In the penultimate episode of the Netflix docuseries, the pedophile theory goes into high gear. We’re told that human trafficking is a $150 billion-a-year industry, and about pedophiles lurking in the dark web.
The pedophile theory is a handy one when you need a revolving door of potential suspects. It’s served the Ramseys well over the past 20 years or more, and it’s the gift that keeps giving in terms of new suspects, in the endless search for Madeleine McCann.
At the end of episode seven, the McCann’s PR dude holds up the latest pedophile of the moment, an Australian woman and the mainstream media go nuts. Maybe Madeleine is in Australia?
Search for Madeleine McCann focuses on Australia [August 2009] – Belfast Telegraph
Instantly the previous suspect [whether the bucktooth creeper or Tannerman] is forgotten as the narrative hops from one handy pedophile to the next. While a distracted audience not paying attention to the McCann case might be jarred back into it intermittently with a sense of “oh they’ve found another suspect, the investigation hasn’t been fruitless” a more consistent approach exposes the investigation into Madeleine’s Disappearance as an ongoing circus act.
If Madeleine’s not dead, the public need to reminded periodically that she’s out there, and to do that the show must go on. More and more circus acts are needed, and with them, circus ringmasters.
If the McCann’s and the Tapas Seven have been very effective over the years at PR, at prosecuting and at suing and silencing their critics, they’ve been staggeringly ineffective at investigating their daughter’s case.
In the apology published below, which coincided with another massive payout from the Sunday Times, it doesn’t take a genius to figure out the McCanns appeared to be a little on the slow side in making information available. The Smithman efits came out sometime in 2008 but were only handed over to the cops in late 2009. The Metropolitan Police only received them two years after that. Not exactly a picture of urgency or efficiency, is it?
Gerry McCann attacks ‘disgraceful’ Sunday Times after £55k libel payout [October 2014] – The Guardian
Neither, as it turned out, were more than one of the investigators the McCanns seemed to handpick for the job. Remember, money was not a limiting factor, the public had handed over millions to be spent on the search, and yet which investigators did these clever doctors choose to spend this easy money on?
Who Was Kevin Halligen And How Did He Scam Madeleine McCann’s Family? – Oxygen
Madeleine McCann investigator’s mysterious, sudden death – the Bulletin
The blood-soaked corpse of a private detective who investigated Madeleine McCann’s disappearance has been found at his mansion. Kevin Halligen, 56, dubbed a “cloak-and-dagger, James Bond-style spy”, took the high-profile case in March 2008.
And while Halligen was hired by the McCanns he was involved in a dispute and accused of conning the fund to find their daughter by living a lavish lifestyle during his probe, but producing no results.
Revealed: More bizarre twists in McCann saga – Portuguese American Journal
It turns out that Kate and Gerry McCann suppressed for five years ‘critical evidence’ that became the centerpiece of the recent BBC Crimewatch program on the disappearance of their daughter Madeleine. Findings by ex-MI5 agents long kept under wraps by the McCanns included the two e-fit images described in the Crimewatch program by Scotland Yard’s Detective Chief Inspector Andy Redwood as of “vital importance.”
The images are of a suspected kidnapper seen by an Irish family in Praia da Luz the night Madeleine went missing. They were given to the McCanns by a handpicked team of investigators from Oakley International hired by the McCanns’ “Find Madeleine Fund” in 2008. Henri Exton, an MI5’s former undercover operations chief who led the team, told the Sunday Times he was “utterly stunned” when he watched the Crimewatch program and saw the evidence he had passed to the McCanns presented as a new breakthrough. For some reason the images were not published even in Kate McCann’s 2011 book Madeleine, though it devoted a whole section to eight “key sightings” and carried e-fits on all of them except the Smiths’.
After the investigation went on its adventure to Australia one year, the next she was back in the Algarve, walking around “in plain sight”.
Former Madeleine McCann Investigator Shares Latest Theory On Where She Is Now [2017] – Huffpost.com.au
Former Det Insp Dave Edgar said he believes Maddie is still alive, possibly hidden in plain sight on Portugal’s Algarve with no memory of her real identity.
Speaking to the Sunday Express, Edgar said: “There is every possibility that Madeleine is still alive and could be being hidden somewhere. “Although Dave Edgar has no evidence to back his theory, he believes Madeleine is being held captive in a basement or cellar 10 miles from where she disappeared in Praia da Luz and will give a conference when he has something more substantial to report.”
The investigator that narrates the Netflix docuseries points out, without a hint of irony, how “surprisingly unlucky” the McCanns were in “choosing” one bumbling Inspector Clouseau to investigate their daughter after another.
In virtually none of their many, many press conferences, do the McCanns express regret over their own investigators, nor do they appeal for other investigators or detectives to come forward to lend their expertise. Instead, they appear content to “hope for the best”.
Metodo 3 under investigation in a case of Embezzlement and Money Laundering
Metodo 3, in Spain, has already been linked to other scandals connected to the political and the financial world, and, recently, was equally put in question by their work in investigating the disappearance of Madeleine McCann, where one of the close associates of Francisco Marco, Antonio Jimenez, who was accused of having driven several British journalists to meet previously paid witnesses, who would then declare to have seen the small British girl [Maddie] in Morocco. The Metodo 3 coadjutant, responsible for investigating Maddie was, thereafter, arrested in a case of theft and cocaine trafficking.
