Modern Wisdom - #060 - Robbyn Swan & Anthony Summers - The Disappearance Of Madeleine McCann

Episode Date: April 1, 2019

Robbyn Swan and Anthony Summers are investigative journalists, authors & experts in the Madeleine McCann case. The disappearance of Madeline McCann is the world’s best known missing child case, and the recent Netflix series has reignited interest. From messy investigations to libellous press accusations, missing evidence and thousands of worldwide sightings, this case has fascinated and perplexed the public. Today, Robbyn & Anthony will take us through the most important elements of the case, tell us what the status of the investigation is now, and tell us their opinions on what really happened to Madeleine McCann. Extra Stuff: Submit Information - www.findmadeleine.com Looking For Madeleine Book - https://amzn.to/2YDXpiR Check out everything I recommend from books to products and help support the podcast at no extra cost to you by shopping through this link - https://www.amazon.co.uk/shop/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Join the discussion with me and other like minded listeners in the episode comments on the MW YouTube Channel or message me... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/ModernWisdomPodcast Email: https://www.chriswillx.com/contact Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Howdy friends, I'm coming to you all the way from Boston as my trip across America continues and so did the podcasts and this week it is something very special indeed. Robin Swan and Anthony Summers are investigative authors and two of the world's foremost authorities on the Madeline McCann case. You may recognize them from the Netflix series, which has recently reignited public interest in what was already the world's most famous missing child case. And given that it feels like everybody has an opinion on what happened to little Madeline, I thought it might be a good idea to get some experts in who can actually take us through the real evidence. So today we will be walked through the most important elements

of the case. We will be told exactly what the states of the investigation is now. And Robin and Anthony will tell us their opinion on what really happened to Madeline McCann. Now if you have a friend who has a strongly held theory of their own, I urge you to share this podcast with them to hopefully help to illuminate exactly what is going on with this case. I do think that the common understanding and the common interpretation of exactly what went on appears to be so far from the truth based on what we hear today that it really is quite important to this message to get out. As always, I would really appreciate the shares and if you have any questions or comments or feedback at Chris Willex on all social media or the Modern Wisdom YouTube channel is waiting for you as well. Further to that, if you want to find out more, you can head to the show notes below and grab Looking for Madeline, Robin and Anthony's book, which

has just been updated for 2019 with new evidence and new information. That will be in the show notes below, but for now, please welcome Anthony and Robin. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back. I am joined by Robin Swan and Anthony Summers. You may recognize them from the most recent Netflix series on the disappearance of Madeline McCann. Guys, welcome to the show. Thank you very much. So you are investigative journalists, but you're also married and you've been working together for about 30 years, is that right? That's I think what my wife would say. One of us works. I've never really been fond of that description, the investigative journalist. When asked been fond of that description, the investigative journalist. When asked, I suppose I would say, and I was to nail it down on my bank manager, an engine driver or an investigative journalist,

I would go for the third. But I always think that it's a misnomer in the sense that everyone that everyone in this business, in the journalist business, should, in theory, try to dig beyond the grass that you can see and find out what's underneath. That's what we do, and that's what we've done in our career together. Yes. So, having a look at your back catalog of books, 9-11 Pearl Harbor, Richard Nixon and Madeline McCartan, there's some high-pressure topics in there. Do you ever find the difficulty and the emotion and the pressure of writing with quite inflammatory topics ever, do the lines kind of get crossed with the relationship at all, does that ever kind of come in? Or are you able to kind of mediate those pretty effectively? As a thoroughly cowed husband and co-author, I will leave Robin to us.

On a serious note, always the one to introduce a serious note here. You know, frankly, we're incredibly lucky to be able to do the kind of work we do. You know, what a privilege to be able to explore, you know, some of the most important cultural and historical moments of the last century. And try to bring your own little bit of extra information into that to try to write that story well. Sure, there's pressure. And we don't always agree. But I think the reason we have found that we're able to work together well is that we have sometimes we have slightly different strengths, but we're both incredibly relentless when it comes to the digging. And we really are, if one isn't pushing,

the other one is. And I think so, so we have a real simpatico in that way. But also, I think each of us respects the others talent. Tony has an extraordinary ability to make the complex simple of things and delivering to the project all the nuts and bolts so that we can do that, so that we can have that material to base the story on. I think that Robin's been talking rather, which she said we don't really cash on things. Well, quite often we say, no, that's not right. No, it's not right because, look, this is what I was digging up, or this is

of the X-100 interviews we've done on a subject. Do you remember that so and so said this? So we have to think about that, and the important thing is that we're playing mental ping pong, and it's a terrific asset, actually. I have a friend and sometimes colleague in the United States who already done one book about that seemingly eternal story, the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963, and having done one book, which was a success, and quite a serious book, not just one of those books, one more of those books about the Kennedy assassination. He launched into the research for a second. He has been on that now by my most recent count for about 25 years, possibly more, on his

own. And I think that's fatal for him. I've got a feeling he's going to die without the book having been published. But what he lacks is what we do have, which is someone to play intellectual ping pong with, to say, I've just written these couple of paragraphs. What do you think about that? Is that fair, isn't that fair? All he can do is rattle around in its own head.

And it's a huge advantage to have two people who are sort of on the same wavelength about things working together. I suppose as well when we're talking about these inflammatory topics that are highly charged, it's the sort of thing that requires quadruple checking and you don't want to be making any errors. Absolutely. You bet. And then of course at the end of each book trail, you then have the not only the editor and the art of editing and publishing, except in some circumstances, is not what once it was when I came into the business at the beginning.

