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http://the3arguidos.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=35&t=29346&st=0&sk=t&sd=a
Following on from a very interesting thread last night on 3 As which I took part in where the poster Stevo, raised the issue, did Gerry McCann kill Madeleine and then try to blame Kate I thought I would have a look and see if there is any real evidence that she has not been so willing to take part in his press campaigns. It did not take me very long to do that, with this sprawling 6 page interview where he alone, just goes on and on. He alone recently travelled back to Portugal, he alone is appearing before the Commons Select Committe on Libel litigants, Lawyer's conduct and fees and the conduct of the Press on Tuesday. It does increasingly look like a situation that Kate does not want to be a part of, but still this man endlessly goes on, like a blunderbuss, WILL HE STILL BE FIRING SHOTS WHEN HE BECOMES AN ANTIQUE OR WILL THE POLICE HAVE ARRESTED HIM BEFORE IT GETS TO THAT STAGE. Let us hope so. Do I agree he killed Madeleine? Well no, not necessarily, I think he was responsible for her disappearance though and I think his friends David Payne and Russell O'Brien were too. Do I think Kate was a principal offender who deserves a lengthy custodial sentence? No I most certainly do not. I think what I have always thought she is an ill and oppressed woman who has suffered enormously and she lost her will to prevent some terrible events. She needs help far more than she needs punishment IMO. But of course the law does require that women protect their children. To what extent was she able to do that?
This thread demonstrated that many people hold the same sort of views as Stevo and I do and yet there is this mighty force that prevents people from being able to discuss this, when that force is overborne proper discussion takes place, just for once, that does not focus on endless boring arguments about what PC Grime says, the dogs was it blood or was it cadaver odour, let us take the law into our own hands, let us march on Downing Street, let us prepare a "dossier", it was the British government fault, or the minutiae of which camera someone used, it looks at the real issues and I would urge anyone to have a read, just ignore the time wasters, you will quickly spot themGUESS WHAT GERRY MCCANN? WE DO NOT BELIEVE YOU SUFFERED ONE LITTLE BIT AND WE DO NOT WANT TO HEAR YOU TELL US THAT, WE MOST CERTAINLY DID NOT WANT YOU TO MAKE £10m MAKING BOOKS AND FILMS TO TELL US THAT EITHER AND ARE SO PLEASED YOUR NARCISSTIC DREAMS GOT FRUSTRATED.
JUSTICE FOR MADDIEXX
Unanswered Prayers
After three-year-old Madeleine McCann disappeared on a family vacation in Portugal, her parents pursued a high-stakes strategy: media saturation. It succeeded beyond their wildest imaginings—winning the aid of everyone from J. K. Rowling to the Pope—and failed miserably. Getting the first in-depth interview with Gerry McCann since he and his wife, Kate, were declared suspects, the author re-traces their footsteps to their daughter’s empty bed.
by Judy Bachrach WEB EXCLUSIVE January 10, 2008
![Kate and Gerry McCann appeal to Pope Benedict XVI Kate and Gerry McCann appeal to Pope Benedict XVI](http://www.vanityfair.com/images/culture/2008/02/cuar01_mccanns0802.jpg)
Kate and Gerry McCann appealed to Pope Benedict XVI in St. Peter’s Square, in Rome, four weeks after Madeleine’s disappearance. Felici SNC/Grazia Neri/Polaris.
On a hot day last September, four months after their daughter, Madeleine, almost four, vanished from a sleepy resort town in Portugal during a family vacation, Kate and Gerry McCann, both British doctors, opened their villa door to a local policeman.
The policeman’s name was Ricardo, and he had been, relatively speaking, on friendly terms with the couple. He knew their circumstances. Their lives, heavy with grief since their daughter’s disappearance, had undergone a few small improvements. Kate had grown shockingly thin, but at least she was eating regular meals.
This time, however, the bearing of the detective from the Policia Judiciária was different. And the McCanns were not entirely surprised. “Because for months they used to have regular weekly meetings with the Portuguese police, and then they stopped,” recalls Gerry’s older sister Trish Cameron, who was in the villa at the time. Also, without the McCanns’ knowledge or consent, the police had photocopied Kate’s diary, examined her borrowed Bible, and removed Gerry’s laptop.
“Do you have something to tell us?” Ricardo asked, dramatically.
“No,” Kate replied. “Do you have something to tell us?”
He nodded. “Yes. You are being made arguidos.” He was using the Portuguese word for “formal suspects.”
It was at that point, Trish says, that her sister-in-law became incandescent with rage, screaming, “Do you honestly believe that I would murder my own child?”
“No,” said the policeman.
The Portuguese police, as they informed the world through calculated leaks to their own media, simply believed that Gerry, a Scottish cardiologist, and Kate, a general practitioner, both 39, were lying when they said their daughter had been abducted from their resort villa the night of May 3. Authorities now suspected the McCanns were somehow responsible for their daughter’s death and the disposal of her body, though in what manner no one seems to know. Local incinerators have been scoured, to no avail. The $4 million reward for information leading to Madeleine’s recovery; the televised pleas by the McCanns; the hiring of Control Risks Groups, a security firm whose directors included former S.A.S. commander Sir Michael Rose; the Find Madeleine Web site visited by more than 80 million people in three months after the disappearance—these, the police believed, were all red herrings.
And for a long time the global media were of the same opinion. “Could Kate and Gerry McCann have had a hand in their own child’s disappearance?” People magazine asked in September. By October, Britain’s Daily Mail had an answer: new dna tests “put the mccanns back under suspicion.” Body fluids found in a car rented by the McCanns 25 days after Madeleine disappeared, it was subsequently reported, matched 88 percent of the child’s genetic profile. (A problem with this information, British DNA specialist Nigel Hodge informs me, is that most genetic profiles are based on 20 DNA components. “And 88 is not divisible by 20,” he says flatly. Moreover: “If there are DNA components that do not match, the DNA could not come from that person.”)
![Madeleine McCann Madeleine McCann](http://www.vanityfair.com/images/culture/2008/02/cuar02_mccanns0802.jpg)
A photo of Madeleine taken on May 3, 2007, the day she disappeared. Kate McCann/PA Photos/Landov.
Undaunted, the tabloids summoned up yet another genetic fantasy: maddie: who’s her daddy? asked the Daily Star in October, implying that Gerry is not Madeleine’s biological father. (The girl was conceived through in-vitro fertilization.) As the news industry trumpeted All Madeleine All the Time, and Barbara Walters and Oprah clamored for interviews, Kate’s elegant face grew more gaunt in each tabloid photo. Meanwhile, a British poll revealed that 48 percent of all respondents believed the couple could have been responsible for their daughter’s death. Only 20 percent considered them completely innocent.
“Yes, yes, I know,” Gerry says bitterly. “Kate killed her in a frenzy, Madeleine was sedated by us, she fell down the stairs—in which case you would have thought they’d have found her body. I’ve heard all that! There have been a huge number of theories in the media. But what I want to know is—who told them all that?”
In fact, much of what is aired or printed about the vanished girl and her parents is mendacious, mistaken, or just plain conflicting: according to the press, to various detectives, and to top Portuguese authorities, the child is alternatively alive in Morocco (or maybe Portugal or Bosnia) or dead, killed one moment by kidnappers and in other instances by family. In all these hypotheses the supporting facts are invented, from the reason for Kate’s lack of public emotion to the first acts of the Portuguese police (dubbed “the Keystone Cops” and “Butt Heads” by reporters). Thus, the media has managed to rob the McCanns of their daughter a second time. And to complicate matters, it was Gerry McCann himself who, two days after Madeleine’s disappearance, ignited the media conflagration that is now consuming the couple.
It is Gerry who is behind what he tells me is “the marketing … a high public awareness” of Madeleine. At his side while we talk is Clarence Mitchell, a voluble former government media analyst and BBC reporter, handpicked by Gerry to be the latest in a line of spokesmen. On October 17, Mitchell spoke at Coventry University. His topic: “Missing Madeleine McCann: The Perfect PR Campaign.” Except that it has been anything but perfect.
It has in fact been so counterproductive that, as winter approached, Portuguese attorney general Fernando Pinto Monteiro suggested that one way or another the McCanns were responsible for their child’s death. Specifically he said that if indeed Madeleine had been kidnapped, it was the carefully contrived publicity engineered by her parents that likely sealed her fate. “With the whole world having Madeleine’s photo,” he observed, any abductor would have been pushed to such a degree that “there’s a greater probability of the little girl being dead than alive.”
And with this last devastating conclusion—namely that Madeleine will likely never reappear—Madeleine’s own father haltingly agrees.
Gerry McCann has vivid blue eyes set in an impassive face, and a jaw that has grown more angular and prominent as the tragedy has unfolded and almost seven pounds have melted from his frame. There are those, including a onetime close associate, who find him difficult and controlling, feeling he has the trademark arrogance and self-regard of many surgeons. And his judgment is certainly questionable. In the fall, for instance, it emerged that the McCanns had made two mortgage payments from the $2.4 million fund set up to find Madeleine. But months of anguish have taken their toll, and now there is mainly resignation.
When the policeman came to their door with the bad news that they were now suspects, Gerry simply asked him to leave. “Why shoot the messenger? I felt that saying anything more was not going to change what happened,” he says.
Kate, however, cannot help replaying the circumstances that led to the child’s disappearance—the work, she is certain, of a mysterious abductor. “I will tell you what I haven’t told anyone,” says Jon Corner, a family friend. “In August, I was with Kate in Portugal. She told me, ‘I wish I could roll back time and go back to the day before Madeleine was abducted. I would slow down time. I would get a really good look around and have a really good think. And I’d think: Where are you? Who are you? Who is secretly watching my family? Because someone was watching my family very, very carefully. And taking notes.’ ”
“That’s a logical conclusion for anyone who knows anything about what happened to us,” Gerry says briskly. This is his first detailed and candid interview since being declared a suspect, and so great is his loathing of most journalists that it takes place in utter secrecy near his home, in Leicestershire. In a country inn lined with portraits of ladies in powdered wigs, a polite manager points the way to the back exit, in the event other reporters drop by.
While front-page stories about the McCanns sell newspapers—up to 30,000 extra copies a day—perhaps because they happen to be a handsome, prosperous couple wrecked by tragedy (“Let’s face it: if Kate were fat and spotty and aging, they wouldn’t be selling all these papers,” says Trish), the British media believe that sales don’t really soar unless the couple is accused of villainy. “The last equivalent story was probably the Second World War,” observed a columnist for The Guardian. When, in November, Panorama, a BBC newsmagazine show, bought the same five-month-old footage of the McCanns (shot by a family friend) as ABC’s 48 Hours and repackaged it, viewership rose by 2 million, to 5.3 million.
In this search for villainy, the British tabloids are aided by the most unlikely ally: the Portuguese police, who are often the sources for some of the more outrageous allegations, unquestioningly swallowed by the Portuguese media.
“No, the leak about [Madeleine’s] DNA not being compatible with Gerry’s is not malicious, not at all,” a Portuguese journalist tells me sarcastically, referring to the who’s her daddy? headline, before turning deadly earnest. “It is revenge, pure and simple. Because the British attack our police as stupid. And backward. And incompetent. Because they say we are a primitive country and our laws are primitive!”
The Portuguese police “don’t want to be portrayed as a leather-jacketed, swearing bunch of fat, greasy villains who beat people up with rubber hoses,” one of the most active in the McCann camp tells me, and yet this is exactly how they have been portrayed.
Thus the Madeleine frenzy, which began as a story about bad judgment and irretrievable loss, has spun out of control, each day bringing fresh allegations, outrage, celebrity alliances—the Pope! J. K. Rowling! David Beckham!—and sensational links to power. At the E.U. summit in mid-October, for instance, British prime minister Gordon Brown, who had regularly been in touch with the McCanns, raised the Madeleine issue with Portuguese prime minister José Sócrates, urging “proper cooperation between the British and Portuguese police.” Gerry’s allies were jubilant.
And yet this high-powered strategy has also backfired. There appears to be massive resentment among the Portuguese. Although Madeleine’s photo is posted at Heathrow, it is nowhere to be found at Faro, the airport nearest the seaside village from which she disappeared.
Shortly after the McCanns hired a team of Spanish private investigators, in early October, word leaked out that the Portuguese police had stopped their search for Madeleine (at least temporarily). Nothing the parents have done has worked out right.
“The McCanns have completely changed the way we now look for missing children—it used to be you go to the police; now it means you go to the media, to celebrities,” says a disapproving Scotland Yard specialist in abused children.
“There are many cases in the world of children who have disappeared,” Portuguese national police chief Alípio Ribeiro recently complained. “But none have this external component, this massive public exposure, that gives it a fantastic, almost surreal dimension.”
The McCanns are both reviled and pitied, occasionally in the same breath. Madeleine’s face has appeared on movie screens, on cell phones, in e-mails, in airports, in health centers, and on British Airways planes. “So the strategy we used,” says Gerry, “well—somehow something caught the public’s imagination.” But it has not caught their daughter’s abductor.
The McCanns are also fairly sure their phones are monitored not only by the British police, who are waiting to see if a kidnapper calls, but also by Portuguese authorities. “It’s quite possible,” acknowledges Gerry’s older brother, John McCann, a pharmaceutical salesman who lives in Glasgow. “Because there’s information that’s been appearing in the press that you’d have to think, How did that get into the public domain? Because it wasn’t us releasing it. Every now and again, amidst all the speculation and rumor and outright lies, there’s been a grain of truth.”
“What happened in the last two months has clearly polarized people,” Gerry says slowly. “People can support you in your darkest hours, and in our case the darkest hour was of course when Madeleine went missing.”
And now, I wonder, with all the polarization?
“And now it is just”—he swallows hard—“bleak.”
Praia da Luz (population 1,000) is regularly described, with reason, as “a little Britain.” The same could be said of the entire Algarve, the southern Portuguese province in which the village is situated, which was partially ransacked in the late 16th century by the Earl of Essex. That tradition is now carried on by more than 50,000 British property owners in the area. Signs are in English, and every other commercial establishment proclaims itself an “Irish pub,” which means Carling beer and, on Sundays, shoulder of lamb and “Yorkie pud.” At 10 o’clock one very warm morning, four beet-red Englishmen sampling lagers in an outdoor café steps away from the turquoise sea are being scolded by their desperate guide: “You are always drunk before noon!”
New security guards, in burgundy berets and black military pants, now ring portions of the Ocean Club resort, where the McCanns were staying until mid-September. The village is quite desolate. The heart went out of it last May.
For almost a week last spring, the McCanns’ holiday routine was unvarying. After high tea, at 5:30 p.m., Madeleine and her two-year-old twin siblings, Sean and Amelie, would be retrieved by their parents from the kids’ club. Two hours later the children were put to bed back in their own room in an unprepossessing corner villa, its two entrances bordered by terra-cotta tile and a small white wall covered with pink bougainvillea. The back door, reached by a gate and a flight of steps, was left unlocked.
Then the McCanns would join seven friends at the resort’s tapas bar, close by the swimming pool, an area described by Gerry as “like being at the bottom of your garden.… You could see our apartment from where we were.” You can indeed glimpse the very top part. However, in order to see anyone entering through the back, one would have to dine standing up. The other entrance to the villa is not visible at all.
At intervals, members of the group (since dubbed “the Tapas Nine”) checked on one another’s children, although this method was imperfect. The night of May 3, Gerry checked on Madeleine, fast asleep in her pink-and-white Winnie the Pooh pajamas, and the twins, at 9:05, but the friend who next checked on the McCann children said afterward that he did not actually see Madeleine.
