What happened to Madeleine McCann? - No. 4 50 ridiculous stories the British media "ARE" telling you

PLEASE COPY THIS LEAFLET OR PASS IT TO OTHERS WHEN YOU’VE READ IT.  THANK YOU

This is our fourth leaflet in this series. The three previous ones featured facts about the reported disappearance of Madeleine McCann that the British media have not been telling you about. This leaflet is different.

While the British mainstream media have for years denied the British public the facts that might help us to better understand what happened to Madeleine, they have, at the same time, shamelessly produced many ridiculous, unbelievable stories about what might have happened to Madeleine, mainly to sell more newspapers and make more money. Some of these stories were even generated by the McCanns’ chief publicist, Clarence Mitchell, former Head of Tony Blair’s  Media Monitoring Unit. He once boasted that his job was ‘to control what comes out in the media’. Many stories featured in this leaflet could have harmed Madeleine, if she really had been abducted, was still alive and being held by an abductor. Suppose even one of these ‘sightings’ and ‘claims’ was true? What would be the effect on any abductor? What would he be likely to do? Many of the stories could have put Madeleine, if still alive, at great risk, by causing an abductor to take steps to evade the police.   

Our first leaflet examined the main facts of the case. You can watch a video of this leaflet on YouTube, in 4 parts, at this link:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gnXtYSeXSiw   Our second looked at the main members of the ‘McCann Team’, examining their activities, focusing on the controversial individuals (some of them criminals) and detective agencies they used - for what they said was their search for Madeleine. Our third leaflet discussed Operation Grange, the 6-year-long Metropolitan Police review and investigation into Madeleine’s reported disappearance. We have numbered our points from No. 151 onwards, this being a continuation of our first three leaflets.

British media stories about the disappearance of Madeleine McCann

We present below a selection of some of the most bizarre claimed ‘sightings’ and stories about Madeleine’s disappearance printed in the British media, some more ridiculous and unbelievable than others. A very useful website on the internet which gives further details about many of these stories is:

http://www.gerrymccannsblogs.co.uk/SIGHTINGS.htm  …and many of them are discussed in detail on this popular Madeleine McCann discussion forum: http://jillhavern.forumotion.net/

In 2017, the Sun published a list of 8,685 different ‘sightings’ of Madeleine.  The initial claim by the McCanns was that Madeleine had been abducted by a paedophile or a group of paedophiles. A bewildering variety of ‘sightings’, theories and claims about what really happened to Madeleine followed. We add comments on some of the stories, which we list in the approximate chronological order on which they were first published:

151. Madeleine seen in a taxi by Mr Cardosa on the day she was reported missing (3 May 2007) COMMENT: The taxi-driver claimed he had had a young blond-haired girl in his taxi, with two adults. But his story unravelled when he got muddled about which day this happened. He was dismissed as an attention-seeker.

152. Robert Murat’s girlfriend Michaela Walczuk handed Madeleine over to someone near the Spanish border (May 2007) COMMENT: This curious story emerged months after Madeleine had been reported missing. Moreover, when it did emerge, it was via the controversial, corrupt Spanish detective agency used by the McCanns, Metodo 3. On 13 November 2007, the man who ran the McCanns’ investigation into Madeleine’s disappearance, businessman Brian Kennedy, met with the Portuguese Police, bringing with him two Metodo 3 detectives (one of them, Antonio Giminez Raso, was arrested three months later and spent four years in prison on serious drugs and corruption charges). At the November 2007 meetings, the Metodo 3 detectives said they had been contacted by a truck driver who saw a blonde woman handing over ‘a package wrapped in a blanket’ to a man on a camp site near the border with Spain. The Portuguese Police followed this up, but it was another false lead.    

153. Maddie in a Dutch shop owned by Anna Stam (6 May 2007):  COMMENT:  This sighting was not made public for a full 15 months. It finally surfaced in the British media on 7 & 8 August 2008, after Anna Stam had flown to London to meet the McCann Team and help to draw up an artist’s sketch of the couple she said she’d seen with a young girl in her party shop in Amsterdam on Sunday 6 May 2007, three days after Madeleine had been reported missing. Ms Stam claimed the girl had spoken to her and said: “My name is Maddie. She is not my Mummy. They took me from my holiday”. Ms Stam did not report her sighting for a month. Dutch police interviewed her, drew up computer e-fits, and sent them to the Portuguese police on 18 June. The Portuguese police declined to follow up the information, besieged as they were by the intense work of their initial investigation and the presence of hundreds of international media journalists in Praia da Luz.  Ms Stam said: “I didn't like the man, he didn't look like a nice person…most people smile when they come in to buy things…he didn't smile back at me when I smiled at him. He had no sparkle in his eyes. He seemed angry”. She added: “The woman seemed stressed and uncomfortable. The man spoke in Portuguese. I know because I have Brazilian friends. The woman spoke in French while the little girl spoke English. It didn't seem like a real family”. The story was revived in August 2008 when the McCanns became aware that the Portuguese police had not travelled to Holland to follow up Ms Stam’s claims.  The McCanns’ PR spokesman Clarence Mitchell told the Mirror: “Anna did the right thing in contacting the Dutch police. But I find it shocking that the Portuguese police weren't even in touch, either with her or with us. I'm grateful to the Mirror for bringing her to us. Her evidence could be very significant. Our investigators will interview her in the next few days”.

154. Madeleine seen near a petrol station in Marrakesh, Morocco, asking to see ‘My Mummy’(9 May 2007) COMMENT:  A witness was sure she saw Madeleine with a man near a Marrekesh petrol station, next to the Hotel Ibis, on May 9, 2007. She said the girl ‘looked very distressed’ and said: “Can we go see Mummy now?’  The Daily Star revived this story as recently as 17 April 2017, as the 10th anniversary of Madeleine’s disappearance neared:  http://www.dailystar.co.uk/news/latest-news/606677/madeleine-mccann-sightings-maddie-2017-morocco

155. Madeleine seen asleep on a Belgian train (May 14, 2007)   COMMENT: A British man claimed he saw a child asleep on a train from Brussels to Antwerp and thought she looked drugged. The girl was with a balding, 6ft white man in his forties, who got off the train at Mechelen carrying her.

156.  Sightings in Geneva, Switzerland (16 May 2007)  COMMENT: A man reported seeing Madeleine in   Geneva on 16 May. In June, there were two separate sightings of a girl seen at Geneva Airport with a blonde woman in her 50s. Fifty police officers were called to search the entire terminal building, while all the pilots were asked to search their planes for the child:   http://www.pressreader.com/uk/daily-mail/20070623/281621005920288

157. Police looking for a red van with false number plates near Lisbon (17 May 2007) COMMENT: This story was reported by SKY News.

158. GCHQ hunt for Madeleine after they intercept messages in Arabic referring to "the little blonde girl" (29 May 2007) COMMENT:  Yes, even GCHQ in Cheltenham were involved in the search for Madeleine, in a story covered by Fox News on 29 May: “Brits Follow Cell Phone Signals in Hunt for Madeleine".

159. Three sightings in Belgium, two in Tongeren (May and June 2007): COMMENT: There were three more reported sightings in Belgium. The first was in May 2007 in Liège. Then, on 27 June, Jessica Beem said she had seen Madeleine in her flower-shop in Tongeren. A third claimed sighting, also in Tongeren, occurred on 28 July on a café terrace, where children’s therapist Katleen Sampermans said Madeleine was with a ‘strange-looking’ Dutch man and an Englishwoman. An artist’s sketch of the Dutchman was compiled. However, the girl turned out to be the 4-year-old daughter of a Belgian man. The Portuguese newspaper Correia da Manha in August 2008 reported that Interpol had received reports from 107 people that they had seen Madeleine. See here:

http://madeleinemccann.org/blog/2014/04/20/correio-da-manha-reports-august/ 

160. Two sightings in Zaio, Morocco (late May/early June 2007) COMMENT: A Spanish tourist said she saw a girl resembling Madeleine as she drove through the town of Zaio in northern Morocco at the end of May. Later, another Spanish tourist, Isabel Gonzalez, said she saw a girl fitting Madeleine’s description being ‘dragged across a street’, also in Zaio, by a North African woman on 15 June.

161. Madeleine seen in Hong Kong (14 June 14  2007)  COMMENT: A woman claimed that she had spotted  Madeleine in a Hong Kong shopping centre. The ‘sighting’ was ruled out after police studied CCTV footage

162. 28 sightings in Malta (17 to 29 June 2007)  COMMENT: There was a spate of alleged sightings of Madeleine in Malta, see e.g. here http://www.standard.co.uk/news/11-sightings-of-madeleine-in-malta-but-police-investigations-draw-a-blank-7237853.html  She was seen several times with a man, once with a woman. Another claimed to have seen her boarding a bus in the capital, Valetta. Elsewhere a Maltese man used his mobile ’phone to take a photo of a child he believed to be Madeleine at a parish festival in Zejtun on 17 June. A man from north Wales  said he saw a girl in the north-eastern town of Sliema wearing a jet black wig who was being told: "Get up, little girl”, by an Arab-looking man. Nothing came of any of these sightings: yet more police time wasted. 

163. Madeleine seen in Dubrovnik, Croatia (19 June 2007) COMMENT: She was allegedly seen in Dubrovnik, Croatia, laying on the floor ‘kicking and screaming’ and yelling: “I’m never going to see them again”.

164. Antonia Toscano, a Spanish journalist and professed ‘expert in Satanic cults’, said he knew Madeleine had been abducted by a French paedophile - on orders from wealthy organisers of a European child sex ring (27 June 2007)  COMMENT: A false claim by a man with a vivid imagination (see also No. 200).

165. Madeleine seen twice in Bosnia (8 July and 10 November 2007)  COMMENT: A British tourist believed he had seen Madeleine at the Roman Catholic shrine of Medjugorje. He said the little blonde girl he saw with a couple was ‘agitated and sobbing’. Police traced the girl, who was a local. In November, an Irishman visiting the same shrine contacted McCann detectives Metodo 3 to tell them he heard a little girl cry ‘I want my Daddy’ as she was driven away (10 November 2007).  This story was apparently backed up by a shop assistant. The Irishman had seen the car’s number plate, details of which were reported by the media before the police had chance to find the owner.    

166. Two women reported seeing a child who looked like Madeleine with a man at a petrol station near Cartagena, Spain (21 August 2007) COMMENT: This alleged sighting was thoroughly investigated by both the Spanish National Police and Civil Guard, using up hundreds of valuable police man-hours: Press Association, 23 August 2007, ‘Madeleine Spain sighting' probed’; also in the Guardian, 26 August 2007.

167. Madeleine was being carried on a peasant’s back in Morocco at Zinat near Tangier. The girl was actually Bushra Binhisa, the daughter of the woman who was carrying her (seen on 31 August, reported 20 September 2007)  COMMENT: This case received huge publicity in the British press, including the broadsheets, in September 2007. A European-looking girl of about Madeleine’s age was photographed as a Moroccan peasant woman carried her on her back. The girl’s face didn’t look like Madeleine at all, yet the British press ran banner headlines: ‘IS THIS MADELEINE?’ It turned out that this photo had first been seen by the McCanns, who passed it to the press. They must have known that it was not their daughter. Yet they let millions of British newspaper readers think that this might be Madeleine. Police and even journalists were sent out to Morocco and soon found the peasant family. The parents were shocked and distressed to have been accused of abducting Madeleine.         

168. Naoula Mahli claimed to have seen Madeleine in Fnideq, Morocco. Later, Lord Leveson was told at the Leveson enquiry into press standards that the Daily Express paid her £500 for her story (November 2007) COMMENT: This alleged sighting by Naoual Malhi occurred (she says) on 21 August 2007, but was not reported to the Spanish police until 6 days afterwards. Mrs Malhi claimed she was told by police that over 100 people had reported seeing Madeleine McCann in the same mountain area. She then reported her claims to Metodo 3 at the end of October. Naoual Malhi is a Moroccan doctor who lives in a British expatriate community near Malaga, Spain. She is divorced and at the time had a 4-year-old child. The blonde girl identified in the city of Fnideq as Madeleine McCann turned out to be a Moroccan child living with her parents, according to the director of the Moroccan Judicial Police. Naoula Mahli wove a superficially believable story about having discovered where Madeleine was being held. But her story didn’t stand up. Did she make it all up just to get £500 from the Daily Express?

  

169. Dunedin, New Zealand: Madeleine was seen in a supermarket in New Zealand with a man (5 December 2007) COMMENT: CCTV footage from New Zealand showed a girl like Madeleine being led into a supermarket by a portly man in shorts. The man’s behaviour aroused the suspicions of a female security guard in the Dunedin shop on South Island. She approached the girl who said her name was ‘Hailey’. But the security guard remained  convinced the girl was Madeleine and reported the matter to police. The CCTV footage of the man and girl was repeatedly shown on New Zealand TV, and in Britain. Interpol in Wellington was also called in to investigate. Of course, it was not Madeleine McCann but a young girl out shopping with her father. 

