The Disappearance of Madeleine McCann (2019–…): Season 1, Episode 1 - The Beneath Truth - full transcript
Following 3-year-old Madeleine McCann's disappearance, her parents plead with both the public and police for answers.
Police in Portugal are searching for
a three-year-old British girl
who is thought to have been
abducted from her bed.
Madeleine McCann was on holiday
with her family
in a resort apartment on the Algarve.
Her parents were having dinner
a short distance away
and they discovered she was missing
when they checked on the room.
The shutters had been broken open
and they've gone into the room
and taken Madeleine.
Sixty staff and guests
carried out a frantic search
until four o'clock this morning.
As time passes,
the likelihood of safe recovery
grows less.
Now is the time to be looking.
It's only really just happened.
They don't want the trail to go cold.
The couple and their families
are completely distraught.
It's unexplainable.
Children just don't disappear
from their beds
in the middle of the night.
I don't remember
any child abduction case globally
larger, more high profile,
more impactful than Madeleine McCann.
If you made a dozen movies out of this,
nobody would believe them.
It's the worst thing that you can possibly
imagine happening to somebody,
that their child disappears.
They had tried for years to have a child,
eventually resorting to IVF,
and giving birth
to their first little girl,
Madeleine.
We first got involved in this story
because we were watching the news
one night.
Kate McCann was asked how long
she would look for Madeleine.
And she said that she would
look for her daughter forever.
And our little girl, whose own middle name
happens to be Madeleine,
turned to me and she said,
"Mommy, would you look for me forever?"
And of course I said the thing
that every parent would say.
"Yes, of course I'd look for you forever."
But then I went away and
I thought about it as a journalist
and I thought about, "What did it mean?
What had the McCanns done?
What was the story?"
The case appeared
to be a great jumble
of allegations and counter-allegations.
You need to build a very careful
chronology, devote all your time,
go on a mining expedition into the story
12 hours a day
to be able to lay out, in the end,
what every story is,
to answer the question,
"What happened?"
We've got more
on that breaking news this hour.
A three-year-old British girl
has gone missing in Portugal.
They believe she is still alive
and that they have a suspect in mind.
Police and sniffer dogs
on the streets...
disappeared from her bed
when they were having dinner...
said a Portuguese man
who was involved in the early searches...
A Russian man...
200 yards
from where Madeleine McCann...
We all want to be here for
the salvation of Madeleine's...
100 days since
Madeleine McCann disappeared...
- Certain things about his behavior...
Police and sniffer dogs...
Suspected traces of blood in
the McCanns' holiday apartment...
Please, if you have Madeleine,
let her come home.
How you feeling?
How did you find the scan?
Gerry had a good job in Leicester.
Kate was working part-time as a GP
while mostly staying at home with,
by then, three young children.
She felt a bit uneasy. She felt sort of
a bit odd about the coming vacation.
In the end, it was a vacation
that should never have happened.
Hang on, I think we're on video.
Get everyone in.
Oopsie! You all right?
We went on the 28th of April,
and there was nine adults and the kids.
It seemed like the ideal balance, really.
Having a family holiday,
the kids having fun and not getting bored,
and for us to have
a little bit of time as well.
Madeleine, in particular,
was having a ball.
The Ocean Club
was one of several complexes
in the village of Praia da Luz.
It was made up of purpose-built apartments
and small villas, mostly self-catering.
It had four pools.
It had numerous tennis courts.
It had a kiddie club where toddlers
and smaller children could be cared for
during the day.
Mark Warner were the company that ran
the Ocean Club in Praia da Luz.
To say it's a middle class holiday
would be fair.
The children make friends
in the kids' club
and then the parents make friends or
the parents meet because the dad sails
and the other dad sails and then
they arrange to meet for a drink
and then the wives meet
or they meet on the tennis court.
So it's a very social holiday
in that respect.
My sister and I have been on a lot
of Mark Warner holidays together,
mainly because we play tennis,
and being two ladies of a certain age,
you people watch.
And we had spotted them as a group
because they were having fun.
We arrived literally
the same Saturday
that the McCanns and their party
arrived at Praia da Luz.
It was a typical family holiday, really.
It's a Mediterranean resort.
The sun was shining for late April.
We were happy with that.
We knew Gerry from our tennis group.
He was well dressed,
great sense of humor.
You don't actually stand talking
an awful lot
because obviously you're worried
far more about your backhand
or your lob.
This is Jessica, my eldest,
who was four and a half here,
and she benefited most from the holiday
by being part of the kids' club.
So this is Jessie here,
playing ringleader.
And, uh, this is Madeleine here.
They were of the similar age,
months in it,
and they became thick as thieves.
I remember they'd been out sailing,
which I thought was quite brave
of the kids' club,
but they took them out on the sea.
And, um, they were together in the boat.
Jess's only real recollection
from the holiday
was where Jess lost
her straw summer hat in the sea
and Madeleine launching herself in
to recover it for her,
much to the alarm of the kids' club staff
who swiftly grabbed her and dragged her
back into the boat.
One of the reasons they had
chosen the Ocean Club
was that it was a family-friendly resort.
It operated a night creche.
All of the McCann group decided
that this really didn't suit them.
Kate and Gerry thought they'd
have to put them down too early
and pick them up too late
and they'd just disrupt the children.
The tapas restaurant was across
the other side of the swimming pool
below the McCanns' apartment,
apartment 5A,
60 yards as the crow flies,
about 100 yards if you walked
down the street, under an archway,
and then along beside the pool
to the tapas,
which was a canopied,
pleasant place to sit.
It would seem the most convenient place
to have dinner
while leaving their children
to sleep in their own rooms.
It seemed a fairly natural
sort of thing to do. It was so close.
You can actually see the apartment.
It didn't feel that different
to dining out the back garden.
The McCanns and their friends
decided amongst themselves
that they would operate what they
thought of as a baby listening service.
Every 20 minutes or half an hour,
they would get up and
check on their own children,
and that is what they did
and did successfully
through much of their holiday.
In the afternoon on the Thursday,
nearly a week into their holiday,
the kids were particularly tired.
Sea air and being out
on the boats all day.
Our intention was to put the kids to bed
and then get a takeaway
from the tapas restaurant
to dine on our balcony.
About half-past five,
Kate went to meet the children
where they were coming back
from their respective kiddie clubs.
And Madeleine was very,
very tired that night,
she noticed it,
and asked to be carried home.
Kate said she started to read
a storybook about animals
that has a little song in it
about if you're happy and you know it,
shout your name.
And the children barely made it through
and Madeleine was almost asleep
before the book was even finished.
Kate then went and
got ready for the evening
and had a first glass of wine
while Gerry was getting ready.
He had come in while the children
were having their final story
and said his goodnights.
By half-past eight, they were
walking down to the tapas restaurant
and getting settled there.
They were among the first
to arrive that night.
Matt Oldfield reported to the McCanns
when he arrived around nine o'clock
that everything was quiet as he passed
the McCanns' apartment on the outside.
About 9:05,
Gerry got up from the table to make
the first check on his own children.
He went into the apartment
through the back patio door,
which was unlocked,
and went to the bedroom door
and had what he described as
"one of those proud father moments,"
looking in at his sleeping children
and thinking how lucky he was.
At 9:25,
Kate was about to leave to check herself
when Matt Oldfield offered
to check for her.
He went into the apartment,
again through the patio door,
but didn't go into the room.
He said he saw some light.
He heard a sound as if it was
one of the twins rolling over,
but there was no other sound
and he went away satisfied.
At ten o'clock,
according to the timeline
given of the evening by Kate McCann,
it was her turn to go to the apartment
and have a check on the children.
She went to the apartment,
again going in through the patio door,
and was surprised
looking toward the bedroom
to see more light
than she expected to see,
and the door open more widely
than she recalled it being open.
She got to the door
and then a wind slammed the door shut.
She opened the door again...
and this time realized
that Madeleine's bed was empty.
And the window was open,
the shutters raised.
I then just went flying out
down to the tapas restaurant,
shouting, "Someone's taken Madeleine!"
And that's when the nightmare started.
Our tennis coach
was running past us,
and, um, I just said,
"You're going the wrong way."
And he said,
"No, I'll be back in a minute.
One of the kids has gone missing."
I left my sister in the bar
and I went back up to find out
what was going on.
And as I turned round the corner
and went up,
there was a lot more commotion now.
Someone called up to us,
calmly called up to us,
"Excuse me," you know,
"can you see from there?"
or, "Have you seen a blonde...
Young blonde child?"
And it was at that point
where the alarm was raised.
We bumped into this chap Jez,
who was on our tennis team,
and he said, "Isn't it terrible
about Gerry's little girl?"
And we said, "Oh, my God,
I didn't know it was Gerry."
And that's when I heard
that terrible noise.
