Media Mayhem - MCCANN MEDIA NONSENSE OF THE DAY

Snipped from above.
Monteiro, 40-year-old had been sacked from his job at the beach club for stealing from guests shortly before Maddie disappeared on May 3, 2007.

Monteiro aroused police suspicions after phone records showed he returned to the resort — where the McCanns were staying — a year after being fired.






How could he have been fired for stealing from guests shortly before Maddie disappeared and return a year after being fired to steal madeleine?

Did Madeleine McCann wander off and have an accident? Was she stolen to order? Or was it a burglary gone wrong? Detective lays out theories about her disappearance

Madeleine McCann went missing from Praia da Luz resort, Portugal in May 2007
Leading detective has revealed five fresh theories to explain child's appearance
Colin Sutton said 'most likely' scenario was she was taken by human traffickers

By Katie French For Mailonline

Published: 12:14, 22 April 2017 | Updated: 01:12, 23 April 2017

A former Scotland Yard detective believes he has come up with the five most plausible theories to explain the disappearance of Madeleine McCann.

Murder detective Colin Sutton said a trafficking gang could have snatched her to replace a dead child or she could have been snatched by a paedophile.

But he theorised the 'most likely and credible scenario' for Maddie's disappearance was a targeted kidnap.

Speaking to The Mirror, he questioned why traffickers didn't take one of Maddie's twin baby siblings instead – who would have no memory of their previous life and less physical identity.

As the 10th anniversary of Maddie's disappearance approaches next month, the investigator has analysed multiple theories for a new book.

Madeleine was just three went missing from Praia da Luz in Portugal in May 2007, almost a decade ago.

He said those closest to Maddie, including her parents, would have been the first line of inquiry for police.

But he added he believed Portuguese police appeared make this their only line of investigation early on in the probe.

He said: 'By concentrating just on that scenario they may have missed tips or other lines that meant going down a completely different investigation route.'

He said: 'A trafficking ring is more likely than a lone paedophile or paedophile ring.'But unless the order was specifically for a young blonde girl, why her and not one of the twins?

'Has a young blonde girl died and their parents want to replace her? Or is there another reason for stealing to order?'

While cops initially believed Maddie could have wandered off and been killed, Sutton believes the tot would surely have taken her beloved toy 'Cuddle Cat' if she had walked out of the apartment.

He said: 'Incidents of children wandering off are much more common than a targeted or non-targeted abduction.

'However Cuddle Cat is a compelling fly in the ointment with this theory.'

He said it was highly unlikely that an opportunist had snatched her, saying that most predatory paedophiles are 'not interested in pre-school age children'.

He said: 'The chances of a predatory paedophile just happening across Madeleine and being able to abduct her without being detected are just so remote.

'I don't know of any other opportunistic abduction of a girl so young.'

And he also believes it is extremely unlikely that she was killed as part of a burglary gone wrong, as most burglars are drug addicts looking for something small they can easily sell.

He said: 'Junkies don't take three-year-old girls.'

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4435038/Did-Madeleine-McCann-wander-accident.html

He said those closest to Maddie, including her parents, would have been the first line of inquiry for police.

But he added he believed Portuguese police appeared make this their only line of investigation early on in the probe.

He said: 'By concentrating just on that scenario they may have missed tips or other lines that meant going down a completely different investigation route.'

Read the files Mr Sutton .... read the files.

Murder detective Colin Sutton said a trafficking gang could have snatched her to replace a dead child or she could have been snatched by a paedophile.

But he theorised the 'most likely and credible scenario' for Maddie's disappearance was a targeted kidnap.

So are we expected to consider the possibility that a paedophile/child trafficking scout just happened to be carousing the streets of sleepy out of season Praia da Luz and the Ocean Club complex, should a lone three year old fair haired girl be holidaying with her family and left alone at night with her two younger siblings without adult supervision?

Bit of a long shot ain't it?

Wouldn't it be more sensible to hang around school gates or public playground or park?

I acknowledge Bridgette O'Donnell's reference to the Ocean Club being full of little blond girls, I mean she would know she was there, in her Guardian exposé back in December 2007 but I think that to be journalistic poetic licence, as the rest of her story seemed to be.

My months with Madeleine

It was a welcome spring break, a chance to relax at a child-friendly resort in Portugal. Soon Bridget O'Donnell and her partner were making friends with another holidaying family while their three-year-old daughters played together. But then Madeleine McCann went missing and everyone was sucked into a nightmare.

Bridget O'Donnell
Fri 14 Dec 2007 11.54 GMT

We lay by the members-only pool staring at the sky. Round and round, the helicopters clacked and roared. Their cameras pointed down at us, mocking the walled and gated enclave. Circles rippled out across the pool. It was the morning after Madeleine went.

Six days earlier we had landed at Faro airport. The coach was full of people like us, parents lugging multiple toddler/baby combinations. All of us had risen at dawn, rushed along motorways and hurtled across the sky in search of the modern solution to our exhaustion - the Mark Warner kiddie club. I travelled with my partner Jes, our three-year-old daughter, and our nine-month-old baby son. Praia da Luz was the nearest Mark Warner beach resort and this was the cheapest week of the year - a bargain bucket trip, for a brief lie-down.

Excitedly, we were shown to our apartments. Ours was on the fourth floor, overlooking a family and toddler pool, opposite a restaurant and bar called the Tapas. I worried about the height of the balcony. Should we ask for one on the ground floor? Was I a paranoid parent? Should I make a fuss, or just enjoy the view?

We could see the beach and a big blue sky. We went outside to explore.

We settled in over the following days. There was a warm camaraderie among the parents, a shared happy weariness and deadpan banter. Our children made friends in the kiddie club and at the drop-off, we would joke about the fact that there were 10 blonde three-year-old girls in the group. They were bound to boss around the two boys.

The children went sailing and swimming, played tennis and learned a dance routine for the end-of-week show. Each morning, our daughter ran ahead of us to get to the kiddie club. She was having a wonderful time. Jes signed up for tennis lessons. I read a book. He made friends. I read another book.

The Mark Warner nannies brought the children to the Tapas restaurant to have tea at the end of each day. It was a friendly gathering. The parents would stand and chat by the pool. We talked about the children, about what we did at home. We were hopeful about a change in the weather. We eyed our children as they played. We didn't see anyone watching.

Some of the parents were in a larger group. Most of them worked for the NHS and had met many years before in Leicestershire. Now they lived in different parts of the UK, and this holiday was their opportunity to catch up, to introduce their children, to reunite. They booked a large table every night in the Tapas. We called them "the Doctors". Sometimes we would sit out on our balcony and their laughter would float up around us. One man was the joker. He had a loud Glaswegian accent. He was Gerry McCann. He played tennis with Jes.

One morning, I saw Gerry and his wife Kate on their balcony, chatting to their friends on the path below. Privately I was glad we didn't get their apartment. It was on a corner by the road and people could see in. They were exposed.

In the evenings, babysitting at the resort was a dilemma. "Sit-in" babysitters were available but were expensive and in demand, and Mark Warner blurb advised us to book well in advance. The other option was the babysitting service at the kiddie club, which was a 10-minute walk from the apartment. The children would watch a cartoon together and then be put to bed. You would then wake them, carry them back and put them to bed again in the apartment. After taking our children to dinner a couple of times, we decided on the Wednesday night to try the service at the club.

