The McCanns’ libelling of others: 1. Martin Grime

Dr Kate McCann, in her book ‘madeleine’, has comprehensively smeared top dog handler Martin Grime, who took his cadaver dogs out to Praia da Luz.

On pages 249-250 of ‘madeleine’, for example, she writes:

   

“At one point [during the screening of a video of the cadaver dog Eddie alerting to the scent of a corpse in the living room of the McCanns’ apartment] the handler [Martin Grime] directed the dogs to a spot behind the conch in the sitting room, close to the curtains. He called the dogs over to him to investigate this particular site.

“The dogs ultimately ‘alerted’. I felt myself starting to relax a little. This was not what I would call an exact science”. Dr Kate McCann is clearly querying Mr Grimes’ expertise.       

 In a second passage, Dr Kate McCann clearly implies that Mr Grime deliberately caused his cadaver dog to alert to their hired Renault Scenic car.

 

She writes:

 

     “…we were in an underground garage where eight or so cars were parked, including our rented Renault Scenic. It was hard to miss: the windows were plastered with pictures of Madeleine. In medicine we would call this an ‘unblinded’ study, one that is susceptible to bias. One of the dogs ran straight past our car, nose in the air, heading towards the next vehicle.

“The handler stopped next to the Renault and called the dog. It obeyed, returned to him, but then ran off again. Staying by the car, PC Grime instructed the dog to come back several times and directed it to certain parts of the vehicle before it eventually supplied an alert by barking…when researching the validity of sniffer dog evidence later that month, Gerry would discover that false alerts can be attributable to the conscious or unconscious signals of the handler…this certainly seemed to be what was happening here…”        

Dr Kate McCann is plainly suggesting, and has done so to hundreds of thousands of readers of her book, that Mr Grime is incompetent. Not only is this suggestion libellous, it is patently ludicrous. One must ask: would a person such as Mr Grime, whose professional livelihood depended on the 100% reliability of his dogs, proceed to suggest the past presence of a corpse at locations in the McCanns’ flat, and in their hired car, if Madeleine might still be alive somewhere?

 

She might have been found alive the next day

 

If so, Martin Grime’s professional credibility and his livelihood would have been ruined for ever.

Published by The Madeline McCann Research Group, March 2012  

The cost of looking for Madeleine so far. £20 million?

How much has the search for Madeleine cost so far? It began at 10.00pm on Thursday 3 May when the McCanns said that Madeleine had been abducted.
 

Here is a rough calculation of the total costs so far, accompanied by a few notes:

£548,477 - The cost for Leicestershire Police's part in the search in 2007-8 was £548, 477, of which the Home Office refunded £525,069.

£4 million - A conservative estimate of the cost to the Portuguese Police of their investigation, just in 2007-8.

 

£3 million - A conservative estimate of the costs of the McCanns’ private investigations so far, made up as follows:

·         At least £300,00, maybe more, to Metodo 3

·         £½  million plus expenses to Kevin Halligen

·         Salaries and expenses to Dave Edgar, Arthur Cowley and assorted other detectives, plus trips to Germany (Hewlett), Barcelona (Victoria Beckham-lookalike) and various other trips

·         Salaries of Justine McGuinness and Clarence Mitchell plus expenses: £300,000 so far

£2 million -  the estimated cost to Interpol and an assortment of police forces around the globe, who have had to deal with hundreds, possibly thousands of ‘sightings’ of Madeleine, in countries such as the U.K., Germany, France, Portugal, Morocco, Spain, Canada, Venezuela, Australia and New Zealand.

The estimate is based on say 1,000 ‘sightings’ requiring an average of say £2,000 of police time to investigate each sighting   

£3.5 million - for the current Scotland Yard ‘Review’. The review is said to be staffed by 37 officers. If their average salary is say £40,000, and they work on the review for say at least a year, that would cost around £2 million alone (including e.g. pension and employer’s N.I. contributions), and that doesn’t include the cost of e.g. hotels and travel for visits to Portugal and Spain   

£1 million - for lawyer’s fees: Edward Smethurst (co-ordinating lawyer), Carter-Ruck (suing lots of people), Michael Caplan Q.C. (extradition), Portuguese lawyers including extradition lawyers and Isabel Duarte, International Family Law Group (wardship proceedings before ms Justice Hogg in the High Court)    

An unknown amount - for the current Portuguese investigation begun in Oporto.

 

An unknown amount - for answering various Freedom of Information Act queries from press and public about the case.