But then, this is a real discipline, not least in this case, which has seen a lot of lawsuits, you then have the lawyer, and a good lawyer will make sure that you're not making a huge gratuitous erasure and getting yourself into great libel suit. On the other hand, a good lawyer will be one who does not just crush what you're trying to say, and one has to be very careful at that. But I also think, and perhaps more important than what we think or what any lawyer thinks or anything like that is, we are trying to get to the historical truth here. In our 9-11 book, we were writing at the time that all of the 9-11 truth movement was at its height. And there were stories circulating about World Trade Center 7 and what hit the Pentagon, etc., etc., etc. that just had no basis in fact. And these are people's lives. Their loved ones were talking about, you know, did a missile, was it not really a plane that hit the

Pentagon, wasn't it a missile? Well, what happened to the, to the, to all the victims who are on that plane? Are you not thinking of their family? Have you no compassion when you come forward with a wild conspiracy theory about what really happened there? Have you not, as I have done, looked at the exhibits in the Musawi case, which is a Zakaraz Musawi, another of the suspects in the 9-11 attacks, the exhibits in that case show very clearly some horribly graphic images of the victims of the plane attack on the Pentagon. This kind of conspiracy theory, fake news, it's been around a long time. And, you know, it's our job as historians or journalists

or whatever you want to call us, to try to get beyond that to the actual truth of the event. Because there has to be some reality. You know, you are entitled to your own opinion, but you are not entitled to your own facts. And that remains true, it was always true, and it will be ever thus. You know, these days we talk about the trolls,

the internet trolls. We didn't have the word trolls, although it existed in stories about magic. We didn't use the word trolls in journalism. We had the cranks, and you'd know you were getting a letter from a cranker. When I did my first book, I got thousands of letters, those old-fashioned things. things that you can't necessarily post with a stamp on them. And I would know immediately the nature of the person writing to me because they would either have bright red ink or green ink on the address, probably in capital letters and written sometimes very carefully. And you knew that inside there would be a communication from a crack possibly with an idea, suggestion about the story,

not usually the tuberative, not usually full of venom. Now there's a totally different phenomenon which you've seen on shore'm sure, regularly, which is the stuff that comes in over the internet, which is often from people who really should be locked up. Well, the problem is that it's so easy for people to just the distance from brain to fingertips or brain to mouth has been reduced so far and with ease of access and you know if you guys have Twitter or Instagram or a Facebook page or whatever it is it takes them on two seconds, they browse on a mobile app and they can delegate their opinion out to the

masses as it were even when a lot of the time it's probably not worthy of that. So I want to get on with that, without consulting their conscience. Oh, well they feed their own, without consulting their own humanity. They forget that there's a person on the other end of this. And you know, as you touched on there, Robin, people forget, and this is a key point that I want to discuss

with regards to the model in McCann case, that people do forget it's not just a story, and the same thing goes for this. You guys aren't fiction writers, and they're not complaining at you because you ended the story in a way that they didn't like. It's that you're reporting the fact in as virtuously away as you guys can. And if they don't like the way that the fact come across, presuming that you've done it with, to the best of your professional abilities, they're really just arguing with reality. Their problem is, I don't like what reality is serving me. I need someone to vent at. And it happens to be that your name is on the front cover of the book or in the credits of the TV show. So moving on to the Madeline McCann case. The first thing upon watching the most recent

Netflix series, and I'm sure lots of people who are listening will have seen it as well, the first thing that struck me was how I don't want to say bungled, but how oddly the case was dealt with upon immediate investigation in terms of the crime scene, in terms of everything else. That was probably one of the most shocking things I got out of it. Well, when you mentioned the crime scene, and I guess you're thinking about the accounts which I've obviously also, although we were interviewed for the series, we weren't part of it. In the Netflix series, we are in each episode, so we have watched it closely.

And we found that virtually everything, and I mean 99.9% was accurate so far as we know. accurate so far as we know. And we, I think ourselves in the shows, discuss what happened in the crime scene. Woman goes into apartment apparently, finds child missing, goes out, makes a terrible cry, all the considerably large party, 9 or 10 people, the other doctors and their friends come, come rushing to the apartment. They're all there, all trampling around the apartment, and then they call the police are called. When the police eventually arrive, they come in, they trample around the apartment. At some point dogs come into the search dogs come into the apartment. And that is completely contrary to what the police, like the way the police like, are crime scene to be handled in what they call

the golden hour, the first hour. That is why when one sees, for instance, a shooting in the street, you see on the news nightly scenes in which the police have put up tapes and stopped people, stopped people trampling over the golden evidence, the first evidence, the evidence was there. And that wasn't done in this case, but you talk about the possible bumbling and so on. Well, there was bumbling at some stage in the investigation, but there's also a thing called human nature when the police were called to the apartment. They thought there was a little girl who was missing, had she wandered off. What had happened?

Where was she? Maybe she's going to turn up in the wardrobe under the bed. Maybe she's there really, maybe she's just hiding from mummy and daddy. And of course none of that proved to be the case. But during that time, people were not thinking of the crime, the possible crime. They weren't thinking of something sinister that wouldn't be sold for more than a decade. They were just trying to find that little girl who might be here. So there was a reason and a sort of a justification for why the golden hour was ignored.

I suppose it's a short-term pain for a long-term gain that you need to make a judgment on upon the beginning of the case, right? You need to they want to think oh well if she is in here somewhere or if it's not a crime we need to work more expeditiously rather than delicately But obviously the benefit of hindsight is is fantastic and looking back

You say well why didn't they just close the case off? I think I think what you say is true, but I also think it was a resource and division of labor issue as well. But the first Portuguese police office to arrive on the scene were the sort of local beat cops who would not necessarily have been all that glued into the idea of crime scene preservation, etc. Whereas immediately an hour later when the more senior detectives arrived, they were themselves horrified by this, you know, tarnishing of the evidence by having all these people trample it. You know, they weren't none too pleased with their colleagues that this had happened.

