17.... - Pat Brown - Chroniques

Why the Smith Sighting - and not the Last Photo - is the Key to the Madeleine McCann Case –10.04.2017

An awful lot of people believe the "Last Photo" is the key to what happened to Maddie. I disagree. Furthermore, I don't believe it is even very important in the analysis of this case. Worse, it is a huge distraction which has lead to a very complicated theory of Maddie dying on Sunday which lacks the support of solid, credible evidence. Furthermore, it completely negates the most important piece of evidence in the case - the Smith sighting. Let me explain how, as a profiler, the "Last Photo" as any kind of evidence pales in comparison to the Smith sighting and excessive focus on it should be laid to rest.

First of all, the "Last Photo" is not photoshopped. It is a real photo. Now, as to when it was taken, I can accept that it might not have been taken when the McCanns claimed (although I believe it may well have been taken when they said it was). I will go even further - to make my point - and be willing to accept that one possibility is that it might have been taken on Sunday. So, let's say it was indeed taken on that day. What does that tell us? Here is where the speculation goes off track. As a profiler, all I can tell you is if it is true the photo was taken days before the McCanns claim, there might be a half dozen reasons for them choosing that photo and saying it was taken later in the week, none of which are very alarming to the point of throwing up a huge red flag. Here is an example of how speculating on certain evidence leads to false conclusions.

My granddaughter was born three years ago. She was born at my daughter's home in a planned home birth quite close to her due date, just a day or so early. At the time of her birth, I lived just thirty minutes from my daughter's home. On the occasion of my granddaughter's first birthday, my daughter cobbled together one of those first-year-of-life albums with photos from birth through turning one. As one peruses the photos, one cannot help notice that there is but one photo of me, the only grandmother, in the whole book and I am conspicuously absent from the birth photos. My ex-husband is shown holding the newborn baby in a couple of photos, the baby's uncles are there with big smiles on their faces, my best friend (who was an "aunty" to my daughter during her childhood) is there helping at the birth, but I am not. Why am I, the grandmother of the baby, the mother of the woman giving birth, not there?

Okay, start speculating.
Did any of you come up with these possibilities?
My daughter and I have a bad relationship and I wasn't invited to the birth.
I was busy doing television and my career and publicity was more important than being at the birth.
I was off traveling - having planned a vacation around the time of my daughter's due date.
I was opposed to home birth an refused to show up and support my daughter's choice. Yeah, none of these are true. Oh, and, wait, look here! What is this?

Yes, that is a photo of me at the birth! What the heck? Where did that come from and why, if it isn't a photoshopped picture or a photo of me with another baby, or a photo of me with the baby on a day sometime after the birth, why wasn't that photo in my daughter's picture book? Why would it be left out?

First of all, let's talk about if the photo is actually me at the birth. Yes, it is a real photo. I was there. Not only was I there, but I chose to be there under stressful circumstances. Oh, no, not that I had any problems with my daughter; our relationship was fine. And I am a supporter of home birth; my son, David, was born at home. In fact, I went with my daughter to her final midwifery appointment and as soon as she called and told me she was in labor, I raced over to her house. I would never have planned a vacation during the last month of her pregnancy and I would have turned down all television and work-related jobs to be present at the birth. In fact, the stressful circumstance which made my presence difficult was that my mother was dying in another state and I had to choose whether to be at her deathbed or at my granddaughter's birth.

I had been at my father's side when he died just a year earlier and I had been making trips back and forth to New York to help my sister care for my mother in her last year of life as she declined with Alzheimers. After she fell and was hospitalized for the last time, my other sister went up to New York to help as my daughter's due date was nearing. I then had to choose to be with my mother or to be with my daughter, not knowing exactly when my daughter would give birth or my mother would leave this world. I did what I thought my mother would sanction; I stayed for the birth. My mother died the same day, just hours after the baby was born, so I was unable to fly there after the birth to be there in time to say goodbye.

So, yes, I was at the birth, totally involved, and none of the negative speculation would have been accurate. So, what about the photo? Quite simple really. My daughter didn't have that photo. I never had sent it over to her. The photos she DID have of me weren't very flattering and she knows I hate bad photos of myself, so she kindly did not include them in the book. Yes, other grandmothers wouldn't have cared if they looked like a wildebeest holding the baby but my daughter knew it would make me shudder. I asked a woman who put a photo of me kissing an iguana in a marketplace during a trip to Nicaragua to pull the photo from Facebook; the iguana's sideview of it's neck and dewlap hanging down looked a whole lot better than mine. I love the photo (privately) but not for public viewing! Okay, call me what you will - proud, vain, whatever - I just hate embarrassingly bad photos of myself at my age.

So, now, see how speculation as to why there was no photo of me at my granddaughter's birth can go so far off course? Now, think about the "Last Photo" of the McCanns. Why would they lie, if they even did, about the time it was taken? I can think of a whole bunch of reasons which are far less bizarre than Maddie being dead by Sunday which then requires a massive plan to hide the fact and cooperation of a great number of people being needed to carry on the charade for the next four days.

Let's see.

1. There WERE other photos of Maddie that week but they were blurred or not very good, so the McCanns chose the pool photo but said it was on Thursday because that made the photo more compelling (the LAST photo! The McCanns like spin and know its value).

2. They were other photos of Maddie but THEY look bad in them (and Kate and Gerry like to look good).

3. There were no other photos past Sunday because once they did their day with the children, they dumped them in care during the day and left them at night because they were busy enjoying their adult vacation and they didn't want to admit not spending time with them.

In other words, it is dangerous to speculate, creating dots that do not necessarily exist and then connecting those dots to create a theory. To me, the "Last Photo" is just a photo and I can find no reason to exaggerate its meaning.

