Extract from Jon Clarke's new book: 'My Search for Madeleine McCann'

Thanks for that x

MY SEARCH FOR MADELEINE: One Reporter’s 14-Year Hunt To Solve Europe’s Most Harrowing Crime

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY SO FAR...

“Tirelessly researched. Told me a lot of things I didn’t know about the case”
MARTIN BRUNT, SKY NEWS CRIME CORRESPONDENT

“Jon is clearly about as steeped in the story as it’s possible to be, and it’s a fascinating account of the inner workings of what sounds like an extremely seedy place.”
SUSIE DOWDALL, DAILY MAIL

“Jon Clarke is a remarkably experienced journalist who has dug deeply into the movements and life of German new-age traveler and fixated preferential sex offender Christian Brueckner, who should have been a prime suspect in 2007.

“This book breaks a lot of new ground on the case and is a real investigative trawl and deep dive into the world of organized child traffickers… and he has interviews with all the key players from all over Europe.

“It is an investigative man-hunt and Jon’s book is compelling. He has a long heritage in the story and his crusade is journalistically sound and his journalistic instincts are sharp.”
DONAL MACINTYRE, TV PRODUCER AND INVESTIGATOR

“Jon Clarke’s book exposes the secret dark world behind the biggest mystery of the 21st century.”
Mike Ridley, The Sun

What his WIFE says : 



"Gabriella Simone" are Clarke's wife's first names.
(She uses her maiden name for the running of their considerable property empire, 
and also uses the same Letter Box number as the Olive press did before it moved operations to the coast.
The same letter box Clarke claims was so erratic that he did not receive any notification from FAPE about their
enquiries of their judgment against him andOP.
Yes, that one. The one they use for renting out some of their properties at over €7,000 per week.)

Interesting that it is not marked as "Verified Purchase"

Other people have been 'whooshed' for that

"This journalist"? Not "My husband" then?  

Customer Reviews help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.

Customer Reviews should give customers genuine product feedback from fellow shoppers. We have a zero tolerance policy for any review designed to mislead or manipulate customers.

We don't allow anyone to write reviews as a form of promotion.

The following are types of reviews that we don't allow and will remove:

A review by someone who has a direct or indirect financial interest in the product.
A review by someone perceived to have a close personal relationship with the product's owner, author, or artist.
A review by the product manufacturer, posing as an unbiased shopper.
Multiple negative reviews for the same product from one customer.
A review in exchange for monetary reward.
A review of a game in exchange for bonus in-game credits.
A negative review from a seller on a competitor's product.
A positive review from an artist on a peer's album in exchange for receiving a positive review from them.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=508510&ref_=nav_cs_customerservice_2bf4fe8c5ec54e6bae2d1c24043f012b

I very rarely visit other social media platforms that discuss the case of Madeleine McCann and/or associated topics but just now I was led to one fringe forum that appears to be very pro Christian Brueckner as 'it was he wot done it !!!'

In not so many words..

Well I read it in the Olive Press, Jon Clarke said 'rhubarb rhubarb rhubarb'.  I don't know if it's true but I can't see any reason to doubt his word ....

 

Oh and the consensus of opinion on this particular platform - Madeleine McCann was abducted, taken from apartment 5a on the night of Thursday 3rd May 2007.

Flying in the face of evidence!

Shortly after I had read Clarke's book I posted this "Open Letter" on this forum.
I then took it down partly to allow people time to read the book and take it at face value, without prejudicing their views before they had time to sift whatever evidence it contained.

Now however, I am putting it back again.
readers may see how egregious is Clarke's twisting of the truth and his wanton disregard for facts.


"OPEN LETTER TO JON CLARKE

Jon,

Firstly I congratulate you on consulting a lawyer before publishing this book.  Your lawyer, whom you have asked me not to name, but who is fulsomely thanked on the Acknowledgements page for helping you out of ‘plenty of scrapes’  has clearly been worth his weight in gold, and the ad hominem attacks on me are slightly more muted and vague than before.
I wonder now if you would seek his advice on the libels about me you published some years ago in the Olive Press, still on-line, which you have never retracted and for which you have still not apologised.

