If Madeleine McCann died on Sunday 29 April, what was really going on behind the scenes that week?

We seem to see only the make-up photos, and those of a much younger Madeleine.

Ah yes but they weren't on the disk handed to the police, they are all after the event.

And in his statement, signed under "oath" Gerry said he had NO MORE PHOTOS I NHIS POSSESSION>

But three weeks later he returned to the UK, and three days later returned with Mitchell as part of his excess baggage, and the same day his sister Philomena, wife of knowledgeable astronomer and skilled manipulator of photographs, Quicksand Tony Rickwood, arrived in PdL  
...And quite by chance the following day the Last Photo = the Pool Photo was released to the press of the world, with an petition by Mitchell to look at the Time = the DATE . . .
And also, quite by chance, that was the days of publication of the utterly lying mendacious untrue and invented story by Danielle Guzmaroli in the women's magazine about the waterslide which - quite by chance - included details of the clothing which had been given in the Last/Pool photo. [except that she got some of it wrong ! ]

One coincidence,  two coincidences ?  ( Kate McCann) ???

Gerry McCann - witness statement 10th May 2007

He is part of this case in the form of a participant and an offended party, as the father of the minor MADELEINE. Being a British national who does not know the Portuguese language, oral or written, the interpreter Alice Dias Homem de Gouveia Avakoff is therefore present.

----- That he confirms the truth of the statements made previously on 4 May 2007 he being available here to provide any further clarifications.

----- Asked, he clarifies that, with regard to the personal photos already delivered by him to the authorities after the disappearance of his daughter MADELEINE, he has no others in his power [possession]. He adds that it is his wife KATE who usually takes pictures, he does not recall if on this holiday any were taken at night.

Kate McCann wrote: On the night Madeleine went missing, Russell, anxious to get posters produced and out there quickly, asked me for my camera, so that he could use the photographs of Madeleine stored on it.

The PJ appear to have been determined to prove we’d brought these posters on holiday with us from Britain. They sent them to a forensics lab for analysis, asking for information on how old they were and how they had been printed and cut. Having established that Kodak paper had been used, they contacted a Kodak representative to find out where this paper could have been bought.

I was so exasperated to read all this. There was a much easier, more obvious way of confirming how and where these posters were produced. They could have just asked. As it was, it took them until April 2008 to verify that the posters had been run off, on the night of the abduction, by Amy Tierney, the Mark Warner duty manager, using her own Kodak paper and her own Kodak printer.

Repeat ad nauseam - lest they forget..

Kate McCann wrote:During Gerry’s tennis lesson, Madeleine and Ella came to the adjoining court with their Mini Club for a mini-tennis session. Jane and I stayed to watch them. It chokes me remembering how my heart soared with pride in Madeleine that morning. She was so happy and obviously enjoying herself. Standing there listening intently to Cat’s instructions, she looked so gorgeous in her little T-shirt and shorts, pink hat, ankle socks and new holiday sandals that I ran back to our apartment for my camera to record the occasion. One of my photographs is known around the world now: a smiling Madeleine clutching armfuls of tennis balls. At the end of their session, the children had been asked to run around the court and pick up as many balls as they could. Madeleine had done really well and was very pleased with herself. Gerry loves that picture.

All this talk of cameras and photographs but .... no photographs?

Chief Faffer wrote: I believe Maddie was already in a freezer well before then.

I'm in three minds about the freezer scenario, for starters there was a forum myth circulating some years ago - even to this day, about Gerry McCann disposing of a fridge. I would think if this be even a remote possibility, the PJ would be very interested in the whereabouts of said freezer.

The church has always been my favoured theory, backed by the frequent reference to the McCanns having been given the keys for private access and/or prayer. Then there is the relationship that developed between the McCanns and the padre, Hubbard.

Of all the people who claimed to have visited Luz over the years, not one so far has taken documented interest in the church. I believe it very likely the church has subterranean passages and/or a crypt running beneath, where a corpse could be stored without detection.

The church works in mysterious ways.

I also think the church is more involved than we know, and probably so is Arthur Haines Hubbard.

I wonder if the police, private detectives, public, dogs etc can't find a body is because there is no body/remains to be found.