We had booked a table for two at Tapas and were placed next to the Doctors' regular table. One by one, they started to arrive. The men came first. Gerry McCann started chatting across to Jes about tennis. Gerry was outgoing, a wisecracker, but considerate and kind, and he invited us to join them. We discussed the children. He told us they were leaving theirs sleeping in the apartments. While they chatted on, I ruminated on the pros and cons of this. I admired them, in a way, for not being paranoid parents, but I decided that our apartment was too far off even to contemplate it. Our baby was too young and I would worry about them waking up.

My phone rang as our food arrived; our baby had woken up. I walked the round trip to collect him from the kiddie club, then back to the restaurant. He kept crying and eventually we left our meal unfinished and walked back again to the club to fetch our sleeping daughter. Jes carried her home in a blanket. The next night we stayed in. It was Thursday, May 3.

Earlier that day there had been tennis lessons for the children, with some of the parents watching proudly as their girls ran across the court chasing tennis balls. They took photos. Madeleine must have been there, but I couldn't distinguish her from the others. They all looked the same - all blonde, all pink and pretty.

Jes and Gerry were playing on the next court. Afterwards, we sat by the pool and Gerry and Kate talked enthusiastically to the tennis coach about the following day's tournament. We watched them idly - they had a lot of time for people, they listened. Then Gerry stood up and began showing Kate his new tennis stroke. She looked at him and smiled. "You wouldn't be interested if I talked about my tennis like that," Jes said to me. We watched them some more. Kate was calm, still, quietly beautiful; Gerry was confident, proud, silly, strong. She watched his boyish demonstration with great seriousness and patience. That was the last time I saw them that day. Jes saw Gerry that night.

Our baby would not sleep and at about 8.30pm, Jes took him out for a walk in the buggy to settle him. Gerry was on his way back from checking on his children and the two men stopped to have a chat. They talked about daughters, fathers, families. Gerry was relaxed and friendly. They discussed the babysitting dilemmas at the resort and Gerry said that he and Kate would have stayed in too, if they had not been on holiday in a group. Jes returned to our apartment just before 9.30pm. We ate, drank wine, watched a DVD and then went to bed. On the ground floor, a completely catastrophic event was taking place. On the fourth floor of the next block, we were completely oblivious.

At 1am there was a frantic banging on our door. Jes got up to answer. I stayed listening in the dark. I knew it was bad; it could only be bad. I heard male mumbling, then Jes's voice. "You're joking?" he said. It wasn't the words, it was the tone that made me flinch. He came back in to the room. "Gerry's daughter's been abducted," he said. "She ..." I jumped up and went to check our children. They were there. We sat down. We got up again. Weirdly, I did the washing-up. We wondered what to do. Jes had asked if they needed help searching and was told there was nothing he could do; she had been missing for three hours. Jes felt he should go anyway, but I wanted him to stay with us. I was a coward, afraid to be alone with the children - and afraid to be alone with my thoughts.

I once worked as a producer in the BBC crime unit. I directed many reconstructions and spent my second pregnancy producing new investigations for Crimewatch. Detectives would call me daily, detailing their cases, and some stories stay with me still, such as the ones about a girl being snatched from her bath, or her bike, or her garden and then held in the passenger seat, or stuffed in the boot. There was always a vehicle, and the first few hours were crucial to the outcome. Afterwards, they would be dumped naked in an alley, or at a petrol station with a £10 note to "get a cab back to Mummy". They would be found within an hour or two. Sometimes.

From the balcony we could see some figures scratching at the immense darkness with tiny torch lights. Police cars arrived and we thought that they would take control. We lay on the bed but we could not sleep.

The next morning, we made our way to breakfast and met one of the Doctors, the one who had come round in the night. His young daughter looked up at us from her pushchair. There was no news. They had called Sky television - they didn't know what else to do. He turned away and I could see he was going to weep.

People were crying in the restaurant. Mark Warner had handed out letters informing them what had happened in the night, and we all wondered what to do. Mid-sentence, we would drift in to the middle distance. Tears would brim up and recede.

Our daughter asked us about the kiddie club that day. She had been looking forward to their dance show that afternoon. Jes and I looked at each other. My first instinct was that we should not be parted from our children. Of course we shouldn't; we should strap them to us and not let them out of our sight, ever again. But then we thought: how are we going to explain this to our daughter? Or how, if we spent the day in the village, would we avoid repeatedly discussing what had happened in front of her as we met people on the streets? What does a good parent do? Keep the children close or take a deep breath and let them go a little, pretend this was the same as any other day?

We walked towards the kiddie club. No one else was there. We felt awful, such terrible parents for even considering the idea. Then we saw, waiting inside, some of the Mark Warner nannies. They had been up most of the night but had still turned up to work that day. They were intelligent, thoughtful young women and we liked and trusted them. The dance show was cancelled, but they wanted to put on a normal day for the children. Our daughter ran inside and started painting. Then, behind us, another set of parents arrived looking equally washed out. Then another, and another. We decided, in the end, to leave them for two hours. We put their bags on the pegs and saw the one labelled "Madeleine". Heads bent, we walked away, into the guilty glare of the morning sun.

Locals and holidaymakers had started circulating photocopied pictures of Madeleine, while others continued searching the beaches and village apartments. People were talking about what had happened or sat silently, staring blankly. We didn't see any police.

Later, there was a knock on our apartment door and we let the two men in. One was a uniformed Portuguese policeman, the other his translator. The translator had a squint and sweated slightly. He was breathless, perhaps a little excited. We later found out he was Robert Murat. He reminded me of a boy in my class at school who was bullied.

Through Murat we answered a few questions and gave our details, which the policeman wrote down on the back of a bit of paper. No notebook. Then he pointed to the photocopied picture of Madeleine on the table. "Is this your daughter?" he asked. "Er, no," we said. "That's the girl you are meant to be searching for." My heart sank for the McCanns.

As the day drew on, the media and more police arrived and we watched from our balcony as reporters practised their pieces to camera outside the McCanns' apartment. We then went back inside and watched them on the news.

We had to duck under the police tape with the pushchair to buy a pint of milk. We would roll past sniffer dogs, local police, then national police, local journalists, and then international journalists, TV reporters and satellite vans. A hundred pairs of eyes and a dozen cameras silently swivelled as we turned down the bend. We pretended, for the children's sake, that this was nothing unusual. Later on, our daughter saw herself with Daddy on TV. That afternoon we sat by the members-only pool, watching the helicopters watching us. We didn't know what else to do.

Saturday came, our last day. While we waited for the airport coach to pick us up, we gathered round the toddler pool by Tapas, making small talk in front of the children. I watched my baby son and daughter closely, shamefully grateful that I could.

We had not seen the McCanns since Thursday, when suddenly they appeared by the pool. The surreal limbo of the past two days suddenly snapped back into painful, awful realtime. It was a shock: the physical transformation of these two human beings was sickening - I felt it as a physical blow. Kate's back and shoulders, her hands, her mouth had reshaped themselves in to the angular manifestation of a silent scream. I thought I might cry and turned so that she wouldn't see. Gerry was upright, his lips now drawn into a thin, impenetrable line. Some people, including Jes, tried to offer comfort. Some gave them hugs. Some stared at their feet, words eluding them. We all wondered what to do. That was the last time we saw Gerry and Kate.

The rest of us left Praia da Luz together, an isolated Mark Warner group. The coach, the airport, the plane passed quietly. There were no other passengers except us. We arrived at Gatwick in the small hours of an early May morning. No jokes, no banter, just goodbye. Though we did not know it then, those few days in May were going to dominate the rest of our year.