Now, the Smith sighting is a completely different animal. THIS is the KEY to the case and yet it is even poo-poo'ed as having merit, mostly because it invalidates the earlier death theory of Madeleine. Simply, if the Smiths saw Gerry carrying Madeleine toward the beach on the evening of May 3, then Madeleine died an accidental death while being neglected and there is no big child sex ring that Gerry and his friends and the British governement are involved in.

But, we can't invalidate or diminish the Smith sighting for one HUGE reason and this is the KEY to the case. The McCanns refused to acknowledge the Smith sighting themselves. Unlike every parent I have ever dealt with whose child went missing or was found murdered, the McCanns were not interested in the biggest lead in their child going missing. Why is this? There can only be ONE reason; Gerry does NOT have a solid alibi for the time of the Smith sighting and Gerry most likely IS the person carrying a little girl toward the beach at the time the Smiths saw the man in the street. For if Gerry DID have a solid alibi at that time, the McCanns would have jumped at a sighting that was validated by an entire bunch of strangers, not just a close friend who could easily not be believed (and wasn't). The McCanns ignoring of the Smith sighting is the bombshell in the Madeleine McCann case, not some photo that has a half dozen reasons for possibily not being the last one taken of Maddie.

Even if I could explain away every other behavior of the McCanns and every other piece of evidence in this case, the one thing I cannot possibly come up with is an alternative explanation for is the McCanns ignoring of the Smith sighting. If they are innocent of any connection to Maddie going missing, they would have jumped on the Smith sighting as a huge lead as to who might have taken their daughter. And if they are guilty of involvement in the disappearance of Maddie, their ignoring of the Smith sighting is the strongest piece of evidence we have of Maddie's death and subsequent cover-up being an inside job and not a stranger abduction.


Why the M. Rowley Interview Confirms my Belief that the SY McCann Investigation is a Farce  26.04.2017
I am stunned that Mark Rowley would give an interview which essentially details the fraud that this investigation is, but I thank him for it. For years I have been stating that the Scotland Yard review and investigation was a farce and a whitewash and I have had many angry emails and comments online that I am completely wrong, that Scotland Yard would never behave in such a manner - that surely, they are either truly searching for an abductor (for those who believe that Maddie was abducted, or that they are surely cleverly coming around to arresting the McCanns by way of eliminating all possible other suspects and secretly moving in for the kill. I have adamantly said for a long time that both sides are suffering from wishful thinking, that NOTHING Scotland Yard has done for six years resembles a proper and honest investigation. Now, that Mark Rowley has gone on record with the following statements, I find my conclusions to be well founded. I will comment on what Rowley says below.
 
Transcript of interview between AC Mark Rowley (MR) and broadcast media for use from 21:00hrs on Tuesday, 25 April.

Q: Six years’ on of Scotland Yard’s involvement, a team of largely 30 people, £11/12 million you’ve spent, what have you achieved?
MR: We’ve achieved an awful lot. I think you know that we have a track record for using cold cases on serious old cases, and we solve many cases that way. This is no different in one respect but is particularly complicated. I think people get seduced perhaps by what they see in TV dramas where the most complex cases are solved in 30 minutes or 60 minutes with adverts as well. What we started with here was something extraordinary. We started with 40,000 documents. We’ve got the original Portuguese investigation and six or eight sets of private detectives who’ve done work and we did appeals to the public, four Crimewatch appeals, hoovering as much information as possible. Sifting that, structuring it and working through it is an immense effort. It’s much more ‘hard slog’ in reality than it is inspiration. That takes time and it takes systems. That’s what we’ve been working on. And what you’ve seen in the bits which have been reported publically is those appeals, when we’ve announced suspects, when we’ve made particular announcements, slowly crunching through it and focusing our attention and making progress. And of course at one stage we had 600 people who at one stage have been of interest to the enquiry, that doesn’t mean that they are suspects, people who were suspicious at the time or have a track record which makes us concerned about them, sifting, which focused the enquiry increasingly and when you’re doing this then across a continent and with multiple languages and having to build working relationships with the Portuguese, you put that together and that takes real time.

PB: Apparently, you have achieved nothing of any merit. You haven't even proven an abduction or come up with a viable suspect. What you have accomplished is ignoring the evidence and spending a lot of the taxpayer's money.Q: So when you talk of success and progress, it’s really a case of eliminating things? You’re not getting any nearer to finding out what happened?

MR: So our mission here is to do everything reasonable to provide an answer to Kate and Gerry McCann. I’d love to guarantee them that we would get an answer, sadly investigations can never be 100 per cent successful. But, it’s our job, and I’ve discussed it with them, we’ll do everything we can do, reasonably, to find an answer to what’s happened to Madeleine. And I know, Pedro, the senior Portuguese colleague I’ve worked with and his team, have a shared determination, to find an answer. That’s what we’re going to do.

PB: Your mission is to provide an answer to Kate and Gerry McCann? That is exactly OPPOSITE of any proper mandate for conducting any criminal investigation. You are to only have allegiance to truth and justice. Besides, unless the parents of a missing child have been eliminated by way of solid evidence, they remain suspects and you cannot be working on their behalf.Q: You’ve described it as a ‘unique’ case. Why is it unique?

MR: I think it’s unique in two or three respects. First of all the way its captured attention in different countries is quite unusual. You’ll get a very high-profile case in a particular country, the way it has captured interest across countries, I think is significant. The length of it. And it’s unusual to have a case like this where you’re doing a missing persons investigation, where ten years on, we still don’t have definitive evidence about exactly what’s happened. And that’s why we’re open minded, even if we have to be pessimistic about the prospects, we are open minded because we don’t have definitive evidence about what happened to Madeleine.

