The Disappearance of Madeleine McCann (2019) s01e05 Episode Script
The Fightback
1 [wind whistling.]
[thunder rumbling.]
I think Leicestershire's a kind of hidden gem of England and I say that as a patriotic, you know, person who was born and raised here.
Rothley is situated in North Leicestershire.
It has a really nice fish and chip shop, a pretty village square, there are some nice pubs.
It's your archetypal English village.
[birds singing.]
I don't think it was known for anything, really, [stutters.]
before the McCann case.
[camera shutters clicking.]
[Haynes.]
I was thinking, "Luz is gonna be quiet again," and suddenly I realised their little town in Leicester is going to be deluged with exactly what we've just had.
Um And they're not going home to quiet and and peace.
They're going home to the same struggle in another place.
[camera shutters clicking.]
[male reporter.]
A police escort out of East Midlands Airport then the short drive to the village of Rothley and their home.
[female reporter.]
Her parents vowed to stay until she was found, but they returned home this weekend without Maddie, clouded under suspicion after being named formal suspects in their little girl's disappearance.
[male reporter speaking French.]
[female reporter speaking Portuguese.]
[indistinct chatter.]
[male reporter.]
This is the first time that Kate McCann and the twins have been in their home since Madeleine disappeared.
[overlapping reporters' voices.]
Kate hasn't been back to the house since this started so it's going to be extremely difficult.
[camera shutters clicking.]
I do worry about how difficult it is for her to have walked through that front door today and to have gone into Madeleine's bedroom, which is as it was when-- when they left for their holiday.
It must be absolutely awful for them.
Part of the reason the McCanns came back, their two-year-old twins-- wanting them to have as much of a normal life as possible, but so hard for them to return without their little Maddie.
[helicopter flies overhead.]
The twins often ask about her.
They simply tell them she isn't here at the moment, but they remain surrounded by her toys, her other belongings, and photographs as each day passes without her.
[male reporter.]
The couple had left in May, hoping to return happy and refreshed after a family holiday.
This was hardly the homecoming they'd prayed for.
[helicopter flies overhead.]
[Robbyn.]
Kate and Gerry McCann had been chased from the Algarve by the press, named as suspects in the investigation by the Portuguese police, uniformly being vilified.
[camera shutters clicking.]
[Robbyn.]
The truth is, though, that they were not completely alone.
There were people watching.
[indistinct radio chatter.]
[man.]
You could sense them taking their gloves off and thinking "Right, everything changes.
" [man 2.]
Whilst you're looking at the parents, you're not looking for the kid.
[plane whooshes overhead.]
[Robbyn.]
One of those people watching was a businessman by the name of Brian Kennedy.
[birds and insects chirping.]
[Brian.]
I was following the story, like everyone else.
I saw that the media and the world had turned against these people.
I was thinking, "No way! Abso-- I'd lose all faith in human nature if these parents are involved.
" We were in the fortunate position in which we had the resources to be able to reach out and help them.
[Brian.]
And what's the headline? Many of my friends said to me, "Why are you getting involved in this? What happens if they're guilty?" And my response was, "But imagine if they're not guilty.
" If you can do something to help, then you bloody better try and help.
[Patrick.]
I think that's something, you know, that my dad is all about.
[Brian.]
When I walked into their lawyer's offices, they both looked like a wreck and I explained that, "Look, I'm here to help.
" Kate started to tell the story and after 12 seconds, just reading the emotions, everything told me, 100 percent, that this woman was absolutely genuine and she was a victim.
I said, "You don't have to tell me any more, Kate.
Let's just get on now and talk about what we can do from here to try and find Madeleine.
" Kate McCann recalls how overwhelmed she was by the thought that this man they didn't know was willing to put his cash and his time on the line to help them.
[Robbyn.]
She could barely keep herself from flinging her arms around his neck and just breaking down and thanking him.
[speaking Portuguese.]
I was proud of him that he wanted to help another family that were going through such turmoil, such a tragedy.
It's like, "Right, let's do something to help this.
This is not right.
" A Scottish millionaire businessman is giving financial backing to the parents of missing Madeleine McCann.
Brian Kennedy, who made his millions from double glazing, has pledged to meet Kate and Gerry's growing costs to help in the hunt for their daughter.
The tycoon, who is estimated to be worth £250 million, is based in Cheshire.
[Brian.]
I grew up in a high-rise block of flats in Edinburgh, working-class family.
I got married very young and, uh, had to start paying bills.
Built up various successful businesses.
The first rule of business is to stay in business.
If you walk into your boardroom, make sure you're the dumbest guy in it! [wind whistling.]
[reporter 1.]
It can't have been the homecoming, of course, that Kate and Gerry McCann were hoping for four months after their daughter disappeared from their holiday flat in Portugal.
The couple have returned home after being declared formal suspects.
[reporter 2.]
They could hold that arguido status for eight to ten months and in that time, either one of them could be called back to Portugal to be questioned.
The first thing was to be able to get Kate and Gerry sufficient legal protection to ensure that they couldn't be taken back to Portugal, from which we're all sure they would have been hung, drawn, and quartered.
[camera shutters clicking.]
How angry are you, how angry are they about being made official suspects by the Portuguese police? The fact that they have been made this arguido status, they're not allowed to discuss things.
They have been effectively gagged by the Portuguese.
I'm furious, the rest of the family are furious.
It's adding insult to injury.
They're at an all-time low and the Portuguese legal system to us is a complete maze and we now need help to negotiate that and that process has already started.
[Brian.]
One of the top lawyers is a guy called Rogério Alves.
He was a well-respected lawyer in Portugal.
The Portuguese had decided Kate and Gerry were guilty.
For him to represent Kate and Gerry was a major cultural issue for him.
[Rogério.]
The case was not very popular in Portugal.
I used to go very often to the television, to the media, talk about justice matters.
So I was truly aware that the public opinion court decided that they had to be guilty.
[reporters yell.]
Gerry! Gerry! [camera shutters clicking.]
[in Portuguese.]
When they left Portugal in September, it had been agreed that we should follow an inquiry that allowed for the possible involvement of the parents in the child's disappearance.
When they left for the UK, someone saw them coming off the plane.
In Praia da Luz on the night of Madeleine's disappearance, an Irishman named Martin Smith and his family had seen a man carrying a little girl wearing pajamas in the street, not far from the Ocean Club.
[in Portuguese.]
Martin Smith sees the images of them coming off the plane and he says, "This was the man I saw.
" "This was the man I saw taking that child.
" Because of the way he carried the child, the way he walked, it was the same person that he'd seen before.
[male voice.]
I would be 60 to 80% sure that it was Gerald McCann that I met that night carrying a child.
[Rogério.]
All those voices saying, "They are guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty.
" I went to London in September 2007.
I want to look in the eyes and reach my conclusion.
[Rogério.]
I met Gerry and Kate.
We talked for a long time.
What I found was a father and a mother suffering, fighting against all odds, trying to understand why everybody's considering me as guilty.
"What have I done? Is it not enough what happened to me? Is it not enough that my daughter disappeared, that nobody can find what happened, that nobody can provide me solid information? Is it not enough that I cannot sleep?" At the end of it, he said, "Fine.
 I will support you and I will represent you and fight your corner," and he proceeded to do so.
I had some comments.
"Well, he's going to to win a lot of money.
He's making this for money.
" Going into petrol fuel stations and on a few occasions, people would spit on him when they knew he was representing, defending the McCanns.
This is what we were up against here.
[in Portuguese.]
The head of the Bar Association believes that the McCann couple are innocent.
Rogério Alves says that this was the defining factor in his decision to accept and defend Madeleine's parents.
[in Portuguese.]
It was my personal and lengthy conversation with the couple that led me to accept the job [Rogério, in English.]
But I don't care much, to be honest, because I'm a lawyer.
What I intend to do is to make things fairly and to protect my clients, especially when they are right.
I think people, you know, criticized the McCann family for, you know, dealing with the press so much, but you have no choice.
They're not gonna leave you alone.
They will follow your every move, TV cameras, radio crews.
[Phil.]
I think people want to try and paint it as a pack that followed them from Portugal up to Leicestershire.
Well, when you've got a story of this magnitude, to somehow say to the press, "Well, just go away and forget it," it's not gonna happen.
The public are not gonna allow that to happen because they want to buy the newspapers and read the stories.
[camera shutters clicking.]
[David.]
The British media were under huge pressure.
Two things they were told to do was get great photographs of the McCanns, Kate in particular, and, you know, possibly the twins if you can, which, of course, raised completely separate ethical issues, and the other thing was get a new angle to the story.
[camera shutters clicking.]
All they're doing is taking the children out to a sort of play area, probably for about an hour.
Um, so if you could respect that um, and, you know, when they come out of the gate, when they come back in, don't crowd in.
 Please don't take photographs of the twins.
Okay? Don't all shout "yes" at once! [indistinct chatter.]
Soon after the McCanns return to Britain, I drove up to meet them.
I drove up one night, it was very late when I got there, I think seven or eight o'clock, and, um, they were sitting in their kitchen and Gerry made me a cup of tea and I was struck by how shocked and how completely riddled with grief Kate McCann was.
[Phil.]
I felt very uncomfortable, actually, being there, talking about a missing child as some sort of PR exercise because, you know, we were to discuss what they were to do and, um [Phil.]
Gerry was very strong.
He had a sponsor who'd come forward, a businessman, who was prepared to pay for the PR to help him, and he wanted to know whether we could put five or six of my staff onto the campaign, try and keep Maddie's name alive and out there in the press.
I said, "Gerry, I think, you know, you've got to be careful.
I think if it's too well-oiled a machine, I think the public will feel very uncomfortable about it.
" I spoke to Gerry once or twice more, but nothing materialized from it.
I think in the end, he understood that I just thought having too slick a PR campaign would work against them.
[female reporter.]
