Quand David Canter se joignit à quatre experts en octobre 2007 pour une brève enquête de terrain, il avait en fait déjà une idée en tête.
Why patterns of the past point to abduction by a stranger as most likely explanation.
22 September 2007 - The Times
Keeping an open mind on the disappearance of
Madeleine McCann amid the surrounding plethora of facts and supposition is
almost impossible — for the officers investigating the case, for the media
reporting it and for anyone who has read about it. It appears that the
Portuguese police may have fallen into the trap of having first formed a view
of who the guilty party is, then seeking out the evidence to support it. (1) It is
rare for people untrained in science deliberately to attempt to refute their
own hypotheses: instead we tend to reinterpret anything that happens to fit in
with the notion to which we have become increasingly committed. The only way
out of this psychological trap is to have a clear picture of what the possibilities
are and to work steadily, safeguarding and collecting all the information that
may be relevant to every possibility then systematically excluding the options
as the relevant information becomes available. (2)
Why are the "Tapas 9" key to solving the Madeleine mystery? In a case such as Madeleine’s disappearance,
we should expect professional investigators to pull together systematic
accounts of the circumstances of a variety of child abductions and see what
they can learn from them. (3) It does not seem to me that the Portuguese police
have done this. If they had, they might have come to the conclusion that the
most plausible reason for Madeleine’s disappearance remains our original
conclusion — her abduction by a stranger. At the Centre for Investigative
Psychology at the University of Liverpool we routinely build up accounts of the
characteristics of particular types of crimes and the criminals who commit
them. Most recently one of my graduate students has collected together all the
information she can on those child abductions that were obviously not part of
some family custody struggle.
Her reviews shows that of the 800 or so
abductions that occur in Britain each year about half are carried out by
strangers to the family, but the great majority were quickly brought to an end
by the abductor being caught in the act or soon after. It is thus extremely
rare for people who do not know the children to be able to steal them away.
There are about 50 of these cases a year in Britain. (4) When a child is reported missing
the police must start from the strong possibility that someone who knows the
child is responsible. Subtle and exotic stories seem to have been developed
about the McCanns. But for these stories to have any credence, they require the
couple to be disturbed and incompetent medics who have a cohort of professional
friends willing to hide the truth under intense scrutiny. This does not accord
with what I call the first law of criminality: people who are criminal in one
situation tend to be criminal in other situations. It is remarkably unlikely
that parents who committed a crime so heinous would have no previous background
that pointed to their evolving evil. (5)
Once we move away from the possibility of the
disappearance having roots in the family then the options require us to think
carefully about the nature of the victim. It is not unknown for depressed or
disturbed women to steal young children, although their preference is usually
for babies. Many paedophiles seek out opportunities for contact with children.
Climbing into a locked apartment with parents visiting to check from time to
time is not the sort of impromptu opportunity that a disturbed individual would
choose. (6) Where there is a strong sexual element in the abduction, the child will
tend to be older, pubescent or in early adolescence. The horror is the tendency
for younger children, of Madeleine’s age, to be abducted in a more planned way,
to be trafficked. The options in Eastern Europe for such trafficking are so
great that the question has to be asked why Praia da Luz would be regarded as
an appropriate location to find victims. (7)
One of the most challenging aspects of
Madeleine’s disappearance is the alacrity with which the McCanns embraced the
media. Possibly they should have been advised that had the publicity not been
so great an opportunistic abductor would probably have eventually let Madeleine
go. Abductors who had planned to take Madeleine, possibly even as part of an
intended ransom demand, would have been disturbed by the feeling that the
world’s media were waiting for them to act and would be driven even farther
underground. (8) The McCanns may not realise the irony of calling the fund they
have set up to find their daughter Leaving No Stone Unturned Limited. Carrying
out a search by turning over every stone is a sure recipe for creating chaos.
Habits of the creatures you are looking for need to be studied and understood.
