Madeleine’s not just a theory, she may still be alive
TWELVE years after she disappeared, we’ve forgotten who Madeleine McCann is.
The pretty three year old would now be approaching her 15th birthday. She’d be a young woman revising for GCSEs, thinking about A-levels and adulthood.
She’d probably be dating and doing odd things to her hair, like most teenagers.
Instead she has become a theory. A thing to be waved for headlines by politicians and other windbags. Reduced to a soundbite on the morning shows, and subject of a Netflix documentary which pretends to be doing something a £12million British police investigation couldn’t.
Madeleine is used as an excuse for the Portuguese cops who failed in every aspect of modern policing, contaminated the scene in that Praia da Luz holiday apartment and left the nearest border post open. Armchair detectives who can’t detect the stink of the online sewers they inhabit use her as a weapon to beat others with, and charlatans have tarnished her name, fleecing the fund set up to search for her.
We have lost sight of the fact Madeleine may be alive. In the years since her disappearance a dozen girls have been found and freed from cellars and secret rooms across Europe and the USA. In the absence of a body, a Fritzl-style, long-term incarceration must remain a possibility.
And she may also be dead – her tiny body a long way from home and those who love her.
Her parents have been victims of incredible vitriol, despite their grief and misery being plain to see, and their alibi rock-solid. Their determination to keep the hunt for Madeleine going so long is proof enough for me of their innocence; a murderer would have let their crime fade.
The guilt they must feel, though, for having left Madeleine sleeping in an unlocked apartment they could not see, must have eaten them up for the past 12 years.
In that time they’ve bought her birthday and Christmas presents in the hope one day she’ll be able to open them, and have probably become used to the nightmares.
Kate and Gerry have served a longer sentence than most murderers do. They’ve paid their dues every day for the mistakes they made. They’ve raised her two young siblings, continued the campaign and kept their sanity amid the failures, blame, court cases and dramatisations.
Someone knows what happened to Madeleine, and is keeping it secret. And it’s now reported the police are running out of leads and money.
Madeleine has been lost more than once – on that fateful summer night in 2007, in the vortex of blame that followed it, and now in a public consciousness which has forgotten she is more than just a name. Remember Madeleine.
Armchair detectives use her as a weapon to beat others