Yes, it’s time we stopped looking for Maddie
As a police boss says the £10m hunt must end, DAVID JONES, who’s reported on the case for eight years, says with a heavy heart ...
NOT long ago, seized by the compulsion to follow up yet another supposedly promising new lead in the Madeleine McCann case, I returned to Praia da Luz, the conspiratorial little resort that will be forever associated with her name.
Having reported on her story from the earliest days after her disappearance, investigating innumerable twists and turns, I have beaten the tortuous path to that craggy tip of the Algarve more times than I care to remember.
Yet revisiting some of its now-fabled landmarks — apartment 5A at the Ocean Club holiday resort, the white-washed chapel where Kate and Gerry would pray for deliverance — it struck me how precious little we have learned about her fate.
Look back at the newspapers of May 4, 2007, the day after Madeleine vanished, and you will read of a ‘gorgeous, active, chatty and intelligent’ little girl, a few days shy of her fourth birthday, who appeared to have been snatched from her bed while her parents dined with friends at a tapas bar a few dozen yards away.
You will read how the child’s abduction was discovered by her mother when she went to check on her at around 10pm; how she found a window was ajar, and ran back to the restaurant in hysterics to raise the alarm; and how witnesses later saw a child being carried off through the darkened streets.
Fast forward eight years, and that, with the addition of a few marginally relevant details, remains the full extent of our knowledge.
We have no more idea what became of Madeleine now than we did then. It is almost as if time has stood still.
Given the enduring global obsession with the case, we might think this quite extraordinary. As of today, the Daily Mail’s archive contains 11,450 stories about Madeleine. Googling her name, I found no less than 1,290,000 references — five times more than you get by tapping in ‘Madonna’ — and the number soars higher with each passing day. The public’s fascination has been matched by the exorbitant amount of time and money spent on trying to solve the mystery.
First we had a series of Portuguese police investigations, the ineptitude of which is well documented. Next came a procession of private detectives (including a self-proclaimed Spanish super-sleuth, expensively hired by the McCanns in December 2007, who blithely promised to have Madeleine home for Christmas).
Then, in 2011, at the behest of David Cameron and Home Secretary Theresa May, Scotland Yard’s finest were called in to clear up the mess.
At least, that was the Prime Minister’s hope, and perhaps his expectation, when — apparently moved by a personal appeal from the McCanns — he ordered a team of Met detectives to be removed from their other duties and assigned to the case, codenamed Operation Grange.
But almost four years and an eyewatering £10 million of taxpayers’ money later — an amount that would pay the annual wages of countless PCs — it is patently obvious his intervention is not producing results.
Though a huge number of manhours have been spent re-examining the 5,000-page Portuguese judicial dossier in the hope that it might contain a vital missed clue, though great swathes of wasteland in Praia da Luz were explored with sophisticated gadgetry last year, and a plethora of suspects re-interviewed, there has been no sign of a breakthrough.
Despite the lack of progress, 31 Met police staff — detectives and civilians — were still working solely on the investigation this week, at a time when the Yard’s budget is being slashed by £600 million over four years, with further cuts to come, and the threat of Islamic terrorism is stretching its resources to breaking point.
Supported by some half a dozen civilian staff and occupying a large office at New Scotland Yard, the Met’s ‘Madeleine Squad’ have spent four years painstakingly reexamining the botched Portuguese investigation. They have been to Portugal no fewer than 33 times — yet still apparently drawn a blank.
You cannot fault their thoroughness. Portuguese officers found hundreds of hair strands in the McCanns’ holiday apartment. Some were never tested for DNA; others were checked but the results were patchy. The Operation Grange team want permis- sion to carry out fresh DNA tests on them, together with the curtains that were hanging in the apartment.
Meanwhile, every witness statement and tip-off is being re-checked, every theory considered, no matter how unlikely.
This led, late last year in Portugal, to the questioning of 11 possibly key witnesses, among them Robert Murat, the British expat who won a huge sum in libel damages after wrongly being named as a suspect by the Portuguese police in the early stages of the hunt for Madeleine.
