THREE weeks short of the first anniversary of Madeleine McCann’s abduction, her mother Kate spoke publicly
for the first time in months. Whatever pain she and her husband Gerry continued to endure, she said, was as nothing compared
with that of their daughter, which began on May 3, 2007 and which, for all they know, is ongoing.
“The pain of separation, the confusion, the fear, the absolute fear she has had to endure and is still
enduring. She is only four years old,” said Kate.
Only four years old. But on May 12 she will be five. Madeleine was three when she last saw her mum and dad.
Her kidnapping, carried out without leaving a trace — at least none Portuguese police have managed
to detect — shocked the world.
It was not just the abduction, nightmarish though that was. It was that two parents would leave their children
alone in an unlocked apartment in a foreign land while they had dinner nearby. The anger directed at the McCanns was amplified
because here were two educated, well-paid doctors who should have known better. For some, their middle-classness worsened
their guilt.
They were seen as having led a privileged life, having effortlessly produced three perfect children and then
having casually, selfishly left them at the mercy of a predator.
For many reasons this could not be further from the truth.
Kate and Gerry McCann are self-made people, not born to privilege. Kate, 40, is a down-to-earth Scouser from
a modest home in Liverpool. Gerry, also 40, is the youngest of five children raised in a south Glasgow tenement.
Their brains and talent won them lucrative careers, she as a GP and he as a hospital consultant cardiologist.
Their children were the result of considerable effort and emotional trauma for a couple who could not conceive
naturally.
Kate and Gerry met as young doctors working in different departments of Glasgow’s Western Infirmary
in the early 1990s.
The attraction was obvious, but any chance of a long-term future together looked doomed from the start when
Kate’s wanderlust took her to a job on the other side of the world — in Wellington, New Zealand. Gerry had also
landed a dream post — in America. But he is a man of steely resolve, as his relentless hunt for Madeleine would later
prove. He wasn’t giving up on Kate. At the last minute, his heart ruled his head. He dropped everything and spent his
savings flying Down Under to be with her.
It was quite a gamble. Gerry admits: “It was really only then that we started going out together.”
And he joked: “I saw Kate on the other side of the river and I crossed it! She made sure that I followed her. I must
have courted her for a long time.”
Kate reciprocated his devotion with hours spent on the touchlines as he captained amateur Kiwi soccer side
Napier City Rovers. He had once been Scottish universities 800 metres champion and was a decent footballer tipped for a professional
career before opting for medicine.
His team-mate and close friend Ian Gearey said: “He was such a down-to-earth, natural guy. Kate was
a doctor in Wellington and Gerry was a surgeon here in Hawke’s Bay. Everyone said he was very talented and he was well
regarded.
“But the work wasn’t the real reason for him coming to New Zealand. He told us he’d come
for her, to woo her, really. He won her heart and they got together here.”
Kate was never in doubt about Gerry after he followed her more than 11,000 miles. By the time they returned
to settle in Glasgow in 1998 they were already planning their wedding.
It took place that December, at Our Lady of the Annunciation in Catholic Kate’s home city of Liverpool.
Two years on, Gerry got a job as a registrar at Glenfield Hospital, Leicester, and the family moved south.
Kate, desperate for children, gave up on a high-flying career in anaesthetics and gynaecology and started
as a part-time GP in Melton Mowbray.
Natural conception proved beyond them. Kate said: “The one thing I had always been definite about is
that I wanted a family. I wanted to be a mother. Then, when we were trying for a baby and it wasn’t happening, it was
really hard.
“The longer it went on, the harder it was. I saw my friends having children and I was delighted for
them, but it made me sad too. We tried unsuccessfully for several years to conceive.
“There came a point when we admitted we needed help. I was so desperate to have a child I’d try
anything. I know IVF isn’t everyone’s choice but I wanted to try it.”
An initial IVF cycle failed, but the couple remained united and strong. Kate finally fell pregnant with Madeleine
in 2002. “It was just fantastic. It didn’t seem true,” she said.
