In 2007, three-year-old Madeline McCann disappeared without a trace at a Portuguese resort where she was vacationing with her family. Over 14 years, investigators had many leads and several hundred suspects, including the girl’s parents, but police could not find the culprits or Madeline herself. In the summer of 2020, a new suspect emerged, but the case is still unsolved.
“Little Britain.”
In 2007, Kate and Jerry McCann were spending a seven-day vacation at the quiet Portuguese resort of Praia da Luz. The choice of place for a British family with three children is pretty obvious. Because of the huge number of tourists from the United Kingdom, Portuguese was only the second or third most commonly spoken language here after English. The locals called the resort “Little Britain.” The resort also had three children’s centers, plus babysitting services were available for times when the playrooms were closed.
The couple vacationed with four families: nine adults, all medical professionals, and eight children, including the two-year-old McCann twins and their three-year-old sister, Madeline. The couple’s vacation was rather monotonous. Each day they had breakfast and lunch with the children in their apartment, and after each meal they sent them off to have fun at the children’s center.
Friends of the couple followed a slightly different schedule: they ate at cafes or each other’s houses rather than at home and, unlike the McCanns, they always spent the morning or afternoon with their children. Every evening, between about 8:30 and 11:30 p.m., all the adults ate dinner at the restaurant. The children were left alone in the apartment, occasionally stepping out to check on them, except for one family who had a baby monitor.
On the penultimate night of the vacation, around 10 p.m., Kate McCann went to her apartment to check on the children. But three-year-old Madeline wasn’t there.The search for the girl, involving family friends, resort staff, vacationers and locals, continued all night. Around 11 p.m., police arrived on the scene. The McCanns were moved to another room while police searched and photographed the apartment where the child had disappeared from.
The next day, police with dogs searched the nearby village without success. The range of the search was expanded from 15 kilometers to 30 kilometers. Naval services searched coastal waters, cliffs and beaches, and tracked if there was any suspicious movement in the port. Military helicopters helped coordinate teams on the ground and surveyed areas that were difficult to reach by other means than by air. But there were no results.
During questioning, McCann’s friend, Jane Tanner, said she saw a man on the street around 9:20 p.m. carrying a young child who resembled Madeline by description. That account led to the girl’s disappearance being treated as a kidnapping.
Adults checked the room three times the night Madeline went missing, but because of the way it was done, it was impossible to speculate exactly what time the kidnapper, if it was him, might have been in the room.The first person to check on the children was their father, 30 to 40 minutes after dinner began. He thought it strange that the door to the room where the twins and Madeline slept was a little more ajar than he had left it when he left for the restaurant. The man paid no attention to this: the windows, blinds, and balcony of the ground-floor apartment remained closed.
Afterward, a friend of the family purposely walked under the windows of the children’s room. He did not notice any noises that would indicate that the children were awake. Half an hour later, he also went to check on the children in the room, but he did not even go into the room where the children were: through the ajar door the twins could be seen sleeping.Madeline’s bed was far away, and thus could not be seen. According to the Portuguese police, the girl could have been abducted after this visit, at about 9:40 p.m., before her mother discovered her disappearance around 10 p.m. The “holy” victim.
Despite a request from the Portuguese police to hold off on the press, the McCanns asked several British media outlets to help find the girl hours after she went missing.Overnight, they sent British police and news outlets family photos, including shots of Madeline. Britons learned of the mysterious disappearance at a Portuguese resort from the morning news.
Media researchers and sociologists believe that things converged in the Madeline McCann case that easily attracted and retained attention. That’s why the media has happily picked up the story and continue to write about the investigation 14 years after the child went missing.
First, it’s a crime against a defenseless young child that always creates a public outcry. Second, children and child incidents are a guaranteed way to get attention in a competitive news environment, says Susan Moeller, a professor at the University of Maryland.
A kidnapped child is the “perfect” and “holy” victim, a crime against whom deserves no forgivenessIf the victim is young, beautiful and female, audiences empathize more with that image, adds sociologist Chris Jenks.