"Did you have a good trip?" asked the cabbie at Gatwick, instantly underlining the conversational dilemma that would occupy the first few weeks: Do we say "Yes, thanks" and move swiftly on? Or divulge the "yes-but-no-but" truth of our "Maddy" experience? Everybody talks about holidays, they make good conversational currency at work, at the hairdresser's, in the playground. Everybody asked about ours. I would pause and take a breath, deciding whether there was enough time for what was to follow. People were genuinely horrified by what had happened to Madeleine and even by what we had been through (though we thought ourselves fortunate). Their humanity was a balm and a comfort to us; we needed to talk about it, chew it over and share it out, to make it a little easier to swallow.

The British police came round shortly after our return. Jes was pleased to give them a statement. The Portuguese police had never asked.

As the summer months rolled by, we thought the story would slowly and sadly ebb away, but instead it flourished and multiplied, and it became almost impossible to talk about any-thing else. Friends came for dinner and we would actively try to steer the conversation on to a different subject, always to return to Madeleine. Others solicited our thoughts by text message after any major twist or turn in the case. Acquaintances discussed us in the context of Madeleine, calling in the middle of their debates to clarify details.

I found some immunity in a strange, guilty happiness. We had returned unscathed to our humdrum family routine, my life was wonderful, my world was safe, I was lucky, I was blessed. The colours in the park were acute and hyper-real and the sun warmed my face.

At the end of June, the first cloud appeared. A Portuguese journalist called Jes's mobile (he had left his number with the Portuguese police). The journalist, who was writing for a magazine called Sol, called Jes incessantly. We both work in television and cannot claim to be green about the media, but this was a new experience. Jes learned this the hard way. Torn between politeness and wanting to get the journalist off the line without actually saying anything, he had to put the phone down, but he had already said too much. Her article pitched the recollections of "Jeremy Wilkins, television producer" against those of the "Tapas Nine", the group of friends, including the McCanns, whom we had nicknamed the Doctors. The piece was published at the end of June. Throughout July, Sol's testimony meant Jes became incorporated into all the Madeleine chronologies. More clouds began to gather - this time above our house.

In August, the doorbell rang. The man was from the Daily Mail. He asked if Jes was in (he wasn't). After he left I spent an anxious evening analysing what I had said, weighing up the possible consequences. The Sol article had brought the Daily Mail; what would happen next? Two days later, the Mail came for Jes again. This time they had computer printout pictures of a bald, heavy-set man seen lurking in some Praia da Luz holiday snaps. The chatroom implication was that the man was Madeleine's abductor. There was talk on the web, the reporter insinuated, that this man might be Jes. I laughed at the ridiculousness of it all and then realised he was serious. I looked at the pictures, and it wasn't Jes.

Once, Jes's father looked him up on the internet and found that "Jeremy Wilkins, television producer" was referenced on Google more than 70,000 times. There was talk that he was a "lookout" for Gerry and Kate; there was talk that Jes was orchestrating a reality-TV hoax and Madeleine's disappearance was part of the con; there was talk that the Tapas Nine were all swingers. There was a lot of talk.

In early September, Kate and Gerry became official suspects. Their warm tide of support turned decidedly cool. Had they cruelly conned us all? The public needed to know, and who had seen Gerry at around 9pm on the fateful night? Jes.

Tonight with Trevor McDonald, GMTV, the Sun, the News of the World, the Sunday Mirror, the Daily Express, the Evening Standard and the Independent on Sunday began calling. Jes's office stopped putting through calls from people asking to speak to "Jeremy" (only his grandmother calls him that). Some emails told him that he would be "better off" if he spoke to them or he would "regret it" if he didn't, implying that it was in his interest to defend himself - they didn't say what from.

Quietly, we began to worry that Jes might be next in line for some imagined blame or accusation. On a Saturday night in September, he received a call: we were on the front page of the News of the World. They had surreptitiously taken photographs of us, outside the house. There were no more details. We went to bed, but we could not sleep. "Maddie: the secret witness," said the headline, "TV boss holds vital clue to the mystery." Unfortunately, Jes does not hold any such vital clues. In November, he inched through the events of that May night with Leicestershire detectives, but he saw nothing suspicious, nothing that would further the investigation.

Throughout all this, I have always believed that Gerry and Kate McCann are innocent. When they were made suspects, when they were booed at, when one woman told me she was "glad" they had "done it" because it meant that her child was safe, I began to write this article - because I was there, and I believe that woman is wrong. There were no drug-fuelled "swingers" on our holiday; instead, there was a bunch of ordinary parents wearing Berghaus and worrying about sleep patterns. Secure in our banality, none of us imagined we were being watched. One group made a disastrous decision; Madeleine was vulnerable and was chosen. But in the face of such desperate audacity, it could have been any one of us.

And when I stroke my daughter's hair, or feel her butterfly lips on my cheek, I do so in the knowledge of what might have been. But our experience is nothing, an irrelevance, next to the McCanns' unimaginable grief. Their lives will always be touched by this darkness, while the true culprit may never be brought to light.

So my heart goes out to them, Gerry and Kate, the couple we remember from our Portuguese holiday. They had a beautiful daughter, Madeleine, who played and danced with ours at the kiddie club. That's who we remember.

Bridget O'Donnell 2007.

· Bridget O'Donnell is a writer and director. The fee from this article will be donated to the Find Madeleine fund (findmadeleine.com).

https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2007/dec/14/ukcrime.madeleinemccann

So why now?

SICK JOKE SHAME Joe Lycett walked off stage in shame after telling Madeleine McCann joke

Isaac Crowson

1:12, 22 May 2022Updated: 1:12, 22 May 2022

COMEDIAN Joe Lycett revealed he once walked off stage in shame after telling a joke about missing Madeleine McCann.

The 33-year-old said he was doing a stand-up challenge at a club while at university.

Live At The Apollo star Joe told the Changes podcast: “People get up and the audience have cards.

“If they don’t like you they put the card up and you get gonged.

“I had one joke which was about Madeleine.

“Silence was the reaction of the room.

"I wasn’t gonged off, I just walked off.

"I was mortified.

“Friends there didn’t want to be with me.

"I thought comedy was saying something shocking.”

Madeleine vanished on holiday in Portugal in 2007 aged three.

https://www.thesun.co.uk/tvandshowbiz/18646910/joe-lycett-madeleine-mccann-joke/

Well that's a non-event.

‘McCann twins may hold clues’ says criminal profiler

THE country’s most senior criminal profiler suggested Madeleine McCann’s brother and sister should have been interviewed about her disappearance.

