Potential breakthrough in McCann case

Clint Van Zandt • Profile • E-mail

The parents of missing British girl Madeleine McCann have released a new artist’s impression of a man they believe could be involved in their daughter’s May 2007 disappearance from a Portuguese ocean front vacation resort.  In one of the most publicized missing cases in the world, an unknown person is believed to have kidnapped 4-year-old Madeleine as she slept while her parents, doctors Gerry and Kate McCann, ate dinner in a restaurant some 100 yards from the family’s hotel room.

Initially Portuguese police believed that Madeleine had been kidnapped by an unknown child predator.  Their investigation then turned to Robert Murat, a local British ex-pat who had inserted himself into the probe.  Gradually, however, police began to focus on the missing child’s parents, eventually going so far as to naming them as formal suspects in their daughter’s disappearance and suspected death.

It was Kate, however, whom authorities appeared to center their attention on, suggesting, at times, their belief that Kate had over-sedated her hyperactive child and then faked the kidnapping to cover up the “crime,” or that both parents had simply been neglect in leaving their three children alone in their bedroom, something agreed to by many, and that Maddie awoke, walked out the door, fell down a flight of stairs, died, and again the parents had covered up their neglect that may have led to their oldest child’s death. Police went so far as to suggest that the parents had hid their daughter’s body for about three weeks and then used a rental car to transport her remains to an unknown burial site.

In September authorities allegedly threatened Kate with taking her other two children from her if she did not “confess” to her suspected wrongdoing.  Shortly thereafter the McCann family left Portugal and returned to their home in the U.K. Due to the international publicity given to this case, many possible sightings of Madeleine have been reported around the world, but none have proven to be the missing girl with a unique mark in her right eye, something that changing her clothing and even changing her hair color and style could never hide. 

Police and Metodo 3, a highly paid private detective agency in Spain working for the McCanns, have come full circle in their investigation, now reverting to the original theory that an unidentified child predator kidnapped Madeleine, probably after watching the family and learning that night after night the McCanns would leave their three children alone in the hotel room while they ate dinner with seven friends in the nearby tapas restaurant.

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