The Guardian newspaper in the UK has published a fairly detailed timeline of the day that Madeleine McCann went missing in Portugal. It can be found
at the following link:
www.guardian.co.uk...
I was looking at it and trying to make myself think very carefully about it, like one of those oft maligned Portugese detectives. Here are the parts I
was examining:
8.35pm: The McCanns are the first of the group to arrive at the tapas restaurant, 50 yards away from their apartment.
8.55pm: The group has ordered starters when the routine of checking on the children begins. Matt Oldfield goes to check his own apartment. He also
tells the Paynes, who are still in their apartment, that the group is waiting for them at the restaurant.
9.05pm: Gerry returns to the apartment through the unlocked patio doors to check on the children. Earlier that week, the McCanns had used a key to go
in through the front door next to the children's bedroom but, worrying the noise might wake the children, they began using the patio doors, leaving
them unlocked.
He enters the apartment and sees that the children's bedroom door, which they always left slightly ajar, is now open to 45 degrees. Thinking this is
odd, he glances into his own bedroom to see if Madeleine has gone into her parents' bed. But he sees that all three are still fast asleep where the
McCanns left them. Putting the door back to five degrees, he went to the toilet and then returned to the restaurant. This is the last time he would
see his daughter.
Why would the door be opened halfway? Let’s assume for a moment that it was not moved by one of the children. It was not moved by the wind because
Gerry would have seen the open window, which was near Madeleine’s bed, when he looked at her. Gerry believes that Madeleine’s abductor was
actually in the room or in the apartment when he checked on the children at 9:05. So the door must have been moved by the abductor.
If the above is true, then the abductor must have come in through the unlocked patio door on the pool side of the apartment, because his only other
way in was via the window, which he would have left open after entering, but which was not open at 9:05.
Does a charge of child neglect become viable at this point?
(The abductor must have entered the apartment from the side that the McCanns say they
could monitor from the restaurant.) I think it does if you are a detective in Prahia da Luz.
Does this account for Kate McCann’s speculation that the window shutter might have been forced open, an action which the police have said did not
occur? Was she trying to avoid accepting a neglect charge that could be based on not having seen a patio door entry by the abductor?
9.08pm: Gerry sees Jeremy Wilkins, another holidaymaker at the resort, on the opposite side of the road as he walks back to the tapas bar and
crosses over to talk. Wilkins and his partner are eating in their apartment since their youngest child will not settle. The two men spend several
minutes talking.
9.10pm: Jane Tanner walks up the road, unnoticed by Gerry and Wilkins, although she sees them. She spots a man walking quickly across the top of the
road in front of her, going away from the apartment block and heading to the outer road of the resort complex. He is carrying a sleeping girl in pink
pyjamas who is hanging limply in his arms. The sighting is odd, but hardly exceptional in a holiday resort. Her daughter is fine; Tanner returns to
the table.
9.30pm: Kate gets up to make next check on her children but Matthew Oldfield and Russell O'Brien are checking, too. Oldfield offers to check the
McCann's children.
In the McCanns' apartment,
Oldfield notices the children's bedroom door is open again, but this means little to him. He merely observes all
is quiet and makes a cursory glance inside the room seeing the twins in their cot, but not directly seeing Madeleine's bed from the angle at which he
stood. Afterwards, he could not say for sure if she had been there or not. Nor could he say if the window and shutter had been open.
But they must have been. Jane Tanner had seen the abductor leave the scene at 9:10. He must have left through the open window thus accounting for the
children’s bedroom door being open again. Here I’m assuming the apartment had a deadbolt lock on the front door which he would not have been able
to lock if he had left through the front door. No one has suggested that the front door of the apartment had been found unlocked, later.
He (Oldfield) would later get a hard time from the police because of this. During his interviews, he was aggressively accused of taking Madeleine,
coming under suspicion because he had offered to take Kate's turn.
10.00pm: Kate checks on the children. She becomes alarmed when she reaches out to the children's bedroom door and it blows shut. Inside the room, the
window is open and the shutter is up. The twins are sleeping but Madeleine's bed is empty.
Shortly after 10pm: Rachael Oldfield goes to Tanner's apartment to tell her Madeleine has been taken. Tanner says: "Oh my God. I saw a man carrying
a girl."
Summing up:
Some time between 8:35 PM and 9:05 PM the abductor enters the apartment, through the patio door. Within five minutes of the time that Gerry McCann
left the apartment, having checked on the children, the abductor leaves and is seen leaving by Jane Tanner.
The alarm is raised at 10:00 PM, thus giving the abductor a lead of about 50 minutes.
Here is an excerpt from an article based on an interview with Miss Charlotte Pennington, a nanny at the Ocean Club.
www.dailymail.co.uk...
"When we were coming out we saw Kate and she was screaming: 'They've taken her. They've taken her!'
Asked if it was the only thing she said, Miss Pennington answered: "It might not have been the first thing she said. But she definitely said it. She
also repeated Madeleine's name and said: 'She's gone, she's gone'.
"I couldn't really believe what I was seeing - she was just so distraught. She was screaming out and tears were running down her face.
"Everyone else was running around trying to help.
"Kate and her friend, who was looking after her, were the only ones who weren't out looking for Madeleine."
While Gerry McCann leapt into action and began frantically searching the resort, she said his wife remained outside the apartment, shuddering with
tears and unable to move.
Asked why she thought Mrs McCann might have shouted "They've taken her", Miss Pennington said:
"I'm not really sure. But maybe she saw some people looking at Madeleine earlier that day, and she immediately thought that they must have taken
her."
The nanny was one of three staff who steered Mrs McCann to the nearby reception area, where they asked her to describe what Madeleine was wearing.
But she remained so hysterical that she could hardly communicate.
"We get missing children all the time, and I have seen plenty of hysterical mothers. But none of them were like Kate."
She confirmed reports from the McCanns' friends that Murat was at the scene.
"He was outside the lobby just before we started on our big search," she said.
"He was adamant that he wasn't there. But he was. He was there in the road, he was just looking. It was about 10.30. He was just watching
"I didn't know his name then. But the next day he was our interpreter and I met him then. He didn't take part in the searches, but he was
there."
Murat has insisted that he was at his home nearby throughout the evening of Madeleine's disappearance. Portuguese sources have claimed that he will
soon be told that he is no longer a suspect.
Miss Pennington explained that she spent the rest of the evening searching for Madeleine, before finally going to bed at 4am.
The McCanns may be negligent, but I don’t think they committed any other crime the night of May 3, 2007. Murat may be a liar but I don’t think he
committed any crime that night either.
Personally, I think Jane Tanner saw the kidnapper and I think it is highly likely that others saw him also, but for reasons of their own, have kept
quiet about it.
