What happened on Thursday, May 3, 2007 in the early evening, the day when Maddie McCann, who was about to turn 4, disappeared into apartment 5A in block G5 of the Ocean Club hotel complex, in Praia da Luz in Algarve, where the McCanns were on vacation with three couples of friends and their children? Seventeen years later, the mystery remains unsolved.
How could a kidnapper whom no one saw or heard enter the apartment and take the child without waking his sister and brother who were sleeping in the room? And how the kidnapper was able to leave the scene without leaving a trace or having planned a vehicle nearby.
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Like every evening, the couples had dinner, without the children who were in bed, in a tapas restaurant located 80 meters away. Every half hour, they would check that everything was going well. At 9:25 p.m., everything seemed in order but Matthew, whose turn it was to go and look, did not enter the room where Maddie was sleeping with Sean and Amelie, the twins.
At 9:55 p.m., their mother, Kate McCann, discovered the empty bed. Kate came back to the restaurant shouting: “They’ve taken her” (They took it). In other words, Kate didn’t know what had happened but for her straight away it was a kidnapping.
From there, the Portuguese investigators will consider that she exhibited surprising behavior. It is therefore a kidnapping but while every second counts, the police were only alerted at 10:41 p.m., after 46 minutes.
Kate is convinced that Maddie has been kidnapped but we see her searching the apartment, in the cupboards and even under the beds. And when she leaves the apartment, she heads in the opposite direction a kidnapper would have taken to get away from the club.
Inconsistencies
Anne Corrêa-Guedes details the numerous inconsistencies noted by investigators. Where would the kidnapper who left no trace have entered? The shutter mechanism did not allow it to be forced from the outside. The lichen encrusted on the windowsill was intact, no traces were visible on the aluminum. The only ones noted were from Kate McCann’s left hand. There was no mess in the children’s room or footprints on the floor. Maddie’s bed was intact as if the little one had not slept there. The scientific police did not find any suspicious biological traces on the mattress, sheets and pillow. A stuffed toy placed near the pillow was in a position not very compatible with kidnapping.
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For investigators, these elements suggested staging. The parents had deliberately tried to put them on the trail of the kidnapping, helped by the testimony of a friend who declared having seen a stranger disappear in the night with a child in his arms. The testimony will be strongly doubted but the tone was set.
The McCanns contacted relatives in England who alerted journalists. The next day, the English press confirmed the kidnapping. Anne Corrêa-Guedes describes the climate that was created and would make the Maddie affair unique. In Praia da Luz, investigators forgot to carry out basic checks, such as searching the garbage bins before the trash cans go through.
Later, two police dogs specially brought from England detected corpse odors and tiny particles of blood in the McCanns’ apartment. On a wall in the living room, in the parents’ bedroom, on a stuffed animal from Maddie, on her mother’s clothes and in the trunk of the Renault Scenic, which was rented after May 3, therefore after the disappearance.
An element of suspicion was added when the McCanns returned to England. A tourist on vacation in Praia da Luz reported seeing around 10 p.m. an individual walking away from the scene carrying a child against him. This witness, seeing on TV the very particular way in which Gerald held his son when getting off the plane, thought he recognized the man he had seen in Praia da Luz the night of the disappearance.
In “Maddie, making a myth”, Anne Corrêa-Guedes joins Commissioner Gonçalo Amaral who headed the investigation in Portugal. For him, the parents are involved in Maddie’s disappearance. Corrêa-Guedes shows how hyper-media coverage harmed the investigation by causing the Portuguese and English police to confront, rather than cooperate.
The McCanns had the support of the English press and the sympathy of everyone, even the Pope in Rome. A support fund, Madeleine’s Fund, raised more than 2.2 million euros which made it possible to recruit the best lawyers. Media that risked casting suspicion learned this the hard way. In Portugal, Commissioner Amaral who headed the investigation was disavowed and sidelined. And when the Portuguese courts invited the McCanns to return to Praia da Luz, they could afford to refuse. So after only 14 months, Portuguese prosecutors decided to close the investigation. Fault, they will say, “to have been able to obtain enough elements”.
The suspect in the Maddie McCann affair also allegedly killed a young girl in Belgium: “We even thought it was Dutroux”
The German track drags on
German police have been announcing since 2020 that a lead leads to a 46-year-old repeat pedophile, Christian Brückner, who was residing in the Praia region when Maddie disappeared. Brückner has been on trial since February in Braunschweig for five sexual crimes committed in Portugal between 2000 and 2017. The Germans claim to have substantial evidence in the Maddie affair but nothing concrete has been communicated, despite the passage of time.
How would the investigation have proceeded if the disappearance had occurred in Belgium? From experience, we will answer: not as it was in Portugal.
“Maddie, making of a myth”, by Anne Corrêa-Guedes, in French from the publisher Balland.