“I did a test at home so I could handle the result if it wasn’t good. I was looking at it thinking,
‘I don’t believe that’. Then I went to the hospital and they checked it. I was really excited.
“It was a really uncomplicated pregnancy — I had no sickness, nothing.”
Madeleine was born on May 12, 2003. “There she was, perfect,” said Kate. “She was lovely.
She had the most beautiful face. I’d thought I was going to have a boy, just based on instinct. That actually made it
even more special that she was a girl. She took us by surprise.”
Gerry said: “It was incredibly special because we had been waiting for a long time.
“Others thought we were getting old and might end up not having our own children.
“She was close to the perfect child. I know all parents think that, but Madeleine really was.”
A friend, Alan Grieves, said: “After many years of hope, the birth of their beautiful Madeleine made
their lives complete.
“We have never seen Kate and Gerry as happy as they were that day.”
Kate said: “The first five or six months were really difficult. Madeleine had very bad colic and cried
about 18 hours a day.
“She had to be picked up all the time, so I spent many a day dancing round the living room holding
her. Sometimes she looked so sad with colic and the three of us would cuddle together trying to get her through it.
“But you go through that difficult, bad stage and it tightens the bond. We’ve both got an incredible
bond with Madeleine.”
The McCanns and their baby girl moved to Holland for a year while Gerry worked on new heart imaging techniques.
They came back briefly for Madeleine’s baptism, carried out by Father Paul Seddon, who had married
the couple five years earlier.
“It was a big family occasion — a wonderfully happy day,” said Father Seddon. “Madeleine
had a whale of a time and really loved being the centre of attention. She had not long been walking and I have some great
memories of trying to keep up with her as she ran around the church.”
In 2004, still in Holland, Kate fell pregnant again through IVF and the family moved back to England, buying
a substantial home in rural Rothley.
Their twins, Sean and Amelie, were born in February 2005 and left little Madeleine awestruck. “She
was amazing,” Kate said. “She was only 20 months old — still a baby herself — but she handled it all
so well.
“Madeleine came in to see them for the first time and, oh . . . her little face! It was lovely.”
Madeleine was as bright as a button, outgoing, loving towards her brother and sister and prone to tantrums,
as toddlers are.
“She’s got bags of character, that’s for sure,” Kate said. “She’s very
loving, caring, she’s very funny, very chatty, very engaging, but she has her moments, like all children do. I do think
she’s pretty special.”
Gerry added: “She is very funny and often a little ringleader in nursery and with her friends. She
was running around shouting, ‘Be a monster, be a monster’ and we would chase her.”
The couple wanted a big family and were planning to try for a fourth baby. Kate’s dad Brian Healy said:
“Children are the most important thing in their lives. Having another was something they’d been thinking about.
“But that was before Madeleine went missing.”
A grainy family video shot on April 28, 2007, is heartbreaking to watch now. Madeleine, wearing a pink
Barbie backpack and holding another little girl’s hand, clambers excitedly up the steps of the plane taking the McCanns
on their fateful holiday to Portugal.
The angel-faced three-year-old slips and grazes her shin on the third step, but cries for only a few seconds.
It would take more than that to dampen her enthusiasm about the prospect of a week in the sunshine.
Madeleine, Kate, Gerry and two-year-olds Sean and Amelie were part of a group of 17 flying from East Midlands
Airport to the Algarve resort of Praia da Luz. They caught the bmibaby flight at 9.30am.
They landed at Faro and hopped aboard the airport shuttle bus.
The video footage continues. Madeleine, a tiny blonde figure still holding her Barbie bag and wearing pink
shorts, a pink top and trainers, swings her legs cheerfully as she sits next to Sean. Kate ruffles Sean’s hair and holds
Amelie’s arm.
For some reason Gerry looks sombre. “Cheer up Gerry,” a friend jokes, to much laughter. “We’re
on holiday.”