It was Kate howling.
I could hear Kate howling.
And it was an animal sound.
I've only heard it twice in my life.
One was when my mother died
and one was when my nephew died.
It's horrible and it's...
It's soul-destroying.
Your child's gone.
You know, how can anybody feel
when their child's not lying in their bed?
"Not Madeleine, not Madeleine,
not Madeleine,"
and I just remember saying that
over and over again.
And Gerry was the same, you know.
It's kind of... I'm not used to
seeing Gerry obviously that upset.
I remember our friends shouting,
"We need to close the borders,"
and they were shouting, "Morocco, Algiers!
Roadblocks! We need roadblocks!"
I just felt so helpless.
By now, word's out in Luz.
Basically, everybody was being called in.
I mean, all staff were there
and obviously a lot of the guests.
They went back
to the apartment and waited
and got more and more agitated about it
and still people were running around
in the shadows around the apartment.
And then the police didn't come.
Gerry went with a companion
to the reception of the Ocean Club
and urged them to call the police again.
A message diverted a couple of policemen
in a patrol car
and they headed rapidly
for the Ocean Club.
There are two different branches
of the police
that are involved in
the McCann investigation.
One is the GNR.
They are sort of the equivalent
of a small town police patrol unit.
They're the first on the scene.
We wandered over to the Ocean Club.
You just can't carry on your evening
eating and drinking and laughing
if a child's gone missing.
So, whoever was available
just went on the search.
I remember the police just saying
that she's probably wandered off
and fallen asleep under a bush...
Allegations are emerging through the...
Which, to me, sounded ridiculous.
I was on my boat in the marina
with my friends
and I had to come back
and there were no lights on.
It should be open till two o'clock
and there was sort of nobody here,
except I think the manager
was clearing up.
And I said, "What's going on?"
And he explained
that there's a child missing
and everyone had gone
to look for the child.
All along the beach,
the children's play area...
There was a circle of area
near the adult pool
that I thought... I've always said
looked like a fairy circle
so I was thinking for a child's mind.
We looked all round there.
Instantly, we were all the same people.
We were all a whole group of people
with one purpose, one aim.
Myself and the guys, we'd suggested
that a group of us bundle into a car
and head north
and suggested that we would spread out...
as long a distance as possible and head
south through the resort towards the sea.
At about midnight,
the local head of the GNR unit
decided he needed to alert
someone in the PJ,
who are the major crimes
investigative unit.
When the case landed,
I was the coordinator
of the investigations.
I was at the peak of my career
after 30 years in the Judicial Police.
The Judicial Police is
the highest criminal investigative body
in Portugal,
like the FBI of Portugal.
Gonçalo Amaral was out
having a very late dinner
and sent an inspector and an investigator
out to apartment 5A.
We came as soon
as it was communicated to us.
Well, not right away.
We arrived after
the National Republican Guard, the GNR,
who also got there late.
The GNR were notified late.
This lateness triggered a delay
to the sequence of events.
When the investigator
and inspector arrived,
they were pretty horrified
by what they found
in terms of the lack of preservation
of the scene.
What we found was an empty place.
It was very messy with clothes,
which is normal, as they were on holiday,
but it was messy.
Many, many people had been
in and out of Madeleine's bedroom
and in and out of apartment 5A,
doors and cupboards opened and closed.
Evidence had been trampled.
We inspected
the place as if it had been a robbery.
It is what you might call
the most "minimal" inspection
in terms of detail.
We eventually ended up
back at the Ocean Club,
where there was quite a big gathering.
It suddenly felt very, very serious
and very, very sinister.
Kate McCann was certainly insistent
that Madeleine had not wandered off.
She was quite insistent
that she'd been taken.
After Madeleine vanished,
it dawned on a member
of the McCann party, Jane Tanner,
that she might well have seen
something extremely important.
At about 9:15, on her way back
to look at her own children,
she had seen a man crossing the road
at the corner by the McCanns' apartment.
I was walking up here
to do the check
and probably as I got to...
It's hard to know exactly where,
but probably about here,
I saw the man walk across the road there
carrying the child.
The child appeared to be wearing
light colored pajamas
and to have bare feet,
and it dawned on her
after it was known
that Madeleine had disappeared,
that just maybe she had seen the abduction
of Madeleine actually taking place.
At around 10 p.m. that evening,
an Irishman named Martin Smith
and his family,
who had been in Praia da Luz on the night
of Madeleine's disappearance,
had seen a man carrying
a little girl wearing pajamas.
They saw a man carrying a child
on his shoulder.
Now, this was just before ten o'clock,
about the same time that Madeleine McCann
was discovered missing at the Ocean Club.
They crossed paths
with a man who was carrying a child,
as if the child was sleeping,
blonde, around Madeleine's age,
and the man was walking briskly.
She described the way he was dressed.
That last morning, May the 3rd,
Madeleine said, "Mummy,
why didn't you come last night
when Sean and I were crying?"
What had Madeleine meant
and what had made her and Sean cry?
If an abductor came,
had he been there the previous night,
been disturbed, maybe,
or not gone through with his crime?
There was certainly
a sense of frustration
on the parts of both Kate
and Gerry McCann.
They were understandably
very, very anxious
for things to be happening
and happening fast
and when they finally stumbled off to bed
for a desperate hour
at about four in the morning, alone,
they woke early and went out
before the first police officers returned
and really felt that they were, you know,
searching for their daughter on their own.
Obviously, we were up
all night and...
we just waited for that first
bit of light. It was about six o'clock.
And then we went out searching,
the two of us, at daylight.
And we were just searching...
through the undergrowth, through bushes.
We were saying
over and over again,
"Just let her be found, let her be found."
Good morning, Hector.
How are you?
Good morning. How's everyone doing?
Hi, guys.
How are we getting on? All good?
Funnily enough, I've kept the hotel bill
from the first couple of days
on the story.
Hotel Belavista, there you go.
From the beginning,
right from the first day,
from the 4th to the 5th.
I got a phone call incredibly early.
Normally if a job came in from
the national newspapers in England,
I'd get a call at 9:30 or half 8, perhaps,
and it was 7 or 7:30
and it was the foreign desk at the Mail.
They quickly told me that a girl had
gone missing, potentially kidnapped,
in the south of Portugal in the Algarve
and could I get there
as quickly as possible to investigate?
More on that breaking news this hour.
A three-year-old British girl
has gone missing in Portugal.
It's thought that
she may have been abducted.
She and her family were staying
in a Mark Warner resort.
Obviously something awful
has gone wrong there
and we'll bring you more on that story
as we find out...
In May 2007, the news came,
a three-years-old girl disappeared
from Praia da Luz
and I was standing at my computer,
astonished with the news.
"It's impossible, not in our country,
not in Algarve.
Algarve is the safest place in Portugal."
And my editor-in-chief told me,
"Go immediately to Algarve."
Praia da Luz in the Algarve.
We'll bring you more details
on that as we...
While on the road, interestingly,
I got phone calls
from both the Mirror and The Sun
also asking if I was able
to cover this case,
which is quite rare to have, you know,
all the papers asking for you to cover it
and so I agreed. I said of course
I would file for them as well
and keep an eye on the story for them.
For me, these stories are often, you know,
kind of mysterious, you know?
Your job is to go and try
and unravel what it is.
What motivates me
being a journalist
is to find the beneath truth
that explains everything.
I have this feeling inside that
I need to run for the news.
I need to be there
and understand because that's my mission.
I just had time to go home,
pick some clothes,
and I was on my way to Algarve.
I don't think they said whether
it was a girl or boy.
I don't even think I had the age.
I didn't have any idea
who the family were.
I fully expected to arrive there
and for this child to have turned up
and for it to have dissolved
into a non-story.
I was thinking that
we go there for two days,
she was going to be found
in the next hours.
I remember driving in and thinking
it was, you know, a fairly pretty place
with nice sort of stone walls.
I'd never been here before,
I didn't know anything
about the village at all.
I'm pretty sure it's not famous
for anything, really.
I don't think there's anything
that any previous news stories
or anything of particular note
that's ever happened in Praia da Luz.
I was growing up around this area
all the time.
Me and all my friends. That's me.
I loved it. I loved being a child here.
The real name is Praia da Luz.
It was Nossa Senhora da Luz,
"Our Lady of Light."
Well, you couldn't really get your mouth
round that on a brochure, could you?
So it's now been updated to Praia da Luz,
which is "the beach of light."
The best thing about Luz is
its beautiful, safe and sandy beach.
As you can imagine, it's extremely popular
with British tourists in the high season
but it's equally loved by the Portuguese.
In 1968, when I first came here,
that is what this land looked like.
Just fields.
My father was a fisherman.
But when the sea was rough,
he couldn't make any money.
It was very hard. There was no jobs.