And I think that was then compounded that the Portuguese police is initial mistakes in terms of the crime scene or then compounded by two other things. One, they failed to clear the parents of involvement. You know, usually in cases like this, it is always a family member when you look at first. And in the words of the policeman who was responsible for reviewing this case and deciding, you know, it wasn't handled very well,

he thought that they had failed to clear the ground in front of them. That's an important mistake that should have been addressed very early on. Instead, it festered. The second thing was the involvement of the British police. You had a crime or a drug or a missing child taking place in Portugal, but she's a British child. So therefore, the parents who don't speak the language are immediately reaching out for all the support they can get.

And that's coming back at them in terms of multiple police agencies all wanting to help, all wanting to get their patch in, all wanting to be the hero. And that also didn't play well. It felt to the Portuguese like the Brits were trampling all over them and being a colonial power and being arrogant and the Portuguese themselves

became very suspicious. What are all these, you know, British police officers doing? And we're having, we're actually having their British police colleagues followed. So the bad relationship, again, didn't help in any attempt to find Madeline. So the British thought that the Portuguese were living in the Stone Age in the sense that they weren't computerized in the way that people from Wenzgote and New York eventually became involved or just the police that were sent out on the A's on the first from England. They saw all the cards in boxes and a sort of temporary headquarters with a lot of paperwork and so on. And people putting in guys typing with two fingers on all typewriters.

That's not how it happens. It's pretty said quarters in England anymore. And so, their grew up feeling that the Portuguese felt as though they were being at a certain level, sort of they were being treated as though they were from the third world. They're not presented. They're not presented fantastically well, I suppose. And there definitely does seem to be a lot of friction that you can tell between themselves and everyone else. And you've got the chief, I think it was the chief of Portuguese police being the times he was going for lunch and coming back.

We're being noted down in the newspaper and the British newspapers were being quite a accusatory and stuff like that. So that takes us on to the press coverage. And a question that I really wanted to ask you was, why do you think this particular case captured such international attention both at the time and then why is it still doing it now? Was it right place, right time? Did it have the right look? Look, the real reason, the initial reason that there was huge press coverage

was because the McCanns, quite wisely, they thought, wanted it, and the end of it became the bane of their existence. But that night, when they were sitting in their agony after the police had come and the police had gone for the time being at 3, 4 o'clock in the morning. They sat with their friends in apartment 5A with their little girl missing. What can we do? Are the police doing enough? No, maybe they could do a long time to come. Maybe they're not. And maybe so we should do something. They tried to reach out to TV stations through relatives in the UK, on the telephone. And by

eight of the nine o'clock in the morning, the news was very brief, but the news was being broadcast on Sky News and other stations in the UK, where, as at the time, it wasn't on Portuguese news, and I gather at all. And during the case, there's a Portuguese law, which says that information cannot be given up, should not be given up by law, while it's ongoing. Now that's very different from the reality, which later on involved, you know, people saying things on the QT, saying on the quatt, saying to journalists, we're not turning it this really, but happens everywhere. It's an old-fashioned, produced tactic, but it got let loose. But anyway, from the McCann's own effort, the press

first knew about it. But what the McCann's by their own admission also thought was, wait a minute, this is the age of the internet. Jerry McCann, the father, had a sister, I believe, called Filomena, in the North of Scotland, who was hip-to-computers and who had students, and she brought students or former students into garage, a sort of makeshift shed, where they sat, and within, what what 24 or 36 hours People in New Zealand knew about this case people who would never otherwise have known about it Which had the effect of getting Madeline's picture the picture of the little girl out there two millions whereas in a similar case in the past That it would not have gone out to millions or certainly not for a very long time. And in the end though, starting an avalanche of chatter on the internet,

chatter which was often far from responsible. I think you are totally right that it became a monster of its own and started to roll along on its own momentum. It's a difficult situation, you know, to the listeners at home. I wonder what they think they would have done in that situation. Would you have allowed the police to have conducted the investigation quietly? Would you have thought that that was the best route or would you have tried to react by getting as much information as much exposure as possible to have this have the thought of this little girl out there. I would guess that the vast majority of people would just want maximum exposure as much.

It feels like you're doing something, right? Like you're helpless in this situation. What can I do? What can I actually, how can I impact and help? You know, you're not an investigator. You don't understand forensics. You don't have these sort of things. So one of the things you can do is disseminate, right? But that's that's not only your natural reaction, but it's also the best advice from from the experts in the field. You know, from the experts in the field. Some of your listeners might be too young to remember it, but years ago, when the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children in the US first got going, for instance, they were behind a great campaign where missing children's faces were put on

those cardboard milk cartons. And that was a way of getting maximum exposure, because everybody got a carton of milk. That was a way of getting maximum exposure for every missing child and it's a brilliant tool. The internet is a wonderful and enormous milk carton in that sense. It can be incredibly effective. What we do know is that publicity does help. There was a recent case I believe in Minnesota where a young girl

was missing for a period of months. And she was spotted by a passerby because her face was recognized. You see these kind of things in the Elizabeth Smart case. Again, she was recognized. There was an oddity about the scene she was seen in by a passerby and was brought to police attention. So the idea that maximum exposure isn't the right thing is actually wrong. It is the right thing, but it can turn around and bite you back.

