EP01 - Madeleine McCann: The Chief Suspect

Donal and Jon Clarke discuss the manic first 24 hours of the Madeleine McCann case, Jon’s arrival in Praia Da Luz, his initial impression of the McCanns and his chance encounter with an early suspect.

Jon Clarke’s book, ‘My Search for Madeleine’ is available via the link below:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/MY-SEARCH-MADELEINE-Reporters-Harrowing-ebook/dp/B09F85HG7S

Transcript

00:38 --> 00:45

Donal:             Jon, the Madeleine McCann story is truly and utterly unique, explain why that is?

00:46 --> 01:58

Jon:                 It’s amazing really, that some fifteen years on the Madeleine McCann case is probably as big now as it was back then, and, really, the impact of this unfortunate missing girl is remarkable when you think how many missing children there are globally every year. I think there’s currently around a million-plus missing children. I think 300 and something thousand in America and around 60,000 in the UK. Obviously, a lot of those are just sort of runaways, but still, one or two percent of those are trafficked or snatched children, which is tens of thousands every year. So, why this one missing girl on a holiday in Portugal in 2007, should be such big news is actually quite remarkable. I guess it boils down to a few key factors really one, the parents and how quickly they got onto it, how keen they were to get the story out, how organised they were. Also, how the press latched on to this young girl what she looked like, how pretty she was, a blue-eyed blonde-haired girl that obviously struck a chord with many, many, middle classes and newspaper, and readers, TV watchers and news-watchers in the UK, but also globally. So, I think that that's really one of the main reasons that we are still talking about Madeleine McCann, fifteen years on.

01:59 --> 02:25

Donal:             For me, I look at this you if go back to the Charles Lindbergh baby to get something of such a gargantuan and international phenomenon around a missing child, and I am persuaded by the fact that there’s really interesting criminological points about this. She's blue-eyed, she’s blonde, she belonged to middle-class parents, doctors, highly connected, there was a church connection, there were political connections and before long there was this extraordinary media scrum, of which you were an early part, explain that.

02:26 --> 03:20

Jon:                 Yeah, well Donal I've been living in…in… Spain’s Rhonda in Malaga for about, not that long actually a couple of years. So, I got a very, very, early morning phone call, I worked for the Daily Mail, and the Mail on Sunday, back in London for many years, and so when I moved to Spain I continued my journalistic career, so I frequently would be sent out on jobs all around Spain and the islands. It was a bit unusual, and it was earlier than normal, I probably normally get a call about 8:00 o'clock or 08.30 this was at about 7:00 or 6:30 in the morning. It's very, very early to be woken up by the Daily Mail foreign desk, and can you get to the Algarve soon as possible? There's a girl gone missing a British girl. I was like, really all that way, you sure? They said yes, just get going and to a place called Praia De Luz it’s the Ocean Club she went missing last night, and we want you to go and investigate.  You don't really ask questions Donal at that point, you pack your bag, you know, your bag’s normally semi-packed, jump in the car, and off you go, and that's what happened. 

03:21 --> 03:36

Donal:             And I suppose what was unusual about this is that the kid was reported missing around 10.20, 10.30, the night before, and within twelve hours, an entire international media scrum is beginning to avalanche its way to this small Portuguese seaside village 

03:37 --> 04:39

Jon:                 Which is culturally very different there. I don’t know if you’re aware that there they normally completely keep it completely under wraps, don’t say anything at all, don’t tell the press, quietly try and go about working out where the child’s gone. I think the McCann’s themselves had kind of realised that the police were a bit sleepy not doing very much, and quite frankly they’d better stir up this hell of a storm, this massive shit storm, and make sure that the world knew that their little daughter had, in their opinion, been snatched and I…I, agree with them actually, and I think that they needed everybody to be on the case because they just feared there wasn't enough being done. So, they called various friends of theirs who worked in the media and one guy called John, in particular, I think called Sky News, and then he called the Mail, he called the BBC, the word just got out, it spread very quickly. The early bulletins on the TV, I think the first bulletin was around 8:30 on ITN, I think, it was, very, very, soon followed by Sky. Every single broadsheet, tabloid, newspapers from the UK, plus every radio station, TV station, had someone down there by the end of that first, well… that second day, well, you know, the day after she went missing. 

