Madeleine McCann: a reporter looks back on a 16-year mystery that never left the front pages
On the May morning in 2007 that followed Madeleine McCann’s overnight disappearance from her parents’ holiday apartment in Praia da Luz, a smart resort in a superior part of Portugal’s Algarve, there remained a quiet confidence she would be found in short order.
The staff at the Mark Warner Ocean
Club resort, where Gerry and Kate McCann, both doctors, had been enjoying the last couple of days of a week’s break, were scouring the beaches with the help of the locals, but everyone was reluctant to believe that a crime could have been committed here of all places.
The insouciance of the Portuguese police tasked with sealing off the apartment, from which she had gone missing, suggested they also believed this was a storm in a teacup.
The McCanns and their friends – dubbed “the Tapas Seven” after the meal they had been sharing when Madeleine, three, went missing – could be spotted wandering around the resort, lost in their thoughts and racked with anguish; Kate gripping her daughter’s favourite pink teddy, as she would for weeks to come.
But for the journalists in Praia da Luz, in the first hours there was certainly nothing to suggest that this was day one in a 16-year mystery that would dominate the news in Britain for weeks to come, and continue to make the front pages a decade and a half later.
The first public statement by the McCanns came late on Friday night when word went round for the media to gather outside the back of the Ocean Club resort.
With the light fading fast, the McCanns emerged from the apartments, lit up by the flash of camera bulbs. Gerry spoke briefly: “Please, if you have Madeleine, let her come home to her mummy, daddy, brother and sister.”
That night, the press pack filled one of the local restaurants. A man from the British embassy came in and asked for quiet. His presence in itself a sign that something was building. He appealed for the photographers to keep their dis
tance and was given short shrift for his efforts.
There was not a lack of empathy for the McCanns, but the appetite in London for this story was starting to make itself felt. Why was this child still missing?
The next day, it became clear that the Portuguese police were also picking up on the febrile atmosphere. Outside the police headquarters in the closest city, Portimão, the director of the Polícia Judiciária, Guilhermino Encarnação, addressed the mainly British reporters under the baking sun – in Portuguese. He claimed they had a suspect. There was a photofit but he couldn’t provide it as it would risk Madeleine’s life. He believed she was alive, he said, and would be found.
The appetite for Madeleine stories – she became the headline friendly “Maddy” – was insatiable. Reporters’ days were filled with chasing false tips of sightings.
There was crucial CCTV footage at a local petrol station to secure. Reports of abandoned clothing or sightings to confirm. One journalist from the News of the World was asked in all earnestness by his news editor to speak to Nasa “and get Maddy’s face beamed on to the moon”.
The public was asked to stare into posters of Madeleine’s eyes. She had a fleck of brown in her iris. Have you seen these eyes, they were asked.
With the Portuguese police offering scant official information, some reporters filled the gap with increasingly speculative copy, derived in large part from the local press, who were being briefed all manner of conspiracy theories by the local police.
Then the McCanns were named as formal suspects. An unforeseen twist in what was already the biggest story around. Gerry, Kate and their two-yearold twins, Sean and Amelie, left the country on a 7am Sunday flight.
The family’s journey home via East Midlands airport, from where they had flown out a week earlier, was followed with almost obsessive interest. An interest that has hardly waned, and the heartbreaking case is making headlines again.