Anyway having watched it, I feel that I want to make a bit of a departure from my usual content here and talk about the Madeleine McCann case. Specifically, I want to list what I think are some of the discrepancies in the story of the night of her disappearance that I think have not been adequately explained in public, and that were mostly skated over quite quickly by Netflix as well. The point is not to imply anything regarding anyone's guilt or innocence; people do illogical and inexplicable things in everyday life, misspeak and just plain make mistakes. For all I know, there are perfectly innocent explanations to everything here. But these are the unxplained discrepancies I was left with after viewing the Netflix documentary and reading up on the case online, as well as a few general observations.
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Madeleine McCann disappeared from Praia da Luz in Portugal on May 3rd, 2007. She was asleep in her family's rented apartment while her parents had dinner at a tapas bar just across from the building. As retired police superintendent Peter MacLeod's ebook details, there is some discrepancy over the way the parents dining at the tapas bar (the "tapas seven") checked on their children in their rooms and when they did so. For what it's worth, I find the MacLeod ebook to be quite tendentious and uncomfortably eager to jump to conclusions, and I certainly don't endorse his overall theory. But I do think the text makes some good points in its examination of the witness statements. It feels worthwhile to start by noting the overall timeline of the evening.
According to the timeline in the Guardian, Mrs. McCann and the children returned to their apartment at about 18:00, and David Payne, one of the "tapas seven", checked in on them at 18:30 at Mr. McCann's request. As I've understood it, that means 18:30 is the last time someone outside her immediate family is known to have seen Madeleine alive and well. At 19:00 (I assume these times are approximations) Mr. McCann returns, and at 20:35 they join the rest of the tapas seven at the restaurant, the children having been put to bed. The McCanns leave the patio doors, facing the restaurant, unlocked since they can only be locked from the inside.
By their own account, Mr. McCann checked in on the children at 21:05 and saw them all asleep. At about 21:30, Mrs. McCann was going to check on the children, but Mr. Oldfield, dining with them, is going to visit his apartment and offers to check theirs as well. Mr. Oldfield enters through the unlocked patio doors, sees all is well inside, but cannot confirm if he saw Madeleine in her bed or not. At 22:00 Mrs. McCann goes to their apartment, and by her own account, fails to find Madeleine inside, and raises the alarm.
As far as I know, none of the above is disputed. At approximately 21:10, Jane Tanner of the tapas seven later reports seeing a man walking down the street, away from the McCanns' apartment, carrying a sleeping child. Known as the Tanner sighting, it is assumed for years that the man she saw had abducted Madeleine McCann and was, in fact, carrying her. The later Scotland Yard investigation was able to identify the man and prove that he was, in fact, another British holidaymaker, who had picked up their child from the resort's night creche and was carrying them to their apartment. However, because this was apparently not known until 2013, it was long assumed that "Tannerman" had abducted Madeleine, and therefore that she must have vanished from the apartment between Mr. McCann's visit at 21:05 and the Tanner sighting at 21:10. This was such a strong conviction for such a long time that as of this writing, the McCanns' website still hosts the identikit drawings based on the Tanner sighting with an appeal for information, even though the person has been identified. So we now know that Madeleine could have gone missing at any time between approximately nine and ten o'clock.
I'm wondering, though, whether the time window might not be even longer. If Mr. McCann did not, in fact, see his daughter at around nine o'clock, then the time she could have vanished extends to at least around 20:30. This is not to imply any sinister motive or intentional deception on his part, but if his check was actually as cursory as Mr. Oldfield's, then Madeleine may already have been gone by then.
Mr. MacLeod has highlighted a change in the statements made by the McCanns on their visits to the apartment that night. Initially, both Mr. and Mrs. McCann claimed to have entered the apartment via the front door, using their keys. Later, they changed their stories to say that they entered through the unlocked patio doors. This may well be an innocent mistake, but to my knowledge it hasn't been explained, and later retellings all have the McCanns entering via the patio. The patio doors were obviously open, since Mr. Oldfield had entered that way and did not, presumably, have a key to the apartment in the first place.
