Four year-old Madeline McCann went missing from her British parent’s holiday apartment in Praia da Luz, Portugal in May, 2007. Her parents mounted a media campaign and website, but no trace of Madeline has been found despite massive publicity. It was a case that dominated the headlines for months in the UK. The tabloids relentlessly went after her parents and printed rumor and innuendo once they were named as suspects by the Portuguese police four months after their daughter disappeared.
Now two newspapers, The Daily Star and Daily Express, have printed front page apologies to Madeline’s parents, Kate and Gerry McCann, after awarding them an undisclosed substantial settlement in a libel suit:
The Daily Star has made a wholehearted apology to Kate and Gerry McCann for stories suggesting the couple were responsible for, or may be responsible for, the death of their daughter Madeleine and for covering it up.
We now recognise that such a suggestion is absolutely untrue and that Kate and Gerry are completely innocent of any involvement in their daughter’s disappearance.
As an expression of our regret we have now made a substantial donation to the Madeleine Fund in the hope that it helps efforts to find her.
We sincerely apologise for any additional distress we have caused the family.
[From The Daily Star via NY Daily News]
There are a lot of unanswered questions surrounding the Madeline McCann case, and I believe that it was only natural to question her parents and that the police should have done it a lot sooner. It seemed odd the way Kate and Gerry McCann handled the situation in that they retained a public relations firm and quickly organized a search fund to accept donations. They are educated doctors, though, and what may seem cold and calculating on their part could be the best way that they could figure out to deal with a terrible situation.
The Portuguese police department responsible for investigating the McCann case has a history of scheming to pin missing children’s cases on their parents. Detectives involved in the McCann case are under investigation for mishandling a similar case concerning an eight year-old girl who went missing just seven miles from Madeline in 2004. The mother was tortured by police for 48 hours, after which she confessed to murdering her daughter. The mother recanted once she had access to a lawyer, but she was eventually convicted of the murder, and is now serving a 16 year prison sentence. The body of the little girl was never found.
Another detective involved in that same torture investigation was writing columns for a Portuguese newspaper about the McCann case. Those very biased articles were picked up by the British tabloids and reported as fact:
Amaral is not the only accused officer linked to the McCann investigation. Another is the recently retired Chief Inspector Paulo Pereira Cristovao, who has been writing a daily column on the Madeleine inquiry for a Portuguese newspaper that has been reporting sensational stories, leaked by sources close to the police inquiry, some of which have later been proven to be untrue.
Cristovao makes clear in his column that he considers the McCanns are probably responsible for Madeleine’s death or disappearance.
[From The Daily Mail]
While the McCanns may have seemed to act defensively and way too professionally, you can hardly blame them given the circumstances. It’s tough to judge what they were up against with a police force that tortured a grieving mother into a confession and newspapers printing every salacious detail of what seems to have been a failed frame up.
Thanks to PRPhotos for these pictures, taken in August, 2007.
No one it seems will ever know what happened to that little girl and maybe these parents did not cause harm to their daughter BUT they are directly responsible for anything that happened to her once they left her alone and without defense with her sleeping siblings at night in an unlocked first floor hotel room in a foreign country.
It’s a shame a little girl is missing because her parents are selfish, neglectful asshats.
I bet they regret the fact that they left their child alone every second of the day. The chances are nothing bad would happen to your child, but you can’t take that risk, and this case just proves that. It’s almost like you HAVE to be a bit paranoid about the safety of your children. I’m not sure I would have left mine alone like they did.
But I certainly don’t think either of them killed Madeleine, or had anything to do with her disappearance.
While I feel the parents were certainly neglectful in their care of the children, I do not think they are guilty of her disappearance. I also feel that whatever way they DO act, they will be damned by some people no matter what.
It always makes my heart sink when a child goes missing, however in this day and age, the parents almost have to hire an attorney immediately because law enforcement may take an innocent statement and turn it against them. And like in some cases, the press can get a hold of this and suddenly the parents are tried unfairly in the papers.
