Kate McCann
EXCLUSIVE to mccannfiles.com
By Dr Martin Roberts
08 May 2011
MADELEINE - ACCOUNTS OF THE TRUTH
Graphic: Louis turner
Is there an 'R' in the month? It might just determine which version of events gets presented today, the lie of the land governing the lie of the truth, so to speak. Messrs. Carter-Ruck having scrutinized Kate McCann's manuscript and, one supposes, given it the 'all clear' in terms of libel risk, does rather beg the question as to whether they, or any other legal authority, exercised anything like a similar measure of caution with regard to the facts as presented, or was the earlier observation by the BBC's Anne Davies assumed to be authoritative? ('The facts can be changed for anyone'). Perhaps Ms Davies might care to lend her expertise to an explanation of the following:
Speaking of her fateful 10.00 p.m. check, Kate McCann says:
"I noticed that the door to the children's bedroom was open quite wide, not how we had left it.
"I couldn't quite make her (Madeleine) out in the dark...I didn't want to switch on the light straight away...taking care to avoid waking the children at all costs...as I ran back into the children's room the closed curtains flew up in a gust of wind...I saw now that behind them, the window was wide open and the shutters on the outside raised all the way up."
This path has been trodden on countless occasions already during the last four years, but since these claims are being loudly repeated it is pertinent to do so once more, a step at a time for the hard of hearing, so there can be no doubt concerning the accuracy or otherwise of this account of the truth.
10.00 p.m. and 'the door to children's bedroom was open quite wide.'
Matthew Oldfield apparently encountered a similar situation at 9.30 p.m. that night as we learn from his Rogatory Interview:
"When you walk into the room, you could see straight into it, because the door was open...it wasn't flat back against the wall...it was just sort of halfway open, so it seemed slightly unusual that it should be so wide open, because you could see straight into the middle of the room from the angle that you approach it."
During their 'Madeleine Was Here' documentary Gerry McCann nods in agreement with Oldfield's account saying, 'that's how it was for me too,' i.e. the door being conspicuously open. But he has already explained that, when he exited the children's bedroom himself, he returned the door to its near closed position, before Oldfield was called upon to do anything. The effort required to open a bedroom door is minimal and the abductor will naturally be credited by some with having done so in-between Gerry McCann's visit at 9.05 and Matthew Oldfield's at 9.30. Except that the evolved story requires the abductor to have been hiding in the bedroom before even Gerry had arrived there and subsequently to have escaped via the window ('They got out of the window fairly easily' - Clarence Mitchell). The door would therefore have remained in the position in which Gerry himself had left it. Matthew Oldfield did not touch it. And with a wide open window introducing gusts of wind from outside, the door, if it moved at all, could only have closed.
Kate's interpretation of what she saw (or didn't see) at 10.00 p.m. was formed in the dark, with the lights off. Specifically, "The window was wide open and the shutters on the outside raised all the way up." An hour or so beforehand and it wasn't quite that dark, as Matthew Oldfield again explained in his Rogatory Interview:
4078 "What was the lighting like around that area at that time?"
Reply "It's getting dusk, erm, by that time, but not completely dark, erm, it was not as dark as it got later on (inaudible) visibility."
He was however certain about the status of the shutters at this time, i.e. shortly before 9.00 p.m.
"And we talked a lot in the previous interviews about what state the shutters were in, whether they were, and they were all definitely down."
When, after barely a few minutes, Gerry McCann pops in, the shutters are still down:
(GM statement to police, 10 May, 2007): 'Everything else was normal, the shutters, curtains and windows closed, very dark, there only being the light that came from the living room.'
So, by the time Matthew Oldfield made his one not-quite-visual check on the infant occupants of 5A, the abductor had already left the apartment, via the window, having infiltrated during the very few minutes it took Oldfield to resume his seat at the Tapas restaurant half an hour earlier, and for Gerry McCann himself to pick up the checking baton immediately (to the consternation of Oldfield, who thought Gerry perhaps did not believe his account of the McCann children's security); hardly any time at all when one considers Gerry's own comment in the book that they were 'checking on their kids only metres away.' However, the certainty Oldfield expressed during his interviews with the Portuguese police, concerning the status of the window and shutters in the McCann apartment, eluded him somewhat when having to deal with these same issues back home in Leicestershire.
