SMITHMAN 2 - What can account for the 17 remarkable similarities between Tannerman and Smithman?

Sonmi-451 wrote:My rationale for voting 'Other', (as requested)

(i) The timing, and evolution, of the relevant statements
...compounded by:
(i) Smiths: No obvious association with the victim, and thus no ulterior motive to offer anything but an honest statement.
(ii) Tanner: An association with the victim exists, and thus a possibility (that at the least needs to be objectively and impartially explored) of a motive to offer something other than an honest statement.

AndyB wrote:I've gone for "some other reason" because I think tanner man was an invention to cover for the genuine sighting of Gerry by the Smiths

Hicks wrote:I wonder if anyone can help me out here?

I have posted a photo showing the layout of the Ocean Club and the surrounding streets. IIRC JT said at the very beginning that the man she saw was carrying a bundle in the direction of the Baptista supermarket.

Where on this plan is the supermarket? Is it in the direction of the beach or towards Murat's villa?

Notice that Sergey Malinka has property near the beach. Interesting!
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I should add....4th picture down the page.

ultimaThule wrote:Surely if Tanner-Crecheman was heading towards the Baptista, JT would have passed him head on and he would have passed Gezza gassing to Jezza, Hicks?

canada12 wrote:If we accept that Tannerman was invented to cover the fact that the Smiths spotted Gerry (or any of the Tapas gentlemen) carrying a child, then it's a very clever move on the part of SY to find and identify "Tannerman". An innocent father. And therefore not the same gentleman that the Smiths saw.

Therefore, in spite of massive publicity, if Smithman cannot be located and eliminated by SY, it stands to reason that Smithman, by process of elimination, must continue to be a "person of interest" in the case. If no one has come forward to identify themselves, they cannot be eliminated. It's unlikely the Smiths made up the story of seeing a man with a child. The only question is, who was he and who was the child?

Whether the man was Gerry or one of the other Tapas friends (or even an acquaintance of Gerry), the question logically must be, why were you carrying that child in that direction? It was either a) a diversion or decoy or b) it was Madeleine. Either way, Smithman is involved in the "removal". There can be no other explanation in the absence of anyone coming forward to identify themselves.

candyfloss wrote:Bumping this for any discussions on 'Smithman'

Tony Bennett wrote:Third, Martin Smith describes himself in the Golf Net company documents as:

QUOTE

• Martin Smith , Managing Director & Founder

A former senior army officer - with extensive management and leadership skills acquired during a twenty-five year career both at home and overseas -, his entrepeneurship, vision, enthusiasm and perseverence has aassembled a team of hugely experienced and talented individuals with the combined skill-sets to realise his ambition of creating a global brand. Through the strategic partnerships that he has established, he has positioned Golf Net to rapidly establish a significant international presence. His inventiveness has created an impressive range of unique and innovative products that will be the launch-pad for what will become a major international brand.

haroldd2 wrote:

candyfloss wrote:Bumping this for any discussions on 'Smithman'

Tony Bennett wrote:Third, Martin Smith describes himself in the Golf Net company documents as:

QUOTE

• Martin Smith , Managing Director & Founder

A former senior army officer - with extensive management and leadership skills acquired during a twenty-five year career both at home and overseas -, his entrepeneurship, vision, enthusiasm and perseverence has aassembled a team of hugely experienced and talented individuals with the combined skill-sets to realise his ambition of creating a global brand. Through the strategic partnerships that he has established, he has positioned Golf Net to rapidly establish a significant international presence. His inventiveness has created an impressive range of unique and innovative products that will be the launch-pad for what will become a major international brand.

Presumably the British army rather than the Irish one, then, given the "overseas" bit.

Sockpuppet wrote:Can you please add the option:

'Jane Tanner engineered her sighting to match the appearance of the man witnessed by the Smith family'.

Tangled Web wrote:Copied this over from the 'digging' thread before I get told off   

1) If 'Smithman' was Gerry carrying a 'decoy' child, surely somebody saw him returning with that child so where are the witness statements supporting this?

2) If 'Smithman' was Gerry carrying Madeleine, surely somebody would still have seen him on his return, even if empty handed. So where are these witness statements?

Witnesses will have been asked what/who they saw around 10 p.m in the vicinity.

Thanks.

Tangled Web.

HelenMeg wrote:

haroldd2 wrote:Presumably the British army rather than the Irish one, then, given the "overseas" bit.

Maybe The Smith family have links through golf to John Geraghty if they are regular visitors to PdL area. Perhaps they are in on this too. I had not considered this but it is worth considering if they were regulars. Maybe their alleged recognition of GM being possible Smithman was to promote yet another red herring to defer from the truth. Nothing would surprise.

haroldd2 wrote:

HelenMeg wrote:

haroldd2 wrote:Presumably the British army rather than the Irish one, then, given the "overseas" bit.

Maybe The Smith family have links through golf to John Geraghty if they are regular visitors to PdL area. Perhaps they are in on this too. I had not considered this but it is worth considering if they were regulars. Maybe their alleged recognition of GM being possible Smithman was to promote yet another red herring to defer from the truth. Nothing would surprise.