Yeah. Sorry, it could have been precisely the right thing in the case of a little Madeline McCann. Not least because Madeline McCann had a thing called a color bomber, which is a sign of the word, medical word for a blemish in her right pupil of her right eye, which if she was walking past you in a store or on the pavement, you wouldn't notice immediately, but it was a blemish, it was an obvious thing. So in those first days, when she was missing and even later, if people's attention had been drawn to this feature of her eyes, then perhaps she

could have might have been recognized and the police or the shop security or wherever it could have been called. So it was like the picture on the milk cart and it was a than thing to do. Yes, I understand. Why was there so much flip-flopping and so many very inflammatory headlines about this case? I don't know how it works with libelous press coverage and stuff like that, but upon reading just a cross section that you see on the documentary, it struck me just how outlandish some of the headlines were like Robert Murat being accused of everything under the sun. I think he's a Swiss national,

the guy that was the computer programmer. Russian. Russian. Russian. He was being accused of everything under the sun. They'd flip flop from the police being at fault to the McCanns being at fault to the dogs, to not the dogs, to... It just seemed like the most temperamental and maximally extreme headlines that could come out about this case at all times. Is that... Is there an undisturbing explanation for that? It sells papers. This case continues to sell papers. It's a terrible, a terrible truth. But the real thing that seemed to be going on during that

summer of 2007, going into the fall of 2008, is that the police, the Portuguese police were becoming frustrated with the way they were being portrayed in the British press. So they were leaking to their Portuguese press contacts, little bits of information that they were developing that was counter to the narrative of the McCanns as victims, that would get printed in the Portuguese press and then picked up and reprinted in the British press with a few little nuances of their own, the translation issue, etc. That would then, in turn, come back and play again into the Portuguese press system. So they were reporting on the reporting and they were reporting on the leaks and it just kept building on itself. And then you had a point in the summer where in their frustration the Portuguese police did something that they had been offered at the

beginning of the summer, which is they took the British police up on the offer of using these highly trained police dogs. And from the moment the police dogs arrived on the scene in Portugal, the entire sort of focus of the case turned from a missing child investigation to a sort of murder inquiry. And once that happened, it became open season on the McCans. There was virtually nothing that couldn't be printed about them, that editors wouldn't approve because they were getting it from multiple, quote unquote, sources. And, you know, they felt they had journalistic and libel cover to do that because there was

such a plethora of reporting coming out of Portugal that the British media could pick up on. So it just fed itself. It's so bizarre how fact being reported becomes the next story, not the facts itself. And I can see how this kind of ever-growing sphere of crazy stories starts to become a feedback loop and feed itself. So you touch there upon the dog, the cadaver dog and the blood dog, I think, you can't ask the dog what it means, it's a very kind of rough hewn result, but it definitely seems like, am I right in saying that the dog... It could give you a hint, it could give you a clue to what might be physical evidence.

evidence. As it turned out, it was quite the contrary. But in the he told me, she said, each said, she said, it became, and with the police by that time being on the, in Portuguese terms, extraordinary pressure and feeling pressured, they've got to do something, they've got to get somewhere. It was a great shining light, a moment of maybe truth. The dogs have discovered real evidence, and the evidence points to Madeline's blood in the apartment 5A, and doesn't this point to a possible accident, and the idea is a possible accident in which she might have died and might it be that the McCanns had somehow accidentally as doctors, let done something to need to the death of their own child, and then kept her body and the fable began to just grow like topsy.

And journalists and reporters who ought to have known better than editors in London who should have known much better and should have said, wait a minute, what do we actually knew? No. Ran while, it was a terrible circus and it took time within the police investigation for the circus to be corrected, and Rob can talk better to that, because I think we should make clear that in the end there was no DNA evidence that pointed to anyone at all. You know, the Portuguese police system is different from what we're used to in lots of places in Western Europe. It's a sort of prosecutorial system in which the police come up with a hypothesis about where what they think the evidence may support. Whereas we kind of come out of the other way, we have the evidence and then we see where the evidence kind of goes.

So there are slightly different nuances there. And so the scenario that Tony was just describing, which to us now, having read all of the evidence, actually is a scenario that is put forward by a senior investigator in the Portuguese police department in September of 2007. I, that Madeleine, you know, met an accidental death in the apartment that her parents hit her body, that they transported it later, and that the McCanns and their friends are all involved in a pact of silence in his words that everyone was lying. And in fact, when we traced the actual evidence

that had come in back before he came up with this hypothesis, you could see that he was basing it on mis-translations, mis-readings of incomplete reports, a lack of evidence, not necessarily through his fault, but it was just a compilation of all of those things. So, for instance, of a British forensic report. For instance, when the dogs did their barking and did made their alerts, they went and they did some scrapings and lifts from various places and started to do the DNA analysis of those. And what they found was that in none of the places that they actually lifted samples

from could they identify any substance as being blood, they identified no DNA as having belonged to Madeline McCann, and they identified no DNA as belonging to any specific member of the McCann family. They did find some DNA of Jerry McCann on a key fob. Well, they might have done because he was holding the key fob because it was for the car. He was driving. So the DNA evidence was just not there to support the hypothesis the Portuguese police had had come to bank on. And in the, you know, we put this evidence, the alleged forensic evidence to a senior Irish

forensic scientist and she examined it and she said to us, you know, this is a whole lot of nothing. And that's what we had, a whole lot of nothing and that's what we had a whole lot of nothing. Is the only evidence which links the McCann family to the disappearance of Madeline, the dogs and the subsequent DNA furore that came around that? Well it isn't the only evidence because the great feature of this case and it can't be said often enough, is that it wasn't any evidence. No evidence that we've known about any of the, we come to learn about it anyway. There's no evidence, there is witness testimony, lots of it, which is interesting to explore.

