I have a very controversial, strange, eccentric theory why Chris Watts may have felt he couldn’t just walk out the door. It has to do with the fact that Shan’ann was fifteen weeks pregnant. I think that was sort of a factor for why he felt locked-in, but more important, why Shan’ann would have felt even more locked-in and ready to do battle [for the house, custody and alimony].
I also think if Shan’ann was a less controlling personality, including less controlling of the family finances and bank accounts, Chris Watts may have felt he had the chutzpah to just chuck the marriage and walk out.
I think it’s naive, and more than a little disingenuous, for Frank Rzucek to sort of imply that Watts was completely free to leave, and if he did, Shan’ann [and everyone else] would be fine with it. Sandi Rzucek also told Dr. Phil that Shan’ann would have coped, and been just fine without Watts’ help and support? Really? Well Shan’ann didn’t think so.
Chris Watts clearly didn’t think walking out and not looking back was an option. And neither did Cassie or Nickole.
As unpleasant and difficult as it is for many people to do, we also have to imagine what it is like for an introverted/non-confrontational personality type to deal with a dominating/intimidating/wear-the-pants type of controlling person. To many ordinary people, confrontation – even confrontation of a domineering, extroverted personality [say, someone like Trump, or even Oprah] – is no big deal. But to an introvert confrontation itself is so terrifying it’s taboo.
We know how Shan’ann reacted to “small” things like the $68 charge on her credit card. She Googled the menu, checked prices, checked when the Rockies game ended and called Chris Watts, questioned him and told him to keep the receipt.
Her response to nutgate was to make a scene of Facebook, and block Chris Watts’ parents out of her children’s and husband’s lives, and this was sketched as for everyone’s own good and in their best interests.
Whether you agree with Shan’ann’s approach or not, the point is, if she reacted in this way to a $68 bill and nuts in icecream, imagine how Watts felt or imagined Shan’ann might respond to something really fucking serious, like a full-blown betrayal [during her pregnancy] like an affair and the prospect of them losing/selling the house.
That was really the bottom line. Watts thought of the house as his. Since we have no idea how much Shan’ann was actually earning [or spending] it’s difficult to tell whether Watts was holding the entire fort financially, or most of it, or how much of it. But for various reasons he didn’t want to share the house with his wife or children.
In the real world, if he [or anyone else] had said to his family, do you mind going away and letting me keep the house? No one would! So this idea punted on Dr. Phil by Shan’ann’s father, that Watts could simply walk out of his house [obviously leaving his house to his family] is ludicrous, and explains why Frank can’t begin to understand “why”. Chris Watts didn’t have a good reason reason for committing his diabolical crimes against his beautiful family, but that’s different to saying he had NO reason.
The Netflix docuseries undermines the Portuguese cops at every turn, but then turns to the lead detective to second guess the cadaver dog evidence.
Although Amaral can be commended for his scenario of what happened, many of his insights and overall approach to the investigation seem to spot-on [far more so than the dubious efforts of British law enforcement over ten or more years], one serious weakness was Amaral’s attitude to the canine searches.
Understandably, the cops don’t like to be “told” what’s happening in an investigation, whether it’s the media yapping at them, the suspects, or worst of all [and most embarrassing of all] barking dogs.
In a few high-profile cases the cadaver dogs figured out the status of the victim months before law enforcement did. The “disappearance” of Laci Peterson and the Casey Anthony cases are infamous examples of cadaver dog alerts right in the beginning, and the Chris Watts case is [arguably] a current example.
It is patently ridiculous, in my view, for searches to continue into victims imagined to still be alive when multiple cadaver traces are linked to these victims, especially when the victims remain unaccountably absent for months and months, and in this case, twelve inexplicable years.
There is simply no getting around the fact that human cadaver odors and human cadaver traces are formed by human cadavers – dead people.
Clearly the Portuguese police in 2007 were familiar with sniffer dogs, in fact it’s obvious from media coverage at the time that the GNR had them on the scene virtually immediately.
But cadaver dogs are a very specialised, highly trained and expensive law enforcement resource. They’re an unusual tool typically deployed in the unusual circumstance where there’s no evidence of foul play, but simultaneously there’s a sinister aspect to an alleged disappearance.
When South Africa’s Danie Krugel departed Praia da Luz in July 2007 after conducting his own search, he left a “by the way” comment to the Portuguese authorities, suggesting they use cadaver dogs.
It was a suggestion the cops hadn’t considered since they were scraping the barrel in terms of dead-ends and bogus sighting, they took his suggestion seriously. As a testament to just how specialised these canine units were at the time, the Polícia Judiciária had to outsource the expertise to Martin Grimes, a well-regarded dog handler [and ex-cop] in Britain.
Keela is hired out at £530 per day, plus expenses. If she worked every day of the year,she would earn almost £200,000 – about £70,000 more than her force’s chief constable. Forces worldwide have expressed interest in her specialist training and Keela will be travelling to America in the new year to help the FBI with two murder inquiries. A South Yorkshire force spokeswoman said Keela – officially a crime scene investigation dog – has saved more then £200,000 nationally since April this year, helping with investigations in Ireland, Cornwall, Wiltshire, Surrey and the Thames Valley.
Of course as soon as the cops elect to bring in cadaver dogs, irrespective of whether they find anything or not, the whole focus of the investigation shifts. As soon as human remains are being searched for, the police search becomes far more serious, along with the potential allegations. The pendulum of justice swings from the relatively benign search for a missing person [who is alive] to the possibility of a homicide investigation.
The search for a living person wandering around [as occurred on May 3rd, and for the next three months] tends to be about line-of-sight and above-ground. Searching for a dead person is the opposite – it involves searching below ground, or for evidence that is invisible or extremely difficult to perceive or detect. Typically in less than straight-forward murder investigations where the victims remains are unaccounted for, other evidence including clothing, hairs and other traces are purposefully concealed, hidden, cleaned, destroyed, removed or manipulated in some way.
It’s interesting that when the dogs detected cadaver traces, the McCanns weren’t arrested on the spot. Surely if you’ve been making the case in public of an abduction, and evidence emerges that some other quite different scenario has occurred, one immediately has a case for obstruction of justice. Well, the Ramsey case is an example where even the discovery of the child dead in the family basement didn’t lead to the immediate arrest of any of the family members, and the parents were only questioned at length several months later.
The hesitation of the authorities may have had something to do with 1) the combination of the massive PR and political clout the McCanns had achieved by August 2007, but also 2) the lack of experience the Polícia Judiciária evidently had with cadaver dogs. If a cadaver dog alerted, did it really mean anything?
In the above clip Gerry McCann’s response to the cadaver dog evidence is to call it “unreliable”, and yet in the garage test, no one told Eddie [or Grimes for that matter] which car belonged to the McCanns. Murat’s car and Sergey Malinka’s car were also checked, along with several others. The dogs only alerted on the outside and inside the McCann’s Renault Scenic.
Aside from the admissibility of the cadaver dog evidence, or whether it even constitutes evidence that could be or should be tested in court, I find the narrative around the introduction of the cadaver dogs the most fascinating.
