The Disappearance of Madeleine McCann (2019) s01e07 Episode Script
Truth and Lies
1 Madeleine was a very strange case because they usually never go after middle-class or high-class people.
They usually go for lower-class kids, third world countries.
That's the main supplier of all these gangs.
So my idea, it's that the value that Madeleine had was really high because if they took her, it's because they were gonna get a lot of money.
Brian Kennedy or the McCanns contracted Método 3.
Método 3 were passionate, fearless, focused, and they attacked it.
Francisco Marco was the director of the agency.
He was my boss.
This case for Método 3 was the biggest case they have done, ever.
We have the description of the woman and the man involved.
Maddie was alive two days after the kidnapping.
Madeleine was in a car and she was given to another person inside Portugal.
I'm not saying we are maybe, no, no, no.
We are very, very close to find the kidnapper.
My phone started going off.
There was unknown callers and my siblings were trying to reach me, my kids were trying to reach me, and I knew something had happened.
I care about reality, not about fiction.
The lies and the untruths will be acted upon very rapidly.
I started working and getting into different chats and different pages.
And I started getting myself inside that world.
These websites that are on the deep web, they are not indexed so nobody can find them.
Basically, no one can access if you are not a friend that trusts you and that give you access to those websites.
I tried to obtain anything related with Madeleine and that's my final goal and my final question was that, always, "Do you know anything about Madeleine? Have you seen any videos? Do you have heard of any videos?" Finally, I reach a person that had deep contacts inside that world.
He sent me several videos, uh, files.
Little by little, I was asking for more, for more, for more.
What I was doing, the police usually, uh, works the same way.
All the information that I was collecting, I was gonna share with the police.
I went into the darkest places of the human being.
I've seen things that I have to live with that all my life, that's things that you cannot forget or erase.
In the early 2000s, the US government created a tool to enable people to use the internet anonymously.
It was to protect intelligence communications, to protect political dissidents, and journalists.
What apparently nobody contemplated was that these same tools would be used by paedophile organisations, by human traffickers, by drug traffickers, by weapons traffickers, by terrorist organisations.
There's a tsunami of indecent images online.
Current estimates are in the UK alone, that 100,000 IP addresses, computer IP addresses, can be downloading indecent images of children at any given moment in time.
In tragic cases like Madeleine McCann's, you should never rule out a commercial motive.
We have a very, very safe country, but we cannot forget that we are not alone in the world.
We have the information that our country is used by traffickers to pass children to other countries.
They enter the country through Algarve and then they go to Spain, to France, to Germany to be exploited.
They have a very strong structure that allows them to move human beings from one country to another in a matter of hours.
It's very easy.
It's frightening because it is very easy.
Portugal's population knew that there had been cases of child abuse and abductions that were sent to international paedophilia networks.
There was a case called Casa Pia.
The João Pedro case.
It was a problem that worried society a lot.
It's the bogeyman, it's the fear factor.
You've got to remember, there are paedophiles in every country and every country has its story, the Beast of Belgium, you know, and keeping children trapped for many years in cells that you build within your home.
The lead of Belgian paedophile network is also very possible.
There are people who kidnap kids for the account of other people.
This has happened over the years.
On internet, on this topic, there are catalogues with children, with ages, blond, this, that.
They are on sale.
What are the police doing? Why this is even possible? Why, when there is money missing from somebody who has a tax evasion status, everybody's on alert, we find the money, we find the person, we find everything.
But when there are kids, there is no one.
Human trafficking on the planet today is a $150-billion-a-year enterprise.
While only two per cent of so-called dark websites are paedophile sites, they account for more than 80 percent of dark web traffic.
Infiltration is the primary investigative technique, but it is time-consuming, it's expensive, and one of the criteria for participation in these dark web groups is you have to provide images of children that nobody's ever seen before.
I had to comment with them, how good they were.
It's like any kind of relationship, little by little, gaining the trust.
It marks you or it changes your way of thinking about things, of course.
Francisco Marco, a Spanish investigator hired by a supporter of the McCanns, is making even more startling claims.
We are very, very close to finding the kidnapper.
When pressed, Marco claimed he could say no more when working on the case.
It's the kind of news the McCanns have heard before, but they're hopeful.
The day that Francisco Marco, director of Método 3, made his claim, the statement was, "We know who took Madeleine, We know where she is, and we know how he did it.
" Francisco Marco didn't know anything about what was happening with the Madeleine McCann case.
At the end, it was only me working on this, having a direct relation with Brian Kennedy.
It was unbelievable.
We didn't have a single clue.
We didn't know who took her, where she was, nothing.
I was ashamed, of course.
Uh, I was shocked and ashamed.
It was a difficult situation and I knew Brian was really, really, really mad.
Imagine you are the McCanns and you are home and you see that.
The director of your private investigation says something like that.
"Where's Madeleine? Who took her?" "I don't know.
" That was his answer.
That's the only answer he had.
We had dinner and I went outside with Francisco Marco to have a cigarette, and he told me, "The benefit that I'm gonna get from this, it's publicity.
" For him, this was business.
This was, uh, something good for his company.
He didn't care about Madeleine McCann.
Brian Kennedy got mad.
The McCanns also asked for an explanation.
I know Método 3 said some silly things that they shouldn't have said.
I lost the plot a bit towards the end and you can understand why.
After months of looking, going down dead ends, you can understand why people lose the plot.
I think the same happened to Método 3.
My ex-boss called me and he told me that Brian Kennedy wanted to stop working with Método 3 and that it was it was over.