Then you can turn over the appropriate stones before your quarry has moved on
or killed its prey. (9)
 |
| Gravure de Daniel Hopfer |
(1) Pourquoi vois-tu la paille qui est dans l'œil de ton frère et n'aperçois-tu pas la poutre qui est dans ton œil à toi ? Luc 6, 41 (2) Cet article n'est pas le premier écrit par David Canter (où sont-ils ?), mais il n'en écrivit pas d'autre, hormis celui qui suit et bien que l'information petit à petit ait fait son chemin. Peut-être que David Canter croit dur comme fer que l'on n'est bien servi que par soi-même. (3) Est-il raisonnable de comparer cette disparition avec des enlèvements d'enfants dans d'autres pays ? Si on compare l'affaire MC à l'affaire Lindbergh en se fondant sur la fenêtre trouvée ouverte, une énorme différence surgit : demande de rançon dans le premier cas, aucun message dans le second. Si on compare l'affaire avec l'affaire de Road Hill qui a en commun une fenêtre trouvée ouverte, une difficulté surgit : la fenêtre de Road Hill ne s'ouvrait que de l'intérieur.
(4) Malheureusement DC n'indique pas de référence. Les statistiques disponibles ne disent pas la même chose.
(5)
DC fait ici exactement ce qu'il reproche en particulier à la PJ : se former une opinion et faire en sorte que les faits s'adaptent à elle, tout ce qui dépasse étant coupé. Il est en train de dire que
les MC et leurs compagnons n'ont ni le passé ni les manières de médecins
psychopathes, il est donc "exotique" et "invraisemblable" d'appliquer
ce qu'il vient de recommander comme le principe de base : commencer par
l'examen des proches de l'enfant disparu. Pour donner plus de corps à sa harangue, il fait de la
disparition un "crime haineux" que seul pourrait inspirer le "mal",
moyennant quoi il peut se permettre de "donner le bon dieu sans
confession" aux si insignifiants MC.
(6) Il y a des mois que la planète sait que la porte-fenêtre était entrouverte.
(7) Sur cette question au moins DC changera d'avis après être venu à PDL : Why
risk being caught in a quite middle-class holiday resort?
(8) Le procureur général de la république l'a remarqué aussi et a dit tout haut ce que certains ont pensé prudemment tout bas. La question demeure toutefois de savoir si ce fut une bévue ou un calcul, et pas un si mauvais calcul que ça.
(9) Peut-être à malin, malin et demi. Qui sait ?
Deux jours après la diffusion du documentaire Dispatches Special, l'un des experts, le psycho-criminologue David Canter, publia l'article suivant.
It is time to discard the myths and half-truths, Madeleine McCann was taken
18.10. 2007 - The Sunday Times
The key to a missing three-year-old girl lies in the resort itself. The reality is very different to the tale in the media
Five months after her disappearance, we are no further towards knowing exactly what happened to Madeleine McCann and we may never know the truth. However, after spending many days in Praia da Luz while making a Dispatches documentary about the case, I have come to the conclusion that the greatest likelihood is that she was abducted, and probably by a local person. There are a number of indicators that have led me to this conclusion. The days that I spent in Praia da Luz speaking to those who were there soon after that dreadful night in May, and with experienced police officers and a forensic scientist, have helped to clear away many of the myths and half-truths that have driven the accounts of Madeleine's disappearance. If you stand outside the apparently unremarkable apartment from which Madeleine vanished, the reality of unexpected horror hits home. The tidy walls and hedges that divide the apartments from the swimming pool, on the far side of which the family were eating tapas on May 3, take on a much more sinister form when you realise that they hide any clear view of the room in which the McCann children were sleeping. (1)
An abductor who knew the complex would have had to be quick to remove the child from her apartment without being seen, but he could have done it. After passing through the alleyway that ran beside the apartment, he would then have found it simple to dash across the deserted road behind the resort and through a small car park to a network of alleyways sheltered by high walls. (2) These alleyways, decorated with lush bougainvillea, provide an ideal rat-run that would be well known to local criminals. Late in the evening it would have been a simple thing to pass through these alleyways to a safe house or a car parked near by. Possible escape routes aside, one of the most convincing arguments I have heard for an abduction by a local came from my colleague at Liverpool University, Professor Kevin Browne, who advises many international agencies including the WHO and Unicef on child protection. He made clear that this quiet village could harbour a number of child abusers who had been released into the community rather than convicted. (3) The situation in Portugal was, he pointed out, very different from that in Britain today, being more the way it used to be here a decade or more ago. Compared with other countries in Western Europe, Portugal convicts a much smaller proportion of child abusers. Children are more likely to be removed from their families, ending up in institutions while their abusers walk free. As a consequence, there are not only potentially more abusers within society unmarked and unmonitored, but a whole new generation of people with an increased likelihood of becoming abusers because of their own experiences. (4)
There are limited possibilities for what happened to Madeleine. I think of these along a continuum from those, at one end, in which she played a significant role, to the other extreme at which would lie an organised network of traffickers who come to Praia de Luz specifically to find a victim. The family or close associates distance us from the possibilites involving the girl herself. Those who know the family but are not really known to the family themselves, such as service staff, lead us a step closer to the possibilities of a distant criminal network. However, there is a crucial prospect of a person who had no direct contact with the family, observing them from afar, although not part of any criminal organisation. Each possible explanation for the disappearance is driven by different assumptions.
