http://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/life/exclusive-twice-past-ten-years-thought-found-madeleine-mccann/By Clarence Mitchell 28 APRIL 2017 • 9:30PM
A former BBC reporter, Clarence Mitchell was appointed to assist Kate and Gerry McCann as their media spokesman following the disappearance of their daughter, Madeleine, in Portugal in 2007. Mitchell now works for a public relations company and continues to assist the McCanns when necessary. Here is his incredible account of the youngster's disappearance, the police operation to find her and the subsequent 10 years of anguish....
Twice in the ten years I have worked with the McCanns, I genuinely thought we were within reach of finding their missing daughter, Madeleine.
The first moment came very early on, just weeks after her disappearance on May 3, 2007. I had been sent by the British government to the Portuguese resort of Praia da Luz to assist Kate and Gerry in dealing with the already huge media interest. Shortly after I arrived, I started to get phone calls, always at three o’clock in the morning, always the same ghostly man’s voice, repeatedly naming a farm where she was being hidden.
The British police recorded the calls and it turned out there was indeed a farm, fitting his description exactly, near Seville, over the border in Spain. As it was raided, and turned out to look exactly as he had painted it in those calls, I really felt we were on to something. But she wasn’t there, and those tip-offs – like so many others that we received from hoaxers, ransom seekers, conmen and psychics – were never explained.
The second came at the end of 2007. I was now being employed by Kate and Gerry as their press spokesman, and they were back at home in Leicestershire with their twins, Sean and Amelie. Spanish private investigators working on their behalf had found a blonde-haired girl who spoke English in a village in the Atlas Mountains of Morocco. All the information coming back to us suggested heavily that it could be Madeleine, so much so that an aircraft was put on stand-by, with its engines running, waiting to fly to pick her up.
Kate and Gerry sat tight. They had learned by that stage to be sceptical, not to give in to natural hope only for it to be dashed. They preferred to wait until the Moroccan authorities had checked it out. And when they did, it became clear she was not Madeleine.
On the tenth anniversary of her disappearance, I continue to assist Kate and Gerry as required, keeping a weather eye on reports and sightings, such as the “significant lead” that Assistant Commissioner Mark Rowley said this week that Scotland Yard’s Operation Grange is following up.
Beyond that, rightly, the Metropolitan Police do not go into operational detail publicly. So, wherever this latest lead may take them, be it Portugal or elsewhere, this time around, like Kate and Gerry, I will sit tight and simply let the authorities do their job before getting my hopes up.
I had spent 20 years as a BBC journalist before becoming a civil servant and helping the McCanns. I met Gerry first. It was some two weeks after Madeleine had gone missing, and he had flown back to England to collect some of her belongings and see members of their large, close extended family.
Obviously, he was distressed, but also very rational. As I have subsequently learnt by spending time with the couple at close quarters, Gerry deals with trauma by compartmentalising it and being in control. His emotions, then as now, are poured into what he can do practically to raise awareness of Madeleine’s disappearance.
In Portugal, I found Kate very friendly, grateful for the support I could offer, but already wary of the media attention. Even though she realised that it was invaluable in keeping awareness high, she – more so that Gerry – found it very intrusive.
That was before it turned into something altogether more cruel, with the McCanns becoming widely vilified for making a mistake in the way in which they chose to care for their children on that fateful night in Praia da Luz. They had left them in an unlocked holiday apartment, though still checking on them regularly, because there was no baby-listening service at their complex.
They were always the first to admit their mistake, but what a price they are still paying. God forbid it is a price they may have to pay for the rest of their lives. I was with them, in private, away from the cameras on many occasions, when they were in absolute grief and misery.
For all the doubters, they have never done or said anything at any time that has given me any cause for suspicion that they were anything other than the innocent victims of a dreadful crime. Before that first meeting with Gerry, I was briefed by British police working alongside the Portuguese on the case. They told me then, categorically, that they had “cleared the ground beneath their feet”
In other words, the British authorities believed that Gerry and Kate were categorically not guilty of any involvement in Madeleine’s disappearance.
Yet the Portuguese police turned against them, naming them as arguido, a technical term conferring certain legal rights that is clumsily and misleadingly translated into English as “suspect”. You can become an arguido over the most minor traffic offence.
By that time, though, I had been called back by the government to London, but Kate and Gerry were ringing me at four in the morning saying: “We’ve been out here in Portugal too long, we’ve been stitched up, we’re about to be arrested, it’s all dreadful.”
