I note that he has been awarded the Sam Adams Award for Integrity in Intelligence Misty
And it backs up Amaral's book.
Someone puts forward the hypothesis according to which Madeleine would have died in her apartment, and that a member of the group would have removed her. It's a possibility, but nothing so far, no evidence, happens to support that theory.
The McCanns are put up with David Payne. We want to search the accommodation of the family friends to try to pick up Madeleine's clothes, especially those she was wearing on May 3rd at 5.35pm when she returned from the day centre with her mother and the twins. Evidently, this initiative is not widely supported. The British ambassador meets with the team directing the investigation. The political and the diplomatic seem to want to prevent us from freely doing our work.
- I'm sure this check is necessary.
- The clothes? Are you mad? if I understand you properly, you want to go into the apartment to take clothes to have them analysed?
- Yes. What's the problem? It's a perfectly normal procedure in cases like this.
- Of course, but with this media hype...I don't think I have ever in my life seen so many journalists....And I didn't come down in the last shower.
THE PJ'S DIFFICULTIES IN COMMUNICATING WITH THE MEDIA; THE PRO McCANN PRESS OFFICE.
From the start of the investigation, we ask for the presence of a press attaché to accompany us and take on communicating with the media. The Justice Minister fulfills this request. Very quickly, however, this decision is contested. The reaction of the press itself is feared and public opinion, which might interpret that presence with direct intervention in the investigation by the minister....Finally, the person retained is an investigator, who is not working on the case, speaks English and has some experience in this field. With hindsight, it can be said that it wasn't a good decision. In fact, after the reading of our first press release and the parents' press conferences, the press let fly.
We were convinced that the people directly involved in the investigation should remain distanced from the media whirlwind. We needed help: the police judiciaire would have to engage staff to dissect published articles, focusing on the analysis of press statements from the parents and their friends.But that didn't happen. The media circus was in full swing: all the time, new articles, live TV, a growing number of journalists running around the streets of Vila da Luz.
It didn't seem normal to us either that a couple whose child has just disappeared engages press attachés to deal with their relations with the media. It is not a question here of minimising the role of the means of communication and ignoring that a subject like this stirs up a lot of curiosity, but that constant preoccupation with the management of their communication by the parents, appeared to us, to say the least, astonishing.