Unanswered Prayers
After three-year-old Madeleine McCann disappeared on a family vacation in Portugal, her parents pursued a high-stakes strategy: media saturation. It succeeded beyond their wildest imaginings—winning the aid of everyone from J. K. Rowling to the Pope—and failed miserably. Getting the first in-depth interview with Gerry McCann since he and his wife, Kate, were declared suspects, the author re-traces their footsteps to their daughter’s empty bed.
BY JUDY BACHRACH - FEBRUARY 2008
Kate and Gerry McCann appealed to Pope Benedict XVI in St. Peter’s Square, in Rome, four weeks after Madeleine’s disappearance. Felici SNC/Grazia Neri/Polaris.On a hot day last September, four months after their daughter, Madeleine, almost four, vanished from a sleepy resort town in Portugal during a family vacation, Kate and Gerry McCann, both British doctors, opened their villa door to a local policeman.
The policeman’s name was Ricardo, and he had been, relatively speaking, on friendly terms with the couple. He knew their circumstances. Their lives, heavy with grief since their daughter’s disappearance, had undergone a few small improvements. Kate had grown shockingly thin, but at least she was eating regular meals.
This time, however, the bearing of the detective from the Policia Judiciária was different. And the McCanns were not entirely surprised. “Because for months they used to have regular weekly meetings with the Portuguese police, and then they stopped,” recalls Gerry’s older sister Trish Cameron, who was in the villa at the time. Also, without the McCanns’ knowledge or consent, the police had photocopied Kate’s diary, examined her borrowed Bible, and removed Gerry’s laptop.
“Do you have something to tell us?” Ricardo asked, dramatically.
“No,” Kate replied. “Do you have something to tell us?”
He nodded. “Yes. You are being made arguidos.” He was using the Portuguese word for “formal suspects.”
It was at that point, Trish says, that her sister-in-law became incandescent with rage, screaming, “Do you honestly believe that I would murder my own child?”
“No,” said the policeman.
The Portuguese police, as they informed the world through calculated leaks to their own media, simply believed that Gerry, a Scottish cardiologist, and Kate, a general practitioner, both 39, were lying when they said their daughter had been abducted from their resort villa the night of May 3. Authorities now suspected the McCanns were somehow responsible for their daughter’s death and the disposal of her body, though in what manner no one seems to know. Local incinerators have been scoured, to no avail. The $4 million reward for information leading to Madeleine’s recovery; the televised pleas by the McCanns; the hiring of Control Risks Groups, a security firm whose directors included former S.A.S. commander Sir Michael Rose; the Find Madeleine Web site visited by more than 80 million people in three months after the disappearance—these, the police believed, were all red herrings.
And for a long time the global media were of the same opinion. “Could Kate and Gerry McCann have had a hand in their own child’s disappearance?” People magazine asked in September. By October, Britain’s Daily Mail had an answer: new dna tests “put the mccanns back under suspicion.” Body fluids found in a car rented by the McCanns 25 days after Madeleine disappeared, it was subsequently reported, matched 88 percent of the child’s genetic profile. (A problem with this information, British DNA specialist Nigel Hodge informs me, is that most genetic profiles are based on 20 DNA components. “And 88 is not divisible by 20,” he says flatly. Moreover: “If there are DNA components that do not match, the DNA could not come from that person.”)
Undaunted, the tabloids summoned up yet another genetic fantasy: maddie: who’s her daddy? asked the Daily Star in October, implying that Gerry is not Madeleine’s biological father. (The girl was conceived through in-vitro fertilization.) As the news industry trumpeted All Madeleine All the Time, and Barbara Walters and Oprah clamored for interviews, Kate’s elegant face grew more gaunt in each tabloid photo. Meanwhile, a British poll revealed that 48 percent of all respondents believed the couple could have been responsible for their daughter’s death. Only 20 percent considered them completely innocent.
“Yes, yes, I know,” Gerry says bitterly. “Kate killed her in a frenzy, Madeleine was sedated by us, she fell down the stairs—in which case you would have thought they’d have found her body. I’ve heard all that! There have been a huge number of theories in the media. But what I want to know is—who told them all that?”