PB: Wait, you have no definitive evidence (but you have some which does not point to abduction) but you are open-minded to what? Only an abduction? And you think it is significant to the case itself that it has captured the interest of the world and it is unusual to have a case be worked on for so long....how is any of this relevant to the actual crime itself? The reason people are fascinated is because of the UK interference and whitewashing of the McCanns and the amount of money spent accomplishing nothing.Q: You say you haven’t got definitive evidence, do you have any clues at all which might explain what happened to her?

MR: So, you’ll understand from your experience, the way murder investigations work, detectives will start off with various hypotheses, about what’s happened in a murder, what has happened in a missing person’s investigation, whether someone has been abducted. All those different possibilities will be worked through. This case is no different from that but the evidence is limited at the moment to be cast iron as to which one of those hypotheses we should follow. So we have to keep an open mind. As I said we have some critical lines of enquiry, those linked to particular lines of enquiry, but I’m not going to discuss them today because they are very much live investigations.

PB: What a pile of malarkey! What ARE you saying? You don't know which hypothesis to follow? That is because you aren't following the evidence, you are just theorizing abduction possibilities and abductors out of the air.

Q: Do you have some evidence, in your six years of investigation, have you unearthed some evidence to explain what happened?
MR: We’ve got some thoughts on what we think the most likely explanations might be and we’re pursuing those. And those link into the key lines of enquiry we’re doing now. As I said, those are very much live investigations and I know that’s frustrating when you’re doing a programme looking back but it’s hard to talk about that now, it’s going to frustrate the investigation.

PB: What?

Q: I know it’s not your money, it has come from the Home Office, but how do you justify spending so much on one missing person?
MR: Big cases can take a lot of resource and a lot of time and we have that with more conventional cases which Scotland Yard gets involved with that run over many years. I think it’s worth noting that this cold case approach we do, every year we’re solving cases that have gone cold years ago. I think in the last year it’s 35 rape cases, and two murder cases. Some of those reaching back to the 1980s. The cold case approach does have some expense, it is time-consuming, looking back at old records, but it does help solve old cases and you give families and victims an understanding of what went on. It’s worthwhile. This case is unusual, it’s not in Scotland Yard’s remit to investigate crimes across the world normally. In this case, in 2011, the Portuguese and British prime ministers were discussing the case and agreed that Scotland Yard would help and recognizing that it’s not what we’re normally funded for, we were given extra money to put a team together to work with the Portuguese and that’s what we’ve been doing ever since. We’ve tried to be careful about public money and we started with that massive sifting and we’ve narrowed the enquiry, the funding has reduced accordingly. And we will stick with it as long as the funding is available, as long as there are sensible lines of enquiry to pursue.

PB: You try to be careful with public money, so you ignored the actual evidence, sifted through piles of useless crap from the PIs, pursued suspects and dug up land based on nary a "nugget" of evidence and that is how you take spend the taxpayer's money? Remind me not to send you out to the store with my credit card to buy a jug of milk.

Q: You’ve talked about 600 people. You at one point had four suspects. Can you tell me the story about how they came into the frame?
MR: So, one of the lines of enquiry, one of the hypotheses was could this be a burglary gone wrong? Someone is doing a burglary, panicked maybe by a waking child, which leads to Madeleine going missing.

PB: Why, let's make up a story based on zero evidence and find some local riff-raff and make it them!

Q: Most burglars would just run out.
MR: Possibly.

PB: No, probably.

Q: Difficult for the public to understand that potential theory, given that every child wakes up.
MR: In my experience, if you try to apply the rational logic of a normal person sat in their front room to what criminals do under pressure, you tend to make mistakes, so it was a sensible hypothesis, it’s still not entirely ruled out, but there was also lots of material about people acting suspiciously, a potential history of some recent thefts from holiday apartments. Working through that it was a sensible thing to pursue, and we had some descriptions to work with, and that led to us identifying amongst the 600, a group of people who were worth pursuing, have they been involved in this activity, have they had a role in Madeleine going missing? Because what the hypothesis was, then we’ve got some searches, we’ve worked with the Portuguese, they were spoken to, and we pretty much closed off that group of people. That’s one example of the journey I spoke about, you start with this massive pool of evidence, you understand it, structure it, prioritise it, you work through and you try and sift the potential suspects, and then you end up where we are today with some key lines of enquiry.

PB: Yes, criminals do make mistakes under pressure, but they usually leave evidence in the wake of it and don't kidnap a little child who can't identify them anyway. They don't sedate children during robberies and they don't accidentally kill a child, run away, and come back later to retrieve a child. What murder mysteries does your team read?

Q: As I understand it, the key to your suspicion about those four suspects was very much to do with their use of mobile phones and one of the criticisms of the original Portuguese police investigation was that they didn’t interrogate the mobile phone data as thoroughly as they could have done. How important was it for you as that part of your investigation for you to pick up and thoroughly investigate the mobile phone data?
MR: So that phone data is always something we will look at and we wouldn’t have had it available if the Portuguese had not got hold of it at the time so we need to be careful about criticism. But we had the data available and we worked with the Portuguese and that was part of the background to do with phone data and various sightings. There was enough there to say, not to prove the case, but there was something worth looking at in more detail and that’s what we did.

PB. People using mobile phones! What a bizarre behavior!

Q: How old were the suspects because I think you interviewed them originally through the Portuguese beginning of July 2014?
MR: By the end of the year we were happy to have brought them out and we were moving on to other parts of the investigation.

PB: Did you read all the commentary mocking your burglar theory?

Q: Do you have any other suspects at the moment?
MR: So, we have got some critical lines of enquiry that are definitely worth pursuing and I’m not going to go into further detail on those. Another I would say though is, these lines of enquiry we have to date, they are the product of information available at the time and information that has come from public appeals that we have done. Four Crimewatch appeals, and other media channels have been incredibly helpful, including yourselves, and thousands of pieces of information have come forward, some useful some not, but amongst that have been some nuggets that have thrown some extra light on the original material that came from the time and that is one of the things that has helped us to make progress and have some critical lines of enquiry we are pursuing today.

