Looking for a cadaver and no longer a child (Expresso)

Maddie Case

Looking for a cadaver, no longer for a child

“This was more than thoroughly searched at the time”. Nonetheless, not even the most skeptical are able to disguise the strange nervousness of someone that feels that something may happen at any moment.


Ricardo Marques | 10:39 04.06.2014

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Searches on a plot near Aldeia da Luz involve members of the British police

The noise of the chainsaw that clears the ground has very little to do with the silence by the sea. Down there, small waves break unwatched on a deserted bay. Up here, very close to the heart of Aldeia da Luz, there are English and Portuguese policemen on a huge sealed-off plot looking for a little girl that disappeared in 2007, nine days away from her fourth birthday.

“A clown show”, say the people of Luz. “This was more than thoroughly searched at the time”. Nonetheless, not even the most skeptical are able to disguise the strange nervousness of someone that feels that something may happen at any moment. Maybe it’s because of the movements on the terrain, with the restless dogs and the English policemen marking spots on the ground. Or maybe it’s just the need to give the story an ending.

Madeleine McCann disappeared on the 3rd of May of 2007, at around ten in the evening. During the following months, the police investigation, of an unprecedented scale, was followed worldwide. The process came to an end without culprits or answers. And without finding the child.

At the end of last year, as foreseen in the closing dispatch, the case was reopened because new leads had been collected by the Polícia Judiciária. At the same time, Scotland Yard had several lines of investigation, which today it seeks to confirm on the ground, based on a request that was made to the Portuguese authorities through a letter rogatory. It is no longer the child that is sought, but a cadaver.

The machines continue to clear the shrubbery near the Casa do Pescador, which lies next to the Casa das Escadinhas and in front of Casa Feliz. There are almost twenty television cameras in the backyard, pointed at a hill where the English police believes a little dead girl may lie.