Destination,
the holiday coast of the Algarve.
You wanted to give
it the air of paradise
and continental and summertime,
making it look like it was a great place
to come to and it was, no doubt about it.
There are apartments,
single and double story blocks
in one part of the village.
They come fully equipped
with all cutlery, crockery, and linen,
and they have the benefit of maid service.
It gave more work to everybody.
Like my sister, she was able to get a job
being a maid and have a wage.
It gave more jobs to the local men as well
because they were building more houses.
There have been interesting episodes.
I remember many years ago
when the tourists discovered that region,
there was a British citizen
who hoisted a flag by the beach.
He had a house by the beach
and everyone was outraged.
All the fishermen said,
"That is Portuguese territory!"
People like coming here
and people like the thought
of having a holiday home.
You know, saying,
"I've got a villa in the Algarve,"
has a certain cachet about it.
And people like that.
They say that the Algarve
is Europe's best-kept secret.
Perhaps they're right.
This is the Mirage.
I built this...
30 years ago.
We have a terrace
with... with sea views.
What has happened over the years
is this town has grown and grown and grown
so we have not much sea view left.
But that's progress.
For 25 years,
it was the most popular bar in the area.
I met a lot of people.
So many bizarre people.
Praia da Luz is a honeypot
of unusual people,
which I find very interesting.
A lot of people lie about who they are
and what they've been.
They come down here
and reinvent themselves.
There is a poem, it's called "Liar Land."
"All silver shores and golden sands
And every morning, every day,
Another liar comes to stay."
And it's true!
Algarve was always
the paradise of the year.
I was so free there.
Very, very safe.
And this is the thing
that doesn't fit in my mind.
How could this happen in the place
where I was when I was a child
and when I felt so, so secure?
The first time
I went to the Algarve was on holiday.
The next time I went to the Algarve
was to work.
They knew me from Lisbon,
from prior investigations,
and needed a good man and a good team
there to fight drug trafficking.
Gonçalo Amaral, when he trained,
was the best student in his year.
In fact, he trained under
the current National Chief of Police.
So he was an intelligent guy.
There are lots of murders
in the Algarve and in our country
and bank robberies also occur
and other violent crimes.
The main opportunities here
are involved in drugs
and that's not necessarily for here,
that's coming through here
by the nature of its geography,
by nature of how easy it is to land it.
The Algarve
is mainly a coastline of beaches
and it's not far from Morocco,
which is the center of production
of cannabis or hashish resin for Europe.
In two and a half hours,
they can get to the Algarve coast.
In southern Portugal,
the Eastern European gangs,
the Balkan gangs,
you've got four or five big gangs
from the UK,
from Germany, from France,
everyone vying for attention down here,
everyone finding opportunities.
Seventy percent
or 80 percent of the hashish
that was trafficked to Portugal
was apprehended in the Algarve.
I was living
with my mother at the time.
I was in bed when she came
and knocked on the door
and she had told me that
she had, um, heard it on the news
that a child had gone missing
in Praia da Luz.
A very serious story
is developing
and is coming through to us.
We can speak now to Jill Renwick,
who's a family friend.
Have they got any thoughts
as to what might have happened?
She's been taken.
She's been taken. That's all they know.
Praia da Luz is very small.
We lived in a house called Casa Liliana,
which was in the middle
of the Ocean Club set-up.
I can remember them mentioning Ocean Club,
so one of the things we discussed
was having a look around the garden,
um, because we have low fences,
some of the fences are low.
So had a look around to see if we could
see anything in the garden,
which... there was nothing.
We're at Casa Liliana, my mother's home
here in Praia da Luz.
While I was in the garden, I'd met up
or had a conversation with over the fence
an English gentleman, um, and asked him
if he knew what was going on,
and he said that a, um,
a three-year-old had gone missing
and they were having problems
communicating with the police.
That's when I suggested maybe
I should go over there
and he said, "Yes, that would be
a very good idea."
They were struggling
making themselves understood
and other people that were there with them
were struggling
to make themselves understood,
and actually that's what I did have,
the language skills,
so that's the only thing I could bring
to the table, were the language skills.
I was driven, that's for sure.
I have a daughter that was relatively
the same age as, um, Madeleine
and I felt that everybody should do
as much as they could to find her.
The trouble is that
the authorities,
the people that might want to help
to look to start with,
but the police haven't been doing anything
since about three o'clock in the morning.
There's a police car sitting there,
but nobody's out looking.
They really need help out there.
I think this is it. This is it.
Yeah, this is it.
This is now what was
the Mark Warner complex, the Ocean Club.
This one here. 5... 5A.
Where are we going, please?
I said hello to them. I introduced
myself as a reporter from the Mail
and they said, "Hi." I think they may
have said, "Thanks for coming."
That was really, unfortunately,
all I could get out of them at that point.
So there wasn't much opportunity, sadly,
to talk to the family about
what had happened the night before.
Initially, there was maybe just a small
bit of tape here
in front of the apartment, the front
and then a bit at the sides,
where the patio doors were.
What happened, then?
Yesterday, around 7:30 in the morning,
her parents... In the night, actually...
And then there was a note
on the steps leading up,
saying, "Don't go past this point."
We went up and looked in,
the door was open,
and I think I tried to speak to them.
I didn't... I didn't want to push
my way through the door
into the apartment, which
would have been a crime scene,
so it wouldn't have been appropriate
to do that,
but I got the impression it wouldn't
have been difficult at all to have
sort of have walked in
and had a look around.
You know, I don't think it was...
It certainly wasn't Fort Knox.
The initial approach,
I won't say it was done badly,
but inadequate.
Why?
In Portugal,
the disappearance of a human being,
the disappearance itself, is not a crime.
It can't be punished.
So the judicial police can't trigger
any kind of investigation
or use certain techniques and procedures,
like wiretapping, for instance,
or surveillance, et cetera,
otherwise it would be treating it
as a crime.
Disappearances continue to be considered,
in Portugal,
as merely something to be investigated.
On the 4th,
Kate and Gerry went into Portimão
to give their statements
about the incident to the police.
One of the things they had stressed
was that their friend Jane Tanner
had told them
of having seen a man crossing the street
carrying a small child in pajamas.
They firmly believed
that Madeleine had been taken.
Kate and Gerry were interviewed,
one at a time.
The police officer sat
laboriously typing up all of the answers.
The policeman at one point asked,
"Kate McCann, is this your first trip
to Portugal?"
And she snapped back,
"Yes, but it's going to be the last."
The ground was being laid for what
was going to be, in the end,
a disastrous relationship.
I witnessed the statements being given.
I didn't ask any questions,
but I took part.
I did say to the mother of the child
that, "Take it easy.
We will do everything in our power
to find your daughter."
They've been searching
all morning and last night,
as have staff and guests.
For now, they have nothing to report.
Obviously, everyone here
is extremely concerned.
One local I spoke to
said that everyone who heard about it
last night has been getting involved.
Photocopied pictures of the little girl
are being handed out around town,
and both the National Guard police
and the crime squad are in.
So that's the state of affairs
at the moment.
She's a doctor.
He's a cardiologist, a consultant.
Saves peoples lives and this is how
he gets repaid?
Somebody takes his kid!
Everybody was looking everywhere
and the police were looking,
everybody was looking.
I went looking to see
if I could find anything.
I have six children
and one of them was only three years old.
I was very sorry for the parents.
I prayed for the little girl.
I prayed a lot for her.
This was a shop I went into,
and as I came out of the shop,
there was an expat woman.
She had a flyer, like a flyer,
a picture of Maddy,
and she was going round and they were
putting them up on walls.
"Have you seen this girl?"
And they had a few, a stack of them
so I said, "Can I take one?"
And really just started
walking round the resorts.
I'm a father of a small girl
who was about to be two, in fact.
You felt it in the stomach.
It's a horrible feeling that, you know,
someone's lost a child.
That summer, we'd been away in Majorca
and we'd left a listening device
in our room and gone down to a restaurant.
And you go, "By the grace of God..."
We were down the road slightly with our
daughter upstairs in the room of a hotel,
but 150, 200 meters away.
Everybody did that
and all our friends would do that.
You know, it was just a case
of as many people helping as possible.
The shops were going on as normal,
everything was going on relatively normal,
apart from a few expats and a few locals
who were sort of helping in this search.
It is a striking community effort.
Whenever we've got the spare time,
we've just got to chip in
a couple of hours or anything every day.
It's just got to be done.
There wasn't any...
any doubt in what we had to do.
We all... We all started looking.
There was a sense that a girl
had walked off at night
and maybe she was just gonna be found
wandering around the field,
she'd fallen down a hole,
she'd tripped up, banged her head,
that she was gonna be found.
There was a big trench here,
from about here...
going down, leading down from about here
all the way down the road,
about this wide and about six foot deep,
and there were two or three guys
working in the trench.
