years in Britain's top security prison, Belmarsh and a further year in a U.S. prison, because I was convicted of serious fraud in the U.S. (£1 million actually). I was pleased to help the McCanns because they paid me £500,000 plus expenses for just four months work. That was from April to August 2008, when the McCanns sacked me, because I achieved nothing for them. The money they paid me came from you – the generous British public, who thought that your money was going on a genuine search for Madeleine. So thank you all for that!  Before I worked for the McCanns, I was employed by the Dutch company, Trafigura, who killed scores of West Africans by dumping hundreds of tons of toxic waste near where people lived. Well, you’ve got to earn your living somehow, haven’t you?


3   NUNO LOURENCO, a Portuguese from the Algarve
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Olá! I’m a Portuguese guy who played a big part in putting the Portuguese police off the scent in the days after Madeleine was reported missing. You see, Madeleine died on Sunday 29 April, four days before the McCanns reported her missing. I was part of the plan to make people think she really was abducted. Various people roped me in as part of their dastardly plot. The thing was, we had to invent a plausible ‘abductor’. Jane Tanner did her bit by claiming she saw a man carrying a young child near the McCanns’ apartment at 9.15pm on the night of Thursday 3 May.

My job was to ring up the Portuguese police the next day and pretend that I too had seen an abductor. With the help of my co-plotters, I was told to invent a story that a Polish holidaymaker, Wojchiech Krokowski, had tried to snatch my little daughter outside a cake shop in the remote village of Sagres. We agreed that we would say this happened on Sunday 29 April, I even took a photo of Krokowski’s hired car to add weight to my little tale. And of course, my description of him matched that of Jane Tanner perfectly…’cloth jacket and trousers’, ‘wearing classic shoes’, ‘didn’t look like a tourist’, same age height and build and so on. And guess what! Our plan worked! I ‘’phoned the Portuguese on the morning of Saturday 5 May. We fooled the head of the Portuguese detectives investigating the case, Goncalo Amaral, into calling Interpol and the German and Polish police. Krokowski’s plane back to Poland had to be grounded at Berlin Airport to see if Madeleine was on the plane or he knew anything about Madeleine. Ha! Ha!  Fooled ‘em good and proper! The police in every country will tell you that after any incident, the first 48 hours are the ‘Golden Period’ when vital evidence can be either gained, or lost. I threw one great big, gynormous spanner into the works, sending them looking in the wrong direction. Sweet!

4     HENRI EXTON, former top officer with MI5
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Hello. I had a career in the security services, reaching the dizzy heights of Head of Covert Intelligence in MI5. But my career in MI5 ended when I was stopped at Manchester Airport walking out of a shop with a bottle of expensive perfume in my hand. I was spoken to by the police, admitted the offence, and accepted a police caution for theft. However, I then successfully got the police to remove my conviction form the records with my MI5 connections, y’know.

I was called in to help the McCanns by convicted fraudster Kevin Halligen and got instructions from him and Cheshire businessman Brian Kennedy.  Like him, I made a show of pretending to look for Madeleine. But my most important job was to produce two e-fits of a man supposedly seen by members of the Smith family from Drogheda, Ireland. How could the Smiths, one year after seeing a man for 2 or 3 seconds in the dark, and after saying they would never recognise him if they saw him again, manage to draw up any e-fit at all? And why did they produce two quite different images? Ludicrous, isn’t it? Well, all I can say is that these things are for me to know, and for you to find out!

5  GORDON BROWN, former Prime Minister
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Hello everyone. I was Chancellor of the Exchequer when Madeleine was reported missing. It was none of my business to get involved in the case, since it was the Foreign Secretary’s job to assist British people overseas who were facing problems. But Gerry McCann kept ’phoning me on one of his mobiles, and as my brother was on an important nuclear energy committee (COMARE) with Gerry, I did my best to help the McCanns. I even persuaded the British government to get the Portuguese police to promote an alleged sighting of an abductor by the McCanns’ friend Jane Tanner, even though the Portuguese police never believed her fantastical abductor story. Later, when I became Prime Minister in July that year, I had discussions with Jose Socrates, the Prime Minister of Portugal (who was later involved in a corruption scandal). He agreed to get the Portuguese co-ordinator of the Madeleine investigation - Goncalo Amaral - off the case. He made sure that this happened, and on 2 October 2007, his officials rang me to tell me that Amaral was going to be removed from his post that very day. Job done! When I met Socrates at that important Lisbon conference later that month when we tried (and succeeded) in taking away even more of Britain’s sovereignty over its own affairs, I thanked him for his valuable help in making sure the Madeleine McCann case didn’t cause Britain too many problems. Pity about that referendum result. Let Nigel Farage be accursed!

Brilliant post 

The McCanns have so many people to thank. Not least OG for spending years deliberately barking up the wrong tree. 

And themselves for deliberately impeding an investigation into their child's supposed disappearence from the very off. As the final PJ reports concludes: 


(snipped from PJ files) "It should be noted, also, the receipt of an enormous quantity of fantastical notifications, devoid of any credibility, which forced the research into constant and considerable clarification efforts, all the more important as it was known that time was of the utmost importance in the fundamental goal of finding the missing girl  …  It should be referred that this investigation moved itself under conditions of exceptional media exposure, with the publication of many "news" of imprecise, inexact or even false contents, which did not help, in the least, the discovery of the truth and created, many times, a climate of unusual commotion and of lack of serenity."




Well done all for putting Madeleine last. 

The picture for no4 Henri Exton is not correct. It is a photo of ex Det Supt Andy Tattersall

WE HELPED THE MCCANNS! - Part 2

[ Note: These purported messages, from 50 people who helped the McCanns in one way or another are interpretations, based on information in the public domain. Some of them include an element of irony and satire.  Where quotations are in inverted commas, these are actual quotes from the people concerned. Otherwise, their statements are not meant to be taken literally, though we believe they reflect realities – MMRG, December 2017 ]

Part 2 of 10 

6  DAVID PAYNE, McCanns’ friend

      
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I’m a Consultant Urologist by trade. My wife and I were good friends of the McCanns and used to go on holiday with them. In fact, it was me that arranged the holiday in Praia da Luz in 2007. I had previously gone on holiday with them in Majorca when some other friends of ours, Dr Arul and Dr Katharina Gaspar were also there. After Madeleine died on the Sunday of the week we were there, we all had to try and convince the police that Madeleine really was alive all that week. It was agreed that Kate and I would help out by pretending that I called at the McCanns’ apartment at about 6.30pm on the night we were going to say the abduction happened.

