The complaints about the Yard investigation seem
to be getting louder and weirder. But why? Why prefer
fantastical theories to the reality? For perhaps the fiftieth time, there isn’t
a case against the McCanns regarding the
disappearance because there's no evidence to charge them with. Literally.
But should it be so hard to hard to discover what happened that night? Isn't something wrong?
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| Irreproachable |
It Should Be So Easy...
Pause for a moment and think: if, say, an abductor had taken
the child, what sort of evidence would we expect could solve
the case? That’s easy enough: evidence of intrusion – prints, exterior
interference, DNA etc; evidence of forcible removal – struggle, noise, damage, cries; eyewitnesses; a trail;
screams or cries of distress from a child forcibly restrained in someone’s
arms; tip-offs from the families of locals. A confession. A body.
But we haven’t got any. It’s never turned up.
But what if something
happened as the PJ posited, an accident involving a member of the group - would gaining evidence be easier? Yes and no. A much smaller target area and a greatly restricted number of possible suspects, sure. But no intruder forensics, of course, and DNA evidence, except that of the child's death, wouldn’t help
since the whole group had a right to be in the apartment. And while the number of suspects is limited so is the number of useful or independent witnesses. Readers can go through the options for themselves: what
emerges, one way and another, is that because of the restricted location and the absence of decisive forensic evidence, investigators are almost exclusively dependent on a small number of witnesses - mainly the holiday group
itself.
The PJ, having found no convincing evidence of abduction,
concentrated on the group. Since, as we
pointed out in The Cracked Mirror,
nothing has emerged to add to what they found regarding abduction, their
decision to discount that possibility appears to have been thoroughly vindicated: if ten years have produced zero evidence for an abduction but some evidence against then
clearly a) the PJ did not miss glaringly obvious abductor evidence because they
were too busy focusing on the McCanns and
b) despite much excitable searching and sighting nothing whatever has been
unearthed anywhere in the world. Abductor-wise there is nobody to question, nowhere to begin and no way of finding an
area to explore. That's why there is no search for an
abductor and hasn’t been since Ribeiro made clear it was all over in summer
2007 and that they were concentrating a very few expert officers to attack the material that could progress the case. Just exactly as Grange is doing now.
But It Isn't
But from the very beginning, and for whatever reason, the Tapas Nine refused to talk frankly
to the PJ and took the disastrous and incomprehensible
decision to provide their own “sequence of events” to them on May 10 2007. The reason most often
suggested for this failure to be completely open was the alleged fear among the Nine that
their own words of co-operation might be used by the incompetent but draconian UK child protection industry to
take their children away for neglecting their welfare in PDL.
The often-suggested alternative reason – that the group
feared the PJ was so useless and/or wicked that they might all be at risk of
some nameless miscarriage – does not hold water: in their PJ statements
on the morning of May 4 several of the Nine were already guarded in
their words when it was much too soon to have made a judgement about the
dishonesty or incompetence of the police, let alone act on it.
By May 10 the group had constructed its “sequence of events from 8.30
to 10PM”, the so-called “typed timeline”, which they arranged to be handed to an
incredulous PJ prior to the next round of statement-taking.
It can be found Here
An Attack On Investigation Itself
The document has been much analysed; here we will merely
note that it is incontrovertibly not
a statement of events but a selectively constructed narrative pointing unerringly and with emphasis to a specific intruder entering
apartment 5A, leaving behind signs of his presence, abducting Madeleine McCann and being witnessed hurrying away with an unconscious child in his arms. All between 8.55 and 9.25, no earlier and no later. Other "events" that might have been relevant to a mystery disappearance are excluded.
There is no possible doubt about this intention: textual and
statistical analysis shows that of the 5 claimed checks over 1.5 hours, no less than four
took place at ten minute intervals
between 8.55 and 9.25, the “abductor available” period while no others took place at all the whole evening except Kate McCann’s
abduction-confirming 10 PM visit.
Each of those four checks, by GM, MO (twice) and JT revealed
supposed "facts" - observations of changes to the apartment consistent with the presence of an
intruder, of a stranger hurrying
away with a “possibly drugged”
child in his arms, about gates “probably shut” but later “possibly
open”. The “intruder” was, without
any doubt, unjustifiably retrofitted into the narrative in the available slots as, for
instance, by Oldfield’s “shutters-down at 8.55” (intruder hadn’t been in the
bedroom yet), Gerry McCann’s most famous urination in history (time was
tight so the abductor was retrofitted in with his presence in the loo), and, of
course, the fabulous moving door.
