Madeleine McCann - Still Missing
...and the misguided campaign against Kate and Gerry McCann
This week I am posting a link to a new article I have written for The Independent, prompted by the Channel 5 drama Under Suspicion: Kate McCann.
I was there in Portugal when the PJ turned the screw, not just on Kate, but on her husband, Gerry too. I later heard all about it from Gerry himself, after we had returned to the UK. That account is in the linked article.
My own flight home came on the night that Kate was being interrogated, with the massed ranks of the media waiting outside the police station, many of them no doubt hoping or waiting to hear she was being charged with her daughter’s homicide after sniffer dogs had found evidence of…well, no one quite knew then what the dogs had found, just that there was evidence supposedly implicating Kate and Gerry McCann.
I was as convinced then as I am now that Madeleine was abducted by a stranger, and her parents were quite obviously the victims of a terrible crime.
The morning after my return from Praia De Luz I was playing an early game of tennis with my friend Ted, at Kingston, near Lewes. My phone rang and I thought I had better answer it. Unexpectedly, it was the PA of the then Editor of The Sunday Times, John Witherow. “Hello David, I am just patching you into the morning conference”. After a brief moment, “Good morning David, what is happening with the parents?”
I was caught on the hop, virtually mid-point, my focus far from Portugal, and I hurriedly tried to marshall my thoughts. Then, as I began to talk, Ted, as is he was prone to do at any opportunity, started practicing his fizzing serves into my end of the court. Thwack! Thwack! I felt awkward that the attendees at the Sunday Times’ news conference would know that they had caught me in the middle of a game of tennis. I knew my own boss, The Sunday Times Magazine editor Robin Morgan would not be impressed. Thwack! So I left the court and started running across the neighbouring green to get away from Ted, while still trying to put my case to conference that the parents were innocent. The thwacks dimmed. Phew.
“But what about the dogs, David?”, said Robin Morgan in his typically combative style. “The dogs don’t lie”. He was articulating what I am sure the entire conference believed, and millions more besides.
But they did, Robin. They really did.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/madeleine-mccann-kate-suspect-evidence-b2978668.html
This is notes on crime 10 thank you for reading. Please subscribe, please share the article and please feel free to leave a comment. Many thanks, David.