Apologies I meant shutter and with squeaky I was being generous as the noise made by raising it is far louder.
As to the second part of your post I have literally no idea how that relates to our current scenario. It is simply common sense that an abductor will want to get in and out of the building housing the child as quickly as possible.
The scenario being put forward is that the abductor entered the room before Gerry's check and when Gerry appeared he hid in a wardrobe in the couple's bedroom or the bathroom. His accomplice was also standing by the window. The problems with this are :
a) When entering the property the abductor would either have gone through the patio doors and straight to the children's bedroom or had a key and came in through the main door and accessed the children's bedroom that way. The first he would have know of Gerry's check is when the patio doors opened therefore being in the children's bedroom when Gerry appeared and Gerry, once in the apartment, having a clear view of the children's bedroom door, how did the abductor get out of the bedroom to hide elsewhere?
b) If the abductor and his accomplice had been watching the group they would know that apart from The McCanns the rest of the group when checking went by the McCann children's bedroom window. Do you really think they'd hang about that window if there could be someone walking by at any second ?
c) And lastly is it really feasible that an abductor who has almost been caught abducting a child will risk being caught again by opening a noisy shutter to communicate with an accomplice outside of the bedroom window, doubling the time he remains in the apartment and therefore the risk of getting caught ? Wouldn't t he just lift the child and talk to the accomplice once he was outside and clear ?
Hmmm. I can agree with a few points.
From your point a) :
- Hiding in the parents' wardrobe isn't impossible (hiding in the children's one seems much more unlikely due to the cot). On the other hand, a parent popping back on a chilly, windy night might have wanted to go to the wardrobe to get an extra jacket. Back on the other side, would a burglar or even a burglar/predator take any time to think of that? Or would someone like that just take the chance that it was just a quick child check and off again?
- In this scenario, there's no way of knowing exactly where this person could have been upon hearing or seeing someone turning up. Did the bottom or child gate squeak? If so, that would have provided seconds prior to the faffing of sliding the verandah door, pushing aside the curtain and sliding it back again. The person may not have been in the kids' bedroom at that point in any case.
Point b) :
No, I don't see how you come to the conclusion that the rest of the group would pass anywhere near the kids' bedroom window, aside from Matt's listening check. Yes, they would have walked up the road, but there was a huge tree, it was dark, and they'd have been focused on their entrance which didn't involve walking along that little path towards their flat.
Point c) :
Lifting the shutter to simply tell an accomplice about the delay seems a little improbable to me, as well.
- A possibility is that if he'd entered via a key, lifting the blind and opening the window could have been a deliberate red herring;
- A panic reaction as a potential escape route for some as yet unknown reason.
- I tend to agree with Sadie that entering via the bedroom window seems unlikely - if the person was quite big.
There are other possibilities, though. Some burglaries involve using children (or very small adults) to get in. If that were the case, it could have been a point of entry, and the small person could have then opened the door.
Finally, yes, I've considered that Kate could have lifted the blinds and opened the window herself. Not necessarily for nefarious reasons, but in a panic to draw an emergency reaction to the fact that she'd disappeared.
Amaral and a pal (Moita Flores?) had said that her prints were found in an "opening position". I checked on that, and I wasn't able to find anything to substantiate it, beyond the fact that only her prints (those with sufficient compatible points) were found on the inside of the window, but that's not at all incompatible with touching the window and poking her face out of the window.