In chapter 14 of Amaral’s book, he spends some time interrogating the confluence of unusual events leading to the use of cadaver dogs. Kate McCann also refers to having a dream about Madeleine in her book in late July. But this “turning point” was only reported in the media in 2010, seven long years after the fact, and only because it emerged in a court action initiated by the McCanns to force Amaral into remaining silent on these damning allegations.
As I pointed out in DOUBT, it was a curious thing that Kate’s dream [implying for the first time that Madeleine was dead] coincided with Gerry’s trip to the USA in late July, and followed shortly on Krugel’s visit in mid-July.
“She gave me the impression she thought Madeleine was dead.” The area was searched unsuccessfully with sniffer dogs. As well as the hillside, they are believed to be concentrating on a road that had been under repair near the McCanns’ Ocean Club apartment, on wasteland to the south, and on land at a beach to the east.
But a source at the FSStold the Evening Standard: “There is no reason to change the direction of the investigation and everything that has emerged indicates that it is focusing where it should. This is a very complex case and forensics are rarely conclusive on their own, but the new material adds to the existing picture that has been built up by police and fills in a few more pieces of the jigsaw.”
The source is said to have claimed that the samples were of sufficient quality to distinguish between Madeleine’s DNA and that of her twin siblings Sean and Amelie or her parents. It was conceded however that the quality of the DNA samples taken by British officers was not as good as it would have been if the Portuguese had collected it earlier.
The McCanns’ supporters insist…it was their own efforts to kick start the investigation that led to them being named as suspects. The sniffer cadaver dogs said to have picked up the scent of a corpse on Mrs McCann were only brought in after the couple gave the go ahead for retired South African police officer Daniel Krugel – dubbed the Locator – to conduct a search. He uses a secret scientific method to find murder victims by following their DNA trail with the help of global positioning satellites. A family friend said: “The irony for Kate and Gerry is that through them trying to move the case forward and be proactive it’s actually led to them being made suspects.
It is thought the McCanns initially welcomed Krugel’s help – but have since changed their minds. A source close to Kate and Gerry, who gave Krugel a strand of Madeleine’s hair after he flew to Portugal in July, said they are unconvinced by his claims and are keeping him “at arm’s length”.
Krugel, 42, contacted the family offering assistance two days after Madeleine disappeared on May 3. In July Gerry allegedly rang him back to accept his offer after receiving a string of emails urging the family to use the South African. Krugel has told the Mirror his machine quickly traced Madeleine. He said: “I went to Praia da Luz in the middle of July and did the tests on Madeleine. “I stayed there for four days, working at night time and all the data was the same. She was there in an area within walking distance of Praia da Luz but it is a very difficult area, with few houses. In my opinion the chances of her being alive are very, very slim.”
He said he gave the McCanns and police a map and an aerial photo of an 800-metre area they must search. Krugel reportedly also first suggested that sniffer cadaver dogs be bought in to search the McCann’s apartment. It was the sniffer cadaver dogs discovery of forensic evidence in the apartment that eventually led to Kate and Gerry, from Rothley, Leics, being officially designated as suspects in the case.
Note the screengrabs above are sourced from 3:08 in the Sky News documentary clip provided below.
It’s possible Krugel and the McCanns had a falling out of some sort, either because Krugel made the allegation that Madeleine was dead [and let’s face it, before anyone else did, bar none] or because they “held him at arm’s length” Krugel felt insulted at this treatment.
Much ado has been made of Krugels’ eccentric methods, with some justification of course, but as a result Krugel hasn’t been credited with pushing the McCann investigation where it really needed to go.
Ironically I had a brush with Krugel myself. In 2017, ironically just as I was completing my exhaustive research and a trilogy of books on the McCann case, I bumped into Krugel at the airport.
I recognized his trademark Inspector Clouseaumoustache immediately. I was surprised by how tall he was, over six-foot. It was weird, and frankly disconcerting, to have worked as a virtual hermit for months on end, solely on the McCann case, and then literally the day I emerged from my cave to fly for a holiday [and freelance assignment] to Mauritius, lo and behold, I bumped into a character right out of the true crime case I’d been working on.
I was tempted to speak to him, but in the end elected not to. I noticed Krugel eyeballing me at one point, so either he’d already made me, or he’d cottoned on to me checking him out, and even snapping the odd photo of him while he was drinking coffee at one point.
Later, when we disembarked from the flight, an elderly woman tripped as she stepped off the bus, and Krugel sprinted over to help her. Despite his being a fairly senior fellow, more senior than me at any rate, he reacted instantly, coming to her aid before anyone else did, including me. That incident made an impression and made me wonder if I too had a view that was too cynical.
Krugel’s entry in the McCann narrative changed everything, and if anything, it’s regrettable that it didn’t change the story and the outcome more than it has.
In DOUBT I make the case that wittingly or not, the area Krugel searched was a misdirection. The reason – I argue – that Madeleine’s remains weren’t found during the crucial month of July 2007 was because the search teams were all looking where they were told or directed to look [including by Kate McCann and her dream] – on the East side of Praia da Luz, the Rocha Negra side.
There’s plenty of reason to believe Madeleine’s remains were stowed on the other side, the west side of Praia da Luz, at least temporarily. And this side corresponds very closely to where the Smith sighting occurred.
Playing us for fools? For twelve years? I know, I know, it’s a ridiculous [say that with a Scottish accent, it sounds stronger] and ludicrous thing to say.
So how about putting the question otherwise.
Have the McCanns been laughing at us for twelve years?
Have they laughed, smiled, chuckled or sneered during interviews over the past many years?
Below is another edit from the same interview, a follow-up answer to the “did you kill your daughter?” question.
Notice how the media have tried to cut this clip below [viewed almost 900 000 times to date] right where both Kate and Gerry are smiling, and Gerry reaches up to scratch his nose. Instead the edit flips back to the interviewer, who is herself beaming after asking whether the parents killed their own child.
— Madeleine CaseTweets🌐 (@McCannCaseTweet) April 19, 2018
Sometimes it’s easier to appreciate and catch the micro-expressions where the interview is frozen into separate screengrabs. Take note of the deadly series import of the question that’s being asked, and the serious potential implications of the question, versus the lighthearted, dismissive expressions and arguably an almost sneering contempt in the response.
Notice how, at about 3:30 in the video below, Gerry compares losing Madeleine and getting over her to “getting over student debt” and “getting back into the black.”
Donations to the Find Madeleine McCann fund fell from almost £2 million to £650,000 in just one year, it was revealed yesterday. Only cash received in libel payoutsto friends of Gerry and Kate McCann – dubbed the Tapas Seven – enabled the search for their daughter to go on, latest accounts show.
Around £260 an hour flooded into the Fund as a wave of public sympathy swept the UK after Maddie’s abductionin Praia da Luz in the Algarve in May, 2007. It had £1.4million in bank donations alone in the first ten months of the search.
But contributions fell away after the McCanns became one-time suspects.And the Fund’s income dropped to £629,181 in the year up to 31 March 2009 – while spending rose from £815,113 to more than £1 million. Outgoings covered investigators, publicity and the pair’s legal fightagainst Portuguese policeman Goncalo Amaral.
