A reminder of the opening post.
Did dissociative amnesia play a part in the chaos the night Maddie disappeared?
Some of the reported events which occurred the night Madeleine disappeared are open to interpretation once the actual evidence is examined. The Portuguese police officers who first attended the Ocean Club that night called in the Policia Judiciaria (detectives) because they felt something just wasn't right. According to these GNR officers, the tapas group were scared, jumpy and nervous. The parents were exibiting signs of extreme stress which manifested itself in them wailing on the bed and the floor. They'd all been drinking, they weren't falling over but it was hard to deal with them. It was hard to get any sense out of them about a possible abduction.
Given that background, it is not surprising therefore that people become confused and disorientated. Witnesses recall events differently at the best of times but in the midst of a possible child abduction scenario, panick and fear take over, logic sails merrily out the window, memories become tainted. Once the dust had settled and witness statements had been taken, it became clear that there were many discrepancies between witnesses.
Three events in particular involving Madeleine's parents were to become of particular interest to investigators. The route taken by Gerry McCann between the tapas restaurant and his apartment at around 9pm. The encounter he had with Jeremy Wilkins outside the apartment at about 9.15pm and the report by Kate McCann that when she checked the apartment just after 10pm that she found the children's bedroom window fully open and the outside shutter raised.
GM in his first statement claimed that he had gained entry to his apartment via the front door which required a key to gain entry. His second statement made reference to this event but this time he agreed that entry had been made from the rear of the apartment via an unlocked patio door. Clearly this was an example of memory lapse.
The second event occurred some 15 minutes later after Gerry McCann left the apartment. According to GM, he saw an holidaymaker approaching and crossed the road to chat to him for a few minutes. According to this holidaymaker, identified as Jeremy Wilkins, it was he who crossed the road to speak to GM who remained on the pavement. Another witness and a member of the tapas group, identified as Jane Tanner, corroborated JW's version of the event and claimed that she slipped past both men as they chatted. Clearly, at least one of the three had suffered a memory malfunction.
The final event is the most interesting. The missing child's mother, Kate McCann, has always insisted that when she went to check on the children in the apartment at around 10pm, that she found the curtains billowing in the wind, the bedroom window fully slid across and the window shutter fully raised. Forensic examination of the window and its surrounds however found only Kate McCann's fingerprints on the window and in such a position which suggested that it was she who had opened it. There were no signs that the shutter or window had been tampered with and no evidence whatsoever that any intruder had gained entry to the apartment. Was this yet another example of a memory loss brought about by severe trauma?
Were these events actually examples of a phenomenon called 'dissociative amnesia' or 'memory loss'. Dissociation is a natural response to a trauma over which an individual has no control, it is known that the condition is aggravated by the consumption of alcohol.
Could it be that the trauma suffered by Madeleine's parents on the night she disappeared was sufficient to trigger this condition resulting in loss of some memory of events while others remain confused. In clinical terms, retrograde amnesia sufferers may partially regain memory later, but memories are never regained with anterograde amnesia because they were not encoded properly. Memories from just before the trauma are often completely lost, partly due to the psychological repression of unpleasant memories (psychogenic amnesia), and partly because memories may be incompletely encoded if the event interrupts the normal process of transfer from short-term to long-term memory.