But basically, there is no evidence. I think that is the only suspicious finding. People have question marks over the timeline presented by the McCans, but the police have concluded that the timeline discrepancies are the discrepancies of people telling the truth about an event they're being asked to recall, you know, in a time of stress, and people don't necessarily get things to the minute correct. They were on a holiday, you know, they were at a dinner table, they may be off by three minutes, they may be off by five,

but essentially people told the same story consistently enough that they were credible, you know. I think police officers are quite often, and other investigators, if somebody's story is too perfect, that's more of a worry than the nine people who are all basically telling you what they remember. And everybody's memory is going to be a little bit different because she was tying her shoe at the time or she was worrying about her own crying baby, but essentially they all

told the same story. I mean, anyone who's listening who has ever tried to think back to a situation which occurred even a day ago, under no stress, being able to get your timeline perfectly accurate, and then on top of that, people who are listening as well, think about the last time that there was an even slightly big secret that was held by more than five of your friends. Like, it's lasted, it's lasted microseconds before everybody knows about it. The thought that the entire party of nine to 10 people were all complicit in the disappearance

and then covering it up and then never telling anyone and no one ever slipping up, et cetera, et cetera. It seems very unlikely. So you touched on it there, there's no evidence of where Madeline McCann went. Is this almost as if someone's gone in and just plucked her out of thin air and puffed? Oh, yes, entirely. I mean, she of lives, it kind of said, it can't be stress, so I'm going to pour in these dresses again. There is no evidence. It was she just vanished to all intents and purposes completely vanished. What has been interesting

down the months has been quarrying the the testimony. Look, if there was three possibilities, how did the little girl vanish from the flat? Possibility one. Did she, as the little girl who was about to be four years old? Did she wander out at the apartment that night? Maybe going to show mummy and daddy she was about before. Look, mummy and daddy, I'm big enough to come to your restaurant table, which were just 60 yards of the crow flies, the other side of the swimming pool. Here I am.

Did she try to do that? Well, and did she, that was then an opportunist abduction? Maybe unlikely, that happens to bump into the one fellow or woman in the street who wants to stay with child, pretty unlikely. But there is a possibility. The streets were riddled at that time with deep trenches. They were redoing the sewer and water system for the town. Deep, I mean mean really deep trenches. And it is not a stupid theory,

it's a hypothesis to wonder whether she fell into one of these trenches and maybe got covered up by the first scoop of the boulders or in the morning. But the workmen who were working on the trenches said they hadn't seen anything like that. So that is one possibility. Second possibility was it which Scotland Yard pursued for quite a while, was it a burglary gone wrong? There had been a rash of burglaries and awful lot of burglaries, which incidentally none of the people staying at that beach resort have been warned about, but people breaking into apartments to steal money, to do the camera, to the phone, had a burglary gone wrong, had the little girl started to make a noise while the burglar was there, had something gone terribly wrong when you tried to silence her. Well, conceivably, there's no evidence of it, except that there were burglaries and the

were some men suspected or being involved in those burglaries, whose phones were near the apartment that night, checks eventually found. And that they were interviewed and were for a while formal suspects. But there's no evidence that happened. There is however a third possibility which we have leaned towards. We're not claiming to lean towards. We're not claiming to to know anything that is special, but we have gathered all the information and there is the information that makes us lean towards the notion that she may have been abducted deliberately in a planned abduction from the flat. A V. There is pretty good information from three or four witnesses that the apartment was watched in those days, and on the day itself of that disappearance, man seeming to noticeably be leaning on a wool looking eyeballing apartment 5A on different days and seen by the same witness on different days. And then on the very afternoon of

the disappearance when the McCanns and the children were out playing tennis or at the beach doing the things you do on holiday. A woman in an apartment above the McCanns looked down and saw a man who seemed to sort of emerge furtively into the alleyway. This is in the afternoon. And then lead by the little gate that led to the main street, seeming to check the gate to see if it made a noise, as if to see if it made a noise, did it squeak or something. It looked like somebody on a reconnaissance operation, whether it was or not is another matter,

but it did look like that. There is also the matter of the charity workers, and that's what I'd like to describe that. Well, there were, in that period, just around the time battle and disappeared, men going door to door in the ocean club resort and in the apartment complexes nearby collecting for what they claimed was an orphanage in a nearby village. Well, we went to the nearby village and there wasn't and had never been anything like an orphanage there.

We contacted this state agency that operates such programs never was an orphanage there. So these men, whatever they were doing, it wasn't collecting for an orphanage. Now, perhaps they were casing for burglaries later, perhaps they were just pulling off a small fraud, collecting bits and bits and bobs of change, but perhaps they were also doing something else. And one of the most troubling incidents we heard about, and we were told about, was one in which a charity collector came to the door, and while the mother of the house was dealing with him. She noticed that the man seemed to be talking to her, but looking over her shoulder at her three-year-old daughter who was playing on the

floor behind her. Later that day, she noticed the man loitering about. The following day, while she was upstairs doing the laundry, she started to come down the stairs. And as she did so, she noticed that the man was in her living room with her three-year-old child. Now as soon as he called sight of the mother, he scampered away, back out the door and gone, and she didn't catch up to him. But given that charity collector, three-year-old girl, it does sound troubling. And those things were not properly investigated at the time. And we're being investigated by the British police and their Portuguese counterparts

in this latter investigation that has taken place since 2011. But the third possibility and the thing that we've just described about the charity work as maybe part of the third possibility is and it's really startling it and emerge for years until Scotland Yard put it together and made it public which is that in the years before and just after Madeline disappeared there had been and just after Madeline disappeared. There had been 28 episodes of an intruder coming, getting into flats and apartments, usually with British children,

within 40 miles of prior to loose. Now that's a high rate of intrusion by any standards in a small place. And the man would come in, usually, appeared to be from the descriptions of the children as far as they could manage from being working in the night with a swore-the man with stubble on his face, talking English, but in an evidently foreign accent with a sort of funny smell about in which the children couldn't describe. And in one particularly chilling incident, which we found out about, actually, the man had come in and got on to the bed with a little girl who's sister was in the room and she said something like it is that you daddy and of course it wasn't daddy. The man though had had a medical mask over his face covering his mouth and those of his cheeks.