Below is a brief summary of how much the Find Madeleine Fund made in less than the first year [ending March 2008]. Just 13% of the total raised was spent on doing what the fund claimed to be raising money for – search and detective fees. By contrast, PR and legal expenses [bear in mind the McCanns were never tried in a criminal court] more than eclipsed the money spent on search and investigation, and after that over a million pounds in “profit” [income] remained.
The fund currently has £728,508 in it which was largely contributed by the public. If the McCanns lose the case, they’ll be forced to use money out of it to pay compensation…Furthermore, the Kate and Gerry have reportedly used money from the fund to cover the costs of hearingson past occasions as well. Retired Detective Chief Inspector Mick Neville, who investigated the case last year, called the most recent developments “tragic”. “It is tragic that funds to try to find her could be lost because of this legal action,” he said. “There is every reason to believe she may be alive.”
The title of the third episode refers to the infamous “Pact of Silence”. It’s an allegation that the McCanns and their friends [the Tapas 7] who they dined with on the night of May 3th, 2007 when Madeleine McCann disappeared weren’t being completely forthcoming to the cops, or the media.
On June 30th, two months after the incident, it took a Portuguese journalist to raise this allegation for the first time in a 3000-word article published in Sol. Since it was written in Portuguese, that’s where the idea was planted first – in Portugal.
June 30, 2007 by Felícia Cabrita and Margarida Davim
Madeleine’s parents and the friends with whom they spent their holidays in Praia da Luz are suspects in the inquiry.There are contradictory versions about the night of the kidnapping, and an assumed pact of silence in the group.
Four long months later, the British press seemed to finally cotton onto this “rumour” and meekly questioned the McCanns about it. Their response, ironically through a PR “spokesman” was to “categorically deny” any secrecy.
Alleged discrepancies in the friends’ versions of events, as well as their refusal to comment on what happened that night, sparked frenzied speculation in Portugal, with reports claiming they agreed to keep quiet to protect the McCanns who remain official suspects in the case.
News that the Portuguese police wanted to re-interviewsome of those on holiday with the McCanns was seen by the Portuguese media as further confirmation of this theory.
But the seven friends – Russell O’Brien and his partner Jane Tanner, Rachael and Matthew Oldfield, Fiona and David Payne, and Mrs Payne’s mother Dianne Webster – have made a public statement to insist they had nothing to hide.
“We wish to state that there is categorically no ‘pact of silence’ or indeed anything secretive between us – just the desire to assist the search for Madeleine,” they said in a joint statement, released by the McCanns’ spokesman Clarence Mitchell.
“From day one, the police in Portugal told us not to discuss our statements. “It is incredibly frustrating for us that the fact we have done as we were asked to by the Portuguese police is still being looked upon as suspicious.“Everything we have done, and continue to do, has been to help with the search for Madeleine and to end this nightmare for Gerry and Kate.”
The denial from the group, known together with the McCanns as the Tapas Nine, came as a source confirmed 39-year-old Mr McCann will return to his work as a consultant cardiologist this Thursday, just a few days before the six-month anniversary of Madeleine’s disappearance….Mrs McCann, also 39, has said she will not return to work as a part-time GP.
But the mindfuckery of the Netflix documentary is to dedicate the first half-hour of episode three to ridiculing, undermining and criticizing the Portuguese police. Let’s be clear: for half an hour prior to introducing the “Pact of silence” as a concept, the Portuguese police are taken through the washer, accused of being fat, lazy, drunk and incompetent.
Once that narrative is in place then the connivance moves on to dealing with their accusations of the McCanns and well, since we know where they’re coming from…treat them with contempt, right?
One of the primary narrators of episode two is the other PR spokesperson for the McCann’s, Justine McGuinness. This is her.
If you’re wondering how or why the McCann case became a media sensation, this is who was behind the PR, at least in the beginning, before ex-BBC reporter Clarence Mitchell took over. And Mitchell took over shortly after the McCanns were named official suspects by the Portuguese. A week after the McCanns were named official suspects in the investigation, McGuinness resigned as their PR representative.
On 12 May 2008 McGuinness was questioned by the Portuguese police on the nature of her relationship with the McCanns. McGuinness said at the time that it was purely professional, and that she worked for them for only 89 days, and hadn’t known them previously.
When asked by the media why she was quitting, McGuinness stated that:
…one reason Ms McGuinness has given to journalists for her departure is that the McCanns have been ordered to remain silent because of the changing nature of the investigation and she feels she cannot help them further…But it is now thought that the McCanns are looking for a different kind of PR advice after they became suspects in the inquiry into their daughter’s disappearance and media coverage has become more negative.
In the interview below, where McGuinness is asked in early September 2007 why Kate McCann is being questioned by the cops, the reporter repeatedly tries to get a straight answer to the question on whether the cops consider Kate as primarily responsible, and Gerry as a sort of secondary figure.
The McCanns were asked asked directly by their suspicious behavior by Sabine Mueller, a German radio reporter on June 6th, 2007. This was during another PR “roadshow”, this time in Berlin. Kate McCann’s response was to refer to the popular vote. That according to her most people believe and support them. That’s how innocence works though, isn’t it? As long as most people believe you, you’re innocent. She then referred to her behaviour as a parent, specifically how often “we were checking on them” on the night in question, to rationalise her/their behaviour.
Yet technically Kate herself never checked on the children prior to something happening to Madeleine on May 3rd, an aspect which she curiously doesn’t seem to express any guilt or remorse over.
According to an article published by the Telegraph the day after the presser in Berlin, the German journalist said felt justified in asking her question:
Afterwards Miss Mueller, 35, who has worked for German Radio for 14 years, said her question was justified. “I was aware it was a difficult question but I felt it was a question that needed to be asked. I don’t suspect the McCanns of being involved. I know it has been seen as a hard question but I do not think it was improper. If they had walked out I would have been sorry. They are putting themselves out there a lot and if they keep staging press conferences they have to expect uncomfortable questions. I was doing my job as a journalist.”
The McCanns also responded to wider criticism of their campaign to raise awareness of Madeleine’s disappearance. They said they were not on a “tour” and reiterated that the sole motivation of their trips to four European countries in the past week was to get Madeleine back. Mr McCann said the alternative was to lock themselves away and wait in despair.
The McCann family is launching a wristband to raise cash and awareness for the missing girl. It will carry the international Crimestoppers number and the “Look” logo designed for the family’s campaign. The family is speaking to a supermarket chain about distributing the bands, for which people will be asked to make a minimum £1 donation.
The notion that Kate is more culpable is interesting. As mentioned above, when it was her turn to check on the children, she didn’t, Matt Oldfield supposedly did.
During the first of dozens of press conferences, Gerry did all of the talking in front of the apartment. Look at Kate’s face and body language.
The DOUBT series explores in-depth the events leading up to Madeleine’s disappearance on May 3rd, and provides a unique scenario for the route of the abduction, as well as the destination. Available at Amazon.co.uk at this link.
Although the second episode of the series is titled “Person of Interest” [singular] it basically looks into two individuals, Robert Murat and Sergey Malinka. It’s interesting that Robert Murat was quickly regarded as a prime suspect, despite having an alibi and despite no eye-witnesses placing him at the scene. Murat was neither implicated nor associated with the two sightings known as Tannerman and Smithman, because he didn’t resemble either of these figures in body shape, hair style or facially.
