Authors: Kate McCann
I know this sounds mad, so let me rewind a little to explain. Danie’s name, and his offer of help, had reached us via a variety of sources within the first few weeks of Madeleine’s disappearance. At the time we were in too much turmoil to pay much attention to anything so esoteric, and in any case we had all our hopes pinned on the police investigation. Towards the end of May, a friend of Danie’s arrived in Praia da Luz and virtually pleaded with me to take up his offer. She spoke of references from the South African police, for whom his machine had brought results, of its 80 per cent success rate and of the support of the South African minister for justice. Whether we were influenced by the distance this young mother had travelled just to talk to us, or whether we were simply plain desperate, I can’t be sure – putting it in perspective today, I’d say it was the latter – but by now we were more receptive.
We were told all we needed to do was to provide samples of Madeleine’s DNA. Desperation does strange things to people. We’re scientists and we don’t believe in hocus pocus or crackpot inventions. How on earth can a machine use a single hair to locate somebody anywhere in the world? It’s impossible, surely. It makes no sense to us now and it didn’t then. But we wanted so badly to find Madeleine that we didn’t need to know how it worked. We even managed to turn a blind eye to the fact that Danie’s ‘matter orientation system’ hadn’t been formally tested by any independent and trustworthy authority. Danie sounded like a nice person (family man, ‘fellow Christian’), and indeed he was. As the director of protection services and occupational health and safety at the Central University of Technology in Bloemfontein, he was professionally credible, and he was prepared to bring his machine over from South Africa to find Madeleine for us. I feel a heavy sadness now, though, at the memory of how close to the edge we were, and how vulnerable that made us.
I remember talking to Gerry and Sandy, trying to decide what to do. Even Sandy, who dismisses anything lacking logic or transparency as mumbo-jumbo, felt, as we did, that since the investigation appeared to have ground to a halt, it was worth trying anything. What else did we have? What harm could it do?
So, in the second week of June, we had confided in Auntie Janet and our friend Amanda back in Leicestershire and got them to go round to our house looking for hairs that could only be Madeleine’s. They came up with five head hairs from the inside of a coat hood and a couple of eyelashes from her pillow and couriered the lot off to Danie in South Africa. They didn’t question what we were doing: they, too, were just desperate for Madeleine to be home.
A week or so afterwards, Danie informed us that he had obtained ‘signals’ relating to Praia da Luz, but that he would need to come over in July and operate the machine in the Algarve to produce more accurate results and pinpoint Madeleine’s location. This all seemed to make sense – or at least, more sense than trying to find her from Bloemfontein.
So here we were now, discussing all this with Luís Neves and Guilhermino Encarnação. Somewhat to our surprise, they seemed quite amenable to giving it a go and agreed to smooth Danie’s transfer through the airport (he had certain requirements to ensure the safety of his MOS machine) in a couple of weeks’ time.
Another matter I raised that day was how significant they felt it was that Fiona, Rachael and Russell had all reported seeing Robert Murat outside our apartment on the night Madeleine had been taken. Luís suddenly got quite agitated. ‘No, Kate!’ he snapped. Our friends hadn’t mentioned this in their statements, he said. Slightly thrown by this rather aggressive response, I insisted, a little nervously, that I was sure they had: not in their first statements, but in the ones they had given after Murat was named as an
arguido
, having recognized him straight away from the television news.
They had merely stated when and where they had seen this man and that he’d been offering his services as an interpreter. That was it: they hadn’t voiced any suspicions that he was involved. I can’t imagine why Neves seemed to want to brush my question aside. Perhaps it was simply because he didn’t have an answer. I’m aware now that the PJ were struggling to move the Murat line of inquiry forward and they were probably feeling quite frustrated. Perhaps I just touched a raw nerve.
At our next meeting, Neves was to change tack and tell us that one of the Ocean Club managers, Sílvia Batista (the lady who had translated for us on 3 May), had also reported seeing Robert Murat outside our apartment that night.
There were so many unanswered questions going round and round my brain; so many days when all I wanted to do was pull the duvet over my head and for it all to go away.
13
THE TIDE TURNS
On Saturday 30 June, a piece entitled ‘Pact of Silence’, written by journalists Felícia Cabrita and Margarida Davim, appeared in a Portuguese newspaper. The criticism implied in the title was in itself interesting, given that this was a country where disregard for judicial secrecy carried the threat of a prison sentence. This was probably the first article openly to cast doubt on our version of the events of 3 May. It raised suspicions about us and our friends, about our characters and about our potential involvement in Madeleine’s disappearance.
Several days before it was published, all of us – Fiona, David, Jane, Russell, Matt and Rachael, as well as Gerry and I – had been contacted on our mobile phones by a reporter. Everyone had given her short shrift, but it was clear that somebody had provided her not only with our mobile numbers, but with other personal information, too. She had addressed me as Kate Healy, and although this was the name by which I was always known before Madeleine’s abduction, since then I’d only ever been referred to as Mrs McCann. She called Gerry ‘Gerald’, a name he never uses. She knew that Jane and Russell had recently moved to Devon.
It was obvious that this reporter had been given access to our statements, our passport details or some other official documentation. There were no prizes for guessing by whom. Evidently there was a leak within the Polícia Judiciária. We brought up this matter at our next meeting with Neves and Encarnação on 5 July. They agreed that, yes, there must be a leak from the PJ, but in spite of the endlessly cited judicial secrecy law, no internal inquiry was ever launched.
Since our series of campaign trips, it had become apparent that, with coverage having reached saturation point, the press were exploring different angles. Their appetite for the ‘human-interest’ aspect seemed insatiable. No longer was it about our lovely missing daughter: it was becoming the Kate and Gerry show. Our friend Jon Corner had predicted this very early on. After sitting in on an interview session with British journalists one day, he’d said to us, ‘They’re asking you about whether you still go running and what kind of trainers you wear, for God’s sake. The longer this goes on, the worse it’s going to get. It will all be about you, not Madeleine.’