Such an image is easy to visualize through photographs, which is what the McCann spouses did. In addition, the audience’s sympathy for the kidnapped child is supplemented by a sense of unrealized potential: the child had a whole life ahead of him, which is now threatened. The viewer projects this experience onto themselves, Jenks believes.
Journalists got in the way of investigating the caseThese days, videos on YouTube, music, documentaries or social media posts don’t surprise anyone. But in 2007, the disappearance of a young child was accompanied by such a social uproar, perhaps for the first time. Thanks to the Internet versions of the media, every new detail about the case available to journalists went viral in a matter of seconds.
The day after the girl went missing, journalists flocked to the village near the resort. By the end of the week, three hundred teams from various media outlets were working there. At first delighted at the extra income, locals soon began to say that the journalists who had stirred up the previously quiet life were “little better than cockroaches.
Portuguese police, according to local laws, were not supposed to disclose details of the investigation. In the report of the 2008 investigation, they lamented that the news, which contained inaccurate and sometimes false information, and information noise interfered with the quiet conduct of the case. After the investigation was completed, the head of the Portuguese police even resigned, tired of the media scrutiny.
For a long time the couple was the only source of information for journalists. In each appearance they emphasized that Madeleine was “kidnapped, but alive” and thanks to the attention of concerned people she could be found. The public reacted vividly: To lose a child is a nightmare for any parent.
But within a month of the girl’s disappearance, the first skeptical comments in the press would be heard, which would eventually lead to harassment.The McCanns, quite successful at channelling the news agenda at home, could not cope with the 24-hour flow of information in foreign publications. A month after Madeline’s disappearance, at a press conference in Berlin, the couple were asked directly why more and more people were blaming them for the girl’s disappearance.
There were just as many people willing to blame the parents as there were sympathizers. The press was not satisfied with the “inappropriate” behavior of the girl’s mother, Kate McCann. They wanted to see a grief-stricken woman, but instead she looked good and acted “unnaturally cold” in public.Leaks from the Portuguese police also fueled the rumors. Allegedly there were contradictions in the statements of the girl’s father and mother about what happened on the day of Madeline’s disappearance.
Anonymous sources claimed that Kate had negligently murdered the girl by giving her too much sedative and that she had disposed of the body with the help of friends.Journalists were also confused by the fact that while the investigation was going on in Portugal, the couple went on a “tour” of European countries and the United States, where they met with public figures, in every way drawing attention to the fact of the missing girl. They prayed in Fatima, Portugal, a city popular with Christian pilgrims.
They had an audience with the Pope at the Vatican and met with the former Attorney General in Washington, then visited Germany, Morocco and Spain.Critics said it was as if places were deliberately excluded from the list of countries where, according to police reports, children matching Madeline’s description had been spotted at the time.The most ardent skeptics believed that the girl was probably not alive and that the McCanns simply did not want to part with the media attention and money from the Madeline Help Fund.
It was created a few years after the girl went missing, along with two websites originally conceived by the parents and their lawyers as the main source of information about the investigation. It soon became clear that the press was handling that role all by itself. Then, according to Albert Moisiu, author of the book about Madeline’s disappearance, it was decided to use the page to transfer donations to find the girl.
According to the most conservative estimates, this way the parents received at least two million poundsIt was impossible to get exact figures because the law did not oblige the parents to make them public. Among those who donated were famous people, including Joan Rowling.Only in 2008, the couple said that they had spent on the search for the girl about a million pounds and that the account was about 450 thousand, without disclosing other details.
In July 2007, British investigators came to the Portuguese resort. They brought with them two springer spaniels. One was trained to detect traces of human blood, the other to detect corpses by smell. This method is used by the British police to investigate similar cases. Newspapers wrote that the dogs were involved in the investigation at the request of the girl’s parents.