You kind of think,
"Could she be down there?
Could she have fallen down there?
Could they have buried her by accident?"
The Algarve, once you leave
the main road and the tourist areas,
there are wells all over the place.
I could take you a ten minutes' drive
where I live there
and you can just go and look down a well,
which is, I don't know, 100 feet deep.
Uh, I'm sure the child didn't
wander up there by himself,
but you don't know, accidents can happen.
I worked initially with the GNR.
In Portugal, we have
multiple versions of police
and in Praia da Luz, we have the GNR.
They cover anything
outside of major towns.
And it was small translations of people
who may have seen sightings
or what they thought might have
been something of importance.
So I went around and
worked with the police
and just... just, um, helped out.
Between myself and the police,
we set up little groups
to go and knock on doors.
In apartments, through the blocks
that were around,
and talked to people and asked them
if they'd seen or heard anything.
It wasn't deep searches.
It was just literally talking to them
and asking them if
they'd seen or heard anything
and just having a quick look around.
Well, police have just
temporarily broken off their search.
They've been searching all morning
and, as you said, last night,
as have staff and guests.
For now, they have nothing to report.
Obviously, everyone here
is extremely concerned.
One local I spoke to
said that everyone who heard about it
last night has been getting involved.
Photocopied pictures of the little girl
are being handed out around town
and both the National Guard police
and the crime squad are involved.
Officers have launched a nationwide hunt,
alerting ports and airports.
At the resort, sniffer dogs have been
scouring the area for clues.
We're trying searching
everywhere around here...
As news spread,
holidaymakers, resort staff,
and villagers joined the operation.
We set up a strategic search
from the right-hand side of the village
across to the left.
Okay, my name is José Dias. I am
responsible for the Algarve Tourism Board.
There is a little bit of negligence
from the parents leaving,
but I'm very surprised. This is, uh...
It's a strange case.
Now, how come a child disappears suddenly
from a... an apartment?
I'm still very stunned
with what's happening.
So, as the time goes by,
I...
I feel a little bit worried.
It's not good for
the reputation of the area.
Of course it is not,
but I understand as well
that after the first thought,
after the first way of reaction,
people will consider that what happened
here could happen everywhere.
I heard about Madeleine's
disappearance initially via media.
At the time, I was running
the National Center for
Missing & Exploited Children.
And I was also simultaneously running
the International Center for
Missing & Exploited Children.
Today, if your child is reported missing,
using technology and
the latest information systems,
we're getting missing child photos
out to the public
and to law enforcement almost instantly.
What we've seen in the United States
and elsewhere,
uh, and it's very frustrating to parents,
is there's some cases
that attract mass media,
there's some cases that attract
very little attention.
My view was always that the determiner
was the circumstance of the case.
There was a transcendent case
in the United States in 1979 in New York.
Police and neighbors
have combed the area
around the missing boy's home
at 113 Prince Street
several times over to no avail.
A little boy named Etan Patz,
the image of that child was seared
into the brains and the souls
of millions of Americans.
What are your thoughts now?
Do you think the kid is still alive?
Six years old,
abducted on the first day
he was allowed to walk alone
to the bus stop.
The chances... Each day,
the chances of the boy coming back alive
are less and less.
I hope he's with somebody...
wiser than he, who will take care of him.
There were lots of other
child abduction cases at that time.
What was it about that case?
The circumstance.
Julie Patz says she took her son
downstairs,
she came back up and watched
from this fire escape
as he passed down West Broadway
towards the bus stop,
where a group of other children
and parents were waiting.
She never dreamed
he didn't get on that bus,
not until four o'clock in the afternoon
when he failed to return home.
Do average people, average parents
identify with the circumstance?
Does a parent think,
"There but for the grace of God go I"?
A little boy named Adam Walsh
became a transcendent case in 1981.
Adam vanished from a Sears
toy department in a Hollywood mall.
The child wandered away from his mother
in a Sears store
in a shopping mall in South Florida.
We want to help them...
How many parents walk an aisle away
from their child?
We were lucky. We were lucky to
have him for six and a half years.
He was a beautiful little boy.
His murder and abduction
changed our lives forever...
Madeleine's story was like that.
If your child isn't safe at a resort,
where people are having fun
and enjoying themselves,
where is she safe?
So it translates to
every parent everywhere,
uh, and the circumstances made it news.
More on that breaking news,
a three-year-old British girl
has gone missing...
She was asleep in her hotel room
at the Mark Warner Ocean Resort
in Praia da Luz.
I was a general correspondent
in northern Spain, in Bilbao,
to cover a completely different story
about a sailing race.
Thirty thousand miles behind him...
People started to talk about the fact
that there was this story developing
down in Praia da Luz.
It's a missing child in a holiday resort
in the summer.
It's going to connect to
an awful lot of people.
We are talking about
a three-year-old girl.
Everybody has children.
Everybody's afraid of losing one.
For us, it was a no-brainer.
We needed to get there.
We dashed to the airport, flew to Madrid,
Madrid to Praia da Luz.
Hired a car and drove like mad,
and we literally pulled up at five to six,
just in time for The Six O'Clock News
that night.
Let's join Robert Hall,
who's on the Algarve for us tonight.
Robert.
Well, Ben, Gerry and Kate McCann
are still in shock tonight,
awaiting news of their missing daughter.
We're heading towards 24 hours
since she disappeared.
It's an event that shocked not only
holidaymakers in this resort,
but also the inhabitants
of this little Portuguese town.
They've all been involved...
At around five or six,
there was build...
It was starting to build up.
There were already people arriving,
journalists,
someone may have come down from Lisbon.
I remember the local Portuguese press
arriving.
When I've arrived there, we were
not many journalists at that moment,
maybe five or six.
We were all facing something
that we didn't understand at all.
And the main question was,
how on Earth was it possible
for somebody to abduct a young child
and walk away, or something,
without anybody seeing it?
Nobody found nothing.
Do you live here?
Do you think it is safe to live here?
Yes, it's very safe.
This is a holiday resort.
There's people all over the place.
Not to do with us,
people just wandering about.
From a safe resort in Algarve
in our safe country...
In their conversations with the police,
Madeleine's parents have made it clear
that whilst they didn't take up
the offer of child care,
they were confident that because
the restaurant was so close,
it's just over this hedge,
they could get back to
the apartment regularly
to check on the children.
The police are also trying to work out
why, if little Madeleine
did wander into the street,
she wasn't spotted by somebody in
the many apartments that overlook it.
I can't recall in my career
going to a story like that
where it had happened in those
circumstances and in that environment.
It was a mystery.
The English Ambassador arrived in Lagos
with a team of British investigators
specialized in cases of this nature.
I have...
been in touch with
the National Chief of Police
during the course of the day and also with
the Chief of Police here in the Algarve,
and they have assured me that
everything possible is being done.
There is an intensive and extensive search
and investigation underway
and that will continue during the night.
We gathered here, hoping to, uh...
We were told that at some point,
there would be an opportunity
to speak to the family, that there was
gonna be some sort of press conference.
A statement
from the judicial police
and a statement from the parents.
We know that in British
and North American tradition,
parents who go through such things
make direct appeals via television to...
A lot of local Portuguese press
and some British journalists,
but it wasn't huge,
it hasn't really exploded.
They moved the McCanns
a couple of apartments down.
And they came out and this was where
the press conference was, standing there.
It was clearly very, very difficult
for Gerry, that first night.
We've got a very short statement to make.
Sir, could you step
forwards, please?
It was very raw and very early.
It's just for BBC and ITN
because of the microphones.
We've got a short statement to make.
"Words cannot describe the anguish
and despair that we are feeling
as the parents of
our beautiful daughter Madeleine.
We request that anyone who may have
any information
related to Madeleine's disappearance,
no matter how trivial...
At that moment,
all you see is suffering.
I remember that I was
keep saying to myself,
"You can't cry. You are reporting,
you can't cry,"
but at the same time,
I feel that this is not news,
this is not a story. This is their life.
Please, if you have Madeleine,
let her come home to her mummy, daddy,
brother, and sister.
As everyone can understand how distressing
the current situation is...
It was, uh, an incredible moment.
You had been working all day,
trying to piece together
what had been going on,
and it just brought it home.
I saw a lot of male journalists
not crying,
but feeling in pain.
This is not solved. This is not good news.
There's no body.
No one knows where she is.
It's almost 24 hours later
and no one's any the wiser at all.
We ask that our privacy is respected
to allow us
to continue assisting the police
in their investigation. Thank you.
For the McCanns, it is now
a matter of praying for a breakthrough.
You don't have a corpse,
you don't have a lead,
you don't have people to interview,
you have nothing.