Other than being sympathetic, I couldn’t do anything to help them. So when the offer came to work for them full-time, I took it in an instant.
What stands out, looking back over ten years, is the sheer lunacy of the accusations made against them.
There was, for instance, the theory entertained by the Portuguese police that their daughter had somehow been killed accidentally and that they then had used their hire car to remove her body and bury it in a secret location. I was there when the keys to that car were handed over to them, at their apartment; they hired it several weeks after Madeleine had disappeared.
Even if they had already got their daughter’s body out of the holiday apartment and stored it somewhere (a fridge was suggested, ridiculously), the police theory would mean that, in the full view of the world’s media, who were camped on their doorstep around the clock, the McCanns would have had to put her into the boot and then shaken off the ever-present paparazzi to dispose of her. It was as implausible as it was utterly offensive.
Later, in the autumn of 2007, when we were all back in England, a team of Portuguese police officers came to interview me about the times I had ridden in that car with Kate and Gerry. Did I notice any unusual smells in the hire car, they asked? It was beyond laughable. It also revealed, I felt, frightening ineptitude.
By then, a whole, vile cottage industry had grown around the case, with retired police officers who had nothing to do with the investigation appearing on Portuguese TV to suggest, for example, the McCanns had been at a swingers’ party on the night of Madeleine’s disappearance. It all compounded their pain.
Kate, in particular, got deeply angry. There was no shouting, sobbing or throwing things. It was more of a simmering but intense rage that things could be so misrepresented and so blatantly unfair.
Their real fury, though, was that such lazy reporting of wild untruths would actually mislead people and so hinder the search for Madeleine. That was why they took legal action against Gonçalo Amaral, the Portuguese police officer who wrote a very unpleasant book about them after being removed from the investigation. If people in Portugal, or elsewhere, believe the claims of an officer who never interviewed them, then Kate and Gerry feared that the public would simply assume Madeleine was dead and forget her.
The pressure would have broken other couples. Occasionally, I would catch them in tears, or hugging each other. But they seem to have coped. If anything, it has brought them together even more, rather than split them apart.
The McCanns are private people. I have never been privy to their innermost thoughts. It is not that sort of relationship. We haven’t even discussed politics. I am hoping to stand as a Conservative candidate in the forthcoming election, and my flag is blue; theirs, I’ve always believed, is red. It certainly didn’t affect our friendship.
They have thrown themselves into looking after the twins, trying as best to create a home where reminders of Madeleine are all around them, where she is still very much part of the family, and where they can shield Sean and Amelie against this constant gaze that the family is still under.
We have a good understanding with the British media that, until they are 18, the twins should never be photographed, but we can’t always enforce it. A local paper here or a foreign agency photographer there has occasionally managed to include them “by accident” in a photograph at a school sports day or other public event.
Despite the support they have received, there are still bills to pay. Before Madeleine’s disappearance, Kate was a locum GP, but she has never returned to work. Gerry continues as a senior cardiologist. (It is a tiny point, but symbolic of how almost every fact is twisted in this story. Gerry is not a surgeon, as often inaccurately reported. He is the man who keeps you alive and your essential tubes open when you are having your heart operation under the surgeon’s knife.)
Kate and Gerry hate being recognised. When I was with them, we would sometimes walk into a restaurant and the whole place would go quiet as they entered. People are mostly sympathetic. Many just don’t know what to say to them.
Nobody in my experience has ever been bold enough to accuse them of anything unpleasant to their faces. All of the worst, ugly nonsense is online – that Gerry is not Madeleine’s real dad, that paedophilia is somehow involved, that there’s a huge global government conspiracy to cover something up.
One of the most ridiculous and offensive theories I have come across online – and there are many – is that Madeleine had somehow been hidden at the church in Praia da Luz inside a coffin, beneath a body awaiting burial.
I continue to believe Madeleine was abducted for some reason. Kate is sure that, just short of her fourth birthday, Madeleine would not have been capable of wandering out of the apartment, closing the curtains, sliding doors and two small gates behind her.
And so the couple keep her bedroom in Leicestershire ready for her return, with the presents there for all the birthdays and Christmases with them that she has missed. It is very much a family-only place. In all my time in their house, that door has remained shut.
They hope and pray that, wherever she is, Madeleine is being looked after. What sustains them is that there is absolutely no evidence of physical harm coming to her. So they will always believe firmly that it is as logical to think she might be alive as it is illogical to assume the worst.
As told to Peter Stanford=====================================================================
How curious that the little girl identified as Bushra reportedly spoke English.
