Disappearance of Madeleine McCann (Part II)

 

McCanns return to the UK, Almeida report

Despite their arguido status, the McCanns were allowed to leave Portugal, and on legal advice did so immediately, arriving back in England on 9 September 2007. The following day Chief Inspector Tavares de Almeida of the PJ in Portimão signed a nine-page report concluding that Madeleine had died in apartment 5A as a result of an accident, that the restaurant meal and apparent regular checks on the McCann children had been part of the cover-up, that the Tapas Seven had helped to mislead the police, and that the McCanns had concealed the body then faked an abduction. An 11-page document from the Information Analysis Brigade in Lisbon analyzed alleged discrepancies in the McCanns' statements. On 11 September the public prosecutor, José Cunha de Magalhães e Meneses, handed the 10-volume case file to a judge, Pedro Miguel dos Anjos Frias. Meneses applied for the seizure of Kate's diary and Gerry's laptop. The police also wanted to trace telephone calls the McCanns and Tapas Seven had made, and there were details in the report about the number of suitcases the McCanns and their friends had taken back to England.

On 28 September 2007, according to a diplomatic cable published by WikiLeaks in 2010, the American ambassador to Portugal, Al Hoffman, wrote about a meeting he had had with the British ambassador to Portugal, Alexander Ellis, on 21 September 2007. The cable said: "Without delving into the details of the case, Ellis admitted that the British police had developed the current evidence against the McCann parents, and he stressed that authorities from both countries were working co-operatively. He commented that the media frenzy was to be expected and was acceptable as long as government officials keep their comments behind closed doors."

In the UK Control Risks, a British security company—paid by an anonymous donor to assist the McCanns since 7 May 2007—took hair samples from the McCann twins on 24 September 2007, at their parents' request. The twins had slept through the commotion in apartment 5A after Madeleine was reported missing; Kate wrote that she was concerned the abductor might have given the children sedatives. According to the PJ files, Kate had asked them to take samples, three months after the disappearance, but they had not done so. Control Risks took a sample from Kate too, to rebut allegations that she was on medication. No trace of drugs was found.

 

Gonçalo Amaral's removal, later developments

On 2 October 2007 Chief Inspector Gonçalo Amaral, the inquiry's coordinator, was removed from his post and transferred from Portimão to Faro after telling the newspaper Diário de Notícias that the British police had only pursued leads helpful to the McCanns. As an example, he criticized their decision to follow up an anonymous email to Prince Charles that claimed a former Ocean Club employee had taken Madeleine.

Amaral was himself made an arguido one day after Madeleine's disappearance, in relation to his investigation of another case, the disappearance of Joana Cipriano. The following month he was charged with making a false statement, and four other officers were charged with assault. Eight-year-old Joana Cipriano had vanished in 2004 from Figueira, seven miles (11 km) from Praia da Luz. Her body was never found, and no murder weapon was identified. Her mother and the mother's brother were convicted of her murder after confessing, but the mother retracted her confession, saying she had been beaten by police. Amaral was not present when the beating is alleged to have taken place, but he was accused of having covered up for others. The other detectives were acquitted. Amaral was convicted of perjury in May 2009 and received an 18-month suspended sentence.

The Madeleine inquiry was taken over by Paulo Rebelo, deputy national director of the PJ, which expanded its team of detectives and began a case review. On 29 November 2007 four members of the Portuguese inquiry, including Francisco Corte-Real, vice-president of Portugal's forensic crime service, were briefed at Leicestershire police headquarters by the British Forensic Science Service. In April 2008 the Tapas Seven were interviewed in England by Leicestershire police, with the PJ in attendance. The PJ planned the following month to hold a reconstruction in Praia da Luz, using the McCanns and Tapas Seven rather than actors, but the Tapas Seven declined to participate. The poor relationship between the McCanns and Portuguese police was evident again that month when, on the day the couple were at the European Parliament to promote a monitoring system for missing children, transcripts of their interviews with the PJ were leaked to Spanish television. The national director of the PJ, Alípio Ribeiro, resigned not long after this, citing media pressure; he had publicly said the police had been hasty in naming the McCanns as suspects. As of May 2008 Portuguese prosecutors were examining several charges against the McCanns, including child abandonment, abduction, homicide, and concealment of a corpse.