A John Geraghty link would be very interesting.

So Martin Smith is an Irish businessman and supposed former senior officer in what must surely be the British army, who set up a company in Dundalk, a town in the Irish Republic that was formerly well known as an IRA stronghold which even tourist literature said to avoid.

Fiona09 wrote:I'm just catching up with this thread so apologies if someone else has already said this (and also apologies for being off-topic but there's been a lot of speculation re Smithman in recent posts).

I don't subscribe to the decoy theory of GM running through the streets with a substitute girl. Why would he risk being identified when according to the timelines he should've been at the Tapas Bar waiting for Kate's announcement along with everyone else? It makes more sense to me that in a panic, GM attempted to hide Madeleine's body before the alarm was raised and took what he believed to be a quieter route, where there was less of a chance of being spotted. Unfortunately, he ran into the Smiths. I think this is when it was decided that Jane should say she saw Tannerman in case the Smith family reported their sighting to the police. This then gave Gerry an alibi as, according to Jane, he was standing on the other side of the street when she saw Tannerman. Therefore, no-one would suspect that it was Gerry that was spotted by the Smiths.

IMO if no-one spotted Smithman, Tannerman would never have existed in the story as he wouldn't have been needed.

All speculation on my part of course!

View-from-Ireland wrote:

haroldd2 wrote:

HelenMeg wrote:

haroldd2 wrote:Presumably the British army rather than the Irish one, then, given the "overseas" bit.

Maybe The Smith family have links through golf to John Geraghty if they are regular visitors to PdL area. Perhaps they are in on this too. I had not considered this but it is worth considering if they were regulars. Maybe their alleged recognition of GM being possible Smithman was to promote yet another red herring to defer from the truth. Nothing would surprise.

A John Geraghty link would be very interesting.

So Martin Smith is an Irish businessman and supposed former senior officer in what must surely be the British army, who set up a company in Dundalk, a town in the Irish Republic that was formerly well known as an IRA stronghold which even tourist literature said to avoid.

Why would he have to be British army?The Irish army has been involved in numerous peacekeeping missions and many friends of mine have served in places like the Congo, Lebanon and younger men in more recent trouble spots.

Tony Bennett wrote:

cassius wrote:

Maybe Smithman is Gerry with another child, not as a decoy as such but rather as a shield or distraction in the event of him being seen, as he does a final check on the burial place he had sourced earlier in the day .

I thought that HelenMeg's 'decoy' theory about Smithman was about as convoluted as you could get, but evidently I was wrong, you have come up with something even more unlikely.

Like HelenMeg, though, you propose a theory that involves one of the Tapas 7 parents volunteering for their young blonde daughter to be carried around the streets of Praia da Luz on a cold night dressed only in pyjamas.

These two theories (yours and HelenMeg's) are theories without a shred of evidence, whereas at least my suggestion that Smithman was fabricated (whether or not you agree) does have a considerable amount of circumstantial evidence to support it.

CynicalAl wrote:


Sorry.... at risk of this place becoming a one-wild-and-unsupportable-theory town, can you enlighten me as to quite what a 'considerable amount of circumstantial evidence to support' the non-occurrence of a non-event which was not witnessed by anyone, as opposed to the common or garden unsupportable and inexplicable denunciation of a legitimate claim of a sighting corroborated repeatedly over time, without any significant change of testimony, by multiple members of the same family looks like, exactly?

Since the latter would seemingly involve a conspiracy theory invented to account for the testimony being nothing short of a contrived and deliberate fabrication involving multiple-generations of the same family for reasons about as spurious and irrational as one can get, presumably the former involves a veritable barrel of eyewitnesses who either saw 'Smithman' but no Smiths, or saw the Smiths but no Smithman, who can be demonstrated as having been in the same street at the same time as this non-event occurred. That should be a fairly simple wrapping up, without the need for any attempts at connecting the dots between common surnames of people who might have happened to have visited the same towns somewhere in the same spheres of travel and who may know someone who might be seventeen shades removed from someone else who knows someone, as the usual efforts at declaring the Smith Family to be liars seem to run.

How, exactly, does this work?

I can't say I agree with HelenMeg's suggestion, but this is where I have a problem with the way you've responded to this, and other suggestions.

HelenMeg's suggestion isn't logical. You apparently correctly recognise that.

Without getting into a debate about how much more illogical your suggestion is than hers, I'll explain why I have a problem with the logic being used to critique these suggestions.

The logic never seems to take into account real world dynamics. The suggestion seems to be illogical to you because in the cold light of day, having pored over this situation - like the rest of us - for a perhaps unhealthy number of hours and imagined and re-imagined it every which way, the lack of logic is apparent. I wonder if a resident former officer of the law might like to confirm just how many otherwise complex cases might have been cracked not by the genius of detection but by the idiocy of an ordinary person, finding themselves on the dark end of misadventure, accident or loss of self-control, acting not with the advantage of many hours of thought and some good banter with a few experts in the field, afforded plenty of time, clear windows of opportunity and a zero-risk environment in which to play out a plot.

