Madeleine McCann: You are all guilty

The Times Online

 

The public is to blame for the heartless abuse being heaped on Kate McCann. The internet has blurred the lines of news and hearsay and the result is trial by global gossip

 

 

Do you find yourself strangely drawn to articles about the McCanns? I do. It’s not edifying: most of us are uncomfortably aware that the slender line where personal tragedy becomes popular entertainment was crossed some time ago. But, like every other person in the country, the story is permanently at the back of my mind.

 

I want to stop reading, listening, watching, Googling, amateur sleuthing; I nauseate myself with my own prurience. My appetite for commentary – which is all that’s left, in the absence of hard facts – has been sated many times over. But I can’t stop.

 

Did they do it? They couldn’t have. And yet . . . And if they did do it, do they have superhuman powers, such as invisibility and Oscar-worthy acting skills? And if they didn’t, and are innocent and probably bereaved, what in God’s name have we done to them?

 

By that “we”, I don’t for once mean the (British) press, which seems to me, despite its inevitable mawkish descents into sentimentality, to have acted pretty responsibly. The press has urged caution, expressed compassion and been reluctant to judge the McCanns, if not the apparently sham-bolic Portuguese police.

 

No, by “we”, I mean the public. Forget that old chestnut “I blame the media”: now that everyone has an opinion and an embarrassment of outlets in which to express it, “I blame the public” is going to become the refrain of the coming decades. There is no shortage of online places where people may freely and anonymously air their opinions, even if their opinions are vile or demented or both; and there are millions of these newly voluble people. They have made it all right to say unspeakable things, to air the most shameful thoughts, always to think the worst, and never to give anyone a chance.

 

With the McCann story, this has, for the first time, resulted in a complete blurring of the boundaries between news and gossip. Sky News lists Madeleine McCann as a “category” on its interactive content screen: news, business, sport, Madeleine.

 

We have been here before with appalling crimes that grip the nation – we may have discussed, say, the James Bulger case among ourselves, watched the news and read the headlines, but then the news was on twice a day, the headlines came only in the morning, and the internet barely existed.

 

Now we have streaming information, an unstoppable torrent of truth, fiction, theory and gossip that is accessible 24 hours a day. The result is that, incredible as it may sound, there is, online (and the real world is catching up quickly), little difference in the tone of the remarks about Britney Spears’s failed comeback, and the comments made about Kate McCann, despite the fact that one is a pop star and the other the mother of a missing girl who may be dead. But there is no thought for Kate McCann’s suffering in the deluge of abuse heaped upon her; the McCanns’ local newspaper’s support website in Leicester-shire had to be closed.

 

We seem to have lost track of why Kate McCann’s picture-editor-pleasing face – blonde, thin, wounded, Diana-like – is in the papers in the first place. By orchestrating the kind of media campaign more usually associated with a multi-million-pound film or music launch, the McCanns have catapulted themselves into the gossip fodder league. That means suffocating 24/7 media interest; it means your choice of earrings is going to be scrutinised and discussed by millions of strangers – it means you have declared open season on yourself when it comes to public consumption.

 

But the public doesn’t just consume: it devours. And once you’ve invited it in, it doesn’t sit down politely and make small talk: it makes itself at home and rifles through your underwear drawer. You can’t ask it to leave, to “respect your privacy”. It’s there for the duration. If the McCanns are innocent, and even if they aren’t, it may well cause them to lose their sanity.

 

Despite popular thinking about journalists “making things up”, the traditional media are regulated. Things have to stand up from every angle. Facts matter. We have lawyers; we try not to libel or slander; to keep objective. The public, through the internet, can – and does – say anything, no matter how degrading or toxic, and keeps on saying it until, by a sort of insane osmosis, it stops being an outright lie and becomes a half-truth.

 

The theory that Kate McCann, a doctor, accidentally oversedated her daughter, causing death, has existed on the internet for months. People write about it LIKE THIS, in indignant capitals, as if it were so obvious as to be a given, and as though they were explaining something simple and obvious to somebody mulishly stupid who refused to see the truth staring them in the face. Behind the capitals, you can almost feel their quickening breath and their peculiar excitement as they comprehensively trash the reputation of a grieving woman who is a stranger to them. Power to the people!

 

Things are ugly out there – there aren’t many things uglier than gossip about infanticide, which is what this story has become, and why it feels so extraordinary. But they have been ugly from the start.

 

The news of Madeleine’s disappearance broke on a Friday evening. I wrote about it the following morning, assuming – naively, in retrospect – that people’s default mode would be compassion or pity. By Sunday evening my e-mail inbox was full. A handful of the e-mails agonised on the McCanns’ behalf. The greater part more or less said, “If you leave small children alone to go and eat tapas, you deserve everything that’s coming to you.”