You have previously sought to give the impression that we barely knew each other in Ronda, indeed using that form of words on one occasion.
I note then that here you now grudgingly admit that we did, and that I knew you and your growing family, that we skied together celebrating a mutual friend’s son’s birthday, having driven the 200km, 2 hrs each way in my BMW Z1, during which we talked at length about things of mutual interest.

Perhaps people should also know that I was a perhaps infrequent but welcomed visitor to your house, as you were to mine, and took an interest in your reconstruction and renovation project, sharing with you my experiences in doing the same to my own -
And that I ‘lent’ you my itinerant odd-job man Terry Williams for some months during which he cleared the brush in your small river -
And that we discussed the pros and cons of the placing of your pool, again drawing on my experiences -
And that I was social friends with at least two of your staff operating from the “cow shed” offices opposite the house -
And that from time to time I gave you the “heads up” on stories which you were then able to cover as exclusive, the most memorable being the elaborate wedding of Desirée, the daughter of the Principe  Alfonso Maximiliano Victorio Eugenio Alejandro María Pablo de la Santísima Trinidad y Todos los Santos zu Hohenlohe-Langenburg,  to   Count Thibault D’Ursel in 2012 - the morning coat and top hat do with many of the nobility of Europe in attendance, followed by the reception at the Bodega in your village –

And that we met socially on several occasions, including another wedding, as we shared the same circle of ex-pat friends -
And perhaps that during what you call an angry exchange only one of us was angry but that as you report you calmed down with a couple of cans of beer on the terrace overlooking my pool and conceded during that civilised and cordial exchange that “You know more about that case than I do…” or words to that effect.

I am reassured that you now have my name and service details more or less correct.  Less so that you say that the retirement of an officer of full pensionable age when no further promotion was possible given the reduction in Senior ranks caused by the re-organisation of the Force is in some way “open to conjecture”.
In what way, pray ?   And perhaps you should speak to your lawyer before answering.

You talk about the Olive Press having exposed many crooks around Andalucia, but appear to use that as an argument that you must not be criticised in this particular case.

As you know, and as I have frequently said and published, I am second to none in my contention that good and investigative journalism is at the heart of our democratic freedoms.
What is deadly is when the press and media are manipulated, whether by politics, money, greed, other pressures or simply ignorance of what is going on.

You quote the Rules of Journalism, the five Ws. When, Where, Why, hoW, and Who.  
But you omit the most important one Police officers always start with –   WHAT ?
“Stick to those and you can’t go wrong”.  Your words.

The difference between us is that I am still looking for evidence of What, and of When and Where, before I even consider HoW, Who or Why.

You seem to go straight for Who, ignoring What, HoW, and even When, perhaps because the answers to those questions are extremely inconvenient.
You appear to have swallowed what you were initially told, without considering the almost total lack of evidence for what has become the ‘official story’, and apparently dismissing out of hand the wealth of evidence against that story, and for a very different one.

You were there.  The world knows that.  There is film of you with the gaggle of journalists just before 10am, shaking hands with a police officer, watching the many police dogs in operation, watching the scenes of crime girl trying to take fingerprints off shutters which were NOT broken, forced, smashed or jemmied, watching the McCanns leaving from Apartment 4G – not 5A – heavily protected against questions from roving reporters by some of the Tapas group and two minders, and there is film of you not speaking to them as they left.

So the question remains, Jon, why did you not put on your investigative hat and ask the sixth W ?
WHAT happened to Madeleine McCann ?
Why did you, and do you, uncritically accept what you have been told, even when the ‘Official story’ – the What, makes little sense and cannot even be reconciled with the ‘Official evidence’ – the How and When ?

To change the subject slightly, you now seek to extricate yourself from the trench story, by saying on p.11
“I am baffled to know why it matters . .”
I am equally baffled to know why an investigative journalist is baffled that an important detail such as the exact location of a deep trench into which a child might have fallen and been inadvertently buried is not of crucial importance in an investigation into a missing child.

From our first day at Police Training College the words “attention to detail” were drummed in.  It starts with neat hair cuts, sharply pressed uniforms and bulled boots, and extends to the exact words used by an accused on arrest and every detail in a prosecution file.