Gerry said later: “Madeleine was dead excited about going away with the rest of the kids. It was her
first time to Portugal. She had her Barbie rucksack with a pull-up handle. It’s a really girlie one. We all had to have
our own rucksacks — even Sean and Amelie — it was quite funny.”
The McCanns’ group arrived at the upmarket Mark Warner Ocean Club resort in Praia da Luz, on the coast
120 miles south of Lisbon. They intended to stay for a week, returning home on May 5. The four families, nine adults and eight
children, had rented apartments in Waterside Gardens Block 5. The McCanns’ flat, 5a, was on the ground floor, on a street
corner. The other families had two flats next door, 5b and 5d, and another on the floor above.
That first evening, Saturday, April 28, the group ate dinner at the Millennium Restaurant and Terrace, another
Ocean Club property ten minutes away. For the rest of their stay they established a practice of giving the kids tea, playing
with them for an hour and then putting them to bed in their apartments before going out to the nearby tapas bar for dinner.
The bar was within sight of the apartments and less than a minute’s walk away.
They took it in turns to make regular checks on the kids. Whatever doubts they should have had about this
arrangement were quelled by the sense of security the resort gave them. They could barely imagine a safer place for the children.
But on the morning of May 3, the date the McCanns’ lives changed for ever, Madeleine gave her parents
pause for thought.
At breakfast she told them she and the twins had been awake and upset in bed the night before, but no one
came to help.
“Mummy,” she said, “Why didn’t you come when we were crying last night?” Kate
said later: “Gerry and I spoke for a couple of minutes and agreed to keep a closer watch over the children” —
which meant more frequent returns from the tapas bar to check on them.
“With hindsight Kate and Gerry think someone could have disturbed Madeleine that night,” their
spokesman Clarence Mitchell said later. “But they felt she and the twins were safe and secure.
“They decided to be even more careful in the times they checked on the children.”
Madeleine spent a happy day at the resort’s children’s club, where she was left with Sean and
Amelie while Gerry and Kate had a stroll. “She had a ball,” Kate said. “They did swimming, went on a little
boat, went to a beach, did lots of colouring-in and face painting.”
The couple collected the children at 12.30pm for lunch at the apartment, then took them back to the kids’
club while they played tennis. Madeleine had tea with staff at 5.30pm and was picked up just before 6pm.
All three kids were put to bed at about 7pm. Madeleine was in her pink Marks and Spencer pyjamas featuring
a picture of Eeyore from Winnie the Pooh.
Kate said: “Before she went to bed, Madeleine said, ‘Mummy, I’ve had the best day ever.
I’m having lots of fun’. They had a little dance prepared for Friday. I don’t know what it was. I never
got to see it.”
By 8pm Kate and Gerry were enjoying a bottle of white wine he had bought from the local supermarket. It
was a Kiwi Sauvignon Blanc, a favourite from their days in New Zealand.
They were six days into their holiday and chatted about how it was all working so well — they were
relaxed and the children were loving it.
Madeleine, Sean and Amelie were asleep in the front bedroom of the apartment, overlooking the small car park
and the street beyond. Madeleine had a single bed nearest the door. The twins were next to her in two travel cots.
At about 8.30pm the McCanns, as they had done since their second night there, strolled to the tapas bar about
50 metres away.
“For us, it wasn’t very much different to having dinner in your garden, in the proximity of the
location,” Gerry said later. “We’ve been assured by thousands of people who’ve either done exactly
the same or say they would have done the same.”
But the sense of security the McCanns felt proved false.
From the tapas bar they could just see the rear of their apartment, where closed but unlocked patio doors
led to the lounge and kitchen. They could not see the children’s bedroom, next to the locked front door.
The diners at the table, later nicknamed the “Tapas Nine”, were Gerry, Kate, Dr Russell O’Brien,
then 36, (a consultant from Exeter and a friend of Gerry), his partner Jane Tanner, 37, Dr Matthew Oldfield, 37, wife Rachael,
36, David Payne, 41, a research fellow in cardiovascular sciences at Leicester University, wife Fiona, 34, and her mother
Dianne Webster.
