Madeleine: Second Extracts Of Kate McCann’s Book

MADELEINE McCann: Day 2 of the Sun’s serialisation of Kate McCann’s book Madeleine. (Day 1 here.).

The Sun (front page): “I SMASHED BED IN RAGE AT COPS”

Today we learn that after just one day working with the “shambolic” Portuguese police she “wrecked a bed as she kicked out in rage”.

The story of the Portuguese police’s investigation has been a spin-off thread in the story of the child’s disappearance. The tabloid media swiftly decided they were “bungling”.

Goncalo Amaral, the policeman initially placed in charge of the investigation and then removed from his post, has written two books about his time looking for the child. His version of the case can be read in Portugal.

Kate McCann’s version of events can be read here:

“The frustration and anger were reaching boiling point. I felt like a caged, demented animal. This was torture of the cruellest kind, Finally, I erupted. I began to scream, swear and lash out. I kicked an extra bed that had been brought into the apartment and smashed the end right off.”

What of the Jane Tanner sighting?

“Althoogh Jane had never seen  or known about Madeline’s Eeyore pyjamas, her description of  this child’s clothes  matched Madeleine’s exactly.”

Before that, we go back to the beginning:

As soon as it was light Gerry and I resumed our search. We jumped over walls and raked through undergrowth. We looked in ditches and holes.

The most striking thing was we were completely alone. Nobody else, it seemed, was out looking for Madeleine. There didn’t seem to be much sense of urgency.

We then get a timeline:

May 3, 2007, 11pm:

“According to the Polícia Judiciária files, two patrol dogs were brought to Praia da Luz at 2am on May 4 and four search-and-rescue dogs at 8am. The tracker dogs did not go out until 11pm. There had been no house-to-house inquiries.”

May 4, 2007:

10am: PJ officers take the McCanns and their friends – soon be called the Tapas 9 in print – to a police station in Portimão.

“I was appalled by the treatment we received. Officers walked past us as if we weren’t there. Nobody asked whether we were OK. Our child had been stolen and I felt as if I didn’t exist.”

2pm: Kate McCann is interviewed.

“As João Carlos, a Portuguese detective, led me up the stairs, I inquired whether he had any children. He told me he hadn’t. ‘But don’t worry. We will find your daughter.’ It was exactly what I was yearning to hear.”

7.30pm: Polícia Judiciária officers drive the McCanns back to Praia da Luz.

“Ten or 15 minutes into our journey, the police officer had a call from his station. He suddenly swung the car into a U-turn and drove us at 120mph back to Portimão.”

Kate McCann tells us her thoughts:

2Had Madeleine been found? Was she alive? Was she dead? I was crying hysterically and praying for all I was worth.”

Had those bumbling cops got a lead?

“Back at the police station somebody showed us a photograph from CCTV of a blonde child with a woman in a petrol station shop. We were asked whether the little girl was Madeleine. She wasn’t. We were sent on our way, devastated.”

Before long the McCanns were not alone. The media had descended on Praia da Luz. The story of Madeleine McCann’s vanishing – a single thread story – was being spun. And before long the parents – the people we had been watching for weeks – were hauled in.

August 2, 2007:

“I had a call from Gerry. The police wanted to come over at 10am. Something to do with forensics.

“It was 5pm when they eventually showed up. They told us they wanted to shoot some video footage of our clothes and possessions… I was devastated. They had taken my Bible, Cuddle Cat (Madeleine’s favourite toy) and my diaries.”

Part of the investigation, right?

August 4, 2007: Investigators Luís Neves and Guilhermino Encarnação, director of the Algarve Polícia Judiciária, are talking with the McCanns:

“Neves stated bluntly they didn’t believe my version of events. It “didn’t fit” with what they knew.

“Didn’t fit? What did they know? They proposed that when I’d put Madeleine to bed that night, it wasn’t actually the last time I’d seen her. But it was. It was! I was being bullied. I assume these tactics were deliberate – knock her off balance by telling her that her daughter is dead and get her to confess.

“On and on it went. Then it was Gerry’s turn. Through his tears he pleaded with the two men: ‘Do you have evidence that Madeleine is dead? We’re her parents. You have to tell us.’

“It’s coming,” Neves told him.

“Our liaison officer Ricardo Paiva arrived. He told us about two springer spaniels brought out to Portugal by the British police to assist in the search.

“Keela, who could alert her handler to the tiniest trace of blood, had done so in apartment 5A. Eddie, a dog trained to detect human remains, had indicated somebody had died there.

“The police appeared to be telling us, on the say-so of a dog, that someone had definitely died in apartment 5A and it must have been Madeleine.”

September 6, 2011: Kate and Gerry McCann are named as arguidos (suspects).

“I was totally perplexed. If, as the PJ alleged, Madeleine’s blood was in the boot of our car, which we had not rented until May 27, how on earth had it got there? Did this mean someone had planted it? I could see no other explanation.

“The police theory, it seemed, was that we had hidden Madeleine’s body, then moved it later and buried it elsewhere.”

September 7, 2011: Questions:

“Carlos [her lawyer Carlos Pinto de Abreu] had advised me not to answer any of the questions put to me. He explained that this was my right as an arguida and the safest option. Any responses I gave might unintentionally implicate me in some way.”

Investigator Ricardo Paiva plays the McCanns a video:

“I saw the dogs going into apartment 5A, one at a time, with the handler. Each dog ran around the apartment, jumping over beds, into the wardrobe, generally having a good sniff. At one point, the handler directed the dogs to a spot behind the couch in the sitting room, close to the curtains. He called the dogs over to him to investigate this site. This was not what I’d call an exact science.”

The dog barks by the couple’s rented Renault Scenic:

“The handler stopped next to the Renault and called the dog. It obeyed, returning to him, but then ran off again. The handler instructed the dog to come back several times and directed it to certain parts of the vehicle before it eventually supplied an alert by barking.”