Thus the most important clue to the mystery of Madeleine’s disappearance was initially ignored. At around 9:15, another friend, Jane Tanner, emerged from her own villa to see a white man in beige trousers—five feet six, brown hair (longer in the back), and perhaps 35, she later told the police. In his arms he cradled a child wearing pink-and-white pajamas.
It wasn’t until Kate walked into the villa at 10 and felt a sickening breeze—the front window had been jimmied open—that she realized something terrible had happened. “The scene was stark,” Gerry tells me. On one bed the twins lay sleeping. In the next lay only the plush cat toy Madeleine was never without. That was when Kate came out screaming, “Madeleine has gone!”
In subsequent moments, she seems to have added, “They’ve taken her! We have let her down!” This was the version Sheena Rawcliffe, the managing director of The Resident, a local English-language newspaper, quickly learned, albeit secondhand, and the phrasing puzzled her. What was meant by “They”? It was the first element to ignite suspicion in the Portuguese press, but not the only one. What kind of parents would go out to eat and leave their small children alone in the room, especially in a country where restaurants welcome children, the local press wondered. Why didn’t they hire one of the resort’s babysitters? What child can actually fall asleep at 7:30 p.m.? In Portugal, as in many Latin countries, bedtime for even small kids might be as late as 10.
Moreover, Rawcliffe says, “If my child were missing, I wouldn’t think right away he was abducted. I would think, Where has the little bugger gone?”
But the McCanns were certain of their suspicions. “Wee Madeleine knows better than to wander away,” another of Gerry’s sisters, Philomena McCann, recalls him saying. And besides, the child was too small to open the window and crawl out. Gerry spent the night scouring the village for his daughter, and talking on his cell phone to relatives.
“Well, never in my life had I heard my wee brother so devastated,” says Philomena, who lives in Ullapool, in northern Scotland. “He was absolutely wailing on the phone. He was incomprehensible at times.”
“It’s all my fault, because Kate and I went out to dinner,” he wept to Philomena, who was stunned. She adds, “My wee brother is not a person who panics—he and Kate are very measured people, usually. That’s when I knew how bad things were.”
At 4:30 in the morning, when the search was temporarily called off, the McCanns found a policeman by their door, smoking, seemingly unworried. “Help me, please help me!” a frantic Kate sobbed into her cell phone to a childhood friend. The police had done nothing overnight, she added; the couple were all alone with no one to turn to.
That same morning, Gerry’s sister Trish phoned the BBC in Glasgow and sent photos of the beautiful little girl who had vanished from the resort. “The day after Madeleine was abducted, as Kate and I left the police station, there were 150 journalists in front of it,” Gerry recalls. “Alex Woolfall [the McCanns’ first spokesperson] explained to me that either I interact with the media or we would be hounded by the press.”
Actually, reporters noticed, Gerry seemed to interact avidly. Within a week, the media ranks in the tiny village swelled to 200: Dutch, German, Spanish, and Portuguese nudging their British and American counterparts. Until very recently, Sky News covered the story in such depth that the top three offerings on its Web site were “UK News,” “Madeleine,” and “World News.” The Portuguese police had never seen anything like it.
In the months following the child’s disappearance, the supposed incompetence of the Portuguese police was the subject of many devastating articles in the press, with an attitude wryly summed up by the Scotland Yard detective as “Johnny Dago is not good enough to do it.” This was at the precise time that, as Gerry explains, “we were relying on the Portuguese to find Madeleine, and it was not helpful at all.” However, since the media were, without a doubt, fed in part by the McCann camp, it is hard to know whom to blame.
It wasn’t true, for instance, that there were no fingertip searches performed at the villa, as reported by one British tabloid, or that the shutters were contaminated in the investigation, as reported by another; two on-the-scene reporters claim that personnel in Portuguese C.S.I. uniforms were seen taking fingerprints from those shutters early on, and then dispatched them to the Instituto Nacional de Medicina Legal in Porto and Coimbra. Nor did police treat Madeleine’s disappearance lightly.
As Woolfall explains, when he arrived a day and a half after Madeleine had vanished: “There were lots of police, I have to say. There is a big emphasis placed on children and family in Portugal. There was no doubt there was a massive effort trying to find her. And you had Portuguese policemen canceling leave and working over weekends.”
On the other hand, the moment police investigate a crime in Portugal, the country’s judicial-secrecy laws basically shroud everything—facts, names, suspects, witnesses—in a blanket of silence. Police press conferences are almost nonexistent; information is usually obtained only through leaks. (In Madeleine’s case, the police appointed a spokesperson, but after being kept clueless by his colleagues, he ultimately resigned.) There are other drawbacks—for example, Portugal has no DNA data banks or national missing-child alerts.
Moreover, Praia da Luz is not the ideal venue for a topflight criminal investigation. Gonçalo Amaral, who for five months was the senior detective in the case, is himself involved in another legal battle. He is accused of covering up a beating by his subordinates of a Portuguese woman who was ultimately convicted of killing her own child. Locally there are no cadaver dogs trained in tracking human blood or remains; after Madeleine vanished, local residents actually used household pets under the guidance of police with drug-sniffing dogs. “Let me tell you, I know a lot about detective dogs, and I don’t know why the police would want anyone bringing their pets to assist,” says Robert Tucker, who runs a New York security firm.
“One of the things the McCanns very much wanted was a forensic sketch of the man the witness saw carrying the girl wearing pink-and-white pajamas,” recalls Justine McGuinness, an early spokesperson for the McCanns. In the vital first months, their pleas went unanswered. In addition, newspapers claimed the sheets on Madeleine’s bed were never sent for analysis.
Besides, by May 15 the police (with the help of a suspicious British journalist from the Sunday Mirror) believed they had found their man: Robert Murat, a mild, slightly plump Englishman of 33 with a detached retina who lives with his mother in a large villa with a lush garden three minutes from the resort. He was declared an arguido—a status he holds to this day, along with the McCanns—and brought in to the police station for 19 hours of interrogation, say his relatives, with no food or sleep.
There, I learn on good authority, three of the Tapas Nine were put into a room with Murat, and each of them identified him as a man they’d seen hanging about the resort in the hours after Madeleine vanished. One of the witnesses, Fiona Payne, told police she’d actually seen him behind the McCanns’ villa that night, and recalled his “dodgy eye.” Another, Russell O’Brien, claimed Murat had said he spoke Portuguese as well as English, which is in fact the case. The McCann friends were not alone in their suspicions. By late December it emerged that three other witnesses claimed to have seen Murat near the McCanns’ villa apartment the night of the abduction.
It is part of the odd dynamic of this story that when I phone Sally Eveleigh, Murat’s cousin, who also lives in Praia da Luz, her first remark is that she cannot utter a syllable about Murat without the O.K. of her British press agent, the famously rambunctious Max Clifford. And when his blessing is secured, her second is: “Wonderful, darling, see you shortly. Robert can’t talk to you, because he’s an arguido. But we’ll have a bit of a party, won’t we?”
When I arrive at her massive house, lined with rosy tile and Moroccan rugs, Sally greets me in floor-length blue voile trimmed with pretty stones. And the party includes Murat: five feet 10 inches, dark-haired, wearing beige trousers, serving us tea, wine, and cigarettes.
“All I can say,” says Murat, “is that I am innocent. There is no way I was at the resort that night. Full stop. I was in my mother’s kitchen until one a.m. Yes, we are a kitchen kind of family. I spent the night at the house.” As an arguido he cannot reveal more. But he does drive me around and point out the major landmarks of the case. “That’s the apartment from which Madeleine vanished,” he says. “That’s my mother’s villa.” The police ransacked the place four months ago and came up with nothing.
‘I wish I hadn’t gone to the tapas bar. I wish I’d stayed in the apartment that night. I wish I’d stayed in the room when I checked on her five minutes longer,” Gerry recalls thinking in the days that followed his child’s disappearance. The world, he says, was “all black, with maybe tiny points of light.” The company that owns the resort sent Alan Pike, a trauma counselor, over from Britain, and he spoke to the couple every day for two weeks. Initially, the counselor tells me, he found the couple “catatonic.” They were certain Madeleine was dead.
But pessimism, the counselor knew, inhibits action. Moreover, he adds, “they still needed to be a mother and father to two other children.”
“Remind yourself of the evidence: there is nothing yet to demonstrate that Madeleine has died,” Pike told the McCanns. It’s time, he added, to take control of the things you can.
Gerry felt re-invigorated by such advice. “We can’t cry our eyes out every day, because that’s not helping,” he says. “So after three days I picked myself up—quicker than Kate could.”
Indeed, Woolfall recalls Gerry’s saying shortly after he arrived, “My biggest fear is that this could be a weekend story: british girl taken from portuguese resort—a terrible story! And then that’s it.” The fickleness of the media, Woolfall adds, had Gerry worried. They might so easily “move on to something else,” Gerry told him. Gradually a strategy was devised: stories, pictures, and exotic destinations were woven together, permanently enrapturing the press and luring it into a long, sleepless vigil.
By the end of May, an audience with the Pope had been arranged through the Westminster office of Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor. The couple and a pool of reporters flew direct from Praia da Luz to the Pontiff in a Learjet belonging to the British billionaire Sir Philip Green.
Other celebrities were just as carefully selected and eagerly appealed to: J. K. Rowling, in part, Gerry explains, because the Harry Potter author had lived in Portugal for a time. Manchester United star Cristiano Ronaldo, because he is Portuguese, and Gerry used to play soccer himself. David Beckham—another Gerry idea—who was living in Spain at the time of Madeleine’s disappearance. Experts in child abduction had informed the McCanns that Madeleine was very likely still somewhere on the Iberian Peninsula.
The media were constantly sought out. Reporters followed the McCanns on trips to Washington (where then U.S. attorney general Alberto Gonzales met with the couple); to Morocco—just in case Madeleine had been taken there—where they met with Charki Draiss, director-general of national security; and to Amsterdam, where the McCanns had once lived. If the networks needed fresh footage, they would be told the exact time the McCanns might be walking to church in Praia da Luz.
So, as it turned out, this was not a weekend story. As time went by, Gerry explains that although “grief washes over you—it’s like a big wave, mostly I was able to beat it back.” The industry he poured into the search jolted him out of depression.
But Kate wasn’t buoyed. From time to time, she would turn to friends and offer a wistful half-plea—“I hope whoever has Madeleine is giving her blankets … is feeding her properly … is keeping her warm.” Not really absorbing at first, her confidant explains, “what kind of person this was.”
Eventually, though, the probable nature of the abductor was brought home to her in the most explicit and horrifying way. Never talk about Madeleine’s preferences to the press, British police warned the McCanns, because whatever Madeleine most loves—a favorite cartoon, say—could be used as a tool for manipulation by her kidnapper.
Madeleine’s mother was also warned not to weep in public. “That was one of the things they were told right from the beginning,” McGuinness reveals. “Don’t show any emotion, because whoever took the child could get off on that, and take it out on the child. Or the abductor might find tears stimulating in some way. Appalling when you’re being told not to show any emotion in public and your daughter is abducted!”
Appalling and, as it turned out, dangerous for the couple. The P.R. campaign was actually backfiring, regarded by many as slick and, given the gravity of the McCanns’ loss, at times downright strange. “I always wanted to meet the pope,” a British reader e-mailed The Resident newspaper, “and now I know how.” Portuguese police made note of Kate’s seeming stoicism in front of the press—the tearless face. They also marveled at the powerful allies the McCanns had accumulated.
“Why are these people able to put together the biggest media campaign ever, from the Pope to the White House?” asks Paulo Reis, a Portuguese freelance journalist who writes a blog about Madeleine, and with considerable authority: he seems to have excellent contacts in law enforcement. “Why are they all coming out strongly defending the McCanns? Who are the McCanns?” he wonders.
Kate and Gerry McCann are both Roman Catholic, the children of carpenters, and products of Scottish medical training, but there the resemblance ends. Gerry, the youngest of five children, is by far the more ambitious and confident of the couple, secure always in the knowledge, as his sister Philomena explains, “that he was absolutely the pet of the family.” As a result, his brother, John, tells me, he grew up “very sociable, always involved in clubs—football clubs, athletic clubs. He likes mixing with people. And like most of us in the family, quite competitive.”
Kate Healy, a deeply religious only child from Liverpool, once confided to her sister-in-law, “There were too many times when I’ve been alone,” and that solitude evidently left its mark. On meeting her in 1992 the boisterous McCanns found her, John recalls, “reserved.” (Although this reserve was apparently not impenetrable. At the University of Dundee, as the Mail on Sunday recently discovered, Kate’s nickname was “Hot Lips Healy,” and she was renowned, according to her yearbook, for leading friends astray during “alcoholic binges.” When asked about this recently by a friend, Kate groaned and said, “My God! I hope they don’t get the rest of that part of my life.”)
At first, she was not deeply impressed by Gerry, refusing even to go out with him. In 1996, she moved to New Zealand to work as an anesthesiologist in a hospital, and it was only when an impassioned Gerry followed her that the family realized the relationship was serious. They married in 1998 and settled initially in Glasgow.
There Kate shifted career course, abandoning anesthesiology for the regular hours and relatively modest pay of a general practitioner. “To be honest, I don’t think Kate is ambitious,” Philomena says. “The career wasn’t as important to her as having a family.”
That family, however, took years to materialize. There were two rounds of in-vitro fertilization, culminating in Madeleine: “As close to a perfect child as you can get,” says Gerry. Less than two years later another round resulted in the twins—born after a very difficult pregnancy, during which, Philomena says, Kate was confined to her bed for months and almost lost them.
“To be perfectly honest, Kate continued to work as a doctor simply for the economics of it,” says Philomena. “Even though she ended up working only one and a half days a week, that money made a big difference to them. Gerry could have managed to support them all, but it would have been difficult, a stretch for him.”
The press has regularly portrayed the couple as far wealthier. Huge emphasis has been put on the large, $1.2 million neo-Georgian-style house in Rothley, Leicestershire, into which the couple moved in 2006.
“People may think, Ooh, these rich middle-class McCanns,” John says bitterly. “Well, these rich middle-class McCanns have studied for donkey’s years, made loads of sacrifices, and put themselves through a lot of inconvenience to get where they are just now. For Catholics, we’ve got a strong Protestant work ethic!” He shakes his head when asked about how things used to be for the couple.
“Everything going for them, perfect family. And as we all know from great bits of literature, sometimes the fates intervene to ruin perfection,” he says. But philosophy fails him when he thinks of Madeleine. “This is our wee girl. My niece! Their darling daughter, for Christ’s sake!”
“So beautiful, astonishingly bright, and I’d have to say very charismatic. She would shine out of a crowd,” family friend Jon Corner says of the child. “So—God forgive me—maybe that’s part of the problem. That special quality. Some bastard picked up on that.”
As months went by, the McCanns turned desperate. There they were, still in Praia da Luz, with nothing to show for it. “We had been trying to persuade Kate to come home,” recalls Gerry’s sister Trish. “But they lived in dread that if Madeleine turned up in Portugal and they weren’t there, it would be horrible.”
Although initially reluctant, the McCanns finally informed the media of Madeleine’s unique right eye—a risky revelation. Whoever had taken the child now held a universally recognizable little girl.
Gerry understood that. But, he says, the iris “is Madeleine’s only true distinctive feature. Certainly we thought it was possible that this could potentially hurt her or”—he grimaces—“her abductor might do something to her eye.… But in terms of marketing, it was a good ploy.”
On the 100th day of her disappearance, however, the marketing of Madeleine came to a halt. On August 11, the police spokesman, Olegário de Sousa, gave an interview to the BBC in which he said clues had been found “that could point to the possible death of the little child.”
