Madeleine McCann

briany

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121774106#Comment_121774106

It wasn't extremely dodgy. I have seen this portrayed as the McCanns panicking and absconding to the UK and lawyering up immediately after the sniffer dogs came in and gave an alert, but that misses the bit where their Portuguese lawyer said to (I think) Kate McCann that, based on the evidence they had collected, the police thought the McCanns were involved in their daughter's disappearance, but that they would probably receive a more lenient sentence if they confessed then. This is what Kate McCann alleges in her book, and I'm not aware of any particular pushback on this claim. In lieu of any pushback, I don't find it too hard to believe since Goncalo Amaral (lead investigator at the time) later wrote a whole book on how he thought the McCanns were involved.

As it turns out, however, the Portuguese police had collected nothing conclusive with regard to a case against them. It wasn't dodgy for this to be pointed out by the legal counsel who the McCanns subsequently hired.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/mccanns-will-use-us-evidence-to-challenge-scent-of-death-claims-402587.html

Sniffer dogs smelling cadaverine isn't enough, or shouldn't be enough, to use as evidence by itself. That's the crux of the matter. There needs to be conclusive forensics to follow. Something which was not produced with respect to the tenuous case against Kate and Gerry McCann, and as such the dog alert became a dead end.

cnocbui

There was no evidence to follow. The dogs barked, but no forensic evidence was found.

A dog barking is not evidence, it doesn't matter if it is well trained to bark when it smells something. You can't put a dog in a witness box and ask it 'why did you bark'. 'Well he looked sad, he always looks much happier when I bark, so I thought i would cheer him up.'

And as I said before, it takes a minimum of two days for a dead body to even start decaying to a point chemical markers of death start to appear, so it's an absolute scientific impossibility that a cadaver dog could have detected anything relevant in the apartment. That dog should never have been let in the apartment as there was literally no point.

Incredibly suspicious when people deny false accusations.

Lindy Chamberlain.

A forensic technician said that a fine spray of brown paint like droplets found on body work in the passenger footwell was tested and shown to be foetal blood, assumed to have been caused when Azarias throat was cut and the arterial pressure caused the blood to spray out in a fine mist, as expert witnesses claimed it would.

Lindy continued to claim innocence and that a dingo had taken her child. How suspicious, claiming such damning evidence, let alone a dog barking on command, was false.

Turns out a dingo did take Azaria. The forensic technician submitted false evidence that the spray was foetal blood, it was just undercoat paint put there in the factory. It contained iron oxide which seems to have been confused with haemoglobin which contains iron.

The technician was under immense peer pressure to return a positive result because the population was whipped up into a frenzy of national hate similar to that the Daily Mail has managed to stimulate for Harry and Meghan. The police and everyone in the prosecution chain had already made up their minds as to Lindy's guilt, and it was obvious to the technician what everyone wanted them to deliver.

There's a chilling similarity with the McCann case as the scum Police leaked information to the press to help stir up a public firestorm of hate for the person they wanted to convict, just as Amaral and his band of thugs did. Every single detail of Kate's diary, seized as evidence, which could be negatively interpreted with some spin, was drip-fed to the media. One of the detectives even met with a journalist and started the swingers rumour.

The media should never have been informed or found out what the dogs did or did not do. Every single element in the investigation that could cast aspersions on the McCanns was deliberately fed to the media by Amaral and his band of confession-beating crooks. I guess it was their pay back for the frustration that this was one case where they couldn't have Kate fall down a lot of flights of stairs, or be made to kneel for hours on fine gravel until she confessed, which was their usual mode of operation to 'solve' cases.

Lindy Chamberlain was wrongly convicted on false evidence and spent 3 years in prison. How suspicious she denied the evidence..

silliussoddius

The Chamberlain case should make everyone pause before they think they can solve a case from the other side of a keyboard.

MonkieSocks

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121776453#Comment_121776453

Don't forget the Shannon Matthews case, where the dogs signaled Cadaver Alert in her home.

Shannon Matthews was alive and still is

silliussoddius

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121776490#Comment_121776490

I’m not familiar with that case. My first exposure to the Chamberlain case was the Meryl Streep film, A Cry in the dark. I had seen it when I was young and had more or less forgotten about it until I was in Australia in 2004, when the case made headlines again.