When Dr Amaral talked about a body in the church that was cremated the next day along with Madeleine, he wasn't wrong.

The McCann's are cock sure there is no trace of her to incriminate them.

The Church

In the deep distant past I recall having a rummage about for information concerning the Church and a police investigation.

If I remember rightly, the police can enter a church in connection with a criminal investigation but a warrant is required beforehand, which can be time consuming and requires evidence and perhaps some conviction, that a crime has been committed and the Church is somehow connected - like harboring a criminal in sanctuary.

But then there is the moral angle, perhaps not able to prevent police entry but the mystery that surrounds the inner sanctums of Christianity does have an influence on how the establishment is viewed, managed and protected. Especially in a country where religious faith is so important to the majority.

The McCanns appeared to use the church in Luz as their own personal space, their territory, their sanctuary. Such behaviour could have a knock-on effect insofar as locals knowing very little about the case - and indeed the PJ acknowledging the sensitivity afforded to the McCanns, they were allowed to continue using the church for their own private reasons.

The church is very near to the Ocean Club so movement night or day wouldn't have posed a problem. A corpse could be concealed in the ambient temperature a subterranean location without detection - for however long it takes.

Father Hubbard and 'Ol Muvver Hubbard played a significant role during the summer of 2007. Not to say I think they were shipped over from Canada to assist the McCanns alone, I don't buy into that theory, but I believe their speedy intimate relationship with the Mccanns to be a red alert (gawd they get everywhere).

So often it's revealed a crime is committed on the door step, so to speak, whilst the manufactured trail takes every direction managed by deliberate deception.

I was particularly fascinated by the unctious farther Hubbards wristwatch.

Father Pacheco, it's reported, had all the McCann paraphernalia removed from the church and said he had been deceived.

What is interesting about Father Hubbard's watch?

Verdi is brilliant at providing videos. Take a look at the most embarrassing interview by a member of the clergy.

Madeleine McCann - Interview with Father Haynes Hubbard 2012

May 7, 2012

I would be interested to know how the McCann's knew John Geraghty, how he got in touch with them and why he offered them the church keys.

crusader wrote:I would be interested to know how the McCann's knew John Geraghty, how he got in touch with them and why he offered them the church keys.

Again there is mystery surrounding John Geraghty - including a case of mistaken identity somewhere along the line - so much has been distorted by media reports and of course the inevitable social media mischief.

You might find something of interest hidden in this old defunct forum thread..

https://jillhavern.forumotion.net/t4990-john-geraghty#108483

As it stands I don't think the Geraghty thread warrants continuation but let me know if you, or any other member, has more to add to discussion and I will decide from there.

Ta  

Back on topic, do we know whose handwriting is on the Slide & Splash sheet?

Silentscope wrote:They had some time to plan, and Images could have been sent by anyone with access to a Laptop with an Internet connection.

Maybe the Police Manuals found in their Villa contained the Information?
The question remains, who gave them these Books, and when?

Uncropped Images were on someones i

I have a problem with the abduction theory. If an abductor had entered the apartment to take a child but ended up killing that child in the apartment. Would he abduct the body or just run . The dog alerts tells us there was a body in 5a.

It dos stretch the imagination, doesn't it? After so many years, and investigation by all manner of people, there is no evidence of that theory at all.

ROSA wrote:I have a problem with the abduction theory. If an abductor had entered the apartment to take a child but ended up killing that child in the apartment. Would he abduct the body or just run . The dog alerts tells us there was a body in 5a.

Hello ROSA, good to see you back posting again

Technically, for accuracy is important, the dog alerts didn't tell us there was a body in apartment 5a, the EVRD alerted to the scent of death and the bloodhound Keela alerted to the scent of blood.  The scent could have been contamination rather than a body in situ - much like the dog's reaction to the items of clothing and the Renault Scenic.  Undoubtedly contamination but doesn't explain when where or why!

That aside, I quite agree - an abductor is very unlikely to purposely or accidentally kill a child and then run for it with the corpse, taken with non-binary gender (read him/her).

All the theories that have been put out there, not one accords with the documented evidence (with the exception of CMOMM) available for all to see in the form of the PJ files.  If only people would stick to fact and evidence!