170. A man who looked like Beatle George Harrison may have abducted Madeleine (January 2008) COMMENT: This was a major front-page story on Sunday 30 January 2008 in the now-defunct News of the World. It was heavily prepared in advance by the McCann Team with the active help of Leicestershire Police. The entire story was woven by the McCann Team around a real individual who was often seen around Praia da Luz. One strange feature of the case concerned McCann friend Jane Tanner’s involvement in the story. She was the friend of the McCanns who claimed she had seen a man carrying a young blond child near the McCanns’ apartment at 9.15pm on the night she was reported missing. In all her descriptions of this man, she admitted that she never saw any part of his face. Brian Kennedy, head of the McCanns’ private investigation, had used a lady by the name of Melissa Little (said to be an F.B.I.-trained forensic artist) to draw a sketch of the man Jane Tanner said she had seen in May. In the sketch, released in October 2007, the man’s face was not seen. Later, in January 2008, Jane Tanner was shown the sketch of the man drawn to look like Beatle George Harrison. It was of his face, and he had a moustache. Despite never having seen the face of the man she said she had seen on 3 May, she now said she was ‘60 to 80% sure’ that ‘George Harrison man’ was the same man she’d seen in May! It emerged later that Jane Tanner had done an identification parade on 13 May 2007, when she said she was ‘adamant’ that Robert Murat was the man she had seen on 3 May. But the subsequent sketch she approved in October 2007 looked nothing like him. Hardly surprisingly, the Portuguese Police dismissed everything Jane Tanner said as wholly unreliable.        

171. Madeleine seen at a service station on the A9 motorway near Montpellier, France (21 February 2008) COMMENT: The claim that Madeleine had been seen in a service station on the A9 motorway in France was taken so seriously by the British press that even broadsheets devoted long articles to the alleged ‘sighting’. Even the Daily Telegraph’s respected Chief Reporter, Gordon Rayner, wrote an extensive piece on the subject, solemnly reported as follows: “Madeleine’s parents were facing further heartache today when it emerged that CCTV footage of a little girl playing in the south of France is ‘almost certainly not her’. Hopes of finding the missing four-year-old were raised when a Dutch student said she spotted the child at a service station close to the city of Montpellier last Friday. Melissa Firing, 18, said the child was with a ‘tall, swarthy’ man who bundled her away in a car. French detectives spent ‘hours’ examining the footage at the nation’s Criminal Research Institute in Rosny-sur-Bois, near  Paris. Police even tracked down the owner of the car in which the little girl was driven away, after the number plate appeared on the video footage. A ‘source close to the McCanns’ said: “The owner has provided a plausible explanation of what he was doing with a young child in a motorway service station”. French police at the time said they were also investigating allegations that young children, including babies, were being ‘sold’ at impromptu auctions in car parks along the Mediterranean coast. 

172. A Portuguese couple with Madeleine in tow knocked at the door of a retired civil servant in Dorset (25 February 2008)  COMMENT: Reported in the Daily Telegraph, 24 February 2008.  This is believed to be the first reported sighting of Madeleine in Britain. It occurred in Dorset, where civil servant Alan Cameron had retired. He told police that Madeleine was with a Portuguese couple who came to the door. Yet another false claim.

173. Madeleine seen on a plane to Brazil, one of six ‘sightings’ in that country (14 May 2008)  COMMENT: A traveller claimed to have seen Madeleine travelling on a plane to Brazil. Interpol’s chief Jorge Pontes said: “This sighting is still under investigation so we cannot reveal details. We have a witness insisting they saw the child on a flight to Sao Paulo”. Clarence Mitchell, the McCanns’ PR spokesman, said: “The couple’s privately hired detective agency, Metodo 3, are looking into the latest claim”. There had been five other ‘sightings’ in Brazil, one in Rio de Janeiro. Brazilian police chief Marilia Moreira Marques said that a man called Mark claimed to have seen Madeleine at a book fair in Cinelandia Square, Rio de Janeiro, on 11 May 2007. The sighting had been reported to a foreign embassy in the capital, and was referred to Interpol, who were said to hold a ‘40-page dossier’ on Madeleine.  On 7 June, a man said he spotted Madeleine in an Ipanema cafe sitting with a man. He said she looked ‘sad’ and was not speaking to her male companion. See:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/madeleinemccann/1954397/Madeleine-McCann-spotted-on-plane-to-Brazil.html

174. Madeleine spotted on a Venezuelan island (18 May 2008)  COMMENT: A British businessman and yacht skipper, Trevor Francis, said he saw Madeleine in the company of two or three women on the island of Margarita in Venezuela. He claimed this happened several weeks previously, but says he didn’t approach her because he was ‘too fearful of causing a spectacle’: “I wanted to grab her and shout out her name and see what reaction I would get," he told the News of the World. Mr Francis claimed he noticed an identical eye blemish to that of Madeleine.   

See also:  http://www.nydailynews.com/news/world/sailor-maddie-mccann-article-1.316136

175. Croatian national footballer’s two-year-old son mistaken for Madeleine (18 August 2008) COMMENT:  Two British tourists spotted a woman leading what they thought was a young girl with long blonde hair along a beach on the Croatian holiday island of Krk. They both immediately thought it was Madeleine McCann. They secretly took photographs of the child. The British woman seized a chance to grab the child’s arm, intending to take her to the police. Only then did she realise that the child was not Madeleine as it was a boy. The boy’s mother turned out to be well-known Croatian model Nives Drpic, while the father was a footballer for the Croatian national team and for Dinamo Zagreb. They were described as the ‘Posh & Becks’ of Croatia. See: http://www.gossiprocks.com/forum/news/79834-british-couple-tried-rescue-madeleine-mccann-lookalike-little-croatian-boy.html  and  http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1046405/British-couple-tried-rescue-Maddy-lookalike--Croatian-football-star-model-wife.html

176. Madeleine seen in Algeria with a suspicious-looking family (September 2008) COMMENT: A man said he had seen a Madeleine look-alike blonde girl, with a British accent, with an Algerian family who were ‘acting suspiciously’.

177. Maddie seen in the company of a big, fat gypsy woman (September 2008)  COMMENT:  A British woman, Mrs Jean Godwin, aged 56, from Widnes, Cheshire, was sure she had spotted Madeleine McCann in the company of two fat women at Carvoeiro, about 30 miles from Praia da Luz, and rang the McCanns’ ‘investigation hotline’. Mrs Godwin described a ‘gaunt, very thin, malnourished’ young blonde girl wearing a black, shiny wig being dragged by ‘gipsy women’. One of the women, she said, was an ‘obese’ size 30, in her mid-to-late 40s, with ‘dirty and unkempt’ red hair. She added: “The girl’s eyes were wide open and my attention was drawn to the large irises. I am 100% sure it was Madeleine”.  This sighting, said the McCann Team’s investigators, matched an earlier account of a fat, red-haired woman, now known to be Yvone Albino, a cleaner, who had been seen by another British tourist, Jeni Weinberger, from Salisbury, Wilshire, acting suspiciously outside the McCanns’ apartment on 3 May 2007, the day Madeleine McCann was reported missing.  The McCanns’ investigators traced her -  she has two grown up sons but no young children - and followed her to a small, run-down farmhouse on an orange grove, near Silves, not far from Praia da Luz. They then began a surveillance operation at the farmhouse, fearing that Madeleine was being held prisoner there. In the following months, Yvone Albino paid several visits to the property, a holiday home owned by a teacher and his partner, whom the investigators deemed to be ‘suspicious’. Their concerns were raised when they discovered a white Citroen Berlingo with a child’s doll on the back seat and a child’s drawing among rubbish bags - even though the couple did not have young children. Mrs Albino, who has two grown-up sons but no young children, used to visit teacher Jorge Martins and his partner Maria Silveira (traced through their car), at their run-down farmhouse in an orange grove. Portuguese police confronted Mrs Albino, who said she knew nothing about either sighting and denied any contact with young children. Officers found the house deserted. The woman with Mrs Albino in Carvoeiro was never identified. Mr Martins and Miss Silveira have never been accused of any crime by police. He told police the doll was given to him by his students several years earlier. Nothing came of all this effort, but it made it look as though the McCann Team were doing a real investigation.                         See: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/madeleinemccann/7364631/McCanns-detective-searching-for-girl-in-a-wig-seen-with-two-gipsies.html

178.  Madeleine spotted in Majorca by British tourist (28 September 2008): COMMENT:  Two British  holidaymakers were convinced that they saw Madeleine on a beach at Cala d'Or, Majorca. She was reportedly ‘in the company of two women’, but they also added: “We saw the girl was on her own under a parasol on the beach with a colouring book, which struck us as odd…later in the week we saw the girl again and the woman was trying to drag them down to the beach, although it was dark, which she again found odd”. Spanish police combed dozens of hotels and holiday apartments to try to locate the girl. One police spokesman said: “We are aware of the numerous previous sightings all over the world that have turned out to be false and it could well be that the couple have made an honest mistake”.  See here: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/madeleinemccann/3086959/Police-investigate-claimed-Madeleine-McCann-sighting-in-Majorca.html  …and in the Daily Mail

179. Madeleine seen with a Portuguese child trafficker in the United States (9 October 2008) COMMENT:     On October 9, 2008 it was reported that Madeleine was living with a Portuguese man in the U.S. He allegedly was a child trafficker, smuggling children from his homeland, Mexico and Greece.

180. Madeleine asked for a chocolate ice-cream from an ice-cream seller whilst with a French family in Brussels (October 2008)  COMMENT: A North African-looking woman with a young girl in tow was picked up on CCTV footage by a security guard at a branch of the Belgian bank KBC. Later, an ice cream vendor, Antonio Migliardi, came forward, describing the woman as being ‘very severe’ with the child, adding: “She held her hand firmly and kept pulling her closer. When I gave the ice cream to the child she stood frozen. The lady took it in her place. Normally a happy child always takes the ice. This was not a normal situation”.  The security guard said: “I will bet everything I own that the child I saw was Madeleine McCann”. Clarence Mitchell, the McCanns’ spokesman, commented: “We take this information seriously”.  See: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/madeleinemccann/2544450/Madeleine-McCann-seen-again-in-Brussels.html

181. Maddie seen in a Spanish restaurant in Maryland, U.S.A. (May 2009) COMMENT: An unnamed woman spoke to the Sun newspaper in June 2013, saying she thought she saw Madeleine in a Spanish restaurant in Montgomery County, Maryland, accompanied by a blonde woman and two men, one of whom was ‘scruffy-looking with a foreign accent’. She added: “I’ve never felt so strongly about something”. She said that Operation Grange was now following up the alleged ‘sighting’.

182. Madeleine was abducted by British paedophile Raymond Hewlett (2009 and 2010)  COMMENT: This was a long-running story in 2009 and 2010. Raymond Hewlett was a convicted British paedophile who had been travelling around Europe in 2007, when Madeleine was reported missing. Another traveller, Peter Verran, had met with Raymond Hewlett in June 2007 in Morocco. The two men discussed Madeleine McCann, and Hewlett admitted that he had been staying about 30 miles away from Praia da Luz at the time Madeleine went missing. He also said he knew of the apartment block where the McCann family had been staying in May 2007. Hewlett denied he had been in Praia da Luz that week and there was no evidence that he was. Yet the McCann Team kept the story of Hewlett being a suspect going for months. They made repeated attempts to interview him, having located him at a hospital in Aachen, Germany, where he was being treated in hospital (see also below).     