I am still baffled why, when you have clearly read the Chapter of the e-book, and have had 12 years of access to the PJ files, you still pretend not to know where the trench actually was.   If you genuinely do not even now, that surely indicates some professional blindness.

And just so that you, and everyone else is in no doubt at all, the statement that “I am pretty certain that he made a fair bit of money from it and any related pursuits”  on p.68. is potentially libellous.  
I have never made a single ha’penny or centimo from this case, nor from any other.   My e-book has had over 1.6 million hits.  Charging 10cts, one hundredth the price of your book would have made me very rich.  But I did not.

I am not paid in the way you are, selling a photo of two people in an allegedly intensely private situation to the Sun and then to Hello, and using the proceeds to buy your farmhouse.   (p.16.)    There are those of us who find that utterly disgusting, and it inevitably clouds the way many view your profession.

Let me try to clear the air on the specific allegation about my visiting your house.

I agreed the sale of the Finca, and in the months that followed before the new owner took possession on completion spent time visiting my support network to thank them for their help over the previous decade and a half.  The laundry, the supermarket, both olive mills, the bank, all with introductions to the new owner to ensure a seamless handover of the business.   I then dropped in on friends and acquaintances to impart my news.
You were on that list, and since it was during the run-up to Christmas I did the traditional thing and took two small bags of gold-foil wrapped chocolate coins as gifts for the children to place under the tree.

I had of course no idea that you had abandoned your wife and children for many months – ‘separated’ is the word you use.
Your wife was not there, and so I left my card with the friend who was minding the children and the house to show who had called as common decency and traditional etiquette would demand.

There was no reason for her to contact me. The message will have been passed by the friend.  If that was unnerving then I can only say it was not intended to be, but if your abandoned wife was emotionally fragile then I can quite understand and I am sorry you caused her such distress and that I unwittingly exacerbated that.
**
So to sum up.   A comprehensive and detailed account of your peregrinations across Europe and collecting evidence of Christian Brückner’s undoubted murky and criminal past.

But as to taking us any further towards finding what happened to Madeleine, I am not so sure.

Sincerely
Peter Mac
Nerja.  9.Sept.2021

It was my intention to scan over the page from Clarke's book 'My Search for Madeleine' so as to keep in context but my scanner has gone up the swanny - and taken me with it!

I haven't the time nor patience to copy over word for word so this short extract will have to do for the moment.

Chapter 2: Just Another Early Morning Job

I didn't know the poor minion who had called me from the Daily Mail's London HQ half an hour earlier. I think he was new to the job, and, as is the way with the Mail. there were few pleasantries (when I worked there in the 1990s, it's computer password for casual staff was 'Yes Sir').

'Can you get to the Algarve ASAP'? he said (for it was more an order than a request). 'Some girl's gone missing. A doctor's kid. The Foreign Office is already on it. Place called Ocean Club in Praia da Luz. Just get going, we'll call you with more en-route.

It really does need the full page to set the scene, I'll have another bash at fixing my scanner later.

Poetic licence a go-go.

Just Another Early Morning Job Chapter 2 
It was an extraordinarily early start. Up and out of the house before 7am was rare for my new life in Spain. It was May 2007 and I was living in the stunning Serrania de Ronda mountains, near Malaga, having relocated from London, and Fleet Street, to set up as a stringer in southern Spain. As I had just set up a regional newspaper, The Olive Press, I was used to taking trips around the country and its islands – usually involving celebrities on holiday, tourists falling out of windows or something connected to the costa del crime ... so to be sent off by the Daily Mail on a missing child story in Portugal wasn’t too out of the ordinary. 
What was different though, was the family involved. The professional, middle-class doctor couple Kate and Gerry McCann were not your typical Brits abroad-type victims – the least likely of British tourists to want to get involved with the press, particularly on holiday. But they were clearly in desperate need for help. Conjuring up a legion of journalists to help in their hunt for their missing daughter (the prettiest, most striking of little girls) seemed to be the best way forward. 
I didn’t know the poor minion who had called me from the Daily Mail’s London HQ half an hour earlier. I think he was new to the job, and, as is the way with the Mail, there were few pleasantries (when I worked there in the 1990s, its computer password for casual staff was ‘Yes Sir’).