Inquiry closed (21 July 2008)

On 21 July 2008 the Portuguese Attorney General, Fernando José Pinto Monteiro, announced that there was no evidence to link the McCanns or Robert Murat to the disappearance. Their arguido status was lifted and the case was closed. On 4 August Portugal's Ministério Público released 17 case files containing 11,233 pages on CD-ROM to the media, including 2,550 pages of sightings. The files included a 58-page prosecutors' report, which concluded: "No element of proof whatsoever was found which allows us to form any lucid, sensible, serious and honest conclusion about the circumstances." In 2009 Portugal released a further 2,000 pages. Days after the case closed, excerpts from Kate McCann's diary, which had been taken by the PJ in August 2007, were published in translation by a Portuguese tabloid, Correio da Manhã, despite a Portuguese judge's ruling in June 2008 that the seizure had been a privacy violation and that any copies must be destroyed. On 14 September 2008, a News International tabloid, News of the World, published the extracts, again without permission and now translated poorly[weasel words] back into English.

Amaral's book (24 July 2008)

The bad feeling between the McCanns and the PJ had reached such a height that Chief Inspector Gonçalo Amaral resigned in June 2008 to write a book alleging that Madeleine had died in an accident in the apartment and that, to cover it up, the McCanns had faked an abduction. Three days after the case closed, his book, Maddie: A Verdade da Mentira ("Maddie: The Truth of the Lie"), was published in Portugal by Guerra & Paz. By November 2008 it had sold 180,000 copies and by 2010 had been translated into six languages. A documentary based on the book was broadcast on TVI in Portugal in April 2009, watched by 2.2 million.

The McCanns began a libel action against Amaral and his publisher in 2009. Madeleine's Fund covered the legal fees. In 2015 they were awarded over €600,000 in libel damages; Amaral's appeal against that decision succeeded in 2016. A judge had issued an injunction against further publication or sales of the book in 2009, but the Lisbon Court of Appeal overturned the ban in 2010, stating that it violated Amaral's freedom of expression. The ban was reinstated in 2015 as part of the libel ruling, then lifted when Amaral's appeal succeeded in 2016. The McCanns appealed the 2016 decision to Portugal's Supreme Court, but the court ruled against them in February 2017. In their 76-page ruling, the judges wrote that the McCanns had not, in fact, been cleared by the archiving of the criminal case in 2008. In March 2017, the Supreme Court rejected the McCanns' final appeal.

Madeleine's Fund inquiry (2007–2011)

Raising money

The McCanns set up Madeleine's Fund: Leaving No Stone Unturned Ltd on 15 May 2007, 12 days after the disappearance. Over 80 million people visited the fund's website in the three months after the disappearance. From September 2007, Brian Kennedy of Everest Windows supported the couple financially, and Kennedy's lawyer joined the fund's board of directors. As of February 2017 it had seven directors, including the McCanns.

Appeals by public figures were screened at football matches across Britain. Between May 2007 and March 2008, the fund received £1,846,178, including £1.4 million through the bank, £390,000 online, and £64,000 from merchandise. Donations included £250,000 from the News of the World, £250,000 from Sir Philip Green, $50,000 from Simon Cowell, and $25,000 from Coleen Rooney. J. K. Rowling and Richard Branson made large donations; Branson donated £100,000 to the McCanns' legal fund. Madeleine's Fund did not cover the couple's legal costs arising from their status as arguidos, but it was criticized in October 2007 for having made two of the McCanns' mortgage payments, before they were made arguidos. A reward of £2.5 million was also offered, including from the News of the World, Rowling, Branson, Green, and a Scottish businessman, Stephen Winyard. In March 2008 the Express Group paid the fund £550,000 and £375,000 in libel damages arising out of articles about the McCanns and Tapas Seven respectively. In 2011, Kate McCann's book, Madeleine, was serialized by The Sun and The Sunday Times, both owned by News International, for a payment to the fund of £500,000 to £1 million. In December 2015, the fund stood at around £750,000.

