Get Ready to Swoon
Madeleine McCann: 'I listened for 15 seconds and knew they were innocent’By Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan7:05AM BST 10 Sep 2014
A wealthy British businessman was moved to help search for Madeleine McCann after her parents Kate and Gerry became suspects
Gerry and Kate McCann never ceased doing what they could to move forward the investigation – which they saw as stalled – into Madeleine’s disappearance. They held, always, to the belief that their daughter could still be alive.
When they returned to the UK from Portugal in September 2007, Gerry insisted it did not mean they were giving up their search for her. ''As parents we cannot give up on our daughter until we know what has happened.”
Three days later, someone who was to be of great and lasting assistance to them got in touch. Brian Kennedy, a wealthy British businessman, had been following events as they unwound in Portugal and wanted to help.
“I was incredulous,” he told us. “I’d been losing all hope and faith in human nature. I had been asking myself, 'How is this possible?’ [Kate] is grieving. My instincts were telling me there was a great injustice being done. I called my lawyer and said, 'I want you to reach out to these poor folks and see if we can help them’.”
Kennedy, the Scottish-born, Cheshire-based son of a window cleaner, then aged 47, had leapfrogged from trainee accountant to a management role in a kitchen-equipment company, then to the mobile-phone business, double-glazing and plastics. By 2007 his net worth as head of his company, Latium Enterprises, was said to be £250 million.
An experiment with retirement had driven him “nuts” and he was back in the business fray. When he began talking about trying to help the McCanns, friends and colleagues told him not to get involved, that his intervention would end in tears. “What,” he recalled someone saying, “if the parents turn out to be guilty?”
“I remember replying, 'What happens if they’re innocent?’ Can you imagine the horror of losing your daughter… and then the world turning against you and accusing you of being responsible for her murder? Is it not bad enough, the terror, the agony they are going through? I could understand it – I’ve got five kids. I told my lawyer, 'If you feel they’re innocent, then we’ll get behind them and help them’.”
His lawyer made contact with the McCanns and they met Kennedy in London. “Within 15 seconds of listening to Kate,” he said, “I made a decision, using all the emotional intelligence one builds up over many years. I was 100 per cent convinced of their total innocence. I told them that, one, we would find a top Portuguese lawyer to defend them, and get them off as arguidos [the McCanns had been designated “named suspects” by the Portuguese authorities days before they returned to England]. Two, we’d do everything in our power to influence the public’s perspective and views. And, three, we’d support them in setting up some private investigators … The Portuguese police had stopped investigating. It was urgent to get some other guys on to it.”
Top-level legal help was found in Portugal. At Kennedy’s bidding and at his expense, Clarence Mitchell – a government adviser who had previously acted as the McCanns’ spokesman in Praia da Luz, the holiday resort from where Madeleine had disappeared – quit his Whitehall job and came back on-board.
Kennedy prefers not to reveal how much he spent on helping the McCanns, beyond saying that there were “substantial” outgoings – principally legal and media-related costs. Stephen Winyard, the owner of Stobo Castle Spa, in Peebleshire, and Sir Richard Branson also contributed. However, it was Madeleine’s Fund – the not-for-profit company established to find her in 2007, the board of which Kennedy’s then lawyer joined – that would, in time, deal with the cost of private investigators, once that effort went into high gear.
Present at Kennedy’s first meeting with the McCanns in London were representatives of Control Risks, a firm specialising in security and crisis management. It had already sent detectives to Portugal to see the couple right after Madeleine’s disappearance, at the expense of an anonymous donor whose identity has never been revealed.
Kate McCann had not enjoyed that first encounter. One of the Control Risk operatives was a mysterious figure who introduced himself only as “Hugh”. He was one of the many former intelligence officers the company employed, and a main part of his role now was as a potential kidnap negotiator. Kate, already distraught, had not liked the James Bond atmosphere he brought with him. Besides, there would never be anybody other than hoaxers with whom to negotiate.
As the McCanns’ renewed use of Control Risks began to be mentioned in the press, noises of disapproval came from Portugal. “You cannot have private detectives intervening in criminal cases,” sniffed Carlos Anjos, head of the Polícia Judiciária’s union. The McCanns resolved to go ahead, motivated by advice Gerry had noted during a research trip to the US earlier that summer.
A document issued by the US Justice Department for use by parents of missing children, The Family Survival Guide, recommended considering using private detectives if they could “do something better or different than what is being done by law enforcement”. Given what they saw as the fiasco of the Portuguese police probe, the McCanns nurtured that hope.