I personally think hiring the PR firm is over the top, but I’m not in their shoes.
And any child disappearing IS a shame. There are some sick MF’s out there.
Why are they apologizing?
The Portugal police have not let them off the hook. When the police designate you as a suspect, it is perfectly legitimate for the press to report it. This is all about the highly placed individuals on the McCann “team”, some of whom were in the Blair gov’t.
It is so sad what they have had to go through with their daughter missing as well. I am sure they more tha any one beat themselves every day with guilt but for these papers to launch a campaign to vilify them was very cruel. Believe me if they had killed her, there were too many people involved it would be out by now almost a year later.
Daily mail even refused to print bloggers comments in favour of the McCanns, I know because I tried several time but my comments were never posted till I said something not negative. Daily mail are low down skunks anyway.
It’s right that the 2 papers in question (although surprised the Daily Mail wasn’t in there also) apologised. What they printed was vile and vicious and was directly responsible for the wrong turn the focus of the search and enquiry took. The Portuguese police should also take a huge share of the blame that the case remains unresolved.
That the McCanns behaved in a way that came across to some people as arrogant is no justification for finding them suspect. Until you’re in a situation like that, in a country where you don’t speak the language, you can’t possibly know how you’ll behave. What they did in terms of arming themselves with a PR machine was their way of focusing immediate and urgent attention on their missing child.
They may not be particularly likeable people, they may be arrogant, selfish, neglectful etc but that’s no justification for the completely unfounded and untrue accusations that were levelled against them at the time.
after watching a news show about the kidnapping, i was enraged. they didn’t just leave their children alone in a hotel room one evening while they went out for a few drinks; they went out every single night and got drunk and didn’t go back to the room until 2 a.m. this went on night after night after night. and there was no way they could keep an eye on the hotel room door, besides the distance between the bar and the room there was also a wall between that unless they were superman they couldn’t possibly see through. and then they play the victim. mrs. mc actually whined that the only reason there’s any negative press about her is that all the ugly dumpy women in the world are jealous that she’s a beautiful slender doctor who dresses well. okay, i’ll step away from the keyboard and take some deep breaths now! sorry for the rant!
that is bad that they left their child alone in a foreign country to go drinking. was their no nanny? two doctors could surely afford a nanny or hired help of some kind right? i have to be honest here and say that i let my daughter play downstairs in my yard for half an hour or so during the day while i am upstairs. i do however, have both gates locked and a good view of the street. i also, thank god, have VERY nosey elderly neighbours on both sides of my fence who are always in their garden or under the gazebo out the back. they would know if something was up. sometimes nosey neighbours are good after all. it gives me a chance to do my housework in peace and her a little run around in the fresh air.
AMEN JOURNEY!!! I could rant for days, no in fact months over these two.
And Rianni, google these selfish little pricks and you will be horrified. I had sympathy for them until I saw the pictures of the resort and saw for myself exactly how they left two year old twins and a four year old. What if there had been a fire? Maybe this will come off as callous but I don’t care. These two deserve every misery and suspicion levels at them. Their actions before and after the disappearance make no damn sense to even the most flippant of parents.
I have to take deep breaths now. I was on a message board for this case for a straight month and this article is bringing back all of my previous outrage.
If they were to be charged with leaving their children alone, then so must their friends – the people they were with that night. You can be certain that they weren’t the only people who did the same thing that evening, or the evening before that or even over the past 30 years. There are babysitting services, although perhaps they were busy that evening – of course they’re probably never vetted in any event.
The constant drip-drip of salacious stories, never confirmed or backed up by reasonable sounding evidence is disgraceful and does little to help the McCanns find out what happened to their daughter.
And Mrs McCann was singularly picked on by the press and police – obviously not behaving in a way that we’d like – a little too poised, a little too polished. She is possibly a very practical person, who is trying to hold it together for her remaining children, and to demand that she be a quivering wreck to satisfy the public perception of how a bereaved parent should beface is disgraceful.