If she had woken up in distress would she have sat and cried or wandered off into the town? If she had wandered off it would have been to try to find her parents – along a probably familiar route to where they were eating. It would have been a terrible coincidence if she had been abducted on such an unlikely journey. (5) The prospect of family or friends' involvement beggars belief. For a start, if the child had been killed in some accident, possibly as a result of an overdose, then her medically trained parents would have had to be exceptionally incompetent, for which there is no evidence. Furthermore, the friends who were with them would all have had to be willing to risk their professional careers to keep such a appalling secret for such a long time. (6)
Organised networks of people traffickers, sadly, have much more obvious opportunities for finding vulnerable children who would not be missed on the streets of many developing countries, or even in the orphanages, and sometimes the streets of Eastern Europe. Why risk being caught in a quite middle-class holiday resort? Against this backdrop, it became clear to me that the police in the Algarve simply do not have the resources to deal with crimes of this magnitude. Their expertise lies in dealing with the drug smuggling that occurs frequently between North Africa and here. But resources that the English police can bring to bear quickly are unlikely to be available to the Portuguese police in any serious inquiry.
Detective Chief Superintendent Chris Stevenson, who headed the Soham investigation into the murders of Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman in 2002, made clear in his contribution to the documentary that the British police would have followed the detailed procedure laid down in an inch-thick "murder manual" – a painstakingly systematic approach that can send the cost of the average murder inquiry to £1 million. (7) Without these resources, the Portuguese police have had to proceed very differently. They have to find ways of taking the short cuts that detectives in fact and fiction have always had to take in the past. This consists of forming a view of what the likely cause of the crime is and using that in the search for clues.
For me the most obvious possibility is the local offender quickly escaping down the rat-run of dark alleys. One witness is reported as seeing a man rushing away from the complex with a child wrapped in a blanket shortly after the last reported sighting of Madeleine. (8) The days spent discussing the disappearance of Madeleine in the actual location where the McCanns had been on holiday provided a rather different perspective from the one heralded in the British media. The little girl may just have been in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Eh oui, à qui le dit David Canter ? Le temps est plus que venu de jeter les mythes et les demi-vérités à la poubelle !
Au mauvais endroit, au mauvais moment... Tout est bien qui finit mal ?
(1) Que veut dire David Canter ? L'immeuble G5 ne fait pas partie de l'OC qui loue certains appartements appartenant à des particuliers. Le G5 n'est donc pas dans l'enceinte "Tapas" de l'OC, enceinte enclose de hauts murs et accessible uniquement par un petit bâtiment abritant la réception. Entre l'enceinte Tapas et le bloc G5, il y a une allée publique assez large, bordée d'un côté par le haut mur de l'OC et de l'autre par les murs plus bas des patios associés aux appartements du rez-de-chaussée. Les enfants MC ne dormaient pas du côté sud de l'immeuble, mais du côté nord. Rien n'aurait empêché de leur attribuer la chambre sud, car les deux chambres étaient équippées de deux lits d'une personne. Ils étaient hors de portée visuelle et auditive, la distance entre parents et enfants, à vol d'oiseau ou non, n'étant pertinente que du point de vue du temps passé par le parent parti faire une ronde.
