An interesting article by Nick Davies with some of the background about where this happened.
http://www.nickdavies.net/1993/08/01/kidnap-murder-and-justice-in-the-algarve/
Thank you Carana ... interesting article:
Nick Davies.
Kidnap, murder and justice in the AlgarveThe Guardian
Published August 1993 No comments... »
Rachel Charles was nine years old when she went missing one warm November day in 1990 as she walked home after school, and when her body was found four days later, tucked under a pine tree a couple of miles along the coast, local people who had never even known her were terrified by the needless brutality of it all. It was a relief to almost everyone when the police arrested Michael Cook, then aged 38, and explained how he had abducted her and tried to have sex with her and then strangled her in his car when she started to fight him off. Cook was convicted of murder and sent to prison for 19 years.
It was on, the face of it, a classically simple piece of crime and detection. Yet nearly three years after Rachel’s death, the case has grown into the most complex of mysteries, riddled with speculation and conspiracy, ringed by allegations of corruption and big-time crime, infested with lies. It is a mystery whose strange and unexpected solution is, even now, only partially clear.
To begin to unravel this story, you have first to understand the place where it all happened – Vale Navio. Twenty years ago, it was 82 acres of scrubland and bleached grass perched over the sea on the Algarve coast of Portugal, nowhere special to anyone except the local peasant farmers who grazed their goats there. Now, Vale Navio is the biggest timeshare complex in Europe – villas, apartments, roads, shops, pools, bars – and in that short time, it has earned more than £30 million for its developers. Very big money – very big trouble.
At various points in its history, powerful Portuguese gangsters have moved in behind the respectable businessmen who were running the place and simply gutted it of cash with the result that most of the tourists who bought shares in Vale Navio now find they own nothing: their villas belong to the bank or else they were never even built. British gangsters smelled the money, too. A group of them arrived from Spain in the late 1980s and, until recently, they were taking £1,000 a week off the managers on the promise of not breaking the legs of their timeshare salesmen.
Drug deals, gun shots, protection rackets, fraud, corruption, theft and murder, too – Vale Navio has seen it all. In June this year, a retired teacher from Luton, Tony Madden, missed death by about 12 centimeters when someone fired two steel balls at him as he was driving out of the complex one night. He had gone there to organise a meeting of timeshare owners who wanted to find out the truth about who ripped them off. Madden was hardly surprised to be attacked. In March, a Manchester businessman named Brian Morgan had gone down to Vale Navio with the same idea and someone had opened fire on him in his villa. Madden went to the police in Albufeira and showed them the steel ball embedded in the door frame of his car, but the police just shrugged and smiled.
The trouble goes beyond Vale Navio. When tourism opened the gate to the Algarve, crime slipped in behind it. The province now rivals Amsterdam as the drugs gateway to Europe: cocaine from the old Portuguese colonies in central America; heroin from the protectorate in Macau; hashish from across the water in Morocco. There’s a new boom in Euro scams, creaming off illicit fortunes from the £10 million a day which the EEC is pumping into Portugal. A cash business like tourism is ideal for money-laundering, and the Algarve is awash with black money. There is still plenty of peace and sunshine, but it is riviera style masking ghetto culture, the Costa Chicago. Even the Sicilian Mafia have turned up. And Mick Cook walked into this.
Mick Cook is what they used to call a wide boy. He is a pint-sized Cockney, raised in Essex, with a teenage history of petty theft and punch-ups, a ducker and a diver, a strictly cash-only man, born to fiddle. If he buys a car, he fiddles the paperwork. If he makes a profit, he fiddles the tax. If he tells you it’s raining, it’s because he’s selling umbrellas. His family are law-abiding, hard-working people and Mick had a good trade as a car-sprayer and panel-beater but he always had one eye on the wrong side of the law, where the deals were. Still, for all that, he was a small-time player, no great intelligence, no big front, no gun and no chance at all of surviving with the big boys who run crime in the Algarve.
Mick Cook arrived in Vale Navio in the Spring of 1989 with his wife, a suitcase containing £63,000 in cash, and a string of bad debts behind him in Essex. He settled down fast, bought himself a flash red Triumph TR7 (never registered it), started panel-beating at a local garage (paid the “Porkies”, as he called them, to do half the work for him), began running Safari tours on the side (never got a licence) and spent long hours in a suntan and swimming shorts with the other Vale Navio Brits in the Nag’s Head bar (known as the Wonkey Donkey). That summer, his marriage broke up and he moved out of Vale Navio to a flat in Albufeira.