 

I know from colleagues on other newspapers that they had the same angry reaction, which they also found themselves disconcerted by.

 

I’ll get back to the tapas point, because it’s central to the whole thing, with opinion dividing into people who see leaving a child as stupid, but not the world’s greatest crime – such people are broadly sympathetic to the McCanns – and people who find it inexcusable, criminal and indicative of all sorts of dark possibilities. This latter group is among the 17,000 who signed an online petition recommending that Leices-tershire social services take into care the McCanns’ remaining two children, Sean and Amelie.

 

The petition was not set up in the past week or so when things became murkier and question marks started mushrooming, but in May, when all we knew of Kate and Gerry McCann was that they seemed hollow-eyed with grief. The McCann story may end up being about the death of empathy.

 

So here we are, obsessed, in the throes of one of those weird national seizures; sitting in judgment, wallowing in what the novelist Philip Roth (apropos Bill Clinton’s infidelity) memorably called “the ecstasy of sanctimony”. The woman at the checkout at Tesco has a view, as does the dinner party guest. The hitherto unsayable – “Do you think they killed their own child?” – has become commonplace. You hear it everywhere. We’re gossiping about a four-year-old child who may be dead, or abducted and raped, or both, and there are no holds barred any more. What brutal thing does this say about us?

 

It’s always risky attempting to analyse the nation’s psyche based on one apparently seismic event: often, when everything settles down, you realise that underneath all the emoting, there wasn’t anything terribly unexpected happening. One thinks of the death of Diana, Princess of Wales: all that was going on was that everyone felt sad and shocked, and then got over it.

 

But the national fixation with the disappearance of Madeleine McCann, and the incendiary emotions it has provoked, is another thing altogether. It isn’t to do with empathy, because it seems to be thin on the ground. Prurience, yes; ghoulish curiosity, certainly – but there are, alas, dozens of hideous crime stories to pick from: why focus so obsessively on this one? Sentimentality, because of the involvement of a small, photogenic child? Perhaps at first – though much of the public commentary on this story is so condemnatory that sentiment doesn’t seem to come into it.

 

That says something peculiar about our monstrous appetite for this tragedy – because, no matter what happened or who did what, a much-loved child has vanished.

 

Much of our fixation has to do with fear, and with the public’s desire to “own” a story. Within 24 hours of her disappearance, Madeleine McCann had become “Maddie”, as though we all knew her. Aside from what she looked like, we knew nothing about her whatsoever – not what toys she liked, “Cuddle Cat” aside, or what her favourite book was, or what she liked eating, or wearing (I am sorry to use the past tense, and mean nothing by it; the present tense looks even odder).

 

But in those early days of the investigation, she became a version of all of our children, a blank to superimpose our own child’s face onto as we peered into the abyss. This was, of course, terrifying: the idea that an ordinary-seeming family could go on holiday and have a child vanish into thin air was more than most of us could cope with.

 

The natural human instinct, when faced with a terrible fear, is to list the things that make us different from the victims of the frightening situation, and in this particular case there were few. Much was made at the time of the McCanns’ social class (working class gone middle), and of the fact that if a single mother from a housing estate had gone out on the razz and left her child alone, sympathy would be in short supply. This is another way of saying that if a person is recognisably different from us, the bad thing that happened to them couldn’t possibly happen to us. The problem with the McCanns is that they were so terrifyingly normal-seeming, so middle-classly resonant, with their neat Boden-esque clothes and their responsible jobs and their three little children.

 

How to differentiate ourselves from them, and thereby reassure ourselves that their misfortune would never be ours? By focusing obsessively on the one questionable thing they did: leaving their children alone in a strange place. Phew – instant relief. “I’d never do that,” the thought process went. “I’m safe. My children will never be harmed.”

 

This is clutching at straws, frankly – as everyone surely knows by now, children who come to harm usually come to harm from a person known to them, more often than not in their own home. But we chose to clutch at this one particular straw, hence, I think, the disproportionate outpouring of vitriol against Kate McCann, who, regardless of her guilt or innocence, was, is and will continue to be punished because she had the temerity to seem so much like us.

 

She has also (more straws) been accused of seeming “unfeeling”, of looking “too groomed” (“I’d look a mess, therefore we’re not the same, therefore it could never happen to me”), of seeming strangely “calm” (or tranquillised, surely?), of, basi-cally, not falling to her knees screaming like an animal in pain – it’s “Show us you care, Ma’am” all over again.

 

In some internet chatrooms and message boards, women b**ch about Kate McCann for not reacting exactly like them – not that they’d know how they’d react in her situation, since they have never been in it. No matter: weird, isn’t it, how she seems so composed – and let’s not call it composure, let’s call it “arrogance” (this from the country that invented the stiff upper lip). Must make her a child killer, and not have anything to do with being told that visible distress might give pleasure to a hypothetical abductor.

