Could more have been done to preserve a potential crime scene?

[Alfred R Jones]

No actually, I'd chuck err in a bin & then pretend she'd been abducted, because it was my wife that stabbed her.

Yes, you're probably right - you strike me as that type.

[John]

The term "rummaged" was used in the archiving report.
The first GNR officers on the scene said there were four or five people in the apartment when they arrived. The GNR officers  looked for the child as they said they did not perceive the apartment to be a crime scene and were sceptical of the claim the child had been abducted.
So we have parents friends and police equally guilty of "rummaging".
Beyond that there is plenty of scope for speculation.

Good find Alice and welcome, here is the exact quote >>

G – Appreciation and judicial frame
 
From the analysis of the elements that are part of the files, this first conclusion emerges immediately:
 
When the GNR officers arrived on location, several people had already touched the window and entered Madeleine's and her siblings' bedroom, and later on, when the PJ arrived at the apartment to collect traces, the space had already been rummaged through and contaminated due to the entrance of all of those people and to the fact that everything had been touched, thus rendering inviable, right away, the collection of important elements for the investigation.
 
In the drama of the moment, nobody – parents, friends of the parents, resort management and personnel – was cold and lucid enough to preserve the crime scene, preventing that rummaging and the consequent contamination of traces from happening, while it is common knowledge that it is any person's responsibility to preserve crime scenes – apart from a legal demand: article 171 number 2 of the Penal Process Code – thus avoiding that traces can be erased or altered, therefore the collectable evidence had already lost much of its indicative value. Hence the lack of evidential elements that were collected during that initial phase, so much so that the only latent fingerprints that were collected, with the number of elements that are necessary to perform a positive identification, were individualised as belonging to the missing child's mother and to a GNR officer (pages 885 and 1520), thus immediately rendering the collection of important data for the investigation inviable.
 
It was only when members of the Polícia Judiciária arrived, at around 0.10 a.m., following a request for their presence, that measures were taken to make the collection of residues and the preservation of the event’s location possible.

www.mccannfiles.com/id136.html

[John]

Welcome.

Which word in Portuguese was translated as "rummaging"?

The Portuguese words are devassado (3rd line down) and devessa (8th line down) representing rummaged and rummaging.




ETA  Pegasus already posted this info at #61

I find the use of the word a bit odd as it translates literally as debauched.  Devastado would be a better word but maybe Montclair can expand on this?  I also notice a reverse translation for rummage is something completely different.  Could there be a regional variation in the Portuguese being used as occurs in the various regions of Spain?

[pegasus]

The Portuguese words are devassado (3rd line down) and devessa (8th line down) representing rummaged and rummaging....

The rummaging of the property (by a few guests and maybe one employee and later by a GNR officer) was incomplete.

[John]

In his book Madeleine - The Truth of the Lie, Goncalo Amaral writes of the difficulties and trials the Portuguese police faced when they attempted to collect forensic evidence.  In particular, he writes...

Lots of people were already in place; however, nobody appeared in the photos. We don't know, for example, how they were dressed. Such observations can turn out to be important later on. The report mentions that the twins were asleep in their bed, but there is no proof to confirm it; on the contrary, in the photographs, you can see empty cots, where only the mattresses remain - the sheets and blankets having been removed. Why have their beds been stripped? If the sheets had not been removed, traces of their presence could have been found there.

The search and examination of the scene were carried out in difficult conditions: when they arrived, the police were met with a large number of people coming and going - family, friends, resort employees, including dogs and members of the National Guard. The contamination of the premises risks bringing serious prejudice, as a consequence, to the investigation. We must ask ourselves if that contamination has been deliberate or not - it can make the search for clues particularly complicated.

Inside the apartment, police forensic specialists proceed to lift finger and palmar prints, a job that is preferably carried out during daylight hours. Others look for traces of blood, samples of fibres and hair. We notice with dismay that one of the technicians, who is working on the outside of the McCann children's bedroom window is not using the regulation suit, thus risking contaminating possible clues. These images of negligence start to circulate world-wide; this isn't, however, the usual behaviour of police judiciaire technicians. It's obvious that no one has broken in and the lock has not been forced. No prints are lifted that are likely to belong to an unknown person, nor the slightest trace of gloves which could have been worn by a hypothetical abductor. In the middle of this desert of clues, two prints are perfectly easily found: the very distinct mark of a palm print on the balcony window at the rear of the apartment, and a clearly visible one of fingers on the window pane of Madeleine's bedroom. The excellent quality of the palm print seemed suspicious to us. Later, analyses confirm our suspicions: it belonged to one of the officers who were present the previous night.

Could more have been done to preserve a potential crime scene?

It was all so simple, all persons should have been removed from 5a and sealed off together with all approaches until a complete CSI sweep had been competed.

[pegasus]

It was all so simple, all persons should have been removed from 5a and sealed off together with all approaches until a complete CSI sweep had been competed.

At least the PJ did move everyone out of the property at about 2AM.
That's how they managed to do the forensics that night.

Can you quote any recent UK missing child case, where UK police took this same sensible measure?

[Carana]

Are the GNR trained to follow any specific protocol in such cases? It's a different type of police force to the PJ, and seems to deal with incidents in rural areas. As far as I'm aware, it's only once the incident appears to be beyond their remit that they contact the PJ.