And only a few days ago, Detective Chief Inspector Nicola Wall — the newly installed head of Operation Grange — flew to Lisbon with a small team of officers for a private meeting with the authorities.
Each such development raises fresh hopes and excites the media, but so far they have all come to nothing. And one had to ask whether DCI Andy Redwood, who had set up the inquiry and had overseen it enthusiastically for four years, would have recently stood down had he been on the brink of solving the biggest case of his career.
All of which goes to explain why the chairman of the Metropolitan Police Federation has now suggested that it might be time to pull the plug on Operation Grange. Expressing the private concerns of many of the union’s 30,000 member officers, John Tully said: ‘It’s time to re-focus on what we need to do to keep London safe. We no longer have the resources to conduct specialist inquiries all over the world which have nothing to do with London.
‘The Met has long been seen as the last resort for investigations others have struggled with elsewhere. It is surprising to see an inquiry like the McCann investigation ring-fenced. I’ve heard a few rumblings of discontent about it from lots of sources.’
He added: ‘When the force is facing a spike in murder investigations, it’s not surprising there is resentment of significant resources diverted to a case that has no apparent connection to London.’
Mr Tully’s remarks have inevitably sparked heated debate. One side insists that the investigation must continue at any cost, while friends of the McCanns have reportedly accused him of speaking out of turn and citing the case to peddle the Federation’s agenda.
But many have praised him for having the courage to voice the unsayable truth. With a very heavy heart, I must say I agree with them.
As the grandfather of three children who are roughly the same age as Madeleine when she was taken, and similarly cherubic, I dread to imagine how it must feel to be living in purgatory like the McCanns.
If, God forbid, I was in their shoes, I would want, demand and plead that everything humanly possible must be done to find a member of my family; or, at the very least, to discover what became of them.
I would gladly swing for any policeman or Home Office mandarin who presumed to evaluate the chances of finding them in the cold terms of cost- effectiveness. I would insist that the search must go on: indefinitely, and whatever the price.
Like Kate and Gerry McCann, perhaps I would cling to miracles, too.
I would remind people how a woman called Jaycee Lee Dugard was found safe in California, fully 18 years after being abducted by a sex offender and given up for dead.
And how, only last month in South Africa, a girl called Zephany Nurse was reunited with her overjoyed parents 17 years after being plucked from her sleeping mother’s arms in a maternity hospital, when she was three days old.
The sad truth is, however, that when we examine such exceptional cases, they do little to support the argument for a hugely expensive and protracted police investigation.
Jaycee’s deranged kidnapper, Phillip Craig Garrido, virtually shopped himself to the FBI by presenting them with a rambling essay purporting to offer a cure for sexual predators, and later parading her and another of his victims at a university campus lecture.
The salvation of Zephany, whose mother Celeste has urged the McCanns to continue praying as she did, and ‘ never give up’, owed still more to happenstance. Her identity was discovered after she was unwittingly enrolled at the same school as her sister, and fellow pupils noticed their extraordinarily similar looks.
But leaving aside, for a moment, the remote likelihood that the Operation Grange team might unearth some crucial piece of evidence at this late stage, it seems only fair to compare the ‘ no stone unturned’ investigation into Madeleine’s disappearance with that of the many other British children who go missing.
Children who, it must be said, vanish without a publicity blitz to draw attention to their plight, without their parents being received by statesmen and religious leaders including the Pope, and without celebrities offering enticing rewards for their return.
Recent figures show that a staggering 160,000 such children are reported missing in the UK each year — one every three minutes. In
There are 31 Met officers working solely on the case
If I was the McCanns, I’d cling to miracles too
the vast majority of cases they are quickly reunited with their parents. Nine out of ten cases are closed within 48 hours, and 99 per cent are solved in under a year.
Under protocol set down by the Association of Chief Police Officers, those who are not found promptly are categorised according to the degree of jeopardy their disappearance is perceived to place them in.
