The major contradictions in the statements of the McCanns and friends
The highly trained British police dogs who detected the scent of a corpse
Strange things the McCanns have said and done
How the McCanns wasted public money on useless private detectives
Can we be sure that Madeleine McCann really was abducted by a stranger? Please take a careful look at these facts about the case, which you won’t find in any of our mainstream media. And if you are concerned about the contents of this leaflet, please copy and pass on to your friends and contacts.
SECTION A. What happened before and after Madeleine was reported missing?
1. The McCanns originally claimed they found the shutters and window of the children’s room open. They ’phoned relatives that night saying: ‘An abductor broke in and took Madeleine’. But when police and the managers of the complex declared there was no sign of forced entry, they changed their story, saying they must have left the patio doors open. The window had been cleaned the day before. Only Kate McCann’s fingerprints were found on the window.
2. The McCanns gave different accounts of whether they were both with Madeleine at tea-time on the day Madeleine was reported missing - and gave three different versions of who read the children bedtime stories the night Madeleine was reported missing: (a) Kate (b) Gerry or (c) they both did.
3. Kate McCann said that their friend Dr David Payne knocked on the front door of their apartment at about 6.30pm on 3 May, but was immediately sent away without ever entering. Dr Payne, however, said he came in, saw all three children dressed ready for bed, and stayed for at least several minutes.
4. The McCanns said the children were in their pyjamas by 6.30pm the night Madeleine disappeared, were bathed at 7.00pm and asleep by 7.30pm. But just a few weeks later, in his blog, Gerry McCann wrote: “The twins must like their new cots as they were asleep by 7.30pm which was most unusual”.
5. Dr Matthew Oldfield claimed he and his wife arrived at the Tapas bar at 8.55pm, but then went back to the Paynes’ apartment to chase them up as they were late. Dr Russell O’Brien confirmed that: “Matt, around 9pm, got up and said ‘I’ll go and drag them out’.” The Paynes flatly contradicted this.
6. Dr Matthew Oldfield changed his story several times. He said he did one ‘check’ on the children, then said he’d done two. He changed his story about the 2nd check, first saying that he walked by the McCanns’ apartment, later saying he’d entered it. Dr Kate McCann claimed Dr Oldfield said, at 9.30pm: “I’ll check on Maddie for you”. Why didn’t he say: “I’ll check on the children?”
7. The McCanns’ friend Jane Tanner insisted she’d seen someone carrying a child close to the McCanns’ apartment at 9.15pm the evening she was reported missing. But she changed her description of this person several times. Later, one of the McCanns’ detectives said she might have seen a woman, not a man. She claimed that when she saw this man, she walked past Gerry McCann and a friend, Jez Wilkins. But neither of them could remember seeing her.
8. Instead of looking for Madeleine, two friends of the McCanns tore off the cover of Madeleine’s Activity Sticker Book, writing down what they claimed was a record of the night’s events. They then wrote out a second timeline of what they said happened. In both versions, they said Jane Tanner had seen an abductor around 9.15pm. But she did not tell the McCanns what she had seen for 24 hours.
9. The McCanns claimed they were dining yards from their children, said they could see their room, and said it was ‘just like being in your back garden’. In truth, the children’s room was 120 yards away and the children’s room was on the far side of the apartment block and they couldn’t see their room.
10. Gerry McCann on 4 May (the day after Madeleine went missing) said: “Yesterday, Madeleine and and the twins were put to bed in their respective beds at 7.30pm”. Yet when the police arrived at about 11.00pm, they found a bed where Madeleine was supposed to have slept and two cots. Moreover, in a magazine interview in January 2008, Gerry McCann said: “On one bed the twins lay sleeping.
11. The McCanns said Madeleine and younger brother Sean were crying on their own the night before she was reported missing. Yet they left all three children on their own again the very next night.
12. Gerry McCann claimed that a senior Social Services official had told him: “Your child care was well within the bounds of responsible parenting”. He has never said who that was.
13. The McCanns, when asked a simple question as to whether they had given the children Calpol or other sedatives the night Madeleine was reported missing, denied on TV ever giving their children Calpol or other sedatives. But Kate McCann’s father confirmed that they did give the children Calpol.
14. The McCanns said: “Madeleine does not like to be called Maddie and does not answer to Maddie”. But Gerry McCann called her ‘Maddie’ on Friends Reunited, the twins called her ‘Maddie’, and their relatives and friends called her ‘Maddie’. A long list of examples is at www.mcannfiles.com
15. Kate McCann said that when she went to their apartment at 10.00pm on 3 May, she was 100% sure that Madeleine had been ‘taken’. But the McCanns allowed their 7 friends, several staff from the Ocean Club, and others, to traipse all round their apartment, thus contaminating a crime scene where vital forensic evidence could have been found. The police found no forensic trace of any abductor.