“I had no experience at all with private detectives,” Kennedy remembered. “But the way you run a business is all about surrounding yourself with people who understand industries that you don’t understand.” He initially hired two former Metropolitan Police detectives, and in late September decided to follow up a rumour that Madeleine might have been sighted in Morocco. Kennedy and the detectives, who flew out aboard his private jet, hired a Moroccan tourist guide to accompany them to the mountain village where it was reported the missing girl might be. She was not there, but the guide – promised a reward – subsequently spoke of having travelled vast distances circulating Madeleine’s picture. “If I find her,” he said, “I will be rich. I have been promised I will never have to work again – maybe a million pounds.”
“I suppose,” Kennedy said later “we had been looking for low-hanging fruit. After a few weeks, though, we decided we needed to go about it in a very professional way.”
Brian Kennedy had set a potentially useful process in motion. Months earlier, the Portuguese police had produced a poor drawing of the man the McCanns’ friend, Jane Tanner, had seen carrying a child near the holiday apartment in which the McCanns had been staying on the night Madeleine vanished. Now, in England, a British forensic sketch artist took on the job of extracting more and relevant information from Tanner. This fresh image got major media coverage – raising the possibility of new leads.
Kennedy then cast around for suitable private investigators to hire, and picked Método 3, a Spanish company. The agency’s claims included having located 23 missing children and teenagers. Given that it was not legitimate for investigators to work for the McCanns in Portugal while the police probe was still under way, it was hoped that Método 3 – with its knowledge of the region and its connections in Spain – might prove effective.
It seemed, briefly, that the private detectives could also rebuild bridges with the Portuguese Polícia Judiciária. At the request of the head of Spain’s anti-kidnapping unit, two PJ officers met Método 3 operatives. But the points the private detectives raised did not interest the Portuguese.
Método 3 followed up on a vast number of potential openings in the hunt for Madeleine. Nothing tangible resulted, but they made some startling statements that kept the case in the public eye. “We are 100 per cent sure,” their boss, Francisco Marco, told the American network CBS, “that she is alive. We know the kidnapper. We know who he is and how he has done it.” On the BBC’s Panorama programme, he said: “We are very close to finding the kidnappers.” Then, in early December, he announced: “We believe she is in an area not very far from the Iberian peninsula and North Africa. And we have a fairly certain idea who she is with.”
No facts emerged, however, to back up these claims. According to The Daily Telegraph, a source close to the McCanns said the couple had begun to think “they might have been sold a pup”. A veteran Spanish police detective was derisive. Método 3 would solve the case, he said, “cuando las ranas crecen los pelos” – “when frogs grow hair”.
As the months slipped by, the McCanns made a move they were to regret. A contract was agreed with Oakley International, a US-based company described by a source close to the couple as being apparently “absolutely the best, but extremely secretive”. Oakley was said to employ former FBI, CIA and US Special Forces personnel. It was reportedly agreed that Madeleine’s Fund would pay the company £500,000 under a three-stage contract – with more to come should Madeleine be found alive.
The McCanns and Kennedy at first got the impression that Oakley was doing its job. Its investigators appeared to be collating and following up information that came in as a response to the parents’ appeals, and were conducting covert interviews in Portugal.
But it later emerged that hundreds of calls to a dedicated hotline were never checked by Oakley. Tapes of interviews conducted in Portugal were said to be useless, involving people irrelevant to the case. Specialists used by Oakley began to find that their bills went unpaid. An undertaking to deliver satellite images of Praia da Luz on the night of May 3, 2007, when Madeleine had disappeared, resulted only in pictures grabbed from Google Earth. With little or no real progress, and as funds continued to haemorrhage, Brian Kennedy called time.
Oakley’s boss Kevin Halligen, it turned out, was a fraud. After his involvement in the Madeleine case, Halligen was arrested in the UK in connection with charges relating to a trading company fraud, and extradited to the United States. He was convicted there on the fraud matter, then deported to Europe.
“The Oakley episode went sort of sweet and sour,” Kennedy told us. “There were genuine guys breaking their back, trying to make a breakthrough. The lion’s share was spent on the investigation, despite what the newspapers say… [But] it all ended in tears.”
It was a major setback, but Kennedy and the McCanns did not give up. On the recommendation of the head of Manchester’s Serious Crime Squad, they went on to hire an experienced former senior police officer, David Edgar. He put in much arduous, systematic work – and held the fort until 2011, when, following an appeal to David Cameron, Scotland Yard began investigating. The dossier the McCanns’ private detectives had gathered was passed to the Yard, and its probe continues today – as Operation Grange.
'Looking For Madeleine’ by Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan (Headline, £18.99) is available from Telegraph Books for £16.99 + £1.95 p&p (0844 871 1514 or visit books.telegraph.co.uk)
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/madeleinemccann/11077525/Madeleine-McCann-I-listened-for-15-seconds-and-knew-they-were-innocent.html