By JAMES MURRAY
00:00, Sun, Feb 14, 2010




Lee Rainbow suggested Madeleine McCann’s brother and sister should have been interviewed
Twins Sean and Amelie were aged just two years and three months when Madeleine was snatched from a holiday apartment on the Algarve in Portugal in May 2007 shortly before her fourth birthday.
A month later, Lee Rainbow, senior behavioural investigation consultant at the National Policing Improvement Agency, wrote a report for Portuguese detectives which may have altered the course of the inquiry.
Mr Rainbow urged them to “consider the possibility of exploring the potential of interviewing Sean and Amelie McCann”.
The children, now five, were sharing a bedroom with Madeleine when she was taken. As reported last year in the Sunday Express, the McCanns believe the kidnapper may have entered the apartment the evening before because Madeleine complained she had been woken by Sean crying.
The last time British police seriously interviewed such a young child was in 1992. Rachel Nickell was murdered in front of her two-year-old son, Alex Hanscombe, on Wimbledon Common, south-west London. Despite his age, Alex was able to give detectives valuable and credible information.
Child psychologists worked closely with police to draw information from Alex in a painstaking exercise which lasted months. Former Portuguese detective Goncalo Amaral has presented Mr Rainbow’s report to a civil court in Lisbon as he attempts to lift a ban on selling his book about the case, The Truth Of The Lie.
In the summary of the 30-page report Mr Rainbow wrote: “The potential involvement of the family in the disappearance of Madeleine McCann cannot be discarded, and it can be considered that, when pondering the basis for research, this hypothesis deserves as much attention as the criminal with sexual motivations that has been previously prioritised.
“It should be stressed that there is no evidence to directly support an involvement of the family, yet given the absence of decisive evidence to prove the contrary, such a scenario has to be explored.” At court last week, Mr Amaral’s lawyer, Antonio Cabrita, read out a section of 37-year-old Mr Rainbow’s report which said: “The family is a lead that should be followed.”
On Thursday the judge hearing the libel case is expected to rule on whether Mr Amaral’s book and a DVD should go back on sale.
Doctors Kate and Gerry McCann, both 41, from Rothley, Leicestershire, won an injunction to have them banned.
It was on the grounds that Mr Amaral’s theory that Madeleine died in the apartment was untrue and had damaged their global search for their daughter.
A spokesman for the couple said that any suggestion from Mr Rainbow would have been considered by investigating officers at the time.
It is not known whether Sean and Amelie were formally interviewed by police.T he children are thought to have slept through the kidnap. The McCanns have always insisted they had no involvement in Madeleine’s disappearance.

https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/158018/McCann-twins-may-hold-clues-says-criminal-profiler?fbclid=IwAR2Y1yQgeu_XO7cResjmrHLHoaREGcjXBirkH26ghzqOFE5ucONxLeGGtEc

'Maddy's on little trip' twins told

By Channel 4 News

Updated on 19 September 2007

Kate and Gerry McCann talk to their two year-old twins about missing Madeleine "all the time", the couple said in their first interview since returning home from Portugal 11 days ago.

When asked by the twins where their older sister is, Gerry McCann said they reply: "She isn't here at the moment."

He added: "We talk about Madeleine to the twins all the time. It's not a hidden subject or anything like that. We discuss her all the time.

"There is no attempt to shield them from Madeleine. Questions as and when they arise are dealt with. When we were in Portugal we told them she was on a little trip."

'There are lots of reasons - spiritual, emotional and social - to return to Portugal quite apart from the investigation.'

Kate McCann

Kate McCann, who was named arguido - formal suspect - along with her husband nearly two weeks ago, said she had every intention to return to Portugal.

She said: "There are lots of reasons - spiritual, emotional and social - to return to Portugal quite apart from the investigation," Mrs McCann said.

"Equally we may wish to go back to discuss things with our lawyers and discuss the search for Madeleine with the police, regardless of what is going on at present.

"We will be going back as and when we wish to. We are not seeking to run.

"If a formal request comes through from the police for us to be interviewed, we will comply with it. There's no question of us not going."

Yesterday, the McCanns new spokesman described Kate and Gerry as "innocent victims of a heinous crime".

Clarence Mitchell, a former BBC reporter director of the Central Office of Information's media monitoring unit inside the Cabinet Office said he "had absolutely no hesitation in accepting" the job of respresenting the couple.

https://www.channel4.com/news/articles/society/law_order/maddys%2Bon%2Blittle%2Btrip%2Btwins%2Btold/819657.html

https://jillhavern.forumotion.net/t14767p425-documented-evidence#453943

This particular incident was reported by The Mail shortly after the event, as sourced by forum member onehand..

Madeleine: Police to show her parents picture of child snatcher suspect who killed himself

Daily Mail

Last updated at 15:56 07 August 2007

Detectives investigating the possibility that Madeleine was taken by a child snatcher who later killed himself are to show her parents a photograph of the dead suspect.

Urs Von Aesch, 67, shot himself in the head and was the prime suspect in the disappearance of five-year-old Swiss girl Ylenia Lenhard, who went missing last week.

The links between Ylenia and Madeleine are striking - they are only a year apart in age, both are blonde and both are of a similar build and height.

It was reported in the Swiss press that detectives in Portugal are to show his photograph to Kate and Gerry McCann after it emerged Von Aesch was on holiday in the Algarve at the beginning of May, when their daughter was snatched.

Police also believe another man, who was earlier gunned down by Von Aesch, could hold the key to solving the mystery.



Detectives are keeping a vigil by the hospital bed of the shot man, hoping he was about to blow the whistle on the child abductor before he was gunned down.

Through Interpol, Swiss police informed colleagues in Spain and Portugal after learning that Von Aesch lived near Alicante and was also on holiday in the Algarve when Madeleine disappeared.

Officers in St Gallen in central Switzerland close to where Ylenia disappeared, have also re-opened files on five other girls who disappeared in the area before Von Aesch moved to Benimantell on the Spanish coast.

His wife who is still in Spain has been questioned by detectives and they are also checking the movements of his Spanish registered white Renault van.

Hans Peter Eugster, a Swiss police spokesman, said: "Because of the similarities in both cases and because Von Aesch lived in Spain we have informed Interpol.

"They in turn have passed on the details to both colleagues in Spain and Portugal and they are looking into reports that Von Aesch was on holiday in the Algarve.

"In our case he is the prime suspect in the disappearance of Ylenia and his body was found near to where some of her belongings were found."

Ylenia was last seen a week ago after she went to her local swimming pool at Appenzell in north east Switzerland.

Hours later a backpack was found in nearby woods at Oberburen which contained her cycling helmet and her scooter was also recovered close by.

Twenty-four hours later in the same woods police discovered the body of Von Aesch who had died from a self-inflicted gunshot to the head.

https://www.gerrymccannsblogs.co.uk/Nigel/id444.htm
___________________________________________________________________

It then reared it's ugly head again in May 2013, around the same time Operation Grange switched remit from inquiry to investigation, once again The Mail and see what a scathing attack against the Portuguese police..

Was Maddie snatched by monster who killed this little lookalike? That's the dramatic new lead uncovered by British detectives so why are the Portuguese refusing to investigate? Daily Mail

   Scotland Yard detectives have a list of 30 potential suspects
   One of them is peadophile and child murderer Urs Hans von Aesch who killed himself in woodland
   Von Aesch murdered five-year-old only five months after Maddie disappeared
   But Portuguese police STILL dragging heels over investigation

By PAUL BRACCHI and STEPHEN WRIGHT
PUBLISHED: 23:46, 24 May 2013 | UPDATED: 13:14, 25 May 2013

Have you seen me? asks the little girl in the poster. The youngster is Madeleine McCann; not the Madeleine we all remember, but Madeleine as she might look today as a ten-year-old.

Her once-blonde hair is darker, the button nose has gone, along with those babyish chubby cheeks, and while the distinctive black 'flash' in her right eye — where her pupil runs into the iris — is still visible, it is not nearly so distinctive.

Behind this latest digitally created picture of Madeleine, now being circulated on the Continent, is renewed hope: that one day Madeleine's parents will find out what happened to her, and so end perhaps the most enduring and haunting mystery of modern times.

That hope, if truth be told, had been all but extinguished, such were the shortcomings of the original Portuguese police investigation into Madeleine's disappearance on the Algarve a few days short of her fourth birthday in May 2007.

Only now, with the intervention of an elite team of detectives from Scotland Yard which has been carrying out a review of the case on David Cameron's orders, has evidence been properly accessed and analysed. It may be six years late, but at least this basic groundwork is finally being tackled.