Private investigators

Madeleine's Fund hired several firms of private investigators, causing friction with the Portuguese police. Shortly after the disappearance, an anonymous benefactor paid for the services of a British security company, Control Risks. There had reportedly been four independent sightings from North Africa; Brian Kennedy went to Morocco himself in September 2007 to look into one. A Norwegian woman had reported seeing a girl matching Madeleine's description in a petrol station near Marrakesh, Morocco, on 9 May 2007; the child had reportedly asked the man she was with, in English, "Can we see Mummy soon?" When the witness returned home to Spain, she learned about the disappearance and telephoned the Spanish police. A month later, according to Kate McCann, the police had still not formally interviewed the woman, which led the McCanns to fear that leads were not being pursued. The McCanns themselves traveled to Morocco on 10 June 2007 to raise awareness. They spent the night at the British ambassador's residence and were briefed by consular staff and a Metropolitan police attaché.

Brian Kennedy hired a Spanish agency, Método 3, for six months at £50,000 a month, which put 35 investigators on the case in Europe and Morocco. It seems the relationship came to an end in part because the head of the agency made several public statements that concerned the McCanns, including to CBS that "We know the kidnapper. We know who he is and how he has done it." Another private investigator was David Edgar, a retired detective inspector hired in 2009 on the recommendation of the head of Manchester's Serious Crime Squad. Edgar released an e-fit in August that year of a woman said to have asked two British men in Barcelona, Spain, shortly after the disappearance, whether they were there to deliver her new daughter. Other private initiatives included a Portuguese lawyer financing the search of a reservoir near Praia da Luz in February 2008, and the use of ground radar by a South African property developer, Stephen Birch, who said in 2012 that scans showed there were bones beneath the driveway of a house in Praia da Luz.

Oakley International

In 2008 Madeleine's Fund hired Oakley International, a Washington, D.C.-registered detective agency, for over £500,000 for six months. (The company owner, Kevin Halligen, was arrested in 2009 in connection with an unrelated fraud allegation. He died in 2018.) Oakley sent a five-man team to Portugal. Led by Henri Exton, a former British police officer who had worked for MI5, the team engaged in undercover operations within the Ocean Club and among paedophile rings and the Roma community.

Exton questioned the significance of the Tanner sighting of a man carrying a child at 21:15 near apartment 5A, and focused instead on the Smith sighting at 22:00—the sighting by Martin and Mary Smith of a man carrying a child toward the beach. The Oakley team produced e-fits based on the Smiths' description. This was a sensitive issue, because on 9 September 2007 Martin Smith had watched BBC footage of the McCanns arrive in the UK from Portugal, at the height of public debate about their alleged involvement. As Gerry McCann exited the aircraft with his son in his arms, Smith believed he recognized him as the man he had seen carrying the child in Praia da Luz. He reported his suspicion to Leicestershire police but later came to accept that he was mistaken: at 22:00 witnesses placed Gerry in the tapas restaurant. Nevertheless, publication of the Smith e-fits, which bore some resemblance to Gerry, would have fed the conspiracy theories about the McCanns.

Exton submitted his report to Madeleine's Fund in November 2008, and suggested releasing the e-fits, but the fund told Exton that the report and its e-fits had to remain confidential. The relationship between the company and the fund had soured, in part because of a dispute over fees, and in part because the report was critical of the McCanns and their friends; it suggested that Madeleine may have died in an accident after leaving the apartment herself through its unlocked patio doors. Madeleine's Fund passed the e-fits to the police—the PJ and Leicestershire police had them by October 2009, and Scotland Yard received them when they became involved in August 2011—but did not otherwise release them. Kate McCann did not include them with the other images of suspects in her book, Madeleine (2011), although she suggested that both the Tanner and Smith sightings were crucial. Scotland Yard released the e-fits in October 2013 for a BBC Crimewatch reconstruction. After it had aired, The Sunday Times published that the McCanns had had the e-fits since 2008. In response the couple complained that the Sunday Times story implied (wrongly) that the McCanns had not only failed to publish the e-fits but had withheld them from the police. The newspaper published an apology on an inside page in December 2013. The McCanns subsequently sued and received £55,000 in damages, which Gerry McCann said would be donated to charity.