PB: I think you mean "No."

Q: The question of other suspects, is there anyone like those four who have been dismissed, is there anyone who has the “aguido” status?
MR: I’m not going to give that level of detail away, we have got some critical lines of enquiry and we are working with the Portuguese on that, we are both interested in. Disclosing any more information on that will not help the investigation.

PB. Yes, the McCanns, but we are not investigating them.

Q: You said the burglary gone wrong theory is not completely dismissed. What are the other theories? You have spoken in the past, Andy Redwood spoke in the past about focusing on the idea of a stranger abduction, is that still the focus, or a focus?
MR: Whilst we’ve got some lead ideas there is still a lot of unknown on this case. We’ve got a young girl gone missing 10 years ago. Until we get to the point where we have solved it, we’re unlikely to have definitive evidence as to exactly what happened at the time. All the hypotheses that you or I could come up with, they all have to remain open and the key lines of enquiry open today focus on one or two of those areas but we have to keep them all open until we get to that critical piece of evidence that narrows it down and helps us to be more confident as to exactly what has happened on the day Maddie went missing.

PB. Don't call her, Maddie; the McCanns don't like that. And are you saying absolutely nothing again?

Q: Over the years you have appealed for a number of what could be called suspicious-looking men, watching the apartment, watching the apartment block. Knocking on the doors touting for a bogus charity. You have issued E-fits, have you been able to identify and eliminate any of those?
MR: Some of them have been identified and eliminated but not all of them.

PB: And none of them have been proven to have the slightest connection to the disappearance of Maddie.

Q: The theory of a sex predator responsible for Maddie’s disappearance is something the Portuguese police have focussed on. How big a part of your investigation has that been, because there were a series of sex attack on sleeping, mainly British children in nearby resorts. So how important has that been to your investigation?
MR: That has been one key line of enquiry. The reality is in any urban area, you cast your net wide and you find a whole range of offences and sex offenders who live nearby and those coincidences need to be sifted out; what is a coincidence and what could be linked to the investigation we are currently dealing with and just like we do in London we have been doing in Portugal so offences which could be linked have to be looked at and either ruled in or ruled out and that’s the work we have been doing.

PB: Well, a small piece of truth. Yes, sex offenses occur in many areas and are not necessarily linked to the case at hand. In fact, there isn't a shred of evidence these other incidents have a thing to do with the McCann case.

Q: Andy Redwood, the first senior investigating officer, said in one interview his policy was to go right back to the beginning, accept nothing, but one thing you appear to have accepted is that this was an abduction. It’s in your first remit statement, it refers to ‘the abduction’, which rather suggests right from the start you had a closed mind to the possibility of parents’ involvement, an accident or Madeleine simply walking out of the apartment.
MR: Two points to that, firstly the involvement of the parents, that was dealt with at the time by the original investigation by the Portuguese. We had a look at all the material and we are happy that was all dealt with and there is no reason whatsoever to reopen that or start rumours that was a line of investigation. The McCanns are parents of a missing girl, we are trying to get to the bottom of. In terms of Andy using the word abduction, she was not old enough to set off and start her own life. However she left that apartment, she has been abducted. It is not a 20-year-old who has gone missing and who has made a decision to start a new life, this is a young girl who is missing and at the heart of this has been an abduction.

PB: The questioner says that there is a "remit that refers to abduction and you just ignored that point. You also ignored that there was a policy (Redwood? Really? Maybe he DID try and was ousted?) that one should go back to the beginning, accept nothing - something I have been saying for years is the hallmark of a REAL police investigation, but you don't obviously agree. You are okay with accepting the previous investigator's conclusions...wait..didn't they make the McCanns the top suspects and weren't they still not cleared as suspects when the case was shelved? So, you are outright lying here. And then you go on about how Maddie didn't go off on her own to start a new life??? Good lord, this is how you reason?

Q: One of the biggest criticisms of the Portuguese investigation, which they acknowledge as well, is that they did not interrogate the parents from the start, if only to eliminate them. When you started your investigation, you appear to have done the same. Did you formally interview the McCann’s under caution, ever consider them as suspects?
MR: So when we started, we started five or so years into this and there is already a lot of ground been covered, we don’t cover the same ground, what we do is pull all the material we had at the start, all the Portuguese material, private detective material, with all the work that had been done, what that evidence supports, what rules these lines of enquiry out, what keeps them open and you progress forward. It would be no different if there were a cold case in London, a missing person from 1990, we would go back to square one look at all the material and if the material was convincing it ruled out that line of enquiry we would look somewhere else. So you reflect on the original material, you challenge it, don’t take it at face value. You don’t restart an investigation pretending it doesn’t exist and do all the same enquiries again that is not constructive.

PB: Oh, so you don't really go back to the beginning; you just decide what else you want to explore. I agree that if there has been adequate investigation prior in a direction to rule out something, yes, you don't repeat the exercise, but you DO go back where there are gaps and people who have not been eliminated. The McCanns were NOT eliminated and there were so many anomalies with them and their friends, that not going back and investigating them and reinterviewing them is either incompetence or misconduct on the part of the detectives.

Q: The first detective in charge of the case said he was going right back to the start of the case and accepting nothing. It seems very much he was suggesting that it was going to be a brand new investigation.
MR: It’s a brand new investigation, you are going in with an open mind. You are not ignoring the evidence in front of you. That would be a bizarre conclusion. You would look at that material, what does it prove, what it doesn’t. What hypothesis does it open what does it close down and you work your way through the case.

PB: How can you have an open mind and ignore the McCanns as suspects?

Q: Just to be clear you did not interview the McCanns as potential suspects?
MR: No

PB: Well, there is finally the proof of what I have been saying for a long time. The police are not secretly investigating the McCanns, interviewing them behind the scenes. This simple "No" is absolutely the truth.