The 30-strong squad working on the inquiry — codenamed Operation Grange — has identified 20 potential suspects, among them several Britons, as the Mail reported last week.

But who are they?

One of the 20, the Mail has learned, was a notorious paedophile who kidnapped and murdered a five-year-old girl in his native Switzerland less than three months after Madeleine vanished from the Ocean Club resort in Praia da Luz.

Urs Hans von Aesch, 67, shot himself dead after poisoning and sexually abusing Ylenia Lenhard.

Like Madeleine, Ylenia was blonde and blue-eyed. At the time Madeleine vanished, von Aesch was living in Spain, but he had visited the Algarve in the past and was known to have friends there.

Interpol twice contacted the Portuguese authorities about von Aesch, but information supplied by the Swiss about possible links with Madeleine was not followed up because senior officers in the Policia Judiciaria — the Portuguese CID — were wrongly convinced that Madeleine's parents were implicated in their daughter's disappearance.

The 'very urgent' messages from Interpol are there, in black and white, printed in publicly available documents in Portugal.

Unlike the Policia Judiciaria, however, detectives from Operation Grange did rigorously pursue this line of inquiry. Last year, they flew to Switzerland to probe von Aesch's movements. He is still believed to be a 'person of interest'.

Two other convicted child abusers — including one believed to be from Britain — who were on the Algarve at the relevant time, are also understood to be on the Scotland Yard 'list', together with a number of hotel workers and lorry drivers.

Detectives are now 'actively' examining mobile phone traffic in the Praia da Luz area on the day Madeleine was last seen.

Although the Policia Judiciaria had this information at the time of Madeleine's disappearance, they did not find out who the phones were registered to, even though 'cell-site' analysis is now a crucial investigative tool and the catalyst for solving countless crimes.

Had standard police procedures been followed back in 2007, it is conceivable that you would not be reading this article now, for the mystery of Madeleine’s disappearance may have been solved.

Nevertheless, Madeleine's parents, Kate and Gerry McCann, are said to be encouraged both by the progress of Operation Grange, and recent events in the U.S., where three women who had been missing for a decade were found alive and well in Cleveland, Ohio.

Kate and Gerry, both doctors,  still refer to Madeleine in the present tense.

'She lives in the village of Rothley in Leicester with her mummy and daddy and little brother and sister, Sean and Amelie,' is how they introduce her on the 'Find Madeleine' website.

'Madeleine is a very happy little girl with an outgoing personality' ... like most girls her age, she likes dolls and dresses (and anything pink and sparkly).'

Madeleine was wearing pink pyjamas, with an Eeyore motif, on the night she was taken from apartment 5a on the ground floor of the Waterside Gardens at the Ocean Club complex.

Her parents were at a tapas bar with friends a few hundred yards away, taking it in turns to return to the flat every 30 minutes to check on the children.

It was Kate who made the final, fateful check at around 10pm. She found the twins were asleep inside but Madeleine's bed was empty, a moment Kate would later relive in her book, Madeleine.

'My heart lurched,' she wrote, 'as I saw now that, behind them, the window was wide open and the shutters on  the outside raised all the way up.  Nausea, terror, disbelief, fear, icy fear. Dear God, no! Please, No!'

Experts will tell you that what happens in the immediate aftermath of a child going missing — the so-called golden hour — is critical. Yet Portuguese police took four days to even issue a description of Madeleine.

All this evidence was later made available to officers from Operation Grange, drawn from the Met's highly skilled Homicide and Serious Crime Command.

Two detectives first visited Praia du Luz in October 2011 and spoke 'informally' to staff at the Ocean Club. Colleagues are understood to have returned there up to ten times over the past two years.

Of particular interest were the numerous holiday flats, some of which were sub-let at the time the McCanns were staying at the resort. They have spoken to residents on the phone in recent months as well as emailing them questions.

'When I spoke to the police they were asking about other crimes happening in the area at the time of Madeleine's disappearance,' said expat Christie Jones, who works for her family's villa management company.

Two private detectives employed by the McCanns, Dave Edgar and Arthur Cowley, have also been interviewed.

'They [detectives from Operation Grange] came to see me late last year about specific people who were of interest to them,' said Mr Cowley, a retired detective sergeant, who lives in Holywell, North Wales.

One of those people, of course — according to a source close to Operation Grange — is the aforementioned Urs Hans von Aesch.

His exact whereabouts when Madeleine was abducted on May 3, 2007 are unclear. He was living near Alicante in Spain with his wife, but border records show that, driving a white van, von Aesch re-entered Switzerland on July 10.

Less than a month later, he used this vehicle to abduct Ylenia as she left her local swimming pool in Appenzell. The day after she vanished, von Aesch was discovered in woodland with self-inflicted gunshot wounds to the head.

Ylenia's bicycle helmet, rucksack and a scooter were found nearby. All of the items contained von Aesch's DNA. Shortly afterwards, the remains of Ylenia were found in a shallow grave in nearby Oberbueren, a 20-minute drive from the spot where she was abducted.

At von Aesch's home in Spain, police seized diaries — in English — revealing his dark sexual fantasies about children and computer discs containing evidence that he had frequently visited child sex websites and forums on the internet.

Swiss police officers were immediately struck by the physical similarities between Ylenia and Madeleine, who had both gone missing within weeks of each other. They alerted Interpol which, in turn, contacted the Portuguese authorities about its suspicions on August 17.

When it did not get a response, it contacted them again on September 3. Again, there was no response, we were informed by sources in Interpol.

We now know why.

Just four days later, on September 7, Kate and Gerry McCann were named as arguidos in the Portuguese investigation. On September 11, police submitted a summary of their case against them to prosecutors.

In his report, Chief Inspector Tavares da Almeida concluded — without a shred of hard evidence — that Madeleine had died in the flat, her parents had hid the body, then faked an abduction and got their friends to lie to the police.

'Kate McCann and Gerald McCann are involved in the concealment of the cadaver of their daughter Madeleine McCann,' he wrote.

Could a police officer have made a more catastrophic misjudgement?

Meanwhile, Ylenia Lenhard's heartbroken mother Charlotte believes her daughter was not von Aesch's only victim.

'I am convinced that my little girl was not the only one,' she told the Mail. 'I simply cannot believe that a man, at the age of 67, suddenly chooses to become a killer. It was in him all the time and I am certain he has struck before.'

Indeed, after von Aesch's death, Swiss police re-opened inquiries into the disappearance of five girls who disappeared from the area in the Eighties, before he moved  to Spain.

These include five-year-old Sarah Oberson, whose neat features and bobbed-hair are also reminiscent of Madeleine McCann, and who went missing in September 1985 when cycling to her grandmother's house 50 meters away; doe-eyed seven-year-old Loredana Mancini, who vanished in April 1983 and was found dead in September of the same year: and eight-year-old Rebecca Bieri, who disappeared in March 1982 and was found dead five months later.

The police were unable to prove links between von Aesch and the missing girls.

Under Portuguese law, a case can be reopened only if there is  new evidence.

Yet the senior Scotland Yard detective who oversaw the two-year-review of the evidence before he retired says it is 'perfectly probable' that information that could identify the suspect responsible for Madeleine McCann's disappearance was already in the  Portuguese files.

'Of course, there is a possibility she is still alive,' said former Detective Chief Superintendent Hamish Campbell. 'But the key is to investigate the case and, dead or alive, we should be able to try to discern what happened.'

It is the very least Kate and Gerry McCann, indeed any parent of a missing child, deserves.