 

And why are her clothes nice? Who thinks about clothes at a time like this? Why does she wash her hair? Couldn’t she wear rags, or sackcloth and ashes? Or – any day now – tar and feathers? And what was that nonsense with the Pope? (Who’d have thought the devout Catholic/Pope combination would be so perplexing and aggravating to so many people?)

 

Our fascination also exists because this story is centrally concerned with what many people perceive as a failure of parenting, a topic we are obsessed by as a nation. We are, collectively, eaten up with anxiety about raising our children. It’s a relatively new thing – people just used to have children and get on with it – and is reflected by the deluge of television programmes, books and publications devoted to how to be a parent.

 

Women, especially, have become almost pathologically insecure on the subject: am I a bad person if I bottle-feed; have I failed if I have a caesarean; do I harm my children by going out to work; have they got enough friends; do they sleep too much or too little; do they eat enough super-foods and fish oils; do they need to learn Mandarin; do they play outside enough; and so on and on.

 

With that insecurity comes the strongest desire to judge, as a means of self-reassurance: you see it every day in the ongoing working mothers versus stay-at-home ones debate. “Well, she barely sees her children because she’s in the office all day, so I’m better than her and my children will be happier” versus “She’s going out of her mind with boredom because she’s stopped working, so I’m better than her” – nobody can win, and the crazy thing is that nobody needs to: it’s hardly a competition.

 

Into this comes Kate McCann, who admits to a failure of parenting, to doing a stupid thing, and we fall on her like a pack of hyenas, weirdly pleased to leave behind our own failings and insecurities for a minute and concentrate on hers.

 

The fact is that while I would never leave small children alone, I know dozens of people who routinely do, and I do not find them irresponsible, just tired.

 

There are so many of them that a whole service industry has built up around them: “family” hotels with a baby-listening service where someone cocks an ear at the bedroom door every now and then while harassed parents try to grab the semblance of a date together in the dining room; holidays, like the McCanns’, with kids’ clubs attached, where children are parked with what amounts to a stranger while parents try to sunbathe in peace for a couple of hours; skiing trips where the chalet comes complete with a random nanny; gyms with crèches; restaurants with some weird bloke in a clown suit “entertaining” the children in another room; and so on.

 

A certain section of society routinely leaves their children in the care of somebody else whom they don’t know terribly well, no matter what the nanny agency has murmured soothingly about police checks. You can think what you like about this, but it is a fact of middle-class life, trying to reconcile loving your children with still having a life of your own, and an omnipresent source of anxiety for many people – if it weren’t, you couldn’t buy teddies with cameras hidden in them to check up on your child carer, and many women wouldn’t have the unpleasant niggling feeling that they don’t entirely trust their nanny to bring up their child.

 

The McCanns were foolish and wrong to leave three small children – babies, really – alone in a strange apartment. But doesn’t the subsequent calamity override the initial human error? Apparently not: only a fifth of Britons think they are completely innocent, according to a poll for this paper today. And 76% think they were wrong to leave them alone. And yet we all take risks: you take a risk every time you let a child out of your sight, every time they board a bus or a train, every time they’re a bit evasive about their whereabouts. If your house is burgled and you stupidly didn’t switch on the burglar alarm, does that mean you deserved it? Does it make your distress, your sense of violation and the loss of your goods any less significant?

 

Meanwhile, with hideous inevitability, the focus has shifted to Kate McCann’s being “volatile”. She “visi-bly lost control” while being questioned for 11 hours, we are told. It’s such a depressingly familiar scenario: a woman in an untenable situation is pushed to breaking point, and then when she does lose it – as lose it she will, because she’s not a robot or a monster – her sane response to an insane, unbearable set of circumstances becomes evidence with which to condemn her.

 

Impound her diary, call in all lap-tops: she must have done it if she shows any feelings. And she must have done it if she doesn’t. QED: she’s had it either way.

 

We are now told, by Portuguese newspapers who claim to have published extracts, that her diary, which the police want to see, shows she “struggled to control Madeleine”, that her children were “hyperac-tive”, and that looking after them exhausted her.

 

She also allegedly wrote that her husband left her to look after them too much on her own. Show me a woman with three children under four who doesn’t express the same frustrations, and I’ll show you an improbability. But even this utterly normal maternal response to child-care – it’s knackering, I wish he’d help out more – is being used as an indication of Mrs McCann’s “instability”.

 

And the people who’ve been there and ought to be able to sympa-thise – other women – are the ones sharpening their knives. As Madeleine Albright, the former US secretary of state, once said: “There is a special place in hell for women who don’t help other women.” If that is so, hell must have got pretty crowded over the past four months.

