Famous last Words.....Dr Martin Roberts 29th April

By Dr Martin Roberts
29 April 2014

FAMOUS LAST WORDS

Gerry McCann (to Piers Morgan, for CNN, 11.5.2011): "I think the worst thing though about the focus on our behaviour and, you know, if we could change it we would have. We can't change it, but it takes the focus away from the abductor and that becomes quite frustrating for us because Madeleine's still missing and th...those, that person or those responsible for taking her are still at large."

As interesting as is McCann's verbal fumble here over the number of people presumed to have been involved in his daughter's abduction, the observation of greater importance for present purposes is the clear separation between the guilty person(s) still at large and the McCanns, who, by the time of this interview, had long since been 'relieved' of their former 'arguido' status by the Portuguese. They were no longer suspects as far as the original investigation was concerned. Let us carry forward therefore the reasonable contention that innocent parties do not have to defend their position.

Recent personal experience has illustrated the application of an obnoxious courtroom tactic, whereby the accused, when questioned as to statements made earlier before the police, suddenly 'comes clean', denouncing them in whole or part as lies, occasioned by fear, stress, sickness or whatever. This not only 'wrongfoots' the prosecution, whose case before the court is built upon evidence of which prior witness statements form a part, possibly even a crucial part, but it denies the jury a benchmark against which to assess what suddenly emerges from the lips of the defendant as 'the truth'.

We know, without the McCanns ever appearing before a court, that their police statements are contradictory. They would hardly need therefore to grovel in remorse and invite a jury to disregard admitted inaccuracies within their earliest testimonies, occasioned by stress, insecurity, misunderstanding or whatever else. They made mistakes for which they are no doubt sorry, so let's wipe the slate clean and start afresh; reset the dial to zero (following DCI Andy Redwood's example). In 2011, four years after the case of Madeleine McCann's disappearance first saw the light of day, Kate McCann did exactly that.

In her 'account of the truth', Kate states:
"You may be wondering not only what relevance all these minute details might have to anything, but also how I can recall them so distinctly and how accurate my recollections can possibly be. The answer is that, within a couple of days, every single apparently inconsequential thing that happened on that holiday would become vitally important, and Gerry and I would soon be painstakingly trying to extract from our brains every tiny incident, no matter how small, that might have been significant. Armed with notebook, pen and dated photographs, I would be challenging myself to piece together as comprehensive an outline of the sequence of events as I could. The regular routines of the week helped to make any deviations from them stand out and undoubtedly made this easier".
Leaving aside the rather obvious question of how the McCanns could possibly have given mistaken information to the police in the first instance, having made such a conscious intellectual effort to enumerate every detail of their recent experiences, we should simply subscribe, as Kate invites us to do, to the idea that by now (2011) she and Gerry are in a position to be unequivocal. Whatever may have been said before, this is the truth. All else is water under the bridge. Metaphorically speaking, the particulars enshrined in 'madeleine' represent the McCanns' position at court. And yet, as we have previously illustrated (see: 'Porkies', McCannfiles 1.8.2013), Kate McCann's opus is littered with lies, none of which can be defended on the grounds of duress, memory loss, illness etc., etc.

As observed at the outset, innocent parties should not be in need of a defence and therefore not feel inclined to lie, especially about irrelevancies. With the focus on an abductor out there somewhere and the McCanns concomitantly blameless, what was so sensitive about the time Kate McCann signed the crèche registers, and the name she used to do so, that she felt the need to lie about such things in her book?

Moving forward two years in time, the BBC Crimewatch broadcast of 14 October last featured a reconstruction of events in Praia da Luz on the evening of 3 May, 2007, and the latest findings of Operation Grange, under the stewardship of DCI Andy Redwood. His presentation of the Grange team's analysis was described by the presenter as 'the truest account yet of what really happened that night'.

As a careful choice of words this one statement is surely among the most startling ever made in connection with the case of missing Madeleine McCann. It tells us at a stroke that the scenario envisaged Scotland Yard is not necessarily correct, nor were any of those preceding it.

Of course we live in a world where the distance between absolute truth and blatant lies is often cloaked by a grey patch in-between, but, when pared down to essentials, statements are ultimately true or false. (Were that not to be the case then I could not be sitting at a computer writing this, Boolean logic being the very foundation of computing). Describing something as 'truest' does not place it in the box marked 'true'. It merely raises it nearer the top (but not altogether out) of the box marked 'false'. Ultimately, neither the account advanced by DCI Redwood nor that previously articulated by Kate McCann can be accepted, without reservation, as true. Why not?

Scotland Yard's fall-back position is easy – they missed something somewhere. Kate McCann does not have one. She knows. She was there. And without the attendant pressures of urgent police inquiries she was in a position more comfortably to reconstitute all of those 'minute details' she and Gerry so carefully assembled and recorded during the first couple of days. And yet, according to a BBC presenter, her 'account of the truth' is, by definition, untrue.

Does it really matter? We all make mistakes at some time or another after all. The point is, that should the McCanns ever be called to defend themselves before a court of law, as opposed to a rabble of journalists outside of one, Kate cannot simply open the trash can and toss 'madeleine' into it as representing one or more errors of judgement. In functional terms they have played that card already with their divergent statements to police. The parties presumed innocent would not have a truthful account to put before a jury. The jury would nevertheless have its benchmark .

"We know, without the McCanns ever appearing before a court, that their police statements are contradictory. They would hardly need therefore to grovel in remorse and invite a jury to disregard admitted inaccuracies within their earliest testimonies, occasioned by stress, insecurity, misunderstanding or whatever else. They made mistakes for which they are no doubt sorry, so let's wipe the slate clean and start afresh; reset the dial to zero (following DCI Andy Redwood's example). In 2011, four years after the case of Madeleine McCann's disappearance first saw the light of day, Kate McCann did exactly that."

I just wonder why they were made "arguidos" without ever having to explain their original testimonies or attend a recon which any innocent Parent would be only too pleased to attend as should her Friends.