Another Look at the Madeleine McCann Case

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.

She has seen the abductor. No one since has come forward to say, “Oh no, that was only me with my child.”

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.

The world knows something fishy has gone on. But what?

Why leave the patio doors unlocked?

In my opinion they should be tried for negligence, no decent parent would EVER leave their kids alone in an unlocked house.

Secondly when the door was open further did he just pop his head in or actually look round. I know it sounds awfully cliche but the "kidnapper" could have been hiding under a bed.

Thirdly what happened to all the money they raised?

reply to post by Migwah


Used to pay off their mortgage was it not?
I`d jail the both of them for neglect.
As for Faither Gerry,I wouldn`t trust this guy
and his beady little eyes,as far as I could
throw him.

I believe that the McCanns are guilty and are responsible for the death of Madeleine and here is my case.

Profile on the McCanns. Both doctors, they have their hands on all prescription medicines. They value travelling and socialising with friends. **Enjoying themselves is a priority.**

Synopsis:

Whilst on holiday in Portugal, the McCanns were due to meet friends for dinner in a restaurant within the resort of where they were staying. With 3 small children, it is not easy to be out at night. Much easier to put the children to bed first. But what if the children should wake up alone, they would be rather distressed to find mum & dad gone. Solution: mild sedative would ensure that they sleep through, thus ensuring a trouble free evening out with friends.

In between courses & drinks the parents check on the children. At some stage Kate checks on the children and something is wrong with Madeleine, she is face down and not breathing. She has suffocated herself in her pillow as being mildly sedated she has slumped into this position restricting her airway.

Kate calls on Jerry and they have to think VERY fast, they are aware that a manslaughter charge will ruin both of them and the lives of their twins. Both distraught and panicked they decide to say she has been abducted. Jerry changes clothes (possibly puts a hat on) and takes Madeleines body (**so a "man" is seen carrying a girl**), and buries her not far from the room, in a shallow grave in a garden bed in a deserted corner of the resort, taking no longer than around 15 minutes.

Jerry then returns to the room, donnes his original clothes and they open the window and bedroom door to make it look like there has been an intruder. Kate then raises the alarm that their daughter has been abducted.

3 Weeks Later:-

Kate and Jerry hire a vehicle (station wagon). In the dead of night they remove little Maddies body from its shallow grave and take her to a permanent location where she is not going to be uncovered. At this time, there is road resurfacing being done to roads outside of the town where they are. Maddies body is buried just near where new tar is to be laid. Hiding her forever.

After that...

The hire car is taken by investigators and DNA from body fluids are found in the boot of the vehicle. Reports say, it is Madeleines. The McCanns furiously fight this revelation.

It is reported that the car has travelled an unusually high number of kilometres/miles during the short time that the McCanns had it in their possession.

Portuguese police maintain the McCanns are the key suspects in the case.

The McCanns will fight to the end to maintain innocence, but I believe it was an unfortunate accident caused by the result of sedation, whether through suffocation or overdose.

Dobbie

One of the unexplained, even by liars, facts of the case is the missing sports bag. A sports kit bag, sort of a duffle bag with handles, large enough to carry your sports gear or your little girl, was acknowledged to be missing from the McCann's apartment after the kidnapping.

Jane Tanner did not see this bag over the shoulder of her "abductor", and the little girl he was seen carrying was, obviously, not in such a bag. Loose end.

What does this loose end mean? Maybe that Jane Tanner is not in on the cover up, if that is what is going on. Maybe the man she saw was just a shy innocent and the real kidnapper went off in another direction with Madeleine in the bag.

Referencing Dobbie's post, I don't think it would be possible to hide and bury even a little body in just 15 minutes, but it might be. It would certainly be possible to put a little body in a kit bag and hide it in 15 minutes, if you were going to move it again. It might even be passed over in an initial search of the apartment.

Many details of this case have not been made public. For instance, had the apartment been disturbed in any way, other than Madeleine's abduction? What happened to the proper contents of the kit bag? What did the kit bag look like?

Also, surveillance cameras at the resort might document exactly the movements of the tapas nine.

I think the Portugese police think that the McCanns did it. I have a pretty low opinion of our young doctors on holiday, but I don't think they did it. There are a lot of oddities in this case though.

[edit on 5-7-2008 by ipsedixit]