Further police inquiries (2011–present)

Gamble report

Alan Johnson, British Home Secretary (2009–2010)

The McCanns met the British Home Secretary Alan Johnson in 2009 to request a review of the case. Johnson commissioned a scoping report from Jim Gamble, then head of the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Center (CEOP). By March 2010 the Home Office had begun discussions with the Association of Chief Police Officers about setting up a British inquiry.

Delivered in May 2010, the Gamble report examined how several British agencies had become involved in the search for Madeleine, including CEOP itself, Leicestershire police, the Metropolitan Police Service, the Serious Organized Crime Agency, the National Police Improvement Agency, Crimestoppers, the Home Office, Foreign Office, and 10 Downing Street. Gamble criticized the lack of coordination. Everyone had wanted to help, and some had wanted "to be seen to help", he wrote, which had "created a sense of chaos and a sense of competition", hampering the inquiry by causing resentment among the Portuguese police. He recommended renewed cooperation between the British and Portuguese, that all relevant information be exchanged between the police forces, that police perform an analysis of telephone calls made on the night of the disappearance, and that all leads be pursued, including those developed by private detectives.

Operation Grange

In May 2011, under Home Secretary Theresa May, Scotland Yard launched an investigative review, Operation Grange, with a team of 29 detectives and eight civilians. The announcement of the review appeared to have been triggered by a News International campaign, by way of one of its British tabloids, The Sun. On 11 May 2011, as it was serializing Kate McCann's book, Madeleine, The Sun's front page hosted an open letter from the McCanns in which they asked Prime Minister David Cameron to set up a new inquiry; 20,000 people signed the newspaper's petition that day. On the same day, according to her testimony to the Leveson Inquiry, Theresa May spoke by telephone, at her instigation, to Rebekah Brooks, chief executive of News International, and Dominic Mohan, editor of The Sun. The next day she wrote to the commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, Sir Paul Stephenson, to say that the Portuguese police had agreed to cooperate with a British inquiry. Within 24 hours, Cameron made the announcement about Operation Grange, to be financed by a Home Office contingency fund.

Operation Grange was led by Commander Simon Foy. Detective Chief Inspector (DCI) Andy Redwood of Scotland Yard's Homicide and Serious Crime Command was the first senior investigating officer, reporting to Detective Chief Superintendent Hamish Campbell. The team consisted of three detective inspectors, five detective sergeants, 19 detective constables, and around six civilian staff. When Redwood retired in 2014, he was replaced by DCI Nicola Wall. By July 2013 the review had become an investigation.

The team had tens of thousands of documents translated, released an age-progressed image, and investigated over 8,000 potential sightings. By 2015 they had taken 1,338 statements, collected 1,027 exhibits, and investigated 650 sex offenders and 60 persons of interest. The inquiry was scaled back in October 2015 and the number of officers reduced to four. The Home Secretary approved an additional £95,000 of funding in April 2016 for what the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe, said was one remaining line of inquiry. Another £85,000 was approved to cover up to September 2017; and £150,000 to cover until 31 March 2019, taking the cost of the inquiry to £11.75 million. The Home Office said it would approve similar funding for 2019.

Theories: Planned abduction, burglary, wandered off

DCI Redwood made clear that Operation Grange was looking at a "criminal act by a stranger", most likely a planned abduction or a burglary that Madeleine had disturbed. There had been a fourfold increase in local burglaries between January and May 2007, including two in the McCanns' block in the 17 days before the disappearance, during which intruders had entered through windows. In an interview in April 2017, just before the 10th anniversary of the disappearance, Scotland Yard's Assistant Commissioner, Mark Rowley, appeared to dismiss the "burglary gone wrong" hypothesis, while adding that it was "not entirely ruled out". Referring to the suspects who might have been involved in burglaries in the area, he said that police had "pretty much closed off that group of people". The remaining detectives were focusing on a small number of inquiries that they believed were significant. Also that month there were claims that Scotland Yard was looking for a woman seen near 5A at the time of the disappearance.

