Were they set up before 2007, or are they just following the McCann model?
The two missing persons cases I am speaking of both date from earlier on this year, 2013. One is from January and the other is from June.
Both are British cases local to my home turf, which is why I am interested in them. One of them, the January case, I was peripherally involved in as I was holidaying a few streets away from where the person disappeared, at the time of the disappearance itself. Police interviewed me and many local residents. There was an extensive search.
After a few weeks the police gave up on the case due to lack of resources, so they claimed. The mother of the person who went missing set up a facebook page a few days after her son disappeared, and seemed to be constantly on line, organising teams of people to help search, engaging in fund raising events, and so on. After a few weeks the police made it clear that they did not have the funds to carry out searches (the terrain was difficult; river beds and extensive tracts of woodland and farmland had to be searched, and conditions were harsh) so the mother raised funds to enlist the help of private divers and private search teams who normally worked for the army, and so on.
By the look of it the mother was at her computer almost constantly for months and it seemed obvious to everyone that this was an appropriate role.
Her son's body was found in a field in mid-April under melting snow by a farmer. He had died of hypothermia on the cold January night.
It is actually a very interesting - and of course sad - case, as the mother and other relatives feel her son may have been drugged and that this element was not properly investigated by police. They also feel that police did not do enough in the early stages of the investigation. There are also a number of people on CCTV footage who must have been witnesses to certain things, and who are believed to be likely to live locally, who have not come forward. As far as the mother is concerned, hypothermia is the technical but not the ultimate cause of death. It could be an interesting case for this site.
The second case involves the disappearance of another student, currently thought to be in the Scottish Highlands somewhere. Police have drawn a blank. The girl's family and friends are running a website and making public appeals.
I don't know if either of these two groups of people were influenced by the McCanns. The cases are quite different. The mother in the first case is more of a Kerry Needham figure. She is a working class lady of limited influence and funds who has gone to great efforts to enlist help from charities and get local people to help her on an individual basis. The family of the second person is Russian and currently live in Russia, so the media aspect of the case in the UK is being run by the girl's UK friends. Possibly a mafia connection there as the Russian father is a person of wealth and influence.
Whatever the case it seems obvious that any family of a missing person today would use the media to assist them in various aspects of the case. Nothing suspicious at all. No police force, no matter how professional, appears to have the resources to investigate these cases properly.
Police on both of these cases have made several public statements to the effect that unless there is concrete evidence at an early stage of foul play, then the assumption is that no crime has been committed, and as such the disappearances are not a matter for the police. (It's no crime for an adult to disappear; in fact the police are obliged to protect the privacy and conceal the location of someone who disappears of their own volition and wants to remain free of contact from his or her relatives). As such these cases were put pretty quickly on the police's back burner. Seems like a catch 22 - there can only be a criminal investigation if there already evidence of a crime. But that's the way it is.
Back to the Madeleine case, I don't see any problem with raising funds to conduct a parallel investigation at all. It is well known that the police are not always going to be willing or able to get to the bottom of matters and the McCanns were reasonable to assume from the early days that if they wanted to find their daughter they would have to appoint themselves as directors and pull out all the stops.