We had made a strategic decision to signal to the media that we would be withdrawing from the spotlight. The face of the campaign had to be Madeleine’s, not ours. We would continue to give interviews that were in her interests, of course, but otherwise, until there was an important development or event, we would be running the campaign more quietly and not commenting on everyday matters. There was no point in diluting the impact of the campaign by reporting on it constantly.
Much to our surprise, however, the press, and in particular the photographers, showed no sign of leaving Praia da Luz. This put us in a difficult position and led to some friction with Justine McGuinness, our new campaign manager. As we had very little to say, yet at the same time the papers still seemed to require a daily photograph of us, we were essentially appeasing the tabloids without generating any significant benefits for the campaign. It wasn’t necessary to bombard the public day in, day out with pictures of us, and the presence of the photographers encouraged the journalists to stay, to write pieces to accompany the photographs, even though there was nothing much to be written. This was no doubt the background to a lot of the ludicrous tales that now appeared, embellished by quotes supposedly uttered by us or by ‘sources close to the McCanns’. The lack of new fuel for the machine also meant that a lot of the knocking pieces springing up in the Portuguese press were promoted to the front pages in the UK throughout July and on into August.
After expressing our intention to remain in the background, we talked about how we might put the resources now at our disposal to good use in the longer term if the search for Madeleine continued to yield nothing. Our visits to Spain, Germany, the Netherlands and Morocco had given us a glimpse of the massive scale of the problems of child abduction, trafficking and exploitation, and we felt we must broaden the scope of our campaign to embrace all the victims of these terrible crimes. We were now aware of the need, for example, to set up coordinated and effective child rescue alerts across Europe. Given the huge support we had been given ourselves, we had a moral obligation to try to do something to make Europe a safer place for all children. If, God forbid, we couldn’t help Madeleine, we were determined that some lasting good should come out of our nightmare.
The sexual exploitation of children in particular is shockingly rife worldwide. The victims of the billion-dollar child-pornography industry are becoming younger, too: approximately a third are under the age of six. A lot of what I’d learned made me feel sick. I was horrified, as a reasonably intelligent and well-informed person, and as a mother, by how little I knew of this. I felt as if I’d been living my life in a cocoon.
Another valuable source of information was Lady Catherine Meyer, the friend Cherie Blair had mentioned to me in her phone call. Catherine, the wife of the former British ambassador to the US, had set up PACT (Parents and Abducted Children Together) after her own two sons were abducted by her ex-husband. She has fought tirelessly ever since for a better international response to such crimes. I so admire her commitment to and passion for protecting children. She is feisty, determined, has a good sense of humour and is not afraid to say what she thinks. Such qualities are essential in this field, where there is so much red tape to be dealt with.
At the end of June, Gerry spoke to Ernie Allen, CEO of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) in the USA. This organization was established in 1984, thanks to the lobbying of Congress by John and Revé Walsh. When their six-year-old son Adam was abducted and found murdered in Florida in 1981, they had experienced the same kind of pain and frustration at inadequate responses that we were suffering now. Today the NCMEC offers a vast range of resources to law-enforcement agencies investigating cases of missing, abducted and exploited children, as well as training and education for people working in this field.
I came into the sitting room just as Gerry was finishing this hour-long phone call to find my husband almost radiant and brimming with optimism. He was already planning to fly out to Washington, DC at the earliest opportunity to find out more about the work of the NCMEC for himself. It wasn’t just Ernie’s positive attitude and encouragement that had lifted Gerry, but the numerous examples he had cited of missing children who had been found, sometimes years later. There really was hope. I hadn’t seen Gerry looking so inspired in two months.
Although our lives were unpredictable and could never now be defined as normal, sometimes days would go by when we jogged along fairly evenly. But then we would be poleaxed by some bolt from the blue. Unfortunately, most of these shocks would be bad ones. The saddest were those delivered with the intention of causing harm.
There were frequent attempts to extort money from us, which were the reason for most of Detective Ricardo Paiva’s visits to our apartment. One I remember from the last days of June was fairly typical. A Dutch man contacted the PJ on the email address given on their website, saying that he knew who had Madeleine and where she was. And asking for money, of course. At the instigation of the PJ, Gerry set up a separate email account to correspond with this guy, buying time for the police to track him down from the IP address he was using, passing incoming messages to the PJ and taking their advice on what to say in his replies. The man was emailing from an internet café, and within a few days, on 6 July, he was arrested in the Netherlands (having been under surveillance in a casino, if I remember rightly). Another couple, an Italian man and a Portuguese woman, had been picked up only the previous week for a separate extortion attempt. As they were already wanted by the police in France it was a mystery why they’d thought it a good idea to draw attention to themselves in this way.
Thankfully, though, there were some nice surprises, too, arising in particular from the kindness and friendship of some wonderful people now entering our lives.
At the beginning of July we received the following letter:
Dear McCanns,
I have a house in P da L, been ashamed of the intrusion to your lives by our media . . . and if you would care to come to lunch/dinner at any time before Wednesday next, do ring and let me know.
I cook decent meals.
Sincerely,
Clement Freud
I’m embarrassed to admit that Gerry and I thought this letter was a hoax; more embarrassing still, while we were vaguely aware of Sir Clement, we had to have our memories refreshed by Sandy and Justine before we could place him exactly. Mind you, he wore so many hats – humorist, MP, gourmet, gambler, press columnist, advertiser of dog food, radio and TV personality – that he was hard to pin down.