Murat also has another rather obvious distinguishing feature – his glasses. Was Murat really a better suspect to seize on than the folks staying at the hotel, including the McCanns themselves?
For some time now Malinka has been agitating about a book that is coming out. As of this writing, in March 2019, there is still no book. I was contacted at one stage to work with and ghost write for Malinka [not directly by Malinka, but by a third party]. I turned down the offer. It seems I’m not the only one.
https://youtu.be/E6Zh2-ae7q0
https://youtu.be/phe4fmgnewo
Sorry to disappoint, but due to the content of the second episode, I won’t be analysing episode two because I consider both “suspects” to be debunked anyway. What I think is far more interesting to address is the gloss-over of the timeline in episode one. The next blog will return to a chronological analysis of the remaining six episodes over the next six days.
NETFLIX TIMELINE
The essential timeline is dealt with for [are you ready for it] less than three minutes total in the Netflix documentary, between 12:00 and 15:00. It starts with the McCanns making their way down to the Tapas bar at 20:30, and they’re the first to arrive. There’s no mention whether them being early or arriving first that particular evening was unusual compared to the preceding week. That’s an issue I deal with in detail in the DOUBT series.
The next timecheck is at 21:00 when Matt Oldfield arrives at the restaurant, apparently volunteering the all clear that the McCann children were sleeping soundly.
Matt Oldfield was very much in the picture immediately after Madeleine’s disappearance, as can be seen in these images.
At 09:05 Gerry leaves the restaurant, presumably before eating anything [and it’s unknown whether he’d ordered anything, or what he ordered if he did] to make his first and only check on the children that night.
We see it dramatized how Gerry closes the door without closing it completely. In some descriptions, Gerry is so specific he even describes how wide the door was opened down to the last degree. This is an important precursor to the actions of the door that follow.
The next timecheck given is 21:25. It’s made explicit that Kate INTENDED to do her check but was forestalled by [guess who?] Matt Oldfield who volunteered to take her place.
And right here is where the timeline goes wonky. Oldfield enters the unlocked apartment the same way Gerry did, via the side patio door, and “saw light” and “heard the sound” as if of a child moving in their blankets.
Thanks to door being open enough to perceive without really seeing, Oldfield is able to do his check without really doing his check. If one of the kids was awake, Oldfield apparently heard it but didn’t look in to make sure. If he had would he have seen Madeleine?
In my opinion Madeleine was already dead at this stage, so she wouldn’t have been in bed, but her body was likely still in the apartment. Her body was either in the cupboard of her parents’ bedroom, or behind the couch, based on cadaver alerts, or possibly laying in the flower bed below the balcony.
It’s also possible immediately after Oldfield left, Madeleine woke up, fell over the balcony railing or down the patio stairs, and died. However since it takes at least an hour for cadaver odor to form it’s more likely Madeleine died earlier in the evening [prior to the McCanns leaving for dinner] than later. Cadaver traces were so strong they were still picked up in late August, three months after the incident, and in spite of the apartment being cleaned numerous times. This strongly suggests her little body remained inert – dead – for some time before it was removed from the apartment.
The Oldfield witness testimony is wonderfully inconclusive and murky, because it doesn’t confirm anything. Maybe all the kids were there and maybe they weren’t.
At the same time, Oldfield’s entry into the narrative means the fact that neither McCanns checked on their brood is justified because a third party is given the responsibility [except that he doesn’t actually check to make sure]. Also, the leaving of a door unlocked is justified to allow access to this known third party, which also – just incidentally you understand – paves the way for the imputed abductor.
So even in a scenario where Madeleine could be proven to have died, who would be to blame? Where would it begin and where would it end? Whose testimony, assuming there was ever a trial to test this version, could be relied on one way or another?
The Netflix timeline picks up again at 22:00. Kate gets up and heads to the apartment. Once again, the door becomes the central feature of her visit. There’s something very strange about the door!
All told, the documentary spends less than two minutes thirty seconds going through the critical timeline. There is virtually no analysis or explanation, no mention of several important witnesses within the timelines. Instead the door, “light” and sounds are emphasised supposedly confirming that everything was okay when it wasn’t.
Strangely, in another reconstruction of the door narrative, this one done inside the McCanns’ residence in Rothley, Kate seems to suggest the door was left virtually closed but that when she approached it, it had opened “quite wide” and it then slammed shut right in front of her.
This witnessed moving of the door and inconsistency of the door conjures the door as a sort of witness to an abductor is who is not otherwise seen or heard, and who doesn’t leave any traces.
That reconstruction can be viewed at 27:58 in the clip below.
Interestingly, in her checking of the children Madeleine is missing, but no mention is made of the twins who are also in the room, or whether they are awake or asleep, or safe. And having just had one child stolen [apparently through the open window], what does Kate do – she abandons both children, runs out of the apartment and raises the alarm, thus leaving the twins vulnerable to additional abductions.
Another easy point to miss: immediately after Madeleine disappears, an awful lot of running happens. Kate runs, then “everybody sprints back to our apartment…”
Now let’s focus on a few observations in terms of the aspects the Netflix timeline implicitly doesn’t address:
Between 20:30 and 22:00 Gerry makes a total of one visit to check on the children, and according to Gerry, verifies that at 20:30 Madeleine was alive and safe. This effectively makes this observation the last time Madeleine was seen alive by any witness, assuming the observation is true and accurate.
Kate McCann also makes a total of one visit to check on the children. When she does the incident has already happened, so arguably Kate’s visit doesn’t count. One can say that technically in the space of 90 minutes, when the plan was to check on the children every 20 minutes, Gerry made the only check and only did so once. In 90 minutes at least 4 checks ought to have been possible.
It’s not clarified what happened after Gerry’s check. We know he checked, but there’s not clarity on what time he was seen returning to the table. One way to establish this would be to look at what food he ordered when, whether he paid for it, and how much of the meal he actually ate that evening.
In the police interviews it’s established that Gerry didn’t go straight back to the restaurant after checking on his children. Instead he is seen on the street by a witness, Jes Wilkens at 21:08 and by Jane Tanner at 21:10. What this does is it pinpoints where Gerry is, giving him an alibi there and then, while also “allowing” Gerry not to be where he’s supposed to be [eating at the restaurant].
Jane Tanner also – very conveniently – sees the prime suspect carrying away a child while at the time seeing Gerry in the street [not carrying anyone, while talking to Jes].
Thirty minutes pass and it’s Kate’s turn to check on the children. During this interval Gerry’s movements aren’t known precisely. During this time, at approximately 21:50, the Smithman sighting occurs about 5 minutes’ walk from apartment 5A. The man and the child spotted in the alley broadly fit both the father and Madeleine’s description, and the man is said to be walking “briskly” in the direction of the sea. In addition, the child in his arms doesn’t appear to be conscious, and is being held “awkwardly”. Even the clothing of the child seen broadly matches what Madeleine was wearing the night she went missing.