The McCanns were becoming frustrated so they contracted with an American company called Oakley International, who had a reputation as being among the big boys in investigations.
They were promised all sorts of things, that the people working for Oakley were former FBI, CIA, and MI6, that they had the latest investigative tools, techniques, the technology available to them, that they could do all sorts of things that Método 3, their previous investigators, could not do.
There comes a point where you decide to, "Let's up the game a bit.
Let's try and bring in someone someone else, someone who's gonna approach this from a different angle.
" So we took them on for a very expensive contract, part-paid them, and they went about their business.
I found out about the case from a mutual friend and he says, "Expect a call from Kevin.
" Kevin Halligen was the president and head of Oakley.
In fact, he personified Oakley.
Everyone, even his partners, recognised Kevin was Oakley.
It's common that you code name your project, you code name, uh, certain suspects.
One of the code names used was Project Omega.
Kevin had access to a dream team that would impress the daylights out of you.
Top in their field.
They had skills.
They certainly did have experience.
Oakley were more secretive, you know, a lot more kind of secret agent kind of stuff, you know? We've all heard of polygraphs or lie detectors.
How about a truth detector that tells investigators a lot more than you say? Uh, the last vacation you took.
Essentially, the technology is computer-based and it listens to the frequencies of the voice.
And you asked me about my shoes and I said, "They were a great deal," and it showed up as inaccurate.
I did several analyses for him, conducting interviews and recording them, and I analysed suspects.
When you said you wear them a lot, you're using a commonly understood language that people know what you mean, but you know what the true meaning of the language is and to your mind, that was an inaccurate statement.
And we can see down to five levels of your subconscious.
I can see if they're thinking from their memory or their imagination.
As well as whether your statement is deceptive.
Rich Parton, thanks very much, and we would just like to say Headline News, of course, does not endorse any of the technology we showcase, we just bring you some of the latest things that are out there.
I just remember feeling a little bit sceptical about them and, you know, they were checked out.
Ultimately, it wasn't my decision on who we brought in.
Things seemed to be going pretty well.
Oakley had set up a hotline to accept tips.
They had people on the ground in Praia da Luz, good people who were working hard and trying to develop contacts.
Oakley sat down with an Irishman named Martin Smith and his family, who had been witnesses in Praia da Luz on the night of Madeleine's disappearance who, at around 10 p.
m.
that evening, had seen a man carrying a little girl wearing pyjamas in the street not far from the Ocean Club.
This is an interview that was conducted with the Smiths in August.
The reason that their time is important is that it hasn't changed.
Maybe it's because they had a few of them that noticed this event all together.
What they did was that they sent their police sketch artist to work with the family and develop two sketches, um, e-fits or identikit sketches of the man they saw, and these are now in circulation still as the sighting of a man of potential interest.
Oakley also had Jane Tanner's description and the Cooperman sketch.
Oakley began a manhunt in the area and came up with some other suspects who had similar appearance to the drawings that came from each person's description.
They interviewed them, some they released, but one man they tracked back to a van.
I do remember Kevin was mentioning that, uh, they were tracking a van One of the suspects that was seen in PDL that night, they had tracked him to where he's living in a van and they had, um, all kinds of surveillance on this individual.
Looking exhausted but resolute, Kate and Gerry McCann returned with their three-year-old twins to the Liverpool church where they married to mark the one-year anniversary of the day a light went out for their family.
The mother of Madeleine McCann has sent a message of thanks to the people of Praia da Luz in Portugal on the anniversary of her daughter's disappearance.
Where there is good in the world, let this good unite.
Where there is strength, let us be giants in the face of darkness.
Where there is hope, let our hearts long for Madeleine's return.
Cleared as suspects, the investigation shelved, the parents of Madeleine McCann say they're relieved to be cleared of any involvement in their daughter's disappearance.
The decision has been reached that Kate and Gerry McCann and Robert Murat's arguido status will be lifted We welcome the news today, although it is no cause for celebration.
It's hard to describe how utterly despairing it was to be named arguido and subsequently portrayed in the media as suspects in our own daughter's abduction.
When the prosecutor decided not to charge them, both PolÃcia Judiciária and the prosecutors said that there was nothing against the father and mother.
We look forward to scrutinising the police files to see what has actually been done and, more importantly, what can still be done as we leave no stone unturned in the search for our little girl.
For me, it was of course a victory and a joy.
My mission is accomplished here.
Madeleine McCann's parents are expected to be given access to the official police files on their daughter's disappearance by the end of this week.
Kate and Gerry McCann and a third Briton, Robert Murat, are no longer formal suspects in the investigation and Portuguese officials say they are now shelving the case.
The prosecutors in the case said that the McCanns had suffered enough.
The disappearance of the child was not a mystery novel.
It wasn't a Sherlock Holmes.
At that point, they said they were going to stop further investigation until such a time that more productive lines of inquiry might be developed.
With that, they shelved the case, and the arguido status that had hung over Gerry and Kate McCann and Robert Murat was lifted.
Just over there is where I, in 2007, was brought for the first time to the PJ in that building over there.
I spent 19 hours.
It was a long, painful day.
I was in a world of my own, I suppose.
It was just absolutely Um, I didn't know what was going on.
I had absolutely no idea what was going on in my life at that time.
After being dropped off, I had to climb over the wall here and then get back into the house because the front of the property was covered in journalists.
It was horrible being completely constrained inside this house.
We had people trying to climb over the fences and walls and helicopters over the top.
When the case was closed and the arguido status was lifted, I felt that it would make a big difference, um, and it didn't.
Having the words of something being lifted is one thing.