Let's go to our top story,
police investigating the disappearance
of Madeleine McCann in Portugal
say they are now treating
a British man as a suspect
who lives just a few hundred meters
from the holiday complex where
Madeleine was staying with her family.
a three-year-old British girl
who is thought to have been
abducted from her bed.
Madeleine McCann was on holiday
with her family
in a resort apartment on the Algarve.
Her parents were having dinner
a short distance away
and they discovered she was missing
when they checked on the room.
The shutters had been broken open
and they've gone into the room
and taken Madeleine.
Sixty staff and guests
carried out a frantic search
until four o'clock this morning.
As time passes,
the likelihood of safe recovery
grows less.
Now is the time to be looking.
It's only really just happened.
They don't want the trail to go cold.
The couple and their families
are completely distraught.
It's unexplainable.
Children just don't disappear
from their beds
in the middle of the night.
I don't remember
any child abduction case globally
larger, more high profile,
more impactful than Madeleine McCann.
If you made a dozen movies out of this,
nobody would believe them.
It's the worst thing that you can possibly
imagine happening to somebody,
that their child disappears.
They had tried for years to have a child,
eventually resorting to IVF,
and giving birth
to their first little girl,
Madeleine.
We first got involved in this story
because we were watching the news
one night.
Kate McCann was asked how long
she would look for Madeleine.
And she said that she would
look for her daughter forever.
And our little girl, whose own middle name
happens to be Madeleine,
turned to me and she said,
"Mommy, would you look for me forever?"
And of course I said the thing
that every parent would say.
"Yes, of course I'd look for you forever."
But then I went away and
I thought about it as a journalist
and I thought about, "What did it mean?
What had the McCanns done?
What was the story?"
The case appeared
to be a great jumble
of allegations and counter-allegations.
You need to build a very careful
chronology, devote all your time,
go on a mining expedition into the story
12 hours a day
to be able to lay out, in the end,
what every story is,
to answer the question,
"What happened?"
We've got more
on that breaking news this hour.
A three-year-old British girl
has gone missing in Portugal.
They believe she is still alive
and that they have a suspect in mind.
Police and sniffer dogs
on the streets...
disappeared from her bed
when they were having dinner...
said a Portuguese man
who was involved in the early searches...
A Russian man...
200 yards
from where Madeleine McCann...
We all want to be here for
the salvation of Madeleine's...
100 days since
Madeleine McCann disappeared...
- Certain things about his behavior...
Police and sniffer dogs...
Suspected traces of blood in
the McCanns' holiday apartment...
Please, if you have Madeleine,
let her come home.
How you feeling?
How did you find the scan?
Gerry had a good job in Leicester.
Kate was working part-time as a GP
while mostly staying at home with,
by then, three young children.
She felt a bit uneasy. She felt sort of
a bit odd about the coming vacation.
In the end, it was a vacation
that should never have happened.
Hang on, I think we're on video.
Get everyone in.
Oopsie! You all right?
We went on the 28th of April,
and there was nine adults and the kids.
It seemed like the ideal balance, really.
Having a family holiday,
the kids having fun and not getting bored,
and for us to have
a little bit of time as well.
Madeleine, in particular,
was having a ball.
The Ocean Club
was one of several complexes
in the village of Praia da Luz.
It was made up of purpose-built apartments
and small villas, mostly self-catering.
It had four pools.
It had numerous tennis courts.
It had a kiddie club where toddlers
and smaller children could be cared for
during the day.
Mark Warner were the company that ran
the Ocean Club in Praia da Luz.
To say it's a middle class holiday
would be fair.
The children make friends
in the kids' club
and then the parents make friends or
the parents meet because the dad sails
and the other dad sails and then
they arrange to meet for a drink
and then the wives meet
or they meet on the tennis court.
So it's a very social holiday
in that respect.
My sister and I have been on a lot
of Mark Warner holidays together,
mainly because we play tennis,
and being two ladies of a certain age,
you people watch.
And we had spotted them as a group
because they were having fun.
We arrived literally
the same Saturday
that the McCanns and their party
arrived at Praia da Luz.
It was a typical family holiday, really.
It's a Mediterranean resort.
The sun was shining for late April.
We were happy with that.
We knew Gerry from our tennis group.
He was well dressed,
great sense of humor.
You don't actually stand talking
an awful lot
because obviously you're worried
far more about your backhand
or your lob.
This is Jessica, my eldest,
who was four and a half here,
and she benefited most from the holiday
by being part of the kids' club.
So this is Jessie here,
playing ringleader.
And, uh, this is Madeleine here.
They were of the similar age,
months in it,
and they became thick as thieves.
I remember they'd been out sailing,
which I thought was quite brave
of the kids' club,
but they took them out on the sea.
And, um, they were together in the boat.
Jess's only real recollection
from the holiday
was where Jess lost
her straw summer hat in the sea
and Madeleine launching herself in
to recover it for her,
much to the alarm of the kids' club staff
who swiftly grabbed her and dragged her
back into the boat.
One of the reasons they had
chosen the Ocean Club
was that it was a family-friendly resort.
It operated a night creche.
All of the McCann group decided
that this really didn't suit them.
Kate and Gerry thought they'd
have to put them down too early
and pick them up too late
and they'd just disrupt the children.
The tapas restaurant was across
the other side of the swimming pool
below the McCanns' apartment,
apartment 5A,
60 yards as the crow flies,
about 100 yards if you walked
down the street, under an archway,
and then along beside the pool
to the tapas,
which was a canopied,
pleasant place to sit.
It would seem the most convenient place
to have dinner
while leaving their children
to sleep in their own rooms.
It seemed a fairly natural
sort of thing to do. It was so close.
You can actually see the apartment.
It didn't feel that different
to dining out the back garden.
The McCanns and their friends
decided amongst themselves
that they would operate what they
thought of as a baby listening service.
Every 20 minutes or half an hour,
they would get up and
check on their own children,
and that is what they did
and did successfully
through much of their holiday.
In the afternoon on the Thursday,
nearly a week into their holiday,
the kids were particularly tired.
Sea air and being out
on the boats all day.
Our intention was to put the kids to bed
and then get a takeaway
from the tapas restaurant
to dine on our balcony.
About half-past five,
Kate went to meet the children
where they were coming back
from their respective kiddie clubs.
And Madeleine was very,
very tired that night,
she noticed it,
and asked to be carried home.
Kate said she started to read
a storybook about animals
that has a little song in it
about if you're happy and you know it,
shout your name.
And the children barely made it through
and Madeleine was almost asleep
before the book was even finished.
Kate then went and
got ready for the evening
and had a first glass of wine
while Gerry was getting ready.
He had come in while the children
were having their final story
and said his goodnights.
By half-past eight, they were
walking down to the tapas restaurant
and getting settled there.
They were among the first
to arrive that night.
Matt Oldfield reported to the McCanns
when he arrived around nine o'clock
that everything was quiet as he passed
the McCanns' apartment on the outside.
About 9:05,
Gerry got up from the table to make
the first check on his own children.
He went into the apartment
through the back patio door,
which was unlocked,
and went to the bedroom door
and had what he described as
"one of those proud father moments,"
looking in at his sleeping children
and thinking how lucky he was.
At 9:25,
Kate was about to leave to check herself
when Matt Oldfield offered
to check for her.
He went into the apartment,
again through the patio door,
but didn't go into the room.
He said he saw some light.
He heard a sound as if it was
one of the twins rolling over,
but there was no other sound
and he went away satisfied.
At ten o'clock,
according to the timeline
given of the evening by Kate McCann,
it was her turn to go to the apartment
and have a check on the children.
She went to the apartment,
again going in through the patio door,
and was surprised
looking toward the bedroom
to see more light
than she expected to see,
and the door open more widely
than she recalled it being open.
She got to the door
and then a wind slammed the door shut.
She opened the door again...
and this time realized
that Madeleine's bed was empty.
And the window was open,
the shutters raised.
I then just went flying out
down to the tapas restaurant,
shouting, "Someone's taken Madeleine!"
And that's when the nightmare started.
Our tennis coach
was running past us,
and, um, I just said,
"You're going the wrong way."
And he said,
"No, I'll be back in a minute.
One of the kids has gone missing."
I left my sister in the bar
and I went back up to find out
what was going on.
And as I turned round the corner
and went up,
there was a lot more commotion now.
Someone called up to us,
calmly called up to us,
"Excuse me," you know,
"can you see from there?"
or, "Have you seen a blonde...
Young blonde child?"
And it was at that point
where the alarm was raised.
We bumped into this chap Jez,
who was on our tennis team,
and he said, "Isn't it terrible
about Gerry's little girl?"
And we said, "Oh, my God,
I didn't know it was Gerry."
And that's when I heard
that terrible noise.
It was Kate howling.
I could hear Kate howling.
And it was an animal sound.
I've only heard it twice in my life.