I wasn't sure why you, ROSA, chose the particular post to reply to as your comment doesn't appear to have any relevance but that's of no importance - the fresh look at this thread is what matters!

So, looking for the relevance of your choice, I came across this which I repeat as I consider it to be of great interest..

I saw Kate and Gerry McCanns' despair and if they were acting they deserved an Oscar, 06 October 2007

I saw Kate and Gerry McCanns' despair and if they were acting they deserved an Oscar Timesonline

The PR expert who advised Madeleine's parents in the first weeks of her disappearance offers a new insight into their state of mind

Dominic Kennedy
October 6, 2007

Gerry and Kate McCann's on-screen composure in the days after their daughter disappeared was at odds with their turmoil and dread behind the scenes, a witness says today.

The couple swung between uncontrollable distress and a determination to do what was needed to help to find Madeleine. They gave no indication that they thought she had been snatched, let alone by a paedophile. Their early assumption was that she had wandered off and had an accident or been taken in by a well-meaning stranger.

Alex Woolfall, a public relations consultant for the holiday resort where the child disappeared, was with the McCanns regularly for that first fortnight and is convinced that they are innocent. "That they could be involved and in any way be guilty - to me they would have to win every Golden Globe and every Oscar ever awarded," he told The Times.

Mr Woolfall has provided the first detailed account by an insider of what happened to the McCanns during the desperate days after Madeleine disappeared. He is an expert in crisis PR at the communications group Bell Pottinger and flew to Portugal as part of the Mark Warner holiday company’s emergency response team on Saturday, May 5. Madeleine vanished on the evening of May 3.

He met the couple for the first time at their new apartment. "They were behaving exactly as I thought someone in that situation would be," Mr Woolfall said. "They had not slept. They were trying to work out what to do that might help generate images of her. They were desperately keen to publicise her face."

The McCanns had photographs of Madeleine on their digital camera, which Mr Woolfall began transferring to a laptop computer. "I said to Kate, 'Let's try to identify pictures where her face is visible'. Downloading the images was a very difficult process for them. It was upsetting.

"They were trying to do two things at once: one, emotionally deal with what was actually, really happening to them; two, operate in some sort of logical way to help get her back."

Mr Woolfall transmitted the photographs to the Press Association in London, from where they were distributed to the media. The portfolio included the now famous image of Madeleine wearing a hat on a tennis court.

The McCanns wanted to do more. "They were exhausted and despairing but thinking, 'Should we go outside and say something that might get her back?' They said they wanted to head downstairs and talk to the media. They were very tired, but that was one thing they were determined to do."

Mr Woolfall went out to alert journalists and returned to the McCanns. "They wrote down what they wanted to say and went out and gave a short statement. After that, they were completely spent. You could tell there was nothing left."

Mr Woolfall was surprised by the reaction of British viewers to the couple's demeanour. "I was struck at the perception of people who had watched Kate and Gerry: that they were very controlled and perhaps were not responding in a way people thought would be more natural. They were not at all controlled. When I was with them, they were between being completely distraught and trying to do what they felt was the right thing." Armchair detectives have leapt to wild conclusions based on the few alleged details of the case to have emerged. One bone of contention has been whether Mrs McCann, when raising the alarm that Madeleine was missing, screamed: "They've taken her." Some have questioned why a mother would leap to the conclusion that a child had been abducted.

Mr Woolfall says that he heard no suggestion in the early days that the girl had been snatched. "Certainly I did not hear any discussion that this could be a paedophile or an aggravated robbery. All the time I was around it was whether she could have wandered off and had an accident or somebody had actually taken her in, perhaps not with ill-intent.

"During the first 48 hours the word being used was 'missing' rather than 'abducted' or any link with a paedophile or any sort of crime. Towards the end of the second week I detected a shift towards there being a consciousness that she had probably been taken rather than wandered off, just on the assumption that anybody would have found her by now."

Many theories have emerged from the claim that Madeleine's twin sister and brother, aged 2, failed to wake or cry when she vanished. Mr Woolfall said he had not heard of the twins' alleged silence until he read about it in a newspaper in Britain. The claim was attributed to the Portuguese police.