Unfortunately, we didn’t rehearse the details of this very well, and so, when we were questioned separately about it, we gave wholly different accounts with 20 contradictions which could not be resolved. Oh well. After Madeleine was reported missing, our friends the Gaspars went to the police. They told them how, when on holiday in Majorca, I twice made sexualised remarks about Madeleine which made them think I might be a risk to children. While on holiday, we used to take in in turns to bath our infant children. After this incident, the Gaspars told the police that they wouldn’t let me bath their children any more. This statement, made just two weeks after Madeleine was reported missing, put me in a very bad light. It’s just as well, then, that the Chief Constable of Leicestershire Police, Matt Baggott, made sure that the Gaspars’ statements weren’t shown to the Portuguese police until after Gordon Brown made sure Amaral was off the case. By the way, I deny the Gaspars’ scurrilous allegations, of course       

7  MARCOS ARAGOA CORREIA, Portuguese lawyer from the island of Madeira

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I was hired by Cheshire businessman Brian Kennedy. I was a young lawyer living on the Portuguese island of Madeira at the time. First, I had to give a credible account of how I became interested in the Madeleine McCann case. I lied, and claimed that underworld sources in Portugal had told me that Madeleine had been abducted, raped, killed and her body thrown into a lake. Later I made up another story, claiming that two days after Madeleine disappeared, I’d had a vision about a young blonde girl being strangled to death by a big man. Both stories were a total pack of lies. Later I pretended to have written to the McCanns offering to help them. I claimed that I’d sent a recorded delivery letter to the McCanns which the Portuguese Post Office failed to deliver. I took the Post Office to court at my local court in Madeira. I lost the case as the judge didn’t believe me. I wonder why? 

I also headed up a search for Madeleine’s bones in the Arade Dam in southern Portugal. In fact, me and a team of British divers did two week-long searches for Maddie’s bones, one in late January 2008, and another one a few weeks later. I told people that underworld sources had given me clues as to which lake they had thrown Maddie’s body into. I later admitted that that was another of my lies. My searches for Maddie’s bones got a lot of publicity. At first I pretended that I was doing all this at my own expense as a ‘Good Samaritan’. That was yet one more of my lies, because I later admitted publicly in a magazine article that the McCanns had paid me to do this via Brian Kennedy and Metodo 3. In fact, that whole ‘search for bones’ was staged for the media and planned long in advance. On 10 December 2007, I had flown to Portugal from my island home in Madeira and met with Francisco Marco, boss of Metodo 3, and one of his staff, at the Arade Dam. Brian Kennedy paid all our expenses and a generous fee for all this, of course. The search for Madeleine’s bones wasn’t a genuine search at all. It was a fake search staged for the world’s media.

But that wasn’t all I did for the McCanns As a lawyer, the McCanns also paid for me to assist one of Portugal’s most notorious-ever murderers - Leonor Cipriano. She and her brother murdered her 8-year-old daughter Joana in 2005; both were sentenced to 16 years in jail for their wicked crime. She had the nerve to complain that she had been tortured into confessing her crime, which had been investigated by Goncalo Amaral and his team. On 8 April 2008 I went to Odemira Women’s Prison and agreed to represent Ms Cipriano against Amaral and his team. None of the officers who were prosecuted were found guilty of torture, but after a strange court case which dragged on for 18 months, Amaral was found guilty of ‘filing a false report’ in the case. At this result, I exulted: “The target was hit”. I had lied for the McCanns, I had conducted hoax searches for bones, and I had, somehow, successfully prosecuted the detective who had prosecuted Ms Cipriano for murder and who was also the chief Portuguese investigator in  the Madeleine McCann case. The McCanns (via Brian Kennedy) paid me a huge amount of money for my services. I am very grateful to them.                         

8  FRANCISCO MARCO, boss of the collapsed detective agency in Barcelona, Metodo 3

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The McCanns hired me and my team of investigators, Metodo 3, who were based in Barcelona.  Brian Kennedy, the man the McCanns chose to lead their private ‘search for Madeleine’, has a villa in Barcelona, where he spends half the year. Contacts… contacts!

Metodo 3 was known as the most disreputable private detective agency in Barcelona - and that’s saying something!  My mother, who founded the firm, was involved in a telephone-tapping scandal which led to her arrest. Never mind, the McCanns chose us, and we became rich - they paid us hundreds of thousands of pounds, and that’s all that matters. Look at the McCanns’ ‘Find Madeleine Fund’ company accounts if you don’t believe me. Just before Christmas 2007, I made a succession of announcements which were enthusiastically reported by the British press. I said that Madeleine was alive. I said that my men knew where she was. A week or two later, I announced to the press: “My men are closing in on the kidnappers”. Then, two weeks before Christmas, I announced “Maddie will be home by Christmas!”  These were all blatant lies. But the McCanns were pleased with my work and continued to employ my firm for another 15 months after that. Ker-ching!! 

9  OPRAH WINFREY, U.S. chat show Queen

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Well, Hiya all. I was mighty pleased to host Gerry and Kate on my show. Why, the money from our advertisers just poured in. They all knew that everybody would be watching me interview Kate and Gerry, which they did, tens of millions of folks worldwide, maybe hundreds of millions. All I had to do was agree to their terms, i.e. don’t ask any awkward questions. It was easy peasy! Thanks Kate and Gerry, nice talking to ya! Did someone say ‘Madeleine McCann’? Who cares!