 

The McCanns did themselves no favours when they embarked, deliberately, on a gigantic, modern publicity campaign. And that has contributed in no small part to making this case seem so compelling now. It is hard to criticise their original motive for hyping up the publicity, but in the process the McCanns unwittingly turned themselves into a soap opera: available to view on a screen near you 24 hours a day.

 

As I write, there are reports that they’re looking for a new, bigger “campaign manager” to try to stem the tide of negative comment. (In what world did Gerry McCann think it was a good idea to put in an “appearance” at the Edinburgh television festival?) But it’s too late. The tide won’t be stemmed and the appointment of a Max Clifford figure will make things worse, not better. Every soap needs a baddie and since we seem to have forgotten that we’re not, in fact, watching a brilliantly scripted and plotted episode of Portuguese Holiday, it was only a matter of time before the goodie turned bad.

 

What a twist! How compelling! More, more. Give me the inside story. One of these mornings, we’re going to wake up and see just how ghastly a part our own voyeurism has played in all of this. At least, I hope we are.

 

Vitriolic rants of the online rabble

 

IF you haven’t read what is on the internet about the McCanns you wouldn’t believe it. Here are a few examples of the kind of vitriol out there. Trawling through the sites to find these quotes is like a trip through the darkest recesses of people’s most ungenerous minds.

 

- ‘I never believed in your pain – the Find Madeleine McCann website

 

- Kate McCann is an ineffectual, weak and total washout of a mother and probably mentally unbalanced. Pathetic woman should never have had kids if she couldn’t cope – Mulderx, Mirror forum

 

- Gerry McCann does come across as a thug to me. I have no idea if wifey is involved but either way she is still as guilty as sin for leaving her children alone – Halibutswift, Mirror forum

 

- The McGrubs are terrible examples of parenting and should be prosecuted. At the very least, they should have to attend parenting classes. The day you put tapas and alcohol before the health and wellbeing of your offspring is a very bad day!!!! – Dr Kildare, HaloScan

 

- The people who must shoulder the burden of responsibility for the Maddie disappearance are Gerry and Kate McCann. If they did it, they are sick and evil and deserve to rot for ever. If they didn’t, they let her down by being selfish and indulging in their own pleasures leaving her alone and vulnerable – Val, Skynews

 

- The parents are a disgrace. They were on the razz every night after leaving their children in the crèche all day every day. Much wanted children? More like little fashion statements that they couldn’t be bothered to look after properly. The children unfortunately got in the way of their “me time” – Proud Parent UK, Alpha Mummy

 

- These people are doctors and in their professional lives would not hesitate to point the “abuse” finger at any other parent who left their children alone like they did. They should hang by their own noose – Arthur, Alpha Mummy

 

- I do think the McCanns have acted somewhat oddly throughout this investigation – particularly the mother. I can’t quite see it as natural for a mother in her position to make one of her immediate priorities in the days immediately following the disappearance of her daughter a visit to the Pope – without her remaining children – Krazykoolkazza, Mumsnet

 

- Even female doctors are subject to domestic abuse whether it be mental, physical or psychological bullying. Kate looks to me to be very submissive to Gerry. Her eyes dart towards him when the couple are questioned by the media. It’s as though she can’t speak up for herself. The running is another strange one. I’m a keep fit nut but the last thing on my mind would be to run if one of my kids were abducted. I would be spewing venom and ranting. – Ragna, Mirror forum’

 

 

Branson’s £100,000 to defend Gerry and Kate McCann

The Times Online

 

THE billionaire tycoon Sir Richard Branson is giving £100,000 to create a fighting fund to help the parents of Madeleine McCann to clear their names.

 

The fund, which will cover both legal and PR expenses, is to seek the support of wealthy businessmen convinced of the McCanns’ innocence. Branson, who has been in regular contact with the couple since their daughter went missing, hopes that it could amass £1m.

 

The money would mean that members of the McCann family could drop their plans to sell their houses to pay legal costs.

 

 

PR expenses? ..... sums them up.

 

Whilst they need legal representation, if innocent they have nothing to fear from so called evidence so why do they need to be employing one of the 'top' lawyers - for top read expensive.

 

They say they hate the media intrusion - yet they are set to make any potential court case a total circus. Hiring top lawyers, hiring PR advisors, starting huge advertising campaigns.

 

Many people have today been killed in a plane crash - yet radio news still leads with yet another mention of Madeline.

 

If they had no hand in their daughter's disappearance (other than leaving her alone) then they must be going through hell at being suspected of harming her.

 

 

PR expenses? ..... sums them up.

 

Whilst they need legal representation, if innocent they have nothing to fear from so called evidence so why do they need to be employing one of the 'top' lawyers - for top read expensive.