Q: Let’s move to today, recently you were given more funding £84,000 to £85,000, how is that going to be used?
MR: As you understand we started with a full-sized murder team of 30 officers, that was a standard operating approach at the time. So we start with that team and work through the massive amount of investigation. The Home Office has been funding that and of course it is public money so they review that from time to time and as the enquiry has gone on we suggested we could run it with a smaller group of people and that is what happened. That recent level of funding reflects that it’s keeping the team going for the next six months and we will want to keep this running as long as there are sensible lines of enquiry and keep asking the Home Office to fund it as long as there are those open lines of enquiry.

PB: In other words, you are getting nowhere and you are trying to shut down this travesty.

Q: I know you don’t want to go into detail but are there more forensic tests, is that what is going on?
MR: I’m not going to talk about detail of the type of work going on but there are critical lines of enquiry of great interest to ourselves and our Portuguese counterparts and there are some significant investigative avenues we are pursuing that we see as very worthwhile.

PB: What he is saying is we are not interested in forensic tests because that would be connected to the McCanns as suspects.

Q: Are you still waiting for answers to new ‘rogatory’ letters. I understand how the system works if you want something in Portugal, you have to send ‘rogatory’ letter and get that approved over there. Are there letters in the post?
MR: That process you describe reflects the first four or five years of our work there, sifting through mass amounts of material, putting together with new evidence that comes from appeals, generates new enquiries and the legal requirements the Portuguese have is quite labour intensive in terms of dotting I’s and crossing T’s and working through that detail. Where we are now is much narrower much more focussed.

PB: Yeah, we are running out of phony suspects. There are not enough creepy people in Portugal left.

Q: Is there anyone you are still looking for?
MR: Where we are now is much narrower and much more focussed.

PB. Not really.

Q: There was a report recently that there was an international manhunt in regards to a person you were interested in talking to, maybe not even a suspect, maybe a witness?
MR: There are odd headlines and odd stories in newspapers on a regular basis and most of those are nonsense.

PB: Yes, most of them generated by Clarence.

Q: You say in your statement, you are getting information on a daily basis, new information, what sort of information?
MR: First of all it is indicative of the level of interest in this case, not just in this country but across the world. The team are getting emails, phone calls, new information all the time and it ranges from the eccentric, through to information that on the surface looks potentially interesting and needs to be bottomed out and are constantly sifting through them.

PB: Yes, it is embarrassing to have the whole world watching a completely bungled farce.

Q: Are you any closer to solving this then you were six years ago?
MR: I know we have a significant line of enquiry that is worth pursuing, and because of that, it could provide an answer. Until we have gone through it, I won’t know if we will get there or not. 

PB: So, no, we are not a bit closer.

Q: What area is that enquiry?
MR: Ourselves and the Portuguese are doing a critical piece of work and we don’t want to spoil it by putting titbits out on it publically.

PB. The "tidbits" are indicative as to how small the clues are...so small, they hardly qualify as anything of worth.

Q: How confident are you this will solve it for you?
MR: It is worth pursuing.

PB: It's shite.

Q: What does your instinct say about what happened to Maddie?
MR: If I start going in to my instinct having read the material of interest we are dealing with at the moment it would give away what we are looking in to so I’m not going to answer that. But what I would say from my experience of dealing with cold cases and these types of investigations is that this time, even sadly after 10 years of Maddie being missing there are nuggets of information and lines of enquiry that are worth pursuing and it is possible they may lead to an answer. As long as we have the resources to do it, and as long as we have those sensible lines of enquiry because if we can provide an answer to a family in this horrible situation that is what we must do.

PB: I have nothing to say about those "nuggets" - more teeny pieces of info - but, yeah, we aren't solving this case and we know why but we are going to give the McCanns the public answer soon and close this down. We need a bit more time to come up with the most believable answer to end this. We have to rethink the burglar thing.

Q: Do the significant lines of enquiry suggest to you Maddie is alive or dead?
MR: As I said earlier on we have no definitive evidence as to whether Maddie is alive or dead. We have to keep an open mind that is why we describe it as a missing person enquiry. Of course we understand why after so many years people would be pessimistic but we are keeping an open mind and treating it as a missing person enquiry.

PB: Except for those pesky dogs and a man carrying a pretty limp child to the beach and the fact the child has never reappeared and that IF the parents aren't covering up what happened to Maddie (her death in the apartment), it would be 99% likely that it was a child sex predator and she would be dead within hours. But, hey, let's not let evidence and logic stand in the way of spending millions of pounds of taxpayer dollars.

Q: You’ve said you are realistic about what you are dealing with, what do you mean by that?
MR: We are realistic about the prospects and the assumptions people will make 10 years on when a little girl has gone missing but there is no definitive evidence and as long as that is the case we have to have an open mind and treat it as a missing person enquiry.

PB: I don't want to talk about it.

Q: If she is alive, she is nearly 14, do you have any idea what she might be doing, where she might be, the circumstances she might be living?
MR: That is such a hypothetical question I cannot begin to answer.

PB: You can't even imagine Maddie is a fourteen-year-old.

Q: There is a chance she may still be alive.
MR: We have to keep an open mind, it is a missing person enquiry we don’t have that definitive evidence either way.

PB: No, but I am not going to admit that.

Q: How confident are you that you will solve the case?
MR: I wish I could say we will solve this. We solve more than 90 per cent of serious cases at Scotland Yard. I wish I could say I could definitely solve it but a small number of cases don’t get solved. What I have always said on this case and I’ve said to Kate and Gerry. We will do everything we can that is possible to try to find and answer. I hope to find an answer but can’t quite guarantee and as a professional police officer and dealing with the families in awful situations it always hurts you can’t guarantee success, but we will do everything we can to try to get there.