10  JANE TANNER, friend of the McCanns

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Hi, I’m the wife of Dr Russell O’Brien, one of Gerry McCann’s many doctor friends. I suppose I’m famous in a way because it was me that said I saw a bloke carrying a young blonde child right outside the McCanns’ apartment at about 9.15pm on the night Madeleine was reported missing. Luckily, just hours after I told the Portuguese police this, a Portuguese bloke, Nuno Lourenco, ’phoned them and described a holidaymaker who had tried to snatch his daughter outside a cake shop in the village of Sagres. He gave them a description of this ‘holidaymaker’ which was a carbon copy of my description! And the police traced this man. It was Polish holidaymaker Wojchiech Krokowski. The Portuguese police were temporarily fooled, getting the German and Polish police to track this man down. But soon the Portuguese police began to doubt my story.

Still, on Sunday 13 May, just 10 days after Madeleine was reported missing, I was asked to take part in a sort of identity parade. Before that, I had a long chat with Detective Chief Superintendent Small of Leicestershire Police and a couple of rather frightening blokes from Control Risks Group. They basically instructed me on exactly what I was going to claim happened and what I needed to do and say. The police put me in a police van with a two-way mirror and several people walked by the van. One of the men who walked by the van was Robert Murat. As soon as he did, I said

excitedly to the police: That’s him. That’s the man I saw walking near the McCanns’ apartment a week last Thursday. I’m sure it‘s him. I can tell by the way that he was walking. And that was exactly what DCS Small told me to say.

As a direct result, less than 48 hours after this, the Portuguese police pulled in Robert Murat for questioning, and made him a formal suspect. If you read the Portuguese police files and Goncalo Amaral’s book on the case, you’ll be aware that there was a deliberate attempt by the British security services to ‘frame’ Murat. I guess I was a pretty big part of that exercise. Wow!

Later in the year, I was asked by Brian Kennedy and an F.B.I. trained ‘forensic artist’. Melissa Little,  to draw a sketch of the man I said I’d seen on the night Madeleine was reported missing. I never saw his face, so I could only describe his height, build and clothes. At the same time, I was shown an artist’s sketch of a sinister looking scraggy-haired man with a moustache, said to be a suspect. He looked a bit like George Harrison of the Beatles, so some people called him ‘George Harrison man’ (others called him ‘monsterman’). I said I was ‘60-80%’ sure that this man and the man I said I saw on 3 May were one and the same! – even though I admit I never saw the man’s face at all! But then I was willing to go along with and say anything to support my friends Kate and Gerry.

Later on, I let it be known that I was mistaken in thinking that the man I had seen was Robert Murat. In fact, the sketch I drew up for Ms Little of the man I saw looked nothing like Robert Murat.          

All this chopping and changing made it look even more certain in many people’s minds that I was fabricating the whole thing. 

It was only 6½ years later that three people came to my rescue! – the lovely Detective Chief Inspector Andy Redwood of the Met Police, and Kirsty Young and Matthew Amroliwala of the BBC. On 14 October 2013, they transmitted a programme, the BBC Crimewatch McCann Show, in which DCI Redwood said he had had a major ‘revelation’ - a bit like St. Paul on the road to Damascus I suppose. He said a bloke had come to see him. He told DCI Redwood that he had said he was carrying a young blonde child in pink pyjamas outside the McCanns’ apartment at the exact same time as the time I said I saw someone: 9.15pm on Thursday 3 May!! So Redwood proved me right after all! (Or did he?). Redwood even showed the 7 million who watched the McCann Show a blurred photo of this man, as ’proof’ he really existed! I guess most of those who watched this show were sure that a high-ranking Met Officer was telling them the truth, which is good because they will all think I really did see a man carrying a child on the night of Thursday 3 May. Hee hee!

WE HELPED THE MCCANNS! - Part 3


WE HELPED THE MCCANNS!

[ Note: These purported messages, from 50 people who helped the McCanns in one way or another are interpretations, based on information in the public domain. Some of them include an element of irony and satire.  Where quotations are in inverted commas, these are actual quotes from the people concerned. Otherwise, their statements are not meant to be taken literally, though we believe they reflect realities – MMRG, December 2017 ]

Part 3 of 10
 
11  DETECTIVE CHIEF SUPERINTENDENT BOB SMALL, formerly with Leicestershire Police

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’Evening All I am DCS Bob Small, I am a little camera shy, that’s why there is not one single photograph of me on the internet.

As Jane Tanner says, I spoke to her on the afternoon of Sunday 13 May, just before she identified Robert Murat as the man she said she’d seen 10 days earlier carrying a child near the McCanns’ apartment. With me were two gentlemen from government-backed private security firm, Control Risks Group, Kenneth Farrow and Michael Keenan.

We were just three people out of a vast number of people who rushed out to Praia da Luz, ostensibly to help find a missing girl. Here’s list of them:

THE PEOPLE WHO RUSHED OUT TO PRAIA DA LUZ AFTER 3 MAY 2007 AND BY FRIDAY 11 MAY 2007, with dates of arrival (or, in the cases of Resonate and Robert Murat, before then).  

Government and Embassy Officials

Robert Henderson – British Consul for the Algarve – immediate (persuaded Portuguese Police to allow the McCanns to wash clothes before seizing them)

John Buck – British Ambassador to Portugal (Lisbon), arrived immediately

Angela Morado – British Proconsul, arrived immediately

Liz Dow, British Consul from the Embassy in Lisbon, arrived immediately

Andy Bowes, British Embassy Press Officer, arrived immediately

Sheree Dodd, Foreign and Commonwealth Office

Other staff from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office

British Police Officers

Glen Power, British Police Liaison Officer for Portugal, arrived 5 May

An ‘Analyst’ (unnamed) from the National Policing Improvements Agency, arrived 4 May

Detective Chief Superintendent Bob Small, Leicestershire Police (4 May)

Two other police ‘family liaison’ officers from Leicestershire Police (4 May)

Government security and secret service personnel

Staff from MI5 (unnamed)

Staff from Child Exploitation and Online Protection Service (unnamed – Kate McCann in her book describes them As ‘Forensic Psychologists’), arrived 4 May

More staff from CEOP, the ‘Director of the Forensic Psychology Unit’ AND a CEOP ‘social worker’ (arrived 6 May)