(2) Remarquer que David Canter n'explique pas comment un ravisseur intervenant rapidement et se faufilant dans le réseau d'allées bordées de hauts murs s'y serait pris pour ne pas réveiller sa victime et l'empêcher de hurler.
(3) Suppositions, suppositions et argument d'autorité..
(4) Une supposition qui va loin ! S'épargnant délibérément l'effort de citer sources et chiffres (les lecteurs du Sunday Times s'embarrassent-ils de ce genre de détail ?), David Canter énonce qu'il y a moins de condamnations pour violences sexuelles sur mineur au Portugal qu'ailleurs en Europe occidentale. C'est probablement exact, mais ce qu'il en déduit ne laisse pas d'étonner : Si on y sanctionne moins, ce n'est pas parce qu'il s'y produit moins d'abus sexuels qu'ailleurs, mais par laxisme..., la conséquence étant que non seulement y a plus de prédateurs en liberté au Portugal qu'ailleurs, mais qu'il a plus de potentiels prédateurs qu'ailleurs, les victimes, faute de réparation, ayant tendance à devenir prédateurs elles-mêmes. CQFD.
(5) Au moment où il écrivait ces lignes, DC ignorait le récit des larmes rapporté par les parents de Madeleine. Il est probable qu'il y aurait trouvé un argument de plus en faveur de cette thèse.
(6) Aucun pédiatre qui se respecte ne prescrira de sédatifs à un enfant qui a du mal à s'endormir parce qu'il a mal au ventre ou est tendu ou a peur de rester tout seul dans le noir. L'overdose, s'agissant de médecins, est une hypothèse aberrante, mais bien d'autres accidents sont possibles. Seulement en cas de force majeure.
(7) Ironiquement l'enquête de Operation Grange, commencée en mai 2011, a déjà coûté 11 millions de livres...
(8) Tannerman, qui ne se ruait pas et dont l'enfant n'était pas enveloppé dans une couverture... Démasqué par DCI Andy Redwook, le chef de Operation Grange, et identifié comme Crecheman, autrement dit un père revenant de la crèche avec son enfant dans les bras.
Television villains - crocodile tears, lies and videotape
18.05.2009 - David Canter (Timesonline)
A generation of criminals brought up on reality TV shows us how easily the camera – or those in front of it – can lie
We live in a media-savvy age. The game shows and endless coverage of the lives of ordinary people that is called "reality television" educate all who watch how to act in front of the cameras. They also provide a way of shaping the meaning of what people do. Children no longer aspire to be train drivers or astronauts, as they did in the past, but to be "famous". This means appearing on television.
People used to be shy of cameras but now many feel their identity is only given form when it is broadcast on television. Yet there is a price to pay for this growing sophistication and desire to engage with public broadcasts. It can easily be hijacked. A new generation of criminals seems to be emerging who use their time in front of the cameras, shedding tears in public, as a way of maintaining their fictional stories.
In contributing to the documentary Tears, Lies and Videotape, I had the opportunity to study the television appearances of a number of people who claimed to be searching for a missing partner or child whom it later turned out they had killed or helped to abduct. Their understanding of how the media works and their ability to pluck the public heartstrings was masterly. Yet none of these people were particularly intelligent or sophisticated. Nonetheless they showed that you do not need any training as an actor, or a part in a Mike Leigh film, to be able to improvise a fictitious role in front of the television cameras.
We have no obvious label for these cases where the culprit appeals for help, other than them exhibiting crocodile tears, so let us call them "crocodiles". These crocodiles teach us the mechanisms by which big lies are perpetrated. They hook into a plausible story of the moment.
