Authors: Kate McCann
Unbeknown to us at the time, shortly after Madeleine went missing, a group called Helping to Find Madeleine was formed, made up primarily of working mums (and a few dads) from around the world who badly wanted to help. I was completely bowled over when I heard about everything they were doing for our campaign. Such commitment and effort from complete strangers takes the breath away. And yet there have been so many people like this, supporters who print and distribute posters, organize cake sales to raise money for the fund, produce handmade books full of lovely messages and prayers and send the most thoughtful gifts for Madeleine.
We’ve had people put money for the fund in our hands on trains, in car parks and in the supermarket; cabbies who tell us to donate our fare. Such warmth and compassion is another trigger for tears. Amelie and Sean began to learn about ‘happy tears’ at a very early stage of their lives and they look a little less puzzled these days when faced with a mother who is smiling and crying at the same time. ‘Are they happy tears, Mummy?’ they ask anxiously.
‘Yes, sweetheart.’
‘Oh, that’s OK, then.’
Gestures of solidarity never fail to lift our spirits and our hearts. Take the lorry driver who recognized us in a traffic jam on the M6 one day, pulled up alongside us, tooted his horn, showed us his Madeleine wristband through the window and gave us a fingers-crossed sign. He probably didn’t have the first idea how much that meant to us.
This grass-roots support firmly underpins the higher-profile help we have been so fortunate to receive from those in a position to bring funds and influence to our search for Madeleine. We cannot begin to express our thanks to the wealthy and successful people who have come to our aid and showed the courage to stand by us when many others ran a mile. Just because someone has the wherewithal to help financially or publicize our cause, it doesn’t mean they are obliged to do so, and they could very easily have chosen not to. We know, for example, that friends and business associates of Brian Kennedy tried to discourage him from getting involved with us, ‘just in case’, but neither his generosity and passion nor his faith and trust in us have ever faltered.
The involvement of some of our well-known backers has been criticized – ‘Why is one child receiving all this attention and support when there are so many others needing help?’ Why? Well, these people are human beings and their hearts have been touched. Most of them are parents or grandparents themselves, they care about children and they have been shocked by how Gerry and I have been treated.
We are just immensely grateful for any assistance we receive, no matter who gives it, no matter what it entails, no matter how big or how small. It all helps us. It all helps Madeleine.
So for every baddy there are a thousand goodies; probably many more. And then there are those it is impossible to be sure about – the folk whose correspondence goes into the ‘Nutty’ box. We must assume that most of these letters, though not necessarily all of them, are sent by people suffering from mental illness, and I don’t want to make light of their problems. Indeed, it is concerning, if our mail is anything to go by, how many vulnerable individuals there seem to be out there with psychiatric conditions that remain either undiagnosed or inadequately treated.
Mental illness is a difficult thing to understand. It’s not like a broken leg or blocked artery, where the condition and solution are obvious. Gerry and I have a little personal and professional experience of it, and during the six months I worked in psychiatry I found it heartbreaking as well as quite fascinating. To see someone you know as a warm, interesting and intelligent person when well and stable admitted to the ward in an uninhibited, distant and dishevelled state is very upsetting, and I can only begin to imagine how difficult it must be for partners, families and, of course, for the patients themselves, who must be so frightened and frustrated.
Over the last four years we have been contacted by various people evidently afflicted by conditions such as schizophrenia and bipolar disease (manic depression). Some of them appear to have become fixated on Madeleine and her plight. Paranoid delusions, delusions of ‘reference’ (when random events convey a special meaning to the sufferer) and ‘racing thoughts’ (where the mind uncontrollably brings up random thoughts and switches between them rapidly, whether or not they are related to each other) have come into play. All of these symptoms can be extremely sad, disabling and potentially dangerous for the person experiencing them.
Within days of Madeleine’s disappearance, several people with major psychiatric problems made their way over to Praia da Luz and somehow managed to get to see Gerry and me. In spite of the state we were in, we found it hard to ignore anybody who was trying to help, even if what they were telling us was complete nonsense. Some of them were very persistent: they would track us down again and again, wielding their piles of papers full of totally illogical ‘facts’, figures and symbols. It was draining and at times a little scary.
On our return to the UK we had a number of such callers turn up on our doorstep, along with assorted psychics and visionaries. Sometimes I would open the door and immediately wish I hadn’t: the behaviour of psychiatric patients can be unpredictable and with Sean and Amelie following me every time I answered the doorbell I felt very vulnerable and anxious. One day Gerry, in what I can only assume was a moment of weakness, let the self-appointed ‘Lord’s Helper’ into the house. He was a tall, elderly gentleman sporting a wooden crucifix the size of Kansas around his neck. I stared at Gerry in disbelief and soon decided it would be wise to take Sean and Amelie out to the park. Thankfully, the Lord’s Helper proved to be totally harmless, even if he was not on the same planet as us that day.
Gerry and I were, I suppose, fortunate to have been surrounded all our lives by good and loving people whose outlook on life and respect for others was similar to our own. But maybe this background only magnified our shock when we were first faced with the small but vociferous group who wished us ill. We had never come across people like this before and it is perhaps the fact that they are so rare that amplifies their voices. But their words and actions are generally less comprehensible than those of the psychiatric cases.
When criticism surfaced shortly after Madeleine was taken it was hard to bear. Nobody likes to be criticized, but this was kicking us when we were down. Then the criticism began to turn nasty. We received letters spitting venom like ‘Your daughter will be getting tortured and it’s all because of you,’ or ‘Your daughter’s six feet under. Shame on you.’ And those were the restrained ones. Other letter-writers took a warped pleasure, it seemed, in going into lurid detail which I couldn’t bring myself to repeat here about what might have happened to Madeleine ‘because of you’. Having to cope with this on top of our raw pain almost pushed us over the edge. We simply couldn’t understand why anyone would want to inflict more agony on us. These people were actually taking the trouble to sit down and write this filth, to spend money on a stamp and take their poison-pen letters to the postbox. Did this make them feel better? Needless to say, after Gerry and I were declared
arguidos
the abuse escalated. We had mail delivered to our house addressed ‘Child Killer Kate McCann’ and ‘The Lying Bastards’.
