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?
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