- "They know that Madeleine is dead and that there
were no abductors."
Correio da Manhã, 16 April 2009
- "...they are drowning
in the lies that they have been saying."
SIC, 12 May 2009
The McCanns views on leaving their 3 children alone
Gerry McCann
"It's difficult because if you are [at home] cutting grass in the back with the mower, and that takes me about half an
hour, and the children are upstairs in a bedroom, you'd never bat an eyelid. That's similar to how we felt."
"If I put the children in the car the chances of having an accident would be greater than somebody coming in, breaking
into your apartment and lifting a child out of her bed. But you never think, I shouldn't put the children in the car."
'Their family says the couple's ordeal has left their staunch Catholic faith undimmed.'
Susan Healy (Kate's mother)
22 October 2007
"...as soon as Kate realised what had happened, it was as if she started to ask God right away to give her Madeleine.
Because Kate and Gerry were not the most devout family."
Gerry McCann
25 May 2007
"I'm not the most religious person in the world..."
Gerry McCann: Madeleine's 'little trip'
Gerry McCann's blog
01 October 2007
'I am still amazed at the irresponsible reporting going on in the press with unsubstantiated reports from unreliable
sources being repeated in the UK and Portuguese press unquestioningly. It is simply untrue that the twins think that Madeleine
has gone on a 'little trip'.'
"There is no attempt to shield them from Madeleine. Questions as and when they arise are dealt with. When we were in
Portugal we told them she was on a little trip."
Mr McCann said: "We have said she's gone on a little trip just now and Amelie came out with one really cutting line that
went right to the core, she said 'Madeleine's on trip, back soon'.
The question of 'abduction'
Alex Woolfall(McCanns' first spokesman)
'Mr Woolfall says that he heard no suggestion in the early days that the girl had been snatched. "Certainly I did not
hear any discussion that this could be a paedophile or an aggravated robbery. All the time I was around it was whether she
could have wandered off and had an accident or somebody had actually taken her in, perhaps not with ill-intent.
"During the first 48 hours the word being used was 'missing' rather than 'abducted' or any link with a paedophile or
any sort of crime. Towards the end of the second week I detected a shift towards there being a consciousness that she had
probably been taken rather than wandered off, just on the assumption that anybody would have found her by now."'
Times interview, 06 October 2007
June Wright(Luz resident)
"I arrived at the Ocean Club reception at around about 10 to
11 and at the time that we arrived a police car arrived - and as the police officer got out a man approached him, who I now
know is Gerry McCann, and said that his daughter had been abducted. That there was no way that she could have opened the shutters
herself, she'd definitely been taken."
Channel 4 Dispatches documentary, 18 October 2007
Susan Moyes(staying 2 floors directly above McCanns'
apartment)
"We were woken up at half past eleven at night by one of the friends
of the McCanns to say 'a little girl' had 'been abducted'; those... those were the words used."
BBC - Stoke and Staffordshire, 14 August 2007
Trish Cameron(Sister of Gerry McCann)
- Receives phone call at 23:40pm on May 3rd
'Heart specialist Gerry McCann rang his sister Trish in
Scotland after Maddy vanished from her cot placed between two-year-old twins Sean and Amelie.
Trish revealed yesterday: "He was breaking his heart,
saying 'Madeleine's been abducted, she's been abducted'."'
Daily Mirror, 05 May 2007
Bridget O'Donnell(staying in adjacent block)
'At 1am there was a frantic banging on our door. Jes got up to answer.
I stayed listening in the dark. I knew it was bad; it could only be bad. I heard male mumbling, then Jes's voice. "You're
joking?" he said. It wasn't the words, it was the tone that made me flinch. He came back in to the room. "Gerry's daughter's
been abducted," he said.'
Guardian, 14 December 2007
Male witness(On holiday, staying at the Ocean
Club)
'I was
looking in the little gardens on the poolside of that block, I was in the end garden when I heard a male voice; he sounded
distraught, his voice cracking with emotion. I looked to see, who I now know to be, Gerry McCann stood above me on the balcony/patio
about 3 metres away, speaking on a mobile phone. I cannot recall his exact words but I got the impression that he was speaking
to perhaps a family member or someone he was very close to due to the nature of his conversation.
He said something along the lines of there being paedophile gangs
in Portugal and that they had abducted Madeleine. I was so shocked by this, having originally thought that she had just wandered
off.
I had looked up by now and we actually made eye contact, his conversation
did not change at all when he realised that I was there. I felt as if I were intruding on a private moment and so I left the
garden at that point.
Statement from PJ case files, 06 December 2007
Jon Corner(Family friend/on board of Madeleine's
Fund)
- Receives phone call at 03:00am on May 4th
'Jon Corner, a close friend of Mrs McCann and godparent of the twins,
said Kate telephoned him in the middle of the night distraught.
He said: "She just blurted out that Madeleine had been abducted.
She told me, 'They have broken the shutter on the window and taken my little girl.''