Additional reporting: Neil Sears in Praia du Luz

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2330660/Madeleine-McCann-Was-Maddie-snatched-monster-killed-little-lookalike-British-detectives-uncover-dramatic-new-lead--Portuguese-refusing-investigate.html

Are the parents of Madeleine McCann still together? Where are her siblings now?

It's been 15 years since the toddler went missing

Aaliyah Ashfield
2 May 2022, 12:00 Updated: 29 Apr 2022, 12:44

The disappearance of Madeleine McCann turned her family’s world upside down – but where are her siblings and parents now?

Tomorrow (May 3) marks 15 years since the tot disappeared.

She was just three years old when she went missing from an apartment in Portugal in May 2007.

Where are Madeleine McCann’s siblings now?

Twins Sean and Amelie were only two years old when their sister Madeleine disappeared in Portugal in 2007.

The pair were sleeping when their sister went missing.

Now 17, they live with their parents at their home in the town of Loughborough in Leicestershire.

Read more: Madeleine McCann suspect Christian Brueckner admits he did ‘nothing-well almost nothing’ in a new letter

The twins have stayed out of the spotlight since their sister disappeared for their own privacy and safety.

They have their own friends and they keep busy and they’re really sporty.

However, their mum Kate has revealed that they are both aspiring athletes.

Speaking in the past to promote her charity Missing People, Kate said: “They have their own friends and they keep busy and they’re really sporty but their only wish is for their big sister to come home.

“We miss our complete family of five.”



Are the parents of Madeleine McCann still together?

Yes, Madeleine McCann’s parents Kate and Gerry are still together.

Kate and Gerry are both physicians who met while working as junior doctors the Western Infirmary in Glasgow.

Over the years, the pair have faced a lot of backlash for their actions but they have never given up on their search to find their daughter.

While they never actually split up, Kate has spoken up about how close their relationship came to breaking point.

In her book, Madeleine, Kate explains: “Tortured as I was by these images, it’s not surprising that even the thought of sex repulsed me.

“I worried about Gerry and me. I worried that if I didn’t get our sex life on track, our whole relationship would break down.”

However, she also recalled how supportive her husband was throughout it all.

She said: “He would put his arm around me, reassuring me and telling me that he loved me.”



https://www.entertainmentdaily.co.uk/true-crime/madeleine-mccann-parents-siblings-now/

Good reporting!
Unless they have sold up and moved they live in Rothley.
Some way south of Loughborough, with the villages of Quorn and Mountsorrel in between.

Speaking in the past to promote her charity Missing People, Kate said: “They have their own friends and they keep busy and they’re really sporty but their only wish is for their big sister to come home.

“We miss our complete family of five.”

The twins were only two years old when Madeleine McCann 'disappeared', they would only have scant memory of their sister, if any memory at all.

If either or both the twins have expressed such an emotion it can only be because it's been instilled in their memories, by their parents!

Tantamount to child cruelty.

The parents McCann asked for the privacy of their two remaining children, the twins, to be respected..



The show must go on!

Verdi wrote:

Speaking in the past to promote her charity Missing People, Kate said: “They have their own friends and they keep busy and they’re really sporty but their only wish is for their big sister to come home.

“We miss our complete family of five.”

The twins were only two years old when Madeleine McCann 'disappeared', they would only have scant memory of their sister, if any memory at all.

If either or both the twins have expressed such an emotion it can only be because it's been instilled in their memories, by their parents!

Tantamount to child cruelty.

The parents McCann asked for the privacy of their two remaining children, the twins, to be respected..



The show must go on!

Two parents in agony and devastated by the " abduction by a predator " of their much loved eldest child ! 

So devastated they arranged photo shoots with their remaining children for the media circus . 

They wonder why we don't believe them !

sandancer wrote:They wonder why we don't believe them !

Amen to that - quote of the decade!

McCann twins pick up the phone every day to ask 'Where are you Madeleine?

Updated: 15:49, 28 April 2008

Madeleine McCann's little sister and brother pick up the telephone every day to ask 'Where are you?', their grandmother has revealed.

Gerry McCann's mother Eileen described how twins, Sean and Amelie, now three, are a constant heartbreaking reminder for their parents because they still ask for Madeleine every single day.

Mrs McCann, 67, also praised Kate McCann for struggling to give her two other children a normal life but admitted this was simply not possible with Madeleine still missing.

The retired book-keeper said: 'Kate and Gerry don't have to remind their twins that Madeleine is no longer there, because they ask where she is all the time.

'They pick up the phone to speak to her and ask 'Where are you?'

She adds: 'Kate is a very capable mother. She is trying to keep life normal for the twins. She tales them to playgroups twice a week. But they are just not a family unit without Madeleine.'

Gerry's mother insists she was always certain Madeleine, then three, was abducted from the couple's holiday apartment in Praia da Luz in the Algarve.

She told the Sun: 'Somebody came into Maddie's room, carried her out in her pyjamas and we just don't know where she is. It's the stuff of nightmares. Whoever did this is a monster.'

Her comments came as it emerged the McCanns are planning to write a book about their 'year of hell' without their daughter.

Publishing sources say they could be paid up to £1million.

The couple's spokesman, Clarence Mitchell, stressed they wanted to raise money for the dwindling Find Madeleine appeal and to counter a campaign of smears by Portuguese police.

Several publishers have approached them and there is every possibility of a bidding frenzy.

Last week it emerged that the former head of the Madeleine investigation, Goncalo Amaral, has written a book about the case with the working title The Truth of the Lie.

Insiders said it will contain 'explosive' details about the police inquiry and the decision to name the McCanns as official suspects, or arguidos.

Mr Mitchell confirmed that Mr McCann, 39, had talked to one publishing house and been approached by several others.

He said: 'The idea of writing an official book at some point is appealing. It's a legitimate way of raising money for the fund but would also give them a chance to put across their side of the story, and to talk about some of the wider issues.'

Scott Pack, former head of buying for Waterstone's, said: 'A book could go for a million. There is a feeling that we know everything there is to know about this story but the public are still fascinated.'

But publisher Patrick Jenson-Smith said it could be difficult to sell 'a story without a conclusion'. The McCanns have considered a series of ways to fund their continuing search for Madeleine, who disappeared from their holiday apartment in Praia da Luz, Portugal, almost a year ago.

The little girl, then three, had been left with her two-year- old twin brother and sister while their parents went out for dinner nearby.

The couple suffered a public backlash when it emerged that their representatives had begun negotiations with the giant IMG entertainment agency over selling the film rights to their story. There were also discussions on bids from the Oprah Winfrey and Barbara Walters U.S. TV shows.

The McCanns, of Rothley, Leicestershire, are desperate to raise money for the Find Madeleine fund amid fears that £1.2million raised in donations from the public will run out within months.

The independent television production company Mentorn Media has made a £10,000 donation to the fund in return for the couple's cooperation with a two-hour documentary to be shown on ITV1 on Wednesday.

In the film, GP Mrs McCann, 40, speaks of her renewed hope that Madeleine is still alive but admitted that sometimes she was ' desperate' and considered giving up.

She said: 'It is pure torture to deal with and it has been a long year of hell.

'You have days when you're so down and desperate and tired. You think you've got to switch off and think, okay, we've tried really hard and we've come up with nothing and now we need to make the best of what we've got.

'We're never going to hit that day. It doesn't matter how small the possibility is [of Madeleine being found alive], the possibility is still there.'

Mrs McCann also told how their twins Sean and Amelie, now three, used their toy phones to try to 'call' Madeleine and played games where they try to find her.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1017137/McCann-twins-pick-phone-day-ask-Where-Madeleine.html

They were pretty certain the "abductor" wasn't coming back, within days, they were putting their 2 other kids in the spotlight.