Actually having something firm and final is something else.
And that wasn't firm and final.
That was just closing a case because they hadn't They couldn't find anything else, not closing the case because they had discovered the truth.
Mr Amaral is publishing a book to make money and all of this publicity surrounding it Two weeks, three editions sold out.
A fourth now available.
Many interested reading in Portugal and the United Kingdom alike The book I wrote was a defence of a number of attacks.
I was called so many things Incompetent, drunkard, fat, and so on.
And during that time, I appealed to the National Director of Policia Judiciária to defend my team and me.
And this didn't happen so that's when I made the decision to publish the book.
Whether it's truth or lies, this is now a matter of public knowledge.
Usually when they ask me about the books of Gonçalo Amaral, my answer is always the same.
"I care about reality, not about fiction.
" To write a book for your own personal gain, you know, for your own personal fame and celebrity, which maligns and directly accuses individuals of being guilty of a crime, is simply not on.
A single theory about it being the parents is unprofessional and in my opinion, and it's only my opinion, unforgivable.
The evidence that the child very likely died in that apartment, as a result of an accident, a domestic accident, and that the body doesn't turn up, the cadaver is concealed.
What do you believe to be the truth? I think the little girl was killed.
A round of applause for Mr Amaral.
- What for? - Because he figured it all out.
Almost one year and two months and we still can't reach any conclusion.
My name is Gonçalo Amaral.
I've been an investigator with the PolÃcia Judiciária for 27 years.
I coordinated the investigation into the disappearance of Madeleine McCann on the 3rd of May 2007.
I watched Gonçalo Amaral's Truth of the Lie the night it was aired in Portugal with some Portuguese friends.
There was a big anticipation that Truth of the Lie was coming out on television.
Lots of people were watching it.
According to the testimony of the Ocean Club's manager when the GNR patrol arrived on location, the child's father threw himself at the officer's feet, like a praying Arab, completely out of control over his daughter's disappearance.
The same scene was repeated, according to the officers, in the couple's bedroom.
Oh, God! No, I don't have that scene in the book of having knelt and prayed.
It's an exaggeration.
Apart from that, it's pretty well produced and overall factual.
What I know tells me that Madeleine McCann died in apartment 5A on the 3rd of May 2007.
The investigation was brutally interrupted and a political and hurried archiving took place.
If you connect them with the fact that,"Oh, uh, our police has suffered pressure from the British police just to help the McCanns," et cetera, you are creating Let me tell you a story.
One day, I was in my office and I receive a call, a telephone call from a journalist, and he asked me to confirm.
"Is it true that there was a meeting between you and the British Ambassador to avoid that Gonçalo Amaral could run for mayor in a small village in Algarve?" Gerry McCann came here to meet with the leader of the Social Democrats, putting pressure on them to deny allowing me to become a candidate.
And in the end, I was not a candidate because the party denied me.
"Yes, it's true.
And in that same meeting were also the Batman uh, and the Superman and the Flintstones.
They are all there.
" The mystery persists.
The former inspector believes that someday, the truth will be known.
When the film finished, I felt totally deflated.
I was like, "Half the country's watched tonight.
" I thought, "That's it.
We've lost the general population's support.
" Yeah.
A brand new billboard poster of Madeleine with "help me" in Portuguese has been splattered with paint.
The stop sign just down from our home, and underneath, they spray painted "the McCanns," like "stop the McCanns.
" I live here so I just wish it'd go away, to be honest, 'cause it's it's no good for us.
If they don't can't find, why they have to to keep searching? People have sympathy for only so long and then it stops.
People just get tired.
They get tired of grief and they get tired of not knowing.
You have a professional like Amaral who actually feeds, feeds what's going on.
What you basically do is you close down the search for Madeleine.
You close down the eyes and ears of the public or the minds of the public because you say, "Look, I was in a position to know.
This is who did it," so we all stop looking and then we simply begin to focus on this miscarriage of justice because the right people aren't being held to account.
Mr Amaral needs to be well aware that the libel lawyers who are representing Kate and Gerry are examining every word that he is saying in his book and they will not hesitate from taking action, legal action against Mr Amaral.
Any lies, any untruths, any defamation will be acted upon It was so important for Kate and Gerry to have the judicial system in Portugal say, "There's no proof to this.
" The trial opposing the McCann couple and Gonçalo Amaral began this morning.
Maddie's parents call for the destruction of all copies of the book The Truth of the Lie, authored by the former inspector who investigated the case.
They also demand that Gonçalo Amaral be prevented from carrying on with his accusations.
Mr Amaral's central thesis has no evidence whatsoever to support it.
To claim, as he did, that Madeleine is dead and that we, her parents, were somehow involved in her disappearance has caused our family incredible distress and continues to do so.
They could take the character damning that it was, they could stand up to that, but if people in Portugal actually believe Gonçalo Amaral's book, then they wouldn't be looking for Madeleine.
Well, we're just here to continue the search for Madeleine and to protect our own family and their human rights and I think it's fairly clear, you know.
No one should be allowed to say that our daughter cannot be found without very good evidence to the contrary, and that's what the court case is about.
So they had to get the book off the shelf.
They had to fight.
The McCanns are the ones who should have had a different attitude.
There is no evidence that Madeleine is dead.
That is what you heard yesterday.
You heard that, didn't you? This is just raking up old ground, isn't it, Gerry? No.
Today, we are here - But the police - No, hang on.
They're not raking it up.
This is a legal - are you satisfied - All those Allow me to just finish.
All those people who laboured away from their homes and families They never heard a word of thanks.