Redwood said in 2013 that, "on one reading of the evidence", the disappearance did look like a pre-planned abduction, which "undoubtedly would have involved reconnaissance". Several witnesses described men hanging around near apartment 5A in the days before the disappearance and on the day itself. In May 2013 Scotland Yard wanted to trace 12 manual workers who were at the Ocean Club when Madeleine disappeared, including six British cleaners in a white van who were offering their services to British expats. In October 2013 Scotland Yard and the BBC's Crimewatch staged a reconstruction—broadcast in the UK, the Netherlands and Germany—during which they released e-fits of the men seen near 5A and of the Smith sighting. Days after Crimewatch aired, Portugal's attorney general reopened the Portuguese inquiry, citing new evidence.

Another theory is that Madeleine, nearly four at the time, left the apartment by herself, perhaps to look for her parents, and was abducted by a passer-by or fell into one of the open construction sites nearby. This is widely regarded as unlikely. According to her mother, Madeleine would have had to open the unlocked patio doors, close the curtains behind her, close the door again, open and close the child gate at the top of the stairs, then open and close the gate leading to the street.

Tracking mobile phone calls

Using mobile-phone tracking techniques, and with the cooperation of over 30 countries, police traced who had used cell phones near the scene of the disappearance within the important time frame. The analysis turned up several calls and texts near the Ocean Club between a 30-year-old former Ocean Club bus driver, and his 24-year-old and 53-year-old associates. Detectives interviewed them in June 2014; they denied any connection to the disappearance. Police also found that the cell phone of a former Ocean Club restaurant worker had been used near the resort that night. Originally from Cape Verde, West Africa, Euclides Monteiro died in 2009 in a tractor accident after being fired from the Ocean Club in 2006 for theft. The suspicion was that he had been breaking into apartments to finance a drug habit. His widow said he had been questioned previously about break-ins involving the sexual assault of children but had been cleared by DNA evidence.

Holiday-home sexual assaults

Scotland Yard issued another appeal in March 2014 for information about a man who had entered holiday homes occupied by British families in four incidents in the western Algarve between 2004 and 2006, two of them in Praia da Luz. On those occasions he had sexually assaulted five white girls, aged 7–10, in their beds. The man spoke English with a foreign accent and his speech was slow and perhaps slurred. He had short, dark, unkempt hair, tanned skin, and in the view of three victims a distinctive smell; he may have worn a long-sleeved burgundy top, perhaps with a white circle on the back. These were among 12 incidents in the area between 2004 and 2010. The PJ reportedly believed the intruder in the four incidents between 2004 and 2006 was Euclides Monteiro, the former Ocean Club employee from Cape Verde who died in 2009.

Searches and interviews in Praia da Luz

In June 2014, officers from Scotland Yard and the PJ, accompanied by archaeologists and sniffer dogs, searched drains and dug in 60,000 square meters (15 acres) of wasteland in Praia da Luz. Nothing was found. The following month, at Scotland Yard's request, the PJ in Faro interviewed four Portuguese citizens, with Scotland Yard in attendance. No evidence was found to implicate them. One man, an associate of Robert Murat, was first questioned shortly after the disappearance. Pedro do Carmo, deputy director of the PJ, told the BBC that the interviews had been conducted only because Scotland Yard had requested them. Eleven people, including three Britons, were interviewed in December 2014. According to the Portuguese media, Scotland Yard compiled 253 questions for the interviewees, including "Did you kill Madeleine?" and "Where did you hide the body?" Robert Murat, his wife, and her ex-husband were questioned, as were a 30-year-old former Ocean Club bus driver and his 24-year-old and 53-year-old associates. The bus driver and associates had telephoned or texted each other near the Ocean Club around the time of the disappearance. They admitted to having broken into Ocean Club apartments but denied having taken Madeleine.

German investigations in 2020

In June 2020, the public prosecutor of the German city of Braunschweig ordered an inquiry regarding a possible involvement of a 43-year-old man, believed to have been living in a borrowed VW camper van in the Algarve at the time of McCann's disappearance. The suspect's car, a Jaguar XJR6, was registered to a new owner the day after McCann disappeared. The prosecutor's office started proceedings on suspicion of McCann's murder. Hans Christian Wolters, from the public prosecutor's office, stated that they are operating under the presumption that McCann is dead, due to the suspect's criminal record. The suspect has been convicted of unrelated offences of sexual abuse of children and drug trafficking, and as of June 2020 is incarcerated in Germany.