One was when my mother died
and one was when my nephew died.
It's horrible and it's...
It's soul-destroying.
Your child's gone.
You know, how can anybody feel
when their child's not lying in their bed?
"Not Madeleine, not Madeleine,
not Madeleine,"
and I just remember saying that
over and over again.
And Gerry was the same, you know.
It's kind of... I'm not used to
seeing Gerry obviously that upset.
I remember our friends shouting,
"We need to close the borders,"
and they were shouting, "Morocco, Algiers!
Roadblocks! We need roadblocks!"
I just felt so helpless.
By now, word's out in Luz.
Basically, everybody was being called in.
I mean, all staff were there
and obviously a lot of the guests.
They went back
to the apartment and waited
and got more and more agitated about it
and still people were running around
in the shadows around the apartment.
And then the police didn't come.
Gerry went with a companion
to the reception of the Ocean Club
and urged them to call the police again.
A message diverted a couple of policemen
in a patrol car
and they headed rapidly
for the Ocean Club.
There are two different branches
of the police
that are involved in
the McCann investigation.
One is the GNR.
They are sort of the equivalent
of a small town police patrol unit.
They're the first on the scene.
We wandered over to the Ocean Club.
You just can't carry on your evening
eating and drinking and laughing
if a child's gone missing.
So, whoever was available
just went on the search.
I remember the police just saying
that she's probably wandered off
and fallen asleep under a bush...
Allegations are emerging through the...
Which, to me, sounded ridiculous.
I was on my boat in the marina
with my friends
and I had to come back
and there were no lights on.
It should be open till two o'clock
and there was sort of nobody here,
except I think the manager
was clearing up.
And I said, "What's going on?"
And he explained
that there's a child missing
and everyone had gone
to look for the child.
All along the beach,
the children's play area...
There was a circle of area
near the adult pool
that I thought... I've always said
looked like a fairy circle
so I was thinking for a child's mind.
We looked all round there.
Instantly, we were all the same people.
We were all a whole group of people
with one purpose, one aim.
Myself and the guys, we'd suggested
that a group of us bundle into a car
and head north
and suggested that we would spread out...
as long a distance as possible and head
south through the resort towards the sea.
At about midnight,
the local head of the GNR unit
decided he needed to alert
someone in the PJ,
who are the major crimes
investigative unit.
When the case landed,
I was the coordinator
of the investigations.
I was at the peak of my career
after 30 years in the Judicial Police.
The Judicial Police is
the highest criminal investigative body
in Portugal,
like the FBI of Portugal.
Gonçalo Amaral was out
having a very late dinner
and sent an inspector and an investigator
out to apartment 5A.
We came as soon
as it was communicated to us.
Well, not right away.
We arrived after
the National Republican Guard, the GNR,
who also got there late.
The GNR were notified late.
This lateness triggered a delay
to the sequence of events.
When the investigator
and inspector arrived,
they were pretty horrified
by what they found
in terms of the lack of preservation
of the scene.
What we found was an empty place.
It was very messy with clothes,
which is normal, as they were on holiday,
but it was messy.
Many, many people had been
in and out of Madeleine's bedroom
and in and out of apartment 5A,
doors and cupboards opened and closed.
Evidence had been trampled.
We inspected
the place as if it had been a robbery.
It is what you might call
the most "minimal" inspection
in terms of detail.
We eventually ended up
back at the Ocean Club,
where there was quite a big gathering.
It suddenly felt very, very serious
and very, very sinister.
Kate McCann was certainly insistent
that Madeleine had not wandered off.
She was quite insistent
that she'd been taken.
After Madeleine vanished,
it dawned on a member
of the McCann party, Jane Tanner,
that she might well have seen
something extremely important.
At about 9:15, on her way back
to look at her own children,
she had seen a man crossing the road
at the corner by the McCanns' apartment.
I was walking up here
to do the check
and probably as I got to...
It's hard to know exactly where,
but probably about here,
I saw the man walk across the road there
carrying the child.
The child appeared to be wearing
light colored pajamas
and to have bare feet,
and it dawned on her
after it was known
that Madeleine had disappeared,
that just maybe she had seen the abduction
of Madeleine actually taking place.
At around 10 p.m. that evening,
an Irishman named Martin Smith
and his family,
who had been in Praia da Luz on the night
of Madeleine's disappearance,
had seen a man carrying
a little girl wearing pajamas.
They saw a man carrying a child
on his shoulder.
Now, this was just before ten o'clock,
about the same time that Madeleine McCann
was discovered missing at the Ocean Club.
They crossed paths
with a man who was carrying a child,
as if the child was sleeping,
blonde, around Madeleine's age,
and the man was walking briskly.
She described the way he was dressed.
That last morning, May the 3rd,
Madeleine said, "Mummy,
why didn't you come last night
when Sean and I were crying?"
What had Madeleine meant
and what had made her and Sean cry?
If an abductor came,
had he been there the previous night,
been disturbed, maybe,
or not gone through with his crime?
There was certainly
a sense of frustration
on the parts of both Kate
and Gerry McCann.
They were understandably
very, very anxious
for things to be happening
and happening fast
and when they finally stumbled off to bed
for a desperate hour
at about four in the morning, alone,
they woke early and went out
before the first police officers returned
and really felt that they were, you know,
searching for their daughter on their own.
Obviously, we were up
all night and...
we just waited for that first
bit of light. It was about six o'clock.
And then we went out searching,
the two of us, at daylight.
And we were just searching...
through the undergrowth, through bushes.
We were saying
over and over again,
"Just let her be found, let her be found."
Good morning, Hector.
How are you?
Good morning. How's everyone doing?
Hi, guys.
How are we getting on? All good?
Funnily enough, I've kept the hotel bill
from the first couple of days
on the story.
Hotel Belavista, there you go.
From the beginning,
right from the first day,
from the 4th to the 5th.
I got a phone call incredibly early.
Normally if a job came in from
the national newspapers in England,
I'd get a call at 9:30 or half 8, perhaps,
and it was 7 or 7:30
and it was the foreign desk at the Mail.
They quickly told me that a girl had
gone missing, potentially kidnapped,
in the south of Portugal in the Algarve
and could I get there
as quickly as possible to investigate?
More on that breaking news this hour.
A three-year-old British girl
has gone missing in Portugal.
It's thought that
she may have been abducted.
She and her family were staying
in a Mark Warner resort.
Obviously something awful
has gone wrong there
and we'll bring you more on that story
as we find out...
In May 2007, the news came,
a three-years-old girl disappeared
from Praia da Luz
and I was standing at my computer,
astonished with the news.
"It's impossible, not in our country,
not in Algarve.
Algarve is the safest place in Portugal."
And my editor-in-chief told me,
"Go immediately to Algarve."
Praia da Luz in the Algarve.
We'll bring you more details
on that as we...
While on the road, interestingly,
I got phone calls
from both the Mirror and The Sun
also asking if I was able
to cover this case,
which is quite rare to have, you know,
all the papers asking for you to cover it
and so I agreed. I said of course
I would file for them as well
and keep an eye on the story for them.
For me, these stories are often, you know,
kind of mysterious, you know?
Your job is to go and try
and unravel what it is.
What motivates me
being a journalist
is to find the beneath truth
that explains everything.
I have this feeling inside that
I need to run for the news.
I need to be there
and understand because that's my mission.
I just had time to go home,
pick some clothes,
and I was on my way to Algarve.
I don't think they said whether
it was a girl or boy.
I don't even think I had the age.
I didn't have any idea
who the family were.
I fully expected to arrive there
and for this child to have turned up
and for it to have dissolved
into a non-story.
I was thinking that
we go there for two days,
she was going to be found
in the next hours.
I remember driving in and thinking
it was, you know, a fairly pretty place
with nice sort of stone walls.
I'd never been here before,
I didn't know anything
about the village at all.
I'm pretty sure it's not famous
for anything, really.
I don't think there's anything
that any previous news stories
or anything of particular note
that's ever happened in Praia da Luz.
I was growing up around this area
all the time.
Me and all my friends. That's me.
I loved it. I loved being a child here.
The real name is Praia da Luz.
It was Nossa Senhora da Luz,
"Our Lady of Light."
Well, you couldn't really get your mouth
round that on a brochure, could you?
So it's now been updated to Praia da Luz,
which is "the beach of light."
The best thing about Luz is
its beautiful, safe and sandy beach.
As you can imagine, it's extremely popular
with British tourists in the high season
but it's equally loved by the Portuguese.
In 1968, when I first came here,
that is what this land looked like.
Just fields.
My father was a fisherman.
But when the sea was rough,
he couldn't make any money.
It was very hard. There was no jobs.
Destination,
the holiday coast of the Algarve.
You wanted to give
it the air of paradise
and continental and summertime,
making it look like it was a great place
to come to and it was, no doubt about it.