This is a legal process which we are going through to protect our daughter and our family.
There's nothing new being said by the police, is it? Of course there's not.
What do you expect from this hearing? For justice to be done.
Now it's up to the court to decide.
The police investigation had been closed down.
So Brian Kennedy was principally funding the McCanns' investigation at that point.
Over time, things started to filter back to the McCanns that seemed odd.
The trust got tired of the continuous invoices they were sending and they just were not making the progress they'd promised to make.
Kevin did what he usually does.
He throws out juicy tidbits and things that would inspire hope.
Kevin told Brian Kennedy that because of his work with US intelligence that he had access to satellite photos of Portugal on the night Madeleine went missing, and that he could access those spy photos and be able to see if there's any suspects in the area, maybe see what happened.
When they were finally produced, they were only Google Earth images of the town, um, so it was all a bit of a terrible letdown.
We had nothing and we're still looking for the child, so you can understand why we'd say if somebody comes in and says, "Look, we can do this and we can do that and we can reveal these GPSÂ satellite pictures of the particular evening 'cause we have a link with the FBI that will give us all of this information," you listen because where else is there to go? Brian Kennedy started getting complaints that people weren't being paid, and he was deeply concerned by the things he was hearing back.
Kevin told me and other people that he sent a team in, a man-and-woman team, with a child similar to the age of Madeleine and put the kid up as bait.
He said at one time, he had a drunken priest, uh, undercover.
When I think of credible intelligence-gathering tools, my mind immediately jumps to, "Where's my drunken priest?" What he said just didn't make sense.
Yeah, the van guy didn't do it.
He's been cleared.
And, uh, neither did anyone else that looked like that that they found in the area.
There's very little evidence that he did what he said he did.
Kevin's only effort was to create a report that indicated they did something.
Halligen had started to become threatening, threatening to do this about the family and say this about the family and expose stuff, just an absolute nonsense.
Then it emerged that the tips coming into the hotline weren't actually being answered or acted upon.
I had the opportunity to sit with Kevin several times and we talked about his relationships.
We talked about his alleged background.
None of these elements were consistent.
I have a vast number of people who are vouching for this man, but nothing is matching up.
And at that moment, everything, everything came into focus.
He was a fraud.
People think we're talking about an investigation of a missing child.
We're not.
You're talking about a conman.
You're not talking about an investigation.
In fact, he hopped on a flight to Rome.
My reaction to him skipping out without paying? Not happy.
No, he wasn't gonna run.
I used every known associate he had, every resource available to track him.
I hired special staff in, uh, the UK just to dig into his past life.
Halligen was revealed to be a grotesque fraud.
He was really an Irishman who had been largely masquerading, um, as an investigator.
He had set up a bogus marriage for himself, even though he was already married.
He had made friends with the Washington elite and was living the high life off the back of what seemed to be the money for the search for Madeleine.
His intelligence credentials were fraudulent, his birth date is fraudulent.
In some respect, it was easy to find him when he changed hotels because Kevin loved accumulating, uh, hotel reward points so the search became easier and easier.
He sent me what he considered to be a threat.
He sent me the lyrics of "Gangsta Paradise," and it was funny because this is who he sees himself as being.
Oakley had ended in tears.
Clearly Clearly an unscrupulous character he had proven to be over the months.
Kevin Halligen was convicted of fraud in another case and spent time in prison in the United States.
He eventually died of a brain haemorrhage in 2018.
The ultimate victims have to be Madeleine and her family.
This is almost a year's worth of hope.
I just can't begin to understand the pain that the McCanns must be feeling.
And it's surprising how unlucky they were on choosing the people for their investigations.
There were, in this case, just an extraordinary number of such what to us seemed Bizarre instances of people trying to involve themselves in this case.
For 18 months, no police agency anywhere had been actively searching for Madeleine.
To the McCanns, that was horrendous and it was totally unacceptable.
There was the surprise announcement in London this morning of a possible break in the long-running search for little Madeleine McCann.
The witness became aware of a well-dressed woman who he describes as appearing agitated.
Two years after Madeleine disappeared, private detectives working for the McCanns brought forward an incident that had only just recently emerged.
A British citizen, an executive, had come forward to remember that at two o'clock in the morning, shortly after Madeleine disappeared, he had been in Barcelona and he had been approached by a woman who said to him, "Have you come to deliver my new daughter? Have you come to deliver my new daughter? Have you got the child?" She asked him three times, then realised that he wasn't the man that she thought he was, and walked away.
The witness has described the woman as, in the witness's own words, "a bit of a Victoria Beckham lookalike.
" She spoke English with what the witness has described as possibly an Australian accent.
This conversation was potentially significant to the investigation into Madeleine's disappearance.
A British man has provided an e-fit of a woman Two former detectives, David Edgar and Arthur Cowley, were the last private investigators hired to work on the case.
They handed over their work to the Met, highlighting what seemed to them significant leads.
But perhaps the most telling sighting of all is that of a woman called Carole Tranmer, who had been out to see her aunt who was living in the apartment immediately above the McCanns.
Carole was looking out of the window.
I'd like to quote it directly.
She said, "Looking down below the McCann flat, I saw someone come out of the ground floor apartment, closing the gate very carefully and quietly.
It looked very strange to me.
He looked to one side and the other, shut the gate, and walked very quickly below us.
" This is on the afternoon of the day Madeleine is going to disappear.
What had struck her as peculiar, she said, "was the way the man had closed the little gate down there.
It was his furtiveness that got my attention.