Mr Mitchell says he's been hired for as long as it takes It became about, you know, that already high excitement with the trucks with the satellite dishes and the cameramen and the photographers and the journalists and they're all jostling and they're all jostling for position and they all want the story and, you know, even as a journalist, this is what I do, it makes me wince when I see that.
[male reporter.]
Madeleine's great-uncle was surrounded by the media as he gave a short statement at the village green.
They're fine.
They-- They've had a decent night's sleep and between You could feel that some elements of the British media, you could sense them taking their gloves off and thinking, "Right, everything changes.
" Rothley's a perfectly pleasant, nice place where, you know, something like this, satellite trucks and cars full of journalists, would have come as a substantial shock.
When some of the Portuguese media became more hostile and included accusations and in effect were much less inhibited in what they were inferring or alleging, then the pressure on their British counterparts just became immense.
[indistinct chatter.]
[male reporter.]
With their twins in Sunday school and hidden from the cameras, the McCanns found themselves amongst friends.
Inside, they were embraced by other members of the congregation.
The reporting I was making, the things I was saying, they disapprove 100 percent of it.
[Sandra.]
I had this impression of people that didn't want me there.
I think you're you're cruel to this couple.
The agony she's going through, nobody knows.
And I think you should leave her alone.
[Sandra.]
There was some people that came to me and said, "What are you doing here? You are invading their privacy.
" -Excuse me, please.
-[Sandra.]
Have the McCanns talked to you? [laughs.]
[Sandra.]
Do you Do you still believe that Madeleine is alive? Yes, of course she is.
[Sandra.]
Do you support the McCann family? Yeah, of course we are.
[man.]
Do you like to see them in church again? [resident.]
Of course we would like, but they can't get out of the house because of you people.
No more, please.
Thank you.
[man.]
But did you pray for Madeleine? [speaking Portuguese.]
Everyone that we tried to talk to knew the McCanns, didn't want the press there.
They just said, "You have to leave our town!" I think it's just terribly sad for everybody involved and I think the media should leave them alone outside the house.
No, Rothley village will support them totally.
We-- We've agreed that they need to have that time and space and there's a lot of support in the village from the residents.
[whirring.]
[whirring.]
There we go.
"Please leave.
" "Angry villagers call on media to give McCanns some space.
" It lists the media organizations in Rothley, showing that it's not just British media.
It's Portuguese, Belgian, French, German, and so on.
It just captures the concern of residents for saying, you know, "We're fed up with it.
" 'Cause they stick their cameras in your face and they're not always the politest of people.
[Nick.]
A good local or regional newspaper holds up a mirror to the community to which it belongs.
Yes, you want to sell newspapers, but, equally, you want to do it responsibly because it's your constituency, because they're your readers that you're talking about.
You have a doorstep and you step off that doorstep and you're in the middle of the community of people who you hope are reading you, and so, to put it bluntly, you don't want to shit on that doorstep.
Many of the nationals had kind of wim-wommed on their coverage.
One minute, the McCanns were responsible.
The next minute, they were grieving for their missing daughter.
We didn't have to distance ourselves from the national hysteria because there was never any suggestion that we were ever going to be part of it.
We were the local newspaper.
That's what we did.
So, um, our concern was to-- was to do that properly, to do the right thing by the family and do the right thing by our readers.
[microfilm reader whirs.]
National tabloids are trying to sell against each other and what they put on their front page can make a significant difference to whether they sell more or fewer copies than their rival titles.
So "You Killed Madeleine" is a pretty dramatic front page that was guaranteed to attract people's attention.
Um, it also happens to be pretty poor journalism.
We tried to tell the story.
I think what we tried to do was to tell the story as truthfully and as honestly as we could.
I think there were all kinds of newspapers who were jumping to all kinds of conclusions and we never did.
They were not charged and they were not convicted and I think it's a, you know, fine old English tradition that you are innocent until you are proven guilty and I think that was our watchword.
That informed everything that we did.
[Phil.]
The agenda moves on so quickly every day.
They would have thought, "Actually, I can write a story on a Tuesday 'cause by Friday, there will be 40 other stories that have broken and my story will be forgotten.
" [John.]
Things start off in Portugal with no accreditation to an official source and end up being reported here as if they are the truth.
That is just crazy! Why are we spending so much energy and time negating rumors and speculation? And this story would appear, let's say, in a British newspaper.
The Portuguese press would then pick up on it.
and would sort of escalate it further.
[female reporter.]
This landscape of speculation is made possible partly because it's difficult to sue the media here and libel damages are small.
So what if some information tarnishes the reputation of people who might be totally innocent? [Justine.]
It's unrelenting.
And, you know, things seem to be getting worse and worse.
[reporter, in Portuguese.]
The police is still waiting for the lab results to come from Birmingham.
According to Jornal 24 Horas, the results conclude that Gerry McCann is not the biological father of Madeleine.
There have also been claims that Kate's been asked to hand in her diary and that Gerry's been asked to give in his laptop.
Having spoken to people close to the McCanns, they say that's simply not true.
Kate and Gerry McCann visited the church here in Praia da Luz almost every day after Madeleine went missing.
Today, it's reported that the police plan to search even here, but there is no sign of such a search, and no confirmation that any kind of search is even planned.
In our world, if there becomes a question like, "Did you sedate Maddie?" it becomes a fact.
The answer doesn't matter, right? The answer is, "Yes, I did sedate Maddie.
" That's how people view it.
They don't care that he said, "Oh, no, I didn't do that.
" They don't take that into account.
They simply say to themselves, "No smoke without fire.
" [rain pattering.]
[thunder rumbling.]
[Kate.]
This is a very nice letter.
It's actually from a mum being very supportive in what we've done and are doing.
We've got a lot of letters as well from people who've got children the same age.
Um The vast majority, 99 percent of them, they're really nice and supportive, and then unfortunately, as we know, there's that one percent of society um who send the nasty ones.
[Gerry.]
That's a good example.
Um The giveaway 'cause normally it's pretty obvious and this says, "Gerry and Kate, how can you use money given by poor people in good faith to pay your mortgage on your mansion you [bleep.]
thieving bastards? Your brat is dead because of your drunken arrogance.
Shame on you.
I curse you and your family to suffer forever.
Cursed Christmas.
If you had any shame, you would accept full responsibility for your daughter's disappearance and give all the money back.
You are scum.
" That's quite nice.
[Gerry.]
Very charming.
[clears throat.]
The McCanns remain formal suspects and could be asked to return to Portugal any day.
Until then, they'll remain here in Leicestershire, attempting to assemble a formidable media and legal team Kate and Gerry were very conscious of who they could trust and who they couldn't trust and they trusted Clarence.
[female reporter.]
They're calling it "the fightback.
" After days of rumor, allegation, and innuendo, a new media strategy led by a former journalist and civil servant.
Kate and Gerry were saying, "Look, we should try and get Clarence Mitchell on board full-time because he can then deal with all the media and we need the media to be on our side on this.
" Good morning.
I'm Clarence Mitchell, for those who don't know me.
[male reporter.]
The Foreign Office official who'd been advising the McCanns will quit his government post to work full-time for the couple.
[Clarence.]
To suggest that they somehow harmed Madeleine, accidentally or otherwise, is as ludicrous as it is nonsensical.
[Phil.]
He was a very competent, uh, sharp individual.
You know, very aware.
If it's a war, I-- I'm trying to hopefully, you know, call a truce.
He was out there, having a drink with them in the evening, he was talking to them, he was giving off-the-record briefings.
He was telling them how the McCanns were and how they were feeling.
[Lee.]
It seems cruel to say it backfired, but I think some people-- some people certainly thought that, "Well, look what you've done here.
You've hired" I heard this, I heard this many times.
This is what people were writing underneath our stories.
You know, you've hired this kind of professional news reporter to manage this story.
It looked slick.
It was incongruous, I think.
[camera shutters clicking.]
They attempted to communicate in an effective way, using PR and the media to get the message out that Madeleine was still out there and that they needed help.
Um That, in some eyes, made it look too slick, you know, too polished, too professional.
Some have commented that the McCanns haven't come across that well, that they haven't been seen to be grieving enough, for example.
How are you gonna advise them on that? But who's to say how much you should grieve? [Justine.]
You know, at the time, Kate was very aware that she was, in some way, not seen as caring.
They'd been advised that, you know, if they showed emotions that that might be detrimental to the welfare of their daughter if she was being held kidnapped somewhere.
[Justine.]
So they had decided that they had to be very controlled when they were in public.
These families are trying to communicate in the most effective way.
They're trying to reach the abductor and plead with the abductor to bring their child back.
They're trying to communicate to the public the urgency of the situation and ask for the public's help.
that's what we really are asking people to try and remember were they in a situation like this, had something else happened, had they seen someone.
This time last year, "Where are you going on holiday? Spain? Portugal?" I've got a map here and [Ernie.]
So there is a kind of mindset that happens in which parents try to be self-controlled.
There's obviously certain things that we just can't control and I think we're getting used to kind of [Ernie.]
They try not to be so devastated that they're not effective communicators and as a result, they can come across robotic.
And so there was criticism of the McCanns, particularly Kate, and that was fed by social media.
I think the website was perhaps three or four years old and it was very much an afterthought.
It was all about the newspaper.
[Lee.]
We put the McCann stuff online and people started to comment on it.
[keyboard typing echoes.]
[Ernie.]
Social media was in its infancy.
Facebook was a year old.
Twitter was just being launched.
Social media fed the paranoia about this case and distorted the message.
You can go on the internet, look at the McCann thing and you'll find every lunatic conspiracy theory going.
In 2007, there were a lot of people who viewed that content as news.
That it's on social media, it must be truth.
[keyboard typing echoes.]
If you're in a pub and somebody offers a view about your business or your football club or your performance onstage, do you really care about it? They don't, but when they read it in the printed word, it has far more impact.
[keyboard typing echoes.]
What happened with Kate McCann, in particular, some of the trolls really affected her.