183. Madeleine was taken on a yacht to Australia by an Australian woman who looked like Victoria Beckham and wanted ‘a new daughter’ (6 August 2009) This was another major news story promoted by the McCanns. Their PR spokesman, Clarence Mitchell, held a news conference where he paraded a sketch of what the woman looked like. He said she looked like Victoria Beckham (‘Posh Spice’). The whole story was said to have come from a British man, said variously to have been a ‘businessman’ or ‘banker’. The McCanns didn’t give the man’s name, so his story couldn’t be checked. It was claimed that the man told the McCann Team that on Sunday 6 May 2007, he had been drinking all evening in some of the numerous bars around Barcelona docks. He said that at 2am that night, a young woman with an Australian accent came up to him and asked: ‘Have you got my new daughter?’ He said ‘No’, and the young woman went away. Despite Madeleine’s disappearance being front-page news around the world at the time, he had delayed reporting this incident for over two years, claiming he had ‘agonised’ all that time over whether or not to report it. It was claimed that Madeleine may have been taken by boat from Praia da Luz to Barcelona (a journey of hundreds of miles), and that the woman with an Australian accent had arranged to ‘buy’ her at Barcelona docks three days later and board a large yacht bound for Australia which was leaving the next day. Amazingly, the British press once again fell for this most unlikely story. It made the top story  on TV and mainstream British newspaper bulletins. It caused an extensive police search for the woman in Australia. A month after this story, the Mail on Sunday exposed the fact that the McCanns’ detectives who had researched this story had neglected to contact any of relevant Barcelona agencies, such as the police and the port authority, and had failed to do the most basic of checks with owners of pubs around the port.  On 9 August, a  Sydney Morning Herald article: ‘Madness in the search for Maddie’, reported that, following the McCanns’dramatic press conference, the search for Madeleine ‘swept across at least four Australian states’, with ‘a string of sightings’ by people who said they had seen a woman looking like ‘Posh Spice’ A 53-year-old Australian woman, Judith Aron, was ‘forced to deny’ that she had abducted Madeleine. She had a fair-haired five-year-old daughter. It was thought that a neighbour had reported her because she ‘spoke Spanish’. Also, an elderly Sydney woman went into Burwood police station claiming that a friend she had met in Spain, and travelled with in Portugal, was the woman in the identikit picture. She was later identified as Nelida Martinez and was soon ruled out. The McCanns said they had received over 600 e-mails after issuing the ‘Posh Spice lookalike’ appeal, mostly from Australia. See: http://www.smh.com.au/national/madness-in-search-for-maddie-20090808-edj3.html ...and http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/madeleinemccann/5981579/Madeleine-McCanns-parents-to-trace-Victoria-Beckham-lookalike.html

184. Madeleine seen with man at petrol station in Devon - arrested (4 September 2009)   COMMENT: A fire protection officer, Jon Hazlehurst  was questioned over Madeleine McCann after being spotted in a petrol station with his step-daughter, Lauren, aged eight (Madeleine would have been six at that time). The man was traced by police, visited by police, driven to Kingsbridge police station and taken into custody. The witness had noted down Mr Hazelhurst's car registration plate and contacted the police. Mr Hazlehurst said: “I was surprised more than anything. I thought it was…a prank, before I realised that they were quite serious. The police were very polite and I understood that they had to follow up the lead, even if it didn't come to anything”. See:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/madeleinemccann/6137830/Man-questioned-over-Madeleine-McCann-lookalike-step-daughter.html

185. Madeleine is alive but being kept in an underground lair within a few miles of Praia da Luz (September 2009)  COMMENT: In 2009, the world heard the extraordinary story of Natasha Kampusch, from Austria - the young girl kept captive for years by a paedophile, until she escaped from his clutches at the age of 18. A similar story of a paedophile keeping his victims locked up involved Fritzl from Germany. Later, Jaycee Lee Dugard, who had been abducted by a paedophile from a bus stop in the U.S. at the age of 11, was found alive and rescued at the age of 29. When these stories began to receive publicity, the McCann Team quickly capitalised on them. Their lead detective at the time, Dave Edgar, exploited these news stories in the Belfast Telegraph and the Independent, stating that his new theory was that Madeleine was likewise being held in an ‘underground lair’ within a few miles of Praia da Luz. This was purely for the press - in order to maintain public perception that Madeleine had really been abducted. Whilst professing that they believed that Madeleine could be hidden near Praia da Luz, the McCann Team made no effort whatsoever to initiate any official or unofficial search for such a lair.

186. Madeleine seen in a Swedish photograph (10 October 2009) COMMENT: This story was first brought to the British public by Antonella Lazzeri of the Sun, which has produced many of the most absurd stories about  alleged Madeleine ‘sightings’. A girl was photographed in Sweden, with claims that ‘after computer-matching’, she could be Madeleine. She was seen at a car show, and was said to have an ‘identical jawline’ and ‘eyes the same colour as Madeleine’. The photo appeared on a website, after which Swedish police were ‘inundated’ with calls from the public, some of them saying they had seen Madeleine at the car show, where she was heard to speak in English. ‘Face-mapping technology’ used by British police was said to have identified the girl as a possible match. Madeleine’s parents Kate asked for ‘an urgent investigation’. The McCanns’ official spokesman Clarence Mitchell said: "Kate and Gerry are liaising with the relevant authorities”. This excellent website carries this Swedish story:

http://www.gerrymccannsblogs.co.uk/press/30OCT9/SUN_10_10_09.htm 

187. Madeleine was seen on TV at a school concert in Canada (5 March 2010) COMMENT: The continued appearance of Madeleine McCann’s appealing photograph in newspapers around the world led to an extraordinary incident in Canada. Distressed viewers inundated a Canadian TV station with calls after a blonde girl looking identical to Madeleine was shown singing with a school choir on a news show. The Canadian police had to contact the school and carry out checks to make sure the girl was not Madeleine.  See: http://www.dailystar.co.uk/news/latest-news/124974/MADDIE-SEEN-ALIVE-ON-TV

188. Madeleine was seen in Dubai (20 January 2011)  COMMENT: Madeleine was reported to have been in a Dubai shopping centre. By this time, she would have been nearly eight years old. The sighting was by ‘an unnamed 35-year-old businessman’. The man with Madeleine was said to be ‘very skinny’ with a moustache and a ‘scary appearance’ – and some commented that he looked very similar to a previous artist’s sketch of a possible suspect [see sighting No. 170, above]. He was accompanied by two women, one of whom was black and wore a veil and the other who was ‘also very thin’, according to the Sun.  See also:   http://metro.co.uk/2011/01/20/madeleine-mccann-seen-in-dubai-630478

189. Madeleine was abducted by vicious paedophiles who took her to the United States, according to  a basketball-playing Angolan amateur sleuth whose front teeth were knocked out by the paedophiles (18 February 2011)  COMMENT: The Sun headed this story: ‘Madeleine McCann is in America - and I know who took her’. This story, once again strongly promoted by the McCann Team, was based on the outrageous and completely unbelievable claims of Marcelinho Italiano, a 6’ 4”, an Angolan-born ‘amateur detective’. He claimed that in the course of his sleuthing in Portugal, he had contacted a group of vicious paedophiles. This brutal group - who, he said, had knocked out two of his teeth in the course of his sleuthing - had supposedly spirited Madeleine away to the U.S., where they were holding her. Italiano claimed he had to flee Portugal and had gone to ground in  Spain in fear for his life. However, when the story broke, a search on the internet soon located him. His name came up as a regular member of a team playing in a Spanish basketball league. Once again, nothing came of this story, which appeared to have been manufactured by the Sun with the help of ex-pat Olive Press editor, Jon Clarke.

See:  https://www.thesun.co.uk/archives/news/379292/madeleine-mccann-is-in-america-and-i-know-who-took-her/

190. Madeleine was seen in India (29 June 2011):  COMMENT: The alleged sighting of Madeleine was made by a British woman on holiday in Jammu & Kashmir, in the northern Indian Himalayas. She raised concerns with other tourists, one of whom, an American, was so sure the girl was Madeleine that he tried to snatch her from the couple she was with. The parents, a French woman and her Belgian husband, were spoken to by the police who insisted they produced their passports. A spokesman for Leh police told the Chandigarh Tribune: “It all depends now on the evidence like DNA for which we need help from Madeleine's parents and the British police”. The McCanns’ PR spokesman, Clarence Mitchell, said: “We remain grateful for people's vigilance around the world. Madeleine is still out there and the search for her very much continues”. This was another Sun story, also reported in the Daily Mail:  http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2019698/Madeleine-McCann-Hopes-dashed-sighting-India.html#ixzz4mXTqmWYV

191. A drunk gypsy told British paedophile Raymond Hewlett that he organised Madeleine’s abduction; Hewlett then wrote a letter on his death-bed to his long-estranged son Wayne, who promptly burnt the letter and then told the Sun all about it (1 September 2011)  COMMENT: Many rate this as the most preposterous story of them all. Raymond Hewlett (see sighting No. 182 above) died in December 2010. He had been estranged from his son Wayne for more than 20 years, because his son had turned against him after learning of his sexual abuse of young children. The story Wayne told to the McCann Team and to the Sun was a strange one. He claimed that a ‘mystery man’ had travelled from Germany with a letter his father had written to him on his death-bed. In this letter, Wayne said, his father explained how he had got to know the leader of a criminal gypsy gang. One evening, they had both had a lot to drink, and the gypsy gang leader had confessed that he and his gang had abducted Madeleine and handed her to a wealthy North African family for money. In the letter, he identified the gypsy gang leader by name. Wayne said he had been upset by the letter and burnt it. However, having burnt it, he apparently then approached either the McCann Team, or the Sun directly, with his story. He could not now remember the name of the gang leader. Despite the obvious unsoundness of the story and the fact that Wayne could not remember even the name of the alleged gypsy gang leader, the Sun put this ridiculous story on their front page - and reported that the British police were taking his information seriously.  Nothing ever came of it.     

192. Madeleine was abducted to Brazil (31 August 2012) COMMENT: Pictures appeared in several newspapers of a young white girl who looked vaguely like Madeleine, in a crowd of people leaving a plane in Brazil. Who developed this story is not clear. But an alert Madeleine McCann researcher, known on the internet as ‘Reggie Dunlop,’ matched the photo of the crowd leaving the plane with a photograph of people seen leaving a plane in Ibiza, several years previously. The photo had been ‘reversed’ (left-to-right) in the newspaper pictures. Whoever developed this story for the press was engaged in a very deliberate deception of the press and the public. 

193. Madeleine was seen in a car leaving a campsite with a Swiss family (9 May 2012) COMMENT: See:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2141774/Madeleine-McCann-sighting-Swiss-father-says-mystery-man-seen-driving-blonde-girl.html

194. Rose Johnson saw Madeleine playing on Penoncillo beach, Spain (3 May 2012)  COMMENT: This was yet one more absurd story reported by the ever-dutiful Jon Clarke, Olive Press Editor. He reported in May 2012 that an ex-pat pensioner, Rose Johnson, believed she had seen ‘eight-year-old Maddie’ playing outside Merendero restaurant on Penoncillo beach, between Nerja and Torrox, the previous summer (2011). She had said: “We were quite taken aback…this Maddie look-a-like walked off the beach and joined a table of what we would describe as a party of Spanish people or similar. They were completely different to her. The whole family was dark skinned, whereas she had fair hair and pale skin and obviously was northern European. It was very, very strange. She was about eight and seemed really airy-fairy, in a world of her own”. Clarke also claimed that Portuguese police, just a fortnight previously, had asked their Spanish counterparts to investigate other sightings in Nerja, and that Rose Johnson had only spoken after reading an Olive Press article. A lady called Karen commented in the Olive Press article, claiming she had seen Madeleine on 6 May 2007 (three days after she was reported missing) “with a family in Cabopino Campsite, near Marbellam who had a dark blue people carrier. Clarke responded: “Hi Karen, we would love to talk to you about this…we have now had at least half a dozen very good ‘sightings’ of Maddie on the Costa del Sol…I really hope somebody can produce the killer fact! Give our newsdesk a call”.  See:

http://www.theolivepress.es/spain-news/2012/05/03/i-saw-maddie-at-costa-del-sol-beach-restaurant/penoncillo-beach-looking-towards-nerja-where-rose-johnson-saw-madeleine-mccann-playing-2/

195. Madeleine spotted in Queenstown, New Zealand on New Year’s Eve, 2012   COMMENT:  A girl was spotted in Queenstown on New Year’s Eve by a retailer. A police investigation began, which discovered that the girl had once previously been identified as Madeleine McCann. See:

http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/8141833/Report-revives-hunt-for-British-girl

 

196. New Zealand school pupil ‘frequently mistaken for Madeleine’ given DNA test (7 February 2013) COMMENT: A New Zealand schoolgirl repeatedly mistaken for missing Madeleine McCann had to give police a DNA sample so that Scotland Yard could confirm that she is not the youngster. Several New Zealanders had thought she was missing Madeleine McCann, who was said to have a mark on her right eye similar to the distinctive one on the British girl's iris.                                See:  http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2274826/Madeleine-McCann-New-Zealand-girl-DNA-sample-prove-missing-Maddie.html#ixzz4mq6RAjwd

197. Madeleine may have been snatched by six people seen in a white van (2014) COMMENT: This was a story possibly leaked by Scotland Yard’s investigation into the disappearance of Madeleine McCann - Operation Grange. It was claimed that Scotland Yard detectives were trying to trace six people, thought to be British, who had used a white van in Praia da Luz at the time the McCanns were in Praia da Luz. There was nothing about it in the Portuguese Police files, and no more has been heard about this since. But, again, it made for a good headline.  

198. Skeltal remains of a fair-haired young girl, found in a suitcase in Australia, ‘could be Madeleine’ (26 July, 2015)  COMMENT: A suitcase containing the skeletal remains of a fair-haired young girl was discovered near a motorway in Wynarka, near Adelaide. Pathologists said she would have died in 2007. There was speculation that the body was Madeleine’s after a police spokesman said that the remains did not match descriptions of any missing children in Australia. But after forensic examination, the DNA did not match Madeleine’s,

199. Former Scotland Yard detective Colin Sutton says that ‘Madeleine was stolen to order for a wealthy North African family who wanted a white child’ (April 2017)  COMMENT: This story appeared just two weeks before the 10th anniversary of Madeleine being reported missing, as the British media geared up for another frenzy of anniversary articles. According to the Press Association, former Met Police Detective Chief Inspector Colin Sutton, who had been to Praia da Luz several times for various newspapers, the most likely hypothesis for what happened to Madeleine McCann was that she had been “stolen to order by slave traders or people traffickers and smuggled into Africa for a rich family who wanted a white child”. A Daily Mirror article claimed that “Gangs are thought to sell children to rich Middle Eastern families while operating out of Mauritania, West Africa”.

