Swindler's List - Dr Martin Roberts 10th January 2014

Hope this hasn't been posted already.


Swindler's List, 10 January 2014


Swindler's List
Gerry McCann, 09 September 2007

EXCLUSIVE to mccannfiles.com

By Dr Martin Roberts
10 January 2014

SWINDLER'S LIST

'Voice breaking with emotion, Gerry McCann read out a statement after disembarking from the plane at East Midlands Airport in which he said that he and Kate had "played no part in Madeleine's disappearance"' (Daily Mail).

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It has long since puzzled me how Gerry McCann could have so readily fulfilled the demands of his assumed role on this occasion, given both the McCanns' earlier acceptance of their tacit involvement (they actually encouraged an understanding that their 'checks' were spaced at half hourly intervals at least) and the documented reluctance of unpractised liars to do just that. Quite unexpectedly, after seven years, Dr. Sharon Leal has kindly solved that particular riddle.

Briefed, as Dr. Leal must have been, to provide an instance of the McCanns' exemplifying her particular criteria for lie detection (or the absence thereof), why should she have settled on the very first public announcement either of them made, when there have been so many since?

To judge from other experts' behavioural analyses of lying, most, if not all, of Gerry McCann's 'pieces to camera' are plagued by tell-tale 'non-verbal' signs of one kind or another; hand gestures in the main. His ear lobes, nose and scalp would be generally safe from assault if his hands were occupied elsewhere, but Kate can only reasonably be expected to hold one at a time, leaving the other free to run riot – which, more often than not, it does. Despite the hours of footage available to her therefore, Dr. Leal would have found very little that was untainted; except, that is, for those moments when Gerry McCann has both hands full (i.e., 'silenced'), as when holding a piece of paper, for instance.

Suddenly the available exemplars are dramatically reduced in number. Furthermore, the purpose of the paper itself must be taken into consideration. As Dr. Leal informs us, if a speaker should equip themselves with a list of things he must be certain to remember, he won't think that looks suspicious', whereas 'a liar might believe that that is suspicious'.

After several months spent coming to terms with 'the situation they found themselves in', the McCanns would hardly have needed a list of prompts in order to deliver their homecoming pronouncement from the airport runway. Which further reduces the suitable options to include that very first emergence before the cameras in Praia da Luz, when Gerry McCann, according to Dr. Leal, 'brought out the list of things he must be certain to remember'. Except of course, he didn't.

For those brief moments, Gerry McCann was not extemporizing spontaneously with the aid of a 'crib sheet', any more than he would do so subsequently at East Midlands Airport, for example (he did not do so there either). He was, instead, reading a statement prepared beforehand. To attempt an evaluation of Gerry McCann's innocence on that basis alone is akin to accusing (or absolving) Sir Lawrence Olivier of Richard III's lies, as previously articulated by William Shakespeare.

In reality Gerry McCann was distanced from the text of his 'speeches' in terms both of time (they were written earlier) and emotional investment, which, although seemingly apparent, is anything but spontaneous. Actors too are able to cry 'on cue'.

In meeting her brief as best she could, Dr. Sharon Leal earned her fee. With so little material to work with she has to be satisfied that she was able to do so at all. But the machinations that must have gone into her choice of illustration suggest that, despite its title, the true purpose of the ITV programme, The Lying Game, was something other than reminding us all of what they had previously told us, five years ago now, in Tears, Lies and Videotape; a programme which contained much the same material, but with explicit exoneration of the McCanns falling to 'Mirror' journalist Rod Chayter ("The McCanns. Clearly innocent. Absolutely clearly innocent"). The voice of an 'expert' was no doubt viewed by the producers as more convincing on this occasion.