Although Kate McCann is quoted in the documentary and in her book saying she ran out of the apartment and when she saw the table shouted “someone’s [singular] taken Madeleine”, others on the scene remembered it differently. One nanny described Madeleine’s mother shouting “they’ve taken her”. Another account from the Moyes couple who were staying two floors above the McCanns, quotes Kate shouting “the fucking bastards have taken her”. And wouldn’t it have made more sense to simply shout the message from the balcony, if the Tapas Bar was within earshot and visual range, as is so often emphasised?
It appears that at no point did either of the McCanns contact the authorities themselves, even when a neighbor offered the use of her phone. Gerry dispatched Oldfield relatively early, at 22:10, to head to receptions and call the police.
For several years the focus of the media was on the Tapas 7’s star witness account – fingering Tannerman – even though the cops had long since dismissed this theory. Meanwhile, Smithman was dismissed or disregarded by the McCanns and their private investigation into that sighting…well…was treated in a very different way to Tannerman.
A straightforward way to figure out who was where, when, and saw what, how and why events played out in a particular pattern, is for all the folks to return to the scene to do a recorded official reconstruction. Put the people like chess pieces on the board and move them about according to what everyone did and saw. This is precisely what the Portuguese cops asked the McCanns to do. This was their response at 4:19 in the clip below.
https://youtu.be/YETJ6WgIrFU?t=259
UPDATE: The clip above has been removed since the publication of this blog, so here’s another. This was the resconstruction response at 0:27in the clip below.
True Crime Intertexuality is a valuable tool for understanding one case through the known circumstances of another. It does require more than a little expertise in true crime to understand how a reference case matches up, and how it doesn’t. Obviously if one’s understanding of either case is flawed, biased or bogus, then the reference itself is flawed, biased or bogus.
In the misleadingly titled Netflix Documentary THE DISAPPEARANCE OF MADELEINE MCCANN two American reference cases are cited: firstly, the disappearance of Etan Patz [in 1972, in Soho Lower Manhattan], and secondly the murder of Adam Walsh [in 1981 from a mall in Hollywood, Florida].
The expert prognosticating on these references is the head of a large missing person’s organisation in America. An expert in missing persons may seem like an expert in true crime and criminal psychology, but alas, true crime isn’t nearly as simple or obvious as it seems.
The obvious similarities between the abduction-sex-trafficker scenario punted by the makers of the Madeleine McCann documentary vis-à-vis the two American boys [the reference cases] are in four extremely broad, basic areas:
All three scenarios involve young children.
All three scenarios involve young children disappearing.
Two scenarios strongly suggest the children were abducted because of a sexual motive.
In all three scenarios the bodies of the missing children were never found.
That’s really where the similarities or “references” end. A proper true crime analysis reveals not so much an overlap between the Patz and Walsh cases to the McCann case, but in fact why the cases are distinctively different to what happened to Madeleine.
Although no bodies were found in all three cases, in both the Patz case and the Walsh case it is generally assumed that both boys are dead, both boys were murdered and the identities of their murderers isn’t mysterious or unknown.
In the Walsh case the boy’s decapitated head was found within a few weeks, however his body has never been recovered.
It should be noted that when it comes to children abducted by sexual predators who are strangers, the children must be disposed of quickly or else the perpetrators face a real risk of alerting family members or passersby to the taboo of an adult keeping a small unrelated child in their possession and raising suspicions. The same situation doesn’t apply when the predators are family, familiar or otherwise trusted by the victims.
The destruction of their little bodies is meant to completely conceal the circumstances surrounding their final moments, and death, from the public’s view. In a scenario where the children become famous in the media, the necessity to dispose of them, and destroy their bodies completely is even more urgent. It’s vital for the predator to make sure no connection can ever be made between the eviscerated corpse and himself.
In a genuine abduction scenario, a case can clearly be made not to alert the media and to alert the authorities discreetly, in order not to provoke, alarm, aggravate or frighten the abductor into doing something rash.
The Ramsey Ransom Note alludes to this cliche, and does so because it’s so typical.
This is why in kidnapping cases the kidnappers insist that the authorities are not contacted, and that if they are, the victim will be killed. The situation for the kidnapper becomes untenable if the victim becomes a public figure. The same applies to an abductor, except there is less incentive to return the victim [now a potential witness] to the custody of the family and/or authorities.
When I researched the JonBenet Ramsey case I was surprised at the persistence of the pedophile narrative in that case. Sure, pedophiles exist. They’re a scourge in our society. But pedophiles more often tend to lurk INSIDE families.
Where family members prey on family members this is especially true when the victim is much younger and more vulnerable. The custody and trust situation of the guardian relative to the child is what is abused, and is both a smokescreen for the crime and the cover-up [which can often go on for years, even an entire lifetime].
JonBenet was abused, but she was a six-year-old beauty queen. Madeleine McCann was three-years-old when she “disappeared”, but there is no forensic evidence of abuse. The closest symptom to anything approximating a molesting scenario is that she had difficulty sleeping. [JonBenet Ramsey also struggled with insomnia and chronic bedwetting, according to the housekeeper Linda Hoffman-Pugh]. Well, so do many three-year-olds.
The notion that a criminal would target a three-year-old child for sexual purposes as a typical scenario is absurd in the extreme. Although – tragically – grooming of young children for sex-trafficking is not completely unheard of in our society, if the child is abducted as a toddler this means the child has to be adopted and raised [fed, housed etc.] for several years, a scenario well beyond the scope of most if not all pedophiles or traffickers.
In a high-profile scenario, the costs to prevent or avoid discovery of the groomed victim skyrockets, making the “investment” worthless. Madeleine McCann is world famous, the most famous missing child in history by a substantial margin. So, even following the theoretical concept to its conclusion [and assuming she’s still alive], the likelihood of any transaction with such a high-profile-high-risk candidate is untenable, to put it mildly.
Back to the reference cases.
Both children in the reference cases were boys, and both were twice the age of Madeleine when they were abducted. Both boys were also cute kids, which is why they were targeted both by the men [probably closet homosexuals] who abducted them, and by the media who covered them.
Those men who abducted these boys didn’t traffic them – the abuse was very brief and intended for discreet, private consumption.
But the area I want to emphasise cuts to the specific circumstances of both theses cases that are pertinently NOT similar to those in the McCann case.
Both boys were abducted opportunistically, that is to say randomly in public areas. The children weren’t studied or stalked, they were encountered by chance. There was no premeditation of the specific victim. Although the execution may have been planned, and the crime a fantasy, the identity of the specific victim was random. In the McCann case the apartment was supposedly targeted, that is to say, not random and not opportunistic.
Patz was abducted by a store keeper with the lure of a soda, and Walsh [it was theorised] through the lure of toys and candy. Walsh was in a toy store, or the toy section of a store, when he was lured into a van. In Madeleine’s case there was no lure, and apparently she [and her siblings] slept through the abduction.
Both boys were murdered shortly after their respective abductions, Patz on the very same day, and Walsh within two weeks of his abduction. Despite their ages, there was virtually no attempt to accommodate, feed or raise them. There is no reason to believe if Madeleine survived her “disappearance”, that she would have been kept alive for any extended length of time, let alone twelve years, given the ongoing risk her life presented to her supposed abductor/guardian/trafficker.
