Religious Fervour is Maddie-ness.
Just an opinion of what Madeleine looks like now, to go with all the opinions of where she is.
Buried in the archives of the Baltimore Sun is a newspaper clipping of a story that its author, H.L. Mencken, dubbed “The greatest story since the Resurrection”. A two year old child had apparently vanished into the night. A nation turned into armchair detectives, some appointed themselves judge and jury, along the way dispensing with the need for ‘evidence’ to match judicial standards – their belief in the truth of the ‘pick and mix’ snippets daily leaked by the media was sufficient to condemn the parents. The parents were on trial long before the perpetrator.
The parents were wealthy middle class professionals, the embodiment of the American dream. They employed a Nanny. The Nanny made two hour checks on the sleeping child. ‘Why so infrequent’? cried the onlookers, ‘I check on my child every ten minutes’. “I look after my child myself’. Everybody had a point of view, an opinion. Some of those opinions were termed beliefs. Mencken was right to make the religious allusion to the Resurrection, for as with all religious beliefs, there were few provable facts in the story, but many disparate theories that one could draw together to make a ‘truth’ that you held hard to.
The Police were initially inept, unprepared for the firestorm of attention that would rage for the next 80 years on the activities of those local men in police uniforms who were charged with making the initial investigation. The forensic examination for fingerprints was marred by the sheer mass of people who arrived, police, media, friends and well wishers, all tramping through the scene. The parents made many unwise decisions, forging relationships with anybody and everybody they thought could help. All these relationships were later dissected and scorned by those who had not been in the parent’s position themselves, but were absolutely, resolutely, sure that they knew what would have been the ‘right’ thing to do, what they would have done, what should have happened if the world had turned to their command.
The Lindberg‘s, for it was their child, were ‘lucky’ in one sense, in that their child was found two months later. Unlucky, devastatingly unlucky, in that the child was dead. Would they have gone on to believe that their child was alive, hopefully happy somewhere, if not with them, had the child not been found? I would think so. There, see, I have an opinion too. Is it logical to believe that the child you cannot see is dead, harmed in some way? You may fear that, it might cross your mind from time to time, but the belief that there is still hope is the only comfort you can hold onto.
Today marks five years since the second coming (sic) of the ‘greatest story since the Resurrection’. Another child went missing in the night. Madeleine McCann. In between, many other children have gone missing, even from Portuguese beachside resorts, yet none have captured the imagination of the watching public in the same way.
None have created such a perfect media storm. No other case has left us knowing so many intimate details of the parent, rather than the child. Google Madeleine McCann and you will get over 31 million responses. 31 million times people have sat at their computer and written her name. That’s the entire population of Canada, 31 million!
Among those 31,000,000 there are countless millions of entries purporting to prove that either Madeleine is dead – there is no proof, merely their ‘belief’; and countless entries purporting to prove that she is alive – there is no proof, merely their ‘belief’. What is striking about the McCann saga is the vitriol and vehemence with which each side condemns the other. Neither side ‘knows’ anything, and yet they are prepared to fight to the death, and certainly into the libel courts to prove that their belief represents the ‘truth’.
None has gained as much currency as the views of the policeman who was in charge of the initial investigation. Gonçalo Amaral. His working hypothesis became that ‘the child was dead’, and the parents were to blame. He viewed the parents as arguidos, the Portuguese equivalent of ‘persons of interest’, not charged, but under suspicion. It was a reasonable hypothesis, there were many unexplained details, but hypothesis is all it was, and the Attorney-General of Portugal refused to go to trial on that basis.
After six months, Amaral was removed from the case. There were other cases proceeding against him and the men under him, and it wasn’t a happy situation to have the man in charge of the investigation under suspicion himself – particularly not when the other cases also involved his suspicion of a Mother whose child had never been found. Amaral went onto write a book about his first six months in charge of the investigation, and unfortunately chose to call it ‘Maddie, The Truth of the Lie’. He explained in detail his theory of why he thought ‘it was the parent’s what did it’. That book has divided the watching armchair detectives as never before.