Clarke, Jon. MY SEARCH FOR MADELEINE: One Reporter’s 14-Year Hunt To Solve Europe’s Most Harrowing Crime (pp. 20-21). OP Books. Kindle Edition.
 
‘Can you get to the Algarve ASAP?’ he said (for it was more an order than a request). ‘Some girl’s gone missing. A doctor’s kid. The Foreign Office is already on it. Place called Ocean Club in Praia da Luz. Just get going, we’ll call you with more en route.’ It was fairly standard stuff for a stringer abroad and I was on the road within about 15 minutes, with just enough time to grab a cup of tea, my always-packed overnight bag and give a quick kiss to my wife Francesca and soon to be 2-year-old daughter Maria. 
It was a beautiful May morning and my British-registered Subaru Impreza loved the empty roads through the stunning Serrania de Ronda, where many a car advert had been filmed. We’d been living there for a couple of years and were about to finish renovating an eighteenth-century farmhouse. One of Spain’s most scenic drives, the winding A-374 skirts the rugged Grazalema Natural Park, past the emblematic white villages of Zahara de la Sierra and Algodonales before striking north towards Sevilla and the dry, flat Guadalquivir plane. It was a journey I knew well, so I was on auto-pilot, losing myself in the excellent early morning show on Spain’s Radio 3. 
It wasn’t until I got to my usual roadside venta for a coffee and a tostada near Utrera, about an hour into the journey, that I began to dwell on the job at hand. By then my mobile had rung twice more, once from The Sun and once from the Daily Mirror, asking me to cover it for them as well. 
Putting me ‘on an order’ as it is called in Fleet Street, I knew it was going to be a fairly lucrative day by the time I’d added in expenses. I didn’t have any more clues to the media storm that was beginning to blow in from a tiny, little-known seaside resort at the other end of the Iberian Peninsula’s long southern coastline.  The story had first appeared as a news flash on Sky News at around 7.45am in the UK, but I figured it would be over by the time I got there: she would be found, like the vast majority of other kids that wander off during their holidays, either dead or alive, in a swimming pool or a ditch somewhere. As a father to a toddler, I understood how the parents must be feeling. Some years later, our own son, Albert, who would be born in 2008, wandered off during a holiday in Portugal deciding, at two years old, that he fancied picking plums in the grounds of the rental home. We lost him for a terrifying ten minutes.

Clarke, Jon. MY SEARCH FOR MADELEINE: One Reporter’s 14-Year Hunt To Solve Europe’s Most Harrowing Crime (pp. 21-22). OP Books. Kindle Edition. 

As I drove, my mind turned to my daughter’s second birthday that coming Sunday and my wife’s that we had celebrate a few days before at a new restaurant that had recently opened in Ronda. I was excited about our pending move into the main part of the ancient farmhouse that we had nearly finished renovating after a year of builders and dust … and thankful, I guess, to have some decent work to pay for it all – in pounds from the UK. So I was loaded up with positive thoughts of my future as I finally sped into the sleepy resort of Praia da Luz, some three-and-a-half hours later.

Clarke, Jon. MY SEARCH FOR MADELEINE: One Reporter’s 14-Year Hunt To Solve Europe’s Most Harrowing Crime (p. 22). OP Books. Kindle Edition.

And in that short extract he gives us 
* the date of birth of his wife, and of one of his children, 
* He gives us a very accurate estimate of the time taken to get from where he lives to PdL, from which we can back-calculate the time of the phone call
* We learn that he knew this story would make enough money to pay for the renovations to the house he had bought with the Kidman Libel Scandal lucre,  [contrary to his assertion elsewhere that he thought she might have been found by the time he arrived ! ]
* an admission that he used his mobile phone whilst driving.  Twice.
* and so much more.

All of which of course he now denies.  And harshly criticises and threatens anyone who points out any of this. [About which more later]
WHY ?

Why I thank you ^^^ saves me the trouble of fighting my scanner before I'm suitably braced.

That is just a one page spread - if nothing else it shows the conceit of the man.

Has anything ever been written about his life before relocating to sunny Spain - apart from being a hack journalist?

This has nothing to do with 'the book' but when it comes to bending rules - two can play!