And had cloth towels or tablecloths or cloths run his feet, one would think perhaps to make sure he didn't need footprints on the parking floor, that sort of thing. And on the education, the little girl was not sexually assaulted in any way, but in other occasions, the little girls had been sexually assaulted. Now, the local constrapatory, we described this before, there are two categories in two police forces in Portugal,

the Guardian Thabby, the field, which is the regular policeman, the guy who drives the patrol car around, the guy who does traffic duty and so on. And the PJ, the police here, Judas Yara, who do investigations. Now, clearly, breaking into houses and messing with little girls, is a job for the P.J., the police said to you this year. And in almost all occasions, the mothers of those other children said, I've said, only the local cops came and took down a few details and then able to wear them. There was no follow-up. It is a shocking realization. It plays into the theory, coupled to the man watching, the man testing the gate and the suspect charity collectors. It all plays into the notion

that she was deliberately abducted? That would also the fact that the intruder was so prepared it would appear with a mask over his face, with towels around his feet, would play into the fact that there was no prints that were found at the crime scene of Madeline's disappearance. It might. It might indeed. disappearance. It might. It might indeed. There was a public. Was there a partial palm print? There were a few partial prints. They were later identified. And please don't quote me on this because they're most of them were not identifiable. One of them belonged to Kate McCann. One of them belonged to one of the police officers who was doing

the fingerprint work, I believe. Again, not great disciplines in some cases in terms of gathering the fingerprints. One thing we haven't touched on it, and again, it's important evidence, and it's important in terms of people as they're thinking about this case, is that there were two sightings that have been considered a particular possible relevance, which is that at about 915, please forgive me, I don't have the paper in front of me. The McCann's friend, Jane Tanner, coming back from the tapest area where they were having their meal. And as she was approaching the intersection of the street on which the McCann's apartment was located, she saw a man, a man who appeared to be dressed,

not like a tourist, but more in more sort of heavy, proper clothing than you normally saw the tourist in. A dark jacket and a kind of muster-y or tanny trousers, with dark hair slightly long at the back. And this man was carrying a child. And he was carrying the child like this, if you can't really see in your podcast, but with his arms outstretched and the little child laying across them in a kind of awkward posture. But the child seemed to be deeply asleep. And she was wearing pajamas, he or she was wearing pajamas. And the

reason I use the word she is because the pajama, apparently, had a light pink or florally pattern. Much as later was described by Kate McCann, pajamas of Madeline had been that night. Now, lots of little girls wear such pajamas. It's not a definitive thing by any means. That man was seen. For years, one didn't know who he was. In 2013, the British investigators, the police, came forward and said they thought that they knew who the man was at this point, and that he had come forward originally and identified to himself and had not ever found its way into the record, and that he had come forward originally and identified to himself and had not ever found its way into the record and that he was a British tourist. Another doctor, in fact, who had been carrying his own daughter home from the babysitting service from the crash.

Completely legit. There's only one oddity in that, and those of us who have looked at this case closely have all registered it. And that's that the direction that the man that Jane Tanner saw seemed to have been traveling in the opposite direction of the man that the man might or should have been taking, had he been doing that. Now we cannot explain that, and we cannot explain that, and normally it perhaps has been satisfied, satisfactory to explain to the police. I would note that the McCann family's website where they keep a kind of updated

Postings on this case they remain that that the the police artist sketch of that man remains up and he is still considered a perfect person of interest So I think there may still be some small doubt about that and then there's a second incident a second incident at about 10 o'clock that night, described by an Irish only, perhaps Tony would like to describe that one. Well, about 10 o'clock that night, which is precisely the moment that back at the department, 5A Mrs. McKen found her child missing. And another man, a man, was seen carrying a child coming down the steps, actually, it's a sort of street of steps, by a family of a large, Irish family, of what age? I had a large family. And the memory was that he didn't say anything.

I believe they said, goodnight, because it was late. Good evening, or what's that? And he just didn't respond. War solidly on. Now, he could have been another innocent father bringing his child home. Oh, could he, could he maybe have been, could this have been another sighting, a relevant sighting, of an adult taking Madeline away, that there is no answer in part of this. Much confusion has been caused over it, because at one point the father in that family that saw the child, that child being carried

later saw had seen Jerry McCann, Madeline's father, arriving back in Lestershire off a plane, and he thought, oh, that looks like the guy we saw that night. But the rest of the family didn't think this. I think the father and the family thought it possibly because of the way that he was during the camp was carrying one of his other children at the time that he was getting off the plane and somehow put two and two together and made about 20. They explained it on his gate, didn't they? They said that's the posture. Exactly. He's pasturing his gate. It's posture. posture just reminded him.

On the other hand, there are only so many ways to carry him. That's it, yeah. And most of the point in this episode is the fact that there is multiple evidence that that moment at 10 o'clock during the can was first at the tapas restaurant with his crowd of friends having his dinner. And then rushing to help his wife and searching for Madeline. So the man on the street with the steps would him in. What was the distance between the tapas restaurant or apartment 5a and the sighting by the Smith family? We walked it. It's not five minutes. It's very close.