The McCanns were livid. They had entertained this idea, but their fears had been partially allayed during their July trip to see the U.S. attorney general. “We learned in Washington that there are plenty of cases where peoples’ children were discovered after two years!” says McGuinness. “And some cases where people’s children were discovered after four years.” That, she adds, is what “kept Kate going.”
But the police felt they had good reason to suspect the child was dead. They had borrowed a pair of springer spaniels trained by South Yorkshire police to smell particles of blood so minute they are invisible to humans. The animals seemed to have picked up the scent of a corpse on Kate’s trousers and on the key fob of the couple’s rental car. (The McCann camp claimed that as a doctor Kate had been near corpses, but since she is a general practitioner the press scoffed at the explanation.)
More than any other evidence, it was the surprising reaction of the dogs from Britain that led Portuguese police to declare the couple official suspects. The investigators thought they had other clues: there was DNA possibly belonging to Madeleine in the McCann car, rented 25 days after the child vanished, but as that car had at various times contained the missing girl’s hairbrushes and sandals, and the soiled diapers of her siblings, the evidence is not wholly conclusive. Moreover, forensic DNA specialist Nigel Hodge, who has investigated more than 1,000 criminal cases, tells me that, in very rare instances, “it is possible for sisters to have the same DNA profile.”
In mid-September, Kate and Gerry were brought in separately to a dingy four-story police station for questioning—Kate first, for 11 hours, and on the next day 7 more. The questioning was interminable, says Trish, who was at the station, in part because “there was no interpreter. At one point there were six people in front of Kate—cops and a lawyer—and they were all just speaking Portuguese!”
Finally, she adds, Kate was given a long list of interpreters, many of whom lived 200 miles away in Lisbon, and told to choose. “Kate was furious at that as well,” Trish recalls.
Over and over again, I am told by a McCann family member, Kate was shown footage of the dogs. It was the animals’ reaction to the scent inside the McCanns’ rental car that particularly interested the authorities.
But the police had more on their minds, as they informed Kate. From what they’d read of her diary, she was clearly a stressed-out mother. Her children were difficult to put to sleep, weren’t they? They needed sedatives to sleep, perhaps? Maybe that’s how Madeleine died? Will you confess, they asked.
Then the police went over a passage from the borrowed Bible found in Kate’s villa: verses in the second Book of Samuel, Chapter 12. The page containing the passage was crumpled. The verses in question deal with the illness and death of King David’s child, a tragedy that occurs after David “scorned the Lord.” Obviously such a page had meaning for her, the police said.
To compound matters, one of Kate’s lawyers, Carlos Pinto de Abreu, relayed to her that if she confessed to having inadvertently killed her daughter and disposing of the corpse, things might go easier. Her jail term might even be as little as two years.
“I’m not going to fucking lie!” Kate barked. The next day she stopped answering a fair number of police questions. “She had already answered some of them,” says Trish. “And her lawyer told her she didn’t have to answer questions.”
“As I suppose you know,” Pike, the trauma counselor, tells me, “the police told her during the interviews that her other two children might be taken away.”
It was time to go home, Gerry decided by September 9. But not alone.
“When Gerry and Kate were about to go home to Britain, Gerry phoned Sky News and said, ‘We’re going home on EasyJet, be on it!’ ” recalls Esther Addley, who has written incisively about the McCanns for The Guardian.
On the couple’s return, there was further pain to contend with. More than 17,000 people had signed a petition suggesting that Leicestershire social services investigate them for leaving their three small children completely alone in the villa.
‘At the time we did it, it was not irresponsible!” Gerry snaps. It is the one subject on which he is quite defensive, arguing first one way, then conceding the opposite: “Of course we feel guilty about not having been there, and that is just something we have to deal with for the rest of our lives. You are not asking anything we don’t think about on a daily basis. We live this 24 hours a day.” His lips twist as he struggles for composure. “But I can’t talk to you about the details of what happened. I live under threat from the Portuguese—if I do talk—of two years’ imprisonment.” He smiles grimly. “It seems to be the same sentence as disposing of a child’s body.”
The mayor of tiny Praia da Luz, Manuel Domingues Borba, announced just a few weeks ago that he for one “would never leave my children sleeping alone and go to dinner in a foreign country.” The McCanns, in his opinion, are “guilty of negligence at the very least.” The Portuguese police, under chief Alípio Ribeiro, are reviewing the case. Some of their detectives, I am told, will likely be flying to Britain soon to re-interview the McCanns, although no official request has yet been made. Should the McCanns actually be charged and tried, their legal strategy will be to focus, in part, on what they claim is the unreliability of evidence turned up by the dogs and to try to move the trial to Britain from Portugal. The McCanns live in perpetual limbo. There is no exit.
By early January there was more bad news: Correio da Manhã, a Portuguese newspaper, claimed that the Policia Judiciária were about to deliver an interim report suggesting the McCanns were “prime suspects” after all, who could have accidentally killed Madeleine and then disposed of her body. Or, the report added, perhaps the child was in fact abducted. In other words, eight months after the little girl vanished, the police still know nothing.
Lately, word has leaked out that the McCanns feel abandoned even by Gordon Brown, once their close ally. Their spokesman doesn’t quite deny this. “That was one of our backers who said it. We would never be that impolitic,” he says. “But it is true that we have requested a meeting with the prime minister to show him the strength of our case, to explain Kate and Gerry’s innocence—and yet all we’ve been offered is a medium-level-consular meeting, which we rejected.”
Occasionally their $1,200-an-hour lawyer Angus McBride, whose salary is defrayed by Virgin founder Sir Richard Branson, Scottish businessman Stephen Winyard, and Brian Kennedy, a multi-millionaire rugby-team owner, drops in on the British tabloids to protest headlines such as portuguese paper smear: “kate killed madeleine as gerry played tennis.”
For Kate, this is all too much. At nights, as her mother recently informed one newspaper, she awakes and thinks Madeleine has come home. While her husband and I talk, she ducks into the local Catholic church, unable, despite her earlier resolve, to face a single question.
Kate is fragile, I say to Gerry.
“That is undoubtedly true,” he concedes. “It’s very difficult to describe this situation. One month, three months, five months, five and a half months. And I know now that, probably, the chances of getting Madeleine back are slim. You know, it’s difficult. Very difficult.” He swallows hard. “You might never see her again. But still you have the hope. Still.”
On Sunday he will join his despairing wife in church, even though, as Gerry puts it, “I am not the most religious person in the world.” The whole McCann family is going to church more often, for that matter, even his skeptical older brother.
“What would you do when you’re desperate?” says John. “You start to ask the big questions again: Why does this happen?”
And?
“And,” he says wearily, “I think there’s probably still no God.”
98 comments:
Foolish Gerry, just thought the press were there to be abused, never seemed to occur they may be more concerned for the abused:
“The McCanns have completely changed the way we now look for missing children—it used to be you go to the police; now it means you go to the media, to celebrities,” says a disapproving Scotland Yard specialist in abused children.
“There are many cases in the world of children who have disappeared,” Portuguese national police chief Alípio Ribeiro recently complained. “But none have this external component, this massive public exposure, that gives it a fantastic, almost surreal dimension.”
and of all this so called support from the British Government who now require him and his libel lawyer to appear before a Commons Select Committee:
Lately, word has leaked out that the McCanns feel abandoned even by Gordon Brown, once their close ally. Their spokesman doesn’t quite deny this. “That was one of our backers who said it. We would never be that impolitic,” he says. “But it is true that we have requested a meeting with the prime minister to show him the strength of our case, to explain Kate and Gerry’s innocence—and yet all we’ve been offered is a medium-level-consular meeting, which we rejected.”
I think this does confirm, Kate could not face these interviews and is tortured by the loss of Madeleine, she clings to hope she may come home, what did Gerry do with her?
For Kate, this is all too much. At nights, as her mother recently informed one newspaper, she awakes and thinks Madeleine has come home. While her husband and I talk, she ducks into the local Catholic church, unable, despite her earlier resolve, to face a single question.
Kate is fragile, I say to Gerry.
“That is undoubtedly true,” he concedes.
Can we better understand that comment from Kate at police interview:
"if the investigation thinks so"
Bloody Hell
“But it is true that we have requested a meeting with the prime minister to show him the strength of our case, to explain Kate and Gerry’s innocence—and yet all we’ve been offered is a medium-level-consular meeting, which we rejected.”
They want to meet with The Prime Minister to show him Kate and Gerry McCann are innocent and have rejected a meeting with someone less important...
Sorry when did the law change and we could go to any minister and tell them how innocent we are and tell them what we want them to do about it???
I believe Gerry and his family will firmly put Kate in the frame for whatever happend when the need arises and if Kate had killed her she must have something big over Gerry to make him want to help cover it all up...
Photographs do not show the whole picture by any means and Kate looks scared in the first few days but to look as joyful as she has since she does not look like a woman who is scared to death of her partner she looks nervous when meeting the pope (I am not Catholic but if I met the Pope someone I have no thoughts for at all I still think I would feel uncomfortable if I was lying to him)...
As for Kate's bruises as I said last night if I was hurting one of my children my Husband would do anything to make me stop grabbing me by the wrists to stop me would not be excesive and if I fought back and was struggeling I could do myself all kinds of damage...
I would do the same if he went for one of them anything to make him stop...
Maybe they did over sedate her and they both know how much trouble they would be in and he has grabbed her to stop her throwing a tantrum like she did when the PJ dared make them Arguidos...
No Idea but as a Mother I would never recover from the loss of one of my Daughters and although time heals if I thought they were dead somewhere or in the hands of a Peadophile ring I would not rest until the day I died if they were not found. I really dont think 9 days later on an emotional day when they would have turned 4 I could have managed a smile even a forced one in fact I doubt I could have got out of bed...
Kate never bothered to look for Madeleine but wants us all to belive she is working very hard? Doing what? Reading the interviews but is she doing it to find Maddie or to see if they have been caught out???
Kate had her chance to answer questions and she did not take it if Gerry was that dangerous she did not think of the Twins once she could have had them taken somewhere safe and told the PJ everything and as a Dr (even a battered one) she would know that there was not a chance anyone would be hostile towards her in fact she would have become the poor Mother she wanted to be and would have had her own victim status....
I dont know what happend but whatever it was they both have something big to hide and there is only one thing I can think of that would make others in the group help them and if that is the reason why the bloody hell are they still allowed to have custody of their children...
If Peadophilia has anything to do with this case then the children need to be kept safe...
If it has nothing to do with this evil then why is no one helping Madeleine?
God forbid she really was taken each adult on that holiday has condemed her to death if she was by not being honest and refusing to help the PJ...
Hiya Hope
I recall that suggestion being made of a meeting with the PM to set out their legal case and being outraged, talking about the separation of powers in the UK and that what they were requesting was a member of the Executive adopt a Judicial function and start interfering in a criminal case, which quite obviously GB would not do. It is like they just want new legal rules to be created for them.
It was exactly the same when they went to the High Court, Family Division to demand the police criminal investigation file against them. No one being investigated in UK gets a police file or information about an ongoing investigation against them. That is our law and it is extraordinary the way they tried to manipulate it. I wonder, will they be having a Commons Select Committee next to look at how a couple of criminal suspects used the proceeds of fraud to pay for lawyers to try and circumvent a criminal case against them? They bloody well ought to do!
There are some interesting concurrent investigations going on by Parliamentary Select Committees, one on Whitehall leaks /whistleblowers and another looking at employing personnel to senior positions in Whitehall from the private sector rather than directly from existing civil service staff. Looking at this, you just cannot help but wonder how much the Mcs /Clarence have seriously upset the government. I think the knives are out!
I do agree Kate does not exactly look scared subsequently but look at the pic at the top right of this blog, there is a silent fury in that look. And what would she get if she failed to play her role, I really dread to think, and not just in terms of a good hiding. Men like him are usually far more emotionally cruel. If Maddie is still alive, he may even be taunting her, behave yourself and one day I might make her re-appear, I am not promising I can track her down now, but..
I think Gerry has always been pretty smug there will simply be no evidence that they killed Maddie and I frankly cannot really see that he did. So he knows he could not be prosecuted for that, but whatever he did, the police will know, I am sure of that. Remember that police memo I posted about David Payne and how closely he was questioned about the fact he had just chosen to go and work in a different area! Not just away from Gerry McCann but probably other people who know him. It can be a peripatetic role for such people. they were close mates and worked together prior to that and so did ROB and MO until they also decided to move area. This has a certain pattern to it that is familiar.
I echo all the things you are saying about Kate and this is why I have sometimes demonstrated a lot of fury towards her myself. But we are just not like her, thank goodness!
xx
Morning Viv, Hope,
Viv thank you for Judy Bachrach’s 2008 article. Of course reading through it there are a number of discrepancies - a major one being the windows were jemmied – which of course is not true and misleading – but a major indicator, if it were true, in a stranger abduction.
The dogs, sorry Viv I know you do not go along with this theory but just thinking it through. I’m rather of the opinion that Keela’s finding can be discounted to a certain extent as although I believe she was alerting to human blood, the blood was down graded and contaminated due to cleaning. Therefore there is not conclusive evidence that it was Madeleine’s blood she was alerting to.
Eddie we are told is believed to have alerted to the scent of a cadaver. This of course does not mean he was alerting to Madeleine’s cadaver. So in my mind there are left only four possibilities for his alert.
1. The police frustrated at a lack of evidence against the parents, but believing they were involved, purposely contaminated areas in and close to apartment 5A - to get the parent to confess.
2. Kate’s explanation of how that scent could have got there – transference from her clothing contaminated with the death scent due to her occupation which involved recent contact with dead patients.
3. Madeleine died in the apartment and her body was later hidden away from the apartment.
4. Eddie gave false alerts in the apartment and flowerbeds outside the apartment and was alerting to something quite different.
Gerry’s sister tells us that during Kate’s difficult pregnancy with the twins she had to spend months in bed and nearly lost them. We were told in a different article with Gerry’s sister saying that Kate, whilst living in Amsterdam, was very unhappy and isolated whilst Gerry was working. Could all this be a prerequisite for a depressive illness?
We are also told in this article that Kate was quiet and reserved. So opposites attract but is that a recipe for a lasting attraction? Then we have the picture of the fitness instructor LOL. She doesn’t look like a shrinking violet, more an outward going personality, like Gerry’s. Well I can see why Kate would get upset if Gerry spent all evening ignoring her and talking to this lady.
Bachrach tells us. “There are those, including a onetime close associate, who found him difficult and controlling, feeling he has the trademark arrogance and self-regard of many surgeons. And his judgment is certainly questionable.” We also know that he compartmentalises. I think with what Bachrach tells us along with his ability to compartmentalise clearly indicated that he could oversee a plan and carry it out to stage a stranger abduction and have the arrogance and ego to keep this pretence up. Kate on the other hand appears to have the less forceful personality and we know as a student she appears quite a heavy drinker, but was the drink used to mask stress factors? Is alcohol or any other mood repressor a factor in this case? Is Kate’s fragile condition caused by previous underlining illness exacerbated by guilt over her daughter or just a natural expression of loosing her daughter?
Sorry - many more questions than answers as usual.
Hope,
You highlight -
“But it is true that we have requested a meeting with the prime minister to show him the strength of our case, to explain Kate and Gerry’s innocence—and yet all we’ve been offered is a medium-level-consular meeting, which we rejected.”
Well the article tells us a close associate says of Gerry “he has the trademark arrogance and self-regard of a surgeon”. That’s obvious but I would go further and say they were all completely delusional if he thought the Prime Minister would personally deal with them over this matter.