04:40 --> 04:48

Donal:             And not only did they contact the media, but they also contacted the foreign office, and they had political heavyweights operating for them, and in their interests overnight, nearly.

04:49 --> 05:20

Jon:                 We shouldn’t forget that the golden hours are vital aren’t they, in any case like this and they did get the Foreign Office involved and the British Consul was quickly involved in the Algarve, and, in fact, the Ambassador, John Buck, down pretty sharpish, the next day, I think.

I don't know the McCann’s, but I've obviously followed the case and I’d met them very briefly that first day, and you could tell they were a very professional organised couple, and they knew what they needed to do. I think they might look back now and slightly regret that, but they certainly managed to get a lot of global interest in their child very quickly.

05:21 --> 05:37

Donal:             For everything that they believe they were doing in the interests of their missing child that had a flip side, because what they were doing was such an unusual pathway, particularly in Portugal, so in many ways as much as it helped the investigation it also turned the spotlight directly upon them. 

05:38 --> 06:31

Jon:                 That's right, well it hindered them in two ways, one, of course, because any possible kidnapper would have seen there’s a huge media storm brewing and, of course, would have panicked over this child, and so that on one hand potentially would have tried to get rid of the evidence very quickly. But secondly, as you point out, the Portuguese and indeed the Spanish are culturally very different, very suspicious of people leaving their kids in apartments and not being on top of them, not playing around with them all the time in the evening, so immediately there was suspicion raised. Immediately, they didn't understand why they hadn’t been with them at dinner at the restaurant that night. I think they also… there was a sense that, well who are these people to come in here and tell us, our, police, what to do and to bring in the British police when we've got perfectly good police force. Oh, and you know, by the way, there’s no sex offenders living in Praia Da Luz, there's no problems like this in Praia da Luz, the Algarve's a safe place for tourism and I mean, this is ridiculous to suggest that its rife with paedophiles and our daughter could have been snatched by one.

06:32 --> 06:48

Donal:             So, in many ways, the family were kind of caught between a cultural war, a reputational war around tourism, and, of course, the sense, and this is the correct sense, that those closest to the missing child should immediately be the first suspects, that is rational and that’s reasonable and understandable.

06:49 --> 07:40

Jon:                Of course, it is, Donal, and you’ll know that in 75% of all occasions that the children go missing or are killed, it is the family and friends who are involved, right? It would be logical obviously to look at them, but maybe they might study the demographics of their holiday and their group. They were there with five professional friends in three other families, and they were doctors, that’s not to say that doctors couldn’t, of course, kill their children. But if they looked at this early on, it didn't look likely that they’d killed their child, I mean, it wasn't logical, that they’d kill their child, and their friends would all back them up and support them. So, I think that's why initially police looked into other avenues. In fact, I remember very early, very, very, distinctly those first few days, they said she's been kidnapped, she’s within, I think they said, within seven miles. We know where she is, we’re talking to the kidnappers, I think they said. I don't understand that to this day. Did they actually have any suggestion or hint that they knew who had her?

07:41 --> 08:31

Donal:             There was such an unusual constellation around events, but because of those, the family's behaviour, the behaviour of the police, and the neurosis around the reputation of the Algarve as a safe place for a holiday, so you had a billion-euro industry nearly in the hands of the international press. But I also think those footprints really still sit heavily in the sand of this story still, and probably point to the reason why this story has become such a toxic story for journalists and commentators to cover. This is a story where, and I've reported upon it over many years in various iterations, I found myself the subject of all sorts of bizarre accusations, allegations, that I'm acting for the Vatican. I mean, it really is a story where unless your narrative aligns with that of somebody online, you're going to be attacked by an army of either McCann haters, or McCann lovers.

08:32 --> 09:44

Jon:                It’s polarised opinion and it's… there's so many trolls out there and they're very, very, aggressive in the way they behave. They will track people down, and they will locate your home, and they will find any chinks in your armour. They accused me of being there the night before. The favourite one saying that I could have been working for MI5 and, of course, because she'd been killed a few days before they needed an army of people to be there to help tidy up, and I'm on team McCann, and I mean, I actually, had Martin Brunt at Sky who was telling me how they accused that he had a house brought for him in Praia da Luz, from the proceeds of all his work he’d done on behalf of the McCann’s. This one guy’s written a book and he's got 27 or 30 chapters, of which four chapters of his book are dedicated just to me, I mean entirely to me. I counted how many words there were in another blog. 10,000 words had been written about me, about me lying, and I’m a disgraced reporter, I’m a yellow reporter… I made it up…I'm a liar, Donal, I’m the lowest of the low and I’m… I’m thinking all I’m trying to do is my job here. I got there yes, I was reporting on it, but at the same time I wanted to find this child. There was a kind of part of me that’s a father, a family man I wanted to find her. Primarily, my job was to pull together as best I could, this story so the people back home could understand what was happening. That was my job. Simply. 

09:45 --> 10:11

Donal:             So I just wanted to emphasise the fact that this is a neurotic toxic constellation of contested events and narratives, and at the end of the day you put yourself out there as a really experienced journalist who’s covered a multitude of various stories, and you’ve covered for all the various newspapers, and suddenly you’re caught in this vortex, and you’ve been assaulted verbally and online, but at the end of the day you’re a committed journalist just trying to get to the truth with no greater agenda than that.

10:12 --> 10:40

Jon:                 You know the truth is you have a look at it and even…even…themselves of course, when did Maddie exactly go missing? What time were they searching in the apartment? What time did they arrive exactly? They don’t know even know, because you know they’re out on holiday, they’re enjoying themselves, they were going around checking on each other’s apartments, some of them were checking better than others at certain times, you know, they were, did they listen properly and so, of course, there’s so much conjecture isn’t there, just amongst the family, you know could be five minutes here, ten minutes there, how do we ever know?

10:41 --> 10:48

Donal:             So, you got the call, and your bag is always semi-packed as a professional journalist and reporter. How did you make your journey? And what happened in the first hours? 

10:49 --> 12:35

Jon:                 Tell you what back then it was right in the early days of living in Spain and I did have a young daughter, but I still had my Subaru Impreza that I brought over from England. So, it was like shit off a shovel, incredibly quick, chuck my bag in the back of the car and whizzed off. And if you know Ronda, the Sierra de Ronda, in Southern Spain, it’s a beautiful neck of the woods, it’s so mountainous, hilly, and the roads are empty and at that time in the morning there’s not a single car and the roads are wonderful, you know, all that money that came down from Brussels. It’s a dream drive to Seville and then you go round the Sevilla ring road, ideally nice and early before the rush hour, and then it’s a sort of straight long flat road all the way past Doñana National Parkall the way to Huelva, and then across the border into Portugal. That time in the morning it’s pretty beautiful, it’s quite magical. It had been pretty hot, unseasonably hot actually, that’s one of the points I always remember at the time being absolutely sure that Gerry couldn’t have gone out and buried his daughter because it was so hot, it’d been such a hot April that the ground was rock hard and it was very dry so I…I got there and of course, you lose an hour, different time zones in Spain because of course, Franco wanted to be on the same time as Germany having… you know,  supported Hitler in the second world war and Mussolini. Say I arrived in Portugal at 9.30 Spanish time or say 10 o’clock Spanish time, that’s about 9 o’clock Portuguese time. I remember Ocean Club, where is it, found it pretty quickly, and arriving and thinking this is supposedly the Ocean Club, I discovered it was meant to be a Mark Warner Resort, and I don’t know if you remember Donal when you were growing up, you’re about my age. That was sort of the pinnacle of middle-class achievement, wasn’t it? going to a Mark Warner holiday, somewhere in Greece or wherever it was in Portugal or Spain. You expected this sort of wonderful enclave, fences, and security guards, but it was just a series of blocks of flats, intersected with public roads that drove all around it.

12:36 --> 12:49

Donal:              Kind of like a square grid-like system and there’s a pool and tennis courts in there and of course, then there are flats overlooking it. I think that one of the early points of contestation is the tapas bar. People had said it was in direct line of sight, which is not the case.

12:50 --> 13:06

Jon:                 Not quite, it’s in the line of sight. I think there’s four families so it’s in the line of sight of I think three out of the four families and they could just about make out the top of the window, the patio window, but you couldn’t quite see it. One of the misconceptions is that people think it must be miles away I can’t believe they left their kids such a long way, it’s not actually that far at all, it’s actually remarkably near.

13:07 --> 13:15

Donal:             The proximity for me has never been the issue, the issue is that as the crow flies a hundred and fifty metres, maybe. The bottom line is whether you would do it anyway, right?

13:16 --> 13:51

Jon:                 Well, I think that goes back to the point that it was supposedly the Ocean Club Mark Warner Holidays, and they’d all booked this quite expensive tennis holiday, and I think they would have expected fairly good security and people with video cameras, and people watching out for them. I mean, when they first got there, they thought the apartment was lovely, it was a big airy apartment, nice views but I think they hadn’t really thought, hold on a minute, this is really wide open. You can get to it, by two public roads either side and just behind the flat there’s a kind of alleyway, it’s still there today actually, it’s an amazing alleyway you could just sort of saunter in and wander around, and I think, take your peek here, there, and everywhere, and this is an expensive holiday Donal, this is not a cheap holiday.

13:51 --> 14:04

Donal:             So, what kind of security measures did you encounter when you arrived?

14:05 --> 15:34

Jon:                 I got there I was able to park my car outside I mean there wasn’t any great roadblock or anything at this point of the morning. I would say there were probably seven to eight people, there was definitely a policeman round the front, one or two policemen in a big line, and at the side, you could see the gates, this tiny little picket fence gates and there was a tiny flimsy bit of yellow police tape and a small note that said, do not enter, or something like that. You know the sort of note that as a journalist you’d completely ignore. I remember bumping into Robert Murat outside and we had a quick chat with him and I’m not sure if it’s before or after I went in, but you know Donal what it's like you just go about your job, and I parked my car quickly.  And I walked up the steps and underneath this little flimsy bit of tape I just sort of went up to the door, it must have been about 9, 9.15, 9.20, 9.30, I’ve no idea exactly what time. I looked in there and the door was open, and I just sort of just knocked and said I’m here from the Daily Mail, I’ve just arrived from Spain and I’d really like to try and work out about what’s really going on and, of course, the McCann’s were there. They were really, really sort of frantically just trying to work out what the hell’s going on and they were off to do a police report, a missing child report at the police station in Portimão.  I could have literally just walked into the apartment and been one of the 26 or 27 people who had walked around the apartment and left their DNA around the apartment, of course, I didn’t, I said thanks a lot I’ll do my best, and they were like, thanks. I wish I’d just grabbed them for five minutes just to have a proper chat, you know, a proper interview but I didn’t press, it I didn’t feel like it was the right thing to do.

15:35 --> 15:40

Donal:             Was there an air of foreboding at that stage?

15:41 --> 15:58

Jon:                 You know what I thought as I drove, you know minding my own business, and thinking as you do in the morning listening to radio three, a bit of music, I just thought she’s just going to be found. She’s either going to be in the swimming pool dead, or she’s going to be found hiding under a cupboard or whatever. There’s no way I’m going to arrive three hours forty-five minutes later and she’s still missing.

15:59 --> 16:09

Donal:             So, you, unusually, met Robert Murat who was the first arguido, man under official suspicion. What role was he playing there when you met him, was he just an interested bystander?

16:10 --> 16:40

Jon:                 Yeah, at that point he was just… he seemed like he was hanging around like a bad smell, I mean he was just sort of there. He was taking an interest and the minute…the minute I said I’d come from Spain I’m a reporter and a journalist and by that time I should point out, I had two phone calls on route one from the Sun, and one from the Mirror, you know the Holy Trinity of British Tabloids. Everyone was really taking an interest in this story, so, I kind of found myself arriving on an order from three papers, although I did a lot for the Mail, I wasn’t officially a stringer or correspondent so I could work for anyone.

16:41 --> 16:48

Donal:             You were an agency for hire. But describe Robert Murat physically because his physical description was to become important later on.

16:49 --> 17:14

Jon:                 You know he was just some sort of bumbling guy. Quite polite, quite posh, typical ex-pat. He kind of seemed to know quite a lot about what was going on, I think. I got the sense he'd been up through the night, and I since discovered that he hadn’t been. I since discovered that he had actually taken a couple of late-night phone calls at 11 pm that he couldn’t remember, then went to bed. The next morning, he seemed to know quite a lot about what was happening, and I don’t remember if I’d talked to him before I went up the steps or after.

17:15 --> 17:21

Donal:              Latterly, there was some suggestion that he was playing the role of an intermediary or translator for the Portuguese police and…

17:22 --> 17:57

Jon:                 That’s right, and we mustn’t forget that that actually, in the end, he had worked for East Anglia Police, Suffolk Police I think, as a translator, he was bi-lingual because he partly grew up in Portugal, and he early on offered his services to help in translation. And I assume he got paid for it, his name is on a lot of those documents and a lot of those translated documents, people, witnesses, people living nearby, I don’t think he was officially on the books. I still think most of the Portuguese speak English and I feel like that they should have had a professional translator in a case like this, of a missing child, they should have had someone there at the crack of dawn.

17:58 --> 18:07

Donal:             I suppose nobody at that stage could have imagined every single dot and every single T, would garner such significance and come under such forensic and microscopic examination.

18:08 --> 18:38

Jon:                  I agree but don’t let’s forget Donal in the year before this had happened you’ve got at least, at least, ten British families complaining about their children being abused in the apartments by weirdos sneaking into their apartments. You’ve got a German kid on the beach, just four weeks before, very nearby, who got grabbed by some naked man and molested. They know that there’s a lot of these people around and stuff going on. There was an elderly woman who was raped, and I spoke to a few people last week in Praia de Luz who had been there all their lives, they had no idea that happened.

18:39 --> 18:46

Donal:              How was Praia de Luz being sold at the time? Were they saying that these sex crimes never happened, when did the truth about this begin to emerge?

18:47 --> 19:27

Jon:                 Everyone I spoke to were saying there’s been no cases like this, you know, the Algarve’s a safe place. Another case we’ll come to later, Hazel Behan; she was told look you don’t want to report this, do you? You don’t want us to publicise this? They pressurised her into pretty much keeping it quiet. Twenty years old Donal, you know, a really pretty beautiful vibrant Irish girl working over there, and that ruined her life, this rape. They wanted her to keep it quiet because it was bad for business to publicise it, bad business to accept that they had six hundred plus sex offenders living just around the area in this lovely little resort. And, you know, you’ve been there a number of times, you know, what it’s like, it’s just got this funny little underbelly hasn’t it, this dark underbelly Praia de Luz and Largos, that part of the Algarve you can sense it.

19:28 --> 19:32

Donal:             And what did you sense when you started asking questions and digging around the area on the first day?

19:33 --> 20:45

Jon:                 Basic breakdown the first day was, I arrived, as I said around 9, 9.30, thereabouts, and at that time there were a couple of local police officers G and R, at the front of the house, no one at the back there may have been a journalist from one of the local papers there. A guy called Len Port who works for a paper called the Algarve Resident, he’s very anti, seemingly of what I’ve read, quite anti the McCann’s I think he believes there may be some sort of conspiracy there. And as I said, Murat was there, and quite a few other, kind, of ex-pats, floating around people trying to help look for her, for Maddy. There were people like, still searching, some of them through the night, they were up again, they were producing pamphlets with a picture of her on it, a very rudimentary pamphlet with her name ‘missing have you seen this girl’ I wish I’d kept one of them. I grabbed a stack full I don’t know twenty or so, and I went around, and I remember leaving one of them in the supermarket, putting it up on the pegboard in the supermarket. I remember then going round and putting them on street corners, I got some sellotape from someone. I was almost sort of doing a bit of searching as well as reporting, you know. I remember going around the corner and walking around and, there was actually some road men working in a trench, two workmen digging away at this trench, and I’d say it was at least a metre and a half deep. I just thought crikey, you know, did she go in here. 

20:46 --> 21:36

To this day I think that’s remarkable and I’m not sure whether they ever dug up the trench, but I said to the guys have you heard about this girl? ‘No.’ There’s this girl look, and I showed them an A4 poster, and they were like no… no… no. Well, I said there’s a girl gone missing, you know, can you look at your trench basically, and see if you can see anything. They like shrugged their shoulders, you know, like, leave us alone. I can kind of remember walking out of the town actually going right off into the countryside and finding various tracks you know, and poking around, and there’s quite a lot of empty ruined houses and farmhouses, I’m talking about up to a dozen. I just kept thinking is she going to be in one of these, thankfully not. To this day I’m pretty sure that I walked right past Christian Brueckner’s house, where he’d rented for seven years, no less. It’s an amazing place like a bird’s nest that looked right down across Praia da Luz, and it was like an eagle’s nest. The McCann’s used to go running up there past it, unbeknown to them that he’d been living there.

21:37 --> 21:47

Donal:             When Gerry went running it was one of those iconic images that people felt I think unfairly, how can this guy be so distracted? Or how can this guy go running at a time like this?

