Case closed for Madeleine McCann?

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PROTECTING THE CHILDREN

Clint Van Zandt offers info to help protect children from predators

The former FBI profiler offers a free DVD which discusses the threat to children from birth through college age, as well as the threat posed to children by predators who lurk on the Internet. It can be found at www.livesecure.org.

Manipulative moves?
In their attempt to solve this case and apparently support their theory that the McCanns were responsible for their daughter’s disappearance, the Portuguese police practiced their own form of “bad cop/bad cop” on Kate McCann. Police allegedly told Kate they believed she was responsible for the death of her daughter, somehow later moving the body in a rental car to its final resting place, and if Kate did not confess the police would send her to jail and take her remaining two children away and place them in foster care in Portugal. This was probably the way police thought they’d scare the McCanns into returning to England, which they did, thereby removing the media microscope that the police were under.

Police claimed they had found physical evidence, probably hair and DNA from Maddie, in the rear section of the car rented by the McCanns, a car they rented weeks after Maddie’s disappearance. Then there were the dozens, maybe hundreds of sightings of pretty European girls of Maddie’s age that were seen across that part of the world, coupled with outrageous claims by private investigators hired by the McCanns that these investigators were somehow about to break the case and had even identified the kidnapper(s) of young Maddie. Then there is the story about local reporters sitting in restaurants around Praia Da Luz swapping and literally making up salacious stories that had nothing to do with reality.

As time went on, police began to look at a composite drawing of a suspicious man seen at the hotel around the time of Madeleine’s disappearance. By one witness account, he was collecting money for what was later proven to be a nonexistent charity, this while “peering” into the various rooms whose door had been opened to him. Perhaps he was looking for the right child to kidnap.

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The police say they have written their final report on Maddie's fate; case closed. After thousands of leads, millions of hits on her Web site and the blessing of Pope Benedict XVI, the golden-haired little girl with the infectious smile is nowhere to be found. Do the McCann’ share some level of responsibility in her disappearance?

They must spend the rest of their lives wondering why they didn’t get a baby sitter to sit outside their hotel door when they went to dinner six nights in a row, establishing a pattern of leaving their three children unprotected for periods of time each night that any potential predator could figure out. But the final responsibility belongs, of course, to whoever carried Maddie out of the bedroom, away from her family, and into the hearts of the world. We will all keep our “emotional porch light” turned on in the hopes of Maddie’s return, but officially, the police have given up the search. Maddie is gone and that’s about the only fact we know for sure, little comfort to a brother and sister that go to sleep every night dreaming of their sister.

Clint Van Zandt is a former FBI agent, behavioral profiler and hostage negotiator as well as an MSNBC analyst. His Web site, www.LiveSecure.org, provides readers with security-related information.