I watched the film again around this time, when the McCann case came up about a year later, the public reaction seemed very similar in both cases. Obviously the McCann case happened in the early days of the mass popularity of the world wide web so it reached more people

i think in the early days of the case people expected Madeleine to be found and there was a sense of “crowd sourcing/slacktivism” where everyone (particularly the tabloids) would get a pat on the back for a job well done. Then when it was obvious it would go beyond people’s attention spans, there needed to be a bogie man and the parents became it. As we’ve seen with the internet being in everyone’s pockets, people just need an iphone to think they’re opinion is fact

If someone was charged tomorrow with loads of evidence, I guarantee there would still be people trying to link the parents to it.

briany

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121776602#Comment_121776602

Problem was that there was no obvious perpetrator in Madeleine's case, but the press still needed a villain, so the parents got the brunt of the outcry.

I suspect that if Jamie Bulger's killers were similarly a mystery, then his mother would have been treated much more harshly with the aspect of her turning away from him to pay for shopping receiving much more focus and ire.

Yes, society always needs someone to pin the responsibility on, and will fill in that gap if news of an arrest being progressed fails to manifest. A vacuum of knowledge will always be filled by theories, no matter how improbable. Conspiracy theories abound even where there is good explanation, eg the poor man who died on a Lufthansa flight from Bangkok back to his home in Germany. He bled to death very suddenly when oesophageal varices ruptured, very common result of chronic liver disease. But lots of the Twitterati and bloggers insist he had Ebola or a new toxin if virus designed to kill society one by one.

silliussoddius

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121777051#Comment_121777051

There's also the weird expectation about how people should behave/grieve in public. There was a local case a few years ago where a teenager went missing, it ended up he had died and the body was found a few days later. During this time I heard a neighbour remark about how the mother had appeared on tv, is there a correct way to behave in these circumstances? Then on the completely different end of the spectrum you have the accusations against the parents of the children in the Sandy Hook shooting.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121777085#Comment_121777085

I’ll tell you what, I spoke on Liveline a few days after my mother died. We had been extremely close, and I was devastated and cried Abu dangly and noisily in the privacy of my home. Anyone listening to Liveline might have thought I was a glib. Also in the day of her funeral I invited a lot of family & friends to a 4 course meal with wine, my mother wanted to be remembered as a hospitable person and this was to be the last evidence of the person she was. A jolly time was had by all in spite of myself and her sister being chief mourners who were truly grieving. I smiled a lot, chatted, made sure everyone was “enjoying themselves”.

I remember somebody hearing about this second hand, and interpreted it as my gleefully celebrating my mother being dead. What a massive misinterpretation!

If I am deeply upset I like to take myself off to cry in private, or I try to pull myself together for the moment, if I can. Sometimes I might appear heartless, but I’m in self-protection mode, it’s a kind of survival mechanism. I also took some Valium, which my mother had put on standby, having asked the GP for this. That really helped me keep myself together.

The McCanns seem to be a very united couple and felt well supported by each other, so they could pull themselves together in public. They are doctors, well practised in having to deliver bad news to people and keeping a calm facade whilst doing so.

rogber

Brueckner has the typical retrusive chin of a paedo, I reckon it was him

Musicrules

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121774857#Comment_121774857

Your daughter's missing, you're desperate to find her, cadaver dogs find something in your apartment, it's hard to take but it could lead to answers as to your daughter's whereabouts. The natural reaction would be to jump on this, despite suspicion, you'd be all over it trying to see where the dogs findings could lead.

Instead, the McCann's lawyered up, tried to discredit the dogs findings and fled the country. That is highly suspicious behaviour. Whether you want to admit it or not.

cnocbui

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121777593#Comment_121777593

You concoct this synthetic drama and invent this nonsense sence of urgency that simply didn't exist.

The parents were desperate to find her and you should read the nannies account of her and Kates desperate search on the night Madeline went missing. Imagine a mother having to look in bins. She might be a doctor but that must have hurt beyond imagining.

Here's the bit you clearly don't get:

Madeline dissapeared on 3rd of May 2007.

Eddie and keela searched the apartment on 3rd August.

By that time there was no sense of urgency; all the urgency was expended 3 months earlier and any notion that anyone official, especially the awful police, was actually looking for Madeline, was long gone! The Police were in full pin it on the parents mode by that time. The McCanns would have been fully aware of what the police were doing and lawyering up was an absolute necessity and not the least bit suspicious.