This article is about the newspapers apologising for unfounded and misleading reporting. The fact remains that that the reporting from the outset has prevented the actual facts of the case being known and clear which in turn resulted in the correct leads not being followed up and the case remaining unresolved.
Some of the comments here are not unlike the comments which appeared in their humdreds on a daily basis on the Daily Express website.
Noone knows what happened here and yet, despite this, the McCanns are still evil incarnate. Yes, they left their kids in a vulnerable situation, yes, that should shame them till the day they die, yes, they come across as controlling and arrogant. All that is true but I think they’re probably in their own personal hell about all this since that day. The point here is that very little of what we’ve all read about this case and these people can be taken as 100% accurate because of the inital mis-reporting and I personally prefer to reserve judgement until I know the facts.
I myself am only judging them on the facts I know which is all I have ever done. They left their babies alone in an unsafe manner and that’s all I’m condemning them for.
If these two a-holes wanted to party every night with their friends in a foreign country, why did they even bring their children along in the first place. I have a son, and when I took a trip to Vegas w/my friend, my son stayed home with my family. That’s because I knew we would be partying it up in Vegas, and I was NOT going to leave my child alone in another city, much less a foreign country!! These people make me sick!
Headache, yes, they did do that and should rightly be condemned for it. But they’re living with the reality of this ever since and probably won’t ever recover from it. They know they’re at fault, there’s nothing they can do to change that. That’s probably punishment enough for any parents.
I once again find myself totally agreeing with headache, among many other posters.
While these parents may not be directly responsible for the disappearance of their child, they are completely responsible for putting their children in an unsafe situation.
If a parent leaves their child home alone, and the child starts a fire, the fire and any resulting injury and/or death is the fault of the parent. This is the same thing with a different outcome.
These people acting extremly selfishly, and negligent, and because of that their child is missing.
If you go on vacation and want to go out every night and drink, then leave your kids at home!!
I don’t have much sympathy for these two.
Some of you are forgetting that cadaver dogs singled out Madeline’s little toy and then Mrs. McCann washed the damn thing, saying it smelled like suntan oil. Riiiight. Cadaver dogs also sniffed death in the back of their hired car. They and their friends changed their stories numerous times, especially in regards to who checked on the children and when. The McCanns claimed there were signs of forced entry when there was not.
One could go on and on about the inconsistancies and anomalies in this case. There are numerous reasons to suspect them, this is not just viscious gossip mongering.
oh yes the “dogs smelt death” business. Without wishing to cause offence, I thought that was horse-twaddle the first time I heard it, and still believe it now. It could(like how the alleged DNA evidence) could be just down to understanding the Portugeuse sources.
But seriously? The scent of “death”? Trailing her scent, yes; smelling for blood or other bodily fluids, yes; “death”, no. Death doesn’t have an odour, people and decay do.
Until proven otherwise, it’s down to whether one personally believes them or not. And although the whole “accidential overdose on sedatives” could be plausible – I agree with some of the other posters in that the hysterical suppositions of members of the Portuguese police and tabloid media have clouded most independant judgement on this and probably have hindered more than they helped.
Mairead, Mrs. McCann was concerned enough about indicators of ‘the smell of death’ on her closthes that she used the excuse that she had recently been in contact with corpses in her practice. Mrs. McCann is a GP, not a forensic pathologist, so presumably she was not around rotting corpses but people who had expired very close to the time she came into contact with them. If she had a problem, as a physician, with the whole ‘smell of death business’ don’t you think she would have scoffed instead of coming up with and explanation?
Fair point.
It bothered me that she washed that cuddle kitty thing because if my child died the last thing I would do was wash one of his items that smelled like him. It seemed suspicious to me, but I don’t think we should condemn them based on such little hunches. My feeling is that they know something, but that is a feeling, not facts, and until there is concrete evidence and not a bunch of dogs sniffing around I don’t think it’s right to condemn them.
This is more or less my point, CB. Because so much of what was presented as fact turned out to be suspect, it’s almost impossible to determine the things that did actually happen.