During a fun-filled evening they drank four bottles of wine between them.
The meal was punctuated almost constantly by one parent or another leaving the table to check on their children.
They often crossed paths on their way to the apartments and back.
Gerry went back to 5a to check on Madeleine, Sean and Amelie at about 9.05pm. They were safely asleep. Gerry
saw Madeleine snuggled up with her favourite toy, Cuddle Cat, bought by her godfather. The blanket was up near her head.
Something was slightly odd. Gerry was sure he’d shut the children’s bedroom door when he left
for the tapas bar. Now it was open.
In hindsight he is convinced her abductor had opened it, then hurriedly hid inside the flat as he heard Gerry
enter.
At the time, though, Gerry had no reason to worry — he assumed Madeleine had opened the door earlier
to get a drink of water and gone back to bed. The window was closed and the shutter down. All was fine. Gerry closed the bedroom
door again and left the apartment through the patio doors to rejoin his friends. Madeleine, it now seems, was snatched in
the few seconds that followed.
The kidnapper had only one viable escape route — the bedroom window — since the front door was
locked and Gerry had only just left via the patio doors.
On his way back to the bar, Gerry came across Jeremy Wilkins, another holidaymaker he had met at the resort’s
tennis courts.
They chatted for a few minutes and were seen doing so at 9.15pm by Jane Tanner, a “Tapas Nine”
friend. She was on her way back to her flat to check on boyfriend Russell O’Brien, who was nursing their sick child.
As she passed them she saw up ahead a man walking briskly across the top of the road, away from the apartments
and towards the outer road of the complex. He was swarthy, about 5ft 7ins, between 35 and 40 and with dark, curly hair.
A little girl wrapped in a blanket hung limply from his arms.
All Tanner saw of her was her bare feet dangling down and pink and white pyjamas. Such a sighting was not
unusual in a family holiday resort. “There is a crèche nearby,” she said later. “I thought he might be a
father picking up his child.”
Unknown to her, Madeleine’s pyjamas were pink and white.
Tanner thought nothing further of it. Aside from anything else, she knew Gerry had just looked in on his
kids and presumably found all was well. When she returned to the tapas bar around 9.25pm she understandably did not think
it significant enough to mention.
The next check took place shortly after 9.30pm. O’Brien went back to look in on his child, accompanied
by another friend, Matthew Oldfield, who had offered to save Kate the trouble by checking on her children as well as his.
Oldfield went into the McCanns’ apartment and found the children’s door open but had no reason
to suspect anything — he was not to know Gerry had closed it half an hour earlier.
During his quick check he saw Sean and Amelie asleep but did not set eyes on Madeleine, whose bed was behind
the door. However, the room was silent and he assumed everything was fine.
The men rejoined the table just before 10pm. Not long afterwards, Kate decided to make her own check. It
took less than a minute to walk to the apartment and enter through the patio doors.
She knew something was wrong right away. The window was open, causing a draught which slammed their bedroom
door.
A friend said later: “She knew the window had been closed. She then saw Madeleine was missing but it
took a few seconds to register.
“She searched the flat three times and realised she was gone.” Cuddle Cat was abandoned in the
bedroom. Kate was frantic. She searched the apartment but knew immediately Madeleine had been abducted. “I never thought
for one second that she’d walked out,” she said. “I knew someone had been in the apartment because of the
way it had been left. There wasn’t a shadow of a doubt in my mind she’d been taken.
“There was about 20 seconds of disbelief when I thought, ‘That can’t be right.’ I
was checking for her. Then there was panic and fear. I was screaming her name.”
Her screams echoed round the complex. She ran from the apartment to the restaurant, crying: “Madeleine
has gone. Someone has taken her.”
Gerry ran to 5a and rechecked everywhere Kate had looked, then dashed round the apartment block.
A friend was despatched to the resort’s 24-hour reception desk to phone the police.
