Another theory about Maddie McCann

The recent Netflix tale about Maddie McCanns disappearance was fun, but in a lot of ways it didn’t scratch the more interesting parts of the story for me.

When I read the story of Maddie’s disappearance I, like every reader, bring my experiences and emotions to the story. One of the primary ones I bring is as a mother. My children are older now, but I clearly remember the chaos of those early years.

Now one of the quotes from Kate McCanns book I find strange is ¨Could Madeleine and Sean have woken up while we were at dinner? If so, it was worrying, obviously, but it didn’t seem very probable¨. She explains this as the kids being heavy sleepers but I can’t help but find it strange that a 3 year old and 2 year old twins don’t at times wake each other up and eventually fuss themselves back to sleep.

One of the interesting facts that sometimes gets overlooked within the McCann investigation, is that the parents don’t seem to have taken their phones to the restaurant and relied on a personal accounting of the time for their checks. Which means the 30 minute checks relied on the parents, while drinking, keeping a track of the time and commiting to precise checks. While being convinced that their children where sleep heavily and weren’t going to wake. My gut instinct says they probably didn’t check as often as they planned, nor at the defined intervals. Interestingly Yvonne Martin, a child protection worker from Britain who was in the area, stopped into offer support. At that point Kate seemed very convinced a couple had taken Maddie.

Neighbours did hear the kids crying one of the other nights, but funnily enough this was on another night (Tuesday 1st) where Kate had come back to the house. She was upset because her husband had been ‘paying attention’ to the busty gym instructor Nejoua Chekeya and slept in with the kids that night by her account. So it seems rather odd that the kids could have been crying for an hour on the Tuesday night, but when Maddie brings up the fact they were upset and crying the night before Kate dismisses it as unlikely. The same records show the parents didn’t take phones to dinner, so any timed checks did have to rely on discipline and not set alarms on phone.

So this leaves us with parents not checking in regularly with kids. Sometimes feuding with each other. A family with 3 young children on holiday in a foreign location. Two parents who are medical professionals, more used to death and more clued up on the signs of how causes of death are established than the average parent. And, in my mind the simplest and most logical conclusion of the confluence of these facts is that one or both parents accidentally caused or failed to witness Maddie’s accidental death. Something about the situation around the death was so incriminating that they couldn’t admit to the accident. Perhaps bruising or marks showing she died at the hands of an adult. So, sometime in the very early hours of that morning first morning after her disappearance when they claimed to sleep, one or other of them set off to dispose of Maddie’s body.

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Kate was a keen jogger and pounded the hills of Portugal each morning. I like to think maybe she knew a quiet, peaceful place where they laid Maddie to rest.

If my theory is even close to the truth, I doubt we’ll ever know. But I hope Maddie is at peace wherever she is.