Staff from Special Branch (unnamed)

‘Criminal profilers’ (unnamed - attached to unnamed government security departments)

Government-funded private security firms

Kenneth Farrow from Control Risks Group

Michael Keenan from Control Risks Group

Staff from government-supported private crisis psychology group

Alan Pike, Head of Yorkshire-based Centre for Crisis Psychology (CCP) (arrived 4 May)

Martin Alderton, Colleague of Alan Pike from CCP (arrived 5 May)

Public Relations Consultants

Michael Frolich, Head of Resonate, subsidiary of international PR company Bell Pottinger (already there by Monday 30 April)

Tricia Moon, Deputy Director of Resonate, (already there by Monday 30 April)

Alex Woolfall, Head of Risk for international PR company Bell Pottinger, arrived 4 May (helped to edit Gerry McCann’s photos before putting them on a disc for the PJ)

Lawyers

Staff from the recently-formed International Family Law Group (IFLG):

Michael Nicholls, barrister, arrived 11 May

Accompanied by a ‘paralegal’ from Leicestershire, arrived 11 May

There are references to other government lawyers having arrived

Top staff from Mark Warner (company that organised the holiday)

David Hopkins, Managing Director of Mark Warner

One of his senior colleagues

Interpreters

Robert Murat became the initial main interpreter for the Portuguese Police on 4 May. He had already flown out from England on 1 May. He was recommended by British Consul Robert Henderson

Religious Organisations

Rev. Haynes and Susan Hubbard mysteriously arrived in Praia da Luz from Canada on Sunday 6 May, to take up an appointment as the Anglican Minister in Praia da Luz. The Hubbards rapidly became very close friends of the McCanns

Others

‘Hugh’ – Kate in her book says he would only identify himself as ‘Hugh’, he was brought in by Control Risks Group and said he was ‘a former intelligence officer, now a kidnap negotiator and counsellor’. He attended meeting with the lawyers from IFLG

OTHER APPOINTMENTS

Clarence Mitchell, Head of the government’s Media Monitoring Unit: According to the reply to a Freedom of Information request, he was appointed on Sunday 6 May to head up the government’s PR support for the McCanns, but he did not travel to Portugal until 22 May 2007

The government set up a very high-powered liaison committee on Tuesday 8 May under the Chairmanship of Matt Baggott, Leicestershire Police Chief Constable. It consisted of representatives from a wide variety of government departments and agencies. The government has refused to answer FOI Act questions about who those agencies were.

Government Ministers Gordon Brown (Chancellor of the Exchequer) and Margaret Beckett (Foreign Secretary) spoke to Gerry McCann in the first week. Tony Blair, Prime Minister, did so later.

Literally hundreds of international journalists were also there in that first week.

-----------------------------

Impressive, eh? So, you see, I was just part of a big team trying to help the McCanns. My part included influencing Jane Tanner to identify Robert Murat as a suspect, thus taking the heat off the McCanns. Played me cards well, eh? They didn’t promote me to the rank of DCS for nothing, y’know.    

12  ANTONIO JIMINEZ RASO, Metodo 3 detective

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Hola! I’m a Spaniard, or should I say a Catalan, from Barcelona. I once had a high position in the Drugs and Trafficking Division of the Regional Catalan Police. But I fell from grace when I got involved (along with my twin brother) in a 27-strong drugs gang. The extra money was too tempting. I got involved in helping the gang who stole 25 kilos of cocaine from a boat in Barcelona harbour, as a result of which I had to leave my job in the police.

In 2007 I was approached by the disreputable police agency, Metodo 3, to do certain jobs of work for the McCanns. By now, I needed the extra money, so I agreed to do whatever they wanted. They sent me off to Morocco, where my Spanish would be very helpful in trying to persuade people to say they had seen Madeleine, in exchange for a few pounds - or I should say ‘dirhams’ - which is the Moroccan currency these days.

In fact my main role with the McCann Team was to create plausible sightings of her. No way were we actually looking for Madeleine. I even attended a meeting in Portugal with Brian Kennedy and Metodo 3 boss Francisco Marco, when we met the Portuguese police. That was on 13 November 2007. We gave them three bogus sightings, which served to waste more police time following them up.

It was a bit of a problem when I was arrested on 18 February 2008 and remanded in custody for my alleged involvement in the drugs theft from the Barcelona-based ship. The media reported that I was one of the Madeleine McCann investigators employed by Metodo 3. Clarence Mitchell threw the police off the scent straightaway, however, by the simple expedient of denying it! As usual, he got away with his lie.  

I was very relieved that the judge in the Martorell Court, Barcelona, did not convict me of assisting the 27-strong gang nor find that I’d been corrupt. The judge said that this gang was ‘exceptionally violent’. I was very relieved that he let me off, though he did say that I had ‘got far too close’ to these violent career criminals. Phew!    

 

13    JULIAN PERIBANEZ, another Metodo 3 detective

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Hola! I was another Spaniard employed by Metodo 3 boss Francisco Marco. I helped him and Antonia Giminez Raso to put false sightings of Madeleine into the media. But eventually I fell out with Marco and wrote a book about my time with Metodo 3. It was called ‘The Smokescreen’ - La Cortina da Huma. I explained how the whole outfit was ridden with corruption and criminality. I wrote one whole chapter about what Metodo 3 did for the McCanns, and you can read a translation of it on Jill Havern’s excellent forum, ‘The Complete Mystery of Madeleine McCann’, here:     [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

In my book, I exposed how Metodo 3 produced fake invoices to claim money from the McCanns’ ‘Find Madeleine Fund’. I also exposed how Marco lied about how many people were working for him on the Madeleine McCann case. I wrote: “Francisco Marco’s agency [said it] turned over about a thousand cases each year…yet during the six years I spent with the company I only dealt with two such cases. Where Madeleine’s case was concerned, Francisco Marco brazenly lied to journalists, claiming he had about 40 people working on the Madeleine McCann case in Barcelona and Morocco”.

Marco was once asked how the Madeleine McCann case would end. He replied: “I would give Madeleine her dolls, calm her down, remove her from the place where she was, ring her parents and put her on the phone”.