[keyboard typing echoes.]
The internet gives the troller all the power and none of the responsibility.
I don't think I even knew what a troll was back then in 2007.
[keyboard typing echoes.]
[Lee.]
And then it just got more and more and more and more vitriolic.
That's when we took the decision to say, as a newspaper, to stop it and to close all comments.
I know how much I love Madeleine and I have no doubt that Madeleine knows how much you know, I love her and I think I mean, I know that and I've just got to think, regardless of what all those people say out there, you know, those bloggers and people on the forums who obviously get some kind of kick out of being nasty, I know that and I know Madeleine knows that and I've just got to kind of keep hold of that, really.
[male reporter.]
This is Kate and Gerry McCann attending a church service yesterday in Rothley.
It was the 150th day since their daughter Madeleine went missing.
[camera shutters clicking.]
On September 10th, Gonçalo Amaral's deputy produced a nine-page report outlining what would become the basis of the PolÃcia Judiciária's case against the McCanns.
In it, he highlighted, uh, the DNA evidence, the alleged evidence of the dog alerts.
[barking loudly.]
[barking loudly.]
The most important thing he outlines in that report is what he characterizes as "inconsistencies," inconsistencies that he says are bordering on incoherence in the testimony of not only the McCanns, but all of their friends as to what actually happened that night.
[Robbyn.]
Inconsistencies in their timeline.
Inconsistencies in their tale of what had transpired.
And from this, he concludes that, in his words, "Everybody is lying.
" We have a mainframe of time, two, three hours.
Okay.
What happened? [Paulo.]
What were you doing? They said it to police, they give their testimony, so let's put that-- that testimony to a proof.
[camera shutters clicking.]
[in Portuguese.]
The truth is the couple never declined to participate in the reconstruction.
[Gonçalo.]
By reconstructing the events, you can prove a lot of things.
[camera shutters clicking.]
[Paulo.]
In that moment, you can confront people with some false testimony, for example, in that moment, because when you say, "I go there and I uh, I only five minutes," and then when you start to make all the way and say, "Oh, this is 20.
Why did you say five?" You see? [Gonçalo.]
A lot of the time, the reconstructions lead the suspects to confess to having committed a crime.
I find that one of the most ridiculous things, that, uh, suddenly you find that those-- a group of friends that were having holidays, spending holidays in a hotel in the Algarve, they all become a criminal association.
And the thing was so stupid that you could picture it like this.
"Well, I went to my room.
I just killed my daughter, which is a mess, but, please, don't tell anybody.
And I need your support just to masquerade of everything.
" This is absolutely stupid, ridiculous, and I don't know how it was even possible to think that everybody could be associated to this plan.
A conspiracy of two people is possible, conceivably a conspiracy of three.
But conspiracy by seven people working together is-- is just so unreasonably improbable.
Where there are innocuous, you know, inaccuracies or reflections, then human nature being what it is, in a stressful situation, people are going to relate the same story that they've seen in different ways, and that is-- is absolutely normal.
[Jim.]
I think a lack of consistency can often, um, provided it's not too outlandish, indicate a level of integrity around the information, rather than the opposite.
[Jim.]
Now, the difficulty is if you are clutching at straws and then you begin to go back over that which you already have and try and view it in a different way.
[Brian.]
Everything was geared around the cadaver dogs.
Across the newspapers in the UK, across the world.
[barking.]
It was all about what these cadaver dogs had found.
[Brian.]
That was the basis of the evidence.
Now, the results of further forensic tests could hold the key to what happens next in the Madeleine McCann investigation.
Portuguese police hope to hear from scientists based in Britain in the next few days.
Months later, when the Portuguese police were getting ready, to submit their case file to the prosecuting magistrate, they finally received the final British DNA report from the living room of apartment 5A near the sofa where the dogs had alerted and from the boot of the McCanns' rental car.
One after another, they listed the DNA samples as having been too meager, too complex, inconclusive, unable to be satisfied.
There never did emerge one single identical match for the DNA of Madeleine McCann.
[Robbyn.]
Moreover, there was not a trace of blood ever identified as having come from either the McCanns' holiday apartment or the Renault Scenic.
Not the blood of anyone, let alone Madeleine McCann.
[in Portuguese.]
I would sum up the work of the FSS lab in one very simple way: manipulation of the results.
Now, who was responsible for that, who made that happen, I couldn't tell you because I'm not in the United Kingdom.
[indistinct chatter.]
[Robbyn.]
Years later when we were doing the research for our own book on the subject, we submitted the DNA evidence to two senior forensic scientists, who between them have had more than 60 years of experience working in the field.
[barking.]
In the words of one of them, the forensic material in this case amounted to a whole lot of nothing.
[whistling.]
[Robbyn.]
The dogs were portrayed as infallible, their abilities so unique that anything they produced was actually, uh, evidence that Madeleine had died and that blood or a body had been found.
That wasn't true.
Good boy! [laughs.]
That's nice! Good boy! We're tending to add more and more specialist subjects to detection dogs.
Um We've now got dogs that not only find narcotics and explosives, firearms, we've got dogs that will indicate people that might have disease.
We've got pipeline detection dogs that find leaks from gas pipes.
We cannot at this moment in time and we'll never be able to take a dog into court and say Well, first of all, we can't question the dog because it doesn't speak our language.
But we will never be able to turn round and say, "The dog found this.
So therefore somebody's guilty.
" [Jim.]
When that DNA was captured, you know, from the car, the boot of the car, the media created the impression that it was a major breakthrough and a definitive piece of evidence.
[in Portuguese.]
Regarding the dogs' signaling, they're indications.
The police can't just say, "Nothing has happened.
" Something might have happened.
[Martin.]
At the present moment in time, the science isn't available to prove that my dog's right.
In you go.
That's it.
Okay.
The dogs are purely there to provide intelligence to investigators to give them a lead as to where to go.
[Gonçalo, in Portuguese.]
Talking about the DNA traces found in the car, let me tell you this.
There is an important thing which is that it's an indication of the possibility that something was transported there.
[camera shutters clicking.]
The body may have been hidden in some sort of freezer somewhere and been transported later in the boot of the car, and bodily fluids may have dropped from the corpse.
An indication from a dog is an indication from a dog, and unless there is independent evidence to corroborate that, then it means nothing.
I had to repeatedly explain to journalists that it wasn't until, you know, 25 days, I think, after she'd disappeared that they actually rented a car.
[in Portuguese.]
The freezer hypothesis originates from the circumstances.
The car was rented many days after the disappearance and the possible death of the child.
As to what happened to the body before that, whether it decomposed, if it was buried, frozen, probably the most correct conclusion is that it was kept in a place where it could be preserved in the cold.
It's a difficult thing to imagine how anybody could actually hide the body of a child for quite a long period of time in a warm environment.
[helicopter whirring.]
What have they done to the corpse in those three weeks, if they were every time in front of us? I saw them from morning to evening every day.
The dog handler, Martin Grime, had said from the outset that no evidential or intelligence reliability could be placed on the dog alerts alone, unless they had been substantiated by corroborating physical evidence.
No evidence of that kind ever emerged in this case.
[Sandra.]
I have a lot of sources inside the PJ and I talked with many people inside the PJ.
They told me that they found the strong evidence inside a car.
This was Madeleine McCann's DNA and then maybe a slightly diluted version, that it was so close to Madeleine McCann's DNA that it should have been, you know, or could have been the key for the investigation.
Then, you know, that's when you need to actually take a deep breath and step back.
[Sandra.]
When I saw the whole report, I think it was in October, I felt they just lied to me.
Uh, the truth was not that.
[in Portuguese.]
the girl's genetic profile.
Sky News is also reporting it won't just be an 80% match, but a full match.
The report concentrated on three principal specimens, two from the living room of the McCanns' holiday apartment.
The other sample came from the boot of the McCanns' rental car, that Renault Scenic that they had rented several weeks after Madeleine disappeared.
The first sample yielded a result that suggested that it could contain some DNA from Madeleine.
It showed matches on various points of Madeleine's DNA profile, but not all of them and, significantly, it was difficult to decide and decipher from what was there whether the sample had come from the DNA of more than one person.
There was no way that you could differentiate the DNA that was found in the cluster as being the DNA belonging to a specific person.
[Robbyn.]
It was also impossible to conclude from the DNA evidence what bodily fluid had produced the DNA sample.
It could have been saliva or semen or blood.
It could have been any of those.
The second sample, uh, was far too complex for any result at all and no evidence that Madeleine's DNA was there at all.
[Robbyn.]
The DNA that was found in the boot of the Renault, uh, was the most challenging of all.
Of 20 matches that would have to occur for this to have been proven to be Madeleine's DNA, there was a match across 15 of them.
Now, that sounds very damning, but one has to remember that Madeleine's DNA sequence comes from a mixture of her father and mother.
So the DNA in the Renault could equally have belonged to members of the McCanns' extended family, from Madeleine's mother, father, Sean, or Amelie, all who legitimately had been in the car.
They all shared DNA.
The fact of the matter is 50% of Madeleine's DNA would have come from one parent and 50% the other.
[Robbyn.]
Moreover, the scientists wrote, there were actually 37 DNA components present in the sample and that meant that there were as many as three different people whose DNA were mixed into this sampling.
[Jim.]
Fifty percent of the DNA that was found could be found in a large number of the scientists in the forensic science laboratory who were actually carrying out the investigation.
Ultimately, when you read through the detail of the DNA, you see the absolute red herring it was, but it was a dangerous red herring because I think investigators in Portugal thought this was the smoking gun and the definitive evidence.
My inside sources lied to me.
[Sandra.]
I called Amaral.
I ask him, "What's this? The blood found inside the apartment and inside the car, the McCanns' car, can belong to anyone.
Because the sample is very little.
And the last paragraph said exactly this.
'This sample is so minimum and is so common that we have plenty of people here that have exactly the same mark.