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There are several discrepancies around what happened at 22:00, when Mrs. McCann reported Madeleine missing. First, there is the mystery of the window. Mr. MacLeod has collected several quotes from the McCanns' friends and relatives, who clearly seem to have been told that the window in Madeleine's room had been forced open. However, no evidence of this exists, and in video footage from immediately after the disappearance (as seen on Netflix), the shutter and window are clearly intact. It's never been established why the McCanns claimed the window had been broken open, when this is clearly not the case.
It's not even clear if the window was ever open at all. Mrs. McCann has given two completely different accounts of how she discovered that Madeleine was missing at 22:00, both quoted in Mr. MacLeod's ebook. In the statement she gave to the police on 4.5.2007, Mrs. McCann says that on entering the apartment, she immediately perceived that the door to the children's bedroom was open, and the window and shutter were also open. But in an interview she gave in 2008, she describes a completely different scene, where everything appears normal at first. Only when she notices that the bedroom door is open more widely than they had left it, does she go to check on the children, and in her words:
"I was looking at Madeleine’s bed which is here, and it was dark and I was looking and I was thinking is that, is that Madeleine or is that the bedding and I couldn't quite make her out, and it sounds really stupid now, but at the time I was just thinking I didn’t want to put the light on because I didn't want to wake them, and literally as I went back in, the curtains of the bedroom which were drawn, [demonstrates with both forearms together] that were closed, “wheesh’ like a gust of wind kind of blew them open."
This later version is the one that the Netflix reconstruction went with. But is it possible for it to be true?
There's an odd detail related to the Tanner sighting. As Mr. McCann returned from his nine o'clock check on the children, he met a fellow Briton in the Rua Dr. Francisco Gentil Martins, leading from the apartment to the tapas bar, and stopped to chat with him. Jane Tanner passed by them and reported seeing them, but they did not see her. The Portuguese police apparently questioned whether this was possible, because the street was narrow and well-lit. It also appears that way in the Netflix series, but I don't know if it's accurate in that respect. If I read the apartment layout in the police files correctly, the children's bedroom faced the Rua Dr. Agostinho da Silva, which has the same kind of street lights as the Rua Dr. Francisco Gentil Martins (at least on Google Street View!) and appears to be equally well-lit.
In his statement of 10.5.2007, Mr. McCann describes that "during the night the artificial light coming in from the outside is very weak, therefore, without a light being lit in the living room or in the kitchen, the visibility inside the bedroom is much reduced". Presumably this is because the various shutters and curtains were usually kept closed. Writing for the Guardian, Bridget O'Donnell describes the McCanns' apartment:
One morning, I saw Gerry and his wife Kate on their balcony, chatting to their friends on the path below. Privately I was glad we didn't get their apartment. It was on a corner by the road and people could see in. They were exposed.
As the apartment was on the ground floor and fairly close to the street, it would certainly have been uncomfortable to have the lights on inside without drawing the curtains or closing the shutters. Both McCanns testified that the window and shutter in the children's bedroom had been closed when they left, and this makes sense. However, if the apartment was quite dark at night, and the window in the children's bedroom looked out onto a well-lit street, should it not have been immediately obvious if it was open? In Mrs. McCann's initial statement it is. But in her later, much more detailed statement, she describes it as being dark, and only perceiving that the window was open when the curtains were moved by the wind.
The crime scene photos (pictures 7 and 8) show the window closed and the shutter down, but the curtains open. So there are now three different configurations for the window: Mrs. McCann's initial account where the window, shutter and curtains were open; her later account where the window and shutter were open, but the curtains closed; and the photograph showing the shutter and window closed, but the curtains open. There are obviously several questions. The shutter appears fairly opaque; if we believe Mrs. McCann's later account, was the difference in light level not perceptible until the wind moved the curtains? It's certainly possible. But if the window and shutter were open at 22:00, when were they closed? If the curtains were drawn, when were they opened and arranged behind the furniture as they are seen in the police photographs?
It does not appear that anyone except Mrs. McCann ever saw the window open, and it seems strange that she would have stopped to draw the curtains and close the window and shutter before reporting Madeleine missing. Of course she may have done so, but the discrepancy between her two accounts has never been explained; both cannot be true. As a historian, I tend to be skeptical when stories become more detailed the further they are from the actual event. Similarly, it has apparently never been explained why the McCanns initially claimed that the window had been forced, but later abandoned the claim. It's entirely possible that these discrepancies are the results of pure misunderstandings and the story becoming embellished with time, which is surely a universal human process. But as it stands, it's not at all clear what the configuration of the window in the bedroom was, or indeed if it matters at all: the apartment was readily accessible by the patio doors, nor has it been established whether the front door was locked.
