Madeleine: The damning case against the police by Britain's top investigative reporter Daily Mail
By David Rose
Last updated at 01:33am on 21st April 2008
Originally published online at 23:27pm on 19th April 2008
Almost a year after Madeleine McCann disappeared from apartment 5A at the Ocean Club in Praia da
Luz, signs on the ground in Portugal of the search for her or her body have become difficult to detect.
The posters and fliers bearing her photo are almost all gone.
All last week in Luz, I saw the police just once - two uniformed officers in a green 4x4, parked
opposite the fateful flat from which she vanished during the evening of May 3.
The vehicle's doors were open and the two men peered at me listlessly while I made a few notes,
before going back to their business: listening to a radio talk show.
The apartment gate was padlocked, but in the little paved front
yard, a purple hibiscus and some dusty geraniums were coming into bloom. The Algarve spring is finally coming.
"It's a new season," said a British woman who works in a local restaurant.
"It's tragic they haven't found Maddie. But the time has come to move on."
Of course, moving on is one thing Madeleine's parents, Kate and Gerry, cannot do.
They remain arguidos, official suspects, - as does Robert Murat, a British expat living in Praia
da Luz who has strenuously protested his innocence - still supposedly being investigated on the grounds that they may have
caused her death or disappearance.
"Intellectually, they have grasped what has happened," said Gerry's elder brother, John. "Emotionally,
they have learnt, to an extent, to cope: one's psychology adapts.
"But they haven't really come to terms with it. There are times when they can seem cheerful, but
then the devastation bursts through. Madeleine's disappearance is a cataclysm that is horrendous for them, and horrendous
for all of us close to them."
"It's an intense, full-on existence for both of them," said the McCanns' spokesman, Clarence Mitchell.
"Gerry is back at work [as a cardiologist] full-time, but when he gets home the campaign to find Madeleine is like having
a second job.
"Kate is determined to make family life for the twins, Sean and
Amelie, as normal as possible.
"They celebrated their third birthdays in the way you'd expect - though since Madeleine went, they
haven't celebrated anything else: Kate's recent 40th passed without being marked.
"But the truth is, it can't be normal. The whole situation dominates every aspect of their lives."
Last week, amid a bitter, public row between Mitchell and the Policia Judiciaria (PJ) over the leaking
of Kate and Gerry's original interview statements to a Spanish television station, it became clear that the long-vexed relationship
between the family and Portuguese detectives is close to breakdown.
Mitchell's insistence that the leak did not come from the McCanns sounds more than plausible: the
statements' emergence overshadowed Kate and Gerry's visit to Brussels to call for a Europe-wide "amber alert" system to aid
the hunt for other missing children.
Instead of their campaign, news coverage was dominated by the
statements with the agonising detail that on the morning of the day she vanished, Madeleine asked Kate why she had not come
to comfort her and the twins when they cried for her the previous night.
As on the evening of May 3, Kate and Gerry had been having dinner with their friends in the Ocean
Club's tapas restaurant - in partial sight of apartment 5A.
However, the Portuguese police detectives' union, which has been a semi-official conduit for detectives'
opinions about the McCanns for months, responded to Mitchell's demand for an inquiry to discover whether the leak had come
from the PJ by calling him a "Machiavellian liar".
According to the union, the McCanns leaked the statements - with the sole aim of damaging the Policia
Judiciaria.
Last autumn, after the McCanns were first made arguidos and sections of both the Portuguese and
British Press were filled with untrue stories about them, apparently from police sources, relations with the PJ hit a low.
In October, after the first Madeleine investigation leader, Chief Inspector Goncalo Amaral, was
fired from the case for telling a Portuguese reporter the British police were 'shielding" the McCanns, their trust in the
PJ improved.
"For a while, the leaks and smears stopped," Mitchell said. Amaral,
meanwhile, was last month committed for trial for alleged perjury arising from his conduct in another, earlier case of a disappearing
child.