16. On the night Madeleine was reported missing, two sets of police arrived, the local GNR, and then the national force, the PJ. On the first occasion, Gerry McCann fell down on his knees, spreading out his arms on the ground, rather like a Muslim at prayer. On the second occasion, both Gerry and Kate McCann repeated that same strange gesture, on the double bed in their apartment, in front of the PJ.
17. On 4 May, the day after Madeleine went missing, the McCanns were returning to Praia da Luz. The police seized CCTV film at a petrol station, showing a girl similar to Madeleine with two adults. The police asked the McCanns to return to Portimão, but Kate McCann became irritated at being asked to visit the police station again. The police said she showed no hope Madeleine could be found.
18. In a BBC TV interview, Kate McCann admitted that she had never spent any time at all physically looking for Madeleine.
19. The Portuguese police were told by British police: “The McCanns have no credit or ATM cards”. But their flights to Portugal and hire of a Renault Scenic in Portugal were paid with credit cards. Then Gerry McCann admitted having credit cards, saying they went missing after his wallet was stolen. He gave two different places where his wallet was stolen: Waterloo Station - or ‘near Downing Street’.
20. After she was taken in for questioning on 7 September, Kate McCann was asked 48 questions by the Portuguese police. She refused to answer any of them. She was asked if she realised that she was hindering the investigation by refusing to answer questions. She said: “Yes, if that’s what the investigation thinks”. Their official spokesman, former head of Labour’s Media Unit, Clarence Mitchell, stated: “The McCanns were fully within their rights not to co-operate”.
21. Mitchell was appointed the McCanns’ spokesman by former Prime Minister Tony Blair. Mitchell once boasted that as the £75,000-a-year Head of Unit, his job was ‘to control what comes out in the media’. When Mitchell’s post with the McCanns became part-time, he immediately landed a job with Freud Communications, owned and managed by Rupert Murdoch’s son-in-law, Matthew Freud.
22. The McCanns said publicly in August 2007: “We will take a lie detector test at any time”. Then a newspaper offered to pay for one. They then changed their mind and said they wouldn’t.
23. Some months after they returned to England, the McCanns and their friends were asked by Portuguese police to take part in a reconstruction of the events of 3 May 2007. They all refused.
24. When asked by a Portuguese journalist from Sol to give some details about Madeleine’s abduction, the McCanns’ friend Dr David Payne said: “This is our matter only. We have a pact of silence. All comments must go through Gerry McCann”.
25. The McCanns’ friends gave three different versions of how often they were supposedly checking the children - hourly, half-hourly and ‘every 15 minutes’.
26. The Portuguese police did not believe that the McCanns’ friend Jane Tanner was telling the truth about the abductor she claimed to have seen. Following a series of mobile ’phone conversations between Gerry McCann and former Prime Minister Gordon Brown, Brown pressurised the Portuguese authorities to allow Gerry McCann himself to release a description based on Tanner’s dubious claims.
27. The Home Office refused the Portuguese police permission to examine the McCanns’ credit card and bank statements, mobile ’phone records and Madeleine’s medical records.
28. Gordon Brown was told that Portuguese detective Mr Amaral, who took the McCanns in for questioning, would be removed from his post before he himself was informed.
SECTION B. The evidence of the cadaver dogs
29. On British police advice, the Portuguese asked top dog handler Martin Grime to bring his springer spaniels, Eddie and Keela, to Praia da Luz. Eddie is trained to detect the scent of human corpses; Keela is a bloodhound. Eddie had never given a false alert in over 200 previous outings. He alerted to the odour of a human corpse in these locations: four different places in the McCanns’ apartment, two of Dr Kate McCann’s clothes, one of the children’s T-shirts, on the pink soft toy, ‘Cuddle Cat’, and in two places in the car the McCanns hired. Eddie did not alert to a corpse scent anywhere else in Praia da Luz. Keela detected blood, which may have been Madeleine’s blood, at some of these places.
30. When they heard about the dogs’ findings, the McCanns reacted strangely, claiming that…
The ‘smell of death’ may have been found on Kate’s clothes because she was said to have been close to six corpses in her last two weeks at work, on the pink soft toy ‘Cuddle Cat’ because she ‘sometimes took Cuddle Cat to work’, or that the ‘smell of death’ could have come from rotting meat that Gerry McCann was taking to the local rubbish dump from time to time
If Madeleine’s DNA, were to be found in the boot of their car, it may have come from the children’s dirty nappies they claimed they were carrying in the boot
Any blood found in the flat might have come from Madeleine ‘grazing her leg’ or suffering a nosebleed. In fact, with the help of Martin Grime’s bloodhound, the police found blood underneath the tiles below a window in the living room of the McCanns’ apartment.
31. The McCanns also claimed that sniffer dogs were ‘notoriously unreliable’. They quoted a U.S. case where a cadaver dog’s alert was said to be wrong. Months later, the dog’s alert was proved right.
32. In 2008, a Portuguese TV interviewer asked: “How can you explain the scent of cadaver found by the British dogs?” Kate McCann replied: “Maybe you should ask the judiciary. They have examined all evidence”. When the interviewer pressed Kate McCann for an explanation, Gerry McCann intervened, smirking, and replied: “Ask the dogs, Sandra”.