' How can you talk about such a serious thing, a crime, neglecting all these issues that are absolutely important to understand the case?" And he said to me, "Look, we have an evidence and our translator didn't translate everything.
He just translated the first paragraphs.
" [in Portuguese.]
I never informed Sandra Felgueiras about any of the details of the investigation.
[footsteps echo.]
[Sandra.]
That was my turning point.
And when this happened, I understood that the intention of those cops that were inside this investigation was not honest.
One of the more bizarre aspects of this case is the lack of evidence to support any theory.
The abduction trail has gone cold and some people are calling this DNA evidence pretty flimsy.
And, Robin, remember, Madeleine's body has not been found.
[male reporter.]
The Portuguese had built their case about what happened in apartment 5A, but it soon came tumbling down.
Take that sighting by the Smith family.
It couldn't have been Gerry McCann because so many witnesses place him at the Ocean Club at the same time.
The Smiths themselves now believe they saw someone else.
And there was the suggestion that Madeleine's parents might have caused her death.
They might have over-sedated her, um, by administering a drug.
[Anthony.]
The fact is that the two children dozed on without making a sound or crying for six hours after the disappearance of Madeleine.
But this prompted in Kate a thought that perhaps they had been sedated by an abductor, who'd applied some form of drug to them to make sure they stayed asleep while he went about his criminal business, abducting their sister.
And there was the suggestion that he might also have sedated Madeleine while removing her from the house.
So the question must remain, were they sedated by an abductor? When the McCanns were their status changed and they were made arguidos, I actually thought the Portuguese police were clutching at straws.
[indistinct chatter.]
So I was as confused, probably, as most people and that's why you begin asking questions within the law enforcement community, and when you begin to realise that the assertion that it's now the parents comes on the back of a flawed interpretation of indications from a dog or low copy number DNA, then I really had deep concerns about the approach of the Portuguese police.
because we are not magicians.
We All the authorities involved are doing [Sandra.]
Why do they let everybody believe that report of the Birmingham lab said something it didn't say? [Rogério.]
And every day, the police was questioned, "What happened? What have you done? Did you have any advance? How are you now? What did you find? What is going to happen? How close are you to-- to find, to arrest somebody?" But one of the responsibles of the investigation created that theory and said, "Well, I know what happened and this is what happened," uh, and I believe that the press find that point of view attractive.
We are-- We are searching for I suppose the first question is did they ever believe the allegations they were making, or had the intensity of third-party criticism towards them over how they had reacted on the night when Madeleine disappeared and how they'd behaved subsequently led them to adopt this approach as a defense mechanism against their own performance? [children's voices on beach.]
[David.]
There were certainly reports that they were worried about how it was going to impact on their tourist industry, so on and so forth.
I believe the police didn't want-- didn't want this case.
They didn't want a missing Madeleine.
They didn't want for people to be thinking across the globe that Portugal is a place that if you go to, your children will get abducted or could get abducted.
So you could understand how the the mood of public opinion would go from sympathy to vilification.
"Let's find somebody to blame for this that doesn't make us look bad.
" [in Portuguese.]
it's very likely that the larger searches on the sites [in Portuguese.]
Madeleine's parents [in Portuguese.]
a vigil where people are asked to I think that's all tied into the tourist industry and tourism being down and the finances, the GDP of the country and everything else.
It's much easier to say, "Aha! We've found some idea, leads, that the parents could have been involved in this.
" [Anthony.]
Late in October, Amaral took a call on his mobile phone and remarked to a member of the press that the British police were just dancing to the McCanns' tune and doing what the McCann couple wanted.
[male reporter.]
A Portuguese chief inspector gave an interview, accusing the McCanns of creating lines of inquiry and blasting Leicestershire Police for hampering his investigation into Madeleine's disappearance.
[in Portuguese.]
The pressure was enormous.
The pressure in terms of the demands, what they said about us, of them considering us a third world country with techniques from the Middle Ages, led by a drunk, a fat guy, a decrepit police officer.
[Anthony.]
It was the end for Amaral.
He was out of his job.
[camera shutters clicking.]
[in Portuguese.]
The investigation ended there.
It ended on the day of October 2nd with my dismissal.
There is one report the then-British Prime Minister Gordon Brown actually made a phone call saying that he wanted to be sure that that man, Amaral, was dismissed.
[camera shutters clicking.]
[in Portuguese.]
Why is the Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, so concerned with this investigation? It's not just a couple, it's several couples.
Upper-middle-class British doctors who let's say "screwed up" in the backyard of a third world country.
And this is something that can't happen in terms of the UK's image.
It could simply just be that.
[Paulo.]
When he looked behind, there was no one to support him.
He thought that he has lots of people to support him.
But when-- when he needs that support, nobody was there.
Not national director, not Judiciary Police, nothing.
Not the Facebook fans, nothing.
If shit happens, you take the blames.
That's the Portuguese way of doing, that's it.
[in Portuguese.]
Gonçalo Amaral was dismissed because he criticized the behavior of his British counterparts.
[in Portuguese.]
Paulo Rebelo, the new supervisor of BIC, is expected in Portimão this afternoon.
Yesterday, for several hours After Gonçalo Amaral's departure, a new investigator, a new chief investigator was brought in.
-That was Paulo Rebelo.
-[camera shutters clicking.]
On the very first day he arrived on the job, uh, Rebelo gave a press conference.
When asked if the McCanns were still prime suspect, he said that that was only a speculation and emphasized that all lines of inquiry were still open.
From that point on, there seemed to be a fresh sort of impetus behind the case, a fresh wind behind the case.
[Sandra.]
Thank God Gonçalo Amaral was replaced for the other cop.
Gonçalo Amaral, in my opinion, didn't didn't make his job as he should.
[Sandra.]
Because he let that journalists like me thought that the McCanns were implicated.
[Brian.]
I think Kate and Gerry would have given up their lives to find Madeleine.
But there's also your own personal pride and honor as an individual.
For somebody to to go through that pain and somebody to then accuse you of the most heinous crime possible [camera shutters clicking.]
I have moved as I've seen the anomalies in the evidence and everything else to a position whereby I do not believe that Kate or Gerry McCann had anything to do with the with the fact that their daughter has gone missing and potentially been abducted.
That doesn't mean that as a professional police officer, I didn't come on a journey from, you know, point A, where that was the hypothesis I would have followed, through to point B and C, where you began to question and think, and then ultimately to you see absolute anomalies in the evidence ironically in the case against them and ultimately in the behaviors that you see within a family that is, in essence, loving.
[Jim.]
If you've ever seen, you know, very young children who have been abused or neglected, there's a reticence when they are around a person who, um, they fear and when the younger children were around Gerry and I saw them 'round him, they were all over him, uh, in a way that just would not be consistent with someone that didn't absolutely love their children and wasn't absolutely adored by their children.
I think Gerry's reaction was pretty typical.
What you sense most is pain, you know.
I also sensed anger and a sense that he was committed to doing everything he could do to make something happen, to get his little girl back.
We're very much on our minds is the fact that we're here without Madeleine.
Nothing that was said, nothing that was done, um, in any way by Gerry was inappropriate.
[camera shutters clicking.]
[Jim.]
And in essence, what it was was someone in absolute shock holding it all together and needing to have that ultimate level of control just to keep putting, I think, one foot in front of the other.
The entire McCann case has become a phenomenon online.
And so there's lots of people hiding behind the anonymity that the internet presents to simply attack and malign people, and who present themselves as being authoritative about the case yet misinterpret, either by accident or design, some of the key factors, which is what spreads the myth about the dogs, which is what spreads the myth about the definitive nature or not of the DNA and forensic evidence.
So it says to ordinary people that it just must be one of those awful cases where police know who did it, but can't actually prove it and what that does, one, it's fundamentally unfair to the parents, two, it goes against, you know, natural justice, innocent till proven guilty, but three, and critically what it does with three, is it stops other people from looking.
watch the video, a new appeal video [Sandra.]
And this is so wrong.
This is This has such bad consequences that even today, I feel a little embarrassed, not to say very embarrassed, of having been part of this.
[in Portuguese.]
It won't just be an 80% match, but a full match.
Did you give to your kids something like Calpol to help them sleep? How can you explain the scent of cadaver by British dogs? Sandra, maybe you should be asking the judiciary because they've examined all this.
But don't you have an explanation for that? Ask the dogs, Sandra.
[chuckles.]
Ask the dogs? No, Gerry The media attention and the fury raised around the dog alerts has stuck in the public imagination.
As far as many people are concerned, they prove the McCanns' guilt in some way.
If anybody ever said or gave clear factual evidence that, "Here's Madeleine's body," or, "Here is clear evidence clear information that she is no longer alive," then they'll accept it.
But until somebody says that Madeleine's not going to come home and proves it, they're gonna believe that she is.
-[Susan.]
Yeah.
-And good for them.
Bless them for that.
For these searching parents, it never goes away.
So even if the result is a terrible one, it's the not knowing that's the worst part.
It's that lingering doubt.
So you have to do what you can to keep hope alive and to keep the search going.
[Jim.]
You do not bring your children away to kill them.
You know, if you're going to do something to your child within your family, you know, you do it somewhere where you're in absolute control.
[camera shutters clicking.]
[Jim.]
And you do not raise the alert and the alarm and continue to press for an investigation, regardless of everyone else saying, "Enough, enough, enough.
" You know, if you are the person that's done something that you want to hide, you know, you're happy when the mists of time begin to overshadow it and people stop talking about it, whereas that's never, ever been the case with Gerry or Kate.
[birds singing.]
[in Portuguese.]
If you have any information on the whereabouts of Madeleine, please get in touch with me and you will be well compensated.
Thank you.
[in English.]
There was a sighting of the family up in the Atlas Mountains, carrying on her back, this mother carrying on her back a child, a blonde child that absolutely looked like Madeleine.
Now, I remember phoning Kate and saying, "Kate, do you want me to go out there?" And she said, "Yes, if you would, please.