200. False claims made by ‘psychics’ and mediums   It is estimated that thousands of assorted mediums, psychics, dream interpreters and others, who claimed knowledge of what happened to Madeleine, contacted the police or the McCanns with their ideas, impressions and theories. Mostly these were vague, e.g. “I see a white cottage on a hillside” or “I see a boat on the sea”. Tens of thousands of valuable police hours were wasted investigating this nonsense. These  mediums and mystics just relied  on their vague impressions and ideas, because no two of them were ever the same.  .        

If you’ve found this leaflet of interest, please pass it on to those you know  >>>   thank you

Published by ‘The Madeleine McCann Research Group’, 14 July 2017.   Further reading/watching:

Recommended discussion forum   >>>   http://jillhavern.forumotion.net/      

Recommended internet library       >>>   www.gerrymccannsblogs.co.uk

Watch the Portuguese detective’s documentary:    www.youtube.com/watch?v=UxGhlYTNisw

Watch Richard Hall’s five Madeleine McCann films  >>  

1. True Story of Madeleine McCann ---- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WIjPcvmVzUo

2. The Phantoms ------------------------------- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dL0-ePd3FCU

3. When Madeleine Died? ------------------- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=70oo2-Sj7to949

4. McCanns’ Embedded Confessions ----- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=slziMpXYjJo&t=59s

5. Madeleine: Why The Cover-Up? ------- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pQgmtrOeDLM

Jill Haverns' letter to Theresa May and Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe. The conduct of the Operation Grange investigation into the reported disappearance of Madeleine McCann

From: Ms Jill Havern and members of ‘The Complete Mystery of Madeleine McCann’

*************

**************

*************

**************

 

Rt. Hon. Mrs Theresa May

Prime Minister

10 Downing Street

LONDON

W1A 1AA

 

Commissioner Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe

Metropolitan Police

8-10 Broadway,

LONDON

SW1H 0BG

 

Monday, 26 September 2016

 

Dear Prime Minister and Commissioner Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe

 

The conduct of the Operation Grange investigation into the reported disappearance of Madeleine McCann

 

First of all, Prime Minister, we congratulate you on your appointment as Prime Minister and wish you every success in your new position. The serious matters raised in this letter will of course be very familiar to you, as you had meetings with the McCanns and their advisers when you were Home Secretary, and asked Sir Paul Stephenson to set up Operation Grange.

 

You may also be aware of three petitions that were placed  on the Prime Minister’s website by members of my forum, in 2010, 2014 and one in 2015, which addressed issues about the investigations into Madeleine McCann’s reported disappearance. The first two called for a public enquiry into the investigations. The most recent called on the Home Office to publish a full report on the work of Operation Grange.         

 

According to statements made in the press on 3 April this year, you – as the then Home Secretary – sanctioned further expenditure on Operation Grange of £95,000, which was said to be for a further six months to ‘conclude’ this review and investigation. That meant that Operation Grange was scheduled to be completed on 3 October, in a week’s time. Since then we have learnt that the funding is to be extended by a further six months, with the team being granted a further £100,000.

 

The forum: ‘Complete Mystery of Madeleine McCann’ 

 

I write in my capacity as the owner of the internet forum, ‘The Complete Mystery of Madeleine McCann’, set up in November 2009. The letter is sent on behalf of my admin team, our members and our regular guests and visitors, who number tens of thousands every day. We currently have over 6,350 members, many of whom read us every day for updates, and hundreds of whom contribute by way of research, comment, and analysis every month.

 

Long-term forum members include many with professional backgrounds, including the police, the law and the medical professions, and others with technical skills in such fields as forensics, photography and statement analysis.

 

The forum is far and away the best-read Madeleine McCann discussion forum on the internet, and has been referred to regularly in the press and in books such as ‘Looking for Madeleine’, by Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan.

 

It is with this background that we urge you to consider most carefully the following issues relating to Operation Grange.       

 

The remit of Operation Grange

 

The very first consideration must be the remit allocated to Operation Grange from the outset. The relevant parts of it read as follows:

 

“The activity, in the first instance, will be that of an ‘investigative review’. This will entail a review of the whole of the investigation(s) which have been conducted in to the circumstances of Madeleine McCann’s disappearance. The focus of the review will be of the material held by three main stakeholders (and in the following order of primacy);

The Portuguese Law Enforcement agencies.

UK Law Enforcement agencies,

Other private investigative agencies/staff and organisations.

“The investigative review is intended to collate, record and analyse what has gone before. It is to examine the case and seek to determine, (as if the abduction occurred in the UK) what additional, new investigative approaches we would take and which can assist the Portuguese authorities in progressing the matter…

“The ‘investigative review’ will be conducted with transparency, openness and thoroughness…” .

 

It was clear from the outset that the initial investigative review had a strictly limited remit. That is highly unusual for any review which purports to be a genuine, comprehensive  review. Most ‘cold case’ reviews start with a ‘clean sheet’, so to speak. 

 

Crucially, however, the review insisted that it would only investigate ‘the abduction’. That meant that, from the very first, Operation Grange had ruled out any consideration of whether or not the McCanns could have been directly involved in the disappearance of Madeleine. 

 

The purpose of this letter is not to make any accusation against the McCanns. It is simply to point out that, despite a number of indications that they may have been involved, the Operation Grange team were told from the start not to investigate them.

 

During his investigative review, the Investigating Officer, Detective Chief Inspector Andy Redwood stated that “Primarily, what we sought to do from the beginning, is trying to draw everything back to, to zero, if you like ..”. Plainly this was not the case, as any potential involvement of the McCanns was ruled out from the beginning.

 

In addition, on the day that your predecessor David Cameron signalled that he had ordered the Home Office to set up a review, his spokesman declared that the purpose of the review was to ‘help the family’. It was plain, then, that the officers leading the Operation Grange team were simply not allowed to consider any involvement of the McCanns in Madeleine’s disappearance. 

 

The interim report of the Portuguese Police, 10 September 2007

 

I will not in this letter set out the many indications that the McCanns may have been directly involved in the disappearance of their daughter. That is something that any genuine re-investigation, with a remit not limited to declaring in advance that Madeleine had been abducted, should examine. I will however refer to the interim report of the Portuguese Police, dated 10 September 2007, a document made public in July 2008. It was compiled by Chief Inspector Tavares de Almeida. In a lengthy document, the contents of which have never been convincingly refuted, he set out the following indications that the McCanns may have been involved. These are all direct quotations from a translation of his report:

 

1 No abduction  “As time went by, the abduction scenario was not confirmed. The abduction hypothesis did not stand up”. 

 
2 The McCanns worked on their version of events  “The information that was initially collected from family and friends was uncertain. In addition, the McCanns and their friends worked on their account of events in order to strengthen and defend their version of what had happened Madeleine” 

3 ‘Distorted’ information  “The information from the immediate family and their group of friends which is fundamental in investigating this type of crime was always distorted…The group’s initial informal statements given during the initial stages of the investigation immediately introduced the abduction hypothesis. But even simple things were the subject of misinformation:

was the window open or closed?

was the shutter up or down?

was the balcony door open or closed?

was the front door merely shut or locked with a key? 

4 Changes of story  “The media attention that has been given to the case and the search for information by the said media has led to an evolution in Madeleine’s parents’ statements. All the information that has been made public has contributed to the McCanns rebuilding and adapting their story to fit the eventual police questions”. 

5 Excuses for corpse scent and blood  “When the media first informed the public that blood had been detected ‘in the car and in the apartment’, Dr Kate McCann and members of her family made statements to the public with the simple excuse that it had been someone who had access to the apartment that had deliberately placed this evidence there. Now they even say that it was the criminal investigation team that placed this ‘false’ evidence (i.e. blood and cadaver odour in the apartment and in the car). In an attempt to justify the finding of [Madeleine’s] blood in the apartment, Dr Kate McCann went even further, stating on that occasion that Madeleine sometimes suffered nosebleeds”.

6 Altering the crime scene  “There is strong evidence that the crime scene was altered, and some furniture was moved around: an intentional alteration of things in that apartment took place, in order to create a false scenario that doesn’t match reality, in an attempt to develop opportunities to create a bogus abduction scenario. Those changes are indications that the abduction was a stage-managed simulation. 

7 Findings of a top sniffer dog handler   In addition, Tavares de Almeida listed the findings of top British dog handler, Martin Grime, who now works for the F.B.I. in the U.S. In early August 2007, he took with him to Portugal two springer spaniels, Eddie, a ‘cadaver dog’ who was trained to alert to the past presence of a corpse, and Keela, a ‘blood dog’ trained to detect blood. According to Mr Grime, the two dogs between them alerted on 17 occasions either to the scent of the past presence of a corpse or to blood in locations connected to the McCanns: their apartment, their clothes and in their hired car. They alerted to no other items or locations in Praia da Luz.

8 The unreliable evidence of Jane Tanner   “Continuing with our analysis of information offered to us, one of the group’s members, Jane Tanner…became an important witness…She said she saw someone crossing the street at dinner time from the location of the McCanns’ apartment towards Robert Murat’s house…This information directed and occupied our work for a long time. This may be an example of how information that is not correct may not only delay the investigation but could even have led to losing the little girl.  Jane Tanner insisted on the truthfulness of her account. This led to certain scenarios being developed. But these scenarios were not sustained in reality..”

9 “The precise moment when Jane Tanner chose to make her statement about what she had ‘seen’ and the explanation for choosing that moment, is unreal. That is to say: it is not easy to accept that any witness (from the group), on seeing someone with a child in their arms walking away from the McCanns’ apartment, didn’t act and speak immediately. Then there is her description of the abductor being altered, or ‘perfected’. These reasons mean there is little credibility in what she says”

10 “There was a discrepancy [about the moment Jane Tanner allegedly saw an abductor] between the statements of Dr Gerald McCann and Jane Tanner. They claimed to have passed each other at only two or three metres’ distance [7 to 10 feet], yet failed to see each other. How could they position themselves as both being together in quite a confined space, yet both fail to see each other walking by; or, more correctly, one sees the other but the other doesn’t see her? Even the exact location where they supposedly crossed each other’s paths is not very well defined by both”. 

The following are direct quotations from Tavares de Almeida’s report, on the subject of the alerts by Martin Grime’s cadaver dogs: 

“Apartment 5A, Ocean Club resort, the McCanns’ apartment from where the child disappeared:  The cadaver dog alerted to the scent of a corpse in the master bedroom, in a corner, by the wardrobe; in living room, behind the sofa, and by the side window, while the bloodhound alerted to blood in the living room behind the sofa, and by the side window (in exactly the same spot that had been signalled by the cadaver dog)”. 

“Front garden of Apartment 5A:  The cadaver dog alerted to the scent of a corpse on one of the flower beds (the dog handler however commented on the ‘lightness’ of the odour in this location)”. 

“The McCann family’s clothes and belongings: The cadaver dog alerted to the scent of a corpse on two pieces of clothing belonging to Dr Kate McCann, one piece of clothing belonging to Madeleine (a red T-shirt) and on Madeleine’s soft toy [Cuddle Cat]. The cadaver odour was detected when the toy was still inside the McCanns’ residence in July 2007; the scent was later confirmed outside the house as well”.

“The vehicle that was used by the McCann family: The cadaver dog alerted to the scent of a corpse on the car key and on the inside of the car boot, while the bloodhound also marked the car key and the inside of the car boot”.

“In a total of 10 cars examined [in an underground car park) the cadaver dog and the blood dog marked only the car of the McCann family, first rented on 27 May”.

Tavares de Almeida concluded his report as follows:

“From everything that was established, the facts point in the direction of the death of Madeleine McCann occurring on the night of 3 May 2007, inside apartment 5A, at the Ocean Club resort in Praia da Luz, which was occupied by the McCann couple and by their three children. There is a coincidence between the markings of cadaver odour and blood [by the two dogs], according to the (partial) Laboratory Report that has been annexed to the files.

“The said marking occurred behind the living room sofa (cadaver odour/blood/DNA), which unarguably proves that said piece of furniture was pushed back by someone, after the death of Madeleine McCann was confirmed. Because of the few traces that were recovered on location and subject to examination, it has to be admitted as a strong hypothesis that it [the room] was subject to a clean-up operation at some time  following the occurrence of death”.

 “From everything that we have discovered, our files result in the following conclusions:

A the minor Madeleine McCann died in Apartment 5A at the Ocean Club resort in Praia da Luz, on the night of 3 May 2007

B a simulation - a staged hoax - of an abduction took place

C in order to render the child’s death impossible before 10.00pm, a situation of checking of the McCann couple’s children while they slept was concocted

D Dr Gerald McCann and Dr Kate McCann are involved in the concealment of the corpse of their daughter, Madeleine McCann

E at this moment, there seems to be no strong indications that the child’s death was other than the result of a tragic accident…

F from what has been established up to now, everything indicates that the McCann couple, in self-defence, did not want to deliver up Madeleine’s corpse immediately and voluntarily, and there is a strong possibility therefore that it was moved from the initial place where she died. This situation may raise questions concerning the circumstances in which the death of the child took place.

I should at this point add the explanations that the McCanns have given for the alerts of the two dogs.