Hiya Wiz
Yes there are many questions there and I will take just one of them the issue of dual diagnosis. It is frequently the case that people with underlying mental health problems abuse substances likes cannabis, cocaine and alcohol to try and mask the unpleasant symptoms of their illness. I think we all agree kate certainly appears to be ill now. The feeling she gets according to her mother that Madeleine comes to her in the night. Yes I suppose it could be an extreme grief reaction but it could also be a psychotic reaction. Is she becoming so ill without proper treatment for depression this is happening or has she always had bipolar perhaps? The experience with Madeleine and then severe problems with pregnancy with the twins could have certainly created those problems extreme stress building to something much worse and on top of that married to man like Gerry McCann, but still it does not take me to where you are going. He was too practised and precise from the very first moments including handing those 6 x 4 pics to the police, getting down on his knees and wailing for the GNR, ringing ambassadors and PR advisers and government contact and god knows what else. He just could not have done all that just on the spur of the moment, on the spur of Kate just having killed Madeleine IMO. On top of that he displays all the classic symptoms of being a narcissist they are rare and very dangerous people. That is what I remain convinced he is. Look at the conduct of his brother and sister I am talking about Philo and John, not so much the others. Nasty people! That evil twisted smirk on John's face as he says, why are we spending so much time negating rumours, well yes, why indeed! Philo, they offered her a deal, which was just a lie as the solicitor pointed out the following morning but not before that fat horrible woman had put it on Sky etc, truly leaving no stone unturned and then her description of what she heard of Kate after being made an arguido screaming with fury and rage. She is a vile woman and was clearly scheming against Kate with a view to deflecting attention from her rotten brother and the one who really has a temper. We can see it top right, we have never seen that from Kate. We can also look at loads of witness statements. They like Kate, she was their friend, they did not have much to do with her once she got with Gerry or they just saw Kate. She was clearly popular and pleasant. No one says that about him!
Viv,
You have a point with the time factor. The scenario I and many others speculate on as a window of opportunity for the crime to have occurred is between 6pm and 8.30 - it is very tight. I think a number believe Madeleine died on the night of 2nd May to allow more time for a plan to be hatch. However, this means the crèche records and the nannies evidence would have to be proven completely unreliable and false. You speculate that this could have been pre-planned quite sometime before. Well all of these are possible but how to prove which, if any are right, I don’t know as a good argument can be forwarded for a number of scenarios. I think the only scenario that doesn’t fit, taking everything into account, is a stranger abduction.
I was just thinking about today’s thread and its reference to courting the press etc. Wow this seems a text book case of the ‘Streisand Effect’. Perhaps Clarence should take a course on how to avoid this as he clearly orchestrated this effect in his handling of the McCann case.
Hi everyone - some very interesting and well thought out posts.
Viv,
I must take issue with you here because I can't agree that Kate McCann has suddenly become the victim here. Madeleine is the victim!
I have never seen Kate looking ill or grief stricken. Remember her at the Amber Alert conference, it was she who did most of the talking. I think she is as much to blame as Gerry in all this and also that she is a lot stronger than she appears, as people who know her well have said.
Kate and Gerry McCann, as were their tapas friends, were irresponsible and reprehensible to go and and leave their children each evening. These children were all under school age and should never have been left alone for a moment.
If, for instance, Gerry had insisted they go out with their pals for a drink, Kate could have refused but she didn't, so she is equally to blame.
What sort of parents do that?
As for Kate being the quiet and reserved one, it's been often said that she was the life and soul of the party at university and very often drinking far too much.
As I've often said, I think the children were given sedatives to make them sleep - how many children fall straight to sleep at a given time, especially when on holiday. But there are other likelihoods of course.
It could be they drank far too much on the 2nd or 3rd May and had had enough of Madeleine crying and the neighbour, Mrs Fenn complaining, so either he or she gave her a wallop and poor Maddie died.
In my opinion, most men would cover up if their wives caused something like that, whereas a woman would probably be unlikely to cover up for a man who did the same. That could account for Kate's bruising.
And why are we discounting the dogs' evidence now when a few months back we were all agreed they had found evidence of Madeleine in the apartment of the McCanns, but no-one else's apartment, and also in their car only - we all saw it on the video so why start to discount that now. I know it's not solid evidence but it couldn't just be coincidence that they only reacted where the McCann family had been.
Goncalo Amaral had every right to print his book and tell his side of the story, when he was discharged from the PJ's because he was getting too near the truth of what happened that night. I can understand that the police may not want it published yet because of claims from the McCanns of unfair trial, although how they could be allowed to plead that in a Court when they have courted publicity from day 1 I don't know!
The arguidos have all made lots of money from the media, but the one who has suffered most after trying to find out the truth about what happened to Maddie, has lost his livelihood.
I know everyone is entitled to change their opinions, but it just seems to me that all we've been saying up to now is being thrown to one side and we are seen to be back tracking.
It was interesting to see that Alan Pike a trauma counsellor who Kate and Gerry went to said that he found the couple catatonic and they were then certain Madeleine was dead.
Just what changed their minds so quickly?
JUSTICE FOR MADELEINE!
Nx
Hi Nancy,
Just reading your post you say.
“It was interesting to see that Alan Pike a trauma counsellor who Kate and Gerry went to said that he found the couple catatonic and they were then certain Madeleine was dead.”
Well with these two it wouldn’t be out the realms of possibility, that they grabbed a medical book and researched on how best not to answer too many awkward questions – bingo - a catatonic ruse. These counselling sessions would have been very tricky for them.
I have to agree with you regarding men covering up for women but not women covering up for men when children are involved. Usually I would have thought this to be the case.
Hiya Nancy
Kate was covered in bruises and if you look at the original pictures I am referring to she does look extremely ill, quite demented in fact.
Women who have oppressive and violent husbands are victims and research confirms that in a very high percentage of cases where the man is violent to the wife he is also violent to the child. In one study they found that half these men had also sexually abused the child. This is a very complex situation IMO and Maddie was clearly the primary victim, Kate had a duty to protect her but women in this situation have often been so overborne by violence and control they no longer have the capacity to do that. It is hard for normal moms who have not experienced that to understand.
As for Kate being the life and soul of the party, many shy people with problems often drink a lot to achieve that effect. I think she has always had a substance abuse problem as Wiz suggested and that is indicative of an underlying problem in her makeup. We do not know what sort of upbringing she had, but she is a dysfunctional woman, there is no doubt about that.
xx
I would just add that whenever Kate has attempted free speech she has been stuck for words and faltering. In Brussels and following release from arguido status, she just read from a script. She has never displayed the arrogance and confidence of Gerry, they are very different people as she herself explains. He likes public speaking and taking centre stage, she does not. But I am thinking he will not like his public speaking much on Tuesday! Cannot wait!
xx
Wiz, if you read the law reports and journals as I have on cases such as this, it is almost invariably the man that is the abuser and primary offender and the woman the passive offender who failed to protect. They fail to protect because they are dysfunctional and in fear of the man and the authorities. Caught between the devil and the deep..
Hi Viv
Who knows what goes on behind closed doors in any house?
Kate looked frightend the day after it happend I agree...
But if she had been terified of Gerry and a gibbering wreck (which to be honest is how I would imagine any Mother would be if they thought their child was in the hands of a peadophile ring) I dont think she would have been out in the public eye and if Gerry needed to keep her quiet I dont think we would have seen much of him either...
All those coordinating outfits accesories and ribbons perfect make up and the many many photos of her looking like she had won the lottery would be hard for her to fake (In fact if she had managed to look ashamed for leaving her children and heartbroken Madeleine was missing in the first few days I would not be here now) but both of them did not ring true...
If she is a battered wife that is tragic but she has had more than enough chances to ask for help if Madeleine died because she did not do the right thing by her is she prepared to loose the twins as well?
I know what courage it takes for woman to leave their cowardly abusive partners but when their children are abused they cant stand back and just let it happen...
Kate seems to have one hell of a temper (well his family tell us she has) so who knows but if she can fly off the handle when someone dares to sugest she may know where Madeleine is and then when she is asked very simple questions and can sit through them refusing to answer it to me shows she is in control...
If she is a coke head or an alcoholic even as a result of abuse from a man she chooses to stay with then the Twins are in danger as it looks like there is no one who will defend them if something evil happends to them as it did to their sister...
I have every sympathy with battered woman but if they stand back and allow the abuse to go on to their children then the child becomes my concern as an Adult (even a damaged one) she has a choice a child does not have any choice but to endure...
Hi All
Viv
It was an extremely interesting thread yesterday from Stevo until Newperson etc., tried to derail it.
I think the post from Honeybear says it all for me.
Well said Honeybear.
Scroll down page.
link
Really good post from Honeybear on 3 As analysing the negative spin towards Kate McCann. Stevo has just added to that, Kate appearing as high as kite/nutty on the Jon Corner video, did him and Gerry give her something and then film her?
The interview that I mentioned in my last post (Sat Mar 07, 2009 11:02 pm) is one of the important ones....it was a possibly "pre - outside advice" interview....The McScmas were freer in their behaviour....which was very telling.
In that interview:
GM did not realise that he was placing his need to demonstrate that he is a loving husband towards KM....over and above showing his concern for his missing daughter....in his psyche in that moment he was giving himself a character reference..."I'm a nice loving person"...this was his priority.
Thus here he was thinking about how he looked in the media...not his daughter.
KM in the same interview did not care how she looked...indeed she looked a mess, full of anger, rage and hatred towards GM, and stupefied at events.
She was not interested or had an awareness of how she looked physically or more importantly how she came across in character....GM was very aware how his character was viewed.
Since then appearances had been very staged.....in particular we have seen much hand holding....but none of the excesses that were viewed in this interview .... no doubt GM was told "it did not look good".....
In addition to this there has been a carefully orchestrated stream of stories about the McScams .....that were meant to enlighten us about this couple.
Bearing in mind there are a multitude of press injunctions and d notices about this case....each story must be analysed as to why it was written and what was it meant to achieve in the publics perspective of the case ..... whenever we heard a story about either KM or GM... it came from one source only ....that ever friendly McScam press release machine!!
So here we go:
Story:
We are informed GM answers his questions
Conclusion:
KM looks very bad in this light as someone told her to keep quiet
Story:
We are informed that KM will be consulting Stella McCartny about clothes
Conclusion:
KM seems totally self obssessed behaving as if celebrity is more important to her than the loss of her child.
Story:
We are informed GM saved a person life on a plane
Conclusion:
He must be a great doctor / good person
Story:
GM has his wallet stolen
Conclusion:
GM is a victim again
Story:
We learn KM has started a diary...in which she writes she wanted to kill Murat
Conclusion:
KM is associated with killing
Story:
GM openly speaks of stories of KM killing MM in a rage in the Vanity Fair Interview
Conclusion:
KM is associated with killing of MM
Story:
We are informed of Hot lips Healy
Conclusion:
KM must be wild, sex crazed.
Story:
We are NOT informed of anything of GM past
Conclusion:
GM must be good as he doesn't seem to have anything in his past
Story:
Pictures are released of KM made up with high lights as if she has posed for some professional studio
Conclusion:
KM comes accross as concerned only with her image in the media
Story:
We are informed that MM questioned her mother only why she did not return from the restaurant the night before
Conclusion:
KM is a wicked mother...doing the same so it seems the night afterwards
Story:
We are shown photos / vidoes of GM alwas having a happy time with MM
Conclusion:
GM is a fun loving, kiddy adoring dad....always playing with the children.
Story:
We are informed that GM will be speaking for the couple
Conclusion:
KM by being silent looks suspicious, GM looks together whilst KM looks as if she can only be controlled by silence
Story:
We are informed of Kates difficulty in handling the children
Conclusion:
KM appears as if she cannot be in control
Story:
We are informed of Gerry looking at the last time at MM lying asleep and thinking how lucky he was
Conclusion:
No such loving thoughts of KM's about MM are released to the media
Story:
We are informed of Kates is to be photographed in a swimsuit
Conclusion:
KM appears completely doolaly
Story:
All of Gerry's relatives give him great character references
Conclusion:
KM is not given this type of coverage...she must the unstable one
Story:
We are informed of GM's travels all over the world and meetings with important people
Conclusion:
KM not associated with this type of "important" work....but associated by use of a photo to killing by the release of knife / birthday cake photo....contrast of characters
Story:
We are informed of KM wild temper tantrums in Portugal
Conclusion:
KM must have very little restraint
Story:
We are informed by philo of a plea deal during Kate's interview
Conclusion:
if such a deal was offered...KM must be the one who killed MM
Stories released into the Media by Team McScam.....who are meant to be representing both KM and GM.... say only positive things about GM and only negative things about KM.
KM would have had no control over their release....GM was handling it and CM putting the machine into action....KM was certainly being talked over by these two and used as their tool to feed a particular story into the media .
Now add to this all the interviews ....Team McScam would have encouraged KM to wear particular types of clothes, earings, have her hair / nails done....all this to reinforce the media stories about someone bessoted more about how she looks than her missing daughter.
And to this add the new behaviour that was to be exhibited on camera...that of GM holding her hand when on camera...GM was meant to look the level headed comforting type by these actions.
Appearance, media stories, silence....all cleverly assembled to create an approriately "strange and highly suspicious" impression of KM .
No wonder so many are convinced that KM did it.....Many of the stories are about her character....she was being set up by Team McScam....!
JMHO
Ah Di, great minds think alike:-)))
Newperson is making a real fool of herself, subtle it ain't!
xxx
Hiya Hope
I think if KATE admits to the authorities what I believe was going on, which she may not have always known about, she most certainly will lose the twins and to her she will then have lost everything. Maybe she wants to make sure the same thing does not happen to them?
It is difficult to interpret what goes on in such a troubled mind but I am sure she has her reasons. Even so, it is a great frustration to us all, I know. But if you were not really to blame and you thought you would have to go to jail and lose the other two as well, and you were very ill, that was the last thing in your world, how would you feel? It is very easy for us to just sit back and say oh go to the police and tell the truth, it is not so easy for Kate!
xx
Watch this video (the one where Kate is explaining why they left Maddie again) but try to avoid looking at Kate, just listen to what she is saying and watch him intently, his eyes dart back and forth, he keeps shooting his head around to look at her it is all so crucial she gets it right, he gulps, he licks his lips, he raises his hands, he frequently tries to interrupt when he feels she is not making that vital point quite how he wishes, why they left her again, and we just never thought someone would take her out of the bedroom. At this point he is almost jumping off the seat. He is an absolute picture of pure nervous guilt.
http://the3arguidos.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=35&t=29346&st=0&sk=t&sd=a&start=375
In another video on there he is bordering on getting argumentative and aggressive with the lovely Sandra Filgeiras "well I would like to know what offences the Portuguese Police are going to charge us with" I really think this proves my point! And it also proves how desperate he/they have always been to find out exactly which way the police were going to jump, because I feel Gerry has a real terror of them getting it right. He is one master manipulator alright, but he cannot help but show how incredibly anxious he is. Kate is much calmer and clearer in these interviews, she does not have that terrible fear and guilt that he is possessed with, that is why!
Hi Viv and DI
honeybear makes a good case for Gerry being in controll I think we have all said at some point that he and his family would drop her in it if it would get him off scott free...
It may not be easy for Kate to go to the police but she has lost one child already the saftey of the other two should come top of her agenda now no matter how scared she is...
Im not being funny but if she has a tale to tell involiving what Gerry did to her and how she has been terified of him with threats of what will happen to her and the twins if she tells I can see her comming out of this as a suffering saint and an example to all woman who are living with cowards...
Have you seen the film Nil By Mouth staring Kathy Burke??? Her abusive husband gets her drunk every day with pills and vodka in her OJ then spills whiskey on her so everyone thinks she is an old soak he tells everyone she is an alcoholic and he is being the loving husband whilst telling her she is ill and he is looking after her (or something like that)...
Maybe she was given something before Panorama it was bloody cold and callous they way she spoke...