Right. Well, yeah. I'm not sure, particularly it wasn't clear. So if the implication from Jane Tana, you said, was 915? It is. So there's a, it seems odd for it have to have been the same man. That seems very unlikely unless he paused somewhere. Because there's a 45 minute gap, 45 minute-ish gap between one side and the other.

Now you are relying on both Jane Tanner and the Smiths being very exact in their timings. But they are pretty reasonable in their timings because of Jane Tanner was timing things because of when she was doing checks on children. And the Irish family, I think they were timing it to the time of sort of, but closing time. I think I thought closing time, I forget the exact age of one new, the time more or less. You go to an important point than to hear those after timing. You're on holiday, you go to an important point that you hear those after time.

You're on holiday, you're going out to dinner. There's no suggestion, by the way, that anyone was rip roaring drunk any of the individuals involved. But you're on holiday, it's getting dark, it's late, perhaps they're closing, little bars, coffee bars are closing, it's the end of the day. And you're all on holiday. You're not watching your watch to see whether in the case of the doctors that

they got to go to another patient, they were relaxing on holiday. You can't. I don't know what I was doing at precisely two o'clock this afternoon. And I'm sure you don't either. Agreed. So I wanted to... It isn't yet. No, no, yeah. In three hours time, I'll work out whether't. Agreed. So I wanted to. It isn't yet. No, no, yeah. In three hours time, I'll work out whether or not it is. So I wanted to touch on on two things before we finish up. So firstly, I wanted to ask what the current status of the investigation is. The current stage of the investigation is that every year for the last couple of years,

the Met has asked for a small trance of money, 150,000 pounds to cover six months of work or three months of work. They have scaled back their team from about 30 officers to only three or four. They have said repeatedly that they are pursuing a line of inquiry, that they want to finish before they conclude their investigation. They have a line of inquiry that they think important enough to continue to want to pursue. The money always seems to run out in March and in September and they have just requested funding for a full year.

Now, that's interesting. It's interesting to us and this can only be conjecture. One would imagine they wouldn't be doing that unless they thought a that it was completeable in that amount of time or that they had something that they thought was important enough but perhaps a little bit more complex than they originally had forecast it would be that they really needed to work on for that time. So one wonders the the investigation is continuing it remains an open investigation in Portugal as well but but as of this moment, we're in a

rather a bit of a news vacuum. How about the McCann's private investigation? Is that obviously they will still be doing things themselves, but my impression and it can only be an impression. We have not been involved with the McCanns personally, person to person for some time now, for better of years. But we had the impression that even then as soon as Scott and Yon took over the case in England, and then the Portuguese who had shelved the case up to then got back into the investigation themselves, liaising

and they could be at that point with Scotland Yard, that the McCans who had previously used private investigators to dig all over Europe and beyond. That they ceased and left it to the police, which was only right. You can't have cops and private detectives all going at things. Hamran Chong is at the same time. My impression is that they are waiting, being briefed by Scotland Yard when it is relevant to brief them and trying to get on with their lives. A very difficult task because they are still pursued, venomously, by the, by the internet

trolls. So this touches on the... First of all, spreading poison about their supposed involvement in the death of their daughter. This is not... I don't think we've had a moment to stress it. And if we are soon to complete this conversation, we should... We would like to stress the fact that in all the work we've done on this case, we never found an

IOT of an indication that the Kans had in any way been guilty in vote in their daughter's disappearance. That was the point that I wanted to finish on, which is I think because of the obsession, I have a number of friends who like to read crime drama, NCIS and true crime detective things, a lot of podcasts at Lanter Monster, the zodiac killer, all of these stories which are some fiction, some fact, and then somewhere between adaptations and all of the rest of it. There is a obsession at the moment, or a particular kind of almost romanticizing of these cases in the general public. And I think very quickly what people forget is that there are real people on the other

side of this. It's what we touched on in the beginning beginning that when the internet trolls go at it with regards to authors like yourselves, they forget that it's not just a title, it's an actual person behind it. And one thing that kept on coming to me throughout watching the Netflix series was if, as the evidence would suggest, the McCanns aren't implicated in the disappearance of their daughter, if that is true, the extra degree of suffering that the McCanns have been put through is almost unfathomable. I'm unforgivable. You said it incredibly well.

That is absolutely true. If the evidence suggests that the McCanns are the victims of a crime or a terrible tragedy and to see them daily having brick bats thrown at them, even seeing that there are those who, even having seen the Netflix film, which I think comes out firmly,

they did enormous amounts of research, and it comes out firmly showing the flawed investigation that led to the, the McCanns being implicated. There are still people who are using that as an excuse to vilify the McCanns. I just think, where is your compassion? There is one thing we should say. We've sort of lost

touch in this long conversation with Madeline herself. Is Madeline herself alive? Could she be alive? Well, the answer is, perhaps, the best of the child protection experts in the world say one should never leave hope, and there is a significant figure. The only published statistics on this are in the United States of children that have disappeared, the latest biggest show, 40% end up sadly, I found dead or known to have died. 56% eventually turned up even after 10, 15, 20 years. And so parents should never lose hope. And I think the clear indication is that the mccans have not and refuse to lose hope. It's a very, it's thinking about what the mccans go through. I'm an empathetic individual

and for anyone else listening out there who is as well. It's painful to watch the way that they go through the situation and they're forced to do these pressing to views and trying, they're getting scrutinized for the fact that Jerry McCann and his wife don't show enough emotion. And you're like, well, what do you want me to do? Do you want me to break down crying on air, or do you want me to get the message across which we think will actually help our daughter? Should I be over dramatic or should I try and be productive? And you know, I asked for the people who were listening to think how would they have reacted?

