Title: TR - March 2 08 Dateline NBC - Missing Madeleine | |
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Date Posted:02/12/2011 8:47 AMCopy HTML TR - March 2 08 Dateline NBC - Missing Madeleine
The sun was dipping over the Atlantic on the Portuguese coast. May 3 had a been a day out of the tourist brochures: a family picnic for the McCanns at the beach, Gerry had played tennis in the afternoon, and by 6:00pm at the ocean club, the mostly British guests were getting ready for the evening. Gerry and Kate had made plans to meet seven of their friends from England -- three of them fellow doctors --at the resort's tapas bar. What happened in the next four hours --between 6pm and 10pm that night -- is the heart of the mystery of Madeleine McCann. It's a crucial timeline as told by the McCanns and their friends from dinner, virtually all of it given to the police in confidential statements that were later leaked to the press. It's been that way with so much in this sensational case. If you're inclined to play detective, keep in mind that a great many of the published reports about the missing child are a hopeless muddle of facts, rumors, off-the-record-sources and flat-out speculation. What we believe was happening inside the McCann’s ground floor apartment was familiar to parents of young children: getting them settled for the night so mom and dad could enjoy their evening out.
Three-year old Madeleine -- days away from her birthday -- had spent the day by the pool and playing in the child-care center. Later that evening, at 8:30pm, when it was time for the grownups to have dinner, the McCanns chose not to drop the kids off back at the baby sitting service. Rather, they say they did what they'd done on previous nights. They tucked in Madeleine and the two-year old twins in one of the bedrooms and left them alone, heading out to the tapas bar -- about 50 yards from their front door.
This graphic view of the resort complex shows the relationship of the buildings. Madeleine and her brother and sister here in the McCann apartment on the end next to the street. And inside the resort's walled perimeter, past the pool, is the tapas restaurant where the dinner was underway by 8:45pm. At 9 o'clock, with food and bottles of wine are arriving, Gerry McCann says he left the restaurant and came back here to the apartment to look in on the children. He saw Madeleine and the twins asleep in bed and returned to the dinner. Half-an-hour later, another of the parents got up from the table to look in on his own child who hadn't been feeling well. He stopped by here too, but reportedly didn't go inside where the McCann children were asleep. All seemed quiet and he return to the dinner. Then at 10:00pm, Kate McCann walks back to the apartment to check on the children.
A window shutter is open, apparently forced from the inside. Her child is gone.
The twins remain asleep as some close by say. Kate McCann screams, "They've taken her." A frantic search of the resort begins. The McCanns and their friends calling out for Madeleine. They're joined by other guests and resort staff. Police arrive -- too slowly, some would later say.
The search goes into the night. Spilling out from the resort into the village itself. By midnight, a distraught Gerry McCann phones home.
And the next day, the first of what would become a familiar and poignant ritual for the McCanns: facing the cameras and pleading for any scrap of information.
A pretty English child abducted from her holiday bed becomes the electrifying international storyline. With their reputation as a safe family tourist destination on the line, the pressure is on the Portuguese authorities to solve the case quickly.
Portuguese national police, the rough equivalent of the FBI, are brought in to take over the investigation from the overwhelmed local village cops. For days, police continue to comb the area around the resort for any trace of the girl, but to some their effort seems amateurish.
Official updates are scare-- -Portuguese law prohibits the police from disclosing details about an on-going investigation. But cops do assure the press that they have a working theory: the child has been kidnapped. The photos of Madeleine issued to the media and police throughout Europe -- one in particular -- point out an anomaly in the child's right eye, something that can be used to identify her. Her parents -- the two doctors -- observant Catholics, find solace in the church nearby the resort.
With no immediate break in the case, reporters and photographers swarmed the seaside village. And the educated parents -- especially the cool, elegant mother -- were trailed ceaselessly by cameras, recording their every move. A sophisticated British public relations apparatus was put in place around the McCanns. The goal in part: to keep the pressure on the Portuguese. The parents vowed not to leave the country without their daughter.
But, at least to southern Mediterranean temperaments, the parents seemed so controlled, so English and rational about their devastating loss. Why didn't Kate wail? A cultural divide of northern and southern Europe was opening and it later would have consequences for the McCanns. But for now, world-wide sympathy for the McCanns was building. Gerry McCann press conference: As we have said before we are positive and focused on the investigation....
The McCanns stayed on at the resort, Kate McCann rarely seen in public without her daughter's stuffed toy cuddle cat. Gerry McCann supportive of the police -- publicly, anyway.
On the eleventh day after Madeleine disappeared, there was suddenly real news to report -- an investigative breakthrough. The cops had a suspect. ></SCRIPT>
A half-British local man in his 30's who lived with his mother in a villa just down the road from the resort. The cadaver dogs and crime-scene technicians were enroute to turn the home upside down looking for traces of Madeleine. Portuguese authorities swarmed a private villa just blocks from the resort where Madeleine McCann had gone missing 11 days before. Crime-scene technicians and dogs worked over the home belonging to the mother of a local man named Robert Murat.