If this is a possibility then shoulednt the police take Kate in for questioning whilst removing the Twins to a safe location (where they can let Kate see they are safe and out of harms way) and then question her again with the promise if she is scared they will do all they can to protect her and her children....
If they had locked Kate and Gerry up in PDL for neglect I would have thought it cold and heartless to throw Kate into Jail if she has been abused for years would also be very unkind but she has to help herself and her children if this is the case no one can do it for her...
years ago they used to interview children in foster homes in front of their loving foster familys and the child had to say all was well even if they were being abused. Now they talk to them alone to make sure they know they can talk freely...
Sureley there are lots of times Kate and the twins could be picked up with no interference from anyone who may want her to keep quiet???
Is New Person a pro then never really read her much???
xxx
Hi Viv
Snap I think is in order lol.
I think you mentioned Clarrie and why he was still around.
I think he knows Kate is extremely vulnerable and possibly feels sorry for her. Clarence must by now know exactly what he is dealing with personality wise. As I have said before Gerry boarding the train leaving Kate stood there with a case and Clarence looking very concerned said it all for me.
Let's also not forget Gerry storming out of the interview leaving Kate just sat there, nice one Gerry.
I hope Clarence has got a caring side to him and that is why he is still around, for Kates sake. However he has said to many unbelievable things in his statements that I am not so sure.
I think CM has said the most stupid things in defence of the McCann's and his presentaion of Tooth Man was awful (in fact I wondered at the time if he bought what he was trying to sell...
Maybe he can see what is going on FGS he used to work for the Government if he has any concerns at all there must be someone he can speak to???
If I accept Kate is a victim of Gerry the only question I have left is what are the others scared of and why are they not rushing to help Kate???
When you look at this report it is easy to see how the lies and disinformation were started by Philomena McCann, that the police believed Kate killed Madeleine. I remember being very shocked at the time and thinking what on earth makes them think that. The only thing in this report that tells you that is the disgusting Philomena McCann. When you look at what the "family spokesman" David Hughes says, it is a very different picture to the one painted by that evil woman. He says Kate and Gerry WERE BOTH ASKED THE SAME QUESTIONS.
I think an agenda is being pursued of continuing to try and blame Kate, insisting it was a killing and could be nothing else and insisting the police are no longer investigating this. There are certain people I have noticed who get very angry and aggressive if you try and say otherwise.. what I am saying, of course there is still an ongoing investigation and that I believe this involved sex offending and abduction arranged by Gerry McCann. There is also great anger if Mrs Justice Hogg gets mentioned. Very interesting!
Kate and Gerry McCann named as suspects
By Caroline Gammell in Portimao and Gordon Rayner
Last Updated: 1:20AM BST 09 Sep 2007
Previous
1 of 2 Images
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Gerry McCann emerges from the police station
Gerry McCann emerges from the police station
Madeleine McCann graphic
Interactive graphic: The disappearance of Madeleine
Kate and Gerry McCann could be charged with the "accidental" killing of their daughter Madeleine after Portuguese police challenged them directly whether they were behind the toddler's disappearance.
* Video: Gerry McCann re-interviewed
* The claims and the case for the defence
* Full coverage: The search for Madeleine McCann
In an extraordinary twist, Mrs McCann's family said detectives now believed she caused the four-year-old's death in their holiday apartment, then hid the body before returning a month later to dispose of it.
Shortly after midnight, Mr McCann emerged from the police station with his lawyer Carlos Pinto de Abreu who read out a short statement.
He said: "Kate and Gerry McCann have today both been declared arguidos with no bail conditions and no charges have been brought against them. The investigation continues."
Mr McCann stared straight ahead as his suspect status was announced and refused to answer questions from awaiting journalists. A crowd which had been attending a concert in the town square earlier listened to the announcement and several people gasped audibly.
A family spokesman David Hughes said Mr McCann had been asked the same questions as his wife but he refused to comment on when the couple would return to Britain. Mr McCann was driven away in a silver Audi to return to his wife.
It was claimed that police had offered Mrs McCann a "deal" of a two-year jail sentence if she confessed and told them where the body was.
The astonishing developments followed the discovery of blood in a car the McCanns hired four weeks after Madeleine's disappearance 128 days ago, which police believe proves Mrs McCann killed Madeleine.
The allegation was dismissed as "ludicrous" by Mrs McCann's husband Gerry, while her parents said the police investigation had become "a joke".
Mrs McCann was declared a formal suspect, or "arguida" by police, who spent a second day questioning her in the Algarve town of Portimao before releasing her without charge five hours later.
Mrs McCann has been warned by her lawyer Carlos Pinto de Abreu to be prepared for the fact she might now be arrested and charged.
A family spokeswoman, Justine McGuinness, revealed that Mrs McCann had been asked outright if she had killed her daughter, and was "shocked and angry" at the allegation, which she emphatically denied.
Miss McGuinness said: "They believe they have evidence to show that in some way she's involved in the death of her daughter, which of course is completely ludicrous.
* Shocked response from friends and family
* Villagers back Madeleine McCann's parents
* Timeline of Madeleine McCann's disappearance
"They have suggested that blood has been found in a hire car that they hired 25 days after Madeleine was taken. How on earth could you hide a body for that long? We are in a hot climate.
"When this was put to Kate she was very taken aback. It was the first time she had heard the allegation and she actually swore at police."
Mr McCann's sister, Philomena, later revealed the plea bargain offered by detectives.
She said: "They tried to get Kate to confess to having accidentally killed Madeleine by offering her a deal through her lawyer, which was 'if you say you killed Madeleine by accident and then hid her and then disposed of the body, then we can grant you a two-year jail sentence or even less. You may get off because people feel sorry for you'."
According to one report, the police asked Mrs McCann, a doctor, whether she had sedated her daughter, leading to speculation that detectives think she may have accidentally given Madeleine an overdose.
Mr McCann, 39, expressed his own frustrationin his blog on the Madeleine campaign website, saying: "We will fight this all the way."
Police had told Mrs McCann before she went for questioning that they had 22 "difficult" questions to put to her further to the information she had given them during 11 hours of questioning on Thursday.
Whistles and jeers mingled with shouts of support as she arrived at the police station today carrying Madeleine's favourite toy, cuddle cat.
Viv -
I certainly have no time at all for Gerry McCann who is a greedy, and conniving, child neglecting barsteward, but I don't think he killed Madeliene and framed Kate.
As Hope said, surely the rest of the tapas pals, (or Kate herself who is not a shrinking violet to my mind), would have said something by now.
By the way, do you have a link with the pictures of Kate with serious bruising? I have never seen those photos.
I could be wrong; indeed we all could be, but I still go along with the accident theory, either by overdose, or Madeleine finding those drugs in the wardrobe and eating some. Or, if they left the door open as they said, she could have wandered off and was found when Kate returned to the apartment - the final check up!
Or, one of them could have struck Maddie in anger, who was obviously thought to be spoiling their fun, with Mrs Fenn complaining about her crying continuously for over an hour.
IMO they all wanted to save their necks and the story of an abduction was made up - of that I have no doubt.
Sorry, I certainly don't see Kate as dysfunctional. I think she is one very clever and canny lady. If she is dysfunctional, then the whole of the tapas 8 must be because no normal loving parent would go out every evening leaving their children, who were virtually still babies, on their own. They are, all disgusting excuses for parents.
Also I think some people on that thread have short memories and are forgetting that it was Kate who failed to answer those 40 questions to try and find Maddie.
And the numerous pictures of she and Gerry laughing their heads off, and on Maddie's birthday! What can't speak can't lie, as they say!
And none of them bothered to return to PdeL for a reconstruction.
That to me makes them all guilty as hell.
I do agree with one view on Stevo's thread though.
Swati said:
"I don't care who did what - they should be rotting in a cell, both of them!"
I would just add that all 8 of those parents should be!
Only Maddie is the victim of this very lucrative scam!
JUSTICE FOR MADELEINE!
Nx
Hiya Nancy
Well I certainly agree with your sentiments about Gerry.
I have just tried to find some of the DV shots and do not know where they all are now, I cannot really remember, I seem to recall having a pretty good discussion with Dr Val who used to be on DE and is now on 3 As about this. But there are two on this blog, this one have a look at her elbow, you will probably need to blow the pic up, really nasty bruise, which at the time I thought it looked like she had been flung on the floor, and landed on it.
http://www.netglimse.com/celeb_gallery/Gerry_Mccann/73852
and then this one:
http://justiceformaddie.blogspot.com/2007/12/domestic-violence-finger-tip-brusing.html
which when blown up shows bruising to both upper arms. There was another picture I found where you could kind of see up her sleeve and you know all those sort of dotted little red bruises, pretty horrible. Also I remember noticing there were pics where sometimes her hair was not covering her eye and there appeared to be a heavily made up split over her eye and marks by her nose. Dr Val also noted bruising on her chest but I was not so sure about that.I am sure it will all be on 3 As somewhere!
But also in the pic sitting with Gerry note her demeanour, there were a number of these pics and he always seemed to want to have his hand there covering her arm up. I think she just looks battered, mentally and physically.
The only way I can make sense of their behaviour and all the witness statements is they were covering a terrible secret and it was not their child neglect because they emphasise that. Look at the terible neglect both Rachel and JT/OB are prepared to admit to. So, in the context where you have three professional people suggesting Payne is a paedo, OB avoiding at all costs explaining what he was doing on the Monday night etc. I come to the conclusion Maddie may have been a seriously abused child and they are prepared to admit neglect to cover something much worse.
I do not see how Kate could have found Maddie dead at 10 and then called them back over and only about 40 mins later the police were there. That just does not make sense.
I think Maddie was abused and injured and he could not allow her to start school in Sept and he had to get rid of her. The police in October 07, after we had been told they accused them of killing them said they were going back to the kidnapping theory. Parents do become involved in such things, just check on the net, it is considered another very serious form of child abuse. I am afraid I would not put anything past Gerry McCann.
There is also a post on this blog confirming that as at July 08 the McCanns were being investigated for kidnapping homicide abandonment and disposal of a cadaver. So I am not just making it up, the police thought they may well have been involved in her kidnapping. I think this is why the press are now careful to say "disappearance" which is pretty neutral!
There are other reports confirming the McCanns were being investigated looking at two separate scenarios, kidnapping or homicide. I not know why everyone seems to ignore this other than I think people balked at the kidnapping word because they thought it meant the McCanns claim of stranger abduction was being accepted which of course it never has been!
Hi
Some of my first words when seeing Gerry speak on May 4th was He did it I dont like the look of him at all..
When they said Kate had killed her I was shocked as I always thought it was him.
The McCann family have hinted often that Kate has a temper is not on her own with the children and is unstable...
Maybe she is battered but I have seen her looking very in control on many occasions and again all those happy snaps??? If she loved Madeleine how could she look so happy and full of Joy (Unless she really is under his control and he has told her she had better look damn happy) but her eyes are happy and I am not sure you can fake that???
She would have all the support and care in the world if this is what happend and for the sake of the twins if this is what happend she needs to speak up.
God knows living with the guilt and the fear is a hell of a lot worse than comming clean and starting again...
Hope, I was so upset when I thought, although now realise that was just a lie, the PJ were saying she killed Maddie. I just remember saying to Luke Oh my god no, that cannot be right, it just has to be him, he is vile!
I think the issue is what Kate may have been duped or terrorised into allowing to happen to Maddie and that could get her a very big dose of custody for what the woman often gets it for, failure to protect.
Going to get Luke and go out and eat
BBL
xx
Hi Viv and Hope,
I'll try to get through on those bruise links and let you know what I think. Otherwise I'll take a look on the 3A's.
If all the tapas friends were in on the scam then Maddie may have gone already (on the 2nd as some people think)when Kate said 'they've taken her', although in the other scenario, I'm sure Gerry could have put Maddie somewhere within the 40 minutes. There was some talk of a fridge - perish the thought!!
I can't believe I'm actually saying all this, but I know some things happen in this world that are unbelievably unbelievable if you know what I mean.
I must admit I can't get my head around the child abuse thing,although I know it happens in many families, but would Kate have closed her eyes to that - I very much doubt she would, that's if she knew.
I know McCann and Payne were seen gesticulating in a lewd fashion towards Maddie in Majorca, so I'll keep an open mind on that.
I just wish we could come to some sort of finalisation of this crime because I am beginning to feel we are bashing our heads against a brick wall.
JUSTICE FOR MADDIE!
Nx
Hi All
I know I have said this before. I have a very good friend who was being battered and bruised by her husband witnessed by her children and she never disclosed this to myself or any of her family members. I saw her on a regular basis and never suspected anything.
Years later due to illness the whole story started to unfold. What I found interesting was she kept protecting her husband, even when the police were called.
What I think I am trying to get across is she never had a mark on her, which is why myself and her family never had a clue. Her bruises were always hidden beneath her clothes, he was careful never to mark her face or her arms, he was extremely cunning in that respect.
My question is why would Gerry cause bruises to Kates arms and face for all to see, especially when the cameras were on them on a daily basis?
...I think Maddie was abused and injured and he could not allow her to start school in Sept and he had to get rid of her...
Schools are a lot more on the ball these days and teachers are very skilled at listening in this area in general. I am sure the children's parents will be sent to coventry by many when the twins start this September. Question is, did they get into the catholic school ?
Hiya all
I remember Kate's mom saying Kate felt if she had bigger breasts she would look more maternal and people would like her more. She does sound as though she suffers from low self-esteem which of course can be part of a depressive illness.
If you look at that busty young lady that he was flirting with on the holiday I think you can imagine how he was taunting her. Perhaps not that he was particularly interested in the woman, just that he gets pleasure out of upsetting her. This type of male is like that.
We did hear reports that Kate was loud and out of control one night, supposedly from Mrs Fenn, but then suddenly we heard no more of that.
The one main bruise that you can see on Kate's arm, not long after Maddie went missing in the pink top I think it is where he is sitting mauling her is yellowing. I think it might have happened on 3 May or quite possibly on some other night when there was terrible disharmony, perhaps Kate trying to stand her ground. We know that she slept in the same room with the children on 2 May. Was that because she was arguing with him, perhaps over what was to happen and he became violent? Was it because she wanted to protect Madeleine from harm by staying in the same room as her?
BT, I do think that is right, she was abused, the abuse had reached a point where perhaps actual physical injury occurred. I have felt that for a long time, Madeleine had reached the stage where she was actually getting too old, he could not allow her to go to school.
There will be justice for this little one, I am still certain of that
xxx
WE are working it out!
I think the police have adequate grounds to arrest Gerry McCann but sometimes they like to wait until they can get them all, so that there can be no comparing notes!
Post subject: Re: Whooshed Daily Mail Martin Smith Story
New postPosted: Tue Mar 10, 2009 9:59 am
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harmony wrote:
But what if there was one or more other men in that town that night matching that overall description given by the group of witnesses?
What, and also carrying a child who looked just like Maddy? I find that an extraordinary suggestion, particularly when we are told how quiet it was, early season.
I think people need to remember that when the Smiths saw a man carrying a child asleep (apparently) at about 9.50 in the evening, in a holiday area, that is a normal thing to see. It is normal because I am sure I am no different to most holiday makers, when my kids were little, if we went out at night, they came with us, and when they are tired, the go to sleep in the parents arms or pushchair or whatever. So in the Smiths minds at the time they would not register "oh gosh there is a man abducting a child", it would hardly affect the subconcious because it was just a normal sight and I believe Gerry knew that is how people would have seen it. But when the Smiths start to hear the news it starts to dawn that perhaps what they saw was not a normal sight at all and just may be relevant. I think that is a complete explanation as to why they did not immediately report. But having done so, they made every effort, even flying back to Portugal.