Tracie Andrews claimed that her partner Lee Harvey had been attacked in an incident that was quickly labelled "road rage". As a former model she was comfortable in front of the cameras and so confidently invented a story of being attacked by a driver who had played "cat and mouse" and had "staring eyes". She took advantage of the headline clichés created by current "rages", from "air rage" to "shop rage". These imply a sudden, unthinking outburst of violence, so that by making reference to them no further elaboration seems necessary. The lie is supported by the implicit story in which it is embedded.
The most telling example of how our susceptibility to an apparently plausible sob story can be manipulated was when Karen Matthews declared that her daughter Shannon had gone missing. As often happens when such cases hit the headlines I was approached by journalists and asked to provide a "profile" of the sort of person who would have abducted Shannon. The assumption was that there were close parallels to Madeleine McCann's case. When I pointed out the differences in the age of the victim, the locality, how the child had vanished and the family circumstances, my response was treated with some surprise. When she was found to be involved in her daughter's abduction, the news was then about what a clever actress she had been. But watching the recordings of her during the period her daughter was missing shows that she never really had to lie directly at all. She did what many people do when they want to be deceptive. She played to the expectations of those around her.
On a number of occasions Matthews actually told the truth, but it was interpreted to fit in with an abduction scenario. She said she was sure that Shannon was alive and being held by someone nearby who knew Shannon and her as well. She even hinted that she felt she could no longer trust those close to her. In her television appeals Matthews emphasised how Shannon's father and her family was missing her. The hole that might have been expected in Matthews's own life was never expressed. With hindsight even her initial 999 call was a rather formal "I want to report my daughter is missing".
In earlier studies I have done it emerged that false calls to 999 are often distinct from genuine ones by the false caller's determination to get the message across, as opposed to expressing the anxiety and emotion of a real situation.
Perhaps we should not be so surprised at Matthews's ability to deceive so many people for so long. Studies have shown that police officers are no better at telling whether someone is lying or not than anyone else. Most of us find it far more difficult to spot deception than we realise. If you wanted to reach for a Darwinian interpretation of this weakness we all have, then it may be argued that the hominids who could dissimulate most effectively were most likely to mate, so effective deception has become hard-wired into our very beings.
Detectives identify liars because they tend to assume that most people talking to them are being economical with the truth, especially if their interviewees are known to have committed crimes in the past. But when their interlocutors are apparently the victims of a crime, there is a tendency to respond with sympathy rather than suspicion. This concern is especially likely when the account given by the victim fits well with a storyline that we have all come to accept from earlier headlines and saturation television coverage.
We interpret how these apparent victims act in the frame of the many factual and fictional accounts of crime that fill the media. When Paul Dyson appealed for help to find his missing partner Joanne Nelson he said she meant the world to him and he missed her terribly. He shed real tears. Given the outpourings of genuine grief that are broadcast, it does not occur to most of us that someone who kills in the anger and frustration of trying to prevent his loved one from leaving him will quite honestly say he misses the victim and they were the most important person in his life. He will even be telling the truth when he says, as Dyson did, that he wants her back.
As in other forms of economy the ready currency of grief undermines its value. For a while false sorrow is squandered. The problem this causes is that it can then become valueless. Other stories take the place of the distraught parent or partner and narratives of devious "crocodiles" replace them. As long as exciting stories float free of the facts then the media and the police may be convinced by them. We have to distinguish between reality and the images that appear on our screens. It is only when we dig behind the headlines that the truth will emerge.
18.05.2009 - David Canter (Timesonline)
A generation of criminals brought up on reality TV shows us how easily the camera – or those in front of it – can lie
We live in a media-savvy age. The game shows and endless coverage of the lives of ordinary people that is called "reality television" educate all who watch how to act in front of the cameras. They also provide a way of shaping the meaning of what people do. Children no longer aspire to be train drivers or astronauts, as they did in the past, but to be "famous". This means appearing on television.
People used to be shy of cameras but now many feel their identity is only given form when it is broadcast on television. Yet there is a price to pay for this growing sophistication and desire to engage with public broadcasts. It can easily be hijacked. A new generation of criminals seems to be emerging who use their time in front of the cameras, shedding tears in public, as a way of maintaining their fictional stories.
