• We have updated the guidelines regarding posting political content: please see the stickied thread on Website Issues.
They could have cloned Madeleine for less.
 
how does it compare with the ben needham case

Ben Needham's family accept that he is dead, and that he died soon after he was last seen. He was not abducted. It seems he wandered onto a nearby building site and was accidentally run over by a construction vehicle. The workers quickly buried his body to cover up the accident.

Shameful and cowardly but not malicious, which might be a small comfort to Ben's family.

The area where the body might be was dug up a few years ago, following a revelation of a deathbed confession, and items were found that were recognised as belonging to Ben. While sadly no bones or other remains came to light, what was found did corroborate the builders' account of Ben's death.
 
I bet they didn't spend a fraction of that looking for that lass from Blackpool who was reputed to have ended up in the kebabs.

Sorry to be dim but to whom are you referring?

Also, has any one been following the "who ha" over the Netflix 8 part documentary of the McCann case?
 
what was the cost of the investigation ?

I'm not sure how many different sets of figures you'd have to track down and add up to determine this. The last two increments of special funding from the Home Office within the last few years totaled 500K - 550K pounds. I have no idea how complicated it would be to try and identify countable amounts dating back to the 1990's.
 
To put that into perspective, the cost of the Soham murder investigation (Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman) was less than £10M, and even that nearly bankrupted the Cambridgeshire police.

maximus otter

Seeing as we have you here, I'm curious. When we hear about investigations that run to millions or tens of millions of pounds, are there some 'single item' costs that drive that figure upward or is it merely the agglomeration of wages/overtime for so many different people over an extended period?

I speak in total ignorance, but are--perhaps--forensics or something especially costly.
 
Last edited:
Seeing as we have you here, I'm curious. When we hear about investigations that run to millions or tens of millions of pounds, are their some 'single item' costs that drive that figure upward or is it merely the agglomeration of wages/overtime for so many different people over an extended period?

I speak in total ignorance, but are--perhaps--forensics or something especially costly.

Waaaay above my link on the food chain, but here’s a thumbnail FOIA breakdown of the costs in the Sarah Payne murder in 2000:

“The investigation into the disappearance of schoolgirl Sarah Payne cost almost £3 million.

Sussex Police spent nearly £2 million on wages for the 910 police officers and 112 members of police staff who were involved with the inquiry from the initial police response the day the report was made.

More than £800,000 was spent on overtime as officers carried out a painstaking search for the little girl.

The cost of forensic science used to crack the case came to £415,689

Other costs, including vehicle costs and staff subsistence, came to £430,000

Chief Superintendent Kevin Moore, head of Sussex Police CID, said: "I would bet most of the staffing costs would have gone on the major search operation and house-to-house enquiries.”

https://www.theargus.co.uk/news/1859160.Sarah_Payne_investigation_cost_nearly___3m/

So: roughly 65% in wages, of which 40% was overtime; 13% forensics; 14% food & transport.

Yet the pivotal evidence was a £17 DNA test on a single hair found on a T-shirt in the offender’s van...

maximus otter
 
Last edited:
So: roughly 65% in wages, of which 40% was overtime; 13% forensics; 14% food & transport. Yet the pivotal evidence was a £17 DNA test on a single hair found on a T- shirt in the offender’s van...
maximus otter
So really, context is everything. What are the chances that the single hair would have gone undetected without the other money being spent? I would say the chances of having an officer spot 1 hair in that van, without the rest of the investigation going on, would have been perishingly unlikely. It is amusing to think that the whole case hinged on 1 low priced DNA test, but it took a lot of groundwork to get to that point, no? Where is Sherlock Holmes when you need him? I'm sure he would have come in well under 3 million pounds, but he is also a fictional character, and the real world is strangely racist towards fictional characters.
 
What are the chances that the single hair would have gone undetected without the other money being spent? I would say the chances of having an officer spot 1 hair in that van, without the rest of the investigation going on, would have been perishingly unlikely. It is amusing to think that the whole case hinged on 1 low priced DNA test...

Off at a tangent, yesterday I watched the first episode of the TV documentary series Homicide Squad: Atlanta. The nude body of a nineteen-year-old girl is found in a public park, and the police begin their investigation. I watched the initial response with some shock, as SOCOs, detectives etc. walked around the crime scene in street clothes, and no attempt was made to shield the scene from weather or prying eyes.

Later the girl's car is found abandoned, and three (?) detectives attend the scene and make a pretty cursory search. One, to his credit, spots an abandoned dress and water bottle on the other side of a fence topped with barbed wire. In the UK, this new scene would have been swarmed by SOCOs. In Atlanta, a detective stands on a shopping trolley (?), leans over the wire (doubtless leaving fibres and possible blood exactly where the offender might have) and fishes out the dress and water bottle using a branch from a nearby tree! He even handles the water bottle with his bare hands, joking to a colleague, "That'll be my prints on the bottom!", or similar. I was wincing. What if the proverbial single DNA-matchable hair had been on that dress - until he'd dragged it over a fence using a stick?

