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The Madeleine McCann Disappearance

min_bannister said:
So how could the dogs have been trained on human corpses if they were British or Portugese? I am not sure bits of placenta etc are really going to be the same.
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To be really pedantic about it, a dog trained specifically to detect cadaverine does not necessarily need to practice on actual corpses given that Google suggests cadaverine can be - and is - synthesised.
 
Krepostnoi said:
To be really pedantic about it, a dog trained specifically to detect cadaverine does not necessarily need to practice on actual corpses given that Google suggests cadaverine can be - and is - synthesised.
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I am sure but cadaverine is not unique to human flesh - the dogs could mistake rotten animal for rotten human.
 
Well, when ya dead you wont be, they will start dropping off, unless you get burnt
 
Give your body to a medical school with a rider that they hand on the left overs for cadaver dog training.
 
who they gonna arrest? its the dead body that insisted
 
Chop my legs off and stick me in a banana box for all I care,
strangely the wife was threatening to have me chucked in the
fire box of a Blackfive going up Shap only this morning.
 
MorningAngel said:
Police request Madeleine inquiry funds - BBC News
https://apple.news/ATR8V9dVOQyKzoFi8KcCwWw

Have they actually got any more leads or are they tripping all this money down a big black hole? I don't see why it keeps getting more money with no movement.
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You'd certainly like to think it means they have some sort of new avenue of inquiry to pursue. If not, "more of the same" as an investigatory tactic seems no more likely to bear fruit now than it has for the last 10 years.

From that linked article (my bold):
In April, the force said it was still pursuing a critical line of inquiry, 10 years after Madeleine's disappearance in Portugal, aged three...

In April, the force's Assistant Commissioner, Mark Rowley, said they still hoped they could provide answers.

He said: "I know we have a significant line of inquiry which is worth pursuing, and because it's worth pursuing it could provide an answer, but until we've gone through it I won't know whether we are going to get there or not."

Mr Rowley said there was no "definitive evidence" as to whether Madeleine was alive or dead.

He also declined to reveal the nature of the working theories or whether any suspects were currently being considered, but said the investigating team were still receiving evidence and new information from members of the public on a daily basis.
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It'd be nice to think that all that was more than just words, but only time will tell, I guess.
 
Funding has been as tight for the police as it has been for anyone else. According to one of my brothers best friends - who works in serious crime (as a copper, not a serious criminal), over the last five years or so their budgetting has been under more intense scrutiny than it has ever been before.

Under these circumstances I'm pretty sure they'll need at least an inkling of new evidence - of course, one of the issues with this is that these days rapid advances in forensic science and DNA analysis can mean that some 'old' evidence has a constant potential to become 'new' evidence.
 
Spookdaddy said:
Funding has been as tight for the police as it has been for anyone else. According to one of my brothers best friends - who works in serious crime (as a copper, not a serious criminal), over the last five years or so their budgetting has been under more intense scrutiny than it has ever been before.

Under these circumstances I'm pretty sure they'll need at least an inkling of new evidence - of course, one of the issues with this is that these days rapid advances in forensic science and DNA analysis can mean that some 'old' evidence has a constant potential to become 'new' evidence.
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Certain high profile cases seem immune to the budgeting affecting other matters. Madeleine McCann, Stephen Lawrence, Operation Yewtree... all have had apparently limitless funds devoted to them, far more than your average run of the mill murder or child abuse case. No doubt the same will be true of the next media obsession.
 
Quake42 said:
Certain high profile cases seem immune to the budgeting affecting other matters. Madeleine McCann, Stephen Lawrence, Operation Yewtree... all have had apparently limitless funds devoted to them, far more than your average run of the mill murder or child abuse case. No doubt the same will be true of the next media obsession.
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Clearly there's an argument for saying that dedication to an investigation can be influenced by external scrutiny and the additional pressure this incurs, but I'm not sure the cases mentioned are really that comparable?

Although classed as an investigation, Yewtree is effectively an umbrella under which several individual although interconnected investigations have taken place - which is clearly bound to be both more expansive and therefore more expensive. And the subsequent efforts of the Met in regard to the Lawrence case were at least partly a face-saving exercise to make up for the initial ridiculously sloppy investigation. The cold-case review which finally saw a result is something which is regularly applied to others when new evidence has arisen, or where advances in technology have made existing evidence worthy of review; this is really not that rare, or necessarily simply a reaction to pressure from the media - in fact isn't there an entire thread on this board dedicated to the process?
 
This is kind of old news. Working away quite a lot, with intermittent wifi and other inconveniences, I have a habit of writing posts offline and then forgetting to do anything with them. So apologies if this is a little outwith the flow of the current conversation...and the quotes I’m responding to are several months old.

rynner2 said:
...Just because they are professional people and don't talk the same way as most oiks do does not necessarily mean they have something to hide. (Or they may have something to hide, but something not relevent to their daughter's disappearance.)
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I tend to agree. I believe it is much more difficult it to extrapolate a truth from the examination of outward behaviour than we are commonly lead to believe: guilty people can sometimes feel genuine grief, and therefore act in a way which we believe indicates innocence - the bereaved sometimes feel nothing but a void, and their subsequent apparent 'coldness' can appear to indicate guilt. The simple fact is that people act in different ways to extreme stress – that there is a general weighting to one side of a behavioural spectrum does not necessarily indicate guilt in those who fall outside that range.