The man had moved stealthily, as if he didn't want anyone to know he was coming and going.
" That has to be significant in any investigation of this case.
They usually go for lower-class kids, third world countries.
That's the main supplier of all these gangs.
So my idea, it's that the value that Madeleine had was really high because if they took her, it's because they were gonna get a lot of money.
Brian Kennedy or the McCanns contracted Método 3.
Método 3 were passionate, fearless, focused, and they attacked it.
Francisco Marco was the director of the agency.
He was my boss.
This case for Método 3 was the biggest case they have done, ever.
We have the description of the woman and the man involved.
Maddie was alive two days after the kidnapping.
Madeleine was in a car and she was given to another person inside Portugal.
I'm not saying we are maybe, no, no, no.
We are very, very close to find the kidnapper.
My phone started going off.
There was unknown callers and my siblings were trying to reach me, my kids were trying to reach me, and I knew something had happened.
I care about reality, not about fiction.
The lies and the untruths will be acted upon very rapidly.
I started working and getting into different chats and different pages.
And I started getting myself inside that world.
These websites that are on the deep web, they are not indexed so nobody can find them.
Basically, no one can access if you are not a friend that trusts you and that give you access to those websites.
I tried to obtain anything related with Madeleine and that's my final goal and my final question was that, always, "Do you know anything about Madeleine? Have you seen any videos? Do you have heard of any videos?" Finally, I reach a person that had deep contacts inside that world.
He sent me several videos, uh, files.
Little by little, I was asking for more, for more, for more.
What I was doing, the police usually, uh, works the same way.
All the information that I was collecting, I was gonna share with the police.
I went into the darkest places of the human being.
I've seen things that I have to live with that all my life, that's things that you cannot forget or erase.
In the early 2000s, the US government created a tool to enable people to use the internet anonymously.
It was to protect intelligence communications, to protect political dissidents, and journalists.
What apparently nobody contemplated was that these same tools would be used by paedophile organisations, by human traffickers, by drug traffickers, by weapons traffickers, by terrorist organisations.
There's a tsunami of indecent images online.
Current estimates are in the UK alone, that 100,000 IP addresses, computer IP addresses, can be downloading indecent images of children at any given moment in time.
In tragic cases like Madeleine McCann's, you should never rule out a commercial motive.
We have a very, very safe country, but we cannot forget that we are not alone in the world.
We have the information that our country is used by traffickers to pass children to other countries.
They enter the country through Algarve and then they go to Spain, to France, to Germany to be exploited.
They have a very strong structure that allows them to move human beings from one country to another in a matter of hours.
It's very easy.
It's frightening because it is very easy.
Portugal's population knew that there had been cases of child abuse and abductions that were sent to international paedophilia networks.
There was a case called Casa Pia.
The João Pedro case.
It was a problem that worried society a lot.
It's the bogeyman, it's the fear factor.
You've got to remember, there are paedophiles in every country and every country has its story, the Beast of Belgium, you know, and keeping children trapped for many years in cells that you build within your home.
The lead of Belgian paedophile network is also very possible.
There are people who kidnap kids for the account of other people.
This has happened over the years.
On internet, on this topic, there are catalogues with children, with ages, blond, this, that.
They are on sale.
What are the police doing? Why this is even possible? Why, when there is money missing from somebody who has a tax evasion status, everybody's on alert, we find the money, we find the person, we find everything.
But when there are kids, there is no one.
Human trafficking on the planet today is a $150-billion-a-year enterprise.
While only two per cent of so-called dark websites are paedophile sites, they account for more than 80 percent of dark web traffic.
Infiltration is the primary investigative technique, but it is time-consuming, it's expensive, and one of the criteria for participation in these dark web groups is you have to provide images of children that nobody's ever seen before.
I had to comment with them, how good they were.
It's like any kind of relationship, little by little, gaining the trust.
It marks you or it changes your way of thinking about things, of course.
Francisco Marco, a Spanish investigator hired by a supporter of the McCanns, is making even more startling claims.
We are very, very close to finding the kidnapper.
When pressed, Marco claimed he could say no more when working on the case.
It's the kind of news the McCanns have heard before, but they're hopeful.
The day that Francisco Marco, director of Método 3, made his claim, the statement was, "We know who took Madeleine, We know where she is, and we know how he did it.
" Francisco Marco didn't know anything about what was happening with the Madeleine McCann case.
At the end, it was only me working on this, having a direct relation with Brian Kennedy.
It was unbelievable.
We didn't have a single clue.
We didn't know who took her, where she was, nothing.
I was ashamed, of course.
Uh, I was shocked and ashamed.
It was a difficult situation and I knew Brian was really, really, really mad.
Imagine you are the McCanns and you are home and you see that.
The director of your private investigation says something like that.
"Where's Madeleine? Who took her?" "I don't know.
" That was his answer.
That's the only answer he had.
We had dinner and I went outside with Francisco Marco to have a cigarette, and he told me, "The benefit that I'm gonna get from this, it's publicity.
" For him, this was business.
This was, uh, something good for his company.
He didn't care about Madeleine McCann.
Brian Kennedy got mad.
The McCanns also asked for an explanation.
I know Método 3 said some silly things that they shouldn't have said.
I lost the plot a bit towards the end and you can understand why.
After months of looking, going down dead ends, you can understand why people lose the plot.
I think the same happened to Método 3.
My ex-boss called me and he told me that Brian Kennedy wanted to stop working with Método 3 and that it was it was over.
The McCanns were becoming frustrated so they contracted with an American company called Oakley International, who had a reputation as being among the big boys in investigations.