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Stevo
Post subject: Re: Whooshed Daily Mail Martin Smith Story
New postPosted: Tue Mar 10, 2009 10:05 am
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Geko wrote:
I haven't had time yet to read all the pages on this thread yet but i'm convinced it was the Smith sighting that prompted Tanner to invent her 'bungleman'. IMO the abductor theory had to be bolstered so when the carrier was seen by the Smiths it needed to be padded out at a time Gerry had an alibi - Jez Wilkinson.
Yes and don't forget that there was talk of a mole inside the PJ. No doubt this 'mole' (or one inside LP) conveyed the Smith sighting to Team McCann early on in the investigation - back in May when Smith first alerted the police.
When was Tanner's sighting formally mentioned to the PJ?
I have this from May 25:
Image
Notice the timing - 9:30pm. Tanner's sighting at 9:15pm changed from this official version anyway. The Wilkins/9:15pm situation was clearly a later modification. Clearly the PJ weren't referring to Smith's sighting in this bulletin.
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viv
Post subject: Re: Whooshed Daily Mail Martin Smith Story
New postPosted: Tue Mar 10, 2009 10:28 am
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Hiya Steve
But I think they were referring to the Smith statement and immediately put out this bulletin. The Smiths say in the news report they had no contact with the PJ since 26 May and they originally telephoned them so the date 25 May seems right to me.
I would also point out that Tanner advised the Police during the early hours of 4 May about her sighting, but in the presence of three who I say are the main culprits, Gerry, OB and Payne. These are the three who were desperately writing out various timelines that night on Maddie's book prior to the PJ arriving. Very typically guilty behaviour. I think she did see Gerry and was determined to tell the police, she did not know it was Gerry she had seen. I think they persuaded her OK go on then but got her to alter the time she saw him to the same time as Gerry was with Jez Wilkins to give him an alibi.
I think the PJ by putting out the time of 9.30 in this bulletin are taking the median between the two times advised to them i.e. 9.15 by Tanner and 9.50 by the Smiths.
I think what probably happened is Tanner's original sighting was very vague (eggman) and they did not find her very credible, but when this was corroborated by the Smiths definitely took it seriously and then immediately put the bulletin out. Indeed this provides a complete explanation for the delay in doing so. The McCanns said the PJ finally agreed to put the description out because they got British to intervene but I think the reality is they did so because they now started to believe it. There is a also an e-fit by Mr Flack of someone hanging around the apt that night and he is a dead ringer for Gerry McCann.
The e-fit by Mr Flack is on the side panel of my blog:
http://justiceformaddie.blogspot.com/20 ... omena.html
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viv
Post subject: Re: Whooshed Daily Mail Martin Smith Story
New postPosted: Tue Mar 10, 2009 10:40 am
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I do think it is an amalgam of the two sightings, because they say carrying a child (the Smiths) or something that could have been a child (Jane Tanner). Of course she subsequently elaborated on that no end, even changing him to a swarthy chap with a moustache and long hair etc, to completely save Gerry, or so they thought. I think it will get her four years!
It also confirms that the PJ acted perfectly properly in putting out a press bulletin for this man carrying a child to identify himself, Gerry has consistently refused to do so!
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viv
Post subject: Re: Whooshed Daily Mail Martin Smith Story
New postPosted: Tue Mar 10, 2009 10:52 am
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I think Jane Tanner went back to the apt that night, not to do a check but to find out what the heck OB was up, given he had been missing for most of the night. His meal was ruined. I think this would have been about 9.40 /45 and she saw Gerry on her way back to find out what was going on. I have always thought the so called Check by Mat at 9.30 when he supposedly went off with OB is just a complete lie.
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PJ Press bulletin STevo 10.05 post at page 15:
http://the3arguidos.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=35&t=29416&start=210
I just hope Kate McCann will be treated with leniency, she has lost her little girl and she has been villified by the McCanns/Team McCann. How much more can one woman suffer after years of being married to this animal who stalked her to New Zealand?
Hi Viv, I have to agree with your assessment of JT’s statement from the very vague to the more specific. I posted yesterday on 3A’s and copy it below taking into consideration the Smith sighting which is very important.
Jane Tanners statement, although not executed well, is not the work of a fantasist as it is quite well thought out and really very, very good and multi faceted.
1) She is suggesting at 9.15pm she witnessed the abduction and this clears her partner O’Brien who has no alibi from about 9.30 to 10.00pm. By suggesting an abduction took place earlier puts him in the clear whether he has an alibi or not for later in the evening.
2) To ensure this clears O’Brien without doubt she completely gives the opposite description of the abductor i.e short as opposed to tall, dark as opposed to fair etc. Subconsciously she is probably describing Gerry.
3) By saying she saw Gerry talking to JW allows the time of her sighting to be fixed specifically. Both GM and JW said they talked at 9.15 approx thus her sighting is set at this time.
4) She is also giving Gerry an alibi by saying she saw a stranger abduction when Gerry can be proved not to be involved and talking to an independent witness. She is also suggesting that the abductor had a passing resemblance to Gerry thus compromising any other witness statements who may have seen the same thing.
5) She is indicating to the pj that she is very diligent in checking on her young children regularly. Therefore covering her self against any negligence charges.
6) She is undermining the Smith’s sighting that took place later in the evening.
The only problem with the picture she paints is neither Gerry or Jez see her but she obviously reasons this one discrepancy could be fudged as it was worth the gamble as her sighting made 6 positive points against one negative one. Her statement in the light of the above does appear to have been worked out very carefully and not the work of a silly fantasist.
On BBc just now following an appearance at Select Committee.
Madeleine McCann was treated as a "commodity" by the UK press, her father Gerry has told MPs.
mmmmm one of the MP's should have pressed further and stated ' but wasn't it you who used that money to pay your mortgage and thus treat her as a commodity? '
Same old smarmy grin
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7935156.stm
Gerry McCann you are bloody stupid yes your daughter was treated as a commodity and you treated her that way no words of comfort or love in your blogs it was all about you and your precious fund...
Madeleine has made you a lot of money but there is a huge reward for information about her that may have saved her but did you tell the world about this did you hell!!!
I dont know what happend but after you dared pay your mortgage with Madeleines Money you should have realised people did not give it to you it was to find your daughter...
But she was only worth £250k on search fees while your Brother was paid to manage a fund that any other family would have managed between them for no wage...
Keep talking Gerry you look a fool and I am more convinced than ever you and every slime ball who has turned their back on Madeleine and lied for you will soon be in jail where child neglecting scum belong.
Justice for Madeleine your daughter is the only thing anyone is concerned with your laughing smiling face gave you away a long long time ago...
This was a related article to the side of todays story... It was not so long ago that this was whoosh clunked from the news sites...
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7548108.stm
Madeleine revelations offer few facts
By Steve Kingstone
BBC News
Portuguese prosecutors shelved their investigation last month
There was no shortage of compelling lines of inquiry to emerge from the Portuguese police files on the abduction of Madeleine McCann released this week.
One possibility was that Madeleine was abducted by a loitering stranger, whose description was not circulated by police.
Another claim was that she was seen being carried by her own father, shortly before 10pm on the night of her disappearance.
Madeleine may have told a woman in an Amsterdam fancy dress shop that she was abducted while on holiday.
And she could have been kidnapped to order by a Belgian paedophile gang.
The fact is, though, that while all of these lines of inquiry featured in the files, the documents also showed that none of them produced meaningful results when investigated further.
'Not credible'
Specifically, Portuguese police decided the loitering "stranger" was, in all probability, a local musician.
Detectives accepted that Gerry McCann could not have been carrying Madeleine through Praia da Luz shortly before 10pm because other witnesses placed him at the Ocean Club's tapas restaurant.
Portuguese sources have told the BBC that the richly-detailed sighting of Madeleine in a Dutch costume shop was judged "not credible".
In most cases, the sensational lines of inquiry were dismissed long ago by Portuguese and/or British police
Madeleine case 'lead' played down
And the Belgian kidnap-to-order theory stemmed from an anonymous phone call, the significance of which is being played down by the Metropolitan Police.
The documents, released to journalists on Monday as a CD-Rom, contain 11,223 pages of witness statements, photographs, e-mails and expert testimony.
On their own, the myriad potential sightings of Madeleine - from Spain to Serbia, Mexico to Indonesia - take up a 14-volume annexe, stretching to 2,550 pages.
Unsurprisingly, the police have not given details of every single outcome. Instead, a foreword to the sightings annexe states that, although well-intentioned, many witness accounts were "of little substance and purely speculative."
Wryly, the police report points out that "Madeleine" was sometimes seen "on the same day, in places 4,000km apart."
Eager media
Having been starved of hard facts about the case for 15 months, in line with Portugal's judicial secrecy laws, journalists are now eagerly sifting through the files and unearthing genuinely insightful details.
But it's worth bearing in mind that these revelations are "new" only to reporters and the public.
In most cases, the sensational lines of inquiry were dismissed long ago by Portuguese or British police or both.
The McCanns' daughter disappeared days before her fourth birthday
There is also a fierce war of interpretation, with different media outlets assuming opposing positions.
For example, one Portuguese tabloid, which still harbours suspicions surrounding Kate and Gerry McCann, has focused on the "possible compatibility" (a phrase from the final police report) of Madeleine's DNA with samples taken from the couple's hire car.
By contrast, UK newspapers have highlighted the more cautious tone taken by Britain's Forensic Science Service, which warned that the results were "too complex for meaningful interpretation."
Likewise, Portuguese media have used police photographs of the McCanns' apartment to allege that the couple and their friends somehow altered the scene of the crime - an allegation which is vehemently denied.
Back in Britain, tabloid newspapers have seized on apparently unresolved sightings of Madeleine to denounce the Portuguese police as incompetent.
Interpretation
In the days ahead, there will be more revelations, and they will no doubt help sell newspapers.
One Portuguese editor told me that since 3 May last year, his tabloid had carried 170 front pages related to Madeleine, and sales had leapt by 25%. I imagine a similar effect has been seen in Britain.
However long these intriguing stories run, the epic police files really boil down to three basic facts.
The material included CCTV images of a child in a petrol station in the Algarve
They are: Madeleine McCann went missing on the night of 3 May 2007; there are no certainties about what happened to her; Kate McCann, Gerry McCann and Robert Murat have all been explicitly cleared of involvement in her disappearance, after prosecutors found "no proof that they committed any crime" (press statement by the attorney general).
And if you want one paragraph which sums up the tragedy of these events, turn to volume 17, page 4,647, in which the Portuguese public prosecutor outlines his conclusions.
"No element of proof was found... as to the circumstances in which the child was taken from the apartment (whether alive, whether dead, whether the victim of negligent homicide or wilful homicide, whether the victim of kidnap-to-order or an opportunistic kidnap).
"We can't even make a consistent prognosis of her fate, including... whether she is alive or dead."
Curiously, the prosecutor then adds that "it seems more probable" that Madeleine is dead.
But like so much of what we are now seeing and hearing, his words are interpretation rather than fact
Hi Hope,
It didn't surprise me at all today that we had the two biggest spin merchants going, GM and his side kick CM, whinging about the press. CM made his living for years via the media and still does.
I cannot believe no-one questionned Gerald McCann about why he immediately got on to the Sky Media rather than calling the police on the night they discovered Maddie missing.
What a completely camouflage all round! And what a puny lot asking the questions.
And what hypocrites they all are!
Nx
I have just watch a 1½ hours video coverage of the committee proceedings this afternoon.
link
Gerry McCann, Adam Tudor (Carter-Ruck) and Clarence used this as yet another platform to show how Madeleine was abducted and there is no evidence to suggest otherwise. The McCanns were victims of the press publishing untrue stories for nothing but profit according to GM. He told the committee they consulted the PCC’s Sir Christopher Meer, and he advised them that their only recourse was to take legal redress. This was also the advice given by Carter-Ruck. They decided to take legal action, GM says, because if people believed the lies printed that Madeleine was dead and they were involved people would stop looking for her.
GM also commented their legal actions have changed the way things were being reported. Tudor from Carter-Ruck commented the press now know how much it’s going to cost them if they get things wrong.
Gerry and Tudor said they did not know Portuguese law therefore they did not know if the Portuguese press were breaking their countries laws. Gerry was quick to point out that Portuguese law was historically founded on a fascist then communist regime therefore the press there was a lot less well reported as opposed to the press in the UK. He accused the British Press of copying articles from the Portuguese press without checking them out.
Gerry said that the PCC had helped get removed from outside their house the photographers they had also issued a missive for the media to be more careful in the reporting of the McCann case this was in late 2007.
Tudor from Carter-Ruck and Gm say they do not know Portuguese law and therefore do not know if the Portuguese press were breaking their countries laws of libel. Pleeeeease …….is Gerry asking us to believe he never consulted a Portuguese media lawyer to find out. Come on Gerry we weren’t born yesterday.
Hi Nancy and Wizard
Gerry can say what he likes about the press I dont like the way they work on many levals...
Nothing will change the fact he is a crap father who neglected his children on a nightly basis to have some fun in a bar...
In Gerrys own words during interviews or whilst blogging he has uttered the most discusting comments and smiled grinned and laughed his way through the first few weeks of his daughter in his words was taken by a gang of peadophiles (although in Gerrys own words he has no reason to believe she has been harmed) sick bastard...
Blame the press blame the bloggers blame Madeleine but the blame lies at your door Gerry and people can see through you and all your paid spin!!!!!!
Hi All
Sorry I have not had time to read back.
Wizard
I just picked up a comment from your report.
They decided to take legal action, GM says, because if people believed the lies printed that Madeleine was dead and they were involved people would stop looking for her.
Perhaps what he really means is the fund would dry up if people believed Maddie was dead.
Hi Wizard and Hope -
It won't be long till Maddie's 6th birthday and then we'll see the McCanns and CM using the media that they hate so much reporting on their grief and with pictures of Maddie all over the front pages. They are a lot of hypocrites of that there is no doubt!
So good to see TB grabbed himself a seat behind the three muskateers - I hope he was making them feel uncomfortable.
Gerry certainly was gobsmacked when someone mentioned Murat to him - for once the smug look was off his face and he was completely lost for words!
As for worrying about the twins' privacy, there are many pictures that have been in the media of the four of them together and the two MCs laughing all over their smug faces!
Lies, lies, lies!!
And just where does the money come from to be able to afford one of the most expensive firm of lawyers in London? I thought the fund money was dwindling!!
The mind boggles!
Nx
Nx
Hi Di and Hope,
Well there was Gerry sitting in the committee with freshly dyed hair and a new leaner look. Smart looking suit and he seem to forget his labour routes with dark conservative suit and blue tie.
His performance this afternoon, and this is what it was, I would have found convincing if I did not know better. Gerry said. “We were not controlling the media”. Well that’s true but they certainly have been trying. As Gerry pointed out later when referring to the action taken against the DX. “Our actions changed the way things were reported.”
Another point.
Who was the PJ mole and why can he/she not be found?
This PJ kept the McCanns one step ahead thoughout the investigation, even allowing them to leave Portugal as soon as they were made Arguidos.
This mole should be outed and shamed.
Hi Wizard
Yes The McCanns actions certainly changed the way stories are reported, of that I have no doubt.
However, I still harp back to when they were advised, by the PJ, not to mention Maddies eye defect, as it could endanger her life, but they still did go public. Sorry that is not normal at all of caring parents.
What they should have been doing was to promote the reward money at every given opportunity, did they no. If I have seen it mentioned twice that would be all.
Something is very wrong with all of this imo.
Di, with regard to the reward money. Gerry says it would be too difficult for them to operationally deal with the response from the reward.
Controlling the press – I like Carter-Rucks threat “if they make mistakes they know how much it will cost them.” So much for the freedom of the press make a mistake and you could be bankrupted by a defamation or libel action.
