The Disappearance of Madeleine McCann

The Disappearance of Madeleine McCann

True crime doesn’t always have a resolve, and hardly ever a happy ending. Though solved mysteries with a tight bow tying everything together can help me sleep at night, sometimes it’s more fun to explore every avenue of an unsolved crime. My favorite one happens to be the disappearance of Madeleine McCann.

There are many intriguing parts to this mystery, including the still, unresolved status of it. The avenues of what could have happened, who took her, did someone even take her, where she is, and beyond are many. The theories go on for pages and pages. This crime happened fourteen years ago, and it is still a highly discussed case.

The McCann family was on vacation with a group of friends in Praia da Luz, Portugal, at the Ocean Club Resort when Madeleine mysteriously vanished from her bedroom. The seven adults were eating dinner and rotating checking in on their collective eight sleeping children. Madeline and her twin siblings were in an apartment not many feet away from the dinner party going on. Madeleine’s mother, Kate, was the one to discover Maddie missing during her check-in on the children. Madeleine was only three years old at the time of her disappearance, and her siblings were only two.

Apparently, the families had a nightly routine of putting the children to bed and leaving them alone in their apartments at the Ocean Club Resort while they went to the resort’s restaurant for dinner. This routine went on for two or three nights before Madeleine disappeared from her bed. The parents were using the back sliding door to go in and out of their apartment to check on the children while leaving the front door locked. The resort was not a private residence with guest only access. In fact, there was street access from the sliding door at the apartment the McCann’s were staying in.

Kate noticed the door of the kids’ bedroom slammed shut after her check in around 10 pm, which led her to see the window was open, and Madeleine was missing. Kate recalled that the day before, Madeleine asked her why she didn’t come when they were crying. It is a possibility the kidnapping was attempted the night before. Kate ran to tell everyone Madeleine was missing, shouting ‘they took her’.

One of their friends recalled that she saw a man carrying a limp, young, blonde girl in pink pajamas quickly down the street during her check in on her children. She thought it could have been another guest taking their child to bed. They reported this sighting to the front desk and the police arrived and began a search. The sketch of this person was not released to the media for several weeks.

The resort they were staying at was condo style, in a neighborhood with homes and other apartment complexes. Without it being an enclosed resort with easy access to the apartments, anyone could congregate there. The McCann’s unit was also on the end on a corner. Since they had been leaving the kids every night, there is a theory that someone kept watch of this and knew exactly when to swoop in and strike. If it was not someone who had been watching, it could have been a person out searching for a victim. The easy access to the McCann’s apartment was the perfect choice for a predator.

Since a body has never been found, the speculation surrounding a person scouting out Madeleine and taking her after days of observing would point to possible sex trafficking. This has been debunked because Maddie had coloboma, a condition of the eye that causes the pupil to have a unique shape. People believe this eye condition would prevent her from going into sex trafficking because she would be too recognizable. Detectives on this case have spent time sorting through child sites to see if Madeleine would pop up to no avail.

Foreign countries are a hot spot for sex trafficking geared towards tourists. Families are less on their guard, as the McCann’s were. They felt comfortable enough to leave the children alone every night, not considering that a Caucasian little girl is the perfect victim for trafficking. People are drinking, having fun, and enjoying their holiday with less inhibitions. Crimes like sex trafficking, robberies, and more are easily done against tourists and predators know to recognize them and strike.

Another theory is that the parents accidentally or even purposely killed Maddie and staged a kidnapping to cover it up. Cadaver dogs searched the apartment and their rental cars during the investigation. The dogs alarmed near the bed, the parents’ closet, and the trunk of the rental car, meaning they detected the scent of blood. This detail of the case gave me chills to hear. This theory has been declined because of the unreliability of cadaver dogs. The apartment could have also had traces of scents from previous guests.

The apartment did not get properly secured when the police arrived, so the crime scene likely got tampered with. Police did not put out an alert for her disappearance for a few days, or alert border control in a timely manner. She could have been taken anywhere within a matter of hours, making the search extremely tedious.

There are many little details and questions on this case that lead to open-ended conclusions. From the window accessibility to why the parents left the kids, from the possibility of the abductor being in the room the night before to it being an accident done by the parents. One of the biggest questions remain, and that is, where is she today? Is she alive in sex trafficking or living somewhere with a new identity? Is she sadly living a life in captivity, never to see the daylight again? Or is she dead and buried in the greatest hiding spot of all? Are the resources in Praia da Luz not good enough to discover where she is?

News articles about Madeleine still circulate many times a week. There have been thousands of sightings of Maddie, suspects that come out of the woodwork, and witnesses who have new information all these years later. The leads have never turned out to be anything credible. Unfortunately, all the theories and possibilities of what happened to her may not ever come to a resolve in our lifetime.