 

They say they hate the media intrusion - yet they are set to make any potential court case a total circus. Hiring top lawyers, hiring PR advisors, starting huge advertising campaigns.

 

Many people have today been killed in a plane crash - yet radio news still leads with yet another mention of Madeline.

 

If they had no hand in their daughter's disappearance (other than leaving her alone) then they must be going through hell at being suspected of harming her.

 

Of course they would be going through hell (if they did'nt kill her), and being critisized for every last thing they say or do is'nt going to help anyone. Since when do people who are innocent have nothing to fear, plently of innocent people have gone to jail, and in a situation this big, probebly the biggest story of the century, of course they are going to be getting the top lawyers to help them, especially with all of these theory's going around the media about them killing her etc. And I don't recall them ever saying they hate the media intrusion, but if they did then you can hardly blame them as they are followed everywhere by hundreds of photographers, who seem to sit outside their house all the time now. I'm suprised they have'nt gone completely insane. And even if they say nothing to the media, if there is a court case, it is going to me a media circus regardless of whether they hire an expensive lawyer or a cheap one.

The unanswered questions

Daily Telegraph.co.uk

Last Updated: 1:29am BST 16/09/2007

 

Where is Madeleine's body?

 

One detective has been quoted as saying that her body was dumped at sea in a bag weighted with stones.

Police were said to be considering the possibility the McCanns somehow recruited an accomplice to help smuggle the body on to a boat.

Another theory is that Madeleine was buried beneath major roadworks.

 

The area around the Nossa Senhora da Luz church, where the McCanns regularly prayed, was dug up for water pipes around the time Madeleine disappeared.

 

Officials have, however, dismissed this theory because the holes were just 27 in deep and 16 in wide.

 

Was Madeleine accidentally killed by an overdose of sleeping tablets?

 

French tabloid France Soir claimed Portuguese police believe tests on hair, blood and bodily fluids, allegedly found in the McCanns' hire car, will "prove that the little girl had ingested sleeping pills, in large quantities''.

 

However, Alan Baker, a British forensic scientist, said: "If you have got fresh blood you can make fairly informed comments about the level of drugs. These dried up samples, though, are not such ideal samples that would be thrown out of any UK court because they are unreliable."

 

Does Kate McCann's diary prove that she was struggling to control her "hysterical" children?

 

Reports allege that photocopies of the diary, obtained by Portuguese police, show Mrs McCann struggled to cope with three "hysterical" children.

However, Alex Cayless, the McCanns' former neighbour, said: "I never heard Kate or Gerry raise their voices to their children or anyone else."

 

How convincing is the forensic evidence allegedly found in the hire car?

 

Examination of the Renault Scénic, hired 25 days after Madeleine disappeared, has reportedly revealed hair, blood and body fluids with DNA matching Madeleine's and in such quantities that it cannot have simply rubbed off from her belongings.

 

However, one senior British police source said last week: "The quality of the evidence, especially the way it has been collected, gives great cause for concern. The procedure that the Portuguese authorities went about collecting this data without a representative lawyer present for the McCann's would lead to any supposed evidence being inadmissable in a UK court of law, because the defence could argue that the alleged evidence had been planted."

 

Is there a "missing half hour" in the McCanns' account of the night of Madeleine's disappearance?

 

On May 3, the McCanns dined with seven friends at a tapas restaurant close to their holiday apartment.

 

Initially, it was reported they were first to arrive at 8.30pm. However, Portuguese police are now said to have found inconsistencies with the friends' statements, indicating they did not arrive until about 9pm.

The alleged "missing half hour" would have provided more time for something to have happened to Madeleine.

 

Police are reported to be preparing to re-interview the McCanns' fellow diners. However, Rachael Oldfield, one of the diners, has denied discrepancies in the timings.

 

What about Robert Murat, the first person to be named as a suspect?

 

Mr Murat, 33, who lives near the Ocean Club Resort, acted as a translator in the early days of the inquiry until suspicions about his behaviour began to grow.

He has always insisted he was unfairly smeared and no evidence linking him to the child's disappearance has been found.

 

Has blood been found in a second apartment? If the McCanns killed Madeleine, might they have hidden her body there before moving her in the hire car?

 

The Portuguese magazine O Crime claims sniffer dogs found samples of blood in an apartment near the McCann's.

In the days after Madeleine disappeared, the McCanns moved to an apartment a few doors down from 5a where they had been staying.

But any evidence provided by sniffer dogs is highly contentious. Two weeks ago in Wisconsin, a murder trial judge threw out such evidence, stating it was "no more reliable than the flip of a coin".

 

How could the McCanns have hidden their daughter's body for 25 days with the world's media watching their every move?

 

No detailed answer has been offered by the Portuguese authorities. A Policia Judiciaria source was last week quoted admitting: "There are lots of indications but … we have nothing concrete."