[sadie]

At least the PJ did move everyone out of the property at about 2AM.
That's how they managed to do the forensics that night.

Can you quote any recent UK missing child case, where UK police took this same sensible measure?

I thought that it was 4am?
Are you sure that it was the PJ that moved the Mccanns or the racket that moved them?

How many such happenings as Madeleines abduction have you heard of within an hotel type situation? 
Very much easier to move them there than in a normal house situation.  I dont know, but it is a firly good bet that in any hotel situation with a serioius crime in a room/ suite, the occupants would be accomodated elsewhere

[Carana]

It was all so simple, all persons should have been removed from 5a and sealed off together with all approaches until a complete CSI sweep had been competed.

I don't think that it was so simple if you take context into consideration. Again, hindsight is wonderful. At the time, the GNR were brought in due to a report of a missing child. When they arrived, they were trying to gather information about what had happened and searched the apartment themselves to make sure that it wasn't just a false alert. There was also a language problem and general panic which may have delayed matters.

In theory, she could have been found at any moment, in which case there would have been no need to contact the PJ. The OC had taken action to try to find her and there was no sign of her, so it would have become obvious that the situation was more serious than initially thought.

Turn that around. From the parents' perspective, every minute would have seemed like hours. The so-called "golden hours", as they later found out, were missed.

Ironically, one of the points that Amaral & co. found suspicious as supposedly being a restricted publication for law enforcement only found in the villa was, in fact, nothing more than a case management manual for first responders, available to the general public. A simple Google search could have proven that... so why the insinuation that it was "restricted" material?

[Brietta]

- the bed sheets and the position of the soft toy raised suspicions. bed looks like nobody slept there, soft toy is position symmetrically to the pillow, pink blanket is almost folded. father confirmed that the blanket and the soft toy were in that position when he went to check his daughter 
http://gerrymccan-abuseofpower-humanrights.blogspot.co.uk/2007/08/analysing-crime-scene-apartment-5a.html

All of the above items were in place after the McCann family vacated the premises, as verified by the photographic evidence to which Dr Amaral refers in the above clip.

Why was cuddle cat not bagged?

Why was the blanket not bagged?

Why were the bedclothes not preserved for evidence?

These are the last known articles which were close to Madeleine.
If they had been checked they might have shown a trace of an intruder. 

Allowing further contamination of CC and the blanket which subsequently vanished and the destruction of the bedclothes as evidence is inexplicable.

The value of careful preservation of evidence enabling use of technology not available at the time to solve a case is illustrated by reference to the solving of the murder of Elaine Doyle in Greenock.
Although the probability of achieving a similar successful outcome from the last known items to be in direct contact with Madeleine and a possible abductor would have been slight ... we can never know because nothing was preserved.

 - CLIP - The forensic scientist described years of work on samples taken from the crime scene.

She and her colleagues examined tape which had been laid across Elaine's body in the hope of trapping hairs or fibres which might help track down her killer. She also tested the teenager's clothes for clues.

The court heard how some tiny traces matched the DNA of police who had handled clothing or the body, forensic scientists, and a member of the laboratory staff.

But two results could not be accounted for until Mr Docherty volunteered a sample of his DNA in May 2012 and gave another sample on March last year, when he was arrested and charged with the murder.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-27670875

[pegasus]

I thought that it was 4am?
Are you sure that it was the PJ that moved the Mccanns or the racket that moved them?

How many such happenings as Madeleines abduction have you heard of within an hotel type situation? 
Very much easier to move them there than in a normal house situation.  I dont know, but it is a firly good bet that in any hotel situation with a serioius crime in a room/ suite, the occupants would be accomodated elsewhere

1. You may be right, it would be interesting to know at what time the family was moved out, 2am or 4am.
2. That night MW offered the family 4G, however the family chose instead to stay in 5H.
3. Hotel situations are irrelevant as this was not a hotel.

[slartibartfast]

I thought that it was 4am?
Are you sure that it was the PJ that moved the Mccanns or the racket that moved them?

How many such happenings as Madeleines abduction have you heard of within an hotel type situation? 
Very much easier to move them there than in a normal house situation.  I dont know, but it is a firly good bet that in any hotel situation with a serioius crime in a room/ suite, the occupants would be accomodated elsewhere

Lots of questions and uncertainty there Sadie.

[pegasus]

Lots of questions and uncertainty there Sadie.

Actually I will be trying to work out the time the PJ moved the occupants out, as part of examining the differences between the first set of PJ photos (early hours of 4th) and the second set of PJ photos (probably afternoon 4th).

[pegasus]

Preserving the scene is all very well, but the question is, did the GNR actually fully search the apartment?

[sadie]

Lots of questions and uncertainty there Sadie.

Slarti you are not nit picking again are you?


Maybe you dont know, cos you haven't been here that long, but continual unecessary demands on me to prove stuff, which everyone knew was true, caused massive reading for me.  The tiny font has damaged my eyesight.

I now rarely refer to the files but rely on my memory.  I have a mass of stuff stored there.  Because of possibly not remembering properly, I prefer to not state things as fact unless I am totally sure.

I know it is not as good, but I aint ruining my eyesight any more.  Hope you understand.