Those deemed to be ‘high risk’ are judged either to be vulnerable, in danger of harming themselves or others, or falling victim to serious crime. Those at medium risk are thought ‘likely’ to be in danger, and those at low risk are judged to be safe.
So how much time and money might you expect the police to invest in searching for one ‘medium risk’ child? According to a recent study by Portsmouth University’s Centre For Missing Persons, the amount is astonishingly low: between £1,325 and £2,415.
Compared with the millions poured into the search for Madeleine, this figure — which covers such basic procedures as taking an initial call, risk assessment, obtaining a photograph of the child, undertaking a house search, and a police national computer check — is derisory indeed.
Mercifully, as matters stand, just 131 unsolved missing children cases (including Madeleine’s) are listed on the website Missing Kids UK, which is run by the Child Exploitation And Online Protection Centre — the national law enforcement agency which protects Britain’s minors.
On the website, one finds many forgotten children whose anguished parents would doubtless walk barefoot across hot coals if it meant their disappearance would receive the same microscopic attention as Madeleine’s.
It goes without saying that none of this is any fault of the McCanns.
To the contrary, via Kate’s bestselling book and the couple’s countless public appearances, during which they are always eager to look beyond their own loss, and by promoting innovative methods of prevention and detection, no one has done more to raise public awareness of missing children. They have become unofficial global ambassadors for the cause.
It is to their eternal credit that they have remained so resolutely optimistic, re- stating at every opportunity their unswerving belief that somehow, one day, their daughter will come back to them.
They always speak about Madeleine — whose 12th birthday falls this May — in the present tense, and in their Leicestershire home they continue to maintain her pink bedroom, crammed with teddy bears, rosary beads and other gifts from wellwishers. There is also a special keepsake box into which her siblings, twins Sean and Amelie, now ten, put mementoes for her for when she returns.
Last week, reportedly responding to Mr Tully’s remarks through friends, they remained typically upbeat, expressing their gratitude to the Operation Grange team and insisting there was ‘still a job of work to be done’. If I were them, I would say exactly the same.
Regrettably, however, after eight years of false dawns, wrongly accused suspects, and epic wildgoose chases (one of which saw me spend days on the trail of a blonde-haired girl sighted with an Arab woman in northern Morocco), I have come to the same conclusion as John Tully: enough is enough. A greateat many people in Praia da Luz, as I have discovered, feel the same way.
From the moment Madeleine was taken, they have behaved with commendable dignity and shown enormous compassion towards her family, even though the reputation of their once-blameless resort has been irreparably sullied and the tourism industry that supported their livelihood has suffered a mortal blow. (The Mark Warner holiday firm through which they booked their ill-fated trip has dropped the town from its destinations.)
Surely now it is time to spare a thought for their wishes? Surely it is time to stop treating their town as one big crime scene, to be forensically re-examined and excavated, and allow them to try to get back to some semblance of normality?
Surely, too, it is time to call a halt on the to-ing and fro-ing of British detectives to this agreeable part of the continent — trips that somehow require them to stay in four and even five- star hotels with spas and golf concessions? Yesterday, invited to compare its scale and cost with that of other missing person inquiries, the Met said this was not possible because each case was individual, and Madeleine’s disappearance was ‘ clearly a unique and complex case’.
In response to Mr Tully’s remarks, the Met said the investigation had commenced at the request of the Home Office, which fully funds it, adding that it ‘does not impact on our other operations in London’.
They admitted that no arrests had been made since the operation began, but declined to describe any progress they may have made.
It should be stressed that I am not arguing for a minute that we ought to forget about Madeleine, or cease to be vigilant. And, of course, the police must investigate any genuinely promising new leads, should they emerge.
I simply believe, with the best of intentions, that it is time to put sentiment aside, face up to the harsh financial realities of modern policing, and regard Madeleine McCann in the same manner as all those other missing children.
We’ve had eight years of wild goose chases