My decade with the McCanns
For 10 years, Madeleine’s parents have endured accusations and wild theories. Clarence Mitchell has been there throughout
Twice in the ten years I have worked with the McCanns, I genuinely thought we were within reach of finding Madeleine. The first moment came very early on, just weeks after her disappearance on May 3, 2007. I had been sent by the British government to the Portuguese resort of Praia da Luz to assist Kate and Gerry in dealing with the already huge media interest. Shortly after I arrived, I started to get phone calls, always at three o’clock in the morning, always the same ghostly man’s voice, repeatedly naming a farm where the three-year-old was being hidden.
The British police recorded the calls and it turned out there was indeed a farm, fitting his description exactly, near Seville, over the border in Spain. As it was raided, and turned out to look exactly as he had painted it in those calls, I really felt we were on to something. But she wasn’t there, and those tip-offs – like so many others that we received from hoaxers, ransom seekers, conmen and psychics – were never explained.
The second came at the end of 2007. I was now being employed by Kate and Gerry as their press spokesman, and they were back at home in Leicestershire with their two-year-old twins, Sean and Amelie. Spanish private investigators working on their behalf had found a blonde-haired girl who spoke English in a village in the Atlas Mountains of Morocco. All the information coming back to us suggested heavily that it could be Madeleine, so much so that an aircraft was put on standby, with its engines running, waiting to fly to pick her up.
Kate and Gerry sat tight. By that stage, they had learned not to give in to natural hope only for it to be dashed. They preferred to wait until the Moroccan authorities had checked it out. It was not Madeleine.
On the tenth anniversary of her disappearance, I continue to assist Kate and Gerry as required, keeping a weather eye on reports and sightings, such as the “significant lead” that Assistant Commissioner Mark Rowley said this week that Scotland Yard’s Operation Grange is following up.
Wherever this latest lead may take them, be it Portugal or elsewhere, this time I will sit tight, like Kate and Gerry, and let the authorities do their job before getting my hopes up.
I had spent 20 years as a BBC journalist before becoming a civil servant and helping the McCanns. I met Gerry first. It was some two weeks after Madeleine had gone missing, and he had flown back to England to see members of their large, close extended family.
Obviously, he was distressed but also very rational. Gerry, a senior cardiologist, deals with trauma by compartmentalising it and being in control. His emotions, then as now, are poured into what he can do practically to raise awareness of Madeleine’s disappearance.
In Portugal, I found Kate very friendly, grateful for the support I could offer, but already wary of the media attention. That was before it turned into something altogether more cruel, with the McCanns widely vilified for leaving their children in an unlocked holiday apartment.
They were always the first to admit their mistake, but what a price they are still paying. God forbid it is a price they may have to pay for the rest of their lives.
For all the doubters, they have never done or said anything that has given me any cause for suspicion that they were anything other than the innocent victims of a dreadful crime. Before I met Gerry, I was briefed by British police working alongside the Portuguese on the case. They told me then, categorically, that they had “cleared the ground beneath their feet” – that Gerry and Kate were not guilty of any involvement in Madeleine’s disappearance.
Yet the Portuguese police turned against them, naming them as arguido, a technical term that is misleadingly translated as “suspect”; it is equivalent to being questioned under caution.
What stands out, looking back over 10 years, is the sheer lunacy of the accusations made against them.
There was, for instance, the theory entertained by the Portuguese police that their daughter had somehow been killed accidentally and that they then had used their hire car to
remove her body and bury it in a secret location. I was there when the keys to that car were handed over to them, at their apartment; they hired it several weeks after Madeleine had disappeared.
Even if they had already got their daughter’s body out of the holiday apartment and stored it somewhere (a fridge was suggested, ridiculously), the police theory would mean that, in full view of the world’s media, the McCanns would have had to put her into the boot and then shaken off the paparazzi to dispose of her. It was as implausible as it was utterly offensive.
Later, in the autumn of 2007, when we were all back in England, a team of Portuguese police officers came to interview me about the times I had ridden in that car with Kate and Gerry. Did I notice any unusual smells, they asked? It was beyond laughable. It also revealed, I felt, frightening ineptitude.
By then, a whole, vile cottage industry had grown around the case, with retired police officers who had nothing to do with the investigation appearing on Portuguese TV to suggest, for example, the McCanns had been at a swingers’ party on the night of Madeleine’s disappearance. It all compounded their pain.
Kate, in particular, got deeply angry. There was no shouting, sobbing or throwing things. It was more of a simmering but intense rage that things could be so misrepresented and so blatantly unfair.
Their real fury, though, was that such lazy reporting of wild untruths would actually mislead people and so hinder the search for Madeleine. That was why they took legal action against Gonçalo Amaral, the Portuguese police officer who wrote a very unpleasant book about them after being removed from the investigation. If people in Portugal, or elsewhere, believed the claims of an officer who never interviewed them, then Kate and Gerry feared that the public would simply assume Madeleine was dead and forget her.
The pressure would have broken other couples. Occasionally, I would catch them in tears, or hugging each other. But they seem to have coped. If anything, it has brought them together even more, rather than split them apart.
The McCanns are private people. I have never been privy to their innermost thoughts. It is not that sort of relationship. We haven’t even discussed politics. I am hoping to stand as a Conservative candidate in the forthcoming general election, and my flag is blue; theirs, I’ve always believed, is red. It certainly didn’t affect our friendship.
They have thrown themselves into looking after the twins, now 12, trying to create a home where reminders of Madeleine are all around, where she is still very much part of the family.
Despite the support they have received, there are still bills to pay. Before Madeleine’s disappearance, Kate was a locum GP, but she has never returned to work. Gerry continues as a senior cardiologist. (He is not a surgeon, as often inaccurately reported. He is the man who keeps you alive and your essential tubes open when you are having your heart operation under the surgeon’s knife.)
Kate and Gerry hate being recognised. When I was with them, we would sometimes walk into a restaurant and the whole place would go quiet as they entered.
People are mostly sympathetic. Many just don’t know what to say to them.
Nobody in my experience has ever been bold enough to accuse them of anything to their faces. All of the worst, ugliest nonsense is online – that Gerry is not Madeleine’s real dad, that paedophilia is somehow involved, that there’s a huge global government conspiracy to cover something up.
One of the most sickening theories I have come across online – and there are many – is that Madeleine had somehow been hidden at the church in Praia da Luz inside a coffin, beneath a body awaiting burial.
I continue to believe Madeleine was abducted for some reason. Kate is sure that, just short of her fourth birthday, Madeleine would not have been capable of wandering out of the apartment, closing the curtains, sliding doors and two small gates behind her.
And so the couple keep her bedroom in Leicestershire ready for her return, with the presents there for all the birthdays and Christmases with them that she has missed. It is very much a family-only place. In all my time in their house, that door has remained shut.
They hope and pray that, wherever she is, Madeleine is being looked after. What sustains them is that there is absolutely no evidence of physical harm coming to her. So they will always believe firmly that it is as logical to think she might be alive as it is illogical to assume the worst.
‘What sustains them is that there is no evidence of physical harm coming to her’