Jill Dando, Madeleine McCann and Jack the Ripper - my journey through cold case TV

This week I have mainly been watching TV shows about failed police investigations.  

First I watched a BBC documentary about Jill Dando.  Being the BBC it spent the first ten minutes telling us how lovely Jill was and how fondly people remembered her because a lot of the general public have forgotten.  Nick Ross told us she always took her high heels off when they were in the same frame so as not to look taller than him.  Eventually the policeman who put away Barry George stood amongst his decision logs trying to explain how they’d got Barry to trial on the basis of one tiny particle of gunshot residue.  The trial lasted 50 days largely due to the paucity of the evidence and the verdict was overturned on appeal.  Of course Barry George could have killed Jill Dando but it’s amazing the thing ever got to trial when they couldn’t do even basic things like place him at the scene.  While they had a photo of George with gun or a replica gun posing as an SAS man in the privacy of his own flat it frankly didn’t seem plausible that a man with Mr George’s limited intelligence should be able to customise the bullet that killed her in broad daylight to reduce the sound as it was ejected from the gun.  The bottom line is however much money was poured into the investigation no one saw the perpetrator, there was no concrete evidence and no one could be placed at the scene so there was never going to be a satisfactory outcome to the case ... but since money is allocated for political reasons a huge amount of money was spent to achieve little except an embarrassing miscarriage of justice…

Next I watched Netflix’s new documentary series on the Madeleine McCann case.  Oh dear… here we are again in the world of endless speculation, too little evidence and too much money.  You can't solve any case with a complete lack of evidence and lots of money but that didn't stop the McCanns having a good go....  aided and frustrated in equal terms by the press creating a circus that probably was more of a hindrance to the investigation than a help. 

The fact is no one saw who abducted Madeleine so no solid conclusions could be made.  With no forensic evidence left at the scene the Portuguese PoPo quickly fell back on the simplest conclusion that the McCanns had done it themselves – that they were trying to cover up an accident.  As with the case of Ms Dando the crime scene had also been contaminated soon after the discovery of the crime making it even harder.  Precious time was lost not doing house to house searches.  The McCanns hired their own PR person and soon the press turned against the Portuguese PoPo which made them ever more suspicious of the McCanns.  Psychological profiling was used to point the finger first at Robert Murat (who lived over the road and did some free translations for the McCanns) and then at a web developer who did some work for him who Murat called on the night (although he can’t remember why).  None of this amounts of a hill of beans but never-the-less both men had their properties raided and reputations trashed by the media to no avail as they were named "augidos". 

Eventually – suspicious of the discrepancies in the stories of the Tapas 7 - the PoPo pulled in the McCanns who did themselves no favours by refusing to answer their questions.  According to the Portuguese PoPo Mrs McCann called them a rude word but who knows?  The Portuguese PoPo were convinced the McCanns were guilty because of the evidence of two sniffer dogs from England – a cadaver dog and a blood dog – but as their handler pointed out … you can’t put a spaniel on the stand.  Scooby Doo Where Are You?  Unfortunately for the Portuguese PoPo they had jumped the gun by not waiting for the thing that every Jeremy Kyle viewer knows one must have - the All Important DNA results.  These showed only an 80 per cent match to Madeleine which meant that the DNA the dogs had found could have come from the parents themselves or Madeleine’s siblings.

Still lead investigator (much maligned by the British press as a lazy, fat bastard) Goncalo Amaral remained convinced it was the McCanns (much maligned by the Portuguese press as lazy Colonial child-neglecters-at-best-murderers-at-worst) wot done it and the whole thing reached the level of an international diplomatic incident when Gordon Brown started insisting Mr Amaral be sacked.  He was… but of course that problem didn’t go away because it created an intensely bitter angry ex-PoPo who decided he’d get his own back by writing a book about the McCanns’ “guilt”.  The McCanns sued and won and lost on appeal. 

Eventually the Portuguese PoPo archived the case and everybody stopped being an “aguido” and many libel damages were awarded...  Still, the McCanns through their fundraising now had huge sums of money to perpetually re-investigate the case.  Much of this money came from Everest Windows entrepreneur Brian Kennedy who dispensed his wisdom from within a giant red sofa to underline his conspicuous consumption and I was reminded of a salesman of Everest Windows who once told me replacing my windows would cost £20,000 but “he could give me a discount” … how I resented staying in to talk to that idiot.  Anyway, soon a private investigation firm was hired who scoured the deep web for peados and found many but not a trace of Madeleine … so the McCann trust sacked them only to replace them with a professional con-man.  At one point a police artist was interviewed who said that there should be more to a drawn photofit than the physical geometry of the person in question and that the portrait should reveal something about the person … but unfortunately the person who saw a man carrying a girl (who turned out to be someone else) couldn’t remember what his face had been like anyway… so the police artist lady had a pretty hard time exercising her artistic licence on nothing.  And people wonder why it's so hard for the PoPo to catch anybody with scientific methods like these...

