Maddy

Madeline McCann. 4 years old, missing from her family's vacation villa in Portugal since May. This story has been impossible to miss here, as it's been front page news for 4 months, and recently took a surprising twist. But I'm getting ahead of myself. A few observations/random thoughts about this news item.

Firstly, much has been made of the fact the her parents, Kate and Gerry McCann, both highly educated and comfortably well-off, would leave their children unattended while they had dinner with friends. People tend to see this and condemn the McCanns as irresponsible. I've even heard people imply that they had it coming.

What seems to be perpetually overlooked, though, is the fact that the resort at which they were staying is entirely geared toward the production of an environment in which parents can do exactly what the McCanns did. Having talked to people who've actually stayed in a Mark Warner resort, it's not uncommon for parents to leave their children unattended for long periods of time. Let's not condemn the parents for doing what many, many others have simply because we have the benefit of hindsight.

Second, and here's where it gets interesting, the McCanns have done a tremendous job of keeping the story alive, ostensibly in the hope that by doing so, someone will come forward and say that they've seen the girl and her abductor. In the last week or so, though, the Portugese police formally placed the McCanns under suspicion, and it's now up to ajudge to determine based on the current evidence whether formal charges should be brought against the parents.

While details of the evidence against them are sketchy and unreliable (there's a huge amount of speculatory "evidence" sprayed around various news outlets), from what I gather, a large quantity of Madeline's hair and some "bodily fluid" which was an 80% match for Madeline's DNA were found in the trunk of a rental car used by the McCanns some 25 days after Maddy's disappearance. Her parents accidentally killed her with an overdose of sleeping pills, hid the body, then disposed of it later, or so goes the theory.

Now, it may just be me, but I think this new evidence is just a bit hard to swallow. My issues with it are fairly simple. First, where, exactly, does one hide a body in a foreign country? And didn't the police thoroughly search the resort compound and surrounding areas immediately after the disappearance? OK, so maybe the McCanns initially hid the body somewhere else. But if the they were at dinner with friends, when would they have had time to get far enough away that that the body wouldn't be found and then get back without arousing curiosity from their dinner companions? And if the killing was accidental, as has been suggested, wouldn't they have been noticeably shaken during dinner?

OK, set that aside for the moment. Consider the evidence that's been found in the car. A "large amount" of hair? Come on. I just can't imagine that people who are clever enough to have stashed a body for 3 weeks while a massive manhunt and media frenzy raged around them would make the schoolboy mistake of not vacuuming out the car after they'd dumped the body. And just how would they have been able to elude the photographers, journalists and random strangers who've surrounded them for long enough to retrieve the body, move it and then bury it again. Aren't the chances pretty good that someone would have noticed that? Or did the McCanns kill the onlookers, too?

In fact, I'm not alone in thinking that the rental car evidence is a little dodgy. Dr. Michael Baden, chief forensic pathologist for the New York State Police, was quoted as saying that a body which had been decomposing for 25 days would leave a large amount of putrefying matter behind unless it was tightly wrapped. It doesn't seem that a great deal of anything was found in the car. But, as Dr. Baden points out, if the body were so tightly wrapped, how did the hair get out?

Since everyone seems to be in mystery solving mode these days, I'll offer my two alternative theories:
- The Portugese police planted the evidence in the car because they're tired of looking like the Keystone Kops. I admit that this is pretty unlikely since the police would have had to obtain Maddie's hair and some sort of bodily fluid in order to put these into the car, but certainly, given that they had access to the villa, they could have obtained these fairly easily. I'm not fond of this theory, since it feels a bit too Hollywood for me.
- Maddy is alive, and her abductor planted the hair in the rental car to make it a) look like she's dead so as to reduce the intensity of the search and b) make it look like the McCanns did it. Win-win. This is also admittedly a bit of a stretch, since, just as it's unlikely that the McCanns could have exhumed, moved and reinterred the body unnoticed, it's equally improbable that anyone would be able to break into their rental car unnoticed, but I don't think it's outside the realm of possibility.

So maybe my theories aren't watertight, and I certainly don't have all the facts in my posession, but from what's been reported, it doesn't seem like the police have it quite right, either.

Either way, I hope I'm right, and that Madeline is found. The sad fact is, though, that children go missing all the time, from all parts of the world, and no one's looking for them. Maybe we should be.