And allowing a man outside the familial circle (Uncle Dave) to bath her children - apparently !?!

When I was at school, after physical acitivities, I would never allow the sports tutor near my naked body - it was intuitive, even when a teenager.

What hope for a very small child?

They were so into each other ....

5 years since the disappearance of Madeleine McCann

A sex offender imprisoned in Germany is the latest official suspect in the search for the three-year-old, who would now be 18

Tereixa Constenla
Praia da Luz - May 07, 2022 - 00:46 GMT+1

Kate and Gerry McCann, the parents of the then three-year-old Madeleine who disappeared one night in the resort town of Praia da Luz in Portugal’s Algarve region on May 3, 2007, have not stopped looking for their daughter.

“Even though the possibility may be slim, we have not given up hope that Madeleine is still alive and we will be reunited with her,” the two recently wrote on their website findmadeleine.com.

In Praia da Luz today, there are no longer signs about searching for Madeleine. Tapa’s, the restaurant where the McCanns and their friends were dining when the toddler went missing, is now called Izakaya.

The investigation was re-opened in 2020 when the Portuguese Prosecutor’s Office received evidence pointing to Christian Brückner, a German who had been previously convicted of a rape in Algarve. Portuguese police had investigated and ruled out Brückner in 2007, but this week declared the 44-year-old an arguido – an official suspect under Portuguese law.

Brückner, currently incarcerated in Germany, is back in the spotlight due to his presence in Praia da Luz the night of the event and his history as a sexual aggressor.

According to Rui Gustavo, a journalist for Portuguese weekly Expresso: “The evidence they have is that his cell phone was activated near Praia da Luz that night and that a witness heard him boast that he knew about the disappearance of the girl.”

“It is merely circumstantial evidence, they need to have more if they want to convict him in court,” said the reporter, who specializes in judicial and police information.

German agents have interrogated the suspect, and ordered analysis of DNA remains found in the van he drove while in Algarve.

In 15 years, Brückner is the fourth arguido. The first was Robert Murat, who started out as an informal collaborator of investigators in 2007 - translating for the police and helping search efforts - before becoming suspect number one.

His Praia da Luz chalet is now a skeleton, having been thoroughly dug over in the search for Madeleine’s body.

Murat left Algarve and settled in the UK. He declined an interview for this newspaper. On the Netflix series The Disappearance of Madeleine McCann, he tells the cameras he was pressured by the Portuguese police to admit his guilt. When he was finally released due to lack of incriminating evidence, he was traumatized: “I would lock myself in the dark at home, wanting to die. It was hell on earth.”

The disappearance of three-year-old Madeleine was an international event. Within two weeks of her disappearance, more than 25,000 people from around the world had sent messages of support. The writer J. K. Rowling and the businessman Richard Branson, among others, offered more than €4.5 million euros in rewards. The residents of Praia da Luz (numbering a little more than 4,000 in the low season and 20,000 in the summer) turned out to search for and shelter the McCanns, who attended mass at the Nuestra Señora de la Luz church, strolled along the beach and appeared before the press on a daily basis, with Kate McCann clinging to her daughter’s favorite cuddly toy, a pink cat.

The Portuguese investigation, which was led by the Judicial Police inspector Gonçalo Amaral, then turned its attention to Kate and Gerry McCann, declaring the parents to be official suspects and accusing them of hiding their daughter’s accidental death and simulating a crime.

Amaral, who ended up leaving the police force, wrote several books related to the investigation and clashed in court with the McCanns over the content of the first, “The truth of the lie”. Fifteen years later, by email, he says the investigation did not have declared arguments for possible parental negligence.

On the night of May 3, 2007, the McCanns and other friends were having dinner at Tapa’s while their young children slept alone in the apartments. Every once in a while someone got up to go check on them. In the police investigation, doubts were raised about the chronology of these visits.

Today, from the restaurant you can partially see the façade of apartment 5A, which this week was occupied by tourists. The person in charge of the restaurant refuses to speak with EL PAÍS, in a reflection of the general weariness felt towards the media in Praia da Luz.

Here. universal sympathy for the McCanns has also long since disappeared. “I don’t say it easily, but, for me, they are to blame,” said real estate agent Samuel Diogo.

Certainly the sentiment against the McCanns was strong, and well fuelled by the tabloid press. Headlines like ‘Police suspect Gerry is not Madeleine’s father’, ‘Maddie’s body in parent’s car’ appeared amidst speculation that the girl died due to an accidental overdose of a drug intended to make her sleep.

After being declared arguidos, the McCanns hired lawyer Rogério Alves, who told this newspaper by phone that the police theory of the parents’ culpability was convenient for authorities, saying “that theory is unfounded and has been disproved,” and that it offered a solution for police who were coming up with nothing.

The McCanns are doctors, have good networks, and receive a lot of money in donations to fund the search, which also feeds grudges. One of their patrons is the Scottish millionaire Brian Kennedy, they have hired detective agencies and communications specialists, and been received by Pope Benedict XVI. The London police investigation alone has cost more than €13 million.

Meanwhile, Praia da Luz, once known as the place where Paul McCartney spent the summer, is now perhaps forever associated with the disappearance of Madeleine McCann.

https://english.elpais.com/society/2022-05-06/15-years-since-the-disappearance-of-madeleine-mccann.html

Why Does Madeleine McCann Continue to Be a National Obsession?

Alice Standen
July 30, 2020



It’s been over a decade since Madeleine McCann went missing in Portugal. However, the McCann case is still ongoing and continues to earn global media attention, in spite of the fact that someone is reported missing every 90 seconds in the UK. Disabled people, as well as people of color, are among those more likely to go missing than the average person but seem to be less likely to hold the attention of the public for a few months, let alone several years. So, why do missing posters seem to be plastered with white, middle-class, able girls?

Madeleine McCann is one of the most famous cases of missing children and shook the entire world at the time of her disappearance. Even thirteen years later, everybody recognizes the iconic photo of the blonde toddler staring directly into the camera. When it first happened, the McCann case was all over the news than in the way that coronavirus is now, (you couldn’t move for hearing about it), and every few years the story seems to rear its head again. If nothing else, the McCanns have been persistent in the search for their daughter.

People have been critical of the media attention garnered by Madeleine McCann, as she is one of the biggest examples of what is called “missing white woman syndrome”. This is a phenomenon in which white women and girls from middle-class backgrounds receive the most media attention. It’s nearly always a white face on the side of milk cartons.

Disabled people, as well as people of color, are among those more likely to go missing than the average person but seem to be less likely to hold the attention of the public for a few months, let alone several years. So, why do missing posters seem to be plastered with white, middle-class, able girls?

People of color are overrepresented in missing statistics and equally underrepresented in the media: sociologist Zach Sommers found black victims received disproportionately less news coverage than white ones. Cases often fly completely under the radar, such as the murder of Stephen and Stoni Blair, who were missing for three years before their bodies were uncovered in their very own homes. Such cases demonstrate the lack of urgency and attention when black kids go missing. Comparisons have been drawn between the abductions of Elizabeth Smart and Alexis Patterson, for example. The former (white) attracted national attention and ended up being found, while the latter (black) did not and is still missing to this day.