The suspect was listed as serving seven years in jail for the rape of a 72-year-old pensioner in the Algarve. On 3 June, the Criminal Police Office made a public appeal for information relating to the case on Aktenzeichen XY … ungelöst, a crime programme broadcast by the public television station ZDF. The police stated that they received useful information in 2013 after the case was first featured on Aktenzeichen XY, but that it took years to find substantial evidence for prosecution, and that they still need more information. The prosecutors asked the public for information about the suspect's phone number and the number that dialed him on the day of McCann's disappearance, with which the suspect's number had a 30-minute connection.

On 27 July German police began searching an allotment in Hanover in connection with the investigation.

Other inquiries

In the early days of the inquiry, the Portuguese police searched through images seized from paedophile investigations, and Madeleine's parents were shown photographs of sex offenders in case they recognized them from Praia de Luz. Several British paedophiles were of interest. In May 2009 investigators working for the McCanns tried to question one, Raymond Hewlett; he had allegedly told someone he knew what happened to Madeleine, but he retracted and died of cancer in Germany in December that year. Scotland Yard made inquiries about two paedophiles who had been in jail in Scotland since 2010 for murder. The men were running a window-cleaning service in the Canary Islands when Madeleine went missing.

A man from Northern Ireland who died in 2013 was discussed in the media in connection with the disappearance; after being released from prison for the sexual assault of his four daughters, he had moved to Carvoeiro, Portugal, not far from Praia da Luz, and was there when Madeleine went missing. Another focus of Operation Grange was Urs Hans von Aesch, a deceased Swiss man implicated in the 2007 murder, in Switzerland, of five-year-old Ylenia Lenhard. Ylenia disappeared on 31 July 2007, nearly three months after Madeleine, and was found dead in September as a result of toluene poisoning. Von Aesch was living in Spain when Madeleine disappeared. In June 2016 Operation Grange officers interviewed an alleged victim of the deceased broadcaster Clement Freud, who was accused that year of having a history of child sexual abuse. Freud had had a home in Praia da Luz, and had befriended the McCanns in July 2007, weeks after the disappearance. His family said he was in the UK when Madeleine went missing.

Tabloids and social media

"Trial by media"

Eilis O'Hanlon wrote that the disappearance "could almost stand as a metaphor for the rise of social media as the predominant mode of public discourse". Twitter, one year old when Madeleine went missing, became the source of much of the vitriol. Ten years later, the "#McCann" hashtag was still producing over 100 tweets an hour, according to researchers at the University of Huddersfield. Social media's attacks included a threat to kidnap one of the McCanns' twins, and when Scotland Yard and Crimewatch staged their reconstruction in 2013, there was apparently talk of phoning in with false information to sabotage the appeal. One man who ran an anti-McCann website received a three-month suspended sentence in 2013 after leafleting their village with his allegations. The following year a Twitter user was found dead from a helium overdose after Sky News confronted her about her 400 anti-McCann tweets.

Roy Greenslade called the Daily Express coverage a "sustained campaign of vitriol".

The couple's status as photogenic, articulate, and professional was at first beneficial. Every institution in the UK wanted to help, from 10 Downing Street down. The McCanns took full advantage of the interest by hiring public-relations consultants and offering regular events to give the media a daily news peg. But the frenzy turned against them, and there began what PR consultant Michael Cole called the "monstering of the McCanns". They were harshly criticized for having left their children alone in an unlocked apartment, despite the availability of Ocean Club babysitters and a crèche. The argument ran that a working-class couple would have faced child-abandonment charges. Seventeen thousand people signed an online petition in June 2007 asking Leicestershire Social Services to investigate how the children came to be left unattended.