It took Patz’ parents several hours to raise the alarm. Patz disappeared in the morning, and his parents only alerted the authorities in the evening. In Walsch’s case, the boy’s mother spent more than 90 minutes searching fruitlessly through and around the store. They also used public-address system. Only when these measures failed did Revé Walsch finally call the Hollywood Police [at 13:55]. In the McCann case, however, both parents knew instantly Madeleine had been taken, and were scornful of the notion that she might have wandered off, or gotten herself lost. They were also contemptuous of the “slow pace” of the Portuguese cops to arrive, when in fact the police response was normal given the situation.
The McCanns’ absolute conviction so early in the investigation knowing exactly what happened is a lot more sinister when juxtaposed alongside the responses of parents in genuine abduction scenarios. [Incidentally, Patsy Ramsey shared the same absolute certainty during her 911 call, although the bogus Ransom Note provided some reinforcement to her certainty. JonBenet’s body meanwhile was lying in the basement of the house all along. In other words, Patsy’s “certainty” was misleading, and arguably more than that – misdirection.]
Although Patz was “missing” for decades, and declared legally dead as late as 2001, 22 years after his abduction, the mystery of what happened to him was finally solved after 33 years even in the absence of recovering his remains. In other words, even though no body was recovered, there’s no doubt that the child is deceased. As such, is the Patz case really an approximate reference case for Madeleine McCann?
A New Jersey man was arrested in the killing of Etan Patz, Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly announced on Thursday, an extraordinary moment in a case that has gripped New York City’s psyche ever since the 6-year-old boy vanished in SoHo on his way to school in 1979. The man, Pedro Hernandez, told investigators that he lured Etan to the basement of a bodega where Mr. Hernandez worked at the time with the promise of a soda, Mr. Kelly said. Once Etan was inside, Mr. Hernandez choked him, stuffed his body into a bag and took the bag about a block and a half away, where he left it out in the open with trash, Mr. Kelly said.
…It is unclear whether investigators have been able to corroborate the account Mr. Hernandez has provided. Without any trace of human remains or other forensic evidence, any possible prosecution of him would face significant evidentiary hurdles.
…Mr. Hernandez, who was 18 at the time Etan vanished, worked as a stockboy in a bodega at 448 West Broadway that is now an eyeglass store, Mr. Kelly said. Etan disappeared on the first morning his parents allowed him to walk alone from the family’s home on Prince Street to a school bus stop on West Broadway.
Mr. Hernandez was working in the basement, which had a separate door to the street, Mr. Kelly said. Etan was at the bus stop when Mr. Hernandez led him away and to the basement, Mr. Kelly said…Mr. Hernandez’s name was mentioned in a 1979 detective’s report as part of the investigation into Etan’s disappearance, Mr. Kelly said. The report listed him as an employee of the bodega, but Mr. Hernandez was never questioned by investigators, Mr. Kelly said.
“I can’t tell you why, 33 years ago, he wasn’t questioned,” he said. “We know that other people in the bodega were questioned.”
A woman interviewed by The New York Times last month who ran a playgroup in SoHo at the time Etan disappeared recalled seeing mounds of garbage bags in the days after the boy vanished, which included Memorial Day weekend. “I always thought there were so many garbage bags out and why did they not search them,” said the woman, Judy Reichler, who now lives in New Paltz, N.Y. “For three days everyone piled bags on the street and then they got picked up.”
British detectives open new investigation after reviewing all evidence into disappearance of three-year-old from Portugal
Redwood said none of the individuals was connected to Madeleine’s family or friends who were with her parents on holiday at the time. The Met team’s work leads them to believe Madeleine was abducted in a criminal act by a stranger.
What do a phoenix, a dragon and the sun have in common. Simple. Each in their own way represent not only absolute power, but rebirth, transformation, victory of life over death, and ability to magically transcend and bind of ashes and dust.
In true crime one of the major gripes I feel with most people involved in the genre is there one-dimensional thinking, in fact their one dimensional approach to virtually every fucking thing. True crime feels like it’s at least a duality of some sort, good versus evil, light versus dark. It’s more than that, it has many interconnected layers, shades of grey, hidden meanings and dead ends. And yet to the average person it’s always dead simple. X is totally and absolutely innocent, and Y is a monster. Of course the average person casting these aspersions sees him or herself invariably as X [and thus perfectly innocent too] and everything that is unfair, wrong or to blame about their world as Y. And they spend a lot of their time making sure what they see and believe conforms to this prescribed, self-reinforcing transference. That’s not true crime, it’s a kind of self-perpetuating voyeurism. It’s what the tabloids run on.
At TCRS we like to be a lot more sophisticated in our approach, and we like to think not a little, but a lot about how crimes and criminals fit into the larger human condition. Some people roll their eyes when, for example, we dig into the extended history of one or other character. What the fuck has history or geography got to do with why Chris Watts strangled his pregnant wife? Excellent question. The answer is both nothing and everything – simultaneously. Try to figure that one out.
One essential aspect to true crime that is highly misunderstood, underestimated and minimized [especially by the criminals themselves] is the emotional dynamic. It’s so ironic to me how people invariably notice how emotionless a murderer appears, and they hold this up as a sort of summit flag to plant on the top of the Mount Everest of the case file.
SEE, they scream, I TOLD YOU HE HAS NO FEELINGS. HE IS A PSYCHOPATHIC EVIL NARCISSISTIC MONSTER. THAT’S WHY HE COMMITTED THIS CRIME.
No, it’s the opposite. The crime was committed not because of an absence of feelings, but because of a surfeit of emotion. The nonchalance mask is the last resort of the criminal to hide exactly those slippery little sensations that drove the motive to commit the crime in the first place. From the outside looking in we see the lack of emotion and damn the criminal for it, but from the inside, the criminal is doing his best not to show emotion, not to show the reason why he was driven out of his body and mind to do what he did.
Chris Watts’ affair with Nichol Kessinger isn’t evidence that Watts is a heartless man with no feelings, it’s the opposite. The affair drew him outside of himself, pulled him outside his shell and reminded him that he HAD feelings, and had a whole dimension to his heart and his head and his life that he wasn’t given voice to. These emotions played a cardinal role in activating ultimately a murderous response from Watts, but that’s only one side of the emotional coin.
https://youtu.be/A8j0m1rw3ng
The other side of the emotional coin was the suppression of healthy feelings and emotions. Those feelings that made him like his wife, and love his children had to be dealt with too.
Of course those feelings never existed and never came into play, because Watts isn’t a human being, he’s an alien psychopath remember. And when you deny Watts feelings, you throw away the good with the bad, and all chances of figuring out why what happened happened. That’s why he committed this crime. Not because he’s human, like the rest of us, but because he’s NOT human and not like the rest of us.
Yup, keep on telling yourself that. It ought to make you feel better as the X part of the equation. The reason Watts did what he did is because we don’t understand him. Yeah right.
“I TOLD YOU HE HAS NO FEELINGS. HE IS A PSYCHOPATHIC EVIL NARCISSISTIC MONSTER. THAT’S WHY HE COMMITTED THIS CRIME….”