However, now the relationship is back at rock bottom. "The Portuguese justice minister needs to
get a grip on his police force," Mitchell told The Mail on Sunday.
"We are confident those statements came from someone in the police chain. It's not just disappointing
that after nearly a year, there is no sign of Madeleine: it's an absolute tragedy."
If the PJ had been "doing its job properly", Mitchell continued, the McCanns would never have felt
compelled to engage the Barcelona private investigation agency Metodo 3, on which the Find Madeleine campaign has already
spent £200,000. "Not a penny would have been spent on the private investigators," he said.
To Mitchell, the recent PJ visit to Britain to reinterview the
McCanns' seven friends who were dining with them on the evening of May 3 was a diversion from what should be the inquiry's
main thrust, finding Maddie:
"All of them put their case forcefully, saying nothing had changed from when they made statements
first time around. The re-interviews suggest the PJ has nothing substantive to go on."
Mitchell said the PJ's performance meant the time had come for an "international inquiry" into their
handling of the Madeleine case. "What we want is not just an investigation of this latest leak, but a much wider inquiry into
their conduct.
"It's the sort of thing that could be done peer to peer - maybe by officers from Europol, someone
senior from Scotland Yard, or the FBI. It's not about blame, but learning the necessary lessons."
It is an extraordinary demand, born of exasperation, which is certain to be resisted in Portugal.
Yet an examination by The Mail on Sunday of the PJ's record --not only in its failure to find Madeleine, but in the previous
two Algarve cases where children have disappeared or been murdered - suggests it may well be justified.
"You have to remember: until 1974 Portugal was a dictatorship," said a veteran Algarve journalist,
who asked not to be named. "That was the climate in which the PJ was created. Their methods were pretty rough."
Brutal treatment of suspects was routine. One expatriate British woman told me how a friend of her
mother had been arrested in the late Eighties on suspicion of breaking and entering a house - only to be savagely beaten in
custody.
"she was bruised all over her body. Of course, the police said
they hadn't done anything, and were never called to account," the woman said.
"This is Heartbeat country," another expat said. "People talk to the police, and so often they think
they know who's guilty, but can't prove it. So they make an arrest and turn up the pressure in the hope of getting a confession."
In the Portuguese criminal justice system, confessions are still regarded as they were in the days
of the Inquisition - as the "queen of proofs". British police, it has to be said, sometimes used to operate in a similar way.
But it has its drawbacks, as shown by the succession of miscarriages of justice based on false confessions,
such as the Guildford Four and Birmingham Six IRA cases.
The abduction of a child by a stranger is, mercifully, a rare event: in Britain, there have been
about seven cases a year since records were first kept in 1970. But it poses daunting challenges to investigators.
"In these circumstances, having close contacts in the community may be of limited help," said Mark
Williams-Thomas, a former Surrey police detective and an expert in paedophile crime. "You need to progress scientifically.
Above all, you must preserve the scene and every scrap of physical evidence."
It has been widely reported that in the hours and days after Madeleine went missing, the PJ failed
to do this, reacting sluggishly to her disappearanceand allowing apartment 5A to become contaminated. It was not the first
time the PJ has made such mistakes.
Thirty miles east of Praia da Luz lies the resort of Albufeira, where a collection of clifftop villas
known as Val Novio was once a thriving development, favoured by British expats.
Now largely abandoned, it was there, on November 19, 1990, that Rachel Charles, aged nine, went
missing.
Neil McKay, a Bafta-winning TV scriptwriter who has specialised in factual dramas about crime, was
on holiday nearby with his father at the time. "We were sitting in a bar having a beer one evening," he recalled.
"This English guy came in, saying a little girl had disappeared two days earlier but the police
were refusing to mount a proper search. He said her family wanted every British tourist or expat to meet on the beach at seven
next morning to try to find her.
"so we went. There must have been more than 200 of us. Tragically, it didn't take long to find her
body, hidden among some pines."