But also, perhaps, too friendly. Fluent in English and Portuguese, he had volunteered to translate for the police the day after Madeleine disappeared.
Finally, a reporter for one of the British tabloids thought his interest was so off-the-charts that she brought her suspicions to the police.
The police named the 33-year-old half-English, half-Portuguese man as a formal suspect in the child's disappearance. During this search, several items belonging to the house owner were seized and they are now being examined...
But it would appear that nothing of forensic value was found in his home. Murat's aunt, sally Eveleigh, jumped to his defense.
And the case against him -- the neighborhood man who lived with his mother -- was dissolving even though the Portuguese would not officially dismiss him as a suspect.
The authorities were now more than two weeks into the investigation and they still had little more than a missing child flyer for Madeleine McCann. Gerry and Kate McCann, meanwhile, were stepping up their campaign for the cameras. Three weeks after her daughter's disappearance, Kate, who's described as shy, spoke about that evening and its aftermath.
The mother explained the seemingly unexplainable: why she had felt comfortable leaving three children under four-years-old, not with the resort baby-sitting service, but home alone with the door unlocked.
Dateline made the walk between the tapas bar and the apartment --it took 52 seconds. We also sat down at the restaurant to check out the view and had trouble seeing into the McCann’s ground-level unit. Still, Madeleine’s parents say they felt a sense of security on the night of May 3.
Even though the McCanns were taking some hits for what they did -- or didn't do -- that night, support for them remained strong. The Find Madeline Web page was getting millions of hits. Gerry McCann’s blog became one of the most widely read on the Web. Money was pouring into the family's fund -- $2 million by summer's end. And a who's who of Britain had lined up behind the McCanns: Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling, tycoon Richard Branson, and football idol David Beckham:
The Catholic McCanns were even flown to Rome on a private jet for an audience with the Pope, who blessed a picture of the little girl. John McCann is Madeleine’s uncle.
The goal was to get Madeleine back or get information about her fate.
The McCanns made personal appeals in Berlin and in Amsterdam, both tourist markets for the Algarve. Had anyone seen anything? Was there a vacation snapshot perhaps with a clue in the background? As the child's story went global, tips came pouring in. Was she seen at a restaurant in Belgium, or had she been put on a ferry to morocco? The Madeleine sightings stretched across Europe and north Africa. So it went for the rest of the summer: leads that went nowhere. A letter sent to a Dutch newspaper claimed that Madeleine’s body would be found in a shallow grave near the resort. It wasn't. Psychics had visions, but Madeleine remained gone.
The find-Madeleine McCann machine was in full throttle: a well-oiled, well-funded operation complete with its own pop anthem: "Don't you forget about me."
It was a very good campaign in terms of keeping the story alive. Yet the parents with their posters and media entourage were also becoming a major thorn in the side of the Portuguese police, keeping the pressure on, silently implying the back-home belief that the Portuguese weren't up to the job. Case in point: news that one of the McCann’s holiday companions had seen a man near the apartment the night Madeleine disappeared. In his arms, wrapped in a blanket, he carried a child wearing pink pajamas, like the ones Madeleine had been wearing. Why hadn't police immediately released a description?
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A bias about the Portuguese, southerners in general, raised its ugly head. And back in England the tabloids, the blogs, ate it up: the cops down there were hopelessly inept. What they needed was Scotland Yard -- London’s metropolitan police -- to come in and sort things out.
By the early August, it seemed that Kate and Gerry McCann --- who'd vowed not to leave without their daughter --- had become the guests that had overstayed their welcome in Portugal.
But the McCanns seemed oblivious to the slights, and showed a brave face, even when grim news was leaked to the media: that police had found traces of blood in their resort apartment.
But that's not what the Portuguese police were leaking to favorite local reporters by mid-August, three months into the investigation. According to those reports, the Madeleine McCann investigation hadn't stalled at all. The police it seemed had mounds of new evidence and a bombshell new theory of the case -- one that didn't involve a mysterious abductor. The McCanns were now the target of the police investigation. CONTINUED: What did the cops have on Kate McCann? Three-and-a-half months after she went missing, the Portuguese media reported a whiplash of a new lead: the cops believed that Madeleine McCann was, in fact, dead and her parents were responsible.
In the span of a news cycle-- in England and around the world-- the couple had morphed from the cruelly heartbroken parents of a missing child to suspects. It was a very dark turn of events.
Kate and Gerry McCann were grilled separately by police inspectors. They were declared "arguidos"-- a Portuguese legal term that roughly means person of interest -- with the right to remain silent and lawyer up.