Like genuinely, genuinely, how would you have reacted in this situation? What would your capacity to hold your emotions have been? Because I've worked on the front door of nightclubs for over a decade, and I see when someone gets knocked back by a dormant that they lose their shit. They're answering the air and they're saying that their dad's a solicitor and this is gonna happen.

And you think, right, this was a nat, a nano gram compared with the situation that these people go through. And how he's put, there's no way to prepare for this. One point that I thought was very, very interesting, which was done by the Russian computer programmer that was briefly implicated because he'd done Robert Marat's website. One thing he says on the Netflix show is, no one teaches you how to behave in this situation and he's referring to when he comes out of the, is apartment, I think he gets into a car and he drives away.

And essentially what he says is, at no point in your life, are you taught what is the optimal strategy to do when this happens? And you extrapolate that forward to the higher degree of scrutiny over a longer term that the McCanns have been through. And you think, well, yeah, what becomes normal? What is normal in that situation? Absolutely.

There's no such thing as normal when the child that you have, the precious child that you have, the precious child that you have come by thanks to IVF as in the case of Madeline disappears off the face of the earth, just like that. It's not being normal. I couldn't agree more. Guys, I really appreciate your time for coming on today.

Am I right in thinking that there is an updated version of your book now available? There is. There is an updated version of our book looking for Madeline and if you would like to, we can, I don't know what you use for your publicity, but we can send you a cover of the book. We don't we don't have the physical book in our hands because we're in Ireland and our publisher is in England, it's only went on the streets at the moment the Netflix series came out, but we can send you a JPEG of it. Fantastic. Well, to the listeners. It's very grateful if you would use it. That's fine. To the listeners who want to, as you know, the modern wisdom Amazon Shopfront will have this book in the show notes below.

All you need to do is click through. If you do purchase from there, you will be supporting the show at Nox Recurs to yourself. And also you will be able to do some further reading on what has been a reignited and fascinating topic. If you have some friends who you know enjoyed the documentary, please share this episode with them. I'm sure that they would be interested to find out some more information about this.

And I'm writing thinking that Anthony and Robin, you're about to go and begin work on another book. Is that right? Yes, you tell us what should we be working with that? Oh, wow. Yes, you tell us what should we be rocking about? Oh, wow. I'll tell you what, if the listeners... Done, I know that. And we even, I even, in my foolishness, long time ago, did a book that hasn't been torn to pieces

by the hands yet on the Kennedy assassination. We did a biography of Richard Nixon. We, you've named some of the books we've done. What should we be doing next? Oh wow. What was I like? Well, the Mueller reports just come out. A good idea. I think one or two other people might be paying attention to I think a couple of people and to a man called Trump. We have a thought of doing a book about nuclear warfare, nuclear matters, and because I find that whereas my generation and people younger than me were

acutely aware of the nuclear threat, purring the Cold War and so on. That now you talk to anybody under 40, and to a lot of people under 40 or younger and say, Hiroshima, and they say, what? Didn't quite get that. It really don't know what he was. And mentioned Three Mile Island to them, which of course is not a bomb, but a disastrous leak of radiation from the power plant. And they say Three Mile Island, one of somebody said to me, Three Mile Island, well that must be where they dropped another of those bombs. I mean, Well, that must be where they dropped another of those bombs. I mean, so we think that since the nuclear threat is still real, that maybe we'll write about that.

So, I will put in the show notes below for anyone who would care to listen to it, but Sam Harris recently did a podcast with Professor Nick Bosterham from the Future of Humanities Institute. And this guy is the world expert on existential threats, essentially. And the particular discussion that he had was very grounding. I've listened to a lot of Nick's work and some of the listeners will have done as well. But I'll send it to you guys once we finish,

I highly recommend that. Another interesting point for people who listen to my episode with Jordan Hall, the owner and founder of Neurohacker, also the founder of the Divex Codec from 20 years ago, he is thinking about how to redesign civilization as a whole from game A to game B, a game which is based on conflict to a game which is based on collaboration. And one of the things that he brought up there when you're talking about the nuclear threat and existential threats generally at the behest of humans in the world is that as technology advances, previously it would have taken huge resources to cause a small amount of damage.

As time progresses and technology progresses, unfortunately, it swings to the other side, and as Nick Bossram's famous example is, he says, we didn't know what it took to create an atomic bomb. Now it could have taken putting sand in a microwave. If all that it took to create an atomic bomb was to put sand in a microwave, you would have this emancipated, delegated, distributed capacity for destruction on a huge scale in the hands of people who have a kitchen appliance. Now, fortunately, because of the way that physics are put together, that's not the case. But it might not have been so.

It might have been the case. When some of the first atomic bombs were detonated in the atmosphere, they didn't know whether or not it was going to literally ignite the entire atmosphere and they were prepared to do those tests. Take that chance. Exactly. So I think, hey, if you guys, if you go for nuclear endgame

and that sort of stuff, we're gonna have you back. I would love to discuss that one as well. Although if it takes 25 years, we may be waiting. No, we're not allowed to take 25 years to do it. What do you know? We have children to support. You know that the song that they play at the end of Dr. Strangelove, who are hard to stop worrying and laugh at the bomb,

is, we will meet again. Don't know where, don't know when, but I know we'll meet again someday. So maybe we'll meet again when we do the nuclear book. That sounds fantastic. Guys, I really appreciate your time. Thank you so much for coming on. Thank you Chris. Thank you. Offends, yeah, oh, yeah, offends.