I did my bit for the McCanns. I interviewed witnesses, even attended a meeting in Brian Kennedy’s ‘Maddie office’ in Knutsford, where I met Freemason Edward Smethurst, and travelled to Portugal with Brian Kennedy and his son Patrick, where, by the way, I was filmed walking with Kennedy. I held up some maps in front of my face so that I couldn’t be recognised. I did my bit for the McCanns and they paid me for my trouble.     

14  DAVE EDGAR, retired Detective Inspector

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Hi. I live in Cheshire, close to Brian Kennedy. I used to work in the police service in Northern Ireland, but left and started again as a Detective Constable in Cheshire. In late 2008, Brian Kennedy asked me to work for him. He gave me offices to work in, in a house he had bought in Knutsford, Cheshire, also near where he lives. Brian told me that I would be portrayed in the media as the successful boss of a well-established private detective agency, Alpha Investigations Group. This was a complete lie, but I wanted the money so I agreed to go along with it.

My first job was to get ready for a documentary being made by Mentorn Media and Channel 4 on the Madeleine McCann case, which was shown in May 2009, two years after Madeleine’s reported disappearance. I was filmed in Brian Kennedy’s office. It looked good on camera. There I was, surrounded by white boards with lots of writing and diagrams on them, bulky-looking files, ’phones and laptops. It really did look like a genuine investigation. I was quite a good actor, you see. In the documentary, I appeared briefly to try and explain away all the massive contradictions between the various different accounts of events given by the McCanns, their friends and others. I waved all this away in a short interview where I said, pretending to be an expert on these things: “Oh well, you always get a few inconsistencies when witnesses try to describe a certain event from memory”.

Later that year, I had to ‘front’ another bogus story about what happened to Madeleine. This was a story which suggested that a woman (who we said ‘looked like Victoria Beckham) was waiting on the Barcelona dockside for Madeleine to arrive by yacht from Portugal. She supposedly went up to men on the docks asking them: ‘Have you got my new daughter?’ This ‘information’ was given to us by a British businessman who had waited two years to come up with this story. Oh, well, that’s what we said, anyway. About a month later, an article in the Mail on Sunday strongly criticised me and my team for not having done ‘basic detective work’ in Barcelona before going public with our story. But that didn’t matter. We had fooled both the media and the public with yet one more bogus ‘sighting’ of a suspect. During the press conference on this mystery woman, I said that Jane Tanner might have seen a woman carrying Madeleine away, not a man. This made both me and Jane Tanner look like idiots, or worse. But, no matter, I got well paid for my work.

I did one more favour for the McCanns. Just after the ‘Victoria Beckham-lookalike’ story, sensational details emerged in the U.S. of an 11-year-old girl, Jaycee Lee Dugard, who had been abducted in 1991. A full eighteen years later, she was discovered to have been living with a Mr and Mrs Garrido, aged 29 and with two children by Mr Garrido.    This was great news for the McCanns. Garrido had kept Jaycee Lee in an underground complex at his home for 18 years. The McCanns said that this case gave them ‘renewed hope’ that Madeleine might one day be found alive. I was set to work on developing a new ‘theory’ that Madeleine was being ‘held in a hellish prison lair’ in the ‘lawless hills’ just a few miles from Praia da Luz. Of course, it was utter nonsense, but the press recycled our new theory without critical comment. We didn’t actually believe our nonsense, so we never sent anyone out there to investigate our claim, and the Portuguese police didn’t buy it, either. But the story kept ‘missing Madeleine McCann’ in the headlines, and encouraged the general public to think there was still a realistic chance that madeleine could be alive. And that was all that mattered. 

15  ARTHUR COWLEY, retired Detective Sergeant

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Hi, I was employed by Brian Kennedy soon after Dave Edgar was appointed. And I appeared with him in the Channel 4 documentary in May 2009. After 30 years in the police force, I had only been promoted once: from Detective Constable (the lowest rank)   to Detective Sergeant. Brian Kennedy wanted the media and the public to think that I was the owner of a business called ‘Alpha Investigations Group’. So he got one of his business friends to set up a domain name: ‘ALPHAIG’ and also helped me create a company with the same name. But it was all a hoax. The business address was my cottage house high up on Halkyn Mountain, over 1,000 feet up in the Welsh hills, where I keep a horse and a few pigeons. There was no office for clients up there. ALPHAIG never traded. It never advertised its services. It never did any business. It produced just one year of accounts which also showed no activity. It was a completely bogus company, but I went along with it as Mr Brian Kennedy paid me quite well for my services. After I finished working for the McCanns, I told the papers: “I will take my secrets about the McCanns to the grave”. So I’ve nothing more to say. Sorry.

Hi Sharon,that is quite a list of benefactors of help and assistance,puts"Thunderbirds are go to shame" childhood memories of the island opening up and your favourite character coming to your rescue,flying out in a Rocket,5,4,3,2,1,Justine,Clarence!

WE HELPED THE MCCANNS!

Part 4 of 10

[ Note: These purported messages, from 50 people who helped the McCanns in one way or another are interpretations, based on information in the public domain. Some of them include an element of irony and satire.  Where quotations are in inverted commas, these are actual quotes from the people concerned. Otherwise, their statements are not meant to be taken literally, though we believe they reflect realities – MMRG, December 2017 ]

 

16  DETECTIVE CHIEF SUPERINTENDENT HAMISH CAMPBELL, former Senior Investigation Officer on the Madeleine McCann case   

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’Evening All! If you look me up on the internet, you’ll find that I was the Investigating Officer in the case of the murder of Jill Dando. It was my work that helped to arrest and charge Barry Bulsara, a.k.a. ‘Barry George’, as her killer. He was found guilty. So I was pleased with my work. Much later, however, Barry Bulsara successfully appealed against his conviction, with the Court of Appeal virtually suggesting he had been ‘framed’ by police officers putting a small amount of firearms residue in one of his coast packets. Oh well! You can’t win ‘em all.           