As far as the other Brits knew, that was more or less all there was to Mick Cook right up to the time that Rachel went missing sometime before 5.00 in the afternoon on Monday, November 19 1990. She was on the bus that brought all the Vale Navio children back from the international school XX miles eastwards along the coast at Vilamoura. Some of the other mothers who were waiting for the bus in front of the reception centre noticed her holding hands with a little girl called Jessica, then heading off on her own across the road, stopping to pat a couple of dogs that were barking at a villa gate, and finally walking round the corner with her bright pink schoolbag on her back. They never saw her again.
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It was a while before her mother, Carol, raised the alarm. The local uniformed police, the GNR, were not too interested and so, overnight, about 30 of the Vale Navio Brits organised their own search, made several hundred photocopies of a poster with Rachel’s picture and started distributing it around the area. The next morning, Tuesday, a Vale Navio gardener came forward and said he had been working on a flower bed just around the corner where Rachel had walked when she left the bus and he had seen her getting into a red car with foreign number plates. He knew Rachel well and he was sure it was her; in his mind, he could still see her wriggling her pink bag off her shoulders and putting it on her lap, and he noticed, too, how she got into the wrong side of the car – a British car.
That afternoon, at 1.30, there was a ransom call: a man with an English accent phoned the Vale Navio sales office and demanded £300,000 for Rachel’s safe return. Now the police started to be more interested and the local detective force, the Policia Judiciaria, were called in. They started talking to the owners of red cars with foreign plates, such as Mick Cook’s flash TR7. Cook told them he had left work once during Monday afternoon to go to a drug store to buy a coloured tape for the side of a car he was working on but he said he didn’t remember being in Vale Navio at all that day.
By Wednesday, the search for the missing girl had made it to the local radio news. That afternoon, her shoes and pink schoolbag were found in some woods ten minutes drive away from the scene of her abduction. That evening, a group of Vale Navio Brits trawled the bars of Albufeira appealing for help and the next morning, Thursday, more than 300 tourists turned out to help. At 11.30, they saw her, not far from where her bag had been found, lying on her back under a thin blanket of pine needles, fully clothed, with purple rope marks on her neck.
By this time, the police had checked the stories of the car owners they had talked to – and suddenly Mick Cook was on his way up the scaffold. His car was not properly registered; no one at the drug store could remember his being there on Monday afternoon; and, worse than that, several people disputed his claim that he hadn’t been to Vale Navio that day and insisted that he had been parked near the reception centre just as Rachel and the other children were climbing off their bus. On Thursday afternoon, the police arrested Mick Cook and questioned him for 12 hours. They let him go but they let him know, too, that he was their prime suspect.
Over the next ten days, the police pursued their case. They found tyre tracks near the body and compared them to the TR7. They found a local riding instructor who said that on Monday afternoon he had been up near the area where Rachel’s body was later found and he had seen a man in sunglasses with a red car and the man could have been Mick. The police seized Mick’s car and found a knife, some hair and a coil of rope, which they sent off to their scientists. They spoke to Rachel’s mother, Carol, who said Mick was one of the very few people whose car Rachel would have agreed to get into. They spoke to her stepfather, Ray, who said he was sure Mick was capable of the crime and added that he had seen Mick touching up little girls in the pool while he was pretending to teach them to dive.
On December 4, the police arrested Mick again and, two days later, they announced that he had confessed to killing Rachel within an hour of abducting her. They sent off to Interpol for his criminal record and declared that he had a history of indecent assault. Mick Cook looked like a very guilty man.
But back at Vale Navio, they were not so sure. They had never been too impressed by the Porkie police who they reckoned were more interested in backhanders than clues. And, more than that, they had a suspect of their own – the little girl’s stepfather, Raymond Derek Charles.
Ray Charles had never been particularly popular in Vale Navio. He was a big man with a blunt manner, inclined to boast about acres of land he owned or thousands of pounds he had stashed away in the bank when everyone knew he was more or less broke. There was a rumour that he had changed his name, that he was on the run from something in England, and everyone knew he drank too much and had a lousey temper. They also didn’t like the way he treated his stepdaughter. As far as they could see, he had always hated Rachel and been jealous of her relationship with her mother and taken every chance to yell at her for the slightest thing she did wrong.
But no-one had ever suspected that he would hurt her, not until she went missing, not until Ray started to behave rather strangely during the search: he stayed at home on his own drinking while Carol went to friends to be comforted; then he said he had been to see a medium who wanted them to search 20 miles inland, far away from where Rachel was eventually found; then in the early hours of Wednesday morning, he went off on his own for four hours and returned with scratches on his legs; that afternoon, he abandoned the search just as they closed in on the area where the shoes and bag were found, as if he knew they were about to find them and did not want to be there when it happened. That was when the talk about him really got going.