Is it significant that the McCanns initially claimed to have entered the apartment via the front door, unlocking and locking it, and also that the window had been broken open, but later admitted to entering through the unlocked patio doors, and dropped the claim that the window was forced?
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Another unexplained detail is Mrs. McCann's reaction to not immediately finding her daughter. Several sources report her screaming "Madeleine's gone! Someone's taken her!" as she ran back toward the restaurant. In the 2008 interview mentioned previously, she says "I knew straight away that, err, she’d been . . . taken, [you] know." This seems odd to me, and as I understand it, the initial reaction of others on the scene was that Madeleine must have wandered off by accident. Mrs. McCann has uncharitably been accused of trying to "plant a story" by insisting that her daughter had been abducted, when in fact she could not know that was the case. She is variously described as either making a cursory search of the apartment, or only looking in the parents' bedroom to check if Madeleine was in their bed. It is, of course, entirely credible for a parent to have an emotional reaction to finding their child missing in the middle of the night, but I feel that this does need to be included in a list of unexplained events.
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Finally, the most baffling detail of all is the claim that the McCann twins, sleeping in the same room as Madeleine, had been sedated. Mr. MacLeod dedicates a full chapter to this, and here I feel that his arguments have real merit. This is an important point, because many of the theories that posit the McCanns were somehow culpable in their daughter's disappearance are based on the idea that they had sedated their children. While this may seem extreme stated in such bald terms, in fact children can apparently be effectively put to sleep with fairly harmless over-the-counter medications. The argument is superficially strengthened by the fact that both McCanns are medical doctors, and Mrs. McCann was a qualified anaesthetist. I apologize for omitting their professional titles, but distinguishing between two Dr. McCanns would make this an even more arduous text!
No physical evidence that the McCann twins were sedated exists; they were tested, but at such a late date that apparently no traces of any substance would have survived. Given how prominently the sedation story has been used to cast blame on the McCanns, it seems ironic that it apparently originates with Mrs. McCann herself. She has stated numerous times, both to the police at the time of the disappearance and publicly later, that she believes the twins and, presumably, Madeleine, had been sedated by the abductor. This is certainly borne out by the fact that all through the night of Madeleine's disappearance, the twins apparently slept soundly. They did not even wake up when they were moved to another place to sleep. In the Netflix documentary, a vacationer at the resort describes Mrs. McCann as "howling" over the disappearance of her daughter. It seems absolutely incredible that the two-year-old twins would have slept through all this, and yet this seems to be an undisputed fact, commented on by the McCanns and the Portuguese police on the scene at the time. So it seems that the twins were indeed sedated.
But how? I agree with Mr. MacLeod that it seems incredible that an intruder could have sedated the children. Any effective sedative would have to have been administered by injection, ingestion or inhalation. If the idea was to keep the children quiet and docile, surely this would have been completely defeated by waking them up to make them eat or drink a sedative, let alone trying to inject them with a hypodermic needle. Applying chloroform would have left telltale marks and an easily detectable smell, and more exotic tranquilizers are frankly very difficult to believe. Now, I'm not an expert in these things, so if there's some credible way in which an intruder could have sedated the children that I'm unaware of, then I am happy to be corrected. But I fully agree with Mr. MacLeod that it is very difficult to understand how this would have been accomplished in practice.
Further, I don't understand why the children would have been sedated. Even when applying a sedative is possible, it's at best an inexact science, and there is always some risk. One of the odd details around the disappearance is that according to the McCanns, Madeleine had asked why they hadn't come the previous night when she cried. A neighbor also testified that on that previous night, she heard a child, presumably Madeleine, crying for an hour without anyone responding. So why would an abductor have found it necessary to sedate the twins at all? They could hardly have done anything more dangerous than crying. Madeleine was only four years old; surely a determined abductor would have easily overpowered her. So what I would add to Mr. MacLeod's analysis is that I don't see what the point of sedating the children would be in the first place. Certainly it's difficult to understand why an abductor would go to the trouble of sedating the twins in any scenario.