The call was made at around 10.15pm — but the local police, ill-equipped for anything of this magnitude,
began a catalogue of incompetence by taking almost an hour to arrive. The two officers who turned up at 11.10pm spoke no English
and needed a translator.
Panic set in. Kate was already sure Madeleine had been taken by paedophiles and would be dead. Gerry tried
his best to comfort her but his fears were identical.
At 11.40pm he rang his sister Trish in Scotland. He was almost incoherent — and Trish tried to calm
him down. It is hard now to imagine this of a man who has remained so calm and measured in public ever since.
At midnight the Policia Judiciaria, the PJ, who investigate serious crimes, were called in, arriving at 1am.
They, along with the McCanns, their friends, other holidaymakers and locals, scoured the area for two and a half hours.
At 3am Kate rang friends Jon and Michelle Corner, Sean and Amelie’s godparents, at their Merseyside
home. Jon said: “She just blurted out that Maddie had been abducted. She said, ‘They’ve taken my little
girl’.”
Child abductions are so rare in Portugal that there was a general feeling among the authorities that Madeleine
would turn up asleep under a bush. Apathy and incredulity set the tone for the police investigation.
The PJ gave up the search for the night at around 3.30am.
Gerry went back out again at about 4am with his friend David Payne.
At 6am Gerry and Kate held hands as they walked around scrubland on the outskirts of the village calling
Madeleine’s name.
The British embassy issued a statement declaring Madeleine missing. But there was no physical evidence she
had been kidnapped. Gerry and Kate alone were convinced of that.
The backlash against the McCanns began immediately. Most parents wondered why an educated couple left
three tiny children unattended to sleep in their holiday flat while they went out to dinner nearby. Many wondered if they
would have done the same and most concluded they wouldn’t.
Most also concluded that the point wasn’t worth making publicly while Madeleine was still missing and
her parents enduring a living hell. Accusations of neglect wouldn’t help her or them.
But in Portugal and the UK a vocal minority wasted no time. The speed and ferocity of the attacks was astonishing.
BBC’s Radio Five Live held an ill-judged debate on the McCanns’ parenting standards only 24 hours after Madeleine
was snatched. Only a few callers found that their sympathy outweighed the urge to attack the couple for “abandoning
their daughter” to her kidnapper.
It was just the beginning. On May 6 a senior Portuguese cop said the McCanns might be charged for leaving
the children alone, which he said was illegal there.
In Britain the NSPCC said babies and children should never be left alone even for a short time.
The chorus of disapproval grew, especially when the McCanns admitted they had left the children the same
way several nights running. Some newspaper columnists could not resist kicking the good-looking middle-class doctors while
they were down.
Not all parents disapproved, however — many sent messages of support to Kate and Gerry saying they
would not have hesitated to do the same thing.
Some newspaper commentators, too, saw nothing wrong with it and pointed out that the chances of a kidnapper
snatching a child from their bed were almost infinitesimally small.
It was a debate Kate and Gerry were by now having endlessly in their minds. “Every hour now, I still
ask, ‘Why did I think that was safe?’ But it did feel safe and so right,” Kate said later. Her mum Susan
Healy defended them: “They know this was a mistake. But it wasn’t child neglect, it wasn’t not caring for
your children.
“Why would you think something like this would happen? You make a decision and think it’s OK.
This time it wasn’t and Kate and Gerry have to live with that. That’s dreadful and they don’t need pressure
from other people.
“Kate and Gerry went to a family-friendly resort where there has never been any crime or any trouble.
“They felt their children were safe, with the shutters down. They were also maybe lulled into a false
sense of security by the fact they went on holiday with three other couples.
“They were quite happy about the checks they were doing on the children. You couldn’t have more
caring parents.
“Kate and Gerry are absolutely devastated. I have heard my daughter wailing like a wild animal.”
The police hunt for Madeleine was a shambles from the outset. For several crucial days detectives failed
even to take seriously the idea she had been abducted — a stance that infected every aspect of the probe.