PB: We are buds with Kate and Gerry and we are readying them for their media appearances when we close the case without a definitive answer. We also want to not say Maddie is dead because that would mean the McCanns should close the fund down.

ENOUGH! If you would like to read the rest of the interview, click here.

A Decade of Deception : The Tenth Anniversary of the MMC Case  - 03.05.2017

Ten years of lies.

Lies of the parents.
Lies of their friends.
Lies of the politicians.

Lies of the police.

Lies of the media.

Behind the lies are the agendas.

Recognize those and you will find the truth.

How do you recognize agendas?

Ignore words and pay attention to behavior.

The behavior of the parents always showed they cared more for their own welfare than Madeleine's.

The behavior of their friends always showed that they cared more for distancing themselves from the case rather than involving themselves in it.

The behavior of the politicians always showed they were more interested in protecting their country more than providing assistance and cooperation.

The behavior of the police always showed they were more interested in serving the people in power rather than the ideals of justice and public safety.

The behavior of the media always showed they were more interested in ratings and earnings rather than presenting the facts and illuminating the truth.

Actions speaks louder than words but many ignore what they see - covering their eyes because to see would require them to confront the truth which would lead to a loss of faith in the things we wish to believe.

But you SHOULD lose faith. It is only by losing faith that we as a society can start to make change. We can't fix the Madeleine McCann case - it is never going to see the inside of a court of law (and the actions of the PJ and Portugal also prove this; they have done nothing of worth in this case since 2007; since then they have allowed a foreign power to run the show and make a mockery of their investigation) - but the Madeleine McCann case should be a wake-up call that we need to work to change.

We need fix what is wrong with how cases are handled by law enforcement and how we fund them.

We need to get vote better people into office and hold them accountable.

We need to strike back against false news and misrepresentation of the facts in the media.

This is what the tenth annivesary of the Madeleine McCann case is all about. Maddie has been dead for a decade, but we are not.

Will we allow the deception to continue for another decade?

 

FOX News Joins the Lying Media Brigade on the MC Case - 03.05.2019 

Yesterday, I received a phone call from a FOX NEWS journalist, Christina Corbin, who knows absolutely nothing about the McCann case. After I discussed the main issues with her, she thanked me and asked me to send her a succinct statement that they could use in their article.
I thought they would follow through with facts because just a month ago they allowed me to speak out.
This is what I sent her:

As a profiler, the most important investigative technique is to focus on the actual evidence and not create theories that have no origination in the facts. Scotland Yard has spent six years carrying out a remit that required them to view this case as a stranger abduction which clearly has tied their hands and forced them to ignore any evidence that supports Kate and Gerry McCann as having any involvement in the disappearance of their daughter. Rather than explore the findings of the blood and cadaver dogs who hit on the McCanns' vacation apartment and car, rather than examining the conflicting and changing statements of the McCanns and their friends, rather than questioning why the McCanns showed little interest in the sighting of the Smith family who saw a man carrying off a small blond girl toward the beach on the evening of Madeleine going missing...they are pursuing wild theories of child sex trafficking gangs, burglaries gone wrong, and, now on the 10th anniversary, a woman in the area wearing a purple coat. While none of the evidence at this point proves the McCanns' guilt in the disappearance of their daughter, the evidence does prove that they should be the top suspects and, if they are not, the Scotland Yard investigation is a sham.

Apparently, that didn't appeal to the editors of this FOX article and the journalist who called me. They went searching for another profiler who would give them what they wanted; they found retired FBI profiler, Mary Ann O'Toole who clearly had little familiarity with the facts of the case. This is what she said:

To Mary Ellen O'Toole, a former FBI agent, the case is "solvable" a decade later.
O'Toole, who is not involved in the investigation, said authorities must carry out two actions: re-examine old forensic evidence using new technology and re-interview key invidivuals at the resort on the night Madeleine disappeared.
"I would have a group of forensic scientists look at the evidence to see if we could re-evalute it using current technology," said O'Toole, who is currently the director of forensic sciences at George Mason University.
O'Toole said she would also re-interview all who were questioned at the resort, as well as interview individuals who might have been overlooked at the time.
"I would want to be looking at everyone: employees of the resort, delivery people, guests, customers, vendors there providing music and other services," O'Toole told Fox News.
"It’s often not the straggly-haired, off-putting individual, but someone who looks regular, quite normal," she said. "You would not rule out anybody."
The passage of time, O'Toole said, can sometimes be key in cracking open an unsolved missing persons case.
"Ten years can do a lot to people and they may now feel they can come forward with information they weren’t comfortable coming forward with at the time," she said.
O'Toole noted that stranger abductions are rare, but cited such cases in the U.S. -- including those in which the kidnap victims were later found alive -- like Elizabeth Smart, who was 14 when she was abducted from the bedroom of her parents Salt Lake City, Utah, home in 2002 and found alive nine months later.
"We’ve certainly seen cases here in the United States where children have been taken and returned, so we know there’s a possibility," she said. "That is one of the possible outcomes and we can hope for that."
Another theory that police say has not been ruled out is a "burglary gone wrong," but O'Toole and others say -- though not impossible -- it's highly unlikely.
"It’s much more likely that Madeleine was the target," said O'Toole. "People don’t morph from a jewel thief into a child abductor."
"If a stranger went into that room, that is really high-risk behavior for an offender," she said. Unless Ms. O'Toole comes forward and states that she was misreprented by FOX News than I guess she joins the many who don't bother with the facts.

Thanks, Christina Corbin, for allowing the public to learn, once again, that fake news is what the media is promoting these days and it is time they demand that they turn off worthless media outlets (which might be most of them) and tell them that they are not media outlets they trust. If the media cannot do true research and spend time working on factual news articles, they should close their doors and stop peddling this crap. If you have no understanding of a complicated case, you should not be reporting on it without diligent investigative effort and your bosses should not be telling you to just come up with anything within a few hours if they have any desire to be considered a reputable news source. And they should not telling you to follow some agenda rather than the truth.
As I have been trying to tell people for a long time, the news media is now about ratings and money and doesn't even attempt to provide facts to the citizens of their country.