In fact, much of what is aired or printed about the vanished girl and her parents is mendacious, mistaken, or just plain conflicting: according to the press, to various detectives, and to top Portuguese authorities, the child is alternatively alive in Morocco (or maybe Portugal or Bosnia) or dead, killed one moment by kidnappers and in other instances by family. In all these hypotheses the supporting facts are invented, from the reason for Kate’s lack of public emotion to the first acts of the Portuguese police (dubbed “the Keystone Cops” and “Butt Heads” by reporters). Thus, the media has managed to rob the McCanns of their daughter a second time. And to complicate matters, it was Gerry McCann himself who, two days after Madeleine’s disappearance, ignited the media conflagration that is now consuming the couple.
It is Gerry who is behind what he tells me is “the marketing … a high public awareness” of Madeleine. At his side while we talk is Clarence Mitchell, a voluble former government media analyst and BBC reporter, handpicked by Gerry to be the latest in a line of spokesmen. On October 17, Mitchell spoke at Coventry University. His topic: “Missing Madeleine McCann: The Perfect PR Campaign.” Except that it has been anything but perfect.
It has in fact been so counterproductive that, as winter approached, Portuguese attorney general Fernando Pinto Monteiro suggested that one way or another the McCanns were responsible for their child’s death. Specifically he said that if indeed Madeleine had been kidnapped, it was the carefully contrived publicity engineered by her parents that likely sealed her fate. “With the whole world having Madeleine’s photo,” he observed, any abductor would have been pushed to such a degree that “there’s a greater probability of the little girl being dead than alive.”
And with this last devastating conclusion—namely that Madeleine will likely never reappear—Madeleine’s own father haltingly agrees.
Gerry McCann has vivid blue eyes set in an impassive face, and a jaw that has grown more angular and prominent as the tragedy has unfolded and almost seven pounds have melted from his frame. There are those, including a onetime close associate, who find him difficult and controlling, feeling he has the trademark arrogance and self-regard of many surgeons. And his judgment is certainly questionable. In the fall, for instance, it emerged that the McCanns had made two mortgage payments from the $2.4 million fund set up to find Madeleine. But months of anguish have taken their toll, and now there is mainly resignation.
When the policeman came to their door with the bad news that they were now suspects, Gerry simply asked him to leave. “Why shoot the messenger? I felt that saying anything more was not going to change what happened,” he says.
Kate, however, cannot help replaying the circumstances that led to the child’s disappearance—the work, she is certain, of a mysterious abductor. “I will tell you what I haven’t told anyone,” says Jon Corner, a family friend. “In August, I was with Kate in Portugal. She told me, ‘I wish I could roll back time and go back to the day before Madeleine was abducted. I would slow down time. I would get a really good look around and have a really good think. And I’d think: Where are you? Who are you? Who is secretly watching my family? Because someone was watching my family very, very carefully. And taking notes.’ ”
“That’s a logical conclusion for anyone who knows anything about what happened to us,” Gerry says briskly. This is his first detailed and candid interview since being declared a suspect, and so great is his loathing of most journalists that it takes place in utter secrecy near his home, in Leicestershire. In a country inn lined with portraits of ladies in powdered wigs, a polite manager points the way to the back exit, in the event other reporters drop by.
While front-page stories about the McCanns sell newspapers—up to 30,000 extra copies a day—perhaps because they happen to be a handsome, prosperous couple wrecked by tragedy (“Let’s face it: if Kate were fat and spotty and aging, they wouldn’t be selling all these papers,” says Trish), the British media believe that sales don’t really soar unless the couple is accused of villainy. “The last equivalent story was probably the Second World War,” observed a columnist for The Guardian. When, in November, Panorama, a BBC newsmagazine show, bought the same five-month-old footage of the McCanns (shot by a family friend) as ABC’s 48 Hours and repackaged it, viewership rose by 2 million, to 5.3 million.
In this search for villainy, the British tabloids are aided by the most unlikely ally: the Portuguese police, who are often the sources for some of the more outrageous allegations, unquestioningly swallowed by the Portuguese media.