 

This point is arguably the strongest reason to suspect that the Portuguese authorities are trying to frame the McCann's for the disappearance of Madeleine as it is well known that at least one set of paparazzi was monitoring them 24/7 from the time of the investigation and certainly around the time that the prosecution authorities allege that they moved Madeleine's body into the hire car.

 

What will happen to the McCanns' other two children now?

 

Social services must consider whether the two-year-old twins Sean and Amelie are "at risk". Mrs McCann has invited social workers into her home. Leicestershire social services has refused to discuss any possible decision but unofficially they are said to be more than happy with the McCanns looking after the twins well-being.

Also, where did this myth that the parents never looked like they were grieving come from? For the first couple of weeks, the mum in particular looked like she was on the verge of a complete mental breakdown, and if you all think about it, have you EVER actually seen her properly smile?

 

myth?... dunno about you but ive seen what parents look like after they have kids go missing, ive seen it for 40 odd years and those of us who have seen this all before can see that there is no change in their expressions ever since may! on the home vids before maddy went they had the same faces on them! they might be innocent, but their demeanour is odd, odd enough to raise suspicion.

MCCANNS ARE NO KILLERS

 

Daily Express.co.uk

Sunday September 16,2007

By Julia Hartley-Brewer

 

Forget the north/south divide, Left-wing or Right-wing, rich or poor, young or old. There are only two types of people in Britain these days: those who think Kate and Gerry McCann killed their daughter and those who think they’re the innocent victims of a horrible crime.

Where do you stand? What’s the latest rumour or DNA detail? It’s the first thing most of us have asked every day since we heard that Madeleine had disappeared all those months ago.

 

The “Did they? Didn’t they?” guessing game has turned into a national sport but this isn’t an episode of Midsomer Murders or Inspector Morse, this is a real child’s life we’re talking about.

 

I have to confess that I don’t like the McCanns very much. I think they’re bad parents for leaving their children alone while they went out to a restaurant and their refusal to accept any responsibility for what happened as a result of their selfishness makes my skin crawl.

And despite all the emotional turmoil we’ve watched them go through day after day they remain strangely distant, cold and unlikeable – but that doesn’t mean they killed Madeleine.

 

We must not make the mistake of confusing their dignity, their religious conviction and their calm determination to find their daughter alive with what appears to be a callous indifference to her fate.

Grief is a very personal emotion and it is not for us to dictate, as we happily tuck our own little ones into bed each night, how many tears they should weep for their lost child.

 

The simple truth is that, even though the evidence against the McCanns seems to be mounting up, it still doesn’t add up. Statistically speaking, most children who die in suspicious circumstances do so at the hands of their parents but not all of them do.

After months of false leads, some say it is the only logical explanation. It isn’t but pointing the finger at the McCanns is certainly the most convenient explanation.

 

For almost everyone involved, from the Portuguese police and authorities to the tourism industry and residents of Praia da Luz, it is in everyone’s interests for this case to disappear, for the McCanns to have gone home and for normal business to resume.

Yet the most likely explanation for what happened is that the Portuguese police are criminally incompetent and they have failed to find the real abductor or abductors and Maddy is long dead.

We are supposed to believe the leaked evidence against the McCanns, despite the fact that the Portuguese police investigation has made the Keystone Cops look like CSI, with no end of errors and missed opportunities and a motto that appears to be “Leave Every Stone Unturned”.

 

Why did the Portuguese Police not seal off the crime scene, yet allow around 200 people to walk in and out of the room where Madeleine was sleeping over the following 48 Hours? Why did the Portuguese authorities take over 48 Hours to tell the sea ports to look out for someone matching the description of Madeleine even though the closest port is just 7 miles away? What happened to the reports of trained police sniffer dogs picking up the scent of Madeleine at a supermarket just 800 metres from that port within the first week of the missing child enquiry?

 

Isn’t it remarkably handy that, after all this time, with no more leads to follow, the Portuguese police have decided to accuse the parents?

 

Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that one or both of the McCanns killed their daughter, either deliberately or accidentally, whether by over-sedation or by force, on the night of May 3. So then what? What did they do with Maddy’s body?

 

If she was killed early that evening, do we really believe that the McCanns calmly went out to dinner for hours while their daughter lay dead beside their sleeping twins? Or, if they discovered her death upon their return, that they were able to quickly hide the body before calling their friends and the police for help?

 

The discovery of Maddy’s hair in the boot of the family’s rented car is hardly convincing either. For a start, Madeleine’s hair, skin cells and other DNA would have been all over everything they owned and could easily have found its way into the boot. So what are the police claiming? That the McCanns moved Maddy’s body in the boot of a car they hired 25 days after she disappeared?

