When I wrote an earlier piece about how tired I was of the parents’ guilt is being inflicted on the rest of us in the daily media barrage of claim and counter-claim I thought I was something of a lone voice. Not a lone voice in how I felt but a lone voice in expressing dislike at the McCann’s guilt being paraded on daily television and in the newspapers as if I was supposed to feel sorry for them in some way. It seems I’m not alone - Booker prize winner Anne Enright wrote a 2,000 word essay entitled, “Disliking the McCanns”, apparently ‘attacked’ by the McCann family as ‘publicity seeking’.
Let’s recount what’s undisputed in the public domain - the McCann’s, Kate and Jerry, decided to leave their three very young children alone in an unfamiliar and unlocked apartment in a strange town in a foreign country while they went out for a meal and wine.
The Booker prize winner says, “”I disliked the McCanns earlier than most people (I’m not proud of it). I thought I was angry with them for leaving their children alone.”
This reminded me of a somewhat heated debate I had with my wife quite early on in the sorry saga. She had said she felt sorry for the parents. I replied I had no sympathy for them whatsoever. She called me a heartless monster. I pointed out that even now with two largely grown up children in a small, fairly quiet, uneventful town in Scotland I would never, ever contemplate leaving my children asleep in an unlocked house let alone a strange town in a foreign country. Turned out I was not alone in my views as she discovered when talking to her colleagues at work.
Last night’s rather disappointing Channel 4 documentary, “Searching For Madeleine”, where a number of British experts were commissioned to offer their opinions on what they believed may have happened, inevitably failed to deliver anything of substance although it did offer some interesting observations about how, in the absence of real information, the media were inclined to simply make things up to fill the vacuum.
Sadly, the truth may never be known.
October 19th, 2007
If you happen to be one of the few people on the planet who don’t know what happened, Madeline McCann vanished from an apartment in Portugal. That’s as much can be said with any certainty from an observer such as myself; that the little girl disappeared. Ever since then, we have had a daily barrage of media coverage shoved down our throats. Initially, this seemed appropriate as it is often through massive media attention that many child abduction cases are quickly solved and the children rescued.
I have been determined not to write a single word about this
cause célèbre as it has been written about
ad nauseum from the outset, mostly, in my opinion, because of the all-expenses-paid journalist junkets to the Algarve.
Aside from that my personal disdain for the parents who left three toddlers alone in a holiday apartment in a strange town in a foreign country while they went out for a meal, is something I preferred to keep to myself. So what has gotten so far under my skin that I’ve chosen to air my opinions? The latest reports that
Madeleine McCann detectives are to ask for British tourists’ DNA.
Picture the scene. You and your family had a lovely holiday in Praia da Luz in the Algarve in Portugal. While you were there, Madeline McCann went missing. A dreadful thing that makes you clutch your own children even tighter to your chest and carefully watch their every move even more closely than before (unlike the McCann’s). Some months later the police come to your home and ask you provide a sample of DNA and also your fingerprints because you are British and happened to be at the same complex.
Nothing to hide?
Of course, there will be people reading this who are foolish enough to believe that if you have nothing to hide then you have nothing to fear. Unfortunately, even if you are innocent you could be misidentified. It has happened before - both in fingerprinting and with DNA.
Not only do you have that to fear but you also have the prospect of your DNA making it’s way into the apartment. How? Contamination of the crime scene, as more than two dozen people entered the Algarve apartment where she was taken before police arrived – including the parents, their friends, other tourists and staff at the Mark Warner complex.
Let’s say for a moment you are one of those people who irresponsibly discards chewing gum by spitting it out onto the pavement for others to step in and it was carried into the apartment on the shoe of one of those twenty-four people. Your DNA would have been trailed throughout the apartment. It would appear from DNA evidence that you had actually been there even though you hadn’t.
Not only that but simply because you happened to be unfortunate enough to choose the same holiday destination as the McCann’s you would be compelled to provide your fingerprints and DNA. You could refuse of course, but that would make you a suspect, which puts you between a rock and a hard place.
As much as I would like the little girl to be found, the likelihood of this happening is, in my opinion, zero. I don’t know whether she was abducted by a stranger, killed by her parents or wandered off on her own having somehow escaped the apartment where she was neglected by her parents, and fell into the ocean. What I do know is that I have had enough of the ‘McCann case’. The police are looking for a body, not a missing child, and they know it. Everyone knows it. The only people who refuse to accept it are the McCann’s, driven on by their public guilt at leaving three toddlers alone in a holiday apartment while they went out.
October 10th, 2007