There are apartments,
single and double story blocks
in one part of the village.
They come fully equipped
with all cutlery, crockery, and linen,
and they have the benefit of maid service.
It gave more work to everybody.
Like my sister, she was able to get a job
being a maid and have a wage.
It gave more jobs to the local men as well
because they were building more houses.
There have been interesting episodes.
I remember many years ago
when the tourists discovered that region,
there was a British citizen
who hoisted a flag by the beach.
He had a house by the beach
and everyone was outraged.
All the fishermen said,
"That is Portuguese territory!"
People like coming here
and people like the thought
of having a holiday home.
You know, saying,
"I've got a villa in the Algarve,"
has a certain cachet about it.
And people like that.
They say that the Algarve
is Europe's best-kept secret.
Perhaps they're right.
This is the Mirage.
I built this...
30 years ago.
We have a terrace
with... with sea views.
What has happened over the years
is this town has grown and grown and grown
so we have not much sea view left.
But that's progress.
For 25 years,
it was the most popular bar in the area.
I met a lot of people.
So many bizarre people.
Praia da Luz is a honeypot
of unusual people,
which I find very interesting.
A lot of people lie about who they are
and what they've been.
They come down here
and reinvent themselves.
There is a poem, it's called "Liar Land."
"All silver shores and golden sands
And every morning, every day,
Another liar comes to stay."
And it's true!
Algarve was always
the paradise of the year.
I was so free there.
Very, very safe.
And this is the thing
that doesn't fit in my mind.
How could this happen in the place
where I was when I was a child
and when I felt so, so secure?
The first time
I went to the Algarve was on holiday.
The next time I went to the Algarve
was to work.
They knew me from Lisbon,
from prior investigations,
and needed a good man and a good team
there to fight drug trafficking.
Gonçalo Amaral, when he trained,
was the best student in his year.
In fact, he trained under
the current National Chief of Police.
So he was an intelligent guy.
There are lots of murders
in the Algarve and in our country
and bank robberies also occur
and other violent crimes.
The main opportunities here
are involved in drugs
and that's not necessarily for here,
that's coming through here
by the nature of its geography,
by nature of how easy it is to land it.
The Algarve
is mainly a coastline of beaches
and it's not far from Morocco,
which is the center of production
of cannabis or hashish resin for Europe.
In two and a half hours,
they can get to the Algarve coast.
In southern Portugal,
the Eastern European gangs,
the Balkan gangs,
you've got four or five big gangs
from the UK,
from Germany, from France,
everyone vying for attention down here,
everyone finding opportunities.
Seventy percent
or 80 percent of the hashish
that was trafficked to Portugal
was apprehended in the Algarve.
I was living
with my mother at the time.
I was in bed when she came
and knocked on the door
and she had told me that
she had, um, heard it on the news
that a child had gone missing
in Praia da Luz.
A very serious story
is developing
and is coming through to us.
We can speak now to Jill Renwick,
who's a family friend.
Have they got any thoughts
as to what might have happened?
She's been taken.
She's been taken. That's all they know.
Praia da Luz is very small.
We lived in a house called Casa Liliana,
which was in the middle
of the Ocean Club set-up.
I can remember them mentioning Ocean Club,
so one of the things we discussed
was having a look around the garden,
um, because we have low fences,
some of the fences are low.
So had a look around to see if we could
see anything in the garden,
which... there was nothing.
We're at Casa Liliana, my mother's home
here in Praia da Luz.
While I was in the garden, I'd met up
or had a conversation with over the fence
an English gentleman, um, and asked him
if he knew what was going on,
and he said that a, um,
a three-year-old had gone missing
and they were having problems
communicating with the police.
That's when I suggested maybe
I should go over there
and he said, "Yes, that would be
a very good idea."
They were struggling
making themselves understood
and other people that were there with them
were struggling
to make themselves understood,
and actually that's what I did have,
the language skills,
so that's the only thing I could bring
to the table, were the language skills.
I was driven, that's for sure.
I have a daughter that was relatively
the same age as, um, Madeleine
and I felt that everybody should do
as much as they could to find her.
The trouble is that
the authorities,
the people that might want to help
to look to start with,
but the police haven't been doing anything
since about three o'clock in the morning.
There's a police car sitting there,
but nobody's out looking.
They really need help out there.
I think this is it. This is it.
Yeah, this is it.
This is now what was
the Mark Warner complex, the Ocean Club.
This one here. 5... 5A.
Where are we going, please?
I said hello to them. I introduced
myself as a reporter from the Mail
and they said, "Hi." I think they may
have said, "Thanks for coming."
That was really, unfortunately,
all I could get out of them at that point.
So there wasn't much opportunity, sadly,
to talk to the family about
what had happened the night before.
Initially, there was maybe just a small
bit of tape here
in front of the apartment, the front
and then a bit at the sides,
where the patio doors were.
What happened, then?
Yesterday, around 7:30 in the morning,
her parents... In the night, actually...
And then there was a note
on the steps leading up,
saying, "Don't go past this point."
We went up and looked in,
the door was open,
and I think I tried to speak to them.
I didn't... I didn't want to push
my way through the door
into the apartment, which
would have been a crime scene,
so it wouldn't have been appropriate
to do that,
but I got the impression it wouldn't
have been difficult at all to have
sort of have walked in
and had a look around.
You know, I don't think it was...
It certainly wasn't Fort Knox.
The initial approach,
I won't say it was done badly,
but inadequate.
Why?
In Portugal,
the disappearance of a human being,
the disappearance itself, is not a crime.
It can't be punished.
So the judicial police can't trigger
any kind of investigation
or use certain techniques and procedures,
like wiretapping, for instance,
or surveillance, et cetera,
otherwise it would be treating it
as a crime.
Disappearances continue to be considered,
in Portugal,
as merely something to be investigated.
On the 4th,
Kate and Gerry went into Portimão
to give their statements
about the incident to the police.
One of the things they had stressed
was that their friend Jane Tanner
had told them
of having seen a man crossing the street
carrying a small child in pajamas.
They firmly believed
that Madeleine had been taken.
Kate and Gerry were interviewed,
one at a time.
The police officer sat
laboriously typing up all of the answers.
The policeman at one point asked,
"Kate McCann, is this your first trip
to Portugal?"
And she snapped back,
"Yes, but it's going to be the last."
The ground was being laid for what
was going to be, in the end,
a disastrous relationship.
I witnessed the statements being given.
I didn't ask any questions,
but I took part.
I did say to the mother of the child
that, "Take it easy.
We will do everything in our power
to find your daughter."
They've been searching
all morning and last night,
as have staff and guests.
For now, they have nothing to report.
Obviously, everyone here
is extremely concerned.
One local I spoke to
said that everyone who heard about it
last night has been getting involved.
Photocopied pictures of the little girl
are being handed out around town,
and both the National Guard police
and the crime squad are in.
So that's the state of affairs
at the moment.
She's a doctor.
He's a cardiologist, a consultant.
Saves peoples lives and this is how
he gets repaid?
Somebody takes his kid!
Everybody was looking everywhere
and the police were looking,
everybody was looking.
I went looking to see
if I could find anything.
I have six children
and one of them was only three years old.
I was very sorry for the parents.
I prayed for the little girl.
I prayed a lot for her.
This was a shop I went into,
and as I came out of the shop,
there was an expat woman.
She had a flyer, like a flyer,
a picture of Maddy,
and she was going round and they were
putting them up on walls.
"Have you seen this girl?"
And they had a few, a stack of them
so I said, "Can I take one?"
And really just started
walking round the resorts.
I'm a father of a small girl
who was about to be two, in fact.
You felt it in the stomach.
It's a horrible feeling that, you know,
someone's lost a child.
That summer, we'd been away in Majorca
and we'd left a listening device
in our room and gone down to a restaurant.
And you go, "By the grace of God..."
We were down the road slightly with our
daughter upstairs in the room of a hotel,
but 150, 200 meters away.
Everybody did that
and all our friends would do that.
You know, it was just a case
of as many people helping as possible.
The shops were going on as normal,
everything was going on relatively normal,
apart from a few expats and a few locals
who were sort of helping in this search.
It is a striking community effort.
Whenever we've got the spare time,
we've just got to chip in
a couple of hours or anything every day.
It's just got to be done.
There wasn't any...
any doubt in what we had to do.
We all... We all started looking.
There was a sense that a girl
had walked off at night
and maybe she was just gonna be found
wandering around the field,
she'd fallen down a hole,
she'd tripped up, banged her head,
that she was gonna be found.
There was a big trench here,
from about here...
going down, leading down from about here
all the way down the road,
about this wide and about six foot deep,
and there were two or three guys
working in the trench.
You kind of think,
"Could she be down there?
Could she have fallen down there?