Len Port, now an Algarve publisher who covered the case for The Portugal News, said: "The police
search was highly inefficient, as, frankly, was everything else about the case. The way the police handled it was desperately
amateurish - and ultimately, a travesty of justice."
Just as they would later do with the McCanns, the PJ soon hit on a suspect who knew the victim and
her family. But according to Port, who attended his trial, it had "no real evidence. It was an unjust trial".
The defendant was Michael Cook, a British expat businessman who had taken part in the search, and
in 1992 he was convicted and sentenced to 19 years. Having protested his innocence, he was released in 2002. Last week, he
told of his ordeal for the first time.
"This has ruined my life," he said. "I still carry the scars from the six times I was stabbed in
prison; as for the times I had the s*** kicked out of me, I long ago lost count."
Following Cook's conviction, his then-Labour MP, Bob Spink, became involved in his campaign. In
a Commons debate in 1992, he said: "The only hard evidence linking Cook to the murder was bogus" - a claim by an elderly gardener
that he had seen Cook bundling Rachel into his car.
However, Spink said, the police had hidden the fact that tyre tracks left by Rachel's abductor "were
of an entirely different type" from those that would have been made by Cook's vehicle.
The PJ, Spink told the Commons, claimed Cook confessed - something he has always denied - and that
they had tortured him: "Cook appeared in court, with black eyes and a missing tooth, and he was deeply bruised.
"It is claimed that Cook was hung from an upstairs window by his feet, that his feet were beaten
until he could not stand, that he was tied to a chair and beaten, that he was deprived of sleep and that a revolver was forced
into his mouth and the trigger pulled in a mock execution."
The PJ also claimed Cook had a record as a paedophile, Spink went on. This, too, was "entirely bogus'.
The trial judge had asked a PJ witness how he knew this: "The officer replied that someone, unnamed, had told him. The judge
accepted that so-called 'evidence' as clear and unequivocal."
It emerged at the trial that while there was no forensic link between Rachel or her clothes and
Cook's car, blood had been found under her fingernails - presumably that of her attacker. But when Cook's lawyers tried to
obtain it to test it for DNA, they were told the samples had been "lost".
Cook told The Mail on Sunday: "I was with the PJ four days and they gave me no food nor let me go
to the lavatory - I literally s*** myself and p****d myself. I was in that state when they first brought me to court.
"What I learnt about Portugal is that once convicted, you never get the chance to get it reversed,
because they destroyed the evidence."
Spink, who is still MP for Castle Point, Essex, said yesterday that as the Madeleine case had unfolded,
he had become increasingly concerned by the "disturbing parallels' between the way the PJ had dealt with Maddie and the murder
of Rachel Charles.
"In both cases, there was incompetence at the outset. And then, having become convinced they had
the right suspects, the police seem to have ignored other avenues of investigation - especially the possibility that both
were abducted by a stranger."
After the death of Rachel Charles, it was not for a further 14 years that another girl went missing
on the Algarve.
On September 12, 2004, Joana Cipriano, aged ten, failed to return to her home in Figueira, near
Praia da Luz, from a shopping trip. The parallels with the McCann case are again disturbingly close.
Like the McCanns, Joana's mother Leonor mounted a campaign for her daughter's return. And like them,
she and her brother Joao became arguidos. As with the McCann investigation from May until October last year, the man in charge
of the hunt for Joana was Chief Inspector Amaral.
According to the Portuguese Press, one factor that influenced his desire to make the McCanns arguidos
was Kate's supposedly "cold" demeanour in dealing with police and on television.
In fact, as the photo published on Section 2's Page 1 today makes clear, the first known image taken
of Kate on the morning after Madeleine's disappearance, she was distraught.
With Leonor and Joao Cipriano, a similar cod psychology was evident. "Amaral said he made them suspects
because when Leonor was on television, she was wearing black, and speaking of her daughter in the past tense," said Sara Rosado,
Joao's lawyer.
"But the camera only showed the top part of her body. In fact, she was wearing red trouse