“No, the leak about [Madeleine’s] DNA not being compatible with Gerry’s is not malicious, not at all,” a Portuguese journalist tells me sarcastically, referring to the who’s her daddy? headline, before turning deadly earnest. “It is revenge, pure and simple. Because the British attack our police as stupid. And backward. And incompetent. Because they say we are a primitive country and our laws are primitive!”
The Portuguese police “don’t want to be portrayed as a leather-jacketed, swearing bunch of fat, greasy villains who beat people up with rubber hoses,” one of the most active in the McCann camp tells me, and yet this is exactly how they have been portrayed.
Thus the Madeleine frenzy, which began as a story about bad judgment and irretrievable loss, has spun out of control, each day bringing fresh allegations, outrage, celebrity alliances—the Pope! J. K. Rowling! David Beckham!—and sensational links to power. At the E.U. summit in mid-October, for instance, British prime minister Gordon Brown, who had regularly been in touch with the McCanns, raised the Madeleine issue with Portuguese prime minister José Sócrates, urging “proper cooperation between the British and Portuguese police.” Gerry’s allies were jubilant.
And yet this high-powered strategy has also backfired. There appears to be massive resentment among the Portuguese. Although Madeleine’s photo is posted at Heathrow, it is nowhere to be found at Faro, the airport nearest the seaside village from which she disappeared.
Shortly after the McCanns hired a team of Spanish private investigators, in early October, word leaked out that the Portuguese police had stopped their search for Madeleine (at least temporarily). Nothing the parents have done has worked out right.
“The McCanns have completely changed the way we now look for missing children—it used to be you go to the police; now it means you go to the media, to celebrities,” says a disapproving Scotland Yard specialist in abused children.
“There are many cases in the world of children who have disappeared,” Portuguese national police chief Alípio Ribeiro recently complained. “But none have this external component, this massive public exposure, that gives it a fantastic, almost surreal dimension.”
The McCanns are both reviled and pitied, occasionally in the same breath. Madeleine’s face has appeared on movie screens, on cell phones, in e-mails, in airports, in health centers, and on British Airways planes. “So the strategy we used,” says Gerry, “well—somehow something caught the public’s imagination.” But it has not caught their daughter’s abductor.
The McCanns are also fairly sure their phones are monitored not only by the British police, who are waiting to see if a kidnapper calls, but also by Portuguese authorities. “It’s quite possible,” acknowledges Gerry’s older brother, John McCann, a pharmaceutical salesman who lives in Glasgow. “Because there’s information that’s been appearing in the press that you’d have to think, How did that get into the public domain? Because it wasn’t us releasing it. Every now and again, amidst all the speculation and rumor and outright lies, there’s been a grain of truth.”
“What happened in the last two months has clearly polarized people,” Gerry says slowly. “People can support you in your darkest hours, and in our case the darkest hour was of course when Madeleine went missing.”
And now, I wonder, with all the polarization?
“And now it is just”—he swallows hard—“bleak.”
Praia da Luz (population 1,000) is regularly described, with reason, as “a little Britain.” The same could be said of the entire Algarve, the southern Portuguese province in which the village is situated, which was partially ransacked in the late 16th century by the Earl of Essex. That tradition is now carried on by more than 50,000 British property owners in the area. Signs are in English, and every other commercial establishment proclaims itself an “Irish pub,” which means Carling beer and, on Sundays, shoulder of lamb and “Yorkie pud.” At 10 o’clock one very warm morning, four beet-red Englishmen sampling lagers in an outdoor café steps away from the turquoise sea are being scolded by their desperate guide: “You are always drunk before noon!”
New security guards, in burgundy berets and black military pants, now ring portions of the Ocean Club resort, where the McCanns were staying until mid-September. The village is quite desolate. The heart went out of it last May.
