Posted on 09/17/2007 9:42:46 AM PDT by UKrepublican
MADELEINE: POLICE TO SEARCH SHRINE FOR BODY
POLICE in Portugal believe Madeleine McCann may be buried at one of the holiest sites of the Catholic Church
Officers were last night planning to launch a search at Fatima in central Portugal.
Devout Kate and Gerry McCann made a pilgrimage there three weeks after their daughter vanished from their holiday apartment in the Algarve resort of Praia da Luz.
Just four days later they rented a car which police believe the couple used to return to the shrine and dispose of Madeleine’s body.
The search in Fatima is said to be one of a series to be carried out over the next few days. It comes as it was claimed yesterday that Kate could be charged with her daughter’s murder.
In just five weeks the McCanns clocked up 1,709 miles in the car and police want to question them about every journey they made. The couple claim they ran up the mileage making
frequent return trips from the resort to Faro Airport 55 miles away.
They were picking up and dropping off family and friends who stayed with them as they mounted their campaign to find Madeleine, who vanished on May 3.
But a police source told the Daily Express yesterday that officers were not satisfied with the explanation the McCanns gave them.
They now believe the couple made the 500-mile return trip to Fatima to dispose of their daughter’s body.
It is one of the few places in Portugal outside the Algarve that the McCanns are known to have visited in the days after Madeleine disappeared.
Officers want to examine a pasture called the Cova da Iria near the village of Aljustrel a mile from Fatima – where the Virgin Mary is said to have appeared to three children in 1917.
Police believe Madeleine died as a result of an accident and her body was hidden before being moved in the McCanns’ hire car.
They are convinced Gerry and Kate McCann’s devotion to their faith played a key role in how they supposedly disposed of the body.
The McCanns’ visit to Fatima on May 23 was the first of a series of organised trips to raise awareness for their campaign to find their missing daughter.
By the time they signed a rental agreement on a Renault with Budget Rentacar at Faro Airport on May 27, Fatima was one of the few places in Portugal they had been to. Detectives are said to be “very concerned” about the high mileage of the hire car and believe the couple may have travelled a long distance to dispose of Madeleine’s body.
A source close to the investigation said: “We are looking for a final resting place for the little girl.
“We now believe the movements of the car in the days after it was hired are the key to solving the mystery.
“Everywhere they have been will be thoroughly examined. They did not know Portugal well. The only familiar places will be the ones they visited.
“They have said the only places they drove to were around the resort and to and from the airport but that does not account for the mileage they did in the car.”
Body fluids with an 88 per cent DNA match to Madeleine were found in the spare tyre well under the carpet in the boot of the Renault along with clumps of the youngster’s hair.
During police interviews the McCanns were shown a video of a sniffer dog “going crazy’’ when it approached their hire car.
Police had previously been working on the theory that Madeleine’s body was dumped in the sea near the beach in Praia da Luz.
The British dogs brought in by South Yorkshire Police allegedly detected a trail of death from the family’s Ocean Club apartment down to the sea front.
Experts in tidal movements were called in to try to establish scientifically where a body may have been washed up. Another theory was that Madeleine’s body was placed in a sack and weighed down with rocks.
Thanks. Good point. It still seems to make the scenario the police are laying out more unlikely. Actually, I’m on the fence on this one. I think they have acted somewhat suspiciously, but I thought the same thing about Chandra’s mother. People act differently under grief and stress. But I don’t see the professionalism from the police I associate with credibility, either.
I know we don’t have great confidence in the authorities there, but:
“Police believe Madeleine died as a result of an accident and her body was hidden before being moved in the McCanns’ hire car.”
IOW, maybe not deliberate murder, but hiding the fact she died.
As to the dogs - I may be mistaken, but dogs are trained to track particular people. Could not this apply to cadaver dogs, too?
Bump
This would actually make some sense if the parents had accidentally killed the child.
Hell, the majority black jury sitting in "protection" of O.J., wouldn't have convicted O.J. of killing a white woman and her Jew friend if they had witnessed the event themselves....
No fact other than white hate Jury Nullification RACISM or fear of returning to the "hood" if they convicted a black hero was at issue in O.J.'s trial....
Not to mention the accounts of the thousands of other eye witnesses.
I understand your point, but, really, what's wrong with buying or selling an image of a saint, even if it isn't well done? Think of the hours that people spend every weekend at flea markets, collecting ultimately meaningless sports memorabilia, and the like. And no one blinks at that. If you're intent on buying low quality stuff, you might as well buy low quality religious stuff.
I’ve never heard of a cadaver dog searching for a particular person. You’d probably have to have a scent from the person’s already dead body to provide to the dog. They’re normally trained to detect any human cadaver, and used mainly for disaster situations where searchers aren’t looking for any particular individual, and for crime investigations where it’s assumed that other information will be used to identify any bodies after they’re found.