 

Dr Gerry McCann is on record as stating, to a Portuguese interviewer: “I can tell you that we have also looked at evidence about cadaver dogs and they are incredibly unreliable”.  This statement contradicts the evidence from many disciplines, not only searching for corpse scent and blood, but also explosives, drugs (even being able to distinguish between different types of explosive material and different drugs) and even medical conditions. Sniffer dogs are used increasingly and to strikingly good effect in many fields in countries all over the world.

 

By contrast, the settled view of Dr Kate McCann, as set out on pages 249-50 of her book ‘madeleine’, is that the dogs made ‘false’ alerts because of “the conscious or unconscious signals of the handler”. This amounts to an attack on the professional integrity and judgment of Mr Grime and implies that the dogs were ‘mistaken’ in all of their 17 alerts to corpse scent and blood.

 

In addition, In the days immediately following leaks about the dogs’ findings, the McCanns and members of their family came up with a series of bizarre and increasingly desperate explanations for them. These included that any blood was from Madeleine having nosebleeds, or having scratched herself when climbing the steps to the aircraft, or from mosquitoes flying into the walls, or that any cadaver odour was due to carrying dirty nappies or rotting meat in their hired car, or to Kate McCann’s clothes and the soft toy, Cuddle cat, having been contaminated by her having visited six people who had died in the fortnight before they left for their holiday.

 

There is no evidence that Operation Grange has addressed these issues, though it has been supplied to them with full references.           

 

New research: A photograph, evidence of collusion, and other matters

During the nine years since Madeleine was reported missing, members of my forum, and many others elsewhere, have added to the concerns about the possible involvement of the McCanns in Madeleine’s disappearance. It would be impossible in a short letter to even list all these concerns. They are all available for the police to see on my forum and on many other places on the internet.  I will however mention just two significant matters.

The photographic evidence of Madeleine’s presence in Praia da Luz on the McCanns’ holiday is confined to just five photographs. Three of those five are genuine photographs taken on the first day of their holiday, Saturday 28 April. A fourth, allegedly showing Madeleine holding tennis balls on a tennis court in Praia da Luz, has been claimed to have been taken by two different people and on two different days. There are other aspects of that photograph that also cast doubt as to its true provenance.

 

A fifth photograph, of Gerry McCann sitting by a pool with his daughters Madeleine and Amelie, is claimed by the McCanns to have been taken at 2.29pm on the day Madeleine was reported missing. They have called it ‘The Last Photo’. However, evidence discussed on my forum suggests that this key photograph may have been taken earlier in the week, probably on the Sunday. There is no indication that Operation Grange has addressed this evidence.

Second, there is the strange and striking correlation of two reports, made respectively by Jane Tanner and Martin Smith, alleging they had seen a man carrying a young child on the night of 3 May 2007, with a third report by a Spanish ex-pat living in Germany Nuno Lourenco, in which he alleged that a Portuguese holidaymaker, Wojchiech Krokowski, had tried to kidnap his own daughter on Sunday 29 April. Nuno Lourenco’s statement can be shown to be demonstrably false, yet his description of Krokowski is matched in almost every detail by the descriptions of Jane Tanner and Martin Smith. In particular, each of the three uses this meaningless phrase to describe the man: “He didn’t look like a tourist”. These facts, prima facie, suggest collusion to promote Krokowski as the likely abductor. This alleged collusion is clearly a matter which should have been addressed by Operation Grange, but there is no evidence that it has been.

 

These issues have been further complicated by the former Investigation Officer of Operation Grange, Detective Chief Inspector Andy Redwood, having claimed to a 7 million audience on BBC Crimewatch on 14 October 2013 that the person seen by Jane Tanner had ‘come forward’, six years later. We were told that he had been carrying his young child home from the night creche, with no mention made of where the child’s mother was. He was said to have been carrying his child in exactly the same way as described by Jane Tanner, with no buggy, no blanket and only dressed in pyjamas. It was dark and cold (13 deg C) at the time. The identity of this person who had suddenly emerged after six years was not disclosed. In addition, if he had been taking the route from the creche described by DCI Redwood, he could not have been taking the shortest route to his apartment. For these reasons and others, many people have real cause to doubt whether DCI Redwood was being truthful.        

Members of my forum and others have on many occasions submitted detailed evidence to Operation Grange on these and other issues, but there is no evidence that these lines of enquiry have been followed up.

 

The appointment of Detective Chief Superintendent Hamish Campbell as the Senior Investigating Officer for Operation Grange

There is one other issue about the remit that has caused widespread concern, and that is why former Detective Chief Superintendent Hamish Campbell was chosen to head Operation Grange and allowed to set the remit. The action for which Hamish Campbell is best known is having been the Investigating Officer into the as-yet-unsolved murder of Jill Dando. His work on the case resulted in an innocent man, Barry George/Bulsara, being wrongly jailed for eight years.

 

There were credible suggestions, though never proved, that the conviction of Barry George was secured by a member of the Metropolitan Police placing an amount of firearms residue, matching the known weapon used to kill Jill Dando, in his coat pocket. Hamish Campbell’s role in that utterly botched police investigation surely made him an unsuitable choice to head up one of the most controversial and expensive reviews and investigations undertaken by the Metropolitan Police.

 

The employment by the McCanns of wholly inappropriate private detection agencies and individuals

I turn now to this aspect of Operation Grange’s remit:

“The focus of the review will be of the material held by three main stakeholders (and in the following order of primacy);

The Portuguese Law Enforcement agencies.

UK Law Enforcement agencies,

Other private investigative agencies/staff and organisations”.

I and my fellow members seriously question the designation of ‘other private investigation agencies/staff’ as ‘stakeholders’. Clearly, what is mainly being referred to here is the McCanns’ own private investigations. DCI Redwood made it clear on a number of occasions that he regarded the McCanns’ own investigations as being of real merit and interest. Pictures were seen in the British press of his men collecting boxes of documentary material from the offices, in Barcelona, of Metodo 3, one of the detective agencies used by the McCanns.  Two e-fits of a man carrying a child said to have been seen by Mr Martin Smith and his family were drawn up by Henri Exton, one of the investigators employed by the McCanns, in the spring of 2008. These e-fits lay gathering dust until suddenly, on 14 October 2013, DCI Redwood produced them, saying that they were now “the centre of Operation Grange’s focus”. These two examples demonstrate without question that Operation Grange have relied to a considerable extent on the material supplied by the various ‘other private investigation agencies/staff’.

However, we would seriously question whether they were right to do so, based on all that is now known about the agencies and people involved in the McCanns’ private investigations, for which, as we know, they received very generous donations, amounting to millions of pounds, from a generous British public.  

In an Appendix, I have provided a list of the main agencies and individuals that the McCanns have employed as part of their private investigations, and what is known about each. In summary, the two main private investigation agencies employed by the McCanns during the first year, namely Metodo 3 and Oakley International, were run by crooks.

 

A third private investigation team employed by the McCanns was hailed in the press as ‘Alpha Investigations Group’ and portrayed as a long-established private detective agency. It was also promoted as consisting of a team of ‘top detectives’. But as set out in my Appendix, the ‘team’ turned out to be two retired, low-ranking detectives. It was a deliberate deception, and a bogus company. ‘ALPHAIG Ltd’, was even formed to try to hide the deception.

 

None of the individuals or agencies used seem to have had any experience whatsoever of finding missing children or adults. All have very dubious backgrounds and histories. I suggest that the Metropolitan Police must have known this from the beginning, since at least some of the facts I set out in the Appendix have been published in Britain’s mainstream media, and in places on the internet (including my own). How, therefore, in the light of the extraordinary conduct of these agencies and individuals,  could the Metropolitan Police possibly claim that such material could assist in their investigations?

 

Given the appalling track record of these agencies and individuals, may I respectfully suggest that much more light will be shed on what really happened to Madeleine McCann if you begin with a fresh police force and a fresh remit. Any new police force should then interview under caution any U.K. individuals who have worked for the McCanns (see the Appendix for a list of names).

 

It would also be useful for any new police force to interview former Metodo 3 employee, Julian Peribanez, who worked on the Madeleine McCann case. Two years ago, he published a book which contained a damning indictment of the corruption and criminality within Metodo 3. His claims amount to an accusation that Metodo 3 was, in effect, never employed to search for Madeleine at all. This matches an account written by Christie Twomey for The Times in early 2008, in which she also made strong criticisms of Metodo 3 and two if its staff.

 

The major involvement of the government and the security services in supporting the McCanns

 

As Prime Minister and the nation’s Home Secretary from May 2010 to July 2016, you will know better than almost anyone else about the extensive involvement of the government and the security services ever since Madeleine McCann was reported missing. This has seemed to a great many people to have been wholly disproportionate. Moreover, it has not led to Madeleine being found nor to the arrest of anyone responsible for her disappearance. I can only summarise here some of this high-level government support:

 

1 Appointing, within days of Madeleine’s reported disappearance, the Head of the government’s Media Monitoring Unit, Clarence Mitchell, to be the McCanns’ public relations spokesman, a post he held for nine years

2 The reported, successful efforts of former Prime Minister, Gordon Brown to persuade the Portuguese police to release the description of a possible abductor, based on the claims of the McCanns’ friend Jane Tanner

3 The direct involvement of MI5, as disclosed by Portuguese investigation co-ordinator Goncalo Amaral, in his book ‘The Truth of the Lie’

4 The role of the British Ambassador in Portugal, interfering with the Portuguese police who were trying to seize items for forensic testing from the McCanns in the early days

5 Delays by the then Home Secretary in 2007 and 2008 in processing requests by the Portuguese authorities for rogatory interviews     

6 The reported involvement of Special Branch officers, who met with the McCanns at East Midlands Airport and drove them to their home the day they returned from Portugal

7 Setting up a top secret national co-ordinating committee on the Madeleine McCann case on 8 May 2007, under the chairmanship of the Head of Leicestershire Constabulary, Matt Baggott

8 The active involvement of the government-backed Control Risks Group in the case from the very first days after Madeleine was reported missing

9 Leicestershire Police officers deliberately delaying sending relevant evidence to the Portuguese Police, advising Jane Tanner ahead of an identity parade in which she purported to identify Robert Murat as the person she had seen carrying a child the night Madeleine was reported missing (leading to his arrest)

10 British criminal profilers identifying Robert Murat as fitting the likely profile of the abductor to the extent of 90% of likely characteristics 

11 The former Prime Minister acceding to a request made by his friend Rebekah Brooks, CEO of Rupert Murdoch’s News International empire, to set up Operation Grange, reportedly after threatening him with ‘a week of bad headlines about Theresa May’.

 

These are only examples of the government’s heavy involvement in this case.         

 

The McCanns’ public appeal for funds

 

There are several issues regarding the McCanns’ fund-raising efforts which do not appear to have been addressed by Operation Grange at all. Some of these are set out in lengthy papers written by qualified accountant, Enid O’Dowd, and can be read on the internet.

 

One issue is that the McCanns’ ‘Find Madeleine Fund’ is a private trust and company and not a charity. Moreover, it is quite clearly controlled by the McCanns and close members of their family and friends, although to the public it appears to be a charity.  Several contradictory statements have been made by the McCanns and those backing them about the use to which the funds have been put. Statements were made that funds would ‘only be used for the search’. However, contrary statements have been made suggesting that significant monies from the fund have been used to pay the McCanns’ legal fees and costs.

 

A further concern was a reference in a recent book to a statement made by Lord Bell of  public relations firm Bell Pottinger - the company brought in to the case by Mark Warner, the holiday firm through whom the McCanns booked their holiday in Praia da Luz. He told a friend: “The McCanns paid me £500,000 in fees to keep them on the front page of every single newspaper for a year, which we did”. This raises the question of whether part or all of this huge sum of money came from the donations from members of the British public, who expected to see the money spent on a search for Madeleine, not a public relations exercise. 

 

Apart from that, why has the public’s money apparently been squandered on the ill-chosen agencies and individuals employed by the McCanns, a responsibility also shared of course with each one of the Directors of the Fund? How could it be, for example, that the McCanns paid Kevin Halligen, said in newspaper articles to be a serial fraudster, £500,000 plus expenses for four months’ work, during which he was for most of the time living a 5-star life of luxury in hotels in Britain and the U.S, with his girlfriend, Shirin Trachiotis? Does the public not need Operation Grange, or others, to provide answers to these questions?   

 

Several analyses of the accounts of the ‘Find Madeleine Fund’ have been carried out by qualified Irish accountant Enid O’Dowd. Her analyses are available at several places on the internet. These analyses have uncovered many anomalies. On page 128 of her book, ‘madeleine’, Kate McCann wrote of the Find Madeleine Fund: “It was set up with great care and due diligence by experts in the field. From the outset everyone agreed that, despite the costs involved, it must be run to the highest standards of transparency”. However, the accounts, every year, convey only the bare minimum to comply with the Companies Acts. The public cannot gain from them anything like a clear picture of where all their money has gone.