According to news reports, the case against the McCann’s consisted of the following: Bodily fluids and hair, reportedly lab-tested as a DNA match to Madeleine, were recovered from the trunk of a car the McCanns had rented 25 days after the child went missing. The implication? The McCanns had concealed their daughter's body somewhere and used the rental car to dispose of it almost a month later. What's more, when so-called cadaver dogs -- animals with a nose for death -- sniffed that rental car they sent up a howl. And there was another, unsubstantiated but widely reported detail -- something psychological. The cops had supposedly read parts of a diary that Kate McCann had been keeping. In it, she reportedly complained that Madeleine was "hyperactive" -- an exhausting, demanding child -- and that her husband Gerry wasn't helping out as much as he should. Did that explain why a stressed-out mother might have given her child a sleeping pill so she could have a relaxing evening out? A sedative that brought on cardiac arrest, theorized the police, causing a death that the parents then had to cover up before going out to dinner. Now people thought back to what Kate reportedly first blurted out when she discovered Madeleine gone: "They've taken her." Was that the start of a cover-up, the secretly guilty mother misdirecting the hunt to phantom abductors? Or, in those frantic moments, were her words lost in translation between English and Portuguese? The parents stopped their almost daily news briefings. Portuguese law forbids them from talking about their interrogation, but back in England friends and family lined up to voice outrage:
Even though they bore the official stigma of suspects in a whole-world's-watching murder investigation, the McCanns were allowed to leave Portugal. With the twins, Sean and Amelie, in arms, the couple did what they said they would never do and went back to England without Madeleine.
Gerry McCann may have been forbidden by Portuguese law from talking about details of the case, but he was clear when he knocked down the police's new theory of a crime.
Kate and Gerry McCann, who'd sought the cameras out at every availability to keep their daughter's case alive, now had become victims of the same media beast. They were hounded from the plane that brought them back to northern England to the front door of their home in Rothley, Leicestershire. The McCanns would be staked out in the coming days as a Portuguese judge read through some 4,000 pages of police reports turned over to him for a finding. The judge could require the McCanns to come back to Portugal for more questioning, perhaps even order their arrest on formal charges. ></SCRIPT>
But could it be true? Had the parents themselves killed their child, perhaps accidentally, and then covered it all up with a monstrous PR campaign? Or was it an abductor -- a little girl stolen from her holiday bed in the night?
We asked NBC News analyst Clint Van Zandt, a 25-year veteran of the FBI and a former criminal profiler there, for his read on the case. For starters, he thinks the Portuguese police botched the investigation with a slow response.
First, the simplest: Did Madeleine wander out of the unlocked apartment and get into trouble of an unknown nature?
On the other hand, for hours a large search party had combed the resort, the town, the beach, calling out Madeleine’s name and did not find her. Which makes him think an abduction a more likely scenario.
But Van Zandt sees another possibility in the abduction theory: a child stolen to be sold as goods to a customer somewhere. Clint Van Zandt: Unfortunately, it's one of the dirty secrets in this world that children are kidnapped, usually they're put into sexual bondage. And sometimes there are individuals who say, you know, I want a child, not for nefarious purposes but I just want to raise a kid ... and I want a pretty, blonde-haired, blue-eyed, little European girl.
But what about the big bombshell - the parents did it. This is, sadly, the one that seasoned detectives have the most experience with.
CONTINUED: Van Zandt dissects the theories Two theories of a crime:
Madeleine is either abducted from her bed by person or persons unknown, or her parents kill her and then somehow dispose of her body. In both theories there's a problem with the clock, the timing almost impossibly tight.
Take another look: the McCann family's apartment -- the large open pool and patio -- and the restaurant over here where the McCann friends are gathered outside. Gerry McCann says he made the short walk to check on Madeleine and the twins at about 9:00pm. Another member of the dinner party reportedly stops to listen at the McCann door while he's up from the table about 9:30. At ten o'clock, when Kate McCann checks on the kids, Madeleine is gone.
The abductor presumably would have had to watch for several nights, monitoring the parents' dinner routine. Still it was a risky grab.
Likewise, for the parents to have killed their child and hidden her body, Van Zandt points to another narrow window of opportunity: from 6:00pm, when Madeleine is last seen apparently by hotel staff, to 10:00pm, when her mother shrieks that her child is gone. A brief window, says Van Zandt, and a ludicrous series of suppositions.
And in Portugal by mid-September, a judge was saying almost those very words to the police. Their case against the McCanns was collapsing before their eyes. The supposed DNA in the rental car now more ambiguous and less damning. Traces of blood in the apartment not from Madeleine. And a mother's diary about an active child and a sometimes less-than-helpful husband, were words that could have been written by millions of women around the world. It had all come back to May 3 at 10:00pm. Madeleine was missing and no one had a clue. ></SCRIPT>
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