What did it mean?

“When researching sniffer-dog evidence later, Gerry would discover false alerts can be attributable to the conscious or unconscious signals of the handler. We would later learn that in his written report, the handler emphasized such alerts cannot be relied upon without corroborating evidence.”

Pages 8 and 9: “Did they expect me to confess to a crime they had made up?”

“If we, or rather I, admitted that Madeleine had died in an accident in the apartment and confessed to having hidden her and disposed of her body, the sentence I’d receive  would be much more lenient: only two years he said, as opposed to what I’d be looking at  if I ended up being charged with homicide. Pardon? … My incredulity turned to rage. How dare they suggest I lie? …did they really expect me to confess to a crime  they had made up..?

IOL (South Africa): “ Did I miss chance to save Maddie?”

Kate McCann slept alone the night before Madeleine vanished because her husband had offended her at dinner, it emerged on Sunday.

Upset by Gerry’s “abrupt” behaviour, she took to a spare bed in the children’s room at the family’s holiday apartment in Portugal.

In her forthcoming book, which was serialised in the Sunday Times, Kate also reveals she is haunted by the belief that Madeleine tried to tell her that somebody had tried to break into the children’s bedroom.

With hindsight, it could have been her “one chance to prevent what was about to happen”, said Kate, adding: “And I blew it”…

The possible missed chance came at breakfast on the day Madeleine vanished, when the little girl disconcerted her mother by asking: “Why didn’t you come when Sean and I cried last night?”

Kate, 43, says: “Not for a moment did we think there might be some sinister explanation. But it is [now] my belief there was somebody either in or trying to get into the children’s bedroom that night, and that is what disturbed them.

“So haunted have I been ever since by Madeleine’s words that I’ve continued to blame myself for not sitting down and making completely certain there was no more information I could draw out of her.”

Kate McCann thought of her own death:

“I had an overwhelming urge to swim out across the ocean, as hard and as fast as I could; to swim and swim and swim until I was so far out and so exhausted I could just allow the water to pull me under and relieve me of this torment.

“I wasn’t keeping that desire to myself, either. I was shouting it out to anyone who happened to be in the room.

“Somehow, inflicting physical pain on myself seemed to be the only possible way of escaping my internal pain.

“The other truly awful manifestation of what I was feeling was a macabre slide show of vivid pictures in my brain that taunted me relentlessly. I was crying out that I could see Madeleine lying, cold and mottled, on a big grey stone slab.”

Irish Independent: Tony Parsons:

Madeleine McCann — gone for 4 years. END these stupid jokes on Twitter about a real child. Help find her.

Daily Mirror: “Kate McCann fears restaurant reservation book tipped off Madeleine McCann’s abductor”

MADELEINE McCann may have been snatched after perverts spotted in a tapas reservation book she had been left alone at her holiday flat, mum Kate fears… But the book was left open and in full view of other diners at the Ocean Club resort restaurant.

Kate said: “It was by ­definition accessible to staff and, albeit unintentionally, probably to guests and visitors, too. To my horror, I saw that, no doubt in all innocence, the receptionist had added we wanted to eat close to our flats as we were leaving our young children alone there, checking on them intermittently.”

David Jones, Daily Mail: “Kate McCann’s haunting account makes me rue the day I doubted them”

Isn’t it the job of all good journalists to doubt official versions of an event until proof is given?

Reading Kate’s haunting account, it is impossible to feel anything but the deepest empathy. In all but the sickest of minds, it will dispel any scintilla of doubt about their involvement in Madeleine’s disappearance.

So let us not speculate. Instead, let’s, er, speculate:

Was a serial child predator on the loose at the time, and was this covered up for fear of damaging the tourist industry? If so, this makes the police’s determination to focus their inquiries on the McCanns, and make them official suspects, even more inexcusable.

He concludes:

And I hope, though not with too much expectation, that it will finally silence those internet ghouls who seek to exacerbate their agony by casting blame and making vicious attacks on their character.

The McCanns were just two decent, loving parents enjoying a family holiday – and, after reading Kate in her own, excruciatingly raw words, I am certainly sorry that I ever thought otherwise.

In other news, the Daily Star tells us of the paedophiles:

TWO of Britain’s most dangerous paedophiles were last night at the centre of the Madeleine McCann investigation.

Depraved Charles O’Neill, 48, and William Lauchlan, 34, were jailed last June for sex attacks on children and the murder of a mum-of-three who threatened to expose them.

O’Neill was sentenced to a minimum of 30 years and Lauchlan to 26.

But now it has emerged the monsters, who were also gay lovers, were touring Spain, and possibly Portugal, on false passports when Madeleine vanished on May 3, 2007

The Mail has more on those criminals:

Leaving Madeleine with a babysitter who none of them knew would have been ‘unwise’, Kate McCann declares in her book.

Explaining why they did not make use of the babysitting service offered by the Ocean Club, she said the couple never even thought about it.

She said: “I could argue that leaving my children alone with someone neither we nor they knew would have been unwise, and it’s certainly not something we’d do at home, but we didn’t even consider it.

“We felt so secure we simply didn’t think it was necessary.’ With the infamous tapas restaurant ‘so near’, the McCanns and their friends decided to do their own child-checking service, said Mrs McCann, adding: ‘It goes without saying that we now bitterly regret it.”

However British police later told the couple their holiday apartment, being a corner flat on the ground floor, next to two roads and with secluded entrances, made it a perfect target for criminals.

Such are the facts. There are no suspects. There is no proof of a crime. All we know is that Madeleine McCann vanished.

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Posted: 9th, May 2011 | In: Madeleine McCann Comments (35) | TrackBack | Permalink