 

More recently, on 2 September 2015, the McCanns’ spokesman, Clarence Mitchell, said:: “They [the McCanns] realise that [Operation Grange]  cannot go on forever. A newspaper report informed the public that Mitchell had explained “how former GP Kate and heart doctor Gerry, both 37, of Rothley, Leics., had moved money from the publicly-backed Find-Madeleine-Fund into a special account in anticipation of having to finance the hunt for their daughter themselves".  The public, when they gave money to the Find Madeleine Fund, would not expect the Directors to then create a separate fund, which was reported as being controlled just by the McCanns.  

 

An analysis of the case by PeterMac, a retired Police Superintendent, and other evidence submitted by members of my forum

 

PeterMac, a retired Police Superintendent, has studied the Madeleine McCann case for nine years, and conducted original research on key evidential issues in the case. I am aware that he has submitted a great deal of evidence to the respective Senior Investigating Officers, always obtaining a receipt for the information he has sent them.   His analysis, which by implication is highly critical of Operation Grange, has been presented in a free e-book which can now be read at this link:

http://whatreallyhappenedtomadeleinemccann.blogspot.co.uk/   

 

It has also been reproduced on my websites, here:

http://jillhavern.forumotion.net/t13115-petermac-free-e-book-what-really-happened-to-madeleine-mccann  

…and here:  http://gerrymccan-abuseofpower-humanrights.blogspot.co.uk/2016/08/retired-police-superintendent-peter.html

 

Other members of my forum have also submitted evidence and have been assured verbally and in writing that all the evidence they have submitted is being kept on computer and has been taken into consideration. It will therefore be available for any fresh police force, not bound by a restricted remit, to investigate.

 

What should happen now

 

I have set out the case that Operation Grange has not succeeded in its search for the truth because of its inappropriately limited remit. I have also referred to justified criticisms about the operation of the Find Madeleine Fund. 

 

Despite impressive statistics released from time to time of the numbers of documents studied, lines of enquiry pursued, rogatory requests submitted, numbers of suspects or persons of interest questioned, etc., it seems plain that after well over six years, Operation Grange is nowhere nearer to solving this case.

 

Despite promises of ‘openness’ and ‘transparency’, there is no evidence made available to the public which demonstrates that any of the above issues I have listed has been fully investigated (if at all) and what (if any) the findings were.     

 

You will be aware that thousands of people, among them professionals such as police officers, criminal profilers, criminologists, doctors, psychiatrists and statement analysts, have questioned the McCanns’ account of events.

 

You may recall that at the recent Police Federation Conference, you addressed the issue of widespread corruption in British police forces and the need to tackle it. It cannot simply be assumed that Operation Grange is free from corrupt influences.At the same time, we have seen in the press over recent years many accounts of senior-level police corruption in the Metropolitan Police force.     

 

On behalf of the members of my forum, therefore, I call on you to:

 

1.      Appoint independent assessors of proven integrity and independence to evaluate the work of Operation Grange, and make its findings public. In this respect, may I remind you of this part of the review’s remit, as determined by DCS Hamish Campbell: “The ‘investigative review’ will be conducted with transparency, openness and thoroughness…” Any such report must include a full investigation into the huge involvement in this case of MI5, Special Branch and other government  or government-backed security agencies; 

 

2.      Appoint, via the new Home Secretary, a different police force, which has the highest possible reputation for integrity and independence, to investigate the reported disappearance of Madeleine McCann;

 

3.      Ensure that any new police investigation has an unlimited remit and can therefore go to wherever the evidence leads them;

 

4.      Order the relevant government department to investigate all aspects of the operation of the Find Madeleine Fund, including

investigating the actions of all of its Directors,

the funding of the private investigations,

whether or not funds have been used to pay the McCanns’ legal fees and expenses,

why it was necessary for a separate account to be set up last year, to be controlled by the McCanns and not the Directors, and

accounting for all monies paid into and from the Find Madeleine Fund since it was set up in May 2007..   

 

I shall send the same letter to Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe but I urge you to seek an urgent meeting with him to discuss the contents of my letter. Please give this matter your most careful consideration and I shall look forward to your response in the near future.

 

Yours sincerely

 

 

_______________________

 

Jill Havern

 

For and on behalf of the members of ‘The Complete Mystery of Madeleine McCann’

   

APPENDIX: The backgrounds and histories of agencies and individuals who were employed by the McCanns and the Directors of the ‘Find Madeleine Fund’ in their ‘Search for Madeleine’

 

Below are listed the main agencies and individuals employed by the McCann Team, in the approximate order in which they were appointed. The details given are by no means a complete record of these matters, which clearly illustrate the unsuitability of all of them to search for a missing child:

 



1 Brian Kennedy



2 Gary Hagland



3 Metodo 3



4 Francisco Marco



5 Antonio Gimenez Raso



6 Julian Peribanez



7 Marcos Aragao Correia



8 Oakley International



9 Kevin Halligen



10 Henri Exton



11 Tim Craig-Harvey



12 ALPHAIG



13 Former Detective Inspector Dave Edgar



14 Former Detective Sergeant Arthur Cowley



15 Melissa Little        

         

Brian Kennedy    Brian Kennedy has been the acknowledged head of the McCanns’ private investigations since September 2007, possibly even before then. He must take personal responsibility therefore for the appointment of all the other 14 agencies and individuals listed above.

 

I refer now to an article by Mark Hollingsworth in the Evening Standard in August 2009, which discusses the McCanns’ private investigation. Here is part of it, quote:    

 

“Kennedy hired Metodo 3, an agency based in Barcelona, on a six-month contract and paid it an estimated £50,000 a month. Metodo 3 was hired because of Spain’s ‘language and cultural connection’ with Portugal. ‘If we’d had big-booted Brits or, heaven forbid, Americans, we would have had doors slammed in our faces’ said Clarence Mitchell, spokesperson for the McCann’s at the time. ‘And it’s quite likely that we could have been charged with hindering the investigation as technically it’s illegal in Portugal to undertake a secondary investigation.

The agency had 35 investigators working on the case in Britain, France, Spain, Portugal and Morocco. A hotline was set up for the public to report sightings and suspicions, and the search focussed on Morocco. But the investigation was dogged by over-confidence and braggadocio. ‘We know who took Madeleine and hope she will be home by Christmas,’ boasted Metodo 3’s flamboyant boss Francisco Marco. But no Madeleine materialised and their contract was not renewed.

Until now, few details have emerged about the private investigation during those crucial early months, but an investigation by the Evening Standard shows that key mistakes were made, which in turn made later enquiries far more challenging.

The Evening Standard has spoken to several sources close to the private investigations that took place in the first year and discovered that:

 

* The involvement of Brian Kennedy and his son Patrick in the operation was counter-productive, notably when they were questioned by the local police for acting suspiciously while attempting a 24-hour ‘stake out’.

* The relationship between Metodo 3 and the Portuguese police had completely broken down.
* Key witnesses were questioned far too aggressively, so much so that some of them later refused to talk to the police.

* Many of the investigators had little experience of the required painstaking forensic detective work”.

 

These were very serious allegations. The most serious by far was the claim that Brian Kennedy’s men had intimidated potential witnesses into silence.

 

I must also refer to what at the time was a secret meeting held on 13 November 2007 between Brian Kennedy and the first and chief suspect at the time, Robert Murat. This was a highly irregular meeting between the man investigating Madeleine’s disappearance for the McCanns (Brian Kennedy) and the original suspect in the case (Robert Murat). Present at the meeting, held in the Portugal home of Robert Murat’s aunt and uncle, Ralph and Sally Eveleigh, were: Kennedy and the McCanns’ co-ordinating Solicitor (and since 2009 a Director of the Find Madeleine Fund), Edward Smethurst, and Robert Murat, his mother, aunt and uncle and Murat’s lawyer, Francisco Pagarete. It was therefore a meeting between top legal representatives of the three main suspects in the case. When, a fortnight later, news of the meeting was leaked to the Portuguese press, Kennedy claimed he had met Murat simply ‘to offer him a job looking for Madeleine’. These facts suggest that Operation Grange should have investigated what the real reason was for this meeting.            

 

Gary Hagland   He was employed by Cheshire businessman Brian Kennedy, who led the series of private investigations conducted by the McCanns and the Directors of the McCanns’ ‘Find Madeleine Fund’. He worked for him, according to statements of his that I have seen, from around September 2007 to March/April 2008, and was based in a house bought by Brian Kennedy for the investigation in Knutsford, Cheshire. He had no qualifications or experience in looking for missing children. His only qualification appears to be in money laundering legislation. An article was written by him in 1993,  published in the Journal of Financial Regulation and Compliance. Accompanying this abstract is a brief description of the author, Gary Hagland, which states: ““Gary Hagland, AMSI MIMgt, entered the fledgling area of compliance in 1985 after leaving the Royal Hong Kong Police where he had served in criminal intelligence for some six years”. In addition, Hagland has written a book, under the pen name ‘Mason Horsburgh’, titled ‘UFO: A Saucer full of Secrets’, in which he describes encounters with aliens and flying saucers, including a rapid trip around the planets to beyond Saturn and back. He is also on record, in writing, as having deep reservations about the work he was employed to do for the McCanns, and claims that he was fired by Brian Kennedy after he told him face-to-face that his investigation was ‘heading in the wrong direction’. He has written an as-yet-unpublished book about his experiences working for the McCanns. 

 

Metodo 3   Metodo 3 was the Barcelona-based private detective agency used by the McCanns as their lead investigators from September 2007 to April 2008. Despite obvious problems surrounding this firm of detectives, the McCann Team continued to use them until at least March 2009. The firm had an extremely poor reputation in Barcelona. Journalist Christine Twomey from The Times interviewed its Director and a colleague in early 2008 and also came away with a strong impression that Metodo 3 was very far from being the reputable agency that the McCanns claimed it to be. Metodo 3 had previously been investigated by Spanish police over persistent allegations that they were involved in systematic illegal telephone tapping, and several of its staff were questioned by police. The firm was later involved in another scandal over government contracts for ‘research’ work. But, instead, they produced useless, bogus reports. In 2014 the firm eventually went out of business when they were again found to have been conducting illegal telephone recordings of conversations between major Catalonian politicians.

          

Francisco Marco   Marco was the Director of Metodo 3 at the time of Madeleine’s disappearance and remained so until the recent closure of Metodo 3. In the run-up to Christmas 2007, Marco lied on several occasions, making these wild and untrue claims which were widely reported in the British press: ‘Madeleine is alive’, ‘We know where she is’, and ‘Our men are closing in on the kidnappers’. This led to dramatic headlines in the British press: ‘Maddie will be home by Christmas’. Despite this succession of outright lies, the McCanns continued to employ his services for at least another 15 months. In 2013 he was at the centre of an operation to illegally record conversations of top politicians in a Barcelona restaurant. He was arrested and charged.     

 

Antonio Gimenez Raso   Antonio Gimenez Raso was one of Metodo 3’s leading investigators on the Madeleine McCann case, from September 2007 to 17 February 2008. On that date he was arrested and remanded in custody on very serious drugs charges. It was alleged that, back in 2004, when he was working as a Drugs and Trafficking Inspector for the Catalonian Regional Police, he had supplied information about a stash of 25 kilos of cocaine, worth millions of pounds, on a boat in Barcelona harbour, enabling a criminal gang to steal it. This gang was later described by a Barcelona judge as ‘a 27-strong vicious gang that practiced exceptional violence’. Headlines in the British, Spanish and Portuguese press on 18 February 2008 stated unequivocally that Gimenez Raso was ‘One of the investigators employed by the McCanns’, a fact that has since been confirmed. Yet the McCanns’ spokesman, Clarence Mitchell, issued an immediate, flat denial, claiming: ‘Gimenez Raso is not one of our men’. After four years in custody, Gimenez Raso was found ‘Not Guilty’ because of insufficient proof that he had supplied information to the gang, but, in acquitting him, the judge told him that the evidence had revealed that “You became much too close to the members of this gang”. It was also revealed that in late 2004 Gimenez Raso had ‘left’ his senior post in the police’s Drugs and Trafficking Department, though whether he was sacked or simply resigned is unclear (see also below under Marcos Aragao Correia).     

 

Gimenez Raso was also central to persistent allegations that members of the McCann Team and British journalists were offering money to people in Morocco in exchange for stories claiming that they might have had a ‘sighting’ of girls who looked like Madeleine McCann. According to one media report: “Antonio Gimenez  Raso had travelled to Morocco and, whilst he was there, was able - somehow - to find a number of witnesses who claimed to have seen Madeleine. It was around the time of Gimenez’s trip to Morocco that the Moroccan government took the unusual step of expelling a man who had been visiting hotels and garages in various parts of Morocco offering people money if they could claim to have seen a girl looking like Madeleine.