If I'd pulled a stunt 1% that crass at a serious crime scene, the SIO would have ensured that I'd be picking my nose out of a catalogue.

maximus otter
 
Last edited:
Off at a tangent, yesterday I watched the first episode of the TV documentary series Homicide Squad: Atlanta. The nude body of a nineteen-year-old girl is found in a public park, and the police begin their investigation. I watched the initial response with some shock, as SOCOs, detectives etc. walked around the crime scene in street clothes, and no attempt was made to shield the scene from weather or prying eyes. Later the girl's car is found abandoned, and three (?) detectives attend the scene and make a pretty cursory search. One, to his credit, spots an abandoned dress and water bottle on the other side of a fence topped with barbed wire. In the UK, this new scene would have been swarmed by SOCOs. In Atlanta, a detective stands on a shopping trolley (?), leans over the wire (doubtless leaving fibres and possible blood at exactly where the offender might have) and fishes out the dress and water bottle using a branch from a nearby tree! He even handles the water bottle with his bare hands, joking to a colleague, "That'll be my prints on the bottom!", or similar. I was wincing. What if the proverbial single DNA-matchable hair had been on that dress - until he'd dragged it over a fence using a stick? If I'd pulled a stunt 1% that crass at a serious crime scene, the SIO would have ensured that I'd be picking my nose out of a catalogue. maximus otter

You frequently bring out the cynic in me M.O.. By way of explanation rather than apology, you do know how many murders occur in Atlanta? It's a pretty bad old town, and when Sherman burned it, they should have let it stay burned imo. These days it is spookville, with many government agencies operating there, due to the South Appalachian transport nexus it represents. Plenty of murder to go around. In the UK murders are still sufficiently rare that you take them super seriously, to your nation's credit. It is also possible that the cop in question was hamming it up for the cameras, having received directions to do something he would never do in a real investigation as it was for the doco. I mean, you know as well as I do that when they show suicides on TV they never give a proper description of methods. Could something similar be at play in the doco? Yeah, I guess now I am making excuses for them. :)
 
One of the headaches is that there's a common thread running through child abuse for a very long time, and some sources on the edge of the Dark Web suggest rather a strange motivation. As a result, child disappearances which fit the pattern (and I think there may be more than one such) are looked at far more closely than others, given that most missing kids resurface fairly soon. On the other hand, the main purpose is to find the kiddy before the consequences of an accident set in.
In Maddy's case, another kid, "Jeremy", went missing in the same region at about that time, and those circumstances matched the pattern, increasing the likelihood Maddy was also taken by the same group.
 
I'm not sure how many different sets of figures you'd have to track down and add up to determine this. The last two increments of special funding from the Home Office within the last few years totaled 500K - 550K pounds. I have no idea how complicated it would be to try and identify countable amounts dating back to the 1990's.
presumably if it can be calculated for one case (as above), it can for another ?
 
presumably if it can be calculated for one case (as above), it can for another ?

Certainly ... The problem is tracking down all the relevant figures ...
 
perhaps theres not much interest in the cost of the needham case compared to mccann
 
Sorry to be dim but to whom are you referring?

Also, has any one been following the "who ha" over the Netflix 8 part documentary of the McCann case?

Charlene Downes, 14 years old when she 'disappeared' in 2003, a suspected murder for which no one has been convicted. The £100,000 reward for information is still outstanding, and now represents less than 1% of the total spent on the search for Madeleine McCann. Charlene was of course working class and from Blackpool, and so prompted poverty tourism pieces in the Guardian rather than repeated front pages in the Daily Mail.
 
what is that comparison meant to represent

Would you prefer the £100,000 being compared to the £2.5M currently being offered as the equivalent in the Madeleine McCann case? Or can we concentrate on the overall context of the difference in response - of one victim being working class and from Blackpool, and so prompting poverty tourism pieces in the Guardian, and one more firmly middle class and photogenic, and prompting instead repeated front pages across the whole of the press.

The fact that something as egregious as "that lass from Blackpool who was reputed to have ended up in the kebabs" needs a Wikipedia prompt, and doesn't result in a wider social memory of reflexive horror is what I'm driving at. And those tabloid values driving political interest and pressure only magnifies that despair at that lacuna in our wider memory.
 
My theory is that the parents gave the kids something to help them sleep whilst they went out for the night and Madeleine reacted poorly to it,passed away and the parents have been covering it up ever since.In the interviews I’ve watched they acted oddly from how I’d believe grieving parents would behave.Thats just my two cents though.Must be horrible to be the parents of some other missing child that hasn’t had the same public interest whilst the McCann case continues to have money poured into it.
 
Would you prefer the £100,000 being compared to the £2.5M currently being offered as the equivalent in the Madeleine McCann case?
at least theres the basis for a comparison rather than rhetoric, mccann case has become huge so the reward has scaled proportionately
 
Back
Top