There are still huge discrepancies in almost all relevant parties’ accounts of what happened on the night and on subsequent days, hence the real need for caution and objectivity. The negligence by the parents has never been in question but the issue of whether the McCanns did or did not play a part in their child’s disappearance, still is.
How sad. My comments on this child – one of the most beautiful kids I have seen- Madeline looks like a wonderful child & I hope she is alive & well & returned to her parents.
The sad truth is we’ll probably never know the truth, and while people want to blame the parents, you’re totally blind to the real travesties here.
I read EVERY reply here, and not ONE person said a damn thing about the sick fucker that most likely killed the kid, OR the fact the damn police who investigated the case TORTURED suspects in similar circumstances! TORTURED PEOPLE. You really wanna believe the
‘facts’ these assholes managed to drag out of people they were torturing for days?
But apparently torture only offends people when it’s American soldiers making people parade around naked. Sickening.
I hear you Scott F, that’s why I specifically talked about the torture case in this post, and made sure I got the facts right.
And every public appearance, media story and magazine article gains them money.
Funny that(!)
Did you know that they were using money from the Find Madeline Fund to pay their mortgage?
I DO think they had someting to do with it. I suspect it was an accident, that they gave the kids sleeping pills to keep them asleep when they went out and accidently gave her too much. There’s lots of conspiracy theories but I just haven;t seen any genuine emotion from them yet, only tortured Catholic guilt.
Finally TABBY! Yes, that is the most plausible theory I have heard about. I watched this 20/20 investigation for like two hours and the McCanns admitted to giving the kids sedatives (very light dosage) and then recanted and said “no nevermind. we meant children’s tylenol” I suppose they could have been coerced or confused the first time they admitted it but they ARE doctors.
It sounds fishy to me that they went out every night and they just knew their kids were gonna sleep sound.
I dont think they could have ever purposefully hurt their kids since they clearly really wanted them (in vitro ect.) but I think they accidentally OD’d with Madeleine and then covered it up.
Google it. It sounds pretty damn consistent and accurate with all the other pieces of evidence.
^^
what I meant by “they ARE doctors” was that they very well could have access to sedatives, and be under the impression that they know how to use them safely.
I didn’t mean that because they were doctors they were above getting coerced by the portugese government if that’s how it seemed.
Molli, I’ve always thought either that she was oversedated or that she woke up in the middle of the night and wandered away. It is a decent sized resort, close to the beach and other things that a four year old could get all up in and the walls and tress and darkness of the place would have made it difficult for a nearly four year old to find her parents if she woke up scared in the middle of the night.
I try to feel sorry for the parents because I can’t imagine how it would feel to lose a child but the callous way their cared for their children is irksome at best.
And then for them to say that they did not trust the sitter service at night but it’s proven that they left the kids there a number of times during the day? Were they afraid the nannies turned into vampires at night?
The whole thing is rather confusing and the parents come out decidedly les than forthright and innocent.
Scott,
I think you’re referring to the Joana case. I have no idea whether the inspectors tortured the suspects or not, but to tell you the truth, their accusers (the mother and the uncle of the child) proved less than reliable throughout the whole thing.
When Joana first disappeared, her mother appeared in all TVs, crying her eyes out, saying the child had gone shopping and never returned and begging whoever took her to give her back. When the police found proof that the child had returned home, she claimed she had too many children so she had given the child up to some couple to raise her. Then the police found traces Joana’s blood in the house. They first claimed that there had been an accident and they’d hid the body out of fear, and the uncle led the police on a wild goose chase for where it was hidden. Then the mother said the uncle had killed the child and threatened her. Then came the confession that they had killed her and dispose of the body in several pigsties. A week later or so, the woman accused the inspectors of beating the confession out of her. Some times later, the uncle did the same.
It’s hard to know what to believe in the middle of it all.
The torture case is as much speculation as the McCann’s being involved in Madeleine’s disappear, so basing this news on the previous cases is poor journalism.
Are there more testimonials around the site?
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