Could they have buried her by accident?"
The Algarve, once you leave
the main road and the tourist areas,
there are wells all over the place.
I could take you a ten minutes' drive
where I live there
and you can just go and look down a well,
which is, I don't know, 100 feet deep.
Uh, I'm sure the child didn't
wander up there by himself,
but you don't know, accidents can happen.
I worked initially with the GNR.
In Portugal, we have
multiple versions of police
and in Praia da Luz, we have the GNR.
They cover anything
outside of major towns.
And it was small translations of people
who may have seen sightings
or what they thought might have
been something of importance.
So I went around and
worked with the police
and just... just, um, helped out.
Between myself and the police,
we set up little groups
to go and knock on doors.
In apartments, through the blocks
that were around,
and talked to people and asked them
if they'd seen or heard anything.
It wasn't deep searches.
It was just literally talking to them
and asking them if
they'd seen or heard anything
and just having a quick look around.
Well, police have just
temporarily broken off their search.
They've been searching all morning
and, as you said, last night,
as have staff and guests.
For now, they have nothing to report.
Obviously, everyone here
is extremely concerned.
One local I spoke to
said that everyone who heard about it
last night has been getting involved.
Photocopied pictures of the little girl
are being handed out around town
and both the National Guard police
and the crime squad are involved.
Officers have launched a nationwide hunt,
alerting ports and airports.
At the resort, sniffer dogs have been
scouring the area for clues.
We're trying searching
everywhere around here...
As news spread,
holidaymakers, resort staff,
and villagers joined the operation.
We set up a strategic search
from the right-hand side of the village
across to the left.
Okay, my name is José Dias. I am
responsible for the Algarve Tourism Board.
There is a little bit of negligence
from the parents leaving,
but I'm very surprised. This is, uh...
It's a strange case.
Now, how come a child disappears suddenly
from a... an apartment?
I'm still very stunned
with what's happening.
So, as the time goes by,
I...
I feel a little bit worried.
It's not good for
the reputation of the area.
Of course it is not,
but I understand as well
that after the first thought,
after the first way of reaction,
people will consider that what happened
here could happen everywhere.
I heard about Madeleine's
disappearance initially via media.
At the time, I was running
the National Center for
Missing & Exploited Children.
And I was also simultaneously running
the International Center for
Missing & Exploited Children.
Today, if your child is reported missing,
using technology and
the latest information systems,
we're getting missing child photos
out to the public
and to law enforcement almost instantly.
What we've seen in the United States
and elsewhere,
uh, and it's very frustrating to parents,
is there's some cases
that attract mass media,
there's some cases that attract
very little attention.
My view was always that the determiner
was the circumstance of the case.
There was a transcendent case
in the United States in 1979 in New York.
Police and neighbors
have combed the area
around the missing boy's home
at 113 Prince Street
several times over to no avail.
A little boy named Etan Patz,
the image of that child was seared
into the brains and the souls
of millions of Americans.
What are your thoughts now?
Do you think the kid is still alive?
Six years old,
abducted on the first day
he was allowed to walk alone
to the bus stop.
The chances... Each day,
the chances of the boy coming back alive
are less and less.
I hope he's with somebody...
wiser than he, who will take care of him.
There were lots of other
child abduction cases at that time.
What was it about that case?
The circumstance.
Julie Patz says she took her son
downstairs,
she came back up and watched
from this fire escape
as he passed down West Broadway
towards the bus stop,
where a group of other children
and parents were waiting.
She never dreamed
he didn't get on that bus,
not until four o'clock in the afternoon
when he failed to return home.
Do average people, average parents
identify with the circumstance?
Does a parent think,
"There but for the grace of God go I"?
A little boy named Adam Walsh
became a transcendent case in 1981.
Adam vanished from a Sears
toy department in a Hollywood mall.
The child wandered away from his mother
in a Sears store
in a shopping mall in South Florida.
We want to help them...
How many parents walk an aisle away
from their child?
We were lucky. We were lucky to
have him for six and a half years.
He was a beautiful little boy.
His murder and abduction
changed our lives forever...
Madeleine's story was like that.
If your child isn't safe at a resort,
where people are having fun
and enjoying themselves,
where is she safe?
So it translates to
every parent everywhere,
uh, and the circumstances made it news.
More on that breaking news,
a three-year-old British girl
has gone missing...
She was asleep in her hotel room
at the Mark Warner Ocean Resort
in Praia da Luz.
I was a general correspondent
in northern Spain, in Bilbao,
to cover a completely different story
about a sailing race.
Thirty thousand miles behind him...
People started to talk about the fact
that there was this story developing
down in Praia da Luz.
It's a missing child in a holiday resort
in the summer.
It's going to connect to
an awful lot of people.
We are talking about
a three-year-old girl.
Everybody has children.
Everybody's afraid of losing one.
For us, it was a no-brainer.
We needed to get there.
We dashed to the airport, flew to Madrid,
Madrid to Praia da Luz.
Hired a car and drove like mad,
and we literally pulled up at five to six,
just in time for The Six O'Clock News
that night.
Let's join Robert Hall,
who's on the Algarve for us tonight.
Robert.
Well, Ben, Gerry and Kate McCann
are still in shock tonight,
awaiting news of their missing daughter.
We're heading towards 24 hours
since she disappeared.
It's an event that shocked not only
holidaymakers in this resort,
but also the inhabitants
of this little Portuguese town.
They've all been involved...
At around five or six,
there was build...
It was starting to build up.
There were already people arriving,
journalists,
someone may have come down from Lisbon.
I remember the local Portuguese press
arriving.
When I've arrived there, we were
not many journalists at that moment,
maybe five or six.
We were all facing something
that we didn't understand at all.
And the main question was,
how on Earth was it possible
for somebody to abduct a young child
and walk away, or something,
without anybody seeing it?
Nobody found nothing.
Do you live here?
Do you think it is safe to live here?
Yes, it's very safe.
This is a holiday resort.
There's people all over the place.
Not to do with us,
people just wandering about.
From a safe resort in Algarve
in our safe country...
In their conversations with the police,
Madeleine's parents have made it clear
that whilst they didn't take up
the offer of child care,
they were confident that because
the restaurant was so close,
it's just over this hedge,
they could get back to
the apartment regularly
to check on the children.
The police are also trying to work out
why, if little Madeleine
did wander into the street,
she wasn't spotted by somebody in
the many apartments that overlook it.
I can't recall in my career
going to a story like that
where it had happened in those
circumstances and in that environment.
It was a mystery.
The English Ambassador arrived in Lagos
with a team of British investigators
specialized in cases of this nature.
I have...
been in touch with
the National Chief of Police
during the course of the day and also with
the Chief of Police here in the Algarve,
and they have assured me that
everything possible is being done.
There is an intensive and extensive search
and investigation underway
and that will continue during the night.
We gathered here, hoping to, uh...
We were told that at some point,
there would be an opportunity
to speak to the family, that there was
gonna be some sort of press conference.
A statement
from the judicial police
and a statement from the parents.
We know that in British
and North American tradition,
parents who go through such things
make direct appeals via television to...
A lot of local Portuguese press
and some British journalists,
but it wasn't huge,
it hasn't really exploded.
They moved the McCanns
a couple of apartments down.
And they came out and this was where
the press conference was, standing there.
It was clearly very, very difficult
for Gerry, that first night.
We've got a very short statement to make.
Sir, could you step
forwards, please?
It was very raw and very early.
It's just for BBC and ITN
because of the microphones.
We've got a short statement to make.
"Words cannot describe the anguish
and despair that we are feeling
as the parents of
our beautiful daughter Madeleine.
We request that anyone who may have
any information
related to Madeleine's disappearance,
no matter how trivial...
At that moment,
all you see is suffering.
I remember that I was
keep saying to myself,
"You can't cry. You are reporting,
you can't cry,"
but at the same time,
I feel that this is not news,
this is not a story. This is their life.
Please, if you have Madeleine,
let her come home to her mummy, daddy,
brother, and sister.
As everyone can understand how distressing
the current situation is...
It was, uh, an incredible moment.
You had been working all day,
trying to piece together
what had been going on,
and it just brought it home.
I saw a lot of male journalists
not crying,
but feeling in pain.
This is not solved. This is not good news.
There's no body.
No one knows where she is.
It's almost 24 hours later
and no one's any the wiser at all.
We ask that our privacy is respected
to allow us
to continue assisting the police
in their investigation. Thank you.
For the McCanns, it is now
a matter of praying for a breakthrough.
You don't have a corpse,
you don't have a lead,
you don't have people to interview,
you have nothing.
Let's go to our top story,
police investigating the disappearance
of Madeleine McCann in Portugal
say they are now treating
a British man as a suspect
who lives just a few hundred meters
from the holiday complex where
Madeleine was staying with her family.