Evidence was contaminated, Portugal’s borders left wide open and the investigation fatally compromised
in virtually every conceivable way by a local force ill-equipped to handle it.
It was bad enough for the McCanns that their child was snatched. It was worse luck still for it to happen
in a backwater policed by incompetents.
In Britain and America, such an abduction would have triggered an almost instant police dragnet — sniffer
dogs and helicopters would have scoured the area while the child’s picture would have been handed to the Press and TV
to make public as fast as possible.
None of this happened. The Portuguese police decided an almost total LACK of publicity was the best
option, to keep suspects in the dark about the investigation’s progress. In the first and possibly most elementary blunder,
police failed to seal off the crime scene — the McCanns’ apartment — until 10am the morning after Madeleine
went missing. Before then family, friends and a wide variety of police officers and “helpers” traipsed through
the property, rendering any DNA clues found there as good as useless.
A friend of the McCanns said: “On the night Madeleine was taken there were loads of people in and out.
Once it was obvious she had not wandered off it should have been immediately sealed.
“Then there were police officers smoking and dropping ash and butt ends.”
Even one of the first officers to arrive admitted the area was “totally contaminated” within
an hour because his bosses failed to secure it. The apartment was trampled “by the world and his dog”, the cop,
speaking anonymously, told The Sun.
“By the time we got there it was chaos,” he said. “When we arrive and see our superiors
on the scene we expect the situation to be under control. It was like they weren’t even there.
“Family, friends, neighbours, staff, people off the street — everyone was in and out of the bedroom
to check under the bed. The damage had been done.”
His partner added: “Any disappearance should be treated as a potential crime. It’s not brain
surgery.”
Portugal’s top forensic expert Jose Anes later said he doubted anyone would ever stand trial because
the evidence was too contaminated for any safe prosecution.
One of the cops leading the search blamed the McCanns. Police chief Olegario Sousa said more than 20 people
entered the apartment early on, touching furniture and opening and closing doors and windows.
He added: “The presence of so many people — especially in the room where the little girl slept
with her brother and sister — could have at least complicated the work of the forensic team.
“At the very worst they would have destroyed all the evidence. This could prove to be fatal for the
investigation.”
The McCanns hit back via a friend, who said: “Of course the family are going to search the apartment.
If your child goes missing, you search under beds, in wardrobes, behind doors — everywhere.”
Yet another gaffe within hours of the abduction only emerged months later.
Police allowed Robert Murat, who later became their first suspect, to sit in as translator at the first witness
interviews. They never checked his background or his alibi — they used him simply because he spoke Portuguese. Regardless
of Murat’s innocence, the information he heard would have been like gold-dust for anyone constructing a cover story.
One of those quizzed was holidaymaker Bridget O’Donnell, an ex-BBC producer who worked on Crimewatch
and was horrified by the amateurish investigation.
She was questioned the day after the kidnapping in her apartment near the McCanns’. Bridget said: “Murat
was breathless, perhaps a little excited. He reminded me of a boy in my class at school who was bullied.
“Through Murat we answered a few questions and gave our details, which the policeman wrote down on
the back of a bit of paper. No notebook.
“Then he pointed to the photocopied picture of Madeleine on the table. ‘Is this your daughter?’
he asked. ‘Er, no,’ we said. ‘That’s the girl you are meant to be searching for.’ My heart sank
for the McCanns.”
Worse was to come. It emerged that police failed to send Madeleine’s bedding for forensic tests. By
the time they revisited the apartment 24 hours after she was taken, cleaners had washed the sheets, blankets and pillowcase.
Vital fibres from the abductor’s clothing, or even their fingerprints, may have been lost.
Only hair samples were sent for testing at a Portuguese forensic lab. An insider there said half the evidence
needed to find out what happened was not tested.
He said: “It is obvious it would have been good if they had sent sheets, blankets, pillows and even
the mattress. Some important clue could have been found.”
It took 48 hours for