There has even been a suggestion that Mrs McCann carried her daughter's Cuddle Cat soft toy because it would look good on TV. "For that to have in any way validity, it would cancel out the fact that these two people hadn't got a clue about PR or the media," Mr Woolfall said. "To suddenly be that sophisticated . . . I noticed Kate often had this toy with her. It was Madeleine’s favourite toy and she would go to bed with it. Kate had it with her when she went to church. She had it in the apartment."

A lingering puzzle for many is why the couple left three children in the flat. "When I first got to Praia da Luz, I asked Mark Warner to put me in the chair at the tapas restaurant that they had sat in and show me where the apartment was," Mr Woolfall said. "It never struck me that it would be a particularly odd thing to leave your children in that apartment, given that it was so close.

"It is incredibly sleepy and quiet in Praia da Luz. There is no traffic noise. One day when he was standing on a balcony, Gerry was saying how they felt when they first came to the resort. The pool was close, supermarket round the corner. They felt everything was a stone's throw."

The McCanns have sometimes irritated observers with the fervency of their do-it-yourself campaign. "When I came back there was criticism: why is this couple out there publicising this, doing interviews, going in front of cameras, going through photo opportunities? If you look at what would have happened in the UK, you would have had, probably within hours, a proactive intervention by British police, who would have said this is the process we now need to go through.

"Kate and Gerry have been largely left to get on with it, with no support in the initial stages, or guidance. They realised the media were a huge potential ally."

Mr Woolfall recalled how the bewildered couple gradually began to recover their composure. "In the first week they were not thinking. They actually did not think. They were in shock.

"In the second week, Gerry behaved very much like a doctor would do. Doctors are analytical. He started to have much more strategic conversations with me about what they might do. They became more aware that getting Madeleine's photograph widely distributed in Spain and possibly North Africa was sensible.

"Gerry said to me, 'We don't want the awareness that Madeleine has gone missing to disappear overnight, and that we are a family whose child went missing on holiday and that is the end of it. We want to try and find her.' When I left Portugal, the beginnings of the idea of having a campaign were probably forming.

"They were actually quite hopeful - far more in that frame of mind than despondent and downbeat. They had gone 360 degrees several times through all the different emotional states, but they soon got some good control on things."

Mr Woolfall left after a fortnight working from 5am to 1am, fending 200 calls a day from journalists as far away as Norway and South Africa. He warned the McCanns that they needed a press officer. "Gerry, I think, spoke to the Consulate and said 'Can you help us? Because there is a lot of media interest and we cannot manage.' As a result of that the Foreign and Commonwealth Office flew out Sheree Dodd [an experienced government spokeswoman]."

At first, journalists treated the McCanns with great respect, but there was a free-for-all when the couple took their first unscheduled walk along the beach. "Freelance snappers started to get quite close to them and one or two questions were thrown at them. That was probably the very early stages of the change," Mr Woolfall said. "It reached a crescendo when the McCanns tried to take their kids to the crèche and were bombarded by snappers and freelancers."

When the McCanns were made suspects, Mr Woolfall was bemused. "I thought it was ridiculous. I couldn't believe it. Completely ludicrous."

Did you suspect them? "My God, no, absolutely not in any way at any stage. I walked into that apartment and just saw two people who were frantic that their daughter had gone missing. Nobody could possibly, if they had anything to do with that, behave in that way for so long.

"It made me laugh rather than be exasperated. From Day One they could not move anywhere without 100 flash bulbs going off. The whole idea that they could have done any of the things the police were suggesting was farcical.

"You could not pick another couple on the planet that would have had that many cameras trained on them."

Note: June Wright, Luz resident, speaking on the Channel 4 dispatches documentary 'Searching for Madeleine':

"I arrived at the Ocean Club reception at around about 10 to 11 and at the time that we arrived a police car arrived - and as the police officer got out a man approached him, who I now know is Gerry McCann and said that his daughter had been abducted. That there was no way that she could have opened the shutters herself, she'd definitely been taken."

[Acknowledgement and special thanks to Nigel Moore of mccannfiles]

That word again .... 'photographs'.

Again I ask .... what photographs?

It hadn't occurred to me before I read ^^ that article, but do the Portuguese police employ family liaison officers?
I hope you are doing well, Rosa.