The shocking truth is that some children, especially those from marginal backgrounds, just slip through the cracks in the system. Activists have tried to bring attention to this issue, such as through the #MissingDCGirls in 2017. Even those who do get media attention are often portrayed differently, focusing on the victim’s problems, such as troubled pasts or abusive boyfriends, or are seen as hopeless cases. Relisha Rudd was eight years old when she went missing in 2014 and claims from authorities that nothing could be done to prevent her disappearance have been rebutted. She received little coverage because she was black and from an impoverished family but is believed to have been taken by an employee at DC General Shelter, where she lived.

It’s also interesting to note how rarely we see disabled people making the headlines. According to the Missing People Research Project, nearly one-third of missing people have some kind of intellectual disability. This would suggest that disabled people would be prominent among missing persons we hear about but that just isn’t the case- there are only two well-known instances.

Many factors can play into why disabled people are so likely to go missing: disabled people are more likely to struggle with a mental illness, have problems with the law, or be homeless. Disabled people of color are even more likely to go missing, as they are part of both risk groups.

Law enforcement is likely to see disabled adults as ‘dependable’ and therefore do not see it as ‘critical’ that they are found, unlike if a disabled child were missing. In the case of Zachary Briary, who went missing in 2016, police declared him “voluntarily missing” because he was living independently from his parents. State laws like this are intended to protect the rights of disabled adults, only allowing limited intervention by parents, which means that they are allowed to make their own decisions- even if they are “bad decisions”.

This is a double-edged sword: although it protects the rights of disabled adults and their control over their own lives, it also makes it difficult for them to be found. How can you tell the difference between a disabled adult who has chosen to quietly move away from their overbearing parents and one who has been abducted by a dangerous individual?

Police assumptions about disabilities can also affect cases. For example, Nora Anne Quoirin, who went missing in 2019, was classified as a missing person case rather than an abduction by the police. Similar to Briary’s case, it was suggested she had climbed out of her window herself. However, her parents argued this was impossible as Quoirin was disabled: she had limited mobility and was dependent on her family, meaning it would be very out-of-character. Her body was later found unclothed and the post-mortem found that she had died of starvation.

While these two cases made headlines, disabled people rarely do. As mentioned before, usually only white middle-class girls make the front page – unfortunately, “able” should also be added to that list. To bring it back to Madeleine McCann, one of the most famous examples of this phenomenon, it’s worth considering why certain missing people become a national obsession while others fade into obscurity.

The main reason the white middle class can make front pages is simply that they can afford to; Gerry McCann spoke about ‘marketing Madeleine’ to keep her in the public eye, which is part of the reason her face was absolutely everywhere after her disappearance. Her parents were also able to earn money from books published about the case. But families who don’t have the funds or capability to put in this amount of effort aren’t able to secure the same awareness. If Relisha Rudd’s mother couldn’t afford anywhere to live, how would she fund an international campaign?

But it isn’t just the McCanns who have invested a lot of money into their case. As of 2018, over £11 million had been spent looking for Madeleine. In contrast, it is estimated that £2,415.80 is spent on a medium-risk, medium-term case. So, when taking into account how much is usually spent by police on a missing person’s case, the amount spent on Maddie McCann certainly seems disproportionate and suggests that she is somehow ‘more important’ than other missing children.

This is likely due to a combination of institutional racism, classicism, and ableism. Like in most media, being white is portrayed as ‘relatable’ and ’universal’ so viewers are expected to sympathize more with ‘blameless white girls’. Whereas black children are more likely to be viewed as troublemakers or their families may be seen as playing a role in their disappearance – Sophia Juarez went missing around the same time as McCann but it was theorized that her own father had kidnapped her, playing into stereotypes people hold about Hispanic people.

Similarly, those from impoverished families are usually seen as being victims of their own backgrounds, (living in ‘more dangerous areas’), and parents are blamed for being ‘bad’ or ‘lazy’. Meanwhile, disabled people just seem to be invisible or expendable in the eyes of the media, and even being abducted isn’t enough to make the nation see us. While there’s no one reason why certain cases are headline news, general trends suggest it helps to fit the typical depiction of a ‘damsel in distress’ and for parents to be wealthy and well-respected by the community.

Obviously, it’s not fair to say that black or disabled children are never headline news. The case of Victoria Adjo Climbié, who was abused and murdered by her mother, received great attention in the UK and is still remembered two decades after it occurred. Similarly, Nora Anne Quoirin disappeared in similar circumstances to Madeleine McCann and received a lot of publicity- however, it’s unclear if this would’ve continued to dominate headlines in the same way as McCann, since Quoirin’s body was eventually uncovered. But these examples are outliers.

I do hope the McCanns ultimately get the closure they need regarding their daughter, especially since they’ve stopped at nothing to get it. However, one missing child shouldn’t be more important than millions of others.

https://cripplemedia.com/why-does-madeleine-mccann-continue-to-be-a-national-obsession/

The People


FATHER'S DAY? I CAN'T EVEN BEAR TO THINK ABOUT IT WITHOUT MADELEINE

HEARTACHE OF BRAVE DAD GERRY

By Rachael Bletchly
17 June 2007

ANGUISHED Gerry McCann is steeling himself for a Father's Day nightmare today without his precious daughter Madeleine.

He said he "couldn't bear" to mark the occasion or even think back to how he spent the day last year - cuddling the toddler who was abducted 45 days ago.

Gerry and wife Kate have been spending Sundays at a zoo with their twins Sean and Amelie since Maddie, four, went missing from their Portuguese holiday flat.

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But this week they took the two-year-olds a day early - to avoid bumping into other families celebrating Father's Day.

Gerry and Kate, 38, plan to spend today dreaming up new ways to spread their daughter's name round the world.

Heart surgeon Gerry, 39, said: "I know it's Father's Day but I haven't thought about it. I can't think about last year and how we spent it.

"I can't really think about anything other than how we can try and get Madeleine back."

Gerry was speaking after a letter to a Dutch paper claimed Maddie was buried on wasteland nine miles from where she was snatched in Praia da Luz.

But a police hunt drew a blank on Friday. Gerry said: "It was terrifying - the thought of a very public search with Madeleine coming out of it dead was extremely upsetting.

"I don't know if the letter was a hoax but it was a relief when nothing was found."

The parents, from Rothley, Leics, are planning a new publicity event for Friday.

Gerry said: "It will be the 50th day Madeleine has been missing - IF she is still missing.

"We are going to release 50 balloons with her image on them in 50 countries." Gerry told how the family was standing firm despite the heartache.

He said: "Kate and I are doing OK considering what we are going through.

"We haven't argued at all and we have a strong relationship.

"I could see how this could tear people apart but that hasn't happened to us."

Gerry added: "We are still thinking about going back to the UK but Kate is adamant about staying at the minute.

"I don't want to go home either - we feel protected here.

"But in the future if Madeleine is not found, it could be more efficient to be in the UK."

Gerry revealed they plan to appoint a professional campaign manager this week.

He said: "There is still a huge demand for information from people back home and we want to keep the interest focused on how to help the search for our daughter. What shines through is the huge goodwill from everyone.

Of course they want a little four-year-old girl reunited with her family - why wouldn't they?

"It has clearly hit a nerve.

Every parent, every brother and sister can understand what it would be like."

The McCanns have posted a new set of photos on their website - 
[ltr]www.findmadeleine.com[/ltr]
 - accompanied by Bryan Adams' No1 hit (Everything I Do) I Do It For You.

The song begins: "Look into my eyes - you will see what you mean to me. Search your heart, search your soul, and when you find me there, you'll search no more."

A pal told The People last night: "Family and friends said the lyrics seemed to encapsulate what Gerry and Kate are feeling as parents more exactly than any other song.

"So we contacted the publishers - who said of course we could use it."