And on and on went on the farce of trying to solve a case without any evidence. If only all this time and money had been spent on some slightly less hopeless cases…

And finally I watched a BBC documentary where a lady in black attempted to identify Jack the Ripper with the help of HOLMES … a much vaunted Home Office computer product which seemed little more than a relational database.  The program ended by telling us who the Ripper was a mere 131 years too late with the certainty that can only come from all the protagonists being long gone.

What all these cases have in common is a large amount of money being spent in the teeth of there not being enough evidence to build a case as if one will ever make up for the other… there’s a moral there but I don’t know what it can be…

The questions Mrs McCann reportedly refused to answer are:

1. On May 3, 2007, around 22:00, when you entered the apartment, what did you see? What did you do? Where did you look? What did you touch?

2. Did you search inside the master bedroom wardrobe?

3. (Shown two photographs of her bedroom wardrobe) Can you describe its contents?

4. Why was the curtain by the sofa near the side window tampered with? Did someone go behind the sofa?

5. How long did your search of the apartment take after you detected Madeleine’s disappearance?

6. Why did you say Madeleine had been abducted?

7. Assuming Madeleine was abducted, why did you leave the twins to go to the ‘Tapas’ and raise the alarm? The supposed abductor could still be in the apartment.

8. Why didn’t you ask the twins then what happened to their sister or why didn’t you ask them later on?

9. When you raised the alarm at the ‘Tapas’ what exactly did you say – what were your exact words?

10. What happened after you raised the alarm there?

11. Why did you go and warn your friends instead of shouting from the verandah?

12. Who contacted the authorities?

13. Who took place in the searches?

14. Did anyone outside the group learn of her disappearance in those following minutes?

15. Did any neighbour offer you help?

16. What does “we let her down” mean?

17. Did Jane Tanner tell you that night she’d seen a man with a child?

18. How were the authorities contacted and which police force was alerted?

19. During the searches, with the police there, where did you search for Maddie, how and in what way?

20. Why did the twins not wake up during that search or when they were taken upstairs?

21. Who did you phone after the occurrence?

22. Did you call Sky News?

23. Did you know the danger of calling the media, because it could influence the abductor?

24. Did you ask for a priest?

25. By what means did you divulge Madeleine’s features, by photographs or by any other means?

26. Is it true that during the searches you remained seated on Maddie’s bed without moving?

27. What was your behaviour that night?

28. Did you manage to sleep?

29. Before travelling to Portugal, did you make any comment about a foreboding or a bad feeling?

30. What was Madeleine’s behaviour like?

31. Did Maddie suffer from any illness or take any medication?

32. What was Madeleine’s relationship like with her brother and sister?

33. What was Madeleine’s relationship like with her brother and sister, friends and school mates?

34. As for your professional life, in how many and which hospitals have you worked?

35. What is your medical speciality?

36. Have you ever done shift work in any emergency services or other services?

37. Did you work every day?

38. At a certain point you stopped working. Why?

39. Are the twins difficult to get to sleep? Are they restless and does that cause you uneasiness?

40. Is it true sometimes you despaired at your children’s behaviour and it left you feeling very uneasy?

41. Is it true that in England you even considered handing over Madeleine’s custody to a relative?

42. In England, did you medicate your children? What type of medication?

43. In the case files, you were shown canine forensic testing films. After watching them, did you say you couldn’t explain any more than you already had?

44. When the sniffer dog also marked human blood behind the sofa, did you say you couldn’t explain any more than you already had?

45. When the sniffer dog marked the scent of corpse coming from the vehicle you hired a month after the disappearance, did you say you couldn’t explain any more than you already had?

46. When human blood was marked in the boot of the vehicle, did you say you couldn’t explain any more than you already had?

47. When confronted with the results of Maddie’s DNA, carried out in a British lab, collected from behind the sofa and the boot of the vehicle, did you say you couldn’t explain any more than you already had?

48. Did you have any responsibility or intervention in your daughter’s disappearance?