What Happened To Madeleine McCann?

Am 04.08.2019 veröffentlicht, The disappearance of Madeleine McCann has captivated thousands of people from across the world ever since she disappeared on May the 3rd of 2007.

Madeleine was on vacation with her parents Kate and Gerry McCann, along with her two year old twin siblings and a group of family friends and their children.

The McCanns arrived on Saturday, 28 April 2007 in Praia da Luz. It is a village in Portugal known as Little Britain for its high concentration of British homeowners and holidaymakers.

They were placed in 5A Rua Dr Agostinho da Silva. It is one of the several properties rented to holidaymakers. 5A was a two-bedroom, ground-floor apartment in the group of apartments known as Waterside Village.

This is a picture showing the step from Rua drive to the patio doors of 5A.

Then this is the front side of the resort.

This is Madeleine\'s bed

And this is Madeleine\'s pink and white Eeyore pyjamas.

The third of may was the penultimate day of their vacation. The children spent the morning in the resort\'s Kids club. The family then lunched at their apartment before heading to the pool.

Afterwards the kids went back to the Kids club. At 6pm that night their mother took them back to the apartment while their dad had a tennis lesson.

The McCanns put their children to bed at 7pm. Madeleine was left asleep in short-sleeved, pink and white Eeyore pyjamas, next to her comfort blanket and a soft toy, Cuddle Cat.

At 8:30 that night the parents left 5A to go to dinner with their friends in the open-air Ocean Club\'s restaurant. It is about 55m or 160 feet away from 5A.

The top of the apartment was visible from the restaurant, but not the doors. The patio doors could be locked only from the inside, so the McCanns left them closed but unlocked, with the curtains drawn, so they could let themselves in that way when checking on the children.

There was a child-safety gate at the top of the steps from the patio and a low gate at the bottom, which led to the street.

The resort\'s staff had left a note in a message book at the swimming-pool reception area, asking that the same table, which overlooked the apartments, be block-booked for 20:30 for the McCanns and friends every evening for the last four evenings of the holiday.

The message said the group\'s children were asleep in the apartments. Madeleine\'s mother believes the abductor may have seen the note. The McCanns and their friends left the restaurant roughly every half-hour to check on their children.

Madeleine\'s father carried out the first check on 5A at around 21:05. The children were asleep and all was well, except that he recalled having left the children\'s bedroom door slightly ajar, and now it stood almost wide open. He pulled it nearly closed again before returning to the restaurant.

Madeleine\'s mother intended to check on the children at 9:30pm, but Matthew Oldfield, one of the family friends that was with them offered to go instead while he was checking on his own children.

He noticed that the McCann\'s children\'s bedroom door was wide open, but after hearing no noise, he left 5A without looking far enough into the bedroom to see whether Madeleine was there.

He could not recall whether or not the bedroom window and its exterior shutter were open at this point.

Madeleine\'s mother did make her own check to 5A at 10pm that night. Kate recalled entering the apartment through the unlocked patio doors to the back.

She immediately noticed that their bedroom door was wide open. She also noticed the window and exterior shutter was open. Madeleine\'s Cuddle Cat and pink blanket were still on the bed, but Madeleine was gone.

After briefly searching the apartment, Kate ran back towards the restaurant screaming that Madeleine is gone and someone had taken her.

At around 10 minutes past 10 Madeleine\'s father sent Matthew Oldfield to ask the resort\'s reception desk to call the police, and at 22:30 the resort activated its missing-child search protocol. Sixty staff and guests searched until 04:30 in the morning, at first assuming that Madeleine had wandered off.

Lots of mistakes were made directly after her disappearance. Police did not do house to house searches. They were also not given a description of what Madeleine looked like for many hours.

Police did also not request motorway surveillance pictures of vehicles leaving Praia da Luz on the night of the disappearance. They only put up roadblocks the next morning at 10am.

Not everyone in the resort at the time was interviewed. The crime scene was not secured. Apartment 5A was rented out two more times before Police could get samples from Madeleine\'s room.

The investigation was off to a bad start and it never really recovered, but there was a few leads and suspects that we will discuss now.

At 9:15 Jane Tanner, one of the McCann\'s family friends, saw a man carrying a young child near Madeleine\'s room. The child in the man\'s arms was wearing light-coloured pajamas with a floral pattern similar to Madeleine\'s.

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