Media,Money, and the McCanns and Why Other Children Matter – 09.08.2017

The three M's... it seems they have been married for an entire decade and show no signs of breaking up any time soon. Just today, the Sun ran yet another appalling article on how time and money are running out for the McCanns (oh, really? Will this ever be so?) but there is HOPE that the Scotland Yard (faux) investigation will get another bit of money so that they can continue to carrying on the search for Maddie or her abductors or whatever the hell the investigators do besides laugh in their beer at this whole ridiculous charade.

And THIS is why I wrote Ten Missing and Murdered Children's Cases that have Nothing to do with Madeleine McCann. Because this whole investigation of children's cases is appalling lopsided and not because there is necessarily good reason for one case to get more financial and investigative support than another but because narcissistic and possibly guilty people like the McCanns have hijacked all the resources via very cooperative media and political conspirators.

HERE is what should be done:

There should be oversight on ALL missing and murdered children's cases (as well as adult cases) by a public commission of experts who log and monitor how these cases are being handled by the police, the press, and politicians.

They need to pressure all of these agencies for proper handling of cases and push for needed training, resources, and outreach.

Most cases are indeed solved in the first 48 because that is when a correct analysis of the case leads to the correct investigative avenue which leads to the correct suspect and allows for the evidence to still exist and be linked to the suspect and the crime scene. MOST efforts and resources need to be available and used on fresh cases to prevent them from becoming cold. Most money spent on cold cases is usually wasted and unproductive.

Because what happens when they become cold? They almost always become unsolvable because suspects, witnesses, and evidence go missing very quickly and barring a lucky DNA hit that will allow for the case to be prosecuted in a court of law, investigating cold cases is generally a HUGE waste of time, money, and manpower. Cold cases may tug at the heartstrings, but, sadly, they usually stay that way and, for this reason, resources must be very carefully allocated for cases like these and only allocated if there is truly a good reason to do so.

The Madeleine McCann case is the poster child for massive waste and corruption. The huge loss of resources that could be used on fresh missing and murdered children's cases is criminal, absolutely criminal. The McCanns and Scotland Yard and the politicians and the fools who send or support these crooks ought to be ashamed of themselves.

Because OTHER CHILDREN MATTER!

But, who is even talking about them? Certainly not the media. Certainly not the McCanns...even though Kate is some weird figuredhead for a missing children's organization who should be distancing themselves as far from the McCanns as they can....except I am guessing they think they can get them more media attention. Yes, OTHER CHILDREN MATTER but apparently not so much in this world dominated by the McCanns.

Get my book FREE for the next five days and write a review on Amazon in support of OTHER CHILDREN. Let the world and the McCanns and the media and the politicians know that OTHER CHILDREN MATTER.

Note to Readers: This book is a satirical but truthful look at how the Madeleine McCann case has eclipsed all other missing and murdered children's cases much to their detriment. This is not an in-depth look at these ten cases but a comparison of what has happened to cases like these in the time of Madeleine McCann. Do they get any media? Do they get support? Do they get properly investigated? Or does the Madeleine McCann case always beat them out, stealing away most of the publicity and funding? We, the public, need to stand up for other missing and murdered children because the McCanns and the media and the politicians surely will not make any real effort to right the imbalance.

Maddie MC Australian Podcast important Followup : 2 KEY POINTS - 09.05.2019

Cover for 'Profile of the Disappearance of Madeleine McCann' 

Mark Saunokonoko’s excellent ten part podcast series on the Madeleine McCann case has come to an end. I very much appreciate being included in the work as it is a rare bit of true reporting on the case amongst the myriad of McCann supported, McCann generated propaganda that has been ongoing for a decade, misleading the public as to the facts of the case.

However, I do want to add TWO POINTS which were not included in the podcast which I believe are of utmost importance to the case, probably my two MOST IMPORTANT conclusions which go to the heart of what happened to Maddie: WHO was Smithman and WHERE is Maddie’s body?

I said in the podcast that I believed Smithman was the key to the case. But, what was left out was the very reason WHY I believe Smithman is the key to the case. It is NOT because I believe the man was the likely abductor of Maddie (as was libelously reported by The Sun) nor because I believe that the man was likely Gerry McCann carrying off the body of his deceased child (although the evidence tends to support this). The major reason I believe Smithman is the key to the case is because the McCanns showed very little interest in this sighting, downplayed the sighting, or tried to link the sighting with Tannerman, an attempt to make two men into one man.

The FACT - and it is a fact - that the McCanns did not want to focus on Smithman as an abductor is a massive red flag. ANY parent of a missing child would move heaven and earth to have such a sighting followed up on by both the police and the public. This was not some vague sighting of a girl matching Maddie’s description in some far off country; this is the sighting of a man carrying a little girl from the direction of the McCann vacation flat at exactly the time the child went missing. Yet, the McCanns shrug their shoulders and show no interest. In fact, when they are confronted, they will only acknowledge the sighting as possibly Maddie IF and only IF that man is also Tannerman thereby giving Gerry an alibi at the time the “original” sighting, Tanner’s sighting, of the man occurred.

The only logical conclusion that one can make that the McCanns did not care to focus on the Smith sighting as the true sighting and separate from Tannerman sighting of someone carrying off their child is because THAT MAN WAS GERRY.

The second important point left out of the podcast was WHERE is Maddie’s body? The podcast covered Location 1 and Location 2 (an initial temporary hiding place, perhaps, under an overturned boat, and a second temporary hiding place in a crevice on the Rocha Negra accessible from the beach).