 

And what did they do with her decomposing body until then? Did they have a handy deep freeze in their holiday apartment? Or did they bury Maddy in the building site next to the church where they prayed almost daily?

 

How, exactly, are they supposed to have got the body there? Since they were kept under 24-hour police and media watch, you’d think that at least one witness might have spotted them carrying a suitcase and a shovel to the church.

 

Maybe they didn’t dispose of the body themselves, instead asking their friends to help them. So do you love any of your friends enough to hide their daughter’s dead body for them if you thought they were responsible for her death? No, exactly.

 

And why, if you have killed your own child, would you launch a high-profile international campaign to find her, knowing that that would mean the eyes of the world’s media would be on your every move for months to come? As double bluffs go, it seems a rather risky tactic.

 

This week, we were told that Kate McCann became hysterical during police questioning and is emotionally unstable. If my daughter had been snatched and I was now being accused of killing her, I think I might get a little hysterical, too.

 

Now leaked excerpts from Kate’s diary claim she found it difficult to cope with three young children. Find me a working mum who doesn’t feel the same way! What other “damning” evidence from Kate’s diary are the Portuguese police expecting to find? “May 4. Dear Diary, I murdered my daughter last night.” I’m sure Kate, like all parents, has on occasion lost her rag with her children but that doesn’t make her a murderer. I am sure, as everyone says, Gerry is a very controlling man but that doesn’t make him a murderer either.

 

The last time I looked, we still believe people are innocent until proven guilty in this country. I don’t believe the McCanns are guilty but the Portuguese police need to find a culprit and sharpish. If they can’t make the charges stick against Kate and Gerry, then it’s only a matter of time before they haul Cuddle Cat in for interrogation.

 

I don’t know if Madeleine is dead or alive but I know she deserves better than this.

 

myth?... dunno about you but ive seen what parents look like after they have kids go missing, ive seen it for 40 odd years and those of us who have seen this all before can see that there is no change in their expressions ever since may! on the home vids before maddy went they had the same faces on them! they might be innocent, but their demeanour is odd, odd enough to raise suspicion.

 

Oh come on. Look at pics of the mother now, and from the first few weeks, clearly there is a difference. She looked dreadful for ages after, her face totally drained.

 

They are not going to end up looking like different people, and even IF they did killed her, then surely they would look worse then they did in whatever videos you are refering to.

Well all these new article cast serious doubt on the apparent guilt of Kate and Gerry if you ask me, especially now we know the Portugese police have been found to have tortured somebody in past to get a result, and that the hair found in the car could be absolutely anybodys....

MCCANNS ARE NO KILLERS

 

Daily Express.co.uk

Sunday September 16,2007

By Julia Hartley-Brewer

 

Forget the north/south divide, Left-wing or Right-wing, rich or poor, young or old. There are only two types of people in Britain these days: those who think Kate and Gerry McCann killed their daughter and those who think they’re the innocent victims of a horrible crime.

 

i dont agree with this, i think that they may have killed their daughter, not 'they DID'.

 

as zeuss pointed out, why would an intruder walk in through an open door then depart through a locked window?... on the other hand if it was the mccanns, where was/is the body? as i see it these are the main sticking points on both sides.

Absolutely. These articles, do not come from craploids like the Sun and are very well written with hard facts. It is interesting that the press are nowhere near as full of un-proven theories today, like they have been for the past few weeks. Sky News's Crime Correspondent, who is covering the case, has said last night, that there is even signs that even the McCanns biggest critics, the Portuguese media, are now starting to realise that all the apperent evidence they have been constatly reporting for the past number of weeks claiming the McCanns are guilty simply does not exist. This whole case is built around speculation and nothing else seemingly, hence why the McCanns STILL haven't been charged.

Oh come on. Look at pics of the mother now, and from the first few weeks, clearly there is a difference. She looked dreadful for ages after, he face totally drained.

 

They are not going to end up looking like different people, and even IF they did killed her, then surely they would look worse then they did in whatever videos you are refering to.

 

oh she looks tired, but not grieving... anyway her demeanour doesnt make her guilty or innocent so theres no point going on about it!

 

they might have done it, its feasible.

Well all these new article cast serious doubt on the apparent guilt of Kate and Gerry if you ask me, especially now we know the Portugese police have been found to have tortured somebody in past to get a result, and that the hair found in the car could be absolutely anybodys....

 

Your timing is good considering the breaking news......

 

Birmingham's Forensics Science Service: Madeleine: Hair in McCann Renault: 'It could be anyone's'

Reuters.co.uk

Last updated at 16:00hrs on 16th September 2007

 

Hair found in the car hired by Madeleine McCann's parents cannot be matched to the missing four-year-old.

 

British forensic experts have concluded the fragments said to be Madeleine's could belong to any number of people who had come into contact with the silver Renault Scenic.