" [theme music playing.]
[thunder rumbling.]
I think Leicestershire's a kind of hidden gem of England and I say that as a patriotic, you know, person who was born and raised here.
Rothley is situated in North Leicestershire.
It has a really nice fish and chip shop, a pretty village square, there are some nice pubs.
It's your archetypal English village.
[birds singing.]
I don't think it was known for anything, really, [stutters.]
before the McCann case.
[camera shutters clicking.]
[Haynes.]
I was thinking, "Luz is gonna be quiet again," and suddenly I realised their little town in Leicester is going to be deluged with exactly what we've just had.
Um And they're not going home to quiet and and peace.
They're going home to the same struggle in another place.
[camera shutters clicking.]
[male reporter.]
A police escort out of East Midlands Airport then the short drive to the village of Rothley and their home.
[female reporter.]
Her parents vowed to stay until she was found, but they returned home this weekend without Maddie, clouded under suspicion after being named formal suspects in their little girl's disappearance.
[male reporter speaking French.]
[female reporter speaking Portuguese.]
[indistinct chatter.]
[male reporter.]
This is the first time that Kate McCann and the twins have been in their home since Madeleine disappeared.
[overlapping reporters' voices.]
Kate hasn't been back to the house since this started so it's going to be extremely difficult.
[camera shutters clicking.]
I do worry about how difficult it is for her to have walked through that front door today and to have gone into Madeleine's bedroom, which is as it was when-- when they left for their holiday.
It must be absolutely awful for them.
Part of the reason the McCanns came back, their two-year-old twins-- wanting them to have as much of a normal life as possible, but so hard for them to return without their little Maddie.
[helicopter flies overhead.]
The twins often ask about her.
They simply tell them she isn't here at the moment, but they remain surrounded by her toys, her other belongings, and photographs as each day passes without her.
[male reporter.]
The couple had left in May, hoping to return happy and refreshed after a family holiday.
This was hardly the homecoming they'd prayed for.
[helicopter flies overhead.]
[Robbyn.]
Kate and Gerry McCann had been chased from the Algarve by the press, named as suspects in the investigation by the Portuguese police, uniformly being vilified.
[camera shutters clicking.]
[Robbyn.]
The truth is, though, that they were not completely alone.
There were people watching.
[indistinct radio chatter.]
[man.]
You could sense them taking their gloves off and thinking "Right, everything changes.
" [man 2.]
Whilst you're looking at the parents, you're not looking for the kid.
[plane whooshes overhead.]
[Robbyn.]
One of those people watching was a businessman by the name of Brian Kennedy.
[birds and insects chirping.]
[Brian.]
I was following the story, like everyone else.
I saw that the media and the world had turned against these people.
I was thinking, "No way! Abso-- I'd lose all faith in human nature if these parents are involved.
" We were in the fortunate position in which we had the resources to be able to reach out and help them.
[Brian.]
And what's the headline? Many of my friends said to me, "Why are you getting involved in this? What happens if they're guilty?" And my response was, "But imagine if they're not guilty.
" If you can do something to help, then you bloody better try and help.
[Patrick.]
I think that's something, you know, that my dad is all about.
[Brian.]
When I walked into their lawyer's offices, they both looked like a wreck and I explained that, "Look, I'm here to help.
" Kate started to tell the story and after 12 seconds, just reading the emotions, everything told me, 100 percent, that this woman was absolutely genuine and she was a victim.
I said, "You don't have to tell me any more, Kate.
Let's just get on now and talk about what we can do from here to try and find Madeleine.
" Kate McCann recalls how overwhelmed she was by the thought that this man they didn't know was willing to put his cash and his time on the line to help them.
[Robbyn.]
She could barely keep herself from flinging her arms around his neck and just breaking down and thanking him.
[speaking Portuguese.]
I was proud of him that he wanted to help another family that were going through such turmoil, such a tragedy.
It's like, "Right, let's do something to help this.
This is not right.
" A Scottish millionaire businessman is giving financial backing to the parents of missing Madeleine McCann.
Brian Kennedy, who made his millions from double glazing, has pledged to meet Kate and Gerry's growing costs to help in the hunt for their daughter.
The tycoon, who is estimated to be worth £250 million, is based in Cheshire.
[Brian.]
I grew up in a high-rise block of flats in Edinburgh, working-class family.
I got married very young and, uh, had to start paying bills.
Built up various successful businesses.
The first rule of business is to stay in business.
If you walk into your boardroom, make sure you're the dumbest guy in it! [wind whistling.]
[reporter 1.]
It can't have been the homecoming, of course, that Kate and Gerry McCann were hoping for four months after their daughter disappeared from their holiday flat in Portugal.
The couple have returned home after being declared formal suspects.
[reporter 2.]
They could hold that arguido status for eight to ten months and in that time, either one of them could be called back to Portugal to be questioned.
The first thing was to be able to get Kate and Gerry sufficient legal protection to ensure that they couldn't be taken back to Portugal, from which we're all sure they would have been hung, drawn, and quartered.
[camera shutters clicking.]
How angry are you, how angry are they about being made official suspects by the Portuguese police? The fact that they have been made this arguido status, they're not allowed to discuss things.
They have been effectively gagged by the Portuguese.
I'm furious, the rest of the family are furious.
It's adding insult to injury.
They're at an all-time low and the Portuguese legal system to us is a complete maze and we now need help to negotiate that and that process has already started.
[Brian.]
One of the top lawyers is a guy called Rogério Alves.
He was a well-respected lawyer in Portugal.
The Portuguese had decided Kate and Gerry were guilty.
For him to represent Kate and Gerry was a major cultural issue for him.
[Rogério.]
The case was not very popular in Portugal.
I used to go very often to the television, to the media, talk about justice matters.
So I was truly aware that the public opinion court decided that they had to be guilty.
[reporters yell.]
Gerry! Gerry! [camera shutters clicking.]
[in Portuguese.]
When they left Portugal in September, it had been agreed that we should follow an inquiry that allowed for the possible involvement of the parents in the child's disappearance.
When they left for the UK, someone saw them coming off the plane.
In Praia da Luz on the night of Madeleine's disappearance, an Irishman named Martin Smith and his family had seen a man carrying a little girl wearing pajamas in the street, not far from the Ocean Club.
[in Portuguese.]
Martin Smith sees the images of them coming off the plane and he says, "This was the man I saw.
" "This was the man I saw taking that child.
" Because of the way he carried the child, the way he walked, it was the same person that he'd seen before.
[male voice.]
I would be 60 to 80% sure that it was Gerald McCann that I met that night carrying a child.
[Rogério.]
All those voices saying, "They are guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty.
" I went to London in September 2007.
I want to look in the eyes and reach my conclusion.
[Rogério.]
I met Gerry and Kate.
We talked for a long time.
What I found was a father and a mother suffering, fighting against all odds, trying to understand why everybody's considering me as guilty.
"What have I done? Is it not enough what happened to me? Is it not enough that my daughter disappeared, that nobody can find what happened, that nobody can provide me solid information? Is it not enough that I cannot sleep?" At the end of it, he said, "Fine.
 I will support you and I will represent you and fight your corner," and he proceeded to do so.
I had some comments.
"Well, he's going to to win a lot of money.
He's making this for money.
" Going into petrol fuel stations and on a few occasions, people would spit on him when they knew he was representing, defending the McCanns.
This is what we were up against here.
[in Portuguese.]
The head of the Bar Association believes that the McCann couple are innocent.
Rogério Alves says that this was the defining factor in his decision to accept and defend Madeleine's parents.
[in Portuguese.]
It was my personal and lengthy conversation with the couple that led me to accept the job [Rogério, in English.]
But I don't care much, to be honest, because I'm a lawyer.
What I intend to do is to make things fairly and to protect my clients, especially when they are right.
I think people, you know, criticized the McCann family for, you know, dealing with the press so much, but you have no choice.
They're not gonna leave you alone.
They will follow your every move, TV cameras, radio crews.
[Phil.]
I think people want to try and paint it as a pack that followed them from Portugal up to Leicestershire.
Well, when you've got a story of this magnitude, to somehow say to the press, "Well, just go away and forget it," it's not gonna happen.
The public are not gonna allow that to happen because they want to buy the newspapers and read the stories.
[camera shutters clicking.]
[David.]
The British media were under huge pressure.
Two things they were told to do was get great photographs of the McCanns, Kate in particular, and, you know, possibly the twins if you can, which, of course, raised completely separate ethical issues, and the other thing was get a new angle to the story.
[camera shutters clicking.]
All they're doing is taking the children out to a sort of play area, probably for about an hour.
Um, so if you could respect that um, and, you know, when they come out of the gate, when they come back in, don't crowd in.
 Please don't take photographs of the twins.
Okay? Don't all shout "yes" at once! [indistinct chatter.]
Soon after the McCanns return to Britain, I drove up to meet them.
I drove up one night, it was very late when I got there, I think seven or eight o'clock, and, um, they were sitting in their kitchen and Gerry made me a cup of tea and I was struck by how shocked and how completely riddled with grief Kate McCann was.
[Phil.]
I felt very uncomfortable, actually, being there, talking about a missing child as some sort of PR exercise because, you know, we were to discuss what they were to do and, um [Phil.]
Gerry was very strong.
He had a sponsor who'd come forward, a businessman, who was prepared to pay for the PR to help him, and he wanted to know whether we could put five or six of my staff onto the campaign, try and keep Maddie's name alive and out there in the press.
I said, "Gerry, I think, you know, you've got to be careful.
I think if it's too well-oiled a machine, I think the public will feel very uncomfortable about it.
" I spoke to Gerry once or twice more, but nothing materialized from it.
I think in the end, he understood that I just thought having too slick a PR campaign would work against them.
[female reporter.]