According to sources connected to Metodo 3, several detectives working for the agency, have questioned the capacity of Francisco Marco in the Madeleine McCann investigation, accusing him of destroying the credibility of the agency, especially after he put to practice a disastrous mass communication strategy.
According to the Attorney General’s Office, the misappropriation of funds and money laundering can concern “colossal” sums of public money.
At the same time the docuseries announces a new suspect resembling Victoria Beckham identified as a sort of cliffhanger to lead into the finale, the series “remembers” an incidental but possibly gamechanging piece of evidence.
A witness in the apartment above saw someone leaving the area below [outside 5A]. Carole Tanmer saw a man acting rather strangely as he closed the gate at 5A. See, this is why an exhaustive timeline – set out in the beginning – makes sense. 
Although many on social media are crowing about how thorough and professional the docuseries is, what it does is it manages to provide an endless series of twists and turns, and intrigue, much as the McCanns themselves seem to have done. There’s always something else lurking around the corner and when we get to it, it’s a false alarm, but oh look, there’s something else over there…
One thing we should see but never do in the docuseries is a clear grid for where all the characters in the Ocean Club were staying relative to the McCanns, including and especially the Tapas 7.
We’re also not provided with a conceivable, clear route an “abductor” might have taken if he headed from the Ocean Club to the Smithman sighting. It’s simply not depicted. No timeline is provided for how long it might take to carry a child from 5A to the location of the Smithman sighting either. There’s also no attempt to interrogate the time of the Smithman sighting in any detail. Since the Smith family ate at a nearby restaurant that night, and received a timestamped receipt, this detail shouldn’t have been too difficult.
Specific information such as the apartment number the McCanns moved to INSIDE the Ocean Club after the incident for the first two months is also left out. It was G5A, the apartment in the same block very close to Dr. Julian Totman [aka Tannerman] former apartment and in fact right beside G4M.
The phone records of the McCanns and the Tapas Seven are also not scrutinised in the series.
And the phone pings for the months following, and July 26th, 2007 in particular, are also not provided.
Good write-up! I’ve been reading the recaps here instead of watching the documentary, because I know it would just piss me off.
People can be so gullible! So easily tricked into looking here at this shiny thing, not over there where the truth lies closer. But even with that having been said, the PR spin machine of the McCanns is astonishing in its efficacy and longevity. Who *are* these people, anyway, and why have so many powerful people and organizations done their bidding from Day One? I think some of it has just been what some might call “dumb luck”, along with getting their chest pieces in place very early on, plus the money factor. That Madeleine Fund is one of the sketchiest things I’ve ever read about, and it’s shocking that so many people of good will and good faith have been duped into donating to what is essentially the McCann reputation management slush fund.
I wonder if one of the Tapas Seven will ever come clean about what they know.
I have avoided watching for the same reasons. I am also only reading Nick’s posts on the documentary. I am planning to read his books on the McCann case (pretty sure the title is “Doubt”) once I move on from reading about the Watts case. I am really looking forward to that series since I am only familiar with this case on a surface level. I trust Nick’s writing, and am hooked to the point where I’m not really interested in any other authors at the moment, at least as far as true crime is concerned.
I’ve always been under the impression that Kate and/or Gerry were responsible for Madeline’s death and disappearance. The more I learn about the circumstances of the case, the more I believe the parents are to blame.
I will only do book #7 on the Watts case once #6 hits at least 10 reviews. So it may be a little while longer for the 7th book, not because there’s nothing to write about, quite the opposite, but because I think it’s going to take audiences and readers a while to realize the Second Confession isn’t what it pretends to be either.
Once they’re there or starting to get there, then it will be a good time to move the narrative on to the next step.
I get a fair bit of correspondence now asking me how I could make so many mistakes [as in thinking errors] in the series. Those folks seem to believe what Chris Watts said, or what someone said about a shadow, changes everything. Maybe it does. Many others feel all the facts, factors and dynamics raised in the TWO FACE series hold together a lot better and more convincingly in spite of the new so-called evidence.
TWO FACE ANNIHILATION won’t be a U-turn on the scenarios presented in the preceding 6 books, but a natural extension of the narrative series, reinforcing what’s been put out there as well as fine-tuning where that’s needed. With each successive book, hopefully, we’ll get closer to what really happened, and the real reasons how, why, when and where.
I found it difficult to watch until I put my preconceived opinions aside and concentrated more on being open to new footage I’d simply not seen before. There was a lot. So I want to encourage you to try to watch with a notepad and make critical observations not of what’s there, but of the techniques used to manipulate the viewer. Some of this may be due to editing, some to the subtle use of piano music, some of it in the footage itself [the various tells” of certain characters etc].
Please share your notes here and so we can extend our collective knowledge-base. 😉
Re the execrable and dubiously commissioned ‘investigation’ of Summer and Swan, first in their book and now used as a sly but dominant undercurrent narrative in this documentary – without any acknowledgement of this and therefore the laughable, blatant bias, Carole Tranmer saw a figure leaving the Oldfield’s garden gate not the McCann’s. It’s in the police files. Perhaps a little light fact checking on the part of the documentary makers (director and producer) might have helped them to have a little less blind faith in their sources, to avoid the absolute whoppers throughout – and to then possibly question whether passing over the content of their documentary to others, in blind faith, was such a bright idea – whilst they busied themselves with yet another tastefully constructed shot of children jumping about on a summer beach, or a pencil being sharpened. Such shoddy work. It would be kindest to say they were out of their depth. But really.