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Madeleine McCann Bio, Disappearance, Search and Investigation

Madeleine Beth McCann was born on May 12, 2003, in Leicester, England. She lived with her family in Rothley.  She is a girl with blonde hair, and her left eye is blue and green while her right eye is green with a brown spot on the iris and also has a small brown spot on her left leg.

Madeleine is the daughter of Gerry Patrick McCann and Kate Marie McCann (nee Healy). Both of Madeleine’s parents are physicians, and they are also practicing Roman Catholics. Her mother was born in 1968 in Huyton, near Liverpool. She holds a degree in medicine, which she got from the University of Dundee in 1992 and from there moved shortly to obstetrics and gynecology before moving into general practice.

Image source: thenypost.com

Her father was also born in 1968 in Glasgow and held a BSc in physiology/sports science from the University of Glasgow in 1989. As of 1992 he got qualified in medicine and obtained a master’s degree in 2002 from the same Glasgow. He became a consultant cardiologist in 2005 in Glenfield Hospital, Leicester. Gerry and Kate both met in 1993 and decided to get married in 1998, then they had Madeleine in 2003 and also had a twin boy and girl in 2005.

Madeleine was the eldest daughter and child of Gerry and Kate and also an elder sister to her twin siblings Sean and Amelia.

Madeleine was known for her disappearance on May 3, 2007, when she was just three years, and her whereabouts are still unknown to date.

Madeleine McCann’s Disappearance

Image source: thenypost.com

Madeleine, her family, and some family friends, together with their children, went for a holiday at a resort in Praia da Luz, in Portugal. They arrived on Saturday, April 28, 2007, for their seven nights spring break. Madeleine and her family were put in 5a, an apartment which consisted of two bedrooms was on the ground floor. The children slept in the room next to the door which was always shut, and their room had a window with a curtain that was always shut throughout their stay.

On May 3, 2007, while Gerry and Kate McCann were out having dinner with a group of friends at a tapas restaurant nearby Madeleine disappeared, her parents believe that she was abducted. They both put Madeleine and her two siblings to bed that night and went to a nearby tapas restaurant which was just 75 yards away and according to them they were checking on them at about 30 minutes interval, they recalled to even checking up on them at around 9 pm and everything had seemed fine at that time. Only for them to return home about an hour later and realized that their eldest daughter was nowhere to be found. During an interview with BBC the McCann’s spokesman said “in the darkness, she didn’t immediately realize Madeleine wasn’t there. She realized the curtains were flapping in the window to the street and it was open which was not how they left it. They left the shutters down and the window closed”.

When Kate realized her daughter was nowhere to be found she immediately raised the alarm, and the McCanns together with their friends, immediately began looking for her around in the resort, and when they couldn’t find her they then contacted the police.

Madeleine’s Search and Investigation

At 10:30 pm the resort started their search, which included sixty staff and guests looking around the resort for Madeleine, and this search continued until 4:30 because they had first thought that she had wandered away before they closed the search and declared it was time to go to bed.

It was reported that the police did not come in time after they were called. It took the police about an hour and a half to get to a potential crime scene. It was also stated that by the time they had come, a lot of people had been in an out of the room, and the possibilities of evidence being tampered with were there.

According to Madeleine McCann’s nanny, she said the resort was not considered a safe place because nannies were given rape alarms and told not to go out alone. She also slammed the Portuguese police for their sluggishness towards the disappearance of the little girl, which robbed them of their chance to find her.

According to Kate roadblocks were not put in place until 10 am the next morning. The following weeks following Madeleine’s disappearance, the Portugal police came up with a theory that the little girl was involved in an internal accident that took her life, and Kate and Gerry tried to cover up the accident. Due to this new development, the McCanns have then proclaimed suspects in September 2007. Then the Attorney General of Portugal closed the case by July 2008 due to lack of evidence against the parents of Madeleine. The McCanns and their friends got apologies and damages for slamming their names when the case was closed without evidence on them. It was believed that the Portuguese police made Madeleine’s parent official suspects save Portugal’s tourist trade.

The McCanns continued with private investigation and shortly after the case took an international interest. In 2009, the McCanns released a picture of how Madeleine would look at age 6 to aid the investigations, and also in 2012, Scotland Yard also commissioned one of how she would look in 2012.

So far, £11.75million has been spent on Madeleine’s investigation by the UK authorities. Another £150,000 was awarded in November 2018 and set to run out in March 2019. It was also believed that additional £300,000 was also awarded on June 5.

The reward to be given to anyone who can provide any information to bring back Madeleine McCann safely has been totaled to be about £2.5 million while a lot above £2.6million to anyone who can find Madeleine.

Up until now, the investigation for Madeleine’s disappearance is still open and involves a whole lot of police officers and some of the staff of Scotland Yard. There have been a lot of potential sightings of the missing girl, but still, yet the police have not been able to locate her.

About Suzan Vega