Nevertheless, Kate's account of the truth requires that the shutters were open:
Shortly after discovering Madeleine's absence "Gerry lowered the shutter at the open window. Rushing outside he made the sickening discovery that it could be raised from this side too, not just from inside as we'd thought."
This 'sickening discovery' has to be assessed against the fact(?) that the abductor used the window as his/her means of egress not access. The shutters must therefore have been opened from the inside to enable escape, not outside to enable entry, which the trespasser is supposed to have accomplished via an unlocked patio door (or a duplicate key, if one subscribes to the Sunday Express style of speculation). Hence Gerry's discovery is hardly 'sickening' and scarcely relevant.
After checking all the cupboards inside 15 seconds, Kate hurtled through the patio doors "down towards Gerry and our friends." As soon as Kate raised the alarm "Everybody sprinted back to our apartment."
Down towards Gerry and our friends.
A statement of Gerry McCann's, broadcast on Oct. 5, 2007 by CBS News (The Early Show, from an interview in late August and held in Lisbon, with reporter Mirna Schindler of Chile's Television Nacional, for "Informe Especial") would appear to place Gerry, not merely elsewhere, but actually in the company of Kate as she checks out the situation:
"No, I mean, that, I think, was absolutely certain but, you know, before you (Kate) raised the alarm, we double and treble checked, but we certainly had no doubt in our mind that she'd been taken."
Everybody sprinted back
Did they indeed?
Tapas diner David Payne gives the lie, both to this statement and Kate's claim that as soon as the table was in sight she started screaming, "Madeleine's gone! Someone's taken her!" The following is extracted from his Rogatory Interview:
"Kate came back just after ten o'clock, you know absolutely distraught err you know just, you know her face I'll never forget. It was a face of someone's child who had been taken and you know and very clearly said she's gone, she's you know, she's gone, you know and there was a disbelief on our face you know ah you know you must be mistaken, what, and then you know just looking at her we just all err left the table, rushed over to her and as we were walking up towards the flat she said err you know they've taken her and it was, you know, and I know there's been a controversy about what was actually said but you know that is very accurately what had been said."
From which one can only conclude that Kate's account of the truth is not quite so accurately what was said or, for that matter, what was done. It would certainly appear that her attempts at suppressing the 'negative voice in her head, tormenting her with the words "She's gone. She's gone"' were not entirely successful. Since these were the very words David Payne heard, they must have escaped Kate's head in order to have entered his.
Once the McCann entourage had variously walked, jogged or sprinted back to apartment 5A, Kate became concerned for her other children, twins Sean and Amelie 'lying on their fronts' in their respective cots, and seemingly oblivious to the pandemonium going on around them; something which 'seemed unnatural' to Kate, who placed the palms of her hands on each of their backs to check for chest movement - 'for some sign of life.'
What remarkable powers Matthew Oldfield had demonstrated barely three quarters of an hour earlier! During his Rogatory Interview he described his experience thus:
"So I approached the room but I didn't actually go in because you could see the twins in the cots and one of the, you could see the twins in the cots because they're in with, sort of the cots were in the middle of the room with sort of a gap of about sort of maybe a foot between the two, the cots had sort of got that fabric end and sort of a mesh side, so you could see the sides and you could see them, erm, see them breathing and there were two there and it was all completely quiet."
From outside a darkened room Oldfield was able to see both twins breathing. Had they, like a pair of synchronized swimmers, simultaneously rotated, so as to make the task that much more difficult for Kate, who was standing right alongside them - with the lights on!? For the book she describes her 'hands on' approach to the question of the twins' vital signs. An informed police source relates how a witness, who was present at the time, saw it somewhat differently:
"...it is certain that those children were sleeping, it is true that they did not wake up during all that noise and it is also certain that the mother, according to a witness, Fiona Payne, held her hand under the twins' noses to see if they were breathing."
In the grand scheme of things it makes precious little difference which way up the twins were sleeping, or quite what Kate McCann did with her hands in order to ascertain that they were breathing, although why she was incapable of seeing in the light what Matthew Oldfield clearly saw in the dark is something of a mystery.
So much for chapter one!
Based on Kate's earlier 'diaries' and other scripts ,'Madeleine' has been years in the planning and months in the writing, yet anyone expecting to be reassured or challenged by the revelation of significant, hitherto unreported facts is likely to be disappointed. That said, Kate's narrative will be helpful. In telling us what she wants us to know, she will inevitably tell us other things besides.