Clarence said this afternoon that the press was selling 40 to 50,000 extra copies per day when they printed a Madeleine story on the front page. Ummm.....profit was being made by the press out of MBM – well we can’t have that can we.
Di,
Want a laugh follow the link - http://www.the3arguidos.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=35&t=29446
LOL Big L's on top form!
Hiya all
In a way it was rather surreal and articial because they are just looking at the media, libel and privacy but set against the background of a criminal case which they are not allowed to refer to our suggest Gerry is guilty.
So what we got was a lack of challenge, I think and that was disappointing. I am not surprised there was a lot of criticism of the press because they did print too much. But what really disappointed me was the committee did not produce any hard evidence and challenge him about that. They were just too nice and polite. They did allow him to just keep complaining about inaccurate lies in the press but at no stage did they challenge him that it was his own sister Philomena McCann who started that. Claiming as she immediately did that Kate had been offered a deal which we know was a lie. She gave one interview saying Kate as the main suspect but also saying Gerry was going to be interviewed at 2 that day. So she was saying this before he had even been interviewed. Then, contrary to what Philomena was alleging that the PJ believed it was Kate, their other spokesman there, Mr Hughes stated they had both been asked identical questions, in short Gerry was just as suspect This makes sense because when the police feel there has been a homicide but they do not know by which parent, they are going to ask them.
So all of his complaints today complaining about distorted and false stories emanating from the Portuguese press are pretty serious lies.
Unfortuntately unless they are going to do the sort of analysis we have done on here and on 3 As this is going to come out as a very one sided story and I really hope that is not the case.
I have to say that Tony Bennett's sprawling effort going into detail about the criminal case against them so far as he is concerned, which often parts company with hard legal reasoning has certainly not helped and he did not seem to look uncomfortable sitting behing Gerry even though it was pretty clear that it was his submission they were referring to which they described as "sick". There is something inherently wrong with a person who has legal training and just keeps trotting out all this stuff when there is no real evidence at all that they killed Madeleine. I still therefore have to seriously question what he is about and whether he is just another member of their team.
I think an example of how Gerry was just allowed to ramble on and did state some quite unbelievable rubbish is when he said
"there is no evidence to suggest she has been seriously harmed"
It was interesting to note the Chairmans's response to this
"ummm, thank you"
and ceased the questioning. Clearly he was not going to challenge him on that because it does get into the area of the criminal case but it is a bizarre and ridiculous thing to say, and so I look forward to their report with interest. The Chair did not back him up when he made that remark, just ummm, well let's move on is not a very reassuring response for Gerry.
Also an interview with Gerry Paxman, who asked a couple of hard hitting questions
"you colluded with them (press) whenever it suited you"
"do you not think you rigged a whirlwind"
Of course Gerry's responses were to adopt the pathetic victim mode, which is so out of character for him but he is very good at putting on the right show.
"What is going on with search for Madeleine"
The search for Madeleine is going on behind the scenes ..using the Find Madeleine Fund..we want to co-operate with the authorities..we will involve the press and the public when there is something to report.
A complete cop out!
I did like the way Paxman kept leaning his chin on his hand and intently studying Gerry as he rambled on though. Penny for his thoughts which he is not allowed to give us!
This is going to annoy the public again I think and overall be perceived as just another opportunity for Gerry McCann to put on his poor little me routine.
Given the situation the BBC obviously cannot really challenge him so why did they just give him this platform?
xx
Morning All,
Viv my next post is the Paxman interview I've transcribed it from BBC iplayer. Please edit if you see fit as it is rather long.
Mosley's comments come up first he throws a completely new light on doing "something a bit iffy on a Friday night" LOL
Paxman Interview with Gerry McCann – News Night 10/03/09 – transcribed from BBCiplayer.
Select Committee today:-
It’s like having thieves break into your house and take everything you have, only worse, because they striped you of your dignity and you can’t necessarily replace that. Max Mosley’s description of what it feels like to be done over in the tabloid press was passionate. He was appealing to a select committee in the House of Commons for a new privacy law. The exposure of Mr Mosley’s taste for sado-masochism, gave a front page spread. Also giving evidence was the father of the abducted child, Madeline McCann, from whom we will hear from shortly. First on the problem the MPs say they want to tackle. How far the press can go has been a thorny issue at least since the first episode of What The Papers Say, to which we off this modest homage. But the question was up in bold capitals today, with the heartfelt testimony of two men, who in their separate ways have suffered at the hands of the media. So we ask, what can the papers say? Max Mosley won £60,000 from the muse of the world last year, a record payout for a claim brought under European privacy provisions. The Formula One boss was affronted that the paper had revealed the SS & M sessions he had quietly been enjoying for decades, as he explained to the Commons Culture Committee. It is not that I had done something a bit iffy on the Friday, and there it is in the paper. I have been doing this for 45 years and there had never been a hint, nobody knew. And suddenly, 10.00 one Sunday morning I get a phone call asking I had seen the News of the World. I said I haven’t. I never see the News of the World. I went to the local newspaper shop and bought two copies. Well I was horrified. The sensation is a little bit like, it’s never happened to me fortunately, a little bit like coming home, finding your front door open and everything in your house removed by thieves. You know you would be shocked, annoyed, angry, outraged. You would have a deep sense that the law had been broken, but an even greater sense that you had been invaded. Mr Mosley told MPs that people should be given advance details of their private lives. But not all observers are convinced. A court always has to be flexible about the application of law to the circumstances that come before it in a court case. It’s important that remains the case. That’s why imposing arbitrary rules, such as a requirement that you must obtain a comment from the subject of a piece before it can be published, is not the way forward.
What about the case of a person who actively courts the papers, although for most understandable of motives, only to end up at the centre of defamatory stories. A person like Gerry McCann, father of Madeline. Gerry McCann. “Madeline, I believe, was made, was a commodity, and profits were to be made. As far as I could see having front page news stories or indeed any stories in newspapers on a daily basis, was not helpful to the search. Undoubtedly we could have sue all the newspaper groups, I feel fairly confident about that. That wasn’t what we were interested in; we were interested in putting a stop to it, first and foremost, and looking for some redress, primarily with an apology.”
Few media outlets emerge with credit from coverage of Madeline’s disappearance, including the portrayal of the McCann’s friends and neighbours in Portugal, according to one seasoned watcher. We shouldn’t restrict this to newspapers, television and radio also. They were jumping on Mr Murat the neighbour, haranguing him, and also hare hanging the families it was a very difficult situation. It became such a huge international story that the interest that the McCann galvanised ran out of control. That is wholly wrong. The development of a privacy right is going to begin to curtail those types of stories, and it is only when that right comes into force, and is being enforced, that we will begin to see the potential impact that such a privacy law could have on what you might all stories in the public interest. The old editors’ motto, publish and be dammed, looks rather more threatened in Fleet Street tonight.
Paxman “Earlier I spoke to Gerry McCann, I asked him if he had been shocked by how the media behaved?”
Gerry McCann. “I was more than shocked; we felt that there was being a complete disservice done to our daughter, who is still missing. That is the thing which is hardest to actually forgive. There was no regard for that; there was no regard for the feelings of both Kate and myself, our other children, in fact our wider extended family. “
Paxman. “Do you think you were naive?”
McCann. “Of course we were naive in the sense that we have never been exposed to the media previously. I think though that we were better protected than many.
Paxman. “But then you had this entire media circumstance cuss? It was a circumstance cuss. Camped out around you? But you collaborated with them, you would announce photo calls and whether or not you would be speaks, do you think, to some degree you reaped a whirlwind?”
McCann. “We reaped a whirlwind, I presume you are taking a very much a devil’s advocate’s position here in what you are doing. We had very clear objectives what we wanted. Any parent would take the opportunity of trying to get information into the investigation that might help find their daughter. That is what our clear objectives were. The one thing I would do slightly differently is the dividing line between when does media covering the story on a daily basis, which happened, I did discuss today the aspect of when we finished our trips, particularly to more rok (?) co-where we felt there might be – Morocco, and Portugal, we felt there might be leads, we didn’t want to leave Portugal because we felt close to Madeleine there. We fully expected the media attention to die down but it didn’t. We should have drawn a clearer line in the sand, even about being photographed.”
Paxman. “We the consumer see this scrum of cameramen and surrounding a couple to whom this terrible thing has happened, we only see it from one side, what is it like on the other side.”
McCann. “It is very intimidating, especially when you haven’t experienced it before. When I came back to the police station on Friday 4th May and saw the mass of media, internationally gathered, the prospect of having them doorsteping, invading your privacy, raking up anything from your school days to potentially university to things that have absolutely no relevance in the ongoing search, filled me with dread.”
Paxman. “Do you draw a lesson about what ought to be done. It is a very broad question, do you draw a lesson?
McCann “I mean simplistically, and it is simplistic, because the regulation and the loss surrounding it and self-regulation is clearly quite complex, but what we would call for is move, and if it is a backward step, we want more responsible reporting, we want accountability for what is written, particularly when it has the potential to seriously damage people’s lives. I don’t know how a family who were seriously damage people’s lives. I don’t know how a family who were less supportive than we are, could have coped, because we had points very close to completely breaking.”
Paxman. “Can you tell us what is happening for Madeline now?
McCann “One thing today we would like to reemphasise, the search for Madeline is very much on going. We have a lot of activity going on behind the scenes; we will go public with the activity when we feel we need more information in a specific area. But Madeline’s fund is funding an ongoing search. We are very, very keen to work with the authorities, both here and in Portugal. To try, at the very, very least, find Madeline, or find who took her.”
End of interview.
Discussion continues with Max Mosley interview.
Hi Wiz
First of all I have to say I find Mossley's conduct repulsive and cannot understand why he felt the need to do that for 45 years. But do the public have a right to know about his deviant sex life, if he is not actually breaking the law? NO I don't think they did. However, there was a previous criminal case concerning S&M where people were convicted of causing GBH because it was held no one can consent to that! But I was horrified when Congress in America where trying to impeach Mr Clinton just because of a pretty mucky sex life and demanding all the gory details. I just happen to think this is just not right. To me sex between consenting adults, apart from the above situation where serious physical harm is caused should be private.
I recall reading that apparently the NOW was Gerry's favourite paper but they are the sort of paper that print things like that. I have no appetite for the sort of muck they write, which is frequently just scandolous gossip. I wonder what is wrong with people who are so interested in the muckier side of other people's lives.
It will be interesting to see if Mossley has persuaded them that our own pretty scant acceptance of a privacy law in the courts should be beefed up to the level we see on the Continent. If that means we do not hear anymore in the press about people like Mossley, I certainly cannot say I would feel I was losing out or had a right to know such personal details.
Gerry McCann just used the opportunity for a publicity event giving the usual one sided version. Where yes, I agree, the press were wrong to run with the story about them killing Madeleine, but I think the Committee should have a look who started this story, Philomena McCann and she was stating that Kate was the main suspect. I read in The Guardian, this gave the rest of the press tacit permission to start reporting on this. So I think the Committee should find that two wrongs do not make a right. That the McCann case was exceptional because Gerry, his spinner and his family abused and fed the media and so yes, there was massive interest in them and a massive and continuing story. But the massive interest in the McCanns was where the public clearly do have a right to be concerned. We heard of terrible child neglect and that the police believed they were responsible for the disappearance of their daughter. There was one female Scottish MP on that Committee who said, "I do not know how they could live with themselves". But I think the reality is I do not know how she can live with herself in taking the side of a press manipulator highly suspected by the Police and expect the general public to adopt her own perverse way of thinking. She should be thinking in terms of at the very least, they subject her to grave risk of very serious harm, by leaving her alone, sometimes for hours to cry, with the door open, according to them, with dangerous medicines etc. This just cannot be condoned as responsible parenting or a couple of parents who actually deserve public sympathy.
xx
Hi everyone -
Well, I think we are more or less together on how we judge that excuse for a Gerry McCann/Clarence Mitchell/ and their expensive lawyer photoshot!
The two biggest spinmasters of them all complaining about press harrassment; never mind that Gerry got in touch with Sky before bothering to look for his daughter!
As for the media saying they killed Madeleine - of course that's wrong, but to my mind they were the perpetrators of gross child neglect which, if Maddie is dead, they bear the responsibility.
They shouldn't complain about press harrassment after going world wide with the story of Madeleine - they are supposedly intelligent doctors who knew how the press reacts in the UK and has for many years - especially the tabloids.
They would have been very upset with no coverage at all because they'd have made no money from ther Madeleine Fund and all the stuff they are still selling, and they are still putting Maddie's picture in some foreign editions of the Daily Mail.
So the McCanns and CM just love the media when it is kind to them, but don't like it if it prints a few home truths.
My advice is - if you don't like the heat, then keep out of the kitchen!
Hypocrites and liars all of them!
Justice for Madeleine, not for the McCanns and their hangers on!
Nx
Hi Viv and Nancy,
I think it is clear that Gerry et al want to control the press and what it publishes about them. They need the press to reinforce their stranger/abductor story and portray them as victims. Nothing else the press do will be acceptable to them. Yes the press did go too far in publishing allegations that could not be proved but a one sided story is not acceptable and this is what team McCann want. As we have seen recently they have effectively gagged the British press with threats of libel, defamation action etc.
If the Mc’s are ever brought to trial and convicted the press will be punching with no holds barred. Hopefully the ’if’ will become a definite ‘when’.
Great posts and thank you both xxx
Doris on 3 As is banging her head up the wall, oh dear!
xx
Published 11/03/2009
Public relations (PR) professional Justine McGuinness is suing the Mirror Group Newspapers over alleged libel.
The expert, who worked as a communications strategist for Kate and Gerry McCann's Find Madeleine Fund for three months, is taking legal action over a story which appeared in The People in October 2007.
She claims that the article, which was entitled "Woman who cost Maddie fund £51k", was defamatory, the Press Gazette reports.
In a writ, Ms McGuinness says that the story suggested she had deliberately ripped off the fund by overcharging the McCanns for expenses to which she was not entitled and that she exaggerated her overtime.
She added that the article states that, because of this, she was forced to quit her role
Ms McGuinness said the allegations damaged her reputation, casting doubt on her integrity and honesty.
She is now seeking damages and aggravated damages for libel from the Mirror Group Newspapers, which publishes more than 150 regional newspapers, five national newspapers and is responsible for over 200 websites.
From Russell Jones & Walker – Solicitors web site.
Well their all jumping on the band wagon. I’m sitting wondering who I can sue because surely there’s money to be made. LOL
Hi All
Thanks Wizard for the link to Big L he certainly has a wicked sense of humour.
Thanks for the above article I read that Justine was suing The People, sorry I am totally ignorant on this, are they connected to the Mirror Group?
I know what you mean about jumping on the band wagon, perhaps we should all sue as bloggers, after all Kate and Clarrie called us some pretty unforgivable things ;o)
Hi ALL
I lost my internet last night so frustrating....
I am pleased Justine McGuinness is suing the papers the way they reported how much she was paid was discusting.
A better article would have been why did the McCann's need to pay anyone anything to talk about Madeleine.
The Fact they chose a lady who charges a lot of money for her services (because she is good at her job and it is her income) is very strange IMHO..
I have never seen any parent of a missing child contact a big shot spin dr to tell the world all about it...
Just not needed yes Madeleine needed to be on billboards and news to see if anyone spotted her the fact the parents were trying to protect their own image just made them look more guilty than ever...
Gerry used the twins as a cute marketing ploy as well and now he has the nerve to complaine about thier privacy???
What a sick joke for parents the pair of them are if Kate is a battered wife and is under Gerry's control she had better grow a backbone PDQ and protect her twins enough is enough Madeleine deserves justice and the lies have to stop they are getting crazier by the day...