Read my blog on these hiding locations here: On Moving and Hiding Bodies

The third and MOST important location would be Location 3.

From my previous blog on Find the Body and Prove We Killed Her, this is the most important point; the location where I believe is the best possiblity to find the body of Madeliene McCann.

Before coming to Portugal, I entertained a number of possibilities: the Huelva baths in Spain where the McCanns went just as the cadaver dogs were arriving, removal back to the UK, and incineration. Each had its interesting possibilities but each also seemed a bit too difficult to accomplish (although by no means am I saying such actions would have been impossible) and it is a pretty good rule of thumb that people do what is easier to manage and simpler to pull off. Because of this, I came to two more probable conclusions, both involving Gerry driving the body to a location he felt was secluded and unlikely to be discovered. I was particularly interested in the activities of the McCann in the days before the Huelva trip when Gerry's phone pinged repeatedly in an area to the west of Praia da Luz along the road to Budens, (estre EN125). I also found it interesting that the day he was to leave for Huelva, he was not feeling well, having a bit of an upset stomach. This led me to theorize he could have used that day to move the body or to recover from moving it the day before. I decided when I got to Praia da Luz, I would take a trip down that road to the west and see whether there were any suitable places to lose a body forever.

Gerry seems to be quite practical and rather cold and calculating and he simply may have decided, Kate’s feelings be damned, that making sure the body was never found was of paramount importance and they would have to live with it.

Monte do Jose Mestre. This huge, desolate area covers many square metres and is filled with a considerable network of dirt roads. Looking down on the area from atop the highest hill is a row of windmills. Small trees and bushes are scattered throughout and the dirt is not impossible to dig in. Gerry had just returned from England and I wouldn’t be surprised, if he is involved in disposing of Maddie’s body, that he brought a small shovel back with him, one that could be tossed into the bushes when he finished digging the grave or thrown away in a dumpster on the way back to Praia da Luz. If the body is buried out there, it would be unlikely to ever be found unless a large contingent of searchers and dogs descended upon the area and then it would still be pretty lucky if they located a grave. I hope, however, this is done sometime in the future.

I would like to know if Maddie is there or not.

Along with retesting the DNA, searching this location is the other most useful exercise in trying to find out what happed to Maddie. True, it would require a lot of searching at that location, perhaps with dogs and metal detectors, but I can think of no better place at this point to search for the body of Madeleine McCann.

So, to recap, the McCanns burying of the Smith sighting is the strongest proof we have that Smithman is the key to the case and likely Gerry McCann carrying off the body of his dead daughter and the possible burying of the child at Monte do Jose Mestre the other most important key to solving the case outside of DNA or a confession.

My comments :

1) Developping your first point would have contradicted MS' constant warning that they weren't suggesting that the MCs were involved in the MMC's disappearance. This point and some other presumptions at least let it clear that the child was by no way abducted.

2) Only one person lifted a bin's lid on May 3/4 night. As domestic residues were compacted in a transfer station before being deposited on the landfill, search there after a couple of days would have been very difficult.

My comment 3) wasn't agreed and ended up in the bin. Je discutais les 3 localisations.
4) Decaying beef or fish stinks also very strongly. The lady supposed to be judge but anonymous never made any statement, why ? The dates aren't even recorded. 
5)  "How to get the smell out of the nose is really quite a problem". The VOCs are transferred on your skin, your clothes (a phenomenon called adsorption), the opposite phenomenon (desorption) occurs under a flux of warm air. This is when you smell the scent again, though you're far from the source. But after some time, it's gone, the scent is just registered in your memory and will always be there.
We have about 5 millions cell sensores that allow us to perceive millions of combinations of chemical compounds, dogs have 200 millions.. It means that when you think you got finally rid of a cadaver scent, the dog still "has" it in his nose, his many sensores catch the scent. For how long ? It depends on many factors, the first being outside v. inside. 
6) It seems there was no death COVs in the car properly speaking. Eddie got the scent of blood and (?) cadaver contamination sniffing the air coming from the compartment of the driver door where the key card was. He didn't alert at any other door. Keela was put in the boot, she has to be very close (unlike Eddie) because she detects very tiny droplets of human blood that have dried on spot. 
7)  Though I'm no profiler I agree with you, Pat, about the Smithman issue being a key. However MS alluded to an interesting detail about Smithman, he was not carrying the child comfortably (as if no resistance was opposed to gravity). Apart from that and according to some independent and early statements the alarm was launched around 9:50/55 while according to UK analysts (see the PJFiles)"in the confusion following the disappearance of Madeleine it would be possible that one of the men or Fiona Payne 'escaped' to join in the searches again later." 
8)  The most remarkable and always neglected point about Jane T is that in her first version of the sighting (to the GNR and PJ on May 3/4 night) 1) she wasn't going up rua FGM, but in the corridor on the north façade of the building, 2) Tannerman was walking on rua AdS and furthermore 3) there was no passing by GMC and JW. You can check this easily consulting the PJFiles. 
9)  Neither you nor me are handlers, so the best we can do is trust authorities like Mark Harrison, the top British expert in the matter of missing persons. He advised to call for the team Martin Grime formed with his two dogs as being the best in the UK. MH attended all the dogs operations. Why should one suspect them ? And what would they have to gain while cheating the Portuguese ? Imagine MMC popped up days after Eddie smelt cadaver in 5A, the career of that precious dog would have stopped immediately.
The only critic you can do that would be legitimate is "ok, this dog Eddie smelt death, but whose dead body ?" As all dead people smell the same. 
10)  There's an important detail you neglect and I'm afraid this is where the devil is. Eddie alerted first in a corner of the parents' bedroom. It took him 4'to find the centre of the scent cone. 27'later Keela was brought on that same spot of the bedroom where Eddie had alerted. She found no blood. Hence what Eddie alerted to wasn't blood, it was residual cadaver scent.