They were promised all sorts of things, that the people working for Oakley were former FBI, CIA, and MI6, that they had the latest investigative tools, techniques, the technology available to them, that they could do all sorts of things that Método 3, their previous investigators, could not do.
There comes a point where you decide to, "Let's up the game a bit.
Let's try and bring in someone someone else, someone who's gonna approach this from a different angle.
" So we took them on for a very expensive contract, part-paid them, and they went about their business.
I found out about the case from a mutual friend and he says, "Expect a call from Kevin.
" Kevin Halligen was the president and head of Oakley.
In fact, he personified Oakley.
Everyone, even his partners, recognised Kevin was Oakley.
It's common that you code name your project, you code name, uh, certain suspects.
One of the code names used was Project Omega.
Kevin had access to a dream team that would impress the daylights out of you.
Top in their field.
They had skills.
They certainly did have experience.
Oakley were more secretive, you know, a lot more kind of secret agent kind of stuff, you know? We've all heard of polygraphs or lie detectors.
How about a truth detector that tells investigators a lot more than you say? Uh, the last vacation you took.
Essentially, the technology is computer-based and it listens to the frequencies of the voice.
And you asked me about my shoes and I said, "They were a great deal," and it showed up as inaccurate.
I did several analyses for him, conducting interviews and recording them, and I analysed suspects.
When you said you wear them a lot, you're using a commonly understood language that people know what you mean, but you know what the true meaning of the language is and to your mind, that was an inaccurate statement.
And we can see down to five levels of your subconscious.
I can see if they're thinking from their memory or their imagination.
As well as whether your statement is deceptive.
Rich Parton, thanks very much, and we would just like to say Headline News, of course, does not endorse any of the technology we showcase, we just bring you some of the latest things that are out there.
I just remember feeling a little bit sceptical about them and, you know, they were checked out.
Ultimately, it wasn't my decision on who we brought in.
Things seemed to be going pretty well.
Oakley had set up a hotline to accept tips.
They had people on the ground in Praia da Luz, good people who were working hard and trying to develop contacts.
Oakley sat down with an Irishman named Martin Smith and his family, who had been witnesses in Praia da Luz on the night of Madeleine's disappearance who, at around 10 p.
m.
that evening, had seen a man carrying a little girl wearing pyjamas in the street not far from the Ocean Club.
This is an interview that was conducted with the Smiths in August.
The reason that their time is important is that it hasn't changed.
Maybe it's because they had a few of them that noticed this event all together.
What they did was that they sent their police sketch artist to work with the family and develop two sketches, um, e-fits or identikit sketches of the man they saw, and these are now in circulation still as the sighting of a man of potential interest.
Oakley also had Jane Tanner's description and the Cooperman sketch.
Oakley began a manhunt in the area and came up with some other suspects who had similar appearance to the drawings that came from each person's description.
They interviewed them, some they released, but one man they tracked back to a van.
I do remember Kevin was mentioning that, uh, they were tracking a van One of the suspects that was seen in PDL that night, they had tracked him to where he's living in a van and they had, um, all kinds of surveillance on this individual.
Looking exhausted but resolute, Kate and Gerry McCann returned with their three-year-old twins to the Liverpool church where they married to mark the one-year anniversary of the day a light went out for their family.
The mother of Madeleine McCann has sent a message of thanks to the people of Praia da Luz in Portugal on the anniversary of her daughter's disappearance.
Where there is good in the world, let this good unite.
Where there is strength, let us be giants in the face of darkness.
Where there is hope, let our hearts long for Madeleine's return.
Cleared as suspects, the investigation shelved, the parents of Madeleine McCann say they're relieved to be cleared of any involvement in their daughter's disappearance.
The decision has been reached that Kate and Gerry McCann and Robert Murat's arguido status will be lifted We welcome the news today, although it is no cause for celebration.
It's hard to describe how utterly despairing it was to be named arguido and subsequently portrayed in the media as suspects in our own daughter's abduction.
When the prosecutor decided not to charge them, both PolÃcia Judiciária and the prosecutors said that there was nothing against the father and mother.
We look forward to scrutinising the police files to see what has actually been done and, more importantly, what can still be done as we leave no stone unturned in the search for our little girl.
For me, it was of course a victory and a joy.
My mission is accomplished here.
Madeleine McCann's parents are expected to be given access to the official police files on their daughter's disappearance by the end of this week.
Kate and Gerry McCann and a third Briton, Robert Murat, are no longer formal suspects in the investigation and Portuguese officials say they are now shelving the case.
The prosecutors in the case said that the McCanns had suffered enough.
The disappearance of the child was not a mystery novel.
It wasn't a Sherlock Holmes.
At that point, they said they were going to stop further investigation until such a time that more productive lines of inquiry might be developed.
With that, they shelved the case, and the arguido status that had hung over Gerry and Kate McCann and Robert Murat was lifted.
Just over there is where I, in 2007, was brought for the first time to the PJ in that building over there.
I spent 19 hours.
It was a long, painful day.
I was in a world of my own, I suppose.
It was just absolutely Um, I didn't know what was going on.
I had absolutely no idea what was going on in my life at that time.
After being dropped off, I had to climb over the wall here and then get back into the house because the front of the property was covered in journalists.
It was horrible being completely constrained inside this house.
We had people trying to climb over the fences and walls and helicopters over the top.
When the case was closed and the arguido status was lifted, I felt that it would make a big difference, um, and it didn't.
Having the words of something being lifted is one thing.
Actually having something firm and final is something else.
And that wasn't firm and final.