This is how Mrs. McCann describes the twins' condition in her book.
In spite of the noise and lights and general pandemonium, they hadn’t stirred. They’d always been sound sleepers, but this seemed unnatural. Scared for them, too, I placed the palms of my hands on their backs to check for chest movement, basically, for some sign of life. Had Madeleine been given some kind of sedative to keep her quiet? Had the twins, too?
Dr. Kate McCann is a qualified anaesthetist, and so is Dr. Fiona Payne, a fellow member of the tapas seven. Dr. Gerry McCann is a general practicioner, and most of the rest of the tapas seven were also medical doctors. It seems amazing that this group of medical professionals would have observed that two very young children were sedated, conclude that they had been put in this condition by a malicious intruder, and not seek any kind of medical care for them. Instead, the twins were simply left to sleep it off, with occasional checks on their breathing. Again, I am not an expert on the subject, but I agree with Mr. MacLeod's analysis that it seems incredibly unlikely that two trained anaesthetists would have automatically assumed that the children had been sedated competently by an intruder and were in no danger, and therefore no medical attention was necessary. The twins were not taken to a hospital or any medical facility.
In his publication, Mr. MacLeod draws the conclusion that Mrs. McCann was not concerned about the twins because she had sedated them herself. This idea is at the heart of many of the theories that implicate the McCanns in the disappearance of their daughter, although I think that requires not so much leaping but making a hyperspace jump to a conclusion. But if it is not the case that they sedated the children themselves, then Mrs. McCann's behaviour with regard to the twins on the night of the disappearance seems very difficult to explain.
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These are some of the questions I was left with after watching the Netflix documentary. Given some of the things I've read online, I feel I have to stress that I don't think any of these things individually or as a group are anything remotely like sufficient cause to malign the McCanns, let alone accuse them of some kind of criminal conspiracy. People misremember and misspeak; our recollections are imperfect and mutable; we make bad decisions. I consider it probable that there are more or less innocent explanations for all of these discrepancies.
One thing I wish Netflix had done was draw on a broader area of expertise. I think a gender studies perspective into how especially Kate McCann has been portrayed as a bad and uncaring mother would have been invaluable. Motherhood is such a deeply politicized and policed place where so many different ideologies intersect. My simple definition of patriarchy is that it's a system where a woman can never do anything right. Kate McCann has been portrayed as both an irrational, hysterical and overemotional mother, and a cold, sociopathic, unfeeling mother. You may think that's a spectrum where there's an acceptable golden mean of motherhood in the middle, but there isn't. The fact is that there is no "right" way to grieve over the inexplicable loss of a child. You cannot look at a parent who's lost a child and say "aha! They are not exhibiting the correct stages of grief, therefore they are faking it". Or indeed anyone who's faced a traumatic event. Yet we do this with people in the public eye constantly, especially anyone who is presented to us as a victim: we assess if they're worthy of our sympathy. And we do it with criteria that are so bad, so fundamentally discriminatory and ideological, that the process is horrible. I really think there are a lot of disciplines in the humanities and social sciences that can shed a lot of light on this, but in a crime documentary, we hear from policemen and journalists, and the policemen's solution is always more resources and powers for the police. It's not a good look, and there are reasons to think that it's had very unfortunate effects on our society.
The disappearance of Madeleine McCann is obviously a fascinating case. The breathless and totally irresponsible press coverage, and the way in which public sentiment is built and then suddenly makes a dramatic turn, is a real microcosm for so many things that were happening around the same time. It's difficult to not notice that the British home secretary who oversaw the review of the case, which later turned into the ongoing Scotland Yard investigation, was Theresa May: she of the racist "hostile environment" policy and later Brexit prime minister. I think that with phenomena like Brexit and Trump, we've gone long past manufacturing consent: our mass media manufacture entire theaters of emotions for us to get caught up in. In some ways, the publicity around the McCann case was a precursor of the emotional theatrics of Brexit. We're long overdue for a proper look at what the media do in our society, and what effects it has on us all.
In the meantime, we hope against all odds that Madeleine McCann is alive and well somewhere.
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