Kate McCann's appearance and demeanor were widely discussed, with much of the commentary coming from other women, including Booker Prize-winner Anne Enright in the London Review of Books. Kate was deemed cold and controlled, too attractive, too thin, too well-dressed, too intense.[ She had apparently been advised by abduction experts not to cry on camera because the kidnapper might enjoy her distress, and this led to more criticism: the Portuguese tabloid Correio da Manhã cited sources complaining that she had not "shed a single tear". Journalism professor Nicola Goc argued that Kate had joined a long list of mothers deemed killers because of unacceptable maternal behavior. Commentators compared her experience to that of Lindy Chamberlain, convicted of murder after her baby was killed by a dingo. Like Kate, she was suspected, in part, because she had not wept in public. There was even a similar (false) story about supposedly relevant Bible passages the women were said to have highlighted. Chamberlain asked: "How can you apologize to me and do this again to someone else?"

In November 2011, the McCanns testified before the Leveson Inquiry into British press standards. The inquiry heard that the editor of the Daily Express, in particular, had become "obsessed" with the couple. Express headlines included that Madeleine had been "killed by sleeping pills", "Find body or McCanns will escape", and "'McCanns or a friend must be to blame'", the latter based on an interview with a waiter. "Maddie 'Sold' By Hard-Up McCanns" ran a headline in the Daily Star, part of the Express group. Lord Justice Leveson called the articles "complete piffle". Roy Greenslade described them as "no journalistic accident, but a sustained campaign of vitriol against a grief-stricken family".

Libel actions

In addition to the McCanns' legal efforts against Gonçalo Amaral and his publisher, the McCanns and Tapas Seven brought libel actions against several newspapers. The Daily Express, Daily Star and their sister Sunday papers, owned by Northern & Shell, published front-page apologies in 2008 and donated £550,000 to Madeleine's Fund. The Tapas Seven were awarded £375,000 against the Express group, also donated to Madeleine's Fund, along with an apology in the Daily Express. The McCanns received £55,000 from The Sunday Times in 2013 when the newspaper implied that they had withheld e-fits from the police.

Robert Murat received £600,000 in out-of-court settlements for libel in relation to 100 articles published by 11 newspapers—The Sun and News of the World (News International), Daily Express, Sunday Express and Daily Star (Northern & Shell), Daily Mail, London Evening Standard and Metro (Associated Newspapers), Daily Mirror, Sunday Mirror and Daily Record (Mirror Group Newspapers). According to The Observer, it was the largest number of separate libel actions brought in the UK by the same person in relation to one issue. His two associates were each awarded $100,000, and all three received public apologies. The British Sky Broadcasting Group, which owns Sky News, paid Murat undisclosed damages in 2008 and agreed that Sky News would host an apology on its website for 12 months.

Netflix documentary (2019)

Netflix released an eight-part documentary series, The Disappearance of Madeleine McCann, on 15 March 2019. Interviewees included Jim Gamble, former head of the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Command; Alan Johnson, former British home secretary; Brian Kennedy, the British businessman who supported the McCanns financially; Justine McGuiness, the McCanns' former spokesperson; Gonçalo Amaral, former head of the PJ investigation; Robert Murat, the first arguido; Julian Peribañez, a former Método 3 private investigator; Sandra Felgueiras, a Portuguese journalist who covered the disappearance; and Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan, authors of Looking for Madeleine (2014).

Notes

Simon Foy, former head of homicide, Scotland Yard (BBC Panorama, 3 May 2017): "Even on the first glance of what we looked at, and when we took the information back and ran it through our own understanding and, you know, verified sightings and accounts and statements, and all the rest of it, it was perfectly clear to us that the McCanns themselves had nothing at all to do with the actual disappearance."

Pedro do Carmo, deputy director of the PJ (BBC Panorama, 3 May 2017): "There is no fact at this point or evidence that suggests they [the parents] were involved in Madeleine McCann's disappearance."

Mark Rowley, Scotland Yard's assistant commissioner (The Daily Telegraph, April 2017), when asked about the McCanns' involvement: "[T]here's no reason whatsoever to reopen that or to start rumors that that's a line of investigation".