Mr Mitchell says he's been hired for as long as it takes It became about, you know, that already high excitement with the trucks with the satellite dishes and the cameramen and the photographers and the journalists and they're all jostling and they're all jostling for position and they all want the story and, you know, even as a journalist, this is what I do, it makes me wince when I see that.
[male reporter.]
Madeleine's great-uncle was surrounded by the media as he gave a short statement at the village green.
They're fine.
They-- They've had a decent night's sleep and between You could feel that some elements of the British media, you could sense them taking their gloves off and thinking, "Right, everything changes.
" Rothley's a perfectly pleasant, nice place where, you know, something like this, satellite trucks and cars full of journalists, would have come as a substantial shock.
When some of the Portuguese media became more hostile and included accusations and in effect were much less inhibited in what they were inferring or alleging, then the pressure on their British counterparts just became immense.
[indistinct chatter.]
[male reporter.]
With their twins in Sunday school and hidden from the cameras, the McCanns found themselves amongst friends.
Inside, they were embraced by other members of the congregation.
The reporting I was making, the things I was saying, they disapprove 100 percent of it.
[Sandra.]
I had this impression of people that didn't want me there.
I think you're you're cruel to this couple.
The agony she's going through, nobody knows.
And I think you should leave her alone.
[Sandra.]
There was some people that came to me and said, "What are you doing here? You are invading their privacy.
" -Excuse me, please.
-[Sandra.]
Have the McCanns talked to you? [laughs.]
[Sandra.]
Do you Do you still believe that Madeleine is alive? Yes, of course she is.
[Sandra.]
Do you support the McCann family? Yeah, of course we are.
[man.]
Do you like to see them in church again? [resident.]
Of course we would like, but they can't get out of the house because of you people.
No more, please.
Thank you.
[man.]
But did you pray for Madeleine? [speaking Portuguese.]
Everyone that we tried to talk to knew the McCanns, didn't want the press there.
They just said, "You have to leave our town!" I think it's just terribly sad for everybody involved and I think the media should leave them alone outside the house.
No, Rothley village will support them totally.
We-- We've agreed that they need to have that time and space and there's a lot of support in the village from the residents.
[whirring.]
[whirring.]
There we go.
"Please leave.
" "Angry villagers call on media to give McCanns some space.
" It lists the media organizations in Rothley, showing that it's not just British media.
It's Portuguese, Belgian, French, German, and so on.
It just captures the concern of residents for saying, you know, "We're fed up with it.
" 'Cause they stick their cameras in your face and they're not always the politest of people.
[Nick.]
A good local or regional newspaper holds up a mirror to the community to which it belongs.
Yes, you want to sell newspapers, but, equally, you want to do it responsibly because it's your constituency, because they're your readers that you're talking about.
You have a doorstep and you step off that doorstep and you're in the middle of the community of people who you hope are reading you, and so, to put it bluntly, you don't want to shit on that doorstep.
Many of the nationals had kind of wim-wommed on their coverage.
One minute, the McCanns were responsible.
The next minute, they were grieving for their missing daughter.
We didn't have to distance ourselves from the national hysteria because there was never any suggestion that we were ever going to be part of it.
We were the local newspaper.
That's what we did.
So, um, our concern was to-- was to do that properly, to do the right thing by the family and do the right thing by our readers.
[microfilm reader whirs.]
National tabloids are trying to sell against each other and what they put on their front page can make a significant difference to whether they sell more or fewer copies than their rival titles.
So "You Killed Madeleine" is a pretty dramatic front page that was guaranteed to attract people's attention.
Um, it also happens to be pretty poor journalism.
We tried to tell the story.
I think what we tried to do was to tell the story as truthfully and as honestly as we could.
I think there were all kinds of newspapers who were jumping to all kinds of conclusions and we never did.
They were not charged and they were not convicted and I think it's a, you know, fine old English tradition that you are innocent until you are proven guilty and I think that was our watchword.
That informed everything that we did.
[Phil.]
The agenda moves on so quickly every day.
They would have thought, "Actually, I can write a story on a Tuesday 'cause by Friday, there will be 40 other stories that have broken and my story will be forgotten.
" [John.]
Things start off in Portugal with no accreditation to an official source and end up being reported here as if they are the truth.
That is just crazy! Why are we spending so much energy and time negating rumors and speculation? And this story would appear, let's say, in a British newspaper.
The Portuguese press would then pick up on it.
and would sort of escalate it further.
[female reporter.]
This landscape of speculation is made possible partly because it's difficult to sue the media here and libel damages are small.
So what if some information tarnishes the reputation of people who might be totally innocent? [Justine.]
It's unrelenting.
And, you know, things seem to be getting worse and worse.
[reporter, in Portuguese.]
The police is still waiting for the lab results to come from Birmingham.
According to Jornal 24 Horas, the results conclude that Gerry McCann is not the biological father of Madeleine.
There have also been claims that Kate's been asked to hand in her diary and that Gerry's been asked to give in his laptop.
Having spoken to people close to the McCanns, they say that's simply not true.
Kate and Gerry McCann visited the church here in Praia da Luz almost every day after Madeleine went missing.
Today, it's reported that the police plan to search even here, but there is no sign of such a search, and no confirmation that any kind of search is even planned.
In our world, if there becomes a question like, "Did you sedate Maddie?" it becomes a fact.
The answer doesn't matter, right? The answer is, "Yes, I did sedate Maddie.
" That's how people view it.
They don't care that he said, "Oh, no, I didn't do that.
" They don't take that into account.
They simply say to themselves, "No smoke without fire.
" [rain pattering.]
[thunder rumbling.]
[Kate.]
This is a very nice letter.
It's actually from a mum being very supportive in what we've done and are doing.
We've got a lot of letters as well from people who've got children the same age.
Um The vast majority, 99 percent of them, they're really nice and supportive, and then unfortunately, as we know, there's that one percent of society um who send the nasty ones.
[Gerry.]
That's a good example.
Um The giveaway 'cause normally it's pretty obvious and this says, "Gerry and Kate, how can you use money given by poor people in good faith to pay your mortgage on your mansion you [bleep.]
thieving bastards? Your brat is dead because of your drunken arrogance.
Shame on you.
I curse you and your family to suffer forever.
Cursed Christmas.
If you had any shame, you would accept full responsibility for your daughter's disappearance and give all the money back.
You are scum.
" That's quite nice.
[Gerry.]
Very charming.
[clears throat.]
The McCanns remain formal suspects and could be asked to return to Portugal any day.
Until then, they'll remain here in Leicestershire, attempting to assemble a formidable media and legal team Kate and Gerry were very conscious of who they could trust and who they couldn't trust and they trusted Clarence.
[female reporter.]
They're calling it "the fightback.
" After days of rumor, allegation, and innuendo, a new media strategy led by a former journalist and civil servant.
Kate and Gerry were saying, "Look, we should try and get Clarence Mitchell on board full-time because he can then deal with all the media and we need the media to be on our side on this.
" Good morning.
I'm Clarence Mitchell, for those who don't know me.
[male reporter.]
The Foreign Office official who'd been advising the McCanns will quit his government post to work full-time for the couple.
[Clarence.]
To suggest that they somehow harmed Madeleine, accidentally or otherwise, is as ludicrous as it is nonsensical.
[Phil.]
He was a very competent, uh, sharp individual.
You know, very aware.
If it's a war, I-- I'm trying to hopefully, you know, call a truce.
He was out there, having a drink with them in the evening, he was talking to them, he was giving off-the-record briefings.
He was telling them how the McCanns were and how they were feeling.
[Lee.]
It seems cruel to say it backfired, but I think some people-- some people certainly thought that, "Well, look what you've done here.
You've hired" I heard this, I heard this many times.
This is what people were writing underneath our stories.
You know, you've hired this kind of professional news reporter to manage this story.
It looked slick.
It was incongruous, I think.
[camera shutters clicking.]
They attempted to communicate in an effective way, using PR and the media to get the message out that Madeleine was still out there and that they needed help.
Um That, in some eyes, made it look too slick, you know, too polished, too professional.
Some have commented that the McCanns haven't come across that well, that they haven't been seen to be grieving enough, for example.
How are you gonna advise them on that? But who's to say how much you should grieve? [Justine.]
You know, at the time, Kate was very aware that she was, in some way, not seen as caring.
They'd been advised that, you know, if they showed emotions that that might be detrimental to the welfare of their daughter if she was being held kidnapped somewhere.
[Justine.]
So they had decided that they had to be very controlled when they were in public.
These families are trying to communicate in the most effective way.
They're trying to reach the abductor and plead with the abductor to bring their child back.
They're trying to communicate to the public the urgency of the situation and ask for the public's help.
that's what we really are asking people to try and remember were they in a situation like this, had something else happened, had they seen someone.
This time last year, "Where are you going on holiday? Spain? Portugal?" I've got a map here and [Ernie.]
So there is a kind of mindset that happens in which parents try to be self-controlled.
There's obviously certain things that we just can't control and I think we're getting used to kind of [Ernie.]
They try not to be so devastated that they're not effective communicators and as a result, they can come across robotic.
And so there was criticism of the McCanns, particularly Kate, and that was fed by social media.
I think the website was perhaps three or four years old and it was very much an afterthought.
It was all about the newspaper.
[Lee.]
We put the McCann stuff online and people started to comment on it.
[keyboard typing echoes.]
[Ernie.]
Social media was in its infancy.
Facebook was a year old.
Twitter was just being launched.
Social media fed the paranoia about this case and distorted the message.
You can go on the internet, look at the McCann thing and you'll find every lunatic conspiracy theory going.
In 2007, there were a lot of people who viewed that content as news.
That it's on social media, it must be truth.
[keyboard typing echoes.]
If you're in a pub and somebody offers a view about your business or your football club or your performance onstage, do you really care about it? They don't, but when they read it in the printed word, it has far more impact.
[keyboard typing echoes.]
What happened with Kate McCann, in particular, some of the trolls really affected her.
[keyboard typing echoes.]