Lots of Portuguese SAR and sniffer dogs were brought in and made extensive searches when it actually made sense to use them, which is right after Madeline went missing and scent and trails would be fresh. There is even an account of one of those dogs finding a scent trail and following it to another apartment, but that didn't pan out.

briany

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121777593#Comment_121777593

The McCanns had been cooperating with the PJ up until the point that they went to the McCanns after the sniffer dog alerts and said that if they confessed then, they'd receive a more lenient sentence. That wasn't suspicion on the part of the PJ, that was a conclusion. Therefore, in order to move things on, it was critically important for the McCanns to demonstrate why the PJ's case against them was a load of crap, which they did quite ably after hiring some proper legal counsel. I say to you that when you're being fingered for a crime which you did not commit, it is the most natural reaction there is for you to want to clear your name. But most ordinary people aren't always learned in the law, which is why they tend to hire lawyers to represent them.

Musicrules

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121778139#Comment_121778139

You still can't explain why the McCann's first instinct was to try to run from the findings of the highly trained dogs and their vastly experienced handler. They were brought over from Britain by the way so not a local conspiracy like you're trying to paint.

This could have been a big break in the case, a clue to what really happened. The McCann's didn't consider that for a second. They couldn't have known that the dogs were wrong or right or anything. So to instantly try to dismiss it and get their highly paid team after it stinks. It's not the reaction of innocent people.

Musicrules

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121778230#Comment_121778230

No, the most natural reaction to a clue in finding your lost daughter that you abandoned to go out with your friends would be to try to see if that leads anywhere. It's not to book a flight out of the country and not even consider that the dogs were right. How could they have known the dogs were wrong?

briany

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121778401#Comment_121778401

The alert didn't turn anything conclusive up. The PJ were apparently trying to use this alert to build a case against the McCanns themselves, among other things which turned out to be similarly non starters. It was natural for the McCanns to discredit this for two reasons - the investigation couldn't move forward very well if this was the leading theory with the PJ team, and public goodwill, support and aid would have been sorely compromised if tabloids had been allowed to continue with their headlines connecting the McCanns to their daughter's disappearance. It is very important in investigations to eliminate certain theories in order to narrow down the range of possibilities.

LambshankRedemption

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121778401#Comment_121778401

How could they have known the dogs were wrong?

Well they knew they had not killed her. So thats how they knew the dogs were wrong.

cnocbui

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121778364#Comment_121778364

Well done inspector Clouseau, I can see you have put a lot of thought into this.

No way the parents could know whether the dogs were right or wrong to positively identify their hire car as having had a dead body in it. I can understand forgetting something like that, easy to do.

I once found a dead elephant in the boot of my Civic I had completely forgotten about, so can relate.

LambshankRedemption

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121778551#Comment_121778551

Thats the elephant in the room.

Packrat

Isn't there any rule against this type of trolling anymore?

Musicrules

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121778543#Comment_121778543

The dogs weren't trying to build a case against the McCann's. They weren't trying to end any goodwill towards them. They made an alert in the apartment. As innocent people, any family in that situation would have tried to find the explanation for that. The abductor may have harmed Madeleine in the apartment. The McCann's booked a flight out of there and got their team to try to rubbish the findings.

Musicrules

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121778545#Comment_121778545

But how did they know an abductor hadn't killed her in the apartment? How did they not even consider that?

Musicrules

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121778551#Comment_121778551

Well you've forgotten about the findings in the apartment. Similarly, the McCann's forgot that the findings didn't automatically point to them. Hence their reaction to it was extremely suspicious.

chooseusername

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121778929#Comment_121778929

"The McCann's booked a flight out of there and got their team to try to rubbish the findings."

4 months after Madeleine went missing both parents were made 'arguidos' and flew back to England. 10 months later the arguido status was lifted.

As arguidos it would have been stupid to remain in Portugal. The local police would have made a big media show of the English couple being arrested. Much like the Irish police did with Ian Bailey and Jules Thomas ( that other thread you're trolling on)

Musicrules

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121778972#Comment_121778972

What has that got to do with them not even considering the cadaver dog findings might have helped find out what happened to their daughter? That's the second trolling accusation in the past few posts. Not agreeing that the McCann's are all innocent and whiter than white is not trolling.

chooseusername

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121779047#Comment_121779047

My response was nothing to do with the dogs, just this;" The McCann's booked a flight out of there......"