The internet has provided individuals like this with a largely unregulated opportunity to set up websites and forums and blogs where they can share their bile and hate with other faceless, anonymous lowlife, all locked away in their bedrooms talking to each other online. In the early days this upset me tremendously, but gradually I grew a protective shell. I learned to ignore it and then to pity these people. To have so little compassion or understanding and so much malice in your heart must surely make you one hell of an unhappy soul. And the capacity to devote so much time to a hate campaign (for some it seems to be practically a full-time occupation) speaks of an empty and friendless life. Thankfully, these sad specimens are not as numerous as they might appear to be. Many of them post messages on websites under a host of different names in an attempt to make the ‘anti-McCann lobby’ look greater than it is.
As well as those who prefer to hide behind computer screens there are the publicity-seekers, like one group set up by a man who has had the gall to use our daughter’s name in the title of his nasty little organization. He and his cohorts prey on vulnerable families who have experienced tragedy. We are not the first to be targeted and, sadly, we probably won’t be the last.
In practice, this bunch have been more of a nuisance than anything else. The only time their activities have seriously distressed me was when they leafleted our village just before Sean and Amelie were due to start primary school. Early that evening a local lady knocked on our door, quite upset. She handed me the offensive pamphlet that had been pushed through her letterbox. Apparently, this had been delivered to all the houses in Rothley except ours and handed out in the village during the day. My visitor told me she was disgusted by it. She hadn’t wanted to worry me by bringing it round, but she ‘couldn’t bear the injustice’.
This incident grieved me more than I would have expected. Up to that point, this man’s activities had always been confined to the internet and therefore, presumably, to like-minded individuals. Now he was spreading them in the community and, worse still, in
our
community. I knew most of the villagers were behind us, but there was always the possibility that a few people might be influenced and I feared that any unpleasant gossip might poison the atmosphere at the twins’ new school and create problems for them at this crucial time. How
could
someone do this to two four-year-olds?
I did log a complaint with the Leicestershire police but, as seems to be the case with so many of these things, there was apparently little they could do.
So we took legal action against him, as a result of which he undertook not to repeat his allegations and was obliged to pay the court fee of £400. It hasn’t made a great deal of difference. He is still going around insinuating that we were involved in Madeleine’s disappearance, only now he is just being slightly more careful about how he says it.
Others have caused us distress, misdirected our investigation and wasted our time and funds by falsely claiming to know where Madeleine is. Although we have trained ourselves not to get our hopes up, there will always be that tiny voice in your head saying, ‘Maybe this time . . .’ But these days, when this ‘information’ amounts to nothing or is exposed as a hoax or extortion attempt, the emotional swings and the final crash are less severe than they used to be.
Hoaxes of one kind or another have run into the hundreds, probably thousands now. Some of these people are just after publicity; others have sought money. Although by and large the police are adept at dealing with this kind of crime, it still hinders our search. In deciding whether to promote the reward on offer for Madeleine’s safe return, we have always had to weigh the inherent risk of attracting greedy criminals against the possibility of luring out of the woodwork somebody who really knows something. We now take the view that anyone with genuine information will be aware of the reward. If they want it, I’m sure they’ll find a way of getting in touch.
It has been far more upsetting and damaging, frankly, to find ourselves let down by people in positions of trust, the very people who ought to be acting in Madeleine’s best interests. Unfortunately, there have been a few of them. Another revelation that appalled us was the existence of individuals whose lives seem to be governed by how they can turn any situation to their own advantage. If their personal agenda is not their prime focus, it is never far behind. They might even be helping, or at least seeming to help, but all the time they are calculating what’s in it for them. There are journalists and ‘criminologists’ I could name whose interest in Madeleine has far less to do with recovering an abducted child than with profiting from her misfortune. They continue to offer their services and ‘expertise’ to promote themselves and make money, often muddying the waters in the process.
You wonder what drives some of these people. Avarice? The need to feel important? Or perhaps something lacking in their lives? Perhaps they are just consumed by a sense of worthlessness and hatred. Maybe some human beings are just born that way.
Thank God for the nice ‘quiet majority’, as they often describe themselves, though they haven’t been quiet to us. They have helped to keep our faith in humanity alive and confirmed to me that my innocent, pre-May 2007 view of the world was not so wide of the mark: most human beings
are
inherently good.
21
CLOSING THE CASE
As the summer of 2008 approached, the investigation into Madeleine’s abduction remained classified and Gerry and I remained
arguidos
. It was like trying to lead our lives in purgatory. At some point – who knew when? – the PJ were going to have to hand their evidence to the prosecutor for examination and he would decide whether to file charges against us, order the PJ to continue the investigation or ‘archive’ the case, which would mean it would stay on file but all active inquiries would cease. In the meantime, fuelled by the customary leaks, speculation in the press about what would happen when rumbled on.
At the end of June, Gerry and I made the difficult decision to take a break. It did not feel right at all to go on holiday without Madeleine, but fourteen unbelievably harrowing and stressful months had passed since she was taken and we were running on empty. We owed it to Sean and Amelie, and we owed it to Madeleine to be physically and mentally fit to go on looking for her. We needed peace and quiet, and to be as far away as we could from the clamour in Europe. So we opted to go and visit Auntie Norah in Vancouver. Clarence told the press firmly that the timing and destination would not be disclosed.