 

At the Leveson enquiry, David Pilditch, lead journalist for the Daily Express  covering the Madeleine McCann case, admitted on oath paying at least one witness money in return for claims of a ‘sighting’. Additionally, Sunday Express reporter James Murray and Express photographer Mike Gunnill were accurately reported to have “driven from Portugal to the southern Spanish port of Tarifa, across to Tangiers, then boarded the train to Marrakech via Casablanca”. There, they had “visited contacts at locations in Marrakech”. Gimenez Raso was known to have been in the area at that time. In addition, Paulo Reis from the GazetaDigital site reported that “The Moroccan authorities expelled a British citizen a few days ago, after he contacted staff from a gas station near the city of Marrakesh. A source from ‘Sureté Nacionale’, Moroccan security and intelligence services, confirmed that the British citizen offered a large amount of money to several employees, in exchange for specific statements about a sighting concerning a blonde girl. The British Embassy in Morocco, contacted by SOS Madeleine, refused to comment. The possibility of having private detectives working in their country was referred, by the same source, as “an offence and a violation of national sovereignty”. These are matters that should be fully investigated, given that there were indeed numerous claimed ‘sightings’ of Madeleine in Morocco, none of which were true. 


Julian Peribanez Julian Peribanez was another employee of Metodo 3 who worked on the Madeleine McCann case. He can be seen in a video uploaded to YouTube walking alongside Cheshire businessman Brian Kennedy, whilst trying to hide his face from the cameras. He was still working for Metodo 3 in 2013 when the scandal of the illegal recordings of politicians in a Barcelona restaurant was exposed. Arrested, he soon admitted his guilt and gave evidence against his boss Francisco Marco to the police on how the illegal recordings operation had been carried out. In 2014, Julian Peribanez wrote a book on his experiences with Metodo 3 in which he gave chapter and verse on a host of illegal activities, scams and frauds carried out by the firm over many years, including in the case of Madeleine McCann. Members of my forum obtained a copy of his book and paid for the translation of the chapter he wrote on the Madeleine McCann case into English. It can be read on my website, here:  

 .  

http://jillhavern.forumotion.net/t12458-exclusive-to-cmomm-corruption-and-criminality-inside-the-metodo-3-investigation-into-madeleine-mccann-s-disappearance-extracts-from-a-book-by-two-metodo-3-men-tamarit-and-peribanez-plus-a-second-book-written-by-francisco-marco         

 

It has already had nearly 8,000 views on my forum. Peribanez makes the following statements about Metodo 3.

 

1 Initially Metodo 3 worked closely with Brian Kennedy and money-laundering expert Gary Hagland, who Peribanez met at least twice.




2 He and a Metodo 3 colleague, Antonio Tamarit, worked in close contact with the British government-backed security firm, Control Risks Group.




3 There was a meeting in Manchester in early 2008 between Brian Kennedy and Marita Fernandes, the mother of the head of Metodo 3 (Francisco Marco) and José Luis Marco Llavina, her nephew, who was Metodo 3’s accountant.




4Tamarit says of these two: “[Neither] had carried out any investigative work for many years…they made a fortune by means of deception and dishonest trickery…Metodo 3 was swindling [Madeleine’s Fund, with] inflated expenses, invented items, false invoices, etc.”




5 Specific information is given: “Francisco Marco…obtained some El Corte Inglés travel invoices and subsequently falsified them by changing the details”.

Peribanez adds that the claims made by Metodo 3 that they had either 20, or even 40, people working on the Madeleine McCann investigation were outright lies. He says there were only ever three. He adds that Francisco’s claims of having ‘a bank of multilingual telephonists to staff the telephone hotline’ were also ‘bogus’.

Marcos Aragao Correia     Marcos Correia was a lawyer from the island of Madeira who played a very significant role in supporting the McCanns, although the McCanns never conceded this fact. We do, however, have multiple evidences from Correia himself that he was directly instructed in his activities at all times by Brian Kennedy, on behalf of the McCanns. He was engaged by them on two main tasks. One was to act as the lawyer representing convicted murderess Leonor Cipriano in a criminal complaint by her against Goncalo Amaral, the co-ordinator of the Madeleine McCann investigation until 2 October 2007. The other was to search the Arade Dam for Madeleine’s bones.

 

Leonor Cipriano and her brother were convicted in 2005 of murdering Ms Cipriano’s 8-year-old daughter, Joana, having originally reported her missing. The murder was especially brutal and each received 16-year jail sentences. In unusual circumstances, Marcos Correia visited Ms Cipriano in Odemira Women’s Prison on 8 April 2008 and replaced her existing lawyer. Mr Correia then pursued, on behalf of the McCanns, a legal action by Ms Cipriano against Mr Amaral and four other detectives, accusing them of having tortured her into making a false confession. The charges of torture were dismissed but, in a decision which baffled legal experts, Amaral was found guilty of ‘filing a false report’ and handed a suspended prison sentence.

 

Still more controversially, Correia worked with Metodo 3 to plan searches for Madeleine’s bones on the Arade Dam, Portugal. As he has personally testified, he met Metodo 3 detectives - Director Francisco Marco and another, probably Antonio Gimenez Raso (see above) - at the Arade Dam on 10 December 2007. Both men had been instructed to meet each other by Brian Kennedy, on behalf of the McCanns. It was a remarkable and expensive meeting. Correia would have had to travel over 600 miles from Madeira, and another 600 back, for the meeting and Marco and Gimenez Raso would have travelled a similar distance from their base in Barcelona.

 

Just seven weeks after this unusual meeting, British and Portuguese newspapers reported dramatic news that a ‘Good Samaritan’, namely Marcos Correia, had begun a gruesome, week-long search for Madeleine’s bones. He claimed he was doing this out of the goodness of his heart, and his own pocket, because he had received intelligence from Portugal’s criminal underworld that her body had been thrown into a lake. He claimed he had worked out which lake it was. He undertook a further week-long search five weeks later, in early March 2008. Nothing of interest was found, but, significantly, he handed his findings not to the Portuguese police, as he should have done, but to Metodo 3 investigators.

 

Statements made by and on behalf of the McCanns suggested that they had known nothing of these planned searches of the dam. But it was clear that they must have done, having put their private investigations into the hands of Brian Kennedy, who in turn employed Correia and the Metodo 3 investigators, who held that significant meeting at the Arade Dam on 10 December 2007. 

 

Only after the two week-long searches did some significant facts emerge about Marcos Correia. First, he admitted, eventually, that he had been paid by Brian Kennedy both to prosecute the Madeleine McCann investigator, Goncalo Amaral, in the criminal courts, and to carry out the two bogus searches of the Arade Dam. It also emerged that he had given two entirely different versions of how he came to take an interest in the Madeleine McCann case.

 

His initial claim was that underworld sources had told him that Madeleine had been abducted by a paedophile gang, raped, killed and then her body thrown into ‘a murky lake’. He said he had then used ‘visions’ and maps to locate where the gang probably threw the body. He later admitted that this was a complete fabrication, and proceeded to give another version of how his interest in Madeleine McCann had arisen. This time, he said that on Saturday 5 May, just two days after Madeleine had been reported missing, he had been to his first-ever Spiritualist church meeting, on the island of Madeira where he lived. On returning home, he said, he had had a vision of a big, powerful man strangling a young blonde girl. Soon afterwards, he claimed, he had heard about the reported disappearance of Madeleine McCann, connected this with his vision, and decided to offer his help to the police and the McCanns. Sometime later, he admitted that this story, too, was a total fabrication.

Later still, interviewed by a Portuguese journalist about his boasts about being a medium and a visionary, he made this claim (quote):   “Metodo 3 submitted me to a test in order to prove beyond all doubt whether or not my mediumistic abilities and my accounts were credible. They were fed up with following false leads. The fact is that the test gave totally positive results, according to what was confirmed to me personally by the Director of Método 3 in Barcelona himself. Following my mediumistic abilities passing Metodo 3’s stringent tests, Metodo 3 offered full support to my research”.

Oakley International     In April 2008, the McCanns replaced Metodo 3 as their lead investigators by a firm called Oakley International. This news was revealed around four months later, in August, when sources close to the McCanns claimed that Oakley International were ‘the big boys’ of international private detection’, based in the United States. On 13 August 2008, the Daily Mail reported: “Kate and Gerry McCann have hired a team of crack U.S detectives to lead the hunt for their missing daughter Madeleine, it has emerged. The unnamed US firm is said to have been offered a £500,000 six-month contract by the Find Madeleine Fund to help spearhead the search. A friend of the McCanns said: 'The hunt for Madeleine is becoming more and more international and it was felt that a truly international firm was now needed to lead the inquiry. These really are the big boys. They are absolutely the best, but they are extremely secretive and cloak-and-dagger about what they do. Since their appointment, Metodo has very much taken a back seat and they are now concentrating primarily in Portugal and Spain and across the Straits of Gibraltar…' The American agency is pretty much handling everything else.' The secretive firm is said to employ ex-FBI, CIA and U.S special forces, according to the Daily Mirror.

 

These claims, however, were completely false - see below.   

 

Kevin Halligen    Kevin Halligen, an Irishman born in Dublin, but who had followed a career in England for many years, specialising in his knowledge of lithium batteries, was the founder of Oakley International. On investigation, this company turned out to be merely a one-man-band company, registered by Halligen. Significantly, it had been registered in June 2007, only after Madeleine had been reported missing. It was nothing like ‘the big boys of international private detection’ claimed by McCann sources. It was, in effect, a bogus sole trader company in which Halligen employed a couple of his cronies.

 

In October 2009, after Kevin Halligen had gone on the run from police, who wanted him in connection with an alleged serious fraud committed in the United States. He was eventually arrested by British police after being found holed up with his girlfriend, Shirin Trachiotis, in the £700-a-night Bank Hotel, Oxford. He was taken immediately to Belmarsh top security prison. There, he spent three years fighting what was, ultimately, an unsuccessful legal battle to avoid extradition to the U.S. In the U.S. he was convicted of a fraud totalling around $1.5 million and was handed a four-year jail sentence.

 

Prior to his arrest, Halligen’s shocking activities whilst working for the McCanns had been revealed in a highly illuminating article by Mark Hollingsworth in the Evening Standard in August 2009. This article noted that the original contract with Kevin Halligen might have been with Kevin Halligen’s company ‘Red Defence International’, but the media reported that it was Oakley International with whom the contract was made. Because of the secrecy surrounding the McCann case, it is impossible to know which, if either, is true. I will quote directly from Mark Hollingsworth’s article:

 

QUOTES: 

“Kevin Halligen [was] a smooth-talking Irishman who claimed to have worked for covert British government intelligence agency GCHQ Halligen [and his friend Henri Exton] were for hire for a fee of £100,000 per month plus expenses”.

  .
“Halligen…has been described as a ‘Walter Mitty figure’. He used false names to collect prospective clients at airports in order to preserve secrecy, and he called himself ‘Kevin’ or ‘Richard’ or ‘Patrick’ at different times to describe himself to business contacts…He is obsessed by surveillance gadgets and even installed a covert camera to spy on his own employees. He claimed to have worked for GCHQ, but in fact he was employed by the Atomic Energy Authority as head of defence systems in the field of new information technology…”

 

“Halligen has a degree in electronics [and] worked on the fringes of the intelligence community...After leaving the AEA, Halligen set up Red Defence International Ltd as an international security and political risk company, advising clients on the risks involved in investing and doing business in unstable, war-torn and corrupt countries…In 2006, he struck gold when hired by Trafigura, the Dutch commodities trading company. Executives were imprisoned in the Ivory Coast after toxic waste was dumped in landfills near its biggest city Abidjan. Trafigura was blamed and hired Red Defence International at vast expense to help with the negotiations to release its executives. A Falcon business jet was rented for several months during the operation and it was Halligen’s first taste of the good life. The case only ended when Trafigura paid $197 million to the government of the Ivory Coast to secure the release of the prisoners. Halligen made a fortune from Trafigura and was suddenly flying everywhere first-class, staying at the Lansborough and Stafford hotels in London and The Willard hotel in Washington DC for months at a time. In 2007 he set up Oakley International Group and registered at the offices of the prestigious law firm Patton Boggs, in Washington DC, as an international security company. He was now strutting the stage as a self-proclaimed international spy expert and joined the Special Forces Club in Knightsbridge, where he met Exton”.

“During the Madeleine investigation, Halligen spent vast amounts of time in the HeyJo bar in the basement of the Abracadabra Club near his Jermyn Street office. Armed with a clutch of unregistered mobile phones and a Blackberry, the bar was in effect his office. ‘He was there virtually the whole day,’ a former colleague told the Evening Standard: ‘He had an amazing tolerance for alcohol…When not imbibing in St James’s, Halligen was in the United States, trying to drum up investors for Oakley International. On 15 August 2008, at the height of the McCann investigation crisis, he persuaded Andre Hollis, a former US Drug enforcement agency official, to write out an $80,000 cheque to Oakley in return for a ten per cent share-holding. The money was then transferred into the private accounts of Halligen and his girlfriend Shirin Trachiotis to finance a holiday in Italy, according to Hollis. In a $6 million lawsuit filed in Fairfax County, Virginia, Hollis alleges that Halligen ‘received monies for Oakley’s services rendered and deposited the same into his personal accounts’ and ‘repeatedly and systematically depleted funds from Oakley’s bank accounts for inappropriate personal expenses’. Hollis was not the only victim. Mark Aspinall, a respected lawyer who worked closely with Halligen, invested £500,000 in Oakley and lost the lot. Earlier this year he filed a lawsuit in Washington DC against Halligen claiming $1.4 million in damages. The finances of Oakley International are in chaos and numerous employees, specialist consultants and contractors have not been paid. Some of them now face financial ruin”.

