I don't think I'd leave my wallet in an unlocked flat, let alone a child of mine. How do we know the flat was unlocked, do we know that?
Yes. We do. It was via doing this that every 20 - 30 minutes one of the group would return to the flats, go door to door, give a cursory check that everything was okay in each flat, move on to the next and return to the restaurant thereafter. Until the next person went off to do the same. This is covered (and the timeline which was given by the party of 7 to the Portuguese local police (the GNR)) in the Netflix documentary.
The GNR dispute that timeline. But there are significant questions to be asked of the GNR's behavior and motives also. I'll return to that.
Mrs McCann said the shutters on the flat had been jemmied (though they hadn't, you can see that in photos). Why would she say that if she knew the door was open - she'd be wondering why they bothered to jemmy the shutters if the door was open.
That was likely based on the fact that the window was not open when they left the flat for the evening. Nor was it noticed to be open either by Gerry McCann when he performed the first check at 21:05, or by Matthew Oldfield when he checked in at around 21:30. When Kate McCann returned at roughly 22:00 the window was open and her daughter missing. It was at that point the alarm was raised.
What is inconclusive is how Madeleine left the flat, who with and by which exit.
The GNR initially accused Matthew Oldfield of being responsible, having passed Madeleine to a third party through that window during his 21:30 inspection. The majority of focus for the GNR was almost singularly and resolutely on the McCanns or somebody within the 'Tapas 7' as they came to be known. Very few lines of inquiry looked beyond those. Only Robert Murat was really an exception to that - but again an English man. A non-local.
Granted through the window, possibly sleeping, would plausibly have been an easier way for any abductor to remove a child from the property. And 5a was the last flat nearest to the road. It arguably would have run less risk of waking the other children or risking Madeleine waking and alerting others with vocal protests.
And then she wouldn't answer any of the local police's questions. What possible explanation could there be for the latter?
By that point, however, it had become clear that the GNR had settled on their version of the story. And they wanted that to be 'English woman kills her child on holiday - nothing to do with Praia de Luz, or any other existing cases we are currently under investigation for. We can make this go away'. And there were several reasons why they did want it to go away.
Things again discussed in the Netflix documentary - There was pressure to restore some kind of semblance of normalcy to Praia de Luz quickly. It was effecting the area's tourism. And while it is implied that there were known elements within the community who may have had associations with historical child abuse charges the authorities understandably would have preferred such things not to be brought up.
But perhaps more importantly for the Portuguese Police, and the head detective of the case, the documentary also mentions that at the time of Madeleine's disappearance they were currently under investigation for their conduct in another child abduction case several years earlier - that of Joana Cipriano in 2004, in another nearby Algarve village, some 11 km away. A case which had involved heavy suggestion of forced confessions, possible beatings to achieve said result, and again no evidence of a body. The missing child's Parents were charged, with the suggestion that the mother had killed the child, and her partner cut up the body, placed it in a freezer and later moved it for disposal.
A case with many discrepancies (such as their not possessing a fridge large enough for what the police were suggesting). But after having failed in implicating Robert Murat to resolve the problem the detectives on the McCann case moved swiftly to replicate numerous details of their previous case and apply it onto the McCann's.
I certainly see it as by declaring Kate McCann as Arguida it would prevent her from speaking out any further about the case (because it effectively is a legal gagging order), and also allow the police to pursue only one line of inquiry, in order to aid making the whole thing go away as efficiently as possible. And the McCann's rightly saw that as a trap. It was. It is difficult to see it as anything else really. And while there were still many, many people at the Ocean Club and surrounding area who the Portuguese police hadn't even approached, let alone spoken to, moving to charge Kate McCann was at best jumping the gun. At worst it was flat out negligence.
And incidentally, why is there this general insistence that the child is still 'missing'? It's massively likely that if she was abducted, she died pretty soon afterwards, unfortunately. With her strange eye, if she was still around someone would have found her by now (or she'd have found herself).
Because, simply put, until there is concrete proof of a body, or somebody has confessed to a murder, that is officially exactly what it is. A missing person case.
As I mentioned above a high number of people at the Ocean Club at the time were never questioned in any way by the police. Very early into the investigation it became apparent that the Portuguese police were no longer investigating people who were coming to them with possible information. Suspicious behavior and incidents in the area which could have supported some kind of evidence of organised child abduction.
Yes, you've got to consider that even if she had been abducted the outcome would likely be quite plausibly bleak. A child that easily recognisable through media exposure would quite likely have not met a pleasant end if traffickers deemed her to be too risky. But we don't know that, and we have no way of ever really knowing that.
I think the best that the McCann's can hope for now is that Madeleine was taken and almost instantly passed to a new set of parents via illegal adoption. Young enough to forget her early childhood and have a whole new identity placed upon her without wholly realising. And hoping that someday she will realise as an adult that something is not quite right. To question that. And take steps towards discovering who she really is. But it remains the lesser likely outcome, of course it does.
Also, the 'unit of friends' hadn't been looking out for the children 24/7, they had been in the nursery during the day several times.
Sorry, that probably a poor choice of phrasing on my part. Yes, there was a 'kids club' which the children of the Tapas 7 had been part of during the daytime, sometimes with their parents on hand. Sometimes without. What I was trying to make clear is that the Parents, as friends, *were* spending time with each other collectively 24/7. There was a clear level of trust. I mean right to the point of checking up on each other's kids. You don't get that without.
One person I do kinda feel sorry for is Matthew Oldfield - the guy who checked up on Apartment 5a between Gerry and Kate raising the alarm. He himself admits that he did not actually check inside the room. He supposedly listened in, heard a sound 'like a child turning over in bed', and left the flat. He's probably spent a decade worrying that he cannot say for certain that Madeleine was in that room at the time he checked, whether there was anybody else *in* that room at the time he entered the flat, or what that noise actually was.