An obvious counter example might be that an apparently classic symptom of the criminal psychopath is a lack of empathy, masked by an ability to act in a way which camouflages that emotional emptiness – that is, they can be very good at acting in a way we expect a 'normal' person to behave. If this is the case then the McCann’s could have been choking-up and breaking-down and generally acting in a way which entirely satisfies the doubts of those who currently believe that their behaviour is somehow odd, while at the same time having an entire busload of toddlers buried under their patio.

The idea that outward appearance and inner reality are necessarily connected in the simplistic ways cod psychologists and various other experts would suggest masks a much more complicated truth: people lie successfully, and people are lied to successfully, all the time – if the truth was actually written on us in the way some people appear to think it is then this simply would not be the case.

I’ll freely admit to finding something not quite right about the McCanns – the difference is that I’m just not sure I’m confident enough in the whole idea of ‘normal’ behaviour, especially in extreme circumstances, to think that this oddness necessarily means the things that some people seem to think it does. And, of course, they may well be guilty as sin – it’s just that I’ve still seen nothing that entirely and unequivocally convinces me of that.

Cochise said:
The point to me is not what happened to Madeleine McCann (we'll probably never know) but exactly why such an enormous amount of resources have been poured into this case . Other children go missing and very little is done...
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I think this gives a slightly false perspective: the overwhelming majority of children reported missing are found within a very short period, and it usually turns out that their absence is a direct result of them doing what children do, rather than anything sinister. And where there is reason to believe that a crime has been committed I ‘m really not sure I believe that ‘very little is done’. Clearly there are several examples where an investigation has started sluggishly, or suffered through incompetence or unhelpful assumptions based on background, behaviour etc, but I think these are a minority. I'm just not sure that there are really many cases which can be compared directly to the McCann’s experience. And I suspect that, if and when it does happen, the issue is not so much that other stories are ignored or sidelined – rather that the McCann’s has been comparatively over-exposed, which is not at all the same thing.

The McCann’s are eloquent and media savvy and clearly have the wherewithal to actively pursue a long term media campaign. I don’t think there is anything overly noteworthy in the fact that the story has kept re-emerging over the years - they are actively engaging in a strategy that any press adviser worth their salt would push for any client who wanted a story of any type to remain in the public consciousness: when the focus fades, push any new factor - and if there isn’t a new factor, dust off and re-spin an old one: doesn’t matter if it’s an anniversary, a crap identikit picture, a rubbish conspiracy theory, an entirely unreliable ‘new’ eyewitness - just keep pushing the story to the front.

It also strikes me that while it would make sense for a guilty person to follow this path in the initial stages of a case such as this one – because that would appear to be the normal behaviour of a bereaved parent - to actively and continuously resurrect the issue every time it fades in the public eye, even years after the event, would seem to indicate to me an addiction to risk of an almost superhuman nature. I’m not suggesting this can’t happen - killers do sometimes actively seek attention. A classic example (although it was months rather than years) would be the case of Mitchell Quy, who actively courted the mainstream media over an 18 month period. And Robert Durst – the subject of the excellent HBO documentary, The Jinx...(spoiler added for those who haven't seen the doc, and may want to...although even adding a spoiler might be seen as a bit of a spoiler - oh bugger, it's that old spoiler conundrum again)
did just this only to quite spectacularly dob himself in in possibly the most quietly, yet devastatingly, dramatic moment I’ve witnessed on film. (Although, given the arguments about inadmissibilty, I can't help wondering sometimes if Durst might not have been playing a very clever and intricate game with the rest of the world.)

It’s clearly a very risky way of getting your adrenalin fix.
 
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Spookdaddy said:
Clearly there's an argument for saying that dedication to an investigation can be influenced by external scrutiny and the additional pressure this incurs, but I'm not sure the cases mentioned are really that comparable?
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The cases are all different, but all are example of investigations which have for whatever reason attracted a large amount of political/media attention and as a result money effectively has been no object to their pursuit. Cases without such levels of attention - and/or a need for arse covering in the police - are subject to far more stringent budgeting.

I'm sure there are other examples of this, but those three sprang to mind.
 
There are some cases that always seem a bit 'odd' because some part of the investigation doesn't seem quite right.

With the September 11th attack it was 'why did building 7 collapse when it wasn't hit by anything' and with this case it is the entirely unsatisfactory issue of the hire car.

INT21
 
I'm late to this discussion but it seems like the consensus here is that the parents killed their daughter....for what reason?
And what are everyone's thoughts on the Jon Benet Ramsay case where the killer was never caught? The parents again...?
 
dr wu said:
I'm late to this discussion but it seems like the consensus here is that the parents killed their daughter....for what reason?
And what are everyone's thoughts on the Jon Benet Ramsay case where the killer was never caught? The parents again...?
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I don't think the McCanns deliberately killed Madeleine. There are suggestions that she was sedated and may have died due to this, but these are only allegations. In any case they abandoned their children to go on the piss. Childcare facilities were available at apartment complex, would have cost the price of a couple of bottles of the wine they drank.

In the JBR case there have been suggestions (on investigative TV programmes) that another member of the family killed her.
 
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