33. When the McCanns moved from their apartment to a villa in Praia da Luz, a neighbour saw their car boot left open all night long. A relative of the McCanns, Michael Wright, admitted to police that this was because of a horrible smell in the car. This was the same car where Eddie, the cadaver dog, alerted to the smell of a corpse.
34. Kate McCann clutched ‘Cuddle Cat’ in front of TV cameras, claiming it reminded her of Madeleine, and was ‘comforting’. Yet shortly before the sniffer dogs arrived, she washed Cuddle Cat, claiming it ‘smelled of sun tan lotion’. This would make forensic analysis of it much harder.
SECTION C. Strange things the McCanns have said and done
35. The McCanns ignored police advice not to publicise Madeleine’s distinctive mark in her right eye, a ‘coloboma’. They said that if she was with an abductor, it could place her life in danger. On 15 July 2009, Gerry McCann said: “We thought it was possible that publicising her coloboma could harm Madeleine. Her abductor might do something to her eye. But in marketing terms it was a good ploy”.
36. Kate McCann, in 2007, said: “I know that what happened is not due to the fact of us leaving the children asleep. I know it happened under other circumstances”.
37. On 3 June 2007, Gerry McCann said: “We want a big event to raise awareness she is still missing…It won’t be a one-year anniversary, it will be sooner than that”. On 28 June, he said: “I have no doubt we will be able to sustain a high profile for Madeleine’s disappearance in the long-term”.
38. On 11 December 2009, Gerry McCann said: “There is no evidence that we were involved in Madeleine’s death”. The previous year, the McCanns’ spokesman said: “Can I suggest you actually quote me accurately. I said: ‘I believe Kate and Gerry are not responsible for Madeleine’s death’.”
39. On 24 August 2007, Gerry McCann, in a Scottish TV interview, said: “In fact, one of the slight positives in all of this is that there is so much rumour about what did and didn't happen, it's actually very difficult, if you're reading the newspapers, watching TV, to know what is true and what's not”.
40. Asked to comment on his reaction at learning that Madeleine had been abducted, Dr Gerald McCann said: ‘It was like being told you were overdrawn on your student loan”.
41. Clarence Mitchell, the McCanns’ spokesman, said in September 2007: “There is a wholly innocent explanation for any material the police may or may not have found”.
42. Unlike most couples who lose a dear child, they did not cling to their other two children. Others cared for them while they flew round the world to meet the Pope, visit the U.S. and do TV interviews.
43. As with all of us, the McCanns’ body language may yield valuable clues. During TV interviews, the following conduct has been observed: avoiding eye contact, nervous twitching, tense facial expressions, shaking their heads while making various assertions, and touching or scratching their faces at difficult moments. They were seen smiling and laughing on what would have been Madeleine’s 4th birthday, just 10 days after she went missing. Many people say they have not seen evidence of the grief that couples would normally express if they had lost a much-loved daughter.
SECTION D. The Fund and the McCanns’ private detectives
44. Only 13% of the McCanns’ Find Madeleine Fund has been spent on searching for Madeleine. The Fund is a private company, not a charity. Much of it has been used on the McCanns’ legal expenses.
45. The first detectives the McCanns employed were the highly controversial Spanish group Metodo 3. Just before Christmas 2007, their boss, Francisco Marco, boasted his men were ‘closing in on Madeleine’s kidnappers’, promising ‘Madeleine will be home by Christmas’. These were lies.
46. Next, the McCanns turned to a private investigator called Kevin Halligen, who has various aliases. He set up a one-man company called Oakley International, formed after Madeleine disappeared. Yet the McCanns’ spokesman claimed Oakley were ‘the big boys’ in international private detection. The McCanns are said to have paid Halligen £500,000, which he squandered on high living and hard drinking, achieving nothing. At present (January 2011), he has been in Belmarsh High Security Prison over a year, awaiting extradition to the U.S., where he is required to answer $2 million fraud charges.
47. All the main ‘private investigation’ agencies used by the McCanns had expertise in such areas as money-laundering, fraud, state security and intelligence - not in finding missing children.
48. The McCanns have produced 16 different artists’ impressions of suspects, ‘persons of interest’ and ‘persons we wish to eliminate from our enquiries’. Yet despite their spending millions of pounds, we, the public, know nothing whatsoever about who is supposed to have abducted Madeleine.
49. The McCanns took legal action to ban Mr Amaral’s book on the case: ‘The Truth About A Lie’. They succeeded in September 2009. But in October 2010 the Portuguese Appeal Court lifted that ban. The McCanns are carrying on with their libel action against Mr Amaral, using their Fund to do so.
50. The McCanns said late last year that their Fund was running low and that the Fund ‘might run out of money soon’. Yet at the very same time, they were negotiating a multi-million pound book deal.
Published by ‘The Madeleine McCann Research Group’
