It's All Much Too Sad

I can’t say I like children all that much.  I’m not sure I agree with the late Kenny Everett that they are noisy, wet, smelly things, but I am happiest when I am not in their vicinity and I do not seek out their society. My own daughter was an exception, of couse, as are the well-behaved offspring of a few close friends, but as a general rule I have little interest in what they do or in anything they may have to say.  However, I do want to mention something in the news, something serious, that does involve children and one child in particular.

I was listening to “Any Questions” a couple of evenings ago, as I often do of a Friday night when wife and I are not out dancing till dawn and whooping it up in one or other of our town’s premier nightspots.  The first question that was put to the panel by a member of the audience asked whether or not they thought that the case of Madeline McCann was being treated like a circus.  Most of them answered yes, and maybe they are right.  Now, I expect most of you will know what this is all about: the 4-year-old daughter of a couple of British tourists disappeared from her parents’ holiday villa in Portugal last May, and not only has she not been seen since, but no one knows what happened to her. You can find a pretty good summary of the case so far here, and I won’t go into all the details.  Just to summarize: her parents left her and her younger twin siblings alone while they went to a tapas bar a few hundred yards away.  When Mrs McCann came back to check on the children, she found Madeline missing.  Since then, they have made several appeals on TV for her safe return, have visited the Pope, have been very vocal abut the case, as any parents would whose child has vanished.

But circus?  Well, it does seem to have been handled strangely, but I am not an expert of Portuguese law, so I have no idea if the authorities are following correct procedure or not.  It is a very disturbing case, and the parents seem to be far more in the limelight than one would expect. In the absence of hard news, rumours are substituted for fact as journalists try to come up with something new for their next copy.  We have been told, with what truth I do not know, that the police know that Madeline’s neck was broken,  that they plan to dig up a stretch of newly laid roadway in the town where Madeline disappeared, that the poor girl’s DNA was found in a car that the McCanns rented three weeks after their daughter disappeared,  and even more fanciful possibilities are suggested: she was kidnapped by an illegal adoption ring or by a group of paramilitary paedophiles. 

When we ask what facts of any substance we know, there is very little. We do know that the  Portuguese police offered Madeline’s mother a short sentence (4 years) if she confessed to having killed her daughter by accident.  She didn’t, and we don’t know if the police had any facts or if they were just fishing.  Then earlier this month, Kate McCann and, a day or two later, Gerry McCann were formally named by the police as suspects, a formality that carries with is several implications, rights and obligations.   After that, the McCanns, who had vowed to stay on Portugal till their daughter was found, returned to England.

The “Any Questions” panellists, though, who all appeared to me to be pretty level headed, all seemed to agree on one thing: that it would be a national trauma for Britain if it turned out that the McCanns did kill their daughter.  One woman went as far as to say that no one with any shred of decency could believe that they had anything to do with it.  I don’t know, though. Opinion certainly is divided.  Over 17,000 people have signed an e-petition demanding that the McCanns’ twins be taken into council care (luckily such decisions are not made on the basis of lists of names on the internet) while the inhabitants of the town where the McCanns live have publicly stated that they know that Kate and Gerry McCann are innocent.

Now, they don’t know whether the McCanns did it or not, and neither do you or I, but I think we must at least admit of the possibility.  There is nothing unheard of in the annals of crime for a parent, or parents, to kill a child and then make a show of calling for his or her return.  There was one case in London sometime ago (sorry, I can’t remember the name) of a woman whose 5-year-old daughter and her best friend went missing, and she made an impassioned plea for their safe return on TV, while all along the poor girls were lying under her bed, where she had hidden them after strangling them; which is where they were found by the police when they did the routine top-to-bottom search of the location where a missing child was last seen.  She tried to blame it on hormones but got sent down for life.  It is standard police procedure in  cases of  murder or abduction, to suspect spouses or parents first, because that is what previous incidents have shown are the most likely explanations. The police need to be able to rule out these obvious suspects as they widen the scope of their investigations and clearly there is something that is preventing the Portuguese police from ruling the McCanns out.

I hope that this will all be academic.  I hope, as does everyone, that Madeline will turn up alive and well, and if the worst should have happened, I do not want to see her parents guilty; the crime of a stranger or strangers would be far less hard to deal with.  Meantime, though, let us open our minds to all possibilities because the news, when it comes, may be very hard to bear.  We will only make it harder if we invest the McCanns with some sort of undeserved sanctity.

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Comments

[Mary Emken]

It infureates me to no end that the McCanns left three small children alone while they went out. That's what I would call negligence on their part. They are doctors.I'm quite sure they could have afforded to hire a sitter for the children while they went out and partied. Lets hope the child is found unharmed.

[samulli]

I was actually waiting for the police to announce this suspicion all along. As you said, the parents are always the first suspects and the fact alone that the McCanns did make such a spectacle of their daughter's disappearance has made them suspicious to me from the start. Well, actually from the day of the visit to the pope, which was way over the top in my eyes. But, whatever.
What makes me sad is that there are a lot of other children disappearing every day and apparently nobody gives a damn about them. If they are "lucky" then they get a mention in the evening news for about 5 seconds. But those people, just because they are wealthy doctors, can afford to raise hell to keep up the search for their child. What's so special about this kid anyway?

[PJ]

Without seeing all the evidence, I can't say whether or not the McCanns are guilty of having anything to do with their daughter's disappearance, but something doesn't feel right about the whole thing.

Responsible parents wouldn't leave such young children alone, which definitely makes me wonder about them as parents.

To answer Samulli's question: the disappearance of a cute blonde blue-eyed toddler is always newsworthy, and the actions of her parents since her disappearance has only added to that fact.

Today I heard that Richard Branson has donated a great sum of money (£100,000 I believe) towards helping the McCanns to pay their legal fees and asked for further donations, let's hope that his good intentions are not in vain...

[Ash]

I can't even stand to read about this anymore.

[Shauna Quirk]

I can’t say I like children all that much. I’m not sure I agree with the late Kenny Everett that they are noisy, wet, smelly things, but I am happiest when I am not in their vicinity and I do not seek out their society. I have little interest in what they do or in anything they may have to say.

Really? Good to know.

[HillCountryGal]

I'm in the "The Parents Did It" camp. Something about them just bugs the shit outta me. Kind of like the Ramseys, you know?

We shall see.

[No Nonsense girl]

That's a tragedy,these cases blow me every time. A young girl went missing in Trois-Rivieres in quebec on july 31st. Cedrika Provencher was a 9 years old little girl, nothing but doubts on the father and a big black hole. :(

http://thenononsense.blogspot.com/2007/08/on-cdrika-provencher-case.html

[Di]

Not sure if this is the one you were wondering about my opinion on...but I was unaware of the case. I sort of took the summer off of TV and didn't start the newspaper up again until the kids went back to school.

I would question the parenting choice of leaving a 4 year old and two younger siblings in a hotel room alone...even if they were just a few hundred yards away. But then again, there are lots of people, including my own husband, who question my parenting choices about various things.

These kinds of cases are so emotionally loaded and the public so jaded by cases like the woman who drove her children into a lake and then claimed their car was hijacked and the children kidnapped. I am torn (have you noticed I'm torn a lot lately?) between abhorrence that a mother could do such a thing and an understanding that mental illness such as that suffered by Andrea Yates, could have prompted a mother's actions.