There is no evidence whatsoever to support the idea that whatever happened to MBM was premeditated. What unfolded after her demise had, at all times, to be a reaction birthed amid a haze of grief, fear and panic-stricken confusion. The collusion of a multiple of individuals, caught in the same emergency, to remove themselves from the most serious consequences of something - particularly if the group agreed that it was an accident arising in circumstances that they all contributed to or routinely replicated, suddenly conjuring up a 'master' plan which seemed at the time to be infallible but which ultimately proved to be ridiculously ambitious and grotesquely ill-advised would appear to fit the available facts and credible hypotheses of this case. Even more than that, the evidence points to there existing multiple stages of collective 'adjustment' to the plan, in other words that mistakes and inadequacies became apparent to the group very quickly and the group was so invested in their committment to the cover-up that they became pragmatic and dynamic in their reactions to what was going on around them - to either control circumstances by any and all means, or where unable, to react in ways which were not only extremely dangerous to their cover story, but also embarrassingly transparent to the point of being tell-tale in the investigation.

At this point, on that basis, we have a hypothesis in which the number of participants and the degree of pragmatic reaction regardless of risk could organically produce an incredibly complex cover-up which may even reach out to a handful of local enablers, perhaps people who have a similarly murky contribution to the situation that they would like to be 'disappeared' from the account of those events and never uncovered. So far we've no need for a complex network of secret society 'pillars of the community' who apparently have no morals and don't blink at the unlawful death of a child and the covering up of said death by those involved, even to the point of the undignified and desecrating treatment of the infant's body - apparently psycopaths in our midst, our government, our legal system, our police force, our medical practices, our churches, our village fetes etc etc ad infinitum.

If the events that unfolded were premeditated, they were catastrophically awful in their planning, resulting in hypothesis that looks like a plan devised by a committee of people in a blind panic, dodging bullets flying everywhere.

Now...

Two choices...

If what happened to MBM happened at the hands of the T9, or under their watch, it was either premeditated or it was an unplanned incident. Therefore the 'cover up' was either dogmatic or pragmatic, planned or unplanned, proactive or reactive.

If it was planned, it came out looking unplanned. If it was supposed to be a proactive cover-up, it came out looking reactive. If it was supposed to be flawless, it came out whistling due to the number of holes in it.

If it was unplanned, it came out looking that way. If the cover-up was reactive, it came out looking so. If it was loaded with mistakes because ordinary people got themselves in an atrocious situation and tried to cover it up, it certainly looks like it was.

I cannot accept in a million years that master planning criminals with an effective criminal network cooked up what transpired and then committed to seven years of cover-up, bringing us to this point.

Conversely, I have every belief that ordinary people did something reckless which went extraordinarily bad and their attempt to cover their own backsides has snowballed into the very embodiment of the proverbial, 'what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive.'

If that is true, then I cannot possibly have any expectation that what actually took place that week, that night, and every day ever since then, would in any way conform to objective rules of logic, rationality, predictability or even common sense. It would be my belief that the evidence fits this being a scenario in which logic, rationality, predictability and common sense were already tragically absent among the very routine plans that this group - apparently selfishly - put into operation in order to have themselves a fun, relaxing holiday unencumbered by responsibilities that they clearly did not take seriously enough. I think something horrible occurred, and logic, rationality, predictability and common sense - having not been invited on the trip - never made another appearance in the story.

Literally every weapon raised in forum like this as a means of critiquing the behaviour of the persons under suspicion and condemning them further, every detail raised as 'evidence' of their involvement, has at the root of it the same absence of logic, rationality, predictability and common sense, or 'organisation', which is one of the key characteristics which tells me that regardless of the engagement of vicious law firms and PR pundits, there is no grand conspiracy led by a masterful intelligence agency, police force, deity or new world order, but rather that even the actions of the contracted help scream loudly of direction by individuals gripped by a paranoia-fuelled blind panic, sociopathically buoyed by the arrogance resulting from their continued survival and their inclusion of well-meaning men and women of influence who have been fooled, not by experts, but by their own misplaced empathy and the legitimacy that this monumental machine appears to have.

I would suggest that those people, the ones in the driving seats, are very much like the man who fell from the top of a great skyscraper and was heard by those on the floors below, as he passed each window, saying 'so far so good.'

They've made this up as they went along, advised by a sea of well-meaning, and maybe even some complicit personalities, offering suggestions and pitching expectations, adding bits on as they go.

On that basis, I don't think any idea involving Smithman, equating Smithman to GM, and considering the possibility of this sighting being the intentional deployment of a decoy can possibly be ruled out on the basis of how logical, rational or 'safe' performing such an act would have been

candyfloss, quoting CynicalAl wrote:Sorry.... at risk of this place becoming a one-wild-and-unsupportable-theory town, can you enlighten me as to quite what a 'considerable amount of circumstantial evidence to support' the non-occurrence of a non-event which was not witnessed by anyone, as opposed to the common or garden unsupportable and inexplicable denunciation of a legitimate claim of a sighting corroborated repeatedly over time, without any significant change of testimony, by multiple members of the same family looks like, exactly?