In contributing to the documentary Tears, Lies and Videotape, I had the opportunity to study the television appearances of a number of people who claimed to be searching for a missing partner or child whom it later turned out they had killed or helped to abduct. Their understanding of how the media works and their ability to pluck the public heartstrings was masterly. Yet none of these people were particularly intelligent or sophisticated. Nonetheless they showed that you do not need any training as an actor, or a part in a Mike Leigh film, to be able to improvise a fictitious role in front of the television cameras.
We have no obvious label for these cases where the culprit appeals for help, other than them exhibiting crocodile tears, so let us call them "crocodiles". These crocodiles teach us the mechanisms by which big lies are perpetrated. They hook into a plausible story of the moment.
Tracie Andrews claimed that her partner Lee Harvey had been attacked in an incident that was quickly labelled "road rage". As a former model she was comfortable in front of the cameras and so confidently invented a story of being attacked by a driver who had played "cat and mouse" and had "staring eyes". She took advantage of the headline clichés created by current "rages", from "air rage" to "shop rage". These imply a sudden, unthinking outburst of violence, so that by making reference to them no further elaboration seems necessary. The lie is supported by the implicit story in which it is embedded.
The most telling example of how our susceptibility to an apparently plausible sob story can be manipulated was when Karen Matthews declared that her daughter Shannon had gone missing. As often happens when such cases hit the headlines I was approached by journalists and asked to provide a "profile" of the sort of person who would have abducted Shannon. The assumption was that there were close parallels to Madeleine McCann's case. When I pointed out the differences in the age of the victim, the locality, how the child had vanished and the family circumstances, my response was treated with some surprise. When she was found to be involved in her daughter's abduction, the news was then about what a clever actress she had been. But watching the recordings of her during the period her daughter was missing shows that she never really had to lie directly at all. She did what many people do when they want to be deceptive. She played to the expectations of those around her.
On a number of occasions Matthews actually told the truth, but it was interpreted to fit in with an abduction scenario. She said she was sure that Shannon was alive and being held by someone nearby who knew Shannon and her as well. She even hinted that she felt she could no longer trust those close to her. In her television appeals Matthews emphasised how Shannon's father and her family was missing her. The hole that might have been expected in Matthews's own life was never expressed. With hindsight even her initial 999 call was a rather formal "I want to report my daughter is missing".
In earlier studies I have done it emerged that false calls to 999 are often distinct from genuine ones by the false caller's determination to get the message across, as opposed to expressing the anxiety and emotion of a real situation.
Perhaps we should not be so surprised at Matthews's ability to deceive so many people for so long. Studies have shown that police officers are no better at telling whether someone is lying or not than anyone else. Most of us find it far more difficult to spot deception than we realise. If you wanted to reach for a Darwinian interpretation of this weakness we all have, then it may be argued that the hominids who could dissimulate most effectively were most likely to mate, so effective deception has become hard-wired into our very beings.
Detectives identify liars because they tend to assume that most people talking to them are being economical with the truth, especially if their interviewees are known to have committed crimes in the past. But when their interlocutors are apparently the victims of a crime, there is a tendency to respond with sympathy rather than suspicion. This concern is especially likely when the account given by the victim fits well with a storyline that we have all come to accept from earlier headlines and saturation television coverage.
We interpret how these apparent victims act in the frame of the many factual and fictional accounts of crime that fill the media. When Paul Dyson appealed for help to find his missing partner Joanne Nelson he said she meant the world to him and he missed her terribly. He shed real tears. Given the outpourings of genuine grief that are broadcast, it does not occur to most of us that someone who kills in the anger and frustration of trying to prevent his loved one from leaving him will quite honestly say he misses the victim and they were the most important person in his life. He will even be telling the truth when he says, as Dyson did, that he wants her back.
As in other forms of economy the ready currency of grief undermines its value. For a while false sorrow is squandered. The problem this causes is that it can then become valueless. Other stories take the place of the distraught parent or partner and narratives of devious "crocodiles" replace them. As long as exciting stories float free of the facts then the media and the police may be convinced by them. We have to distinguish between reality and the images that appear on our screens. It is only when we dig behind the headlines that the truth will emerge.