Despite that failure (or because of it, who knows?!), I was given the job of being the Senior Investigating Officer at Scotland Yard in charge of the Madeleine McCann Review, set up in May 2011. A spokesman for Prime Minister David Cameron had already told the media that the purpose of the Madeleine McCann Review (which became known as ‘Operation Grange’) was ‘to help the McCann family’. As the S.I.O., it was my job to decide the operational ‘remit’ for the investigation. Normally, a Review means that the case is looked at afresh, with no reasonable line of enquiry excluded. But in this case, the Prime Minister had already told the nation that the Review was ‘to help the family’. So this was the wording for the Review that I can up with:

“The activity, in the first instance, will be that of an ‘investigative review’.  This will entail a review of the whole of the investigation(s) which have been conducted in to the circumstances of Madeleine McCann’s disappearance. The investigative review [will] examine the case and seek to determine, (as if the abduction occurred in the UK) what additional, new investigative approaches we would take and which can assist the Portuguese authorities in progressing the matter”.

So, you see, the remit was only to investigate an abduction. If there was any evidence at all that Madeleine might have died in the McCanns’ apartment, and/or that the McCanns or others had hidden her body, the Operation Grange team of 38 officers was told to ignore it, forget about it!  Just as David Cameron asked me, I was pleased to ‘help the family’.   Postscript. Ex Met Police Detective Chief Inspector Colin Sutton has been blabbing that he was going to be doing my job, heading up the Madeleine McCann review – until someone, who he said was ‘a very senior Met Police Officer indeed, told him ‘not to get involved’ as the review would be corrupt and he would not be able to go ‘wherever the evidence led’. Ignore him! Do you think any of us are corrupt? Seriously?  

17  MATT BAGGOTT, Head of the Police Service of Northern Ireland and former Leicestershire Police Chief Constable

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’Evening All! When Madeleine was reported missing, I was the Chief Constable of Leicestershire Police. The McCanns lived in Rothley, Leicestershire -on my patch so to speak. I got a call from someone in Whitehall asking me to send three trusty officers from my force over to Praia da Luz immediately. Sorry, but I can’t tell you what other instructions I was given. Off they went, Detective Chief Superintendent Bob Small and two others. Small did a great job of work with Jane Tanner, as you may have read already [above].

I then got a call ordering me to convene a top-level team of representatives from various government departments and the police and security services. It was set up remarkably quickly, it was all arranged by Tuesday 8 May.  I first met with them all in my office at Leicestershire Constabulary H.Q, at Enderby, Leicestershire. It was exciting! Heady stuff! By the way, the job of this co-ordinating committee wasn’t to help find ‘Madeleine’. No! It was to manage the media. In conjunction with Clarence Mitchell of course. The two of us had many chats. It was quite new for me to get involved in media manipulation as such a high level   

On 5 September 2014 I gave evidence at the Leveson Enquiry into press standards. Lord Leveson was very interested in how beastly the newspapers had been towards the McCanns, and asked me some questions. I made these statements, either in writing or orally: 

(1) “On 8 May 2007 Leicestershire Constabulary was asked to co-ordinate the UK response to assist the Portuguese enquiry on behalf of the UK Government and Association of Chief Police Officers. The Gold Strategy set on this date established that it was a Portuguese-led enquiry and that all actions would comply with requirements of Portuguese law including their Judicial Secrecy Act. Due to the unprecedented media interest in the UK, a co-ordination group was set up on behalf of law enforcement agencies and government departments to coordinate the media interaction and ensure that a consistent stance was taken. This co-ordinating group was chaired by the Head of Corporate Communications from Leicestershire Constabulary. That group has continued to meet as required since 2007”, and

(2) “Due to the thirst for information from the media, every individual working in Leicestershire supporting the police investigation signed a confidentiality agreement. Messages were also disseminated to all staff to make them aware that even private conversations with friends could be reported on in the media…the confidentiality agreement…was something that was put together by the Gold Group who were running the enquiry as part of the U.K. effort, not by myself as Chief Constable”.  

Who was on this Co-ordinating Committee remains top secret. A member of the public tried to find out, by means of a Freedom of Information Act request, the identities of the government departments and agencies, and if possible the names of the individuals, who sat on this ‘Co-ordinating Committee’. The request was refused. Some people say it was a high-powered committee charged with using every possible means to make sure that the abduction story stuck. Well, I’m not going to disclose whether it was or not!

I will however disclose that I arranged for Gerry McCann to have an hour-long tour of my force’s ‘Madeleine McCann incident room’ on Monday 21 May, where we showed him our array of equipment and gizmos we were using to investigate what had happened to Madeleine. As the Daily Express reported on 23 May: “Dr McCann revealed he visited the Leicester-based police incident room during his trip home”. It was an absolute pleasure for me to arrange this tour for Gerry. He was well chuffed with all that we were doing for him!   

Months later, and after the McCanns were made formal suspects, I did the McCanns a massive favour by making the unprecedented decision to link our website to the McCanns’ fund-raising website, which in turn directed any members of the public who might have information not to Leicestershire Police, nor to the Portuguese police, but to the McCanns’ own very dubious private investigators, Metodo 3, via the McCanns’ website. Their controversial boss, Francisco Marco, had made the bold but false claim in December that he knew where Madeleine was, his men were closing in on her, and she would be home before Christmas. I think it is the first time in world history that any police force in the world has helped a suspect in this way - getting people to report direct to the suspect, not the police, and into the bargain helping them raise money via their website. Yay! I’m really proud of my unique achievement!  

I did one other great favour for the McCanns – or rather for their friend Dr David Payne. When friends of the McCanns and the Paynes, Drs Arul and Katharina Gaspar (both G.P.s) made a serious allegation that Payne had used sexualised gestures and words about Madeleine, well, that made it seem as if both men might be sexually attracted to infants. So I ordered my officers to sit on the report until Portuguese detective Goncalo Amaral was out of the way. Amaral was removed from the Madeleine McCann case on 2 October 2007 (five months after Madeleine was reported missing). Two weeks later, when it was safe to do so, I allowed a junior officer to fax the Gaspars’ statement to the Portuguese police.