Amaral has now pointed out that ‘the book deals with six months of the investigation and the conclusions at the time so the investigation needed to continue. The truth is only known when an investigation is finished’. Amaral’s own words, taken from a helpful translation of his recent Panorama interview. Yet that book has been treated as though it is ‘the truth’ written on tablets of stone, by people around the world who have made it their business to harry the McCann’s mercilessly quite content to risk prison sentences to make their opinions, their beliefs, accepted by the ‘non-believers’.
Some of the cases linked to above relate to people well known to me; they have been around since the very earliest days of Madeleine’s disappearance, when I was moderating on a forum that clocked up a regular 1,500 comments a day, every day – comments, not hits! They would be on-line from early morning to late at night – not obsessed with finding Madeleine and discovering beyond doubt what had happened to her and who was responsible, that would be a reasonable enough obsession, but obsessed with proving that their belief, their reading of the various media reports represented the truth and that anybody who disagreed with them must be punished in some way. It was not ‘the truth’ they were pursuing, but acceptance of their views.
Today the McCann’s will be out and about on the airwaves, continuing to push for the case to be re-opened. A somewhat unusual course of action for allegedly guilty parties, but that is as may be. The media will be rehashing old stories in an attempt to redress some snippet of information as an exclusive story. The lawyers will be sharpening their fangs. The Forum Furies will be whacking each other over the head with insults and ‘outings’. The politicians will be attempting to placate each other for past insults hurled via the media. The British police claim to be in possession of 193 new ‘opinions’ and alleged sightings, known in police parlance as ‘leads’. Scarcely surprising that the Portuguese won’t reopen the case until someone comes up with some concrete evidence. Evidence, not a report from a British tourist in Tibuktu who is sure that they might have, possibly, they think, seen a blonde girl five years ago but didn’t think to mention it until the Daily ****** waved their cheque book…..
And Madeleine won’t be home with her family. Five years later. 31,000,000 articles. And still no one has anything better than an ‘opinion’ as to what happened to her. In a final irony, even the new picture released of Madeleine is only an ‘opinion’ of what she might look like now.
I sometimes wonder whether either the media or the Internet would survive the solving of the ‘Maddie saga’.
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1
May 3, 2012 at 12:25 -
Perhaps our prurient interest in others’ business stems from our bonobo-like (social animal) ancestors, just as our aggression could be attributed to our chimpanzee-like ones. But the media feeding frenzy over this sad tale merely reflects what “the great unwashed” want to read about – papers full of good news just don’t sell.
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2
May 3, 2012 at 12:41 -
Add to that the insatiable appetite for televised drama – fictional, real-life or, most disturbingly, a hybrid of the two. There is no such thing as objectivity among the general public; everything is reflected back into cyberspace through a distorting prism of plot twists and dramatic construction.
The internet age has blunted Occam’s razor.
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3
May 3, 2012 at 12:54 -
The Lindbergh case was/is one of those great “whodunnit” “was the wrong man executed mysteries of the 20th Century
Here is a part 1 of a wonderfully cheesy documentary narrated by Leonard (I am not Spock!) Nimoy!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dbeLVi3IuRIBoth cases are both tragedies and interesting social phenomena. What do the tell us? I merely invite the debate!
G the M -
4
May 3, 2012 at 13:15 -
Spot on!
I’ll apologise in advance for sharing it in a couple of Facebook groups but I thought it would make people think a bit.
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5
May 3, 2012 at 13:33 -
“eous” ?
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6
May 3, 2012 at 14:07
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7
May 3, 2012 at 15:28 -
This is too upsetting to contemplate – why didn’t you just leave well alone?
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8
May 3, 2012 at 18:33 -
What a brilliantly-observed point and beautifully reported, as ever. The issue of the whipped-up responses to this terrible event has troubled me since it kicked off. Good work (nothing less than I would expect) for pointing it all out.
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9
May 3, 2012 at 19:01 -
Me? I’ve been in there since almost Day One, so I do know quite a lot about the misinformation that I believe was designed to implicate The McCanns, even if only in Public Opinion.