For almost a week last spring, the McCanns’ holiday routine was unvarying. After high tea, at 5:30 p.m., Madeleine and her two-year-old twin siblings, Sean and Amelie, would be retrieved by their parents from the kids’ club. Two hours later the children were put to bed back in their own room in an unprepossessing corner villa, its two entrances bordered by terra-cotta tile and a small white wall covered with pink bougainvillea. The back door, reached by a gate and a flight of steps, was left unlocked.
Then the McCanns would join seven friends at the resort’s tapas bar, close by the swimming pool, an area described by Gerry as “like being at the bottom of your garden.… You could see our apartment from where we were.” You can indeed glimpse the very top part. However, in order to see anyone entering through the back, one would have to dine standing up. The other entrance to the villa is not visible at all.
At intervals, members of the group (since dubbed “the Tapas Nine”) checked on one another’s children, although this method was imperfect. The night of May 3, Gerry checked on Madeleine, fast asleep in her pink-and-white Winnie the Pooh pajamas, and the twins, at 9:05, but the friend who next checked on the McCann children said afterward that he did not actually see Madeleine.
Thus the most important clue to the mystery of Madeleine’s disappearance was initially ignored. At around 9:15, another friend, Jane Tanner, emerged from her own villa to see a white man in beige trousers—five feet six, brown hair (longer in the back), and perhaps 35, she later told the police. In his arms he cradled a child wearing pink-and-white pajamas.
It wasn’t until Kate walked into the villa at 10 and felt a sickening breeze—the front window had been jimmied open—that she realized something terrible had happened. “The scene was stark,” Gerry tells me. On one bed the twins lay sleeping. In the next lay only the plush cat toy Madeleine was never without. That was when Kate came out screaming, “Madeleine has gone!”
In subsequent moments, she seems to have added, “They’ve taken her! We have let her down!” This was the version Sheena Rawcliffe, the managing director of The Resident, a local English-language newspaper, quickly learned, albeit secondhand, and the phrasing puzzled her. What was meant by “They”? It was the first element to ignite suspicion in the Portuguese press, but not the only one. What kind of parents would go out to eat and leave their small children alone in the room, especially in a country where restaurants welcome children, the local press wondered. Why didn’t they hire one of the resort’s babysitters? What child can actually fall asleep at 7:30 p.m.? In Portugal, as in many Latin countries, bedtime for even small kids might be as late as 10.
Moreover, Rawcliffe says, “If my child were missing, I wouldn’t think right away he was abducted. I would think, Where has the little b....r gone?”
But the McCanns were certain of their suspicions. “Wee Madeleine knows better than to wander away,” another of Gerry’s sisters, Philomena McCann, recalls him saying. And besides, the child was too small to open the window and crawl out. Gerry spent the night scouring the village for his daughter, and talking on his cell phone to relatives.
“Well, never in my life had I heard my wee brother so devastated,” says Philomena, who lives in Ullapool, in northern Scotland. “He was absolutely wailing on the phone. He was incomprehensible at times.”
“It’s all my fault, because Kate and I went out to dinner,” he wept to Philomena, who was stunned. She adds, “My wee brother is not a person who panics—he and Kate are very measured people, usually. That’s when I knew how bad things were.”
At 4:30 in the morning, when the search was temporarily called off, the McCanns found a policeman by their door, smoking, seemingly unworried. “Help me, please help me!” a frantic Kate sobbed into her cell phone to a childhood friend. The police had done nothing overnight, she added; the couple were all alone with no one to turn to.
That same morning, Gerry’s sister Trish phoned the BBC in Glasgow and sent photos of the beautiful little girl who had vanished from the resort. “The day after Madeleine was abducted, as Kate and I left the police station, there were 150 journalists in front of it,” Gerry recalls. “Alex Woolfall [the McCanns’ first spokesperson] explained to me that either I interact with the media or we would be hounded by the press.”
Actually, reporters noticed, Gerry seemed to interact avidly. Within a week, the media ranks in the tiny village swelled to 200: Dutch, German, Spanish, and Portuguese nudging their British and American counterparts. Until very recently, Sky News covered the story in such depth that the top three offerings on its Web site were “UK News,” “Madeleine,” and “World News.” The Portuguese police had never seen anything like it.
(to be continued)