The internet gives the troller all the power and none of the responsibility.
I don't think I even knew what a troll was back then in 2007.
[keyboard typing echoes.]
[Lee.]
And then it just got more and more and more and more vitriolic.
That's when we took the decision to say, as a newspaper, to stop it and to close all comments.
I know how much I love Madeleine and I have no doubt that Madeleine knows how much you know, I love her and I think I mean, I know that and I've just got to think, regardless of what all those people say out there, you know, those bloggers and people on the forums who obviously get some kind of kick out of being nasty, I know that and I know Madeleine knows that and I've just got to kind of keep hold of that, really.
[male reporter.]
This is Kate and Gerry McCann attending a church service yesterday in Rothley.
It was the 150th day since their daughter Madeleine went missing.
[camera shutters clicking.]
On September 10th, Gonçalo Amaral's deputy produced a nine-page report outlining what would become the basis of the PolÃcia Judiciária's case against the McCanns.
In it, he highlighted, uh, the DNA evidence, the alleged evidence of the dog alerts.
[barking loudly.]
[barking loudly.]
The most important thing he outlines in that report is what he characterizes as "inconsistencies," inconsistencies that he says are bordering on incoherence in the testimony of not only the McCanns, but all of their friends as to what actually happened that night.
[Robbyn.]
Inconsistencies in their timeline.
Inconsistencies in their tale of what had transpired.
And from this, he concludes that, in his words, "Everybody is lying.
" We have a mainframe of time, two, three hours.
Okay.
What happened? [Paulo.]
What were you doing? They said it to police, they give their testimony, so let's put that-- that testimony to a proof.
[camera shutters clicking.]
[in Portuguese.]
The truth is the couple never declined to participate in the reconstruction.
[Gonçalo.]
By reconstructing the events, you can prove a lot of things.
[camera shutters clicking.]
[Paulo.]
In that moment, you can confront people with some false testimony, for example, in that moment, because when you say, "I go there and I uh, I only five minutes," and then when you start to make all the way and say, "Oh, this is 20.
Why did you say five?" You see? [Gonçalo.]
A lot of the time, the reconstructions lead the suspects to confess to having committed a crime.
I find that one of the most ridiculous things, that, uh, suddenly you find that those-- a group of friends that were having holidays, spending holidays in a hotel in the Algarve, they all become a criminal association.
And the thing was so stupid that you could picture it like this.
"Well, I went to my room.
I just killed my daughter, which is a mess, but, please, don't tell anybody.
And I need your support just to masquerade of everything.
" This is absolutely stupid, ridiculous, and I don't know how it was even possible to think that everybody could be associated to this plan.
A conspiracy of two people is possible, conceivably a conspiracy of three.
But conspiracy by seven people working together is-- is just so unreasonably improbable.
Where there are innocuous, you know, inaccuracies or reflections, then human nature being what it is, in a stressful situation, people are going to relate the same story that they've seen in different ways, and that is-- is absolutely normal.
[Jim.]
I think a lack of consistency can often, um, provided it's not too outlandish, indicate a level of integrity around the information, rather than the opposite.
[Jim.]
Now, the difficulty is if you are clutching at straws and then you begin to go back over that which you already have and try and view it in a different way.
[Brian.]
Everything was geared around the cadaver dogs.
Across the newspapers in the UK, across the world.
[barking.]
It was all about what these cadaver dogs had found.
[Brian.]
That was the basis of the evidence.
Now, the results of further forensic tests could hold the key to what happens next in the Madeleine McCann investigation.
Portuguese police hope to hear from scientists based in Britain in the next few days.
Months later, when the Portuguese police were getting ready, to submit their case file to the prosecuting magistrate, they finally received the final British DNA report from the living room of apartment 5A near the sofa where the dogs had alerted and from the boot of the McCanns' rental car.
One after another, they listed the DNA samples as having been too meager, too complex, inconclusive, unable to be satisfied.
There never did emerge one single identical match for the DNA of Madeleine McCann.
[Robbyn.]
Moreover, there was not a trace of blood ever identified as having come from either the McCanns' holiday apartment or the Renault Scenic.
Not the blood of anyone, let alone Madeleine McCann.
[in Portuguese.]
I would sum up the work of the FSS lab in one very simple way: manipulation of the results.
Now, who was responsible for that, who made that happen, I couldn't tell you because I'm not in the United Kingdom.
[indistinct chatter.]
[Robbyn.]
Years later when we were doing the research for our own book on the subject, we submitted the DNA evidence to two senior forensic scientists, who between them have had more than 60 years of experience working in the field.
[barking.]
In the words of one of them, the forensic material in this case amounted to a whole lot of nothing.
[whistling.]
[Robbyn.]
The dogs were portrayed as infallible, their abilities so unique that anything they produced was actually, uh, evidence that Madeleine had died and that blood or a body had been found.
That wasn't true.
Good boy! [laughs.]
That's nice! Good boy! We're tending to add more and more specialist subjects to detection dogs.
Um We've now got dogs that not only find narcotics and explosives, firearms, we've got dogs that will indicate people that might have disease.
We've got pipeline detection dogs that find leaks from gas pipes.
We cannot at this moment in time and we'll never be able to take a dog into court and say Well, first of all, we can't question the dog because it doesn't speak our language.
But we will never be able to turn round and say, "The dog found this.
So therefore somebody's guilty.
" [Jim.]
When that DNA was captured, you know, from the car, the boot of the car, the media created the impression that it was a major breakthrough and a definitive piece of evidence.
[in Portuguese.]
Regarding the dogs' signaling, they're indications.
The police can't just say, "Nothing has happened.
" Something might have happened.
[Martin.]
At the present moment in time, the science isn't available to prove that my dog's right.
In you go.
That's it.
Okay.
The dogs are purely there to provide intelligence to investigators to give them a lead as to where to go.
[Gonçalo, in Portuguese.]
Talking about the DNA traces found in the car, let me tell you this.
There is an important thing which is that it's an indication of the possibility that something was transported there.
[camera shutters clicking.]
The body may have been hidden in some sort of freezer somewhere and been transported later in the boot of the car, and bodily fluids may have dropped from the corpse.
An indication from a dog is an indication from a dog, and unless there is independent evidence to corroborate that, then it means nothing.
I had to repeatedly explain to journalists that it wasn't until, you know, 25 days, I think, after she'd disappeared that they actually rented a car.
[in Portuguese.]
The freezer hypothesis originates from the circumstances.
The car was rented many days after the disappearance and the possible death of the child.
As to what happened to the body before that, whether it decomposed, if it was buried, frozen, probably the most correct conclusion is that it was kept in a place where it could be preserved in the cold.
It's a difficult thing to imagine how anybody could actually hide the body of a child for quite a long period of time in a warm environment.
[helicopter whirring.]
What have they done to the corpse in those three weeks, if they were every time in front of us? I saw them from morning to evening every day.
The dog handler, Martin Grime, had said from the outset that no evidential or intelligence reliability could be placed on the dog alerts alone, unless they had been substantiated by corroborating physical evidence.
No evidence of that kind ever emerged in this case.
[Sandra.]
I have a lot of sources inside the PJ and I talked with many people inside the PJ.
They told me that they found the strong evidence inside a car.
This was Madeleine McCann's DNA and then maybe a slightly diluted version, that it was so close to Madeleine McCann's DNA that it should have been, you know, or could have been the key for the investigation.
Then, you know, that's when you need to actually take a deep breath and step back.
[Sandra.]
When I saw the whole report, I think it was in October, I felt they just lied to me.
Uh, the truth was not that.
[in Portuguese.]
the girl's genetic profile.
Sky News is also reporting it won't just be an 80% match, but a full match.
The report concentrated on three principal specimens, two from the living room of the McCanns' holiday apartment.
The other sample came from the boot of the McCanns' rental car, that Renault Scenic that they had rented several weeks after Madeleine disappeared.
The first sample yielded a result that suggested that it could contain some DNA from Madeleine.
It showed matches on various points of Madeleine's DNA profile, but not all of them and, significantly, it was difficult to decide and decipher from what was there whether the sample had come from the DNA of more than one person.
There was no way that you could differentiate the DNA that was found in the cluster as being the DNA belonging to a specific person.
[Robbyn.]
It was also impossible to conclude from the DNA evidence what bodily fluid had produced the DNA sample.
It could have been saliva or semen or blood.
It could have been any of those.
The second sample, uh, was far too complex for any result at all and no evidence that Madeleine's DNA was there at all.
[Robbyn.]
The DNA that was found in the boot of the Renault, uh, was the most challenging of all.
Of 20 matches that would have to occur for this to have been proven to be Madeleine's DNA, there was a match across 15 of them.
Now, that sounds very damning, but one has to remember that Madeleine's DNA sequence comes from a mixture of her father and mother.
So the DNA in the Renault could equally have belonged to members of the McCanns' extended family, from Madeleine's mother, father, Sean, or Amelie, all who legitimately had been in the car.
They all shared DNA.
The fact of the matter is 50% of Madeleine's DNA would have come from one parent and 50% the other.
[Robbyn.]
Moreover, the scientists wrote, there were actually 37 DNA components present in the sample and that meant that there were as many as three different people whose DNA were mixed into this sampling.
[Jim.]
Fifty percent of the DNA that was found could be found in a large number of the scientists in the forensic science laboratory who were actually carrying out the investigation.
Ultimately, when you read through the detail of the DNA, you see the absolute red herring it was, but it was a dangerous red herring because I think investigators in Portugal thought this was the smoking gun and the definitive evidence.
My inside sources lied to me.
[Sandra.]
I called Amaral.
I ask him, "What's this? The blood found inside the apartment and inside the car, the McCanns' car, can belong to anyone.
Because the sample is very little.
And the last paragraph said exactly this.
'This sample is so minimum and is so common that we have plenty of people here that have exactly the same mark.