Sorry I forgot to give the link to 3A's
link
Joana Morais
is worth looking at. Last two posts
Gerry attacks journalists &
The lie of Gerry McCann
Off now see you tomorrow
Di, I hope you don't take offence but I have just removed the post you put on because there are reports which may be true on 3 As the man is really abusive and so I cannot support him on here even if he did write a good article.
Viv xx
re-posted minus the reference
Hiya all
Well my understanding is there is a 12 months time limit from the moment the article was published to issue a writ for defamation.
So I cannot understand how Justine is only suing now. Neither how that will protect her reputation. Most people had forgotten all about this. She is dragging it back up. I would not be surprised if Gerry bunged her a few quid to just jump on the let's get the press campaign. Gerry did whip up the media furore and now he is just trying to silence them and get them the blame.
The Kate killed Madeleine theory was unleashed by his own sister. Within an hour of the police arriving the story was already in the British Press thanks to him and his little cohorts non stop and immediate efforts to get his spun side of the story out. I cannot understand why even Rachel Oldfield was doing this when she had not even been in the apt or spoke to Gerry. It was just like she did not need to. But what friend would do this without even asking if that was OK. If she had rang the press over my child and possibly subjected her to risk of serious harm by doing so, I would have absolutely flattened her. This whole thing is one perverted and sorry mess!
No longer a suspect and then a few months later arrested and charged, long and complex investigation working with CPS lawyers and leading counsel for advice. As someone said on 3 As
WATCH OUT MCCANNS
Husband charged with Kate Prout's murder
Tuesday, March 10, 2009, 11:55
Comment on this story
The husband of retired teacher Kate Prout who disappeared from her 200-acre Gloucestershire farm 16 months ago was today charged with her murder, police said.
Kate Prout, 56, who was a campaigner for milk payment prices, disappeared from the £1.2 million Redhill Farm, in Redmarley D'Abitot, on Bonfire night 2007.
Adrian Prout, 46, who runs a pheasant shoot, has been charged with the murder of his wife despite a body never being found.
In January this year Gloucestershire Police said that he was no longer a suspect and would not reveal this morning what had lead to his re-arrest and charge.
Prout was arrested at the house in Redmarley this morning. He was then taken into custody at Cheltenham Police Station and will appear at the town's magistrates court at 2pm.
Click here!
Ann Reddrop, Head of the Crown Prosecution Service Complex Casework Unit, said: "We have been working closely with the police over the past months to investigate all aspects of Mrs Prout's disappearance before reaching a final decision on charging.
"We have also sought advice from leading counsel. Accordingly, we have this week authorised the police to charge Mr Prout."
Senior Investigating Officer, Acting Detective Superintendent Neil Kelly, said: "This has been a complex, thorough and necessarily lengthy investigation to bring us to this point. I would like to take this opportunity to thank all those affected, especially Mrs Prout's friends and family, for their understanding, tolerance and patience."
Police confirmed today that this was the third time Prout had been arrested. He has remained on police bail throughout the investigation.
The search for Mrs Prout at her farm and in the village, where Top Gear presenter Richard Hammond recently owned a house, failed to uncover her remains.
The search used divers and JCBs to plough through woodchippings to no avail, although police maintained that she had been murdered.
The hunt later moved to Dursley, 25 miles away from her home, where residents said they were questioned about water pipes laid at the time of her death.
She was reported missing from the farmhouse on November 10 2007. She has not been seen since November 5 that year.
At the height of the police probe there were in excess of 100 officers involved in both the search for Mrs Prout and in following up a number of different leads.
A "small team" of staff remained on the case and witnesses appeals were made regularly.
Diane Bellamy, 48, from Bisley, Eric Woolley, 60, the landlord of the village's Rose and Crown pub, and a 43-year-old man from Lydney were all arrested during the course of the inquiry. None was charged and all had their bail cancelled last year.
Mrs Prout's brother, Richard Wakefield, 57, spoke at an early press conference of the family's "agony" at not knowing what had happened.
He said: "Discovering the truth, whatever that may be, will put us out of this agony of not knowing."
Mrs Prout was last heard of on the afternoon of November 5 when she made a phone call to her brother's wife Linda, sounding untroubled and happy.
Mrs Prout spent 20 years as a primary school teacher before taking early retirement. At the time of her disappearance she was involved in a campaign to persuade the Government to increase milk payments to dairy farmers.
Her husband was approached by The Times newspaper in May to comment on the case. He spoke through the intercom, saying: "No thank you, I have got nothing to say. No comment."
Watching GM in parliamentary committee and on Paxman it is very easy to forget the nature of the suspicions levelled against him and what he really must have done if these suspicions are proved right.
Many times during horrendous charges a defendant will appear in court booted and suited and looking very respectable. Even Max Mosley, (Newsnight) although doing nothing illegal, his “iffy Friday night” activities are grubby and abnormal to most people. He again looks very respectable and has forged himself a successful career as a shrewd headed Formula 1 boss.
GM’s appearance on Paxman and in committee had him suited and booted, with freshly dyed hair and looking the picture of respectability. On Paxman he could be seen indulging in sideway eye movements as he sought creative answers to a couple of Paxman’s easy questions. Despite this air of respectability and apparent confidence and calm I believe if he were in court, facing a sharp prosecutor, he would crumple.
Kate of course now seems quite reclusive and we are told she is fragile. Imo she is not let out for good reason – the beans will be spilt.
Morning Everyone
Hi Viv
No offence taken.
Your above report is extremely interesting.
In January the Police said Adrian Prout was no longer a suspect, but unbeknown to him, they were quietly working away behind the scenes.
There is hope yet for justice for Madeleine.
Hi Wizard
I watched the full Parlimentary video last night.
I thought Clarences reaction when he spotted TB sat behind Gerry was a hoot.
I have not seen the Paxman interview yet, is it available on a video link?
Morning Di,
Newsnight's interview with Gerry is available on bbciplayer. When you get to their home page just type in newsnight and all of the recent newsnight programmes are available for viewing in full.
Thanks Wizard
Hiya Di and thanks darling!
Prout certainly is interesting, it demonstrates the way British Police work against a criminal suspect.
Prout was arrested three times, before he was eventually charged and as you say, in only January was told he was not a suspect. This is a good way to let the suspect think they have got away with it. But when they have committed a very serious crime, they are bugged etc.
I think in the interview with Paxman, Gerry looked jaded and had that look about him like his kissed the Irish Blarney Stone, downed a few Guiness and wanted to just keep playing a game, but, by his involuntary sniggering acknowledging that he is certainly not fooling Paxman!
My continuing concern is what has happened to Kate? Absolutely everything is becoming one sided as in the title of this post, isn't it? I fear for her health.
xx
Wiz, sadly this maybe what the Police have had to do, keep the pressure on and wait until Kate can stand it no more?
Gerry clearly seems to be acting without her now in his continuing battle.
xx
Hi Viv
Having now watched Gerry being interviewed by Paxman, thanks to Wizard, I saw a distinct change in Paxman's behaviour after Gerry's prolonged goading smirk. I agree I don't think Paxman was taken in for one minute, in fact he looked as if he wanted to wipe the stupid grin of his face.
Hi everyone -
Good old Jeremy!
Apart from the Spanish and Portuguese interviewers before him, he's the only interviewer so far who has had the guts to make a few pertinent points and not to faun over the VIP Gerry McCann!
Indeed, if body language and facial expressions are anything to go by, Jeremy was obviously bored stiff with what he was obliged to listen to.
The nervous but also somewhat Machiavellian grin Gerry gave when it was suggested the McCann's caused the media siege in the first place was enough to give the game away!
Jeremy suggesting that they collaborated with the media so therefore they surely should have expected them to camp outside their door, obviously hit the spot!
Then GM insisted it was such a shock on the 4th May to see the siege of press outside, and that they fully expected it to die down!
Pull the other one Gerry!
You'd have been a lot poorer without all that media attention which you courted - you know it - and you are not taking anyone in with your subterfuge, least of all Jeremy Paxman!
I wonder how much he got for that interview! Another pile of dosh for the Madeleine Fund.
He insists that the search for Madeleine is ongoing (behind the scenes)! He can say that again - there is not much going on in the public eye that's for sure!
I notice he didn't take Kate with him, obviously worried that Jeremy would tear her to pieces and she would give some of her long pauses and whoosh clunks!
The old, I believe BBC, interview where she was asked why they didn't actually look for Madeleine is a classic and I think Gerry must have been wetting himself waiting for her to answer that one, which she did but so unconvincingly no-one believed her, least of all the interviewer, but she didn't press the point, luckily for Kate.
Just how do these people sleep at night!
JUSTICE FOR MADELEINE!
Qn1) Urm Mr McCann you mentioned the press treated Madeleine as a commodity the other day. May I just point out to you that you used the fund to pay for your mortgage until someone leaked that information out. Given that could it not be stated that pretty much right from the start you and your family seemed to be treating your own eldest daughter as a commodity?
Qn2) You seem to have wanted to use the press and have tried to pursue one line of possibility with regards to Madeleine's disappearance. You have dressed opinion up as facts and many would like to know why you have done that?
Qn3) How were you able to smile with such joy only one week after your IVF first born child had disappeared?
Another thought. Is there a tape as to what McScam did after he and Jeremy Paxman finished the interview ie the off the record chat, that would be very interesting me thinks.
Hi BT
There is an article, DM online, a couple paid £25,000 to have an IVF baby only for the husband to leave after the child was born as he could not cope knowing he was not the father. Several people have said Gerry was not the father. I have no idea what is true regarding that statement.
What I can say is, I know of someone who had IVF several years ago and her husband was not the donor. He was initially thrilled when their son was born.
Sadly, two years later after many difficult times with their sons behaviour, imo brought on by their lack of routine and nothing else, he decided to leave. It was devastating for their family and friends alike.
Sadly sometimes parents or non parents just cannot bond.
BT
I also believe, if there had not been a leak about the mortgage payments it would still be going on today. IMO
Hiya all
I think the IVF issue is an interesting one, given the tests we know they made and Gerry's comments. If I recall, we need to look after our children now, and her daughter.
That Kate is Maddie's mum there can be no doubt.
Could this help to provide an exlanation for Gerry's attitude to Madeleine, that it is OK to abuse her and she is expendable but not his twins?
Speaking of things that go whoosh, clunk. There was a very interesting thread on 3 As looking at the issue of how to approach discussion of Madeleine possibly being the victim of sexual abuse. It has a controversial title " loaned out".
BB posted clearly in a rage a few times before saying she was leaving the thread and not coming back, telling us it was a loathesome and repulsive subject for us to "lovingly" write about.
Bren stated that she was not censoring discussion but was concerned about prejudicing any future trial which I accepted was a valid consideration.
Then whoosh clunk. So getting to the truth on that site? Hummm
It seems clear to me that if anyone dares to raise the subject that probably holds the key to this case, there is a very clear agenda to get people back to talking rubbish and avoid it, otherwise you will be called a paedophile yourself!
Sensible posters who want to seek the truth and use a large forum to do so, are increasingly made to feel very unwelcome. Keep chanting pure rubbish like Tony Bennett is fab and is going to get Justice for Maddie and they love you, but speak the truth and whoosh clunk!
xx
Interesting article posted by James1 3A's link
Could the tide be turning at last.
Daily Mail
13 March 2009
Jan Moir
Gerry's complaints leave a bitter taste
How strange it was to see pale, pugnacious Gerry McCann back in the news this week. It serves as a reminder that while the world has moved on for the rest of us, time stands still for him.
For the McCann family, the clocks stopped nearly two years ago, on that terrible night in the Algarve when their three-year-old daughter slipped from public view and has not been seen since.
In their quest to find Madeleine, the desperate McCanns invited the world's Press into their lives. It was a relationship that was doomed to sour.
Grievance: Gerry McCann has complained about the Press
For months, the McCanns' efforts to keep their daughter's plight high on the news agenda were intense. Far from shrinking from the oxygen of publicity, what they feared most was the muffle of public apathy. In the process, they became experts at manipulating the media to their own advantage.
At one point, Mr McCann even returned to the family home in Leicestershire to tie his own yellow ribbon to the teddystocked Madeleine shrine that had been hastily erected in the centre of the village.
Then and now, watching Gerry McCann walking the red carpet of his grief, as knowing as a Cannes film star, can be an uncomfortable experience.
This week, Mr McCann took the opportunity to air his grievances about the Press and its treatment of his family in front of the House of Commons Culture Select Committee.
For what possible purpose? Certainly, some bad judgment decisions were made by the more excitable newspapers, who have been punished with hefty libel payments and widespread approbation for their troubles. Surely that is an end to the matter?
No. Mr McCann is not finished complaining. Yet the more and more he complains about what happened in the aftermath of his daughter's disappearance, the more I feel he is attempting to assuage his own guilt for failing to be there when she needed him most.
Still, it's not his fault that these useless Select Committees, stuffed with the third rate and the Parliamentary walking wounded, give an indulgent platform for anyone with a grievance.
Hiya Di -
Thanks for posting that - it made my day!!
Great to see someone at last in the press telling it like it is - both she and Jeremy Paxman have gone up in my estimation.
Let's hope there's a yo-ho effect in the media now and that the McCanns and their tapas pals are left in no doubt that very few people with a modicum of intelligence have been taken in by them from the very start!
Nx
Hi BT -
Those three questions in your post at 18.04 yesterday, and a host of others in my opinion, should have been asked I agree, but I get the impression most interviewers are told from the very beginning not to go to near the mark and keep the McCanns sweet! Also of course there's the question of time.
I'm sure if they were allowed to say just what they thought it would be a different story. The BBC have long been supporters of the McCanns as the earlier Panorama programme made pretty clear!
Yes,I'd love to have been a fly on the wall after that interview!
Nx
Viv -
I read some of the thread on the 3A's yesterday and although none of us know for sure that anything like sexual abuse went on with poor little Maddie either involving her parents or the tapas friends, (there is no evidence of course), the fact remains that the McCanns have maintained someone abducted her and what else would that be for if not for paedophilia, so I don't think it should be a barred subject, just as long is it doesn't encourage the more salacious types on there to get a buzz.
It may be a good idea for the moderators to highlight threads that may offend instead of banning them.
Nx
Hi Di,
The mail article.
“Then and now, watching Gerry McCann walking the red carpet of his grief, as knowing as a Cannes film star, can be an uncomfortable experience.”
Does this mean Gerry is a ham actor or ham shanker? LOL
Talking about the Mail article could this be the start of the Streisand effect.
Oh I sincerely hope so!
Hi Wizard
Ham shanker LOL
The article was very cleverly written I particularly like pale, pugnacious Gerry. Jan certainly has a way with words.
I would love to have seen the reaction of Gerry & Pinky when they read the article, not a pretty sight I am sure.
Hi Nancy
It made my day as well. Let's hope there are other reporters willing to join ranks. The fact the article has not been pulled speaks volumes.
Wow! Well done Daily Mail and thanks for posting that, it has made my day too!
Pugnacious
–adjective
inclined to quarrel or fight readily; quarrelsome; belligerent; combative
What a stinging but honest rebuke for Gerry McCann. I wonder what him and Clarence are doing about that? Are we going to get another host of sickening Gerry press?
I hope the Select Committee are not as hopeless as claimed, but would not be too surprised!
xx
Wiz, I think it is an accurate summary of Gerry McCann, he is as knowing as Cannes Film Star,
he is just an actor and aspires to fame and fortune
Remember he wanted Maddie the Movie and Books estimated value £10M!
A polite way of calling him a jumped up liar I think!
New thread called for on this I think, just in case they do get it Carter Rucked!
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