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The
Madeleine McCann mystery is full of big
questions, of course none more important
than how does a little girl vanish
off the face of the earth, never to be
seen again?
Yet packed up in that troubling,
overarching question, which has puzzled
police forces from Portugal and the
United Kingdom for over a decade, is a
perplexing and sometimes disturbing
chain of wider, unresolved concerns.
The Maddie
podcast is the culmination of two
years' of painstaking work,
investigating how Madeleine, a small
three-year-old British girl, vanished in
Portugal in such unusual circumstances
in May 2007. |
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Gerry and Kate McCann,
parents of missing British
girl Madeleine McCann, show
a picture of their daughter
at a press conference in
Amsterdam, Netherlands in
June 2007. (AAP) |
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While researching and making Maddie, a
project which has included many
interviews of key people in seven
countries spread across three
continents, some have asked, why now?
The simple answer to that is Madeleine
is still missing. And there are
lingering questions which appear to have
never been adequately answered with a
reasonable sense of finality.
Maddie
is a wide-ranging investigation which
tackles those questions.
This case is so complex it requires a
probing, multi-episode podcast to
properly examine what could have
happened to her, and scrutinise all the
unexpected avenues that search opens up.
To make sense of the evidence, test
theories and understand crime scenes,
many experts and people close to the
case agreed to be interviewed.
Former police officers and a criminal
profiler, a DNA scientist and crime
scene pathologist, experts in cell phone
data and deception, private detectives
who worked for the McCanns and reporters
who covered this story all appear on
Maddie. |
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Missing British girl
Madeleine McCann, who
vanished on May 3, 2007
while on holiday with her
family in the Algarve, south
Portugal. (AAP) |
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When it comes down to it, there are
really three likely scenarios when you
consider what happened to Madeleine in
the small coastal town of Praia da Luz,
on Portugal's Algarve.
One: A paedophile or child trafficker
somehow broke into the holiday apartment
where the McCanns were staying and
abducted Maddie.
Two: A thief broke into the McCann’s
apartment 5A, bungled the robbery, and
stole Maddie from the bedroom where she
slept alongside her younger brother and
sister, Sean and Amelie.
Three: Something else happened to
Madeleine involving someone known to the
family, and there has been an elaborate
cover-up that has somehow lasted for
more than a decade.
As one former long-serving police
officer said in his Maddie interview,
this is a case which can strongly divide
opinions around a family dinner table.
Since 2007, her mum and dad Kate and
Gerry have steadfastly denied they were
involved in any crime which occurred
inside apartment 5A of the Ocean Club
Resort.
Police have never charged Madeleine's
parents, but during the investigation
they were at one time declared arguidos,
the Portuguese term for formal suspects. |
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Kate McCann, the mother of
missing British girl
Madeleine McCann, arrives at
the police station in
Portimao, southern Portugal,
to be questioned in
September 2007. (AAP) |
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Law enforcement officials who appear on
Maddie have highlighted possible "red
flags" in the accounts the McCanns and
their seven adult friends, known as the
Tapas 7, gave to police. They also
examine the evidence that supports the
theory that Maddie was abducted by a
stranger.
In Maddie, a highly respected
figure in the field of solving crimes
zeroes in on what was a potentially
case-changing piece of evidence in the
original police investigation.
That interview could radically alter the
direction of the case, and help answer
the question: what happened to
Maddie? |
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