The government were most grateful for my help. I duly applied for the top police job of Head of the Police Service of Northern Ireland – and got it!  I was well pleased.

18  DETECTIVE SUPERINTENDENT STUART PRIOR, formerly of Leicestershire Police

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‘Evening All. My boss was D.C.S. Bob Small [see above]. I was given some very important jobs to do in the Madeleine McCann case.  

One of the biggest was to take part in a ridiculous publicity stunt on behalf of the McCanns. They wanted to carry on promoting the abduction theory and one way they did this was to keep on coming up with load of new dark and mysterious suspects or, as they tended to call them, ‘persons of interest’. One of these was said to be a scraggy-haired man with a moustache who had been going door-to-door collecting for a children’s charity round about the time that the McCanns were on holiday in Praia da Luz. He became known as ‘George Harrison Man’ because his face looked a bit more like George Harrison, the former Beatle. The sketch was drawn up by Melissa Little, who was employed by Brian Kennedy, the Cheshire businessman who ran the McCanns’ private investigation. 

There’s a good article about this publicity stunt here:  [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

But let me summarise what happened.

The McCanns and their investigators somehow got in touch with a lady called Gail Cooper. She came up with the story of seeing a suspicious-looking scraggy-haired man. Melissa Little then drew a sketch of him. He was then identified by the McCanns’ investigators as a man who had been collecting on behalf of a local charity, the Roscoe Foundation. On Sunday, 13 January 2008, Brian Kennedy visited Albert Schuurmans of the Roscoe Foundation in Portugal. Three days after this, I got an email direct from Gerry McCann. (By the way, he had been a formal suspect in the case for over 4 months by then, but that didn’t bother us up in Leicestershire! No! We’d already been told the McCanns were innocent).

Gerry sent me an attached PowerPoint presentation (Folio 3966-8 in the Portuguese police files, by the way), with a covering note saying: ‘As discussed’. (You see, by then I’d been having lots of chats with him about all sorts of things. We’d been on first name terms for ages: it was ‘Gerry’ and ‘Stu’).  

Just an hour later I forwarded the presentation to Ricardo Paiva of the Portuguese police, asking for instructions and stating, among other things: “The PowerPoint attached was completed by the McCanns, but the statements were all taken by the U.K. police…This is urgent…we need to decide prior to the Gail Cooper artist’s impression appearing in the U.K. press”.  I finished off my e-mail to Paiva: “I will need to get back to the McCanns as he has asked to be updated. They are very excited about this potential lead”. You see, the McCanns were running this. They were basically telling me what to do. Leicestershire Police were basically obeying their instructions. I didn’t mind! I do as I am told to do! 

Gerry McCann’s ‘Powerpoint’ slides attempted to highlight the alleged similarity between Jane Tanner’s claimed sighting on 3 May and the ‘Monster Man/George Harrison Man’ of Gail Cooper.

Gerry also wrote this: “Tanner spent a full day with Melissa Little, a qualified Police Sketch Artist since 1986, to compile this likeness of the suspect. Melissa met Gail Cooper in a separate session. After spending hours with both witnesses, Melissa Little states: “There are many similarities between Miss Tanner’s man and Gail’s. Tanner believes that there is an 80% likelihood that this is the same man she saw carrying away the child, believed to be Madeleine”.

Jane Tanner, on 13 May 2007, 10 days after Madeleine was reported missing, had said she was sure that Robert Murat was the man she had seen. Now she was saying that the man she saw looked like a scraggy George Harrison! – even though she had never seen the man’s face! I knew it was absurd. I knew she was making it up. But, as I say, I was ‘under orders’ – the ‘Nuremburg defence!.  

Gerry was in effect telling us: “Forget about Tanner saying it was Murat that she’d seen. It wasn’t. Tanner now says the man looks something like these three sketches”.

On 17 January 2008, Detective Constable 4168 of the Leicestershire Police interviewed Gail Cooper and e-mailed the Operational Task Force. He noted at the time that Mrs Cooper was trying to explain why the News of the World, in a recent article, had added to and embellished her police statements, by saying: “It never crossed my mind” that they would do so. The Officer also reported that Gail Cooper had “mentioned a man called Brian Kennedy who was working for the McCanns and...had sent an artist down to do a sketch of the man she saw at the villa” (Police Files: Folio 4005).

The next day, I emailed Ricardo Paiva of the Portuguese police and said: “I am told that the artist’s impression by Gail Cooper is likely to hit the press over the weekend and I will update you on the effects of this next week, although we are not involved in this in any way at all”.

I really don’t know why I ever wrote that! We were up to our necks in plotting this story for the McCanns and the News of the World.!

On Sunday 20 January 2008, the News of the World published their dramatic story, with a front page sketch of ‘George Harrison Man’ and their striking conclusion: “The sketch by qualified police artist Melissa Little bears an uncanny resemblance to an earlier picture, based on Miss Tanner's story”.

‘Monsterman’ was now the No. 1 suspect! Job done!

This man was later identified and ruled out of any connection to Madeleine’s disappearance. But the press never reported that. By that time, the McCann Term had produced other possible suspects.

19  SIR PHILIP GREEN, very rich businessman   

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Hello. My name’s Philip Green. Well, SIR Philip Green to the likes of you reading this. You don’t get made a ‘Sir’ for nothing, you know. Look at ‘Sir’ Jimmy Savile for example.

I am a very successful and clever businessman. I am most famous for selling British Home Stores (BHS) for £1 whilst paying myself and my wife a small fortune in fees as Directors. (Enough to buy me that famous £100 million yacht, anyway, so we are talking millions, tens of millions, hundreds of millions).  That way, I cheated BHS pensioners out of £571 million. That’s a lot of cash. Of course, now that this matter has been brought to my attention, I have found just over half of that to help out those pensioners. Give me some at least some credit for that!

What did I do for the McCanns?  I provided my private jet to fly them to meet the Pope. This was just three weeks after Madeleine was reported missing. It was a very important part of helping to make them famous - and of course it reminded everybody not just of my fabulous wealth, but also my legendary generosity.