The dogs found microscopic traces of Madeline’s blood in the apartment the family rented, on the mother’s clothes, the T-shirt the girl wore shortly before her disappearance, and in the car the family rented on vacation. The samples were confirmed by a British laboratory.
Experts warned Portuguese police that because the test is very sensitive, it could be erroneous. Despite this, investigators gave the McCanns arguido status, the Portuguese term for suspects who have not yet been specifically charged.
On Sept. 7, the couple was charged with staging a child abduction and disposing of the body. The girl’s father agreed to answer all questions from investigators. Her mother exercised her right to remain silent. Despite their arguido status, the couple were not required to stay in Portugal and returned to Britain two days later.
Their return was widely reported in the media, even though the McCanns made no comment. Under Portuguese law, they would have faced up to two years in prison for revealing the secrecy of the investigation.The British press sorely lacked details about the investigation. The newspapers turned to the Portuguese media, which was by then openly harassing the couple. British journalists soon did the same.
59% of the Daily Star’s readers believed that the girl’s parents were hiding the truth about what happened, and 80% of The Sunday Times’ audience was convinced of their guilt. Even The Sun tabloid, one of the most consistent defenders of the couple, devoted a spread to arguments for and against this version.The McCanns turned to professional PR firms to fight back against the aggressive media campaign. They hired specialists in reputation management and media coordination. They also hired private investigators in Portugal to launch an independent investigation.
The Portuguese police could not prove the couple were guilty. More than a year after Madeline’s disappearance, in July of 2008, the case was sent to the archives, reserving the right to resume the investigation if new circumstances arise.A month later, the police, tired of the media noise, took the unprecedented step of releasing a disc with the official documents of the case. More than 11 thousand pages of the case contained testimonies of witnesses and experts, photos, print-outs of emails. The release of the materials, along with the removal of the suspects’ status, gave a new impetus to the private investigation of the case.
In 2010, the British Home Office (an agency similar in function to the Home Office) began reviewing the case again. It cost the missing girl’s parents more than one meeting with the right people who could have influenced the decision to launch an investigation in Britain. Scotland Yard soon concluded that the girl might be alive.
Investigators were looking into resort employees and convicted British citizens convicted of pedophilia who were in Portugal at the time. In 2015, a suitcase with the remains of a child was found in Australia, but identification revealed that the victim was not the missing Madeline, but a two-year-old girl who had been murdered and raped by her stepfather in 2008. According to media reports, the second investigation into the case cost the country’s budget nearly £12 million.
And now, in 2020, a new suspect suddenly appeared in the case – a 43-year-old German citizen. From 1995 to 2007, he rented a house near the resort where the girl went missing and, according to investigators, was stealing from hotel rooms.
The man, who had been convicted several times (including for child abuse), came to the attention of the police because he re-registered his car to another person for no apparent reason the day after Madeleine’s disappearance. German police spokesman Christian Hoppe suggested in an interview that the suspect may have broken into the McCanns’ apartment to commit theft. And when he saw Madeline, he decided to take advantage of the situation.
While the investigation is trying to figure out the details. According to the McCann family representative, the investigation is more confident in this version than in the previous ones. In addition, it is supported by experts from three countries – Britain, Portugal and Germany. The German police believe that the girl is probably no longer alive.
On May 3, 2022 Madeleine’s parents posted on the page devoted to the search for Madeleine: “This year we are celebrating 15 years since we last saw Madeleine. Today is not a harder day, but it is by no means easier than others. Fifteen years is a long time. A lot of people talk about closing the case. That term has always seemed strange to us. Regardless of the outcome, Madeline will always be our daughter, and a terrible crime will remain a terrible crime. It is true that uncertainty breeds weakness, but knowledge and certainty give strength, and for that reason we seek answers, the truth.”
The McCanns went on to thank authorities in Britain, Portugal and Germany for helping to investigate the case. “It is gratifying to know that despite the passage of time, Madeleine is still in people’s hearts and minds,” the couple said.