Madeleine McCann: the woman in purple and plum
Only one front page features Madeleine McCann today: the Daily Star leads with “Hunt for woman in purple”.
News is that a”mystery woman in purple was spotted where she vanished 10 years ago”. On Page 6, there’s more. Indeed, Police are “SET TO ‘SWOOP'” on the “prime suspect in Madeleine McCann’s disappearance”.
What do we know of this mysterious woman? Only that she was seen “lurking outside” the McCanns’ holiday apartment 90 minutes before we know the child vanished. Two “witnesses saw her staring at the holiday flat”. Scotland year “believe” they know the woman’s identity. She “could have been involved in the youngster’s disappearance”.
Daily Mirror (Page 5: “A ‘woman in purple’ now Maddie cops’ No1 suspect.”
Big news, then. But the paper says the woman is someone British police are “thought to be searching for”. We hear from Jenni Murat, “whose son Robert Murat was the first arguido… but was formerly cleared of suspicion in 2008”. She’s quoted: “I saw the woman standing on the corner of the street… She caught my eye as she was dressed in purple-plum clothes. It struck me as strange. It’s so unusual for anyone, particularly a woman, to be standing alone on the street in our resort, just watching a building.”
You can read more about how innocent Mr Murat was brought to the police’s attention here. Indeed, the Express mentions it online:
At the time he was living with his elderly mother, Jenny, at their villa, Casa Liliana, only a couple of hundred yards from apartment 5a. In one of the greatest blunders of the case, police arrested him after hearing vague suspicions from a British journalist who was nowhere near Luz at the time Madeleine vanished.
That British journalist worked for the Daily Mirror.
The Mirror quotes a “police insider” who says the woman is not currently resident in Portugal. Police are “ready to move in and arrest the mystery woman”. It is a “hugely significant line of inquiry”.
No other newspaper features the news in it print editions.
Is that because it’s not new news?
In 2015, the Daily Express reported:
Jenny Murat, 78, the mother of wrongly accused Robert Murat, has potentially breakthrough evidence but no one has spoken to her. At 8pm on May 3, 2007, she went to a supermarket and then drove past Apartment 5a and saw a woman hanging around. Her notes from the time say: “There was a woman standing on the corner under a lamp post.
“I don’t remember much of her other than she was of slight build and was wearing a plum coloured jacket. She moved around the lamp post as if trying not to be noticed.”
As she turned into the driveway of her home, Casa Liliana, she was nearly hit by a car going the wrong way. “When I stopped to open the gates I could not see the car but the woman was in the road looking in my direction.”
And in 2009, the Express reported the words of a woman who wished to remain anonymous:
The slim, Portuguese-looking woman in a plum-coloured top and white skirt with long, dark, swept-back hair acted furtively when she was spotted at 8pm on May 3 in 2007 near the Mark Warner Ocean Club complex.
She was standing under a streetlight at a crossroads only 40 feet from where Madeleine was sleeping with her brother Sean and his twin sister Amelie.
Not quite the “New Clue” the Star presents it as, then.
Posted: 2nd, May 2017 | In: Madeleine McCann, Tabloids Comment | TrackBack | Permalink