Poining out it was 4 months after Madeleine went missing.

cnocbui

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121779047#Comment_121779047

Two dogs bark - now what? Over to you to explain what comes next that leads to solving the case and why the attitude of the McCanns has anything whatsoever to do with what comes next.

nc6000

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121779047#Comment_121779047

Eh, wouldn't that mean the abductor had to be in the apartment with a dead body for a number of hours for there to be any traces left for the dogs to detect? That never happened.

The Portuguese police were obviously trying to stitch up the parents because they had zero other leads and wanted the whole media circus to end.

They appear to have accepted this, otherwise why did they apologise for how the parents were treated?

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-67229219

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-67229219

briany

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121778929#Comment_121778929

The McCann lawyers did not 'rubbish' the findings. They rubbished the conclusion the PJ were attempting to draw from those findings. That's the difference.

Whether through corruption or simple bad police work, the PJ were attempting to put the finger on the McCanns. It would behoove anyone who finds themselves in this situation to find good legal counsel, so that the theory can be quickly eliminated and actual investigative work can then continue. You say that the natural reaction is to be all over the sniffer dog evidence. I say that it's kind of hard to do that when the police are trying to frame you by using it. Proper evidence is needed, and not only was this pointed out by the McCanns to clear their own name, but it would have been pointed out by anyone else who was accused using the same standard of 'proof'.

The sniffer dog alert was tested forensically and yielded no breakthrough. There was nowhere for this avenue to go.

Musicrules

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121779398#Comment_121779398

I know it was nothing to do with the dogs. So not sure why you quoted my post.

Musicrules

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121779419#Comment_121779419

If you were desperately looking for your daughter and cadaver dogs make an alert in the apartment you were staying in, would you get a flight out of the country as quick as you could? That's what I'm discussing here. Their reaction was extremely suspicious. There's no getting around that.

cnocbui

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121779508#Comment_121779508

I'll answer your question if you answer mine.

Musicrules

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121779479#Comment_121779479

The McCann's couldn't have known anything about what the findings could have meant. The dogs weren't trying to stitch them up, either was their handler.

briany

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121779479#Comment_121779479

The theory, such as it is, could only point to the McCanns as it would be close to an impossibility for a 3rd party to be involved if her body was actually in the apartment for several hours.

You know that thing - we've all done it at some stage, I'm sure - where you kill your child by giving them Calpol and then stick their body behind a settee or in a press, and then raise the alarm about them being missing but a few hours later. The perfect crime, you'll all agree. People look behind couches for coins and socks. Not for dead children. No way that little avenue would have been investigated or stumbled upon in the frantic searching which followed the alarm being raised about her disappearance.

Musicrules

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121779491#Comment_121779491

I haven't discussed the police at all. They are completely irrelevant to the McCann's reaction. And their team did try to rubbish the reputation of the dogs and what cadaver dogs could find. And kept going long after the McCann's were suspects.

Musicrules

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121779516#Comment_121779516

Why would I answer yours? It has nothing to do with what I've been discussing. I've said already, the dogs being wrong or right is irrelevant to what way the McCann's and their team reacted to it.

cnocbui

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121779530#Comment_121779530

I already explained to you that the apparent dog reactions to their hire car could only have meant they were involved if supporting evidence had been found, so stop with revisiting your favourite straw man in every single post.

nc6000

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121779530#Comment_121779530

I never said the dogs or their handler were trying to stitch them up. I think the Portuguese police were and that's why the parents returned to the UK.

cnocbui

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121779554#Comment_121779554

You made a couple of linked assertions, I asked you to back up the first on which the second depended in order to have any validity. You failed to do so, rendering your second assertion invalid.

Now you claim your first assertion has nothing to do with anything, which is a good summation of your logically clumsy and deficient posts.

briany

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121779543#Comment_121779543

They were central to the McCanns' reaction. They pointed the finger at the McCanns after the alerts and the McCanns then got lawyers to help them clear their name. That is direct cause and effect.

Sniffer dogs are not evidence in and of themselves. They can point to places where evidence may be collected or samples tested, but if that process yields nothing, the investigation moves on.

chooseusername

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121779492#Comment_121779492

Assuming you're not being disingenuous here, I quoted your post to add some context to; "The McCann's booked a flight out of there...."

LambshankRedemption

Is there such a thing as a troll thats in the closet? Under bridges,sure I've heard of those, but I think what we have here is a troll who is in the closet and doesn't realise.

That or he knows what he's doing and having a big laugh.

Either way a certain poster is going on my ignore list.

tibruit

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121778551#Comment_121778551

You calling somebody Inspector Clouseau. The irony of it.