“…by mid-August 2008, Kennedy and Gerry McCann were increasingly concerned by an absence of details of how the money was being spent. At one meeting, Halligen was asked how many men constituted a surveillance team and he produced a piece of paper on which he wrote ‘between one and ten’. But he then refused to say how many were working and how much they were being paid…Halligen was charging very high rates and expenses….eyebrows were raised when all the money was paid to Oakley International, solely owned and managed by Halligen. One invoice, seen by the Evening Standard, shows that for ‘accrued expenses to May 5, 2008’ (just one month into the contract), Oakley charged $74,155. The ‘point of contact’ was Halligen who provided a UK mobile telephone number”.

 

“The contract [with Brian Kennedy] was terminated by the end of September 2008, after £500,000, plus expenses, had been spent. Halligen has gone into hiding, leaving a trail of debt and numerous former business associates and creditors looking for him. He was last seen in January of this year in Rome, drinking and spending prodigiously at the Hilton Cavalieri and Excelsior hotels…“

                   

Henri Exton     As can be seen above, Exton is or was an associate of Kevin Halligen. It appears that Halligen employed him on his ill-fated Madeleine McCann investigation. Mark Hollingsworth wrote this about him in the 2009 Evening Standard article quoted above:

 

“Exton had been an undercover officer for the Manchester police. A maverick…figure, he successfully infiltrated gangs of football hooligans in the 1980s…In 1991 he was seconded to work on MI5 undercover operations against drug dealers, gangsters and terrorists…But in November 2002, the stress appeared to have overcome his judgment when he was arrested for shoplifting. While working on an MI5 surveillance, Exton was caught leaving a tax-free shopping area at Manchester airport with a bottle of perfume he had not paid for. The police were called and he was given the option of the offence being dealt with under caution or to face prosecution. He chose a police caution and so in effect admitted his guilt”.

 

In the BBC Crimewatch McCann special shown on 14 October 2013, two e-fits of different-looking men were shown to viewers, who were told by the Head of Operation Grange, Detective Chief Inspector Andy Redwood, that the man represented by these two very different e-fits was ‘the centre of our focus’. It was said that these two e-fits were drawn up by two members of the family of Martin Smith, from Drogheda, Ireland. However, there are major doubts about the reliability of the sighting claimed by the family. The e-fits were produced by Exton in the spring of 2008 and shown to the McCanns. The McCanns say that ‘by October 2009’ they had shown these e-fits to Leicestershire Police and the Portuguese police, yet nothing was done about them until the Crimewatch show of October in 2014. Undoubtedly there is a great mystery about Exton’s role in producing those two puzzling e-fits.          

 

Tim Craig-Harvey     Tim Craig-Harvey was another close associate of Kevin Halligen; both had close connections with government security services. Little was known about his role in the Madeleine McCann case until he appeared in a Channel 5 film about the case in early 2014. Research since then has revealed that Tim Craig-Harvey was involved in the formation and running of a number of companies associated with Kevin Halligen. Both had close associates in common. Given what we now know about Kevin Halligen’s history and modus operandi, there must clearly also be major question marks about precisely why Craig-Harvey got involved in the Madeleine McCann case.  

 

ALPHAIG     In March 2009, shortly before a Channel 4 documentary made by Mentorn Media about the reported disappearance of Madeleine McCann, shown in May that year, stories began to appear in the print and TV media about a new company said to have been engaged by the McCann Team to find Madeleine. The press referred to it as ‘Alpha Investigations Group’. A number of reports suggested the following: (a) that it was a well-established and reputable detective agency and (b) that the ‘head’ of this agency was either retired Detective Inspector Dave Edgar, or him and a colleague, retired Detective Sergeant Arthur Cowley. Neither was true.

 

In fact, subsequent analysis by Madeleine McCann researchers unearthed these facts:

1)     Dave Edgar was appointed independently by Brian Kennedy

2)     So was Arthur Cowley

3)     There was and never had been any company called ‘Alpha Investigations Group’, and

4)     Instead, a bogus company, ALPHAIG, had been set up to give the false impression that there really was a company called Alpha Investigations Group.

 

The researchers also unearthed the following facts:

A.     Only after Edgar and Cowley had been working for the McCann Team for months did the head of the McCann Team’s private investigation, Brian Kennedy, set up a one-man-band company, ALPHAIG, in the name of Arthur Cowley, the sole Director. That occurred on 10 June 2009.

B.     One of Kennedy’s friends and business associates, Andrew Dickman, two days later, also registered an internet domain in the name of ALPHAIG - but it was never used.

C.    ALPHAIG never traded.

D.    Only one set of accounts was ever produced and it showed no evidence of any business being done.

E.     The registered office was Cowley’s home - a hilltop cottage 1,000 feet up on Halkyn Mountain in north Wales.

F.     It was never the base for any detective agency.

G.    ALPHAIG never had a website.

H.    ALPHAIG never had any offices.

I.        ALPHAIG never advertised.

J.      ALHAIG ceased to exist in 2011.

K.     Sometime after it ceased to exist, Arthur Cowley spoke to a journalist and told him that he held ‘secrets’ about the Madeleine McCann case that he was not prepared to disclose and would ‘take to my grave’.

 

It appears, therefore, that ALPHAIG was only registered as a company to give a wholly misleading impression to the media and the public. ALPHAIG was a dummy company. Neither Dave Edgar nor Arthur Cowley was employed by, or running, a company called Alpha Investigations Group, nor had they been running any detective agency at all, let alone a well-established one.   

 

The media were deceived. Brian Kennedy appears to have been responsible for this misleading impression being given. He personally appointed Dave Edgar. He appointed Arthur Cowley as well. One of Brian Kennedy’s long-time friends and contacts registered a domain name for ALPHAIG.      

 

Former Detective Inspector Dave Edgar    In his August 2009 article for the Evening Standard, Mark Hollingsworth wrote this about a press conference organised by the McCanns’ spokesman, Clarence Mitchell, and Dave Edgar, earlier that month:   

 

“It was billed as a ‘significant development’ in the exhaustive search for Madeleine McCann. At a recent dramatic press conference in London, the lead private investigator David Edgar, a retired Cheshire detective inspector, brandished an e-fit image of an Australian woman, described her as ‘a bit of a Victoria Beckham lookalike’, and appealed for help in tracing her. The woman was seen ‘looking agitated’ outside a restaurant in Barcelona three days after Madeleine’s disappearance. ‘It is a strong lead’, said Edgar, wearing a pin-stripe suit in front of a bank of cameras and microphones. ‘Madeleine could have been in Barcelona by that point. The fact the conversation took place near the marina could be significant.’

But, within days, reporters discovered that the private detectives had failed to make the most basic enquiries before announcing their potential breakthrough. Members of Edgar’s team who visited Barcelona had failed to speak to anyone working at the restaurant near where the agitated woman was seen that night, neglected to ask if the mystery woman had been filmed on CCTV cameras and knew nothing about the arrival of an Australian luxury yacht just after Madeleine vanished”.

Little is known about the career of Dave Edgar, except that he worked in Northern Ireland for a substantial period, One thing about the press conference that Mark Hollingsworth failed to mention was that during it, Edgar claimed that the McCanns’ friend Jane Tanner, who maintained that she had seen a man carrying a child at about 9.15pm on the evening Madeleine was reported missing, might actually have seen a woman, not a man. This seemed to fit in with the narrative about a woman seen on Barcelona docks that Clarence Mitchell and Dave Edgar were trying to convey to the media. But it made a nonsense of the detailed description she had given on 4 May 2007 (the day after Madeleine was reported missing) of a man.   

 

He also made strange pronouncements about what he thought had happened to Madeleine, often based on a range of media stories. To give one example, in September 2009 he developed the strongly-held belief, published in at least two newspapers, that Madeleine was being held alive in an underground lair within a few miles of Praia da Luz. There was absolutely no evidence of this.  Despite this ‘firm’ belief of Edgar’s, the McCann Team did nothing to follow up this apparently sincerely-held  conviction. It appeared that the only basis for this hypothesis was that the media had reported a few weeks before on the case of Jaycee Lee Dugard, an 11-year-old girl who was abducted in 1991 but was found alive 18 years later, in the summer of 2009. Edgar’s claim that he believed Madeleine was being hidden in a lair on the Algarve coast was fairly obviously for media consumption - to capitalise, as it were, on the publicity surrounding Jaycee Lee Dugard - and was never a genuine line of enquiry.    

      .    .    

Former Detective Sergeant  Arthur Cowley   I have covered his limited role in the  McCann Team’s private investigation above. I have indicated that the evidence  suggests that he was not running a company called ALPHAIG, but merely agreed with his employer,  Brian Kennedy’s plan to make it look as though he and Dave Edgar were running along-established business called Alpha Investigations Group.

 

Melissa Little    Melissa Little was not, strictly speaking, one of the McCann Team’s investigators. She was hailed by the McCann Team as an ‘F.B.I.--trained forensic artist’, which sounded highly impressive. Her main role in the private Madeleine McCann investigation was to produce two sketches of alleged suspects. One of them, of the man supposedly seen by Jane Tanner at 9.15pm on the night Madeleine was reported missing, was produced on 25 October 2007 - nearly six months after Madeleine had been reported missing. There was no obvious reason why the McCann Team took so long to release this sketch. It was of very little, if any, value, so long after the event. Moreover, Jane Tanner’s description has changed over time in significant respects. Moreover, Jane Tanner said she had not seen any of the man’s face.           

 

Brian Kennedy, some weeks later, asked Melissa Little to produce another sketch for him. This time it was of a moustachoied man, with long, straggly hair, said by the McCann Team to be a suspect. It was based on a sighting by a Ms Gail Cooper of a suspicious-looking charity collector she had seen in Praia da Luz.  The McCann Team publicised this sketch, with the help of Leicestershire Police and the News of the World, on 20 January 2008. The man became known by many who saw the sketch as ‘George Harrison man’ or ‘Monsterman’. The sketch was based on reports of this man submitted privately to the McCann Team and not to the Portuguese police. One of the curious features of this second drawing by Melissa Little is that it bore a passing resemblance to the earlier one she had drawn based upon Jane Tanner’s claims. Jane Tanner even made a statement that she was ‘60% to 80% sure’ that the person she had seen and ‘Monsterman’ were one and the same. This wholly lacked credibility as she admitted that she had seen no part of the face of the man she said she had seen.


Paulo Reis, a Portuguese researcher into the Madeleine McCann case, made some important observations, on the ‘GazetaDigital’ website, on Melissa Little’s two sketches. He referred to a Powerpoint demonstration produced by the McCanns and sent to the Portuguese police and Leicestershire Police in advance of the news report in the News of the World. He noted these points:


Although Jane Tanner had not seen the face of the man she claimed to have seen on 3 May, and Gail Cooper had clearly seen, full face, possibly more than once, the man she identified, Melissa Little was somehow able (after spending hours with both witnesses) to state “There are many similarities between Miss Tanner’s man and Gail’s”
Gerry McCann stated in his Powerpoint presentation to Leicestershire Police: “Miss Tanner spent a full day with Melissa Little, a qualified Police Sketch Artist since 1986, to compile this likeness of the suspect”
Miss [Jane] Tanner believes that there is an 80% likelihood that this is the same man she saw carrying away the child, believed to be Madeleine.




The News of the World developed this story still further. They wrote: “The sketch by qualified police artist Melissa Little bears an uncanny resemblance to an earlier picture, based on Miss Tanner's story”. Paulo Reis added this comment to his article: “This is unsurprising given both selections had - using considerable artistic licence - been made by the same artist, Melissa Little, and paid for by Mr Kennedy to assist the McCanns”.




Paulo Reis hinted strongly that Melissa Little may not have been independent, but in effect had colluded with Brian Kennedy and the McCann Team to suggest to the British public that the two images were of the same man. To achieve this, Melissa Little also sketched a drawing of how Monsterman might have looked carrying a child. As no-one had actually seen him doing so, this was most certainly the use of artistic licence, at best, and arguably dishonest.




Two footnotes need to be added.




First, the man identified as ‘Monsterman’ by Melissa Little’s sketch was soon identified by the Portuguese police and firmly ruled out of any connection to Madeleine’s disappearance.




Second, Jane Tanner had taken part in an identity parade on 13 May 2007, 10 days after Madeleine’s reported disappearance. One of those paraded before her, viewed from inside a police van with a two-way mirror, was Robert Murat.. Jane Tanner told the police that she was adamant that Robert Murat was the abductor she had seen just 10 days earlier. Murat was made a formal suspect two days later, partly on the strength of Tanner’s strong conviction that he was the man she had seen. However, Murat looked nothing like either the man she had described as having seen on 3 May, nor did he look anything like ‘Monsterman’. How was it possible for Jane Tanner, who had never seen the man’s face in the first place, to first of all say it was Robert Murat, and then to say it was ‘80% likely’ that he was Gail Cooper’s ‘Monsterman’?

   

 

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 Response from the Home Office