The famous disappearance took place on the night of May 3, 2007 at a resort in Praia da Luz, Algarve region of Portugal. The McCann family left England to holiday there, a beach frequented by many Britons. With three young children – Madeleine, almost 4 years old, and twins Sean and Amelie, 2 years old – the McCanns settled in the Ocean Club resort. The place was very peaceful. Instead of walls and railings, the buildings with the guest apartments opened directly onto the streets of a quiet village of 3,000 inhabitants.
On the night of May 3, Madeleine disappeared. At first, the Portuguese police worked with the idea of kidnapping. Over time, however, suspicions also turned against the girl’s parents, Gerry and Kate.
Since the end of 2007, the investigations started to follow two distinct branches: while the Portuguese police analyze evidence against the McCann couple, they, insulted by being considered suspects, hired a private detective agency, which works on the hypothesis of an international network of pedophiles kidnapped the girl and took her to Morocco.
HYPOTHESIS 1: KIDNAPPING
– (Sattu/Weird World)
1) at 7:30 pm, the couple Gerry and Kate McCann, staying at the Ocean Club resort, began to prepare for dinner with a group of friends. They guarantee: they left the children sleeping and, at 8:30 pm, they arrived punctually at the resort’s restaurant
two) The McCanns had dinner at the Tapas restaurant, less than 100 m from the apartment. Gerry said that at 9 pm he went to check on the children and that he saw Madeleine sleeping. On the way back, he chatted with another tourist on a street near the apartment.
– (Sattu/Weird World)
3) When Gerry returned to Tapas, a white man, aged between 35 and 40, allegedly entered the room. Jane Tanner, a friend who had dinner with the McCanns, says she saw a man on the street with a child in his arms, but she didn’t think it could be Madeleine
– (Sattu/Weird World)
4) Kate claims that at 10pm it was her turn to check on the kids. Upon reaching the room, she would have seen that her daughter had disappeared and found one of the windows open, as if she had been forced. Kate ran and warned her friends
5) In the hypothesis of abduction, one of the biggest suspicions is that Madeleine could have been taken by an Englishman, Robert Murat, who lives near the McCann apartment. According to this version, Robert would have taken the girl on a boat on the night of the abduction.
– (Sattu/Weird World)
6) It is possible that Madeleine was taken to Tangier, Morocco, in an action by a pedophile network. On the 9th of May, a Norwegian tourist who still didn’t know about the case would have seen the girl in Morocco. It would be Madeleine’s last clue
– (Playback/Playback)
7) After the Portuguese authorities closed their investigation in 2008, Scotland Yard, British police, opened its own investigation in 2011, following the hypothesis of kidnapping. It was from this new effort that the image above emerged, estimating Madeleine’s appearance in 2012, when she would have been nine years old. Despite having already collected more than 1,000 statements, investigated hundreds of suspects and spent more than 11 million pounds, the investigation, called Operation Grange, has still not been able to find out what happened to the girl.
HYPOTHESIS 2: KILLER PARENTS
– (Sattu/Weird World)
1) Kate’s diary, who is an anesthesiologist, reveals that she thought Maddie was a child who «wasted her strength». In the event that the parents were to blame, she and her husband would have given their daughter a tranquilizer so that they could have dinner in peace. That was the only day the couple waived the resort’s free babysitting service.
– (Sattu/Weird World)
two) The tranquilizer dose would have been excessive and Madeleine would have died after being drugged. The couple would then take a desperate attitude: they would have put their daughter’s corpse in a car and taken her body about 30 m from the resort, leaving her in a thicket.
– (Sattu/Weird World)
3) By 8:30 pm the McCanns would be back at the hotel, ready for dinner with friends. At 9:00 pm, Gerry went to the bedroom, not to look at the children, but to touch up the crime scene, leaving the window open. At 10 pm, Kate would have started the farce, reporting her daughter’s disappearance
– (Sattu/Weird World)
4) The McCanns’ apartment was packed with police and the couple’s friends. Even with the room full of people talking loudly, the other two children continued to sleep soundly. In this hypothesis, this would be explained by the fact that they were also sedated
– (Sattu/Weird World)
5) 25 days later, the couple would have rented a car, retrieved the corpse and shipped it once and for all in some region of the Algarve or at sea. When investigating a car actually rented by the McCanns after the crime, police found bodily fluids in the trunk.
– (Sattu/Weird World)
6) Sniffer dogs searched the McCanns’ room and found traces of blood on the floor. That track and the fluids in the car were analyzed. Of 19 DNA markers, 15 were compatible with Madeleine’s DNA – the other four were too degraded. Such tests were the main evidence against parents
7) In July 2008, Portuguese authorities concluded that there was no evidence that the McCanns were responsible for the disappearance and closed the case. The Chief Inspector who headed the case between May and October 2007, Gonçalo Amaral, resigned in 2008 to write a book about it, Maddie: A Verdade da Lie. The work claims that Madeleine died accidentally and the couple invented the kidnapping story. The McCanns sued for compensation, but in 2017 the Portuguese Supreme Court decided to deny the appeal.