 

This demolishes earlier claims that the hairs would prove the McCanns had hidden Madeleine's body in the car after killing her in their holiday apartment.

 

The fragments found did not even allow the scientists to establish the sex or age of the individual.

 

Sources from the Birmingham laboratory where the samples were taken for investigation have told Sky News that the hairs discovered in the vehicle hired by Kate and Gerry McCann after she disappeared were found in only very small quantities on the seats - and not in the boot as was previously reported.

 

Additionally no roots were found in the samples, which meant that experts at the Forensic Science Service in Birmingham were unable to test for a DNA match to any individuals.

 

"They were only asked to try to determine sex and age. It was simply not possible to determine whether the hairs belonged to Madeleine," said a source.

 

It has also been reported that police had found 'bodily fluids' - but not blood - in the car with an 88 per cent match to Madeleine's genetic profile.

That fuelled speculation that the little girl had been killed, possibly after being given an accidental overdose of sedatives, and her body hidden before being transported in the boot of the vehicle.

 

The McCanns hired the Renault from Budget 24 days after Maddie vanished on May 3.

 

Portuguese police have become suspicious about the number of miles on the car's mileometer.

 

In the seven days between May 27 - when the Renault Scenic was first rented in Portimao - and June 3 when the McCanns' first contract lapsed, the car travelled 450 miles.

 

The couple pointed out to investigators that the car did many runs to Faro airport, 55 miles away. They emphasised that they flew to Rome to meet the Pope on May 29, returning the next day, and that they then departed for Madrid on May 31.

 

They also told police that friends and family had access to the car while they were away - and that it was used to ferry relatives to and from Faro.

 

But despite what the McCanns have presented as an innocent explanation behind the distances, Portuguese police have asked Budget to provide all details of the vehicle's mileage.

 

The Mail on Sunday has learned that those records show that between June 3 and July 3, the car travelled a further 1,256 miles.

 

Further trips to airports in Lisbon and Faro to pick up relatives and deposit the McCanns for a trip to Germany have been presented as a justification for the high mileage.

 

However, according to a source, the police have not been satisfied with the explanations.

 

oh she looks tired, but not grieving... anyway her demeanour doesnt make her guilty or innocent so theres no point going on about it!

 

they might have done it, its feasible.

 

But how can you or any of us say she has not been grieving? They seem to have been indoors far more than they have had a camera in their faces, so they would've grieved then (even if they did kill her), if not then they would be something seriously wrong with them, as anyone would be grieving if their daughter went missing, or if they killed her by accident.

 

And I agree, they might have done it, but there is no concrete evidence that they did, it all pure speculation.

oh she looks tired, but not grieving... anyway her demeanour doesnt make her guilty or innocent so theres no point going on about it!

 

they might have done it, its feasible.

 

Of course the might have done it.

 

But why did the Portuguese authorities let them leave the country last week with no bail restrictions whatsoever? Why has Richard Branson today taken the PR risk of supporting the McCann's with £100,000 of his own money? Why have the Birmingham lab come out today to rubbish the Portuguese authorities & papers claims about the forensic evidence?

 

 

this threads getting silly..... its all speculation, we dont know the FACTS. the tide will turn the other way on the mccanns tomorrow and theyll be guilty again.... <_<

 

anyway, wether or not they did actually kill her, they DID play a part in her apparent demise by simply being BAD PARENTS, if they had looked after their kids properly this would never have happend, they ARE guilty by neglect.

Of course the might have done it.

 

But why did the Portuguese authorities let them leave the country last week with no bail restrictions whatsoever? Why has Richard Branson today taken the PR risk of supporting the McCann's with £100,000 of his own money? Why have the Birmingham lab come out today to rubbish the Portuguese authorities & papers claims about the forensic evidence?

 

you know what?............ I DONT CARE! lol.

 

 

they ARE guilty of madeleines plight whatever has happend to her, being neglectful bad parents.

they ARE guilty of madeleines plight whatever has happend to her, being neglectful bad parents.

 

Well that was established from the minute the news broke back on May 3rd. :P

Well that was established from the minute the news broke back on May 3rd. :P

 

so lets stop all this nonsense bickering about what happend... we will know in due course, this thread is soooo tiresome.

Why have the Birmingham lab come out today to rubbish the Portuguese authorities & papers claims about the forensic evidence?

 

I was just about to say, did'nt the police say they were 88% Maddie's? Now thry can't even tell if it's even a girls DNA FFS. The whole case is the perfect example of not to believe a world of what you read in the papers (well the tabloids anyway).

so lets stop all this nonsense bickering about what happend... we will know in due course, this thread is soooo tiresome.

 

I agree it's getting tiresome, but new developments seem to arise every five minutes :lol: