DOUBT: The Madeleine McCann Mystery

Did the little girl at the centre of the most heavily reported missing-persons case in modern history ever go “missing” to begin with?

If Madeleine was never abducted, if she died on May 3rd, why was it reported as an abduction?

Despite the absence of a trial, what we have now is a fairly precise version of events from the McCanns themselves, a by-product of their relentless PR. We also know the original lead investigator Goncalo Amaral’s counter-narrative, which is now a legally defensible matter of public record.

The questions that arise from these opposing narratives are dead simple: Which narrative is more credible? Which narrator is more credible? What was the motive behind all the publicity?

Neither Madeleine nor her abductor ultimately benefited from the ongoing media barrage, so who did?

True crime maestro, Nick van der Leek, plumbs quagmires of confusion and a thicket of thorny inconsistencies to probe what lies beneath the psychologies. What is the significance of doctors as suspects? Did it matter or mean anything that the McCanns and their cabal of friends in the Algarve were mostly doctors?

Peeling away the gossamer threads, over the course of just four days [April 29th – May 2nd], van der Leek intuits that very little was routine: not the weather, not where meals were eaten, not where or when they slept