If Watts had no feelings, then it wouldn’t have been necessary to begin to break away and disassociate himself from Shan’ann and the kids over a premeditated period of time.
In the TWO FACE series I refer to this distancing process as Psychological Preparation. Just as athletes mentally prepare and physically train for an important race, so do murderers. They gather intel, they run through the maneuvers, but most important, they prepare their hearts for the most extreme event of their [and their victim’s] lives.
If you haven’t seen Captain Marvel, be warned of spoilers below.
The key to Captain Marvel’s power is letting go and losing control of her human side, specifically her emotions. Once she does that, she releases her true power and she literally glows in the dark with Godlike Phoenix-like plasma energy. Dragons function the same way, at least in symbolic literature.
Emotions, like dragons, guard a great treasure. But counter-intuitively, emotions can hold treasures prisoner. They can trap us in ourselves, in our grudges, resentments, our anger, our jealousy. Anger can rob us of our true potential. Your own anger – not the world, not your boss, not your parents or your spouse – can keep you poor. In this spiel your biggest enemy, your biggest obstacle is you, or more specifically, your persistent failure to master your self.
Often a dragon set loose can devastate and destroy lives not as some externality or beast, but as a part of ourselves that if we don’t, won’t or can’t control. A dragon released will burn through our lives, our homes and burn families to the ground. And the fire that fuels that dragon comes from within. It’s us.
When I traveled to the East I understood the dragon through a Western, Christian mindset. I also thought the Asian and Chinese notion was evil. But when I lived in Asia I understood the dragon as neither good nor evil, but simply as a source of immense power [which could be used for good or evil].
The idea of the sun rising over a frozen, dead Earth, or of a phoenix filling with golden light and coming alive, or of a person reclaiming their memories, their power, themselves – all of these are affirming, in theory.
But there is another side to all this affirmation, a balancing aspect. The MLM Thrive spiel also operates on emotions. If you want something you can have it. It couldn’t be easier. If you want to be healthy, wealthy, be with your family, go on free holidays, have a fancy car, just put up your hand and get yourself a magic patch and all will be well!
If you want to be happy, just SAY SO! Make the choice, and you can change your life with the snap of a finger.
In the Lord of the Rings the ring of power is precisely the same. You want power? Just take the ring!
Of course as soon as you do, you are consumed and destroyed by it, and your world laid waste.
It’s precisely this kind of thinking Chris Watts used to murder his wife. Do you want a better life? Do you want a better wife? Do you want to be healthy and choose to do exactly what you want? Do you want to be free? Do you want control over your money? You do! Well then just make a decision to be happy! Just make the choice! JUST DECIDE TODAY WHAT YOU WANT! It couldn’t be easier.
And so he did.
Chris Watts didn’t kill his family because he felt nothing. He killed because he felt more than he ever had before.
The 6-part TWO FACE series is available at this link.
An important precursor to the “madness” of Vincent van Gogh, and the murder of Van Gogh, was the infamous ear incident. When I conducted my investigation, I examined the ear incident as a crime scene. Who saw what? What motive was there [if it was self-inflicted or otherwise]. What happened in the aftermath? Who said what, why and how was the wound supposedly inflicted? What when was used? What weapon was likely used to sever an entire ear?
I was pleasantly surprised to find a lot of information on all these subjects, even a sketch of the actual wound. Incredibly, almost 130 years later we have Vincent’s own words to get a sense of his feelings about what happened, as well as not one but two portraits to get a more subtle sense about how he felt about it.
The incident took place just before the Christmas of 1888 during the last days when artists Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin lived together. A few days later Vincent van Gogh wrote to his former housemate – who by this time had skedaddled all the way back to Brittany, that trip paid in full by his patrol, Theo van Gogh [Vincent’s younger brother].
By January 1889 Paul Gauguin wanted his fencing equipment back. In his rush to abandon Vincent and the Yellow House in Arles, he left it behind. But in spite of what happened, he wanted it back. Understandably, Vincent wasn’t too chuffed about giving Gauguin his “weapons of war” back.
The full transcript of the letter – written on January 22nd or 23rd – can be read here.
Gauguin’s explanation of the incident was that Van Gogh did it to himself, and that he was mad, a claim he repeated shortly after Van Gogh’s death. He did not attend his friend’s funeral, but said – quite cruelly – that he wasn’t surprised by the suicide because he’d known all along Van Gogh was mad. And so the myth stuck…
And yet of the two artists, Gauguin was a fine one to talk about screw-loose behavior… This is him at the piano.
A number of expert art historians also believe Gauguin is the real culprit behind the ear-slicing incident, but Van Gogh, in typical self-deprecating fashion – and to preserve the art arrangement with his brother – took the rap for it.
I argue in my book The Murder of Vincent van Gogh that when he was shot – purposefully, with direct intent – a similar scenario played at as the one that did around the ear incident. As a result, a popular mythology has developed around the world’s most famous artist, one that is compelling but untrue, and less compelling than what actually happened.
The Guardian has given the new Netflix documentary a 1 star rating, a described it as a “blatant cash-in” and “a rehash”. I’m not sure that’s all it is though, especially since – by the end of the same article – the reporter’s sympathies are clearly with the McCanns. In fact the Netflix documentary isn’t simply a rehash, even if it does a lot of rehashing. Much of the rehashing purports a particular narrative. TCRS regards that narrative as bogus [the sex-trafficking spiel which indirectly resurrects the little girl into imputed sexual slavery]. But to dismiss the entire documentary as a greedy, thoughtless cash-grab is simplistic and false as well.
The documentary has a sly intent, which is to gradually manipulate audiences and plant the seed that somewhere out there, Madeleine is moving around and living out her life, and that there is always hope. This pitch starts from the very first frame, and the first false facts [broken shutters etc] follow in short shrift shortly thereafter.
A few general observations from Episode 1: BENEATH THE TRUTH
Aerial drone footage provides some refreshing spatial context to the greater crime scene of Praia da Luz. One of the opening sounds, ironically – given the use of the raven motif in DOUBT – is the cawing of birds over the Ocean Club crime scene.
A random family with children is seemingly selected to “voyeur” through the sights and sounds of Praia da Luz to get a feel for what it was like to be there when the McCanns were holidaying in May 2007. The family featured in the documentary happened to be in Luz when the incident around Madeleine McCann occurred, as well.
Despite Gerry and Kate not participating in the documentary, within the first few minutes we see familiar footage of their faces. The very first view of Gerry is very early on where he is doing his rounds as a respectable doctor in a hospital in Leicester.
The sympathy narrative is also established early on, with a woman’s voice intoning about how the couple were desperate to have children, finally resorting to IVF. At this stage it’s not made explicit that actually Madeleine had two siblings at the time, and both were present in the same apartment bedroom when she was “abducted”. It should also be noted that post abduction, none of the younger children woke up, in spite of a chaotic cacophony playing out around them. The idea of the children being sedated is not new, although some stories about rows and sedatives have since been removed online, but will it be mentioned in other episodes of this “definitive” documentary?
A pair of journalists are also selected who know the story “inside out”. Initially they’re not identified.
