Madeleine's case began when Kate found her missing from her bed.
Should have been easy enough for the police to set the ball rolling on their procedures for missing children. That is, if they actually had any for reference.
The failed investigation had one extraordinary outcome which influenced how Madeleine's case was perceived over the years and is summed up as follows.
What is striking about the McCann saga is the vitriol and vehemence with which each side condemns the other.
Neither side ‘knows’ anything, and yet they are prepared to fight to the death, and certainly into the libel courts to prove that their belief represents the ‘truth’.
None has gained as much currency as the views of the policeman who was in charge of the initial investigation.
Gonçalo Amaral.
His working hypothesis became that ‘the child was dead’, and the parents were to blame.
He viewed the parents as arguidos, the Portuguese equivalent of ‘persons of interest’, not charged, but under suspicion.
It was a reasonable hypothesis, there were many unexplained details, but hypothesis is all it was, and the Attorney-General of Portugal refused to go to trial on that basis.
After six months, Amaral was removed from the case.
There were other cases proceeding against him and the men under him, and it wasn’t a happy situation to have the man in charge of the investigation under suspicion himself – particularly not when the other cases also involved his suspicion of a Mother whose child had never been found.
Amaral went onto write a book about his first six months in charge of the investigation, and unfortunately chose to call it ‘Maddie, The Truth of the Lie’.
He explained in detail his theory of why he thought ‘it was the parent’s what did it’.
That book has divided the watching armchair detectives as never before.
Amaral has now pointed out that ‘the book deals with six months of the investigation and the conclusions at the time so the investigation needed to continue.
The truth is only known when an investigation is finished’. Amaral’s own words, taken from a helpful translation of his recent Panorama interview.
Yet that book has been treated as though it is ‘the truth’ written on tablets of stone, by people around the world who have made it their business to harry the McCann’s mercilessly quite content to risk prison sentences to make their opinions, their beliefs, accepted by the ‘non-believers’. Anna Raccoon May 3, 2012