Esther Addley (The Guardian, 27 April 2012): "It was, the [Portuguese] attorney general found, largely due to a catastrophic misinterpretation of the evidence collected by these officers [Leicestershire police] that the Portuguese team came to suspect the McCanns in the disappearance. ... Last month, Matt Baggott, at the time chief constable of Leicestershire, admitted to the Leveson inquiry that he had known the Portuguese officers, then heavily briefing reporters that the McCanns were guilty, were wrong on crucial DNA evidence. He could have corrected reporters' errors, even behind the scenes, he admitted, but had judged it better not to."

Brian Cathcart (New Statesman, 22 October 2008): "[T]he McCann case was the greatest scandal in our news media in at least a decade ... Error on this scale, involving hundreds of 'completely untrue' news reports, published on front pages month after month in the teeth of desperate denials, can only be systemic. Judging by what appeared in print, it involved a reckless neglect of ethical standards, a persistent failure to apply even the most basic journalistic rigor, and plenty of plain cruelty."

Gerry McCann (CNN, 11 May 2011): "[T]he technical term is coloboma, where there's a defect in the iris. I don't think it is actually. I think it's actually an additional bit of color. She certainly had no visual problems."

The email from John Lowe (Forensic Science Service, 3 September 2007) continued: "The individual components in Madeleine's profile are not unique to her; it is the specific combination of 19 components that makes her profile unique above all others. Elements of Madeleine's profile are also present within the profiles of many of the scientists here in Birmingham, myself included. It's important to stress that 50% of Madeleine's profile will be shared with each parent. It is not possible, in a mixture of more than two people, to determine or evaluate which specific DNA components pair with each other. ... Therefore, we cannot answer the question: Is the match genuine, or is it a chance match."

Jerry Lawton, Daily Star (Leveson Inquiry, 19 March 2012): "Portuguese police leaked in briefings in Portugal to their journalists that the forensic test results positively showed that Madeleine had been in or linked her to the hire car that her parents didn't hire until three or four weeks after she'd disappeared, and that story became a—created a sea change, without overusing that word, in the way the story has been looked at.

"Those forensic test results became a bone of contention between the UK and the Portuguese police. I was present when a Portuguese team of forensic experts and detectives arrived in Leicester to discuss these results. Of course, they'd already leaked a version of the results. Leicestershire police presumably knew—although it turns out obviously that those test results did not prove that and that the Portuguese police had somehow misinterpreted these results. I just felt that had this been—that Leicestershire police could have briefed, off the record, even unreportable, that the Portuguese police had misinterpreted those DNA results. …

"Every time you rang Leicestershire police on that inquiry—and it was a lot, from every media organization—you were told: 'It's a Portuguese police inquiry. You'll have to contact the Portuguese police.' And of course, they were fully aware that the Portuguese police had judicial secrecy laws and they wouldn't talk about the case."

Matt Baggott, former chief constable of Leicestershire Police (Leveson Inquiry, 28 March 2012): "[A]s a chief constable at the time, there were a number of I think very serious considerations. One for me, and the Gold Group who were running the investigation, which was a UK effort, was very much a respect for the primacy of the Portuguese investigation. We were not in the lead in relation to their investigative strategy. We were merely dealing with enquiries at the request of the Portuguese and managing the very real issues of the local dimension of media handling, so we were not in control of the detail or the facts or where that was going.

"I think the second issue was there was an issue, if I recall, of Portuguese law. Their own judicial secrecy laws. I think it would have been utterly wrong to have somehow in an off the record way have breached what was a very clear legal requirement upon the Portuguese themselves....

"There was also an issue for us of maintaining a very positive relationship with the Portuguese authorities themselves. I think this was an unprecedented inquiry in relation to Portugal. The media interest, their own reaction to that. And having a very positive relationship of confidence with the Portuguese authorities I think was a precursor to eventually and hopefully one day successfully resolving what happened to that poor child.

"So the relationship of trust and confidence would have been undermined if we had gone off the record in some way or tried to put the record straight, contrary to the way in which the Portuguese law was configured and their own leadership of that."

In July the McCanns went to the High Court in London to gain access to 81 pieces of information Leicestershire police held about the sightings, before Portugal released the case files.

£815,000 was spent during this period, including £250,000 on private detectives, £123,573 on the campaign, and £111,522 on legal costs.