The McCanns have always stood by the "facts" in this
narrative and have had nothing to say about its potential malign effects on the investigation. Kate McCann
writes in Madeleine that she has no
doubt at all that the JT sighting was of the “abductor” while Gerry McCann,
through his spokesman, talked of the possible accompanying presence of the “abductor” in the apartment while he was peeing at 9.10 when
the PJ were trying (yet again!) to work out who was doing what in late 2007.
Outside this group-decided window-of-opportunity-for-the-abductor period the “sequence of events” supposedly covering
an hour and an half contains almost no
events, little description and no useful information whatever. The 8.35 - 9.00 period just
contains names and supposed arrival times at the restaurant, the 9.30 -10.00
period consists of just 60 words –
the equivalent of two average length sentences – about what the Yard think is the critical period of the evening. What happened to those
"events"? What were people doing and
seeing? How did the group know that nothing worth telling the police about had occurred in that other hour? Why the sudden explosion of checks coinciding with the window of opportunity for the abductor and the complete absence of them at other times? How could they
have known that Gerry McCann pissing in a toilet bowl at 9.10 was a significant "event" but neither his nor anyone else's bladder was worthy of mention between 9.35 and 10
PM? Where, indeed, was he then? They don't say. When, exactly, did he return to the table from his 9.05 check? They don't say.
We should add, finally, that this self-serving stuff was a
betrayal of the investigative process itself. It was a “collective narrative” when the police, all police everywhere, want an uncontaminated non-hearsay summary of personal experience; it was a selection of information that suited their pre-conceptions and ignored everything that didn’t, when police everywhere want answers to what they, the police, are interested in. It drew on the knowledge of what others had already said in their first statements, a corruption of the witness process every bit as bad as contaminating the crime scene;it
mixed personal recollection with details of what others were doing and put forth both as equally true. All of it was a complete subversion of the universal statement analysis and validation procedure - comparing separate, confidential first-person
recollections with each other to establish the truth.
Trapped
Even more seriously they left themselves with no choice
but to stand by this document for ever, for how could any one of them say they wanted
to rethink anything in the future without destroying the timeline and the credibility
of the other eight? They had trapped themselves, whether they were guilty of
anything or not – the worst outcome for investigators, worse even than a “pact
of silence” (no, there never was one) which, after all, is an implicit admission of guilt and as such can eventually be broken by
offering incentives.
And indeed it was the worst outcome. They stuck by their “collective
recollection” all the way until the case was shelved. They survived
the Archiving Summary's verdict of refusal to co-operate in forming a picture of what was going on that evening "for unknown reasons". They survived the prosecutor’s evidence in the Lisbon
court that they hadn't told the truth about the checking times. They survived the
refusal to do anything to help Amaral’s
successor Rebelo make sense of their actions. And they survived the Leicester
interviews unscathed, despite their inability to make their various claims add up. As far as anyone knows, they have stuck
by it in Operation Grange. At no time have any of them evinced the slightest sense of shame or regret at the effect that their actions and silences may have had on the investigation into the child's fate.
Now the official Redwood/Grange revisions or revelations of "window of opportunity" times and sightings has stranded the typed timeline like a dirty piece of paper from a sinking ship. Perhaps that's what it is. Without the 8.55-9.25 abductor – remember
four “checks” in those thirty minutes and none before or afterwards until 10PM – the narrative is manifestly absurd. The attempts to paint an innocent stranger
as a bogeyman who wore “clothing [that] did
not seem to be of UK origin and may well have been purchased in Portugal” and
carried a “motionless/limp…possibly drugged” child as he "rushed" away from the apartment where Gerry McCann had sensed his presence and Oldfield had observed the door he’d opened, all will demand explanations one day.
Want to Have a Go?
But so what? Demands – who moved
the door? – are one thing, results another. What if they still don’t want
to help or "can't remember"? Faced with the utter intransigence
of that group and their peculiar and striking absence of shame, would
you fancy your chances of discovering what happened that night? In case you'd forgotten you can't force the truth out of people, you can't force them to incriminate themselves and, thank God, you can't lock them up until they answer your questions.
Get real: we're lucky it hasn't taken two decades. Instead, we repeat, things are on target.