Telegraph, 07 May 2007
Sylvia Batista(Head of
administration at the Ocean Club complex)
'She recalled
that the twins were still asleep in their two cots and there was the small, bright pink wool blanket that Madeleine likes
to hold when she sleeps. "We walked out quickly so as not to wake up the twins. The parents immediately said, 'She's been
kidnapped'," said Batisa.'
Times, 06 May 2007
Jon Corner
Jon Corner
Jon Corner talking about Madeleine (Vanity Fair)
"So beautiful, astonishingly bright, and I’d have to say very charismatic. She would shine out of a crowd. So—God
forgive me—maybe that’s part of the problem. That special quality. Some ******* picked up on that."
Jon Corner - Cuddle Cat (Timesonline)
'Gerry paused over Madeleine, who – a typical doctor’s observation, this – was lying almost in "the
recovery position" with Cuddle Cat, the toy her godfather, John Corner, had bought her, and her comfort blanket up near her
head, and Gerry thought how gorgeous, how lovely-looking she was and how lucky he was.'
Jon Corner (Panorama)
CORNER: Well this is the bizarre thing Richard because the police said to Kate and Gerry: "Yeah, we're going to be coming
along, we want to do some forensics." And Kate and Gerry were massively optimistic about this. You've got to remember if your
daughter is missing and the police phone you and say: "We want to do some forensics, that's a straw that you hang onto. That's
a moment for optimism.
- Just earlier Corner had said this:
CORNER: They took most of their clothing, they were taking even the wet clothes out of the washing machine. I was aware
that the cuddlecat was boxed up and we were asked to leave the villa.
- So, the police phoned the McCanns to say they were coming over to do some forensics and the McCanns, it would
appear, immediately filled up the washing machine with clothes.
Cases of Missing Women and Young Girls Get Varying Media Attention, 07 March 2010
Cases of Missing Women and Young Girls Get Varying Media Attention ABC News
Some Missing Persons Cases Captivate the Country While Others Get Little Notice
By RON CLAIBORNE and DAN PRZYGODA March 7, 2010
Chelsea King was the focus of
intense media attention and law enforcement effort, with hundreds of officers and thousands of volunteers joining the search
for her.
Almost exactly a year earlier and about 10 miles from where King was last seen jogging, 14-year-old Amber
Dubois left home to walk to school, never to be seen again. Yet, Dubois' case got far less media attention and seemingly
fewer law enforcement resources.
Hundreds of thousands of children are reported missing every
year. A hundred or so turn out to be the result of foul play, and only a handful of those get the kind of media scrutiny that
King's case got.
Ernie Allen, president of the Center
for Missing and Exploited Children, says the cases that get the most attention tend to involve pre-teen
children where it's immediately apparent that foul play by a stranger, not a family member, is suspected.
"Chelsea's
case received enormous media attention because it was dramatic and sensational. The child goes jogging in a park area and
doesn't come home. With Amber Dubois, nobody saw her disappear, and there's no tangible physical evidence," Allen
said. "She just disappeared."
There have been countless high-profile cases involving
young girls, including the disappearances of Caylee Anthony, Jessica Lunsford,
Somer Thompson and Madeleine McCann, whose story went global because of her telegenic
look and her media-savvy parents.
Robert Thompson, a professor of television and popular
culture at Syracuse University, explains that the reason the media tends to go in a frenzy around these types of cases is
really because of a self-fulfilling prophecy.
"Once one of these stories is decided
to be covered, there's no turning back," Thompson said. "You've sent your reporters and your trucks to it,
and you become invested in it. You start building interest in the story, and your audience wants to hear more about it, so
you keep everyone there to continue reporting on it."
Critics Site Racial Inequality in Press Coverage
Many African-Americans and
Latinos also perceive a racial bias to the coverage. Some believe more attention is paid to missing white children than to
black or Hispanic children. Critics point to several examples.
The 2003 kidnap and murder of African-American college
student Romona Moore from Brooklyn, N.Y., was eclipsed by the disappearance of Svetlana Aranov, a white woman from Manhattan's
Upper East Side.
LaToyia Figueroa, a young African-American and Hispanic woman, who disappeared while pregnant
in Philadelphia in 2005, only got a fraction of the news coverage as Natalie Holloway, a white teen who vanished in Aruba
around the same time.
Kathy Times, a member of the National Association of Black Journalists explained, "If
you're white, wealthy, cute and under 12, then you're more likely to get the eye of the national media."
Quoting from a Scripps Howard study, Times continues, "One study showed that about 35,000 kids went missing one year,
and a little more than half of those were white, but about 67 percent of stories covered by The Associated Press were about
white children."
And then there was the case of 13-year-old Laura Ayala, a Latina teen, who vanished near
her Houston home in 2002 as she went down the block to buy a newspaper for a class assignment.
"The Hispanic
media was wonderful," Allen said. "The mainstream media wasn't as interested. Is that because her mom couldn't
tell her story in English? I don't know."
