The Blacksmith Bureau 4/02/2015

Slowly, surely



For seven years now we’ve stuck to the same line: that we aren’t detectives, that we haven’t any theories about how the loss of the child occurred, that we don’t get involved in the dog evidence – except to condemn the way that Mr Grime, an honourable man, has been traduced by anonymous cowards and lunatics – and we don’t have any secret inside knowledge of the case.

For seven years we’ve stayed away from these issues, accepted police findings and concentrated on the one thing we’ve been convinced of – that Kate and Gerry McCann are pathological liars whose words about anything are worthless. Throughout this time the one thing that might convince us that Madeleine McCann is indeed alive is if the parents were to state, as a fact, that she is dead.

We have quoted the evidence month after month over the the years, most devastatingly from the words and admissions of the couple themselves. There isn’t any need for argument about the existence of a list of hugely significant whoppers that grows longer as the years go by: it is there for anyone to see in Madeleine, the absolutely damning blogs, the sworn evidence of one of the archiving summary authors, in Lisbon in 2009/10 and Gerry McCann’s elaborate fictions to cover his Amaral ambush visit to Portugal. No mysteries, no speculation.

Just Not Kosher

Once upon a time, back in in 2007, it was a matter of impressions and suspicions, wasn’t it? A feeling that the pair just weren’t kosher. The appointment of a seriously creepy ghoul of a spokesman who identified himself utterly with defending the interests of Gerry and Kate, not Madeleine McCann, and, indeed, clearly saw the dead child as a soft stepping stone to new riches, strongly reinforced these doubts. But the pair had a real talent for deceit, at least in the short term: to take one trivial but famous example, they constantly attempted to minimise the distance between restaurant and apartment, never giving the actual yardage but always implying that it was insignificant.

“Like being in your own back garden” just stank of dishonesty, yet when people studied transcripts they found it impossible to quote words that were outright lies. Clever, eh? Yes, some gardens are indeed one hundred and fifty feet long from lobster and champagne-loaded wrought iron picnic table to bedroom window, with another seventy-five feet or so of side-passage or orangery before you can actually get into to the house, so it’s not a proven lie, is it? The pair never told us just when they dined al fresco in an “own garden” of such dimensions, rather than in a block-paved Rothley yard on a B&Q bench. But, again, there were no words you could point to as a provable intention to deceive, were there?

Better Call Saul Mitchell

The mutation in late 2007 of Mitchell from a “spokesman” with a defensive brief to an outright consigliore, conspiring with the group of nine to avoid returning to Portugal while helping the parents’ lawyers to iron out inconsistencies in their stories – a transition that he will eventually have to answer for – marked the beginnings of a written audit trail for the lies which grows longer and clearer day by day. Yet one thing, of course, remained missing until recently: judicial examination of McCanns claims and the testing of their credibility in a court of law.

Leaving aside the question of Goncalo Amaral’s fate, why does the lengthy legal examination of the credibility of McCann words matter so much? Because it gives formal, forensically argued and judicially decided confirmation that McCann words and claims are unsustainable before a court. Secondly, not a single witness was found who was able to convince the court that the pair are indeed truthful while, conversely, there was convincing evidence from other, authoritative, witnesses that their claims were untrue, i.e. false. These matters of fact are clearly stated in the judge’s findings, which we’ll look at in further detail next time.

So now we feel vindicated in our seven year struggle to convince anyone who can read that, whatever their lawyers have said, whatever the MSM hasn’t said, the McCanns really are people whose words cannot possibly be relied on, who are dishonest. A future Judge Tugendhat, at any further Alice in Wonderland proceedings at the High Court, will no longer have to squeeze what he can out of the archiving summary and other material helpfully provided by Carter-Ruck when assessing the McCanns’ veracity; he will have page after page of Portuguese evidence and findings before him.

And Next…

Where to now? Consider the implications for the investigation into the missing child. AJS, in the introduction to the second “edition” of the Cracked Mirror outlined the crux of the 2007 investigation:


“Much has been written about the 2007 investigation, most of it, unfortunately, worthless. To understand it properly the reader should forget media comment and concentrate on the two issues that lay at its core.

The investigating officers and analysts found the evidence of the nine unconvincing virtually from the start, though the McCanns took great care to prevent this being known in the UK…In court and under oath in the matter of McCanns v. Amaral in 2009 officers described the group's version of events as a childish "fairy story" which nobody with an ounce of critical judgement could take seriously.

But this in turn meant that the theory of abduction itself was in trouble: the group lacked veracity, according to the police, yet it was the group who provided the evidence of abduction, notably in the statements of Kate McCann and Jane Tanner. The task of the investigators, therefore, lay in establishing the reliability of these witnesses and simultaneously searching for positive evidence of the abduction beyond the nine's claims.

The subsequent story of the investigation is, despite all the glare and uproar, essentially simple: it was impossible to establish the veracity (by supporting evidence, reconstruction, CCTV, statement analysis and telecommunication links) of the group; and it was impossible to find independent (CCTV, forensic science material, eye-witnesses) evidence to confirm the abduction theory.”

Now, eight years later, the civil courts have decisively altered this picture. The PJ at that time, like the UK doubters, did not possess hard evidence to demonstrate that the McCanns didn’t just “lack veracity” but were witnesses whose claims could not possibly be relied on. Now they have it, from the courts. Had they had it in 2007/8 then the parents claims as the sole “witnesses” of abduction from Apartment 5A would surely have been excluded and the investigation would have taken a very different course. And had the prosecutors possessed such evidence, again, it is impossible to believe that the archiving summary could have been written the way it was. Jane Tanner, as we know, has been excluded as a reliable witness to events: what she had to say has been discarded as of no value by Scotland Yard. Who’s next?

Jane Tanner, as we know, has been excluded as a reliable witness to events: what she had to say has been discarded as of no value by Scotland Yard. Who’s next?


Yes, I wonder.