Something for thr Weekend - Dr. Martin Roberts

Dr. Roberts' latest "Something for the Weekend" (April 24, 2015) has now been posted at www.mccannfiles.com under Latest News (scroll down)

Something for the Weekend
Sweeney Todd

EXCLUSIVE to mccannfiles.com

By Dr Martin Roberts
24 April 2015

SOMETHING FOR THE WEEKEND

For a close shave, Occam's Razor is to be recommended. Sweeney Todd too probably had something of a reputation for barberous efficiency. Until, that is, he was discovered to have contributed one too many fingers to Mrs Lovett's pies. (Other people's fingers, that is). Back in May 2007, someone cooked up a proposal and sold it to Dr Gerry McCann, who was busy not enjoying himself on holiday. His response too was, 'Love it!' And so the story of Madeleine McCann's abduction was born.

People seldom do things without a reason, however fanciful. If Madeleine McCann was to be reported missing it was because she was, indeed, 'missing', in a generalised sense at least, prior to the announcement of her absence. Our good friend Occam has recently been recruited to support the idea that these eventualities were closely concatenated in time, the one following the other in an inevitable 'stimulus - response' fashion. It is not at all an unreasonable supposition, for even if we stub a toe we don't usually wait thirty seconds before saying, 'Ouch!'

Not all actions provoke an immediate consequence however. Even in the realm of animal learning, subjects (rats) have been deliberately rendered ill as an experimental outcome, inflicted as a direct result of some prior behaviour. Clearly there was an interval of time in-between.

However good or impoverished a theory might appear at first blush, its ultimate power is governed by the extent to which it accommodates all of the known data, not merely the greater part. If there is some observation or other for which one's theory offers no satisfactory explanation, then that theory must be open to question, unless or until the awkward observation(s) should be proven false.

In the case of Madeleine McCann and her disappearance from Praia da Luz, it is the McCanns who first tempted us with an appeal to Occam: Madeleine was missing. She was there a moment ago. Now she's gone. She must therefore have been abducted. As Gerry McCann huffed and puffed in front of the Lisbon court house fully five years ago now, 'Where...where...where is the child? What other explanation can explain how she's not here?'

Many of us I'm sure could offer just such an explanation, which means that abduction per se, although a claim of the McCanns, is by no means 'cut and dried' as the root cause of Madeleine's disappearance. Similarly, opinions as to the 'spur of the moment' nature, or not, of Madeleine's removal from apartment 5A, must deal adequately with all those contextual features of the incident which are known to have arisen. The attribution of mere coincidence is insufficient when there are so many such 'coincidences' to be taken into account.

The question has been asked here before (The X Factor, 28.2.2013): Which of two opposing views (Madeleine's abduction/removal on the Thursday night vs. an earlier departure) better accommodates the strange goings on that week? Another discussion (the Cerberus Problem, 13.8.11) examined the possibility that Thursday 3 May was, in very many respects, an addition to the narrative of the holiday, and logically quite unconnected to prior events.

To give but one example, previously mentioned (although not discussed) in the article 'Schadenfraud' (30.4.2014), Gerry McCann's receipt of regular text messages, and his predictable recourse to voicemail thereafter was a daily routine associated with the aftermath of Madeleine's disappearance. It was also a behaviour he first exhibited on May 2nd – over twenty four hours before Madeleine was found to be missing.

It would be facile to dismiss these mysterious communications as having no relevance whatsoever to each other since, on closer examination, the schedule of those messages, which Gerry received on May 2, strongly suggests a connection both within and between the different groups of messages (see also 'Chapter and Verse', 14.10.2009). And this quite apart from McCann's perceived need to delete them in the first instance, followed by his embarrassed public denial of their very existence.

Ah yes, but how is that related to events afterwards? Gerry's feverish texting is only to be expected in the light of events.

That's as may be. What is not to be expected however is the daily regularity of incoming text messages in discrete groups, followed almost immediately each time by Gerry McCann's 'cross checking' of his own voice mail. If this standardized behaviour is a reflection of Madeleine McCann's abduction, then she must have been 'abducted' (I use the word loosely) over 24 hours earlier than announced, as that is when this style of interchange first arose.

If the McCann telecommunications from May 4 onward were a reaction to abduction then, similarly, those of May 2 would have been a reaction to something occurring previously. Ipso facto the 'discovery' of the night of May 3 becomes a planned event.

As Clarence Mitchell made clear (for the benefit of Peter Levy's listeners):

"That is the working hypothesis on which the private investigation is also based. That there is somebody, perhaps one, or just two or three people out there who know what happened and that there was an element of pre-meditation, pre-planning went into it."

You bet!"

I can no longer remember, but I'm sure others will.... aside from David Payne, who of the group claimed to have seen Madeleine on May 3rd?

It just seems strange that they were all conveniently not around on that day - not having their usual lunch, nor afternoon tea, etc, but busy down at the beach. Russell can't remember seeing Madeleine in the creche when he collected his child, Matt didn't notice whether she was in her bed that night when he checked in on 5a etc. If only DP is willing to say he saw Madeleine on May 3rd at 6.30pm, why only him? what's his motive?