Have I Slandered or Libelled anyone? Probably. But then I have been well informed of my Right to Free Speach sic. And I can usually give as good as I get these days.
I did briefly wonder about The McCann’s involvement until I began to realise that there is no proof of anything, and that so much of what was being said was downright lies.
Now, I happen to believe that no proof of the child’s death is more important than no proof that she is alive.
And of course, I have to wonder why so many lies were told. -
10
May 3, 2012 at 21:14 -
“Ask the dogs, Sandra”, as Madeleine’s father said to a Portuguese journalist, when being asked what he thought about some of the most reputable cadaver [EVRD] and blood [CSI] search dogs signaling in their holiday apartment, their rented car and on clothing items of Kate McCann and her missing daughter. She appropriately responded with: “I’m asking you”. He smirked.
Yes, Elena, you’re right. There were so many lies told. And I will say no more before I am marked a “forker” …
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11
May 4, 2012 at 02:32 -
In “Our Maddie” a narrative has been created that is every parents worst fear. It’s much easier to become a callous, heartless, insensitive, smartarse than it is to face those fears, or to consider the disturbing realities of this case, knowing that justice (before God’s final judgement, at least) may never be done.
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12
May 4, 2012 at 09:33 -
In the extraordinarily unlikely scenario that she is still alive, it would be better now if she were not found; can you imagine the anguish of these people trying to deal with a child who now speaks only Portuguese (or something) and has no idea who they are?
The overwhelming probability is that she’s dead, and has been dead since an hour or two after the abduction, and the real tragedy is that the bereaved parents can’t grieve and move on.
The rest of us have had much more than enough of the whole business.
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13
May 4, 2012 at 11:59 -
A very tragic case. I think if the Mcanns had accidentally killed Maddie, then upon discovery of thier dead child the parents would have been a lot more upset than they were, and would have found it diffcult to think straight to cover up the death. My experience of death of a close relative is its an emotional hammer blow and you are not in control .
I would have also thought that if they had been responsible for the death they would have not been trying to raise awareness of the case and get it reoponed.
I dont think the McCanns did it -
14
May 4, 2012 at 15:02 -
Sadly for the McCanns but obviously not for the parents of these two women, Jaycee Dugard and Elizabeth Smart, two high-profile child-abductions in the States, ended with the abductees returned alive, in one case decades later. While it is most likely Maddy is dead, there will always be that lingering doubt among some people, the McCanns included (provided they’re not the agents of her death). Almost as many cases can be cited where the parents were fairly dodgy as not; I am put in mind of a case in California, the abduction and murder of Danielle van Dam, where although the mother was clearly not a suspect, her promiscuous lifestyle made her a target for the wrath of many people who claimed that had she not been out trawling that night, the perpetrator wouldn’t have seen her and figured he had a clear shot at the child. For my own part, I pass no judgement on the McCanns, either in terms of guilt/innocence of one or both parents, or of their fitness AS parents. But at some point, don’t we have to draw a line under all this and say, right, barring any new evidence, we must admit there is no way to know what happened to this girl and here it must stay, because life cannot always have a neat little bow tied around it? Excuse what would appear to be a pun in questionable taste, and it is meant sardonically, life is “maddening” that way.
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15
May 5, 2012 at 00:30 -
EXCELLENT article Anna. I couldn’t have put it better myself and I’ve read the files in this case plus the oft link Cipriano missing child case also investigated by Goncalo Amaral. I only took a real interest in the case after hearing the parents of Madeleine give their evidence to the Leveson Inquiry.
It’s a real tragedy for the child and much worsened heartache for her parents by the input of armchair detectives, opportunistic conspiracy theorists and Trolls always on the lookout for their next victim.
The materially relevant evidence in this case – when noted and properly evaluated, points away from the parents and hence toward an abduction forensically undetected for whatever reason (I’ve a very firm opinion in regard to the latter but it’s immaterial for the present purposes).
As indicated above by others, there have been other abducted children reunited with their family after many years and those cases permit Kate and Gerry McCann to cling to the belief that Madeleine could still be alive…
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