' How can you talk about such a serious thing, a crime, neglecting all these issues that are absolutely important to understand the case?" And he said to me, "Look, we have an evidence and our translator didn't translate everything.
He just translated the first paragraphs.
" [in Portuguese.]
I never informed Sandra Felgueiras about any of the details of the investigation.
[footsteps echo.]
[Sandra.]
That was my turning point.
And when this happened, I understood that the intention of those cops that were inside this investigation was not honest.
One of the more bizarre aspects of this case is the lack of evidence to support any theory.
The abduction trail has gone cold and some people are calling this DNA evidence pretty flimsy.
And, Robin, remember, Madeleine's body has not been found.
[male reporter.]
The Portuguese had built their case about what happened in apartment 5A, but it soon came tumbling down.
Take that sighting by the Smith family.
It couldn't have been Gerry McCann because so many witnesses place him at the Ocean Club at the same time.
The Smiths themselves now believe they saw someone else.
And there was the suggestion that Madeleine's parents might have caused her death.
They might have over-sedated her, um, by administering a drug.
[Anthony.]
The fact is that the two children dozed on without making a sound or crying for six hours after the disappearance of Madeleine.
But this prompted in Kate a thought that perhaps they had been sedated by an abductor, who'd applied some form of drug to them to make sure they stayed asleep while he went about his criminal business, abducting their sister.
And there was the suggestion that he might also have sedated Madeleine while removing her from the house.
So the question must remain, were they sedated by an abductor? When the McCanns were their status changed and they were made arguidos, I actually thought the Portuguese police were clutching at straws.
[indistinct chatter.]
So I was as confused, probably, as most people and that's why you begin asking questions within the law enforcement community, and when you begin to realise that the assertion that it's now the parents comes on the back of a flawed interpretation of indications from a dog or low copy number DNA, then I really had deep concerns about the approach of the Portuguese police.
because we are not magicians.
We All the authorities involved are doing [Sandra.]
Why do they let everybody believe that report of the Birmingham lab said something it didn't say? [Rogério.]
And every day, the police was questioned, "What happened? What have you done? Did you have any advance? How are you now? What did you find? What is going to happen? How close are you to-- to find, to arrest somebody?" But one of the responsibles of the investigation created that theory and said, "Well, I know what happened and this is what happened," uh, and I believe that the press find that point of view attractive.
We are-- We are searching for I suppose the first question is did they ever believe the allegations they were making, or had the intensity of third-party criticism towards them over how they had reacted on the night when Madeleine disappeared and how they'd behaved subsequently led them to adopt this approach as a defense mechanism against their own performance? [children's voices on beach.]
[David.]
There were certainly reports that they were worried about how it was going to impact on their tourist industry, so on and so forth.
I believe the police didn't want-- didn't want this case.
They didn't want a missing Madeleine.
They didn't want for people to be thinking across the globe that Portugal is a place that if you go to, your children will get abducted or could get abducted.
So you could understand how the the mood of public opinion would go from sympathy to vilification.
"Let's find somebody to blame for this that doesn't make us look bad.
" [in Portuguese.]
it's very likely that the larger searches on the sites [in Portuguese.]
Madeleine's parents [in Portuguese.]
a vigil where people are asked to I think that's all tied into the tourist industry and tourism being down and the finances, the GDP of the country and everything else.
It's much easier to say, "Aha! We've found some idea, leads, that the parents could have been involved in this.
" [Anthony.]
Late in October, Amaral took a call on his mobile phone and remarked to a member of the press that the British police were just dancing to the McCanns' tune and doing what the McCann couple wanted.
[male reporter.]
A Portuguese chief inspector gave an interview, accusing the McCanns of creating lines of inquiry and blasting Leicestershire Police for hampering his investigation into Madeleine's disappearance.
[in Portuguese.]
The pressure was enormous.
The pressure in terms of the demands, what they said about us, of them considering us a third world country with techniques from the Middle Ages, led by a drunk, a fat guy, a decrepit police officer.
[Anthony.]
It was the end for Amaral.
He was out of his job.
[camera shutters clicking.]
[in Portuguese.]
The investigation ended there.
It ended on the day of October 2nd with my dismissal.
There is one report the then-British Prime Minister Gordon Brown actually made a phone call saying that he wanted to be sure that that man, Amaral, was dismissed.
[camera shutters clicking.]
[in Portuguese.]
Why is the Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, so concerned with this investigation? It's not just a couple, it's several couples.
Upper-middle-class British doctors who let's say "screwed up" in the backyard of a third world country.
And this is something that can't happen in terms of the UK's image.
It could simply just be that.
[Paulo.]
When he looked behind, there was no one to support him.
He thought that he has lots of people to support him.
But when-- when he needs that support, nobody was there.
Not national director, not Judiciary Police, nothing.
Not the Facebook fans, nothing.
If shit happens, you take the blames.
That's the Portuguese way of doing, that's it.
[in Portuguese.]
Gonçalo Amaral was dismissed because he criticized the behavior of his British counterparts.
[in Portuguese.]
Paulo Rebelo, the new supervisor of BIC, is expected in Portimão this afternoon.
Yesterday, for several hours After Gonçalo Amaral's departure, a new investigator, a new chief investigator was brought in.
-That was Paulo Rebelo.
-[camera shutters clicking.]
On the very first day he arrived on the job, uh, Rebelo gave a press conference.
When asked if the McCanns were still prime suspect, he said that that was only a speculation and emphasized that all lines of inquiry were still open.
From that point on, there seemed to be a fresh sort of impetus behind the case, a fresh wind behind the case.
[Sandra.]
Thank God Gonçalo Amaral was replaced for the other cop.
Gonçalo Amaral, in my opinion, didn't didn't make his job as he should.
[Sandra.]
Because he let that journalists like me thought that the McCanns were implicated.
[Brian.]
I think Kate and Gerry would have given up their lives to find Madeleine.
But there's also your own personal pride and honor as an individual.
For somebody to to go through that pain and somebody to then accuse you of the most heinous crime possible [camera shutters clicking.]
I have moved as I've seen the anomalies in the evidence and everything else to a position whereby I do not believe that Kate or Gerry McCann had anything to do with the with the fact that their daughter has gone missing and potentially been abducted.
That doesn't mean that as a professional police officer, I didn't come on a journey from, you know, point A, where that was the hypothesis I would have followed, through to point B and C, where you began to question and think, and then ultimately to you see absolute anomalies in the evidence ironically in the case against them and ultimately in the behaviors that you see within a family that is, in essence, loving.
[Jim.]
If you've ever seen, you know, very young children who have been abused or neglected, there's a reticence when they are around a person who, um, they fear and when the younger children were around Gerry and I saw them 'round him, they were all over him, uh, in a way that just would not be consistent with someone that didn't absolutely love their children and wasn't absolutely adored by their children.
I think Gerry's reaction was pretty typical.
What you sense most is pain, you know.
I also sensed anger and a sense that he was committed to doing everything he could do to make something happen, to get his little girl back.
We're very much on our minds is the fact that we're here without Madeleine.
Nothing that was said, nothing that was done, um, in any way by Gerry was inappropriate.
[camera shutters clicking.]
[Jim.]
And in essence, what it was was someone in absolute shock holding it all together and needing to have that ultimate level of control just to keep putting, I think, one foot in front of the other.
The entire McCann case has become a phenomenon online.
And so there's lots of people hiding behind the anonymity that the internet presents to simply attack and malign people, and who present themselves as being authoritative about the case yet misinterpret, either by accident or design, some of the key factors, which is what spreads the myth about the dogs, which is what spreads the myth about the definitive nature or not of the DNA and forensic evidence.
So it says to ordinary people that it just must be one of those awful cases where police know who did it, but can't actually prove it and what that does, one, it's fundamentally unfair to the parents, two, it goes against, you know, natural justice, innocent till proven guilty, but three, and critically what it does with three, is it stops other people from looking.
watch the video, a new appeal video [Sandra.]
And this is so wrong.
This is This has such bad consequences that even today, I feel a little embarrassed, not to say very embarrassed, of having been part of this.
[in Portuguese.]
It won't just be an 80% match, but a full match.
Did you give to your kids something like Calpol to help them sleep? How can you explain the scent of cadaver by British dogs? Sandra, maybe you should be asking the judiciary because they've examined all this.
But don't you have an explanation for that? Ask the dogs, Sandra.
[chuckles.]
Ask the dogs? No, Gerry The media attention and the fury raised around the dog alerts has stuck in the public imagination.
As far as many people are concerned, they prove the McCanns' guilt in some way.
If anybody ever said or gave clear factual evidence that, "Here's Madeleine's body," or, "Here is clear evidence clear information that she is no longer alive," then they'll accept it.
But until somebody says that Madeleine's not going to come home and proves it, they're gonna believe that she is.
-[Susan.]
Yeah.
-And good for them.
Bless them for that.
For these searching parents, it never goes away.
So even if the result is a terrible one, it's the not knowing that's the worst part.
It's that lingering doubt.
So you have to do what you can to keep hope alive and to keep the search going.
[Jim.]
You do not bring your children away to kill them.
You know, if you're going to do something to your child within your family, you know, you do it somewhere where you're in absolute control.
[camera shutters clicking.]
[Jim.]
And you do not raise the alert and the alarm and continue to press for an investigation, regardless of everyone else saying, "Enough, enough, enough.
" You know, if you are the person that's done something that you want to hide, you know, you're happy when the mists of time begin to overshadow it and people stop talking about it, whereas that's never, ever been the case with Gerry or Kate.
[birds singing.]
[in Portuguese.]
If you have any information on the whereabouts of Madeleine, please get in touch with me and you will be well compensated.
Thank you.
[in English.]
There was a sighting of the family up in the Atlas Mountains, carrying on her back, this mother carrying on her back a child, a blonde child that absolutely looked like Madeleine.
Now, I remember phoning Kate and saying, "Kate, do you want me to go out there?" And she said, "Yes, if you would, please.
" [theme music playing.]