That was just closing a case because they hadn't They couldn't find anything else, not closing the case because they had discovered the truth.
Mr Amaral is publishing a book to make money and all of this publicity surrounding it Two weeks, three editions sold out.
A fourth now available.
Many interested reading in Portugal and the United Kingdom alike The book I wrote was a defence of a number of attacks.
I was called so many things Incompetent, drunkard, fat, and so on.
And during that time, I appealed to the National Director of Policia Judiciária to defend my team and me.
And this didn't happen so that's when I made the decision to publish the book.
Whether it's truth or lies, this is now a matter of public knowledge.
Usually when they ask me about the books of Gonçalo Amaral, my answer is always the same.
"I care about reality, not about fiction.
" To write a book for your own personal gain, you know, for your own personal fame and celebrity, which maligns and directly accuses individuals of being guilty of a crime, is simply not on.
A single theory about it being the parents is unprofessional and in my opinion, and it's only my opinion, unforgivable.
The evidence that the child very likely died in that apartment, as a result of an accident, a domestic accident, and that the body doesn't turn up, the cadaver is concealed.
What do you believe to be the truth? I think the little girl was killed.
A round of applause for Mr Amaral.
- What for? - Because he figured it all out.
Almost one year and two months and we still can't reach any conclusion.
My name is Gonçalo Amaral.
I've been an investigator with the PolÃcia Judiciária for 27 years.
I coordinated the investigation into the disappearance of Madeleine McCann on the 3rd of May 2007.
I watched Gonçalo Amaral's Truth of the Lie the night it was aired in Portugal with some Portuguese friends.
There was a big anticipation that Truth of the Lie was coming out on television.
Lots of people were watching it.
According to the testimony of the Ocean Club's manager when the GNR patrol arrived on location, the child's father threw himself at the officer's feet, like a praying Arab, completely out of control over his daughter's disappearance.
The same scene was repeated, according to the officers, in the couple's bedroom.
Oh, God! No, I don't have that scene in the book of having knelt and prayed.
It's an exaggeration.
Apart from that, it's pretty well produced and overall factual.
What I know tells me that Madeleine McCann died in apartment 5A on the 3rd of May 2007.
The investigation was brutally interrupted and a political and hurried archiving took place.
If you connect them with the fact that,"Oh, uh, our police has suffered pressure from the British police just to help the McCanns," et cetera, you are creating Let me tell you a story.
One day, I was in my office and I receive a call, a telephone call from a journalist, and he asked me to confirm.
"Is it true that there was a meeting between you and the British Ambassador to avoid that Gonçalo Amaral could run for mayor in a small village in Algarve?" Gerry McCann came here to meet with the leader of the Social Democrats, putting pressure on them to deny allowing me to become a candidate.
And in the end, I was not a candidate because the party denied me.
"Yes, it's true.
And in that same meeting were also the Batman uh, and the Superman and the Flintstones.
They are all there.
" The mystery persists.
The former inspector believes that someday, the truth will be known.
When the film finished, I felt totally deflated.
I was like, "Half the country's watched tonight.
" I thought, "That's it.
We've lost the general population's support.
" Yeah.
A brand new billboard poster of Madeleine with "help me" in Portuguese has been splattered with paint.
The stop sign just down from our home, and underneath, they spray painted "the McCanns," like "stop the McCanns.
" I live here so I just wish it'd go away, to be honest, 'cause it's it's no good for us.
If they don't can't find, why they have to to keep searching? People have sympathy for only so long and then it stops.
People just get tired.
They get tired of grief and they get tired of not knowing.
You have a professional like Amaral who actually feeds, feeds what's going on.
What you basically do is you close down the search for Madeleine.
You close down the eyes and ears of the public or the minds of the public because you say, "Look, I was in a position to know.
This is who did it," so we all stop looking and then we simply begin to focus on this miscarriage of justice because the right people aren't being held to account.
Mr Amaral needs to be well aware that the libel lawyers who are representing Kate and Gerry are examining every word that he is saying in his book and they will not hesitate from taking action, legal action against Mr Amaral.
Any lies, any untruths, any defamation will be acted upon It was so important for Kate and Gerry to have the judicial system in Portugal say, "There's no proof to this.
" The trial opposing the McCann couple and Gonçalo Amaral began this morning.
Maddie's parents call for the destruction of all copies of the book The Truth of the Lie, authored by the former inspector who investigated the case.
They also demand that Gonçalo Amaral be prevented from carrying on with his accusations.
Mr Amaral's central thesis has no evidence whatsoever to support it.
To claim, as he did, that Madeleine is dead and that we, her parents, were somehow involved in her disappearance has caused our family incredible distress and continues to do so.
They could take the character damning that it was, they could stand up to that, but if people in Portugal actually believe Gonçalo Amaral's book, then they wouldn't be looking for Madeleine.
Well, we're just here to continue the search for Madeleine and to protect our own family and their human rights and I think it's fairly clear, you know.
No one should be allowed to say that our daughter cannot be found without very good evidence to the contrary, and that's what the court case is about.
So they had to get the book off the shelf.
They had to fight.
The McCanns are the ones who should have had a different attitude.
There is no evidence that Madeleine is dead.
That is what you heard yesterday.
You heard that, didn't you? This is just raking up old ground, isn't it, Gerry? No.
Today, we are here - But the police - No, hang on.
They're not raking it up.
This is a legal - are you satisfied - All those Allow me to just finish.
All those people who laboured away from their homes and families They never heard a word of thanks.
This is a legal process which we are going through to protect our daughter and our family.