20  JIM GAMBLE, former Head of the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Service, now Director of the private company InEqe

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Hi! You may remember that I led the highly controversial Operation Ore, an investigation into people who watched child sexual abuse online via the U.S.-based American-based internet site, Landslide. Look up ‘Operation Ore’ on Landslide, and you’ll see that Operation Ore resulted in 7,250 suspects being identified, 4,283 homes being searched, 3,744 arrests, 1,848 charged, 1,451 convictions, 493 cautioned and 140 children removed from suspected dangerous situations  Also, at least 33 people committed suicide rather than face justice. So my campaign was very successful, and on the back of it I was promoted to the new post of Head of the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Service, or ‘CEOP’ for short.

When Madeleine was reported missing, I went swiftly into action. There is evidence that I set up a dummy CEOP webpage for missing Madeleine during Monday 30 April - three days before Madeleine was reported missing. But I’m not admitting anything about that; in fact I have publicly denied it.

First of all, I asked anyone who had been in Praia da Luz around the time of the McCanns’ holiday to send me their holiday snaps, in case Madeleine’s abductor was on one of them. I have never revealed how many photos were sent in, and I never sent these photos on to the Portuguese police, as I should have done. They stayed with CEOP. One press report noted: “Gonçalo Amaral, the former PJ inspector, recalls that, with the consent of the Portuguese authorities, an appeal was made for tourists to send in photos…The purpose was ‘to identify anyone suspicious who might appear looking at the family’, he says. But despite “much that arrived at the English police, none of those images ever reached us”.

As the Head of CEOP, I lent my considerable weight to suggestions by the McCanns that Madeleine had been abducted by a lone paedophile, or a group of paedophiles - even though the only evidence that there even was an abduction came from the McCanns and their close circle of friends. In this work, I had a team of trusty people around me who could be relied to stay ‘on message’: Mark Williams-Thomas, Dr Joe Sullivan and Graham Hill, to name three.

An early McCann Team campaign featured Madeleine’s coloboma – the ‘leak’ from her pupil to the iris. They designed a campaign logo: ‘LOOK for Madeleine’ with the second ‘O’ featuring a black line from the centre of the ‘O’ to the outside, looking like Madeleine’s eye. It was noted by some that this ‘O’ looked very similar to the design of the letter ‘C’ in CEOP. Hmmm.   

CEOP, by the way, was actually set up as a company, it was not part of any police force or government department, although it was generally regarded as being part of the police service.  I was its CEO. We got a substantial amount of our funding from private sources, e.g. from Sir Richard Branson (Virgin), Microsoft, BT, O2, and VISA.

On Monday 21 May, just 18 days after Madeleine was reported missing, I had a meeting in my office with Gerry McCann, who had come over to England for the weekend. There were a few others at that key meeting, but I’m not letting on who they were. We made plans. And again, sorry, but I’m not sharing with you what those plans were.

After that, I would often appear together with the McCanns on TV sofas, helping them to project the story of how a paedophile abductor had ‘stolen’ Madeleine. If Madeleine had been stolen by a paedophile, it was extremely likely that by now Madeleine would have been killed. But the McCanns wanted to emphasise that Madeleine was still alive - after all, it helped keep the donations coming in to their ‘Find Madeleine Fund’ - so I went along with them.

In May 2009, after Madeleine had been missing for two years, I appeared in a CEOP-produced video: ‘Minute for Madeleine’. Again, it rehearsed the theory that Madeleine was abducted by a paedophile. And I went on SKY News and other media to promote it: Link:  [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

A year later I again showed my commitment to the McCanns and the paedophile theory. I organised a CEOP conference on 26 January 2010, when I invited both Gerry McCann and my good mates Dr Joe Sullivan and Graham Hill to speak. The conference was titled: “Taken: Sexually-motivated child abductions” - an event ‘for law enforcement officers only’. Once again, then, having Gerry at my conference promoted the ‘abduction by a paedophile’ theory.

Someone asked me by e-mail why Gerry McCann had been asked to speak at a conference on sexually-motivated child abductions. I replied via my Training Officer, who replied on 19 January:

“Thank you for your interest in the work of CEOP and your comments. The fact that we invite a speaker does not mean that we endorse their views. Our conferences allow people to exchange and challenge views. The current position regarding the McCanns is that they are the parents of a missing child who is presumed to have been abducted: that being the case anything that Gerry McCann has to say will be of interest to those who work in [law enforcement] and will attend the conference”. 

Around this time, the McCanns were pushing hard for the government to set up a review by a British police force into the reported disappearance of Madeleine McCann. Guess who was given the job of preparing a feasibility study for this review? Yep! You’re right! ME!    

In March, the Yorkshire Evening Post reported that I was “spearheading the carrying-out of a scoping exercise to assess the feasibility of a review by a British police force into the disappearance of Madeleine McCann”. I did my scoping review, recommending how it should be done. And the review, called Operation Grange, was set up a year later, on 12 May 2011.

On 10 April 2010, as the Independent reported: “Jim Gamble of CEOP told the BBC he believed some sex offenders should be encouraged to seek treatment rather than be threatened with jail terms…some offenders should receive a police caution, then be managed within the community. He said too many people were being convicted of paedophilia to be dealt with in the criminal justice system”. I was criticised for that as being soft on paedophiles. Michelle Elliott, Director of the charity Kidscape, said: “Mr Gamble's views on people who download illegal images [are wrong]. They are just as guilty as the people taking the photos. If they didn't view, the child wouldn't be abused. Therefore I think those people deserve prison’.” Huh! What does she know!

Soon after that kerfuffle, I lost my post as Head of CEOP. The new Home Secretary, Theresa May, had decided CEOP should be brought under the Serious and Organised Crime Directorate, now the National Crime Agency. In a huff, I offered to resign. Theresa May accepted! 

I’m proud of my work for the McCanns. I helped people to believe in the abduction. And my scoping report prepared the way for that mighty Scotland Yard investigation, Operation Grange, which has so far cost about £13 million and achieved…er…well, nothing so far. Here’s hoping, though!
 “WE HELPED THE MCCANNS!” was devised and written by the Madeleine McCann Research Group, December 2017