In the summer of 2007, while families relaxed on beach holidays across southern Europe, I was immersed in an altogether different experience in the Portuguese resort of Praia de Luz, where one family’s idyllic break with friends had turned to tragedy.
Madeleine McCann disappeared from her bed at Mark Warner’s Ocean Club resort on the night of 7 May, probably at around 9.15pm. She was a week short of her fourth birthday. If she is still alive, she turned 23 last week. But no trace of her – dead or alive – has ever been found.
I reported the case at length, made several trips to Portugal and was there in early September when the story turned on its head. After weeks of whispering and rumour, driven by the Portuguese police (The PJ – Policia Judiciaria), they finally and openly began treating Madeleine’s parents, Kate and Gerry McCann, as being responsible for killing their own daughter. They were separated and brought in for hours of intense questioning. They were made “arguidos” – suspects.
These events, which I witnessed and heard about first hand from the McCanns themselves, are the subject of a new Channel 5 drama, aptly titled Under Suspicion: Kate McCann.
There is no doubt in my mind that the McCanns played no part in Madeleine’s disappearance. For the McCanns to be responsible, they would have been obliged to enter into an unthinkable pact, not just with each other, but with their travelling companions, all seven of them, a close-knit group of friends. When you hear what the Portuguese police accused them of doing, you will realise how absurd the accusations were.
But equally, as the couple know only too well, mud sticks. The suspicions have never gone away and perhaps never will, unless or until Madeleine is found. Although I have not seen or spoken to them for some years now, I often wonder, after nearly two decades, what semblance of normal life the McCanns have found, with their twin children, Sean and Amelie, who were then aged two and are now young adults – and Madeleine, who remains, I am sure, a powerful presence in her absence. I don’t doubt that Kate and Gerry McCann’s immense fortitude and resilience have carried them through. It was certainly cracking, however, during those days in August and early September, as the 100th day since Madeleine’s disappearance approached.
“It’s getting very nasty,” their then public relations assistant, Justine McGuinness, told me after I landed at Faro. She wasn’t wrong. Justine, too, was feeling the strain of the intense media interest that focused on the police station at Portimao, as first Kate and then Gerry were interviewed and given formal suspect status.
I had met the couple briefly already and saw great strain in their gaunt features. They seemed to be ordinary people, from ordinary backgrounds, both high-achieving enough to have become doctors and now leading different, more comfortable lives from the ones they had been born into. Perhaps their abilities made them less supine than others might have been, more ready – after the initial shock – to strategise about what needed to be done and how to do it.
Their status as suspects meant they were bound by the rules of judicial secrecy, but Gerry McCann did not want to be silenced, and soon after they returned to the UK we met in a pub near their home back in Leicester, where he told me what had been going on, over nearly three hours of huddled chat, which I recorded, together with Clarence Mitchell, who had by now become the family’s trusted PR.
When we returned to their home afterwards, so that Gerry could call me a cab, Kate was sitting with a friend in the lounge and said a polite hello. While we waited in the kitchen for the taxi to arrive, there were two plates of food in the kitchen, covered in cling film, prepared by Kate for Gerry and Clarence’s supper. And on the fridge, a star chart for Madeleine, to monitor her progress in sleeping through the night and (with terrible irony) remaining in her bed.
Reviewing the transcripts of our talk that night, I am struck by Gerry McCann’s ability to identify with the Portuguese police’s position. He could see why they were suspicious, even if they had put two and two together and made 37, instead of four. In reality, as we now know, the police in Portugal had been briefing against the couple since the opening salvo of an article in a Portuguese paper which revealed the names of their friends for the first time and implied they were all in a conspiracy of silence. There were stories of excess drinking by the group and carelessness in leaving their children, none of it standing up to scrutiny. But all that was of secondary consequence to the real turning point in the investigation, the deployment of two sniffer dogs brought out from the UK to examine both the McCann’s apartment and a row of relevant vehicles, including the car the McCanns had hired more than three weeks after their daughter’s disappearance.
There were two dogs – one detected blood and the other could detect the scent of a dead body. A fragment of blood was found in the lounge of the apartment the family had used, and the cadaver dog “alerted” (froze) while examining the boot of the McCann’s car. It was suggested that a sample of fluid had been found that matched Madeleine’s DNA.
Suddenly, the Portuguese police’s suspicions – that Madeleine could have died in an accident and her body removed and disposed of by her parents – apparently had some basis.
Kate was the first to be summoned for an interview and questioned over 11 hours (and five more hours the following day) and Gerry followed. They had known they were to be questioned but not what the allegations were. There was a list, in fact, of 22 factors that were presented to Kate’s lawyer as indicators of her guilt. Gerry told me he had said to Kate that the Portuguese police “were driving down a cul-de-sac with their foot on the accelerator and they won’t break”. The skewed focus on them as suspects was a terrible distraction from the search for their daughter. Gerry described to me how he had cried in his interview, and Kate had been given the third degree. Kate was, he said, very angry and defiant. As they badgered her to reveal “what really happened,” she retorted, “you’re the police, you tell me”. She asked, plaintively, if they were trying to destroy her family. She was afraid of losing Sean and Amelie too.
Then as now, if you think about it, the likelihood of two people – both doctors – accidentally harming their child and not immediately seeking help is implausible enough, to then hide it from your friends, or draw them into a homicidal conspiracy was and is close to impossible. Added to that, the implication that the body had been transported in the car they rented 24 days after the disappearance could only mean they had kept the corpse hidden for three weeks. Where? How?
Finding DNA that was similar (but not a precise match) to that of Madeleine in a car used by her family was hardly an investigative breakthrough. As we now know the dogs were eventually discredited and there is not the slightest sliver of evidence to support the suggestion that Kate and Gerry McCann were involved in Madeleine’s death.
The prime suspect remains the convicted German rapist Christian Bruckner. It has been some years now since the German police asserted they had concrete evidence of his role in the abduction of Madeleine. Bruckner has never been charged. The evidence has yet to be revealed but the Metropolitan Police are reportedly pushing to bring Christian Bruckner, the prime suspect in Madeleine McCann's disappearance, to the UK for trial, before the 20th anniversary of Madeleine's disappearance next year, according to recent reports. A significant obstacle to a UK trial is Germany’s constitutional law, which prevents the extradition of its citizens to non-EU countries like Britain. Unfortunately for the McCanns, until someone is charged and the mystery is solved, their heartbreak and clear evidence of innocence will, for some, never be enough.
David James Smith is a journalist and author, and regularly writes on his Substack “Notes on Crime”.