We’re told ahead of time that this case is a confusing jumble, and a lot of different faces are quickly implied as suspects – a Russian, a neighbor etc.
Kate McCann’s voice provides voice over as the camera pans over Praia da Luz. She sounds like a normal mother who wanted to have a nice, fun holiday with her children. They can have fun [separately] and so can the adults [somewhere else].
There’s a nice little clip of the kids heading up the stairs onto the plane – which is from old, grainy cell phone footage. When Madeleine stumbles a voice can be heard saying kindly, protectively, “Oopsie daisy”. Is it Gerry’s voice? Neither parents are anywhere in sight during this footage.
In another clip of Gerry on the bus by the same cameraman, it’s cut off in the documentary right at the point where Gerry moans on camera that’s he’s not on holiday. The cameraman actually points out on camera in the original footage that Gerry – sitting beside a row of kids – appears to be sulking and needs to “cheer up”. This nifty editing is the first clear indication that the documentary means to distort footage so as to present the McCanns in a misleadingly flattering light.
An American woman’s voice continues to narrate the set-up at the Ocean Club, which the subtitle of the documentary identities as Robbyn. Robbyn Swan is the co-author – with Anthony Summers – of a neither-here-nor-there investigation into Madeleine McCann’s disappearance. The description of the book Looking for Madeleine clearly matches the broader arc of the documentary, which is an investigation into the disappearance as some sort of sex-trafficking spiel. The same book [rated 2.8 out of 5 on Amazon.com and 2.7 on Amazon.co.uk] also maligns the Portuguese investigation into the McCanns, just as the McCanns’ themselves have done.
Next the babysitting facilities of the Ocean Club are criticized as being inadequate. The McCanns felt it didn’t suit them, as they had to put them down too early and pick them up too late. So of course the McCanns elected to take care of the babysitting and putting to bed themselves, which apparently involved each one – Kate and Gerry – doing an ongoing relay every half hour to check on them, along with the Tapas 7 as well. Not that that was any inconvenience. One can say with some certainty, had the McCanns made use of the babysitting services that every other family seemed to be using, Madeleine would not have been abducted, wandered off, killed, sedated – pick your scenario.
In my first analysis of the documentary I noted how AFTER Madeleine’s disappearance the McCanns were only too happy to use the Kids’ Club Creche facility. The photos of them taking them there first thing each morning to drop them off [after the disappearance] was after all how the paparazzi got their daily photo op with the couple.
The authors then contextualise the various parts of the original crime scene. I like that they refer to the distance from the Tapas Bar to apart 5A as 60 yards “as the crow flies”.
The authors rationalize how the McCanns setup a relay team with the Tapas 7 where some of the parents would leave the restaurant midway through dinner and listen in on the various children in the various apartments. This is described as a “better” system than having all the kids together in a creche, looked after by one person, and thus allowing the couple to holiday the way most normal parents would. [Of course the doctors argue that their system is more normal and more sensible, which is why Madeleine was completely safe and nothing happened to her…].
The backstory of the crime is glossed over, in the sense that the crucial days leading up to May 3rd aren’t covered, nor any of the incidents that took place in this week. Nothing is mentioned [at this point] about the controversial “last photo” either [taken on the first day of the holiday]. Instead the coverage deals with the afternoon of May 3rd and the kids being “particularly” tired that day. They were particularly tired so they would have slept particularly well that night, is the obvious but misleading inference.
That’s fifteen observations of roughly the first ten to fifteen minutes of episode one. That’s enough.
It should be clear that much of the first episode is broadly supportive of the McCanns, and even sympathetic to them. By green lighting their babysitting approach, the way is paved for some outsider, some shadowy interloper to spoil the perfect fairy tale of perfect parenting.
Of course, in a scenario where someone has to get up every 20 minutes, leave the restaurant and run around the apartments, we also have a scenario for one of the group disappearing for several minutes, with or without a child in their arms…and no one being any the wiser.
Tomorrow TCRS will be doing a similar analysis and review of episode two.
When Special Agent Grahm Coder gently prods Chris Watts about whether he’s “sure” the kids were still alive, do you notice how he answers? What does he reference?
This YouTuber is spot on in picking up the inconsistency of the so-called “last words”. While the CBI Report quotes Watts consistently repeating Bella’s last words as “Daddy, No!, the Daily Beast quotes Watts saying Bella said, “No Daddy!”
I doubt there were any last words by Bella, or any running around the house around mommy’s body, and I don’t believe the children were taken to the CERVI 319 site alive and killed there. It didn’t happen.
What did happen is worse, and it occurred before Shan’ann’s death as I’ve maintained throughout the TWO FACE series all along. The whole point of killing the children when they were, and the way they were, was to prevent what Watts once referred to as a “cry fest”. Just as Shan’ann’s murder was done to ward off a rowdy confrontation in the early hours of the morning, the girls were killed silently and discreetly and behind four walls.
It’s interesting how in the first confession Watts also refers to this idea of “doing the same thing [murdering in the same way] to her [to a second person]”. In the Second Confession it swings from the first version of murdering Shan’ann the same way she murdered the kids to murdering Bella the same way he murdered her sister and/or Shan’ann.
Unfortunately in the actual report of the discovery file, McKenna isn’t quoted talking about babysitting Bella, and Bella’s distress at being unable to sleep, and “what if Ceecee doesn’t wake up”. It is nevertheless recorded in the audio interview.
I will be spending a lot of time deciphering these details and the overarching psychology of the Second Confession, as well as providing brand new insights, in TWO FACE ANNIHILATION, the seventh book in the series available in April 2019.
In POST TRUTH, the 100th True Crime Rocket Science [TCRS] title, the world’s most prolific true crime author Nick van der Leek demonstrates how much we still don’t know in the Watts case. In the final chapter of the SILVER FOX trilogy the author provides a sly twist in a tale that has spanned 12 TCRS books to date. The result may shock or leave you with even more questions.
SILVER FOX III available now in paperback!
“If you are at all curious about what really happened in the Watts case, then buy this book, buy every one he has written and you will get as close as humanly possible to understanding the killer and his victims.”- Kathleen Hewtson. Purchase the very highly rated and reviewed SILVER TRILOGY – POST TRUTH COMING SOON.
TCRS MERCH available now – just in time for Christmas!
Book 5 – ALL NEW! “I have thoroughly enjoyed this audiobook…” – Connie Lukens. Drilling Through Discovery Complete Audiobook
Read the entire 9-Part TWO FACE series, the most definitive book series covering the Chris Watts Case
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Book 4 in the TWO FACE series, one of the best reviewed, is available now in paperback!
“Book 4 in the K9 series is a must read for those who enjoy well researched and detailed crime narratives. The author does a remarkable job of bringing to life the cold dark horror that is Chris Watts throughout the narrative but especially on the morning in the aftermath of the murders. Chris’s actions are connected by Nick van der Leek’s eloquent use of a timeline to reveal a motive.”
He uses a secret scientific method to find murder victims by following their DNA trail with the help of global positioning satellites. A family friend said: “The irony for Kate and Gerry is that through them trying to move the case forward and be proactive 
The description of the book 
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