The McCanns steel themselves all over again
Producer Steven Anderson spent years filming the the couple’s search for Madeleine, while countless hopes were dashed
Afew years after Madeleine McCann went missing, I returned to Praia da Luz with her father, Gerry. I was an independent television producer who had come to the Algarve to film reconstructions of what might have happened – the McCanns’ private detectives hoped broadcasting the footage might jog someone’s memory and lead to the crucial breakthrough.
Word quickly spread through the small village, and a crowd gathered as we followed Gerry to room 5A of the Ocean Club resort – the first time he’d been back. We filmed as he revisited the bedroom where he’d last seen Madeleine asleep in bed, her younger twin brother and sister in nearby cots. He surveyed the sliding patio doors, which had been left unlocked that night so they could avoid waking the children when they returned from dinner in the tapas bar, 70 metres away.
Gerry handled the moment and his emotions calmly. But while filming in the nearby restaurant where he and Kate had eaten with their group of friends – the so-called Tapas Seven – he suddenly needed a minute to himself.
Walking away from our crew, he was out of my earshot, but was heard to say, “If only we hadn’t come here.” His momentary self-chastisement was met by one of my colleagues, who tried to plead with him that it wasn’t his fault. “It’s the abductor who’s to blame,” I heard her say.
It was a striking moment as both Gerry and Kate tried hard to keep their composure in public.
In the intense days immediately after Madeleine’s disappearance, they had received counselling advice to try to stay controlled in front of the media.
Many kidnappers, they were told, “get off ” on the grief that traumatised parents show on television, “so stay calm and don’t play into their hands”.
Gerry is a consultant cardiologist and during the time we spent together I noticed a certain professional detachment take over. Like Kate, he was criticised in some quarters for not showing enough emotion, but to me, this looked like a coping mechanism. Madeleine had gone missing when she was in their care and both felt a crushing sense of responsibility. The only way ahead now was bringing all of his discipline and focus to the task of finding her – or, at least, finding out what had happened to her.
Like almost everyone, I was fascinated by the story from the start. On a personal level, I had been on Mark Warner holidays, similar to the resort where Madeleine went missing, with my own family. And on a journalistic level, it was the biggest, most powerful humaninterest story I’d ever known.
At the end of the summer in 2007, I was asked to be the executive producer of a BBC programme due to air that November, marking 200 days since Madeleine went missing. Richard Bilton was the reporter and, as well as showing behind-thescenes footage of Kate and Gerry, filmed by a friend of theirs in Praia da Luz that summer, we also secured an exclusive interview with one of the Tapas Seven, Jane Tanner, who spoke for the first time about what she had witnessed – a man walking away from the holiday apartments with a child in his arms, on the night Madeleine went missing.
After that, I made a programme for ITV marking the first anniversary of her disappearance, and spent time filming Kate and Gerry at their home in Rothley, Leicestershire. Our team also accompanied them to the European Commission, where they were campaigning for a child abduction alert system to be introduced across the continent.
What struck me was how incongruous it all was. An ordinary young family living in an anonymous cul de sac just outside Leicester, at the centre of this extraordinary story resonating across the world. Not only had their life changed forever, in the most appalling way, but they were now characters who millions believed they knew well enough to judge. I recall Kate’s exasperation at one sensationalist story that bore little relation to reality: “This isn’t a soap opera,” she said. “It’s real life, and it’s our life.”
I was with them when news broke that the owners of Express newspapers were ordered to pay them £550,000 for libel after publishing defamatory stories about their case. I was also filming with them when the Portuguese police announced the McCanns were no longer being considered “arguidos” (persons of interest) – a moment that should have been one of relief, but was tempered by the reality that the police were simultaneously “shelving” the case. The hunt for their missing daughter had effectively come to an end after just 14 months, and with no result.
Living with this devastating new reality was clearly debilitating and I felt a certain empathy.
Like Kate, I’m from Liverpool, and like Gerry, I have a big, loud, working-class family, and did well enough to go on holiday to middleclass resorts. Gerry once spoke about briefly having the perfect nuclear family – before the unimaginable happened.
Over subsequent documentaries, my colleagues and I interviewed others involved in the case: various members of the Tapas Seven; Robert Murat, the first suspect who was subsequently cleared; and the Portuguese police detective, Goncalo Amaral, whose legal battles with the McCanns have kept the courts busy for more than a decade.
When some of the early weaknesses in the investigation began to become clear – failure to secure the crime scene and preserve potential forensic evidence – the British media turned its fire on the Portuguese police. The McCanns were wrongly suspected by many in the force of somehow orchestrating those attacks. The relationship poisoned quickly and, to a significant extent, never recovered. Various suspects were mentioned to us over the years, but never Christian Brückner – the 43-year-old German rapist and child sex offender, now the prime suspect – whose name I first heard only last week. Mr Amaral is said to have considered and discounted him back in 2007, though Portuguese police have insisted they passed all the relevant details on him to Scotland Yard in around 2012.
As speculation mounts, I imagine that Kate and Gerry will be trying hard not to get ahead of the situation. I was with them on several occasions when new sightings of Madeleine were reported from all over the world, only to be met by a muted reaction from her parents. This seemed like selfdefence: steeling themselves against building up hopes most likely to be cruelly dashed. Also, they had their own parents and relatives to consider. All were anxious for good news; the McCanns didn’t want to crush their dreams over and over again.
Both highly-educated doctors, they would have known that it was highly unlikely Madeleine had survived after vanishing that night. But as parents, they said they would never give up on her, they owed it to her, particularly as there was no evidence that she had come to any harm. They also had two more children and had to do all they could to give them the love and care they deserved.
After Kate published her book in 2011, and they succeeded in persuading the government to launch a Scotland Yard inquiry, the filming stopped. The McCanns felt they’d said all they had to say, and that the police should get on with the job, unhindered by the media circus their intervention would guarantee. But my time with them gave me an insight into one of the most remarkable stories of our times; how life can be transformed in an instant, no matter how much we like to think we’re in control.
A crowd gathered as we followed Gerry back to room 5A of the Ocean Club resort