I’d really like to hear the Portuguese police speculate as to where the body might have been hidden for that length of time. It couldn’t have been very close to the McCanns since they were under such constant watch by media and subject to frequent visits by authorities. And if it was some distance from them, yet close enough to still be retrievable by them, it must have been well within the area in which a massive search was underway during that entire period, under the direction of the Portuguese police. The public was under non-stop media bombardment, so practically everybody was keeping an eye out for anything suspicious that could be related to the disappearance of a little girl in the area. If the McCanns could have hidden, moved, and disposed of the body during this period, so could anyone else — like the real perp.
The only thing I know for sure is that I won’t be visiting Portugal anytime soon.
Pardon my ignorance.....did they make the movie “song of Bernadette” based on this?
As am I.
The fact is that there is a very plausible theory regarding the parents being responsible - they certainly could have done this.
But I don’t see the professionalism from the police I associate with credibility, either.
Portugal is a small country and the girl disappeared in a resort town of a few thousand people - not a major city. Holding the Portuguese police to the professional standard of an FBI forensic team is a bit much to ask.
There are two facts here that should be considered:
(1) There was no immediate evidence on the scene that a crime had occurred.
(2) The police originally believed the McCanns' version of events.
The second fact was an understandable police erro.
That movie was based on the experience of Bernadette Soubirous in the French town of Lourdes in 1858, whereas the Fatima vision occurred in Portugal in 1917.
But both were encounters with the Virgin Mary, both involved young people and both involved towns that would later become sites of religious pilgrimage.
If they had done DNA tests on the hair and it matched, they would have said so. My guess is it’s just hair that’s the same color or appears to match.
Also, if it had follicles, that would mean a lot, and they would have said so. Follicles would mean the hair came out by it’s roots, and could not be just normal hair you’d find on clothes, hairbrush, etc.
If they had found a lot of hair with follicles attached, that would be unusual and incriminating and we’d have heard them mention it, imo.
Exactly a colleague at work told me that the dogs that her father trains can still detect death up to 2 years afterwards.
You may be right about the cadaver dogs generally. But it wouldn’t take much for them to search for a particular individual, either. They only need the general scent of the person, not “dead”, just a piece of clothing.
It’ll be interesting to see what’s going on with this. If it was accidental, I’d be asking “what were the parents doing trying to hide this, and making a false report?”
“I understand your point, but, really, what’s wrong with buying or selling an image of a saint, even if it isn’t well done?”
I also too well understand your point.
Speaking personally, a flea market is flea market. But in Fatima, these are not passed off as flea markets. They are passed off as the real thing doing miracles for what ever ails one or for the future just in case. Good luck charms or whatever would be as effective.
I am not contradicting you because you believe otherwise. I like that. How boring the world would be if we all thought alike.
Please jump in again for a great conversation.
Thank you.
Yeah, that's bad.
Is it possible that the corrupt police are involved in kidnapping young girls? There was another mother of a missing child who was tortured by the same police. Involvement in a kidnapping ring would provide a motive for the police to cover up the truth about the crime, and point the blame towards the parents.
Has it been established that they drugged daughter so she would sleep or is that speculaton? I still have questions why any parent would leave 3 babies for ANY amount of time to go eat-especially in a foreign country. As a mom I would NEVER have left babies for 1/2 hr or whatever they said. That fact alone makes me a bit suspicious. Anyone else?
I have raised kids and remember when they were four years old.
A four year old (Madeleine was two weeks shy of her fourth birthday) can open doors. She can open zippers and bottles. She can turn on running water. She can climb on top of furniture and fall off of it. She can get herself into a ton of mischief if she is not supervised.
Would a responsible parent leave a four year old unattended in a hotel room with her two two-year-old siblings with the door unlocked for two hours?
Unlikely.
The McCanns seemed quite confident that they could leave her there for hours two blocks away and just check in on her from time to time.
That's not rational.
A look at the layout shows that the hotel room was a short walk from and in clear sight of a swimming pool - a swimming pool the children had likely played in that week.
All that would be necessary for total disaster would be for the four year old to open the door - and her two siblings could walk right into the swimming pool and drown.
That could have happened in a two minute span.
The parents were both doctors and they were both supremely confident that their four year old would cause no trouble - why?
Perhaps because they slipped her what they believed to be a child-sized dose of sleeping pill to put her out so they could enjoy the evening.
As I pointed out on another thread, a friend who is a doctor told me that it isn't uncommon for doctors to prescribe medicine for their children rather than take a day off to see a pediatrician - and this sometimes causes problems for doctors who aren't pediatricians.
I think it is quite plausible that the McCanns mistakenly gave their daughter an OD, and then covered it up - because if they had been exposed they would have gone to jail, lost custody of their other children and lost their medical licenses.
Another possibility is that Madeleine was in the room horsing around and fell off a bureau or entertainment center or some other piece of furniture and fatally injured herself.
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