There's nothing new being said by the police, is it? Of course there's not.
What do you expect from this hearing? For justice to be done.
Now it's up to the court to decide.
The police investigation had been closed down.
So Brian Kennedy was principally funding the McCanns' investigation at that point.
Over time, things started to filter back to the McCanns that seemed odd.
The trust got tired of the continuous invoices they were sending and they just were not making the progress they'd promised to make.
Kevin did what he usually does.
He throws out juicy tidbits and things that would inspire hope.
Kevin told Brian Kennedy that because of his work with US intelligence that he had access to satellite photos of Portugal on the night Madeleine went missing, and that he could access those spy photos and be able to see if there's any suspects in the area, maybe see what happened.
When they were finally produced, they were only Google Earth images of the town, um, so it was all a bit of a terrible letdown.
We had nothing and we're still looking for the child, so you can understand why we'd say if somebody comes in and says, "Look, we can do this and we can do that and we can reveal these GPSÂ satellite pictures of the particular evening 'cause we have a link with the FBI that will give us all of this information," you listen because where else is there to go? Brian Kennedy started getting complaints that people weren't being paid, and he was deeply concerned by the things he was hearing back.
Kevin told me and other people that he sent a team in, a man-and-woman team, with a child similar to the age of Madeleine and put the kid up as bait.
He said at one time, he had a drunken priest, uh, undercover.
When I think of credible intelligence-gathering tools, my mind immediately jumps to, "Where's my drunken priest?" What he said just didn't make sense.
Yeah, the van guy didn't do it.
He's been cleared.
And, uh, neither did anyone else that looked like that that they found in the area.
There's very little evidence that he did what he said he did.
Kevin's only effort was to create a report that indicated they did something.
Halligen had started to become threatening, threatening to do this about the family and say this about the family and expose stuff, just an absolute nonsense.
Then it emerged that the tips coming into the hotline weren't actually being answered or acted upon.
I had the opportunity to sit with Kevin several times and we talked about his relationships.
We talked about his alleged background.
None of these elements were consistent.
I have a vast number of people who are vouching for this man, but nothing is matching up.
And at that moment, everything, everything came into focus.
He was a fraud.
People think we're talking about an investigation of a missing child.
We're not.
You're talking about a conman.
You're not talking about an investigation.
In fact, he hopped on a flight to Rome.
My reaction to him skipping out without paying? Not happy.
No, he wasn't gonna run.
I used every known associate he had, every resource available to track him.
I hired special staff in, uh, the UK just to dig into his past life.
Halligen was revealed to be a grotesque fraud.
He was really an Irishman who had been largely masquerading, um, as an investigator.
He had set up a bogus marriage for himself, even though he was already married.
He had made friends with the Washington elite and was living the high life off the back of what seemed to be the money for the search for Madeleine.
His intelligence credentials were fraudulent, his birth date is fraudulent.
In some respect, it was easy to find him when he changed hotels because Kevin loved accumulating, uh, hotel reward points so the search became easier and easier.
He sent me what he considered to be a threat.
He sent me the lyrics of "Gangsta Paradise," and it was funny because this is who he sees himself as being.
Oakley had ended in tears.
Clearly Clearly an unscrupulous character he had proven to be over the months.
Kevin Halligen was convicted of fraud in another case and spent time in prison in the United States.
He eventually died of a brain haemorrhage in 2018.
The ultimate victims have to be Madeleine and her family.
This is almost a year's worth of hope.
I just can't begin to understand the pain that the McCanns must be feeling.
And it's surprising how unlucky they were on choosing the people for their investigations.
There were, in this case, just an extraordinary number of such what to us seemed Bizarre instances of people trying to involve themselves in this case.
For 18 months, no police agency anywhere had been actively searching for Madeleine.
To the McCanns, that was horrendous and it was totally unacceptable.
There was the surprise announcement in London this morning of a possible break in the long-running search for little Madeleine McCann.
The witness became aware of a well-dressed woman who he describes as appearing agitated.
Two years after Madeleine disappeared, private detectives working for the McCanns brought forward an incident that had only just recently emerged.
A British citizen, an executive, had come forward to remember that at two o'clock in the morning, shortly after Madeleine disappeared, he had been in Barcelona and he had been approached by a woman who said to him, "Have you come to deliver my new daughter? Have you come to deliver my new daughter? Have you got the child?" She asked him three times, then realised that he wasn't the man that she thought he was, and walked away.
The witness has described the woman as, in the witness's own words, "a bit of a Victoria Beckham lookalike.
" She spoke English with what the witness has described as possibly an Australian accent.
This conversation was potentially significant to the investigation into Madeleine's disappearance.
A British man has provided an e-fit of a woman Two former detectives, David Edgar and Arthur Cowley, were the last private investigators hired to work on the case.
They handed over their work to the Met, highlighting what seemed to them significant leads.
But perhaps the most telling sighting of all is that of a woman called Carole Tranmer, who had been out to see her aunt who was living in the apartment immediately above the McCanns.
Carole was looking out of the window.
I'd like to quote it directly.
She said, "Looking down below the McCann flat, I saw someone come out of the ground floor apartment, closing the gate very carefully and quietly.
It looked very strange to me.
He looked to one side and the other, shut the gate, and walked very quickly below us.
" This is on the afternoon of the day Madeleine is going to disappear.
What had struck her as peculiar, she said, "was the way the man had closed the little gate down there.
It was his furtiveness that got my attention.
The man had moved stealthily, as if he didn't want anyone to know he was coming and going.
" That has to be significant in any investigation of this case.