21:48 --> 22:29

Jon:                  You’ve got to hold it together, haven’t you, I mean they’re professional middle-class people. Never forget this right Donal, they’re doctors, she’s a GP, he’s a Surgeon, things they’ve seen, the amount of times they’ve had to hold it together, as they’ve reported to family members about a loved one dying, or having cancer, or having a horrific operation, that’s going to leave them scarred for life, or unable to walk. You’re used to in that profession, holding it together, aren’t you? You’re used to being professional, that’s one of the fundamental issues at play here. I mean the whole trolling that’s gone on, people just don’t understand why they couldn’t show more emotion, why they couldn’t, why they didn’t lose it, why they were able to hold it together. And again, I go back to the very beginning if you see them there’s so much pent-up tension and anguish, but it’s controlled, they’re holding it together, Donal you know, they’re just managing to hold it together.

22:30 --> 22:43

Donal:              And do you think that because they were holding it together, and they were trying to keep their emotions in check that, that’s part of the reasons why a lot of the suspicion began to alight upon them? Very irrationally, but it did so.

22:44 --> 23:16

Jon:                 Yeah, I think they don’t understand why a woman wouldn’t just collapse in floods of tears. I was talking to a guy whose mother actually owns an apartment two floors above the McCann’s or maybe it was directly above the McCann’s. She just said she heard Kate just howling at night, three nights in a row, like, in particular, the first night just for an hour, howling in absolute pain, and agony she said she never ever heard such horrible howling and pain, and grief they just wanted to hold it together for the cameras I think, and for the media.

23:17 --> 23:21

Donal:              And you talk of holding it together for the media. You were there for the first press conference what was the mood?

23:22 --> 24:12

Jon:                 I’d been walking all around the resort, and I’d been everywhere. I kind of looked in every nook and cranny, I’d talked to everyone I could possibly talk to, you know, probably hundreds of people, and I’d kind of drawn blanks everywhere. I sort of must have surfaced back at Ocean Club HQ at around 5. I think the press conference was late, I think it was around 9 or 9.30, it was already dark.  By then, the TV networks had arrived from the UK, the Portuguese networks were there. Portugal’s never had anything like this before, no one has ever done a press conference about a missing child before in Portugal.  They’ve certainly not done it outside in the streets, impromptu press conference outside the apartment where she’d supposedly been snatched. And so there’s a lot of kind of nervous energy, no one’s was quite sure what’s happening, and no one was quite sure who’s going to appear, who’s going to speak. And by this point, I don’t really need to be there to be fair, all the guys I was reporting for were there. 

24:13 --> 25:16

I mean really like any good freelance investigative journalist, or Sunday news journalist, which is more what I specialise in, I should have been elsewhere looking for leads, chasing leads, and doing other things but there was something about this case I needed to be there I needed…I felt like I needed to see them again, I needed to understand what was happening. We sort of stood around mingled for about half an hour twenty minutes and suddenly out of one of the apartments, upstairs apartments, came Kate and Gerry they stood in front of the cameras he put his arm around her, and he… she just had that famous cuddle cat just strangling it, like, you could just see her hands and the veins and she was just holding it together somehow, its 24 hours later this is just horrific.  I don’t know if they’d almost actually timed it to the time 24 hours to the moment she would have been taken. Gerry read out this extremely moving speech about please bring our daughter back. That sticks in my mind it was…it, was just amazing and it was I don’t know people can say look back and say watch that, how they made it up, they were acting, no they weren’t, I mean it was so clear what they were going through hell. Everyone just sort, of stood in total silence, there were no questions afterwards, and they went off and walked off afterwards 

25:17 --> 25:30

All these journalists all these tv journalists we’ve all got kids and we’ve all been on holiday in places like this, and we’re thinking Jesus, you know, I’ve got a two-year-old…

25:31 --> 25:16

Gerry McCann:            “Words cannot describe the anguish and despair that we are feeling. As the parents of our beautiful daughter Madeline, we request that anyone who may have any information related to Madeleine’s disappearance no matter how trivial contact the Portuguese police and help us get her back safely. Please if you have Madeline let her come home to her mummy, daddy, brother, and sister. As everyone can understand how distressing the current situation is we ask that our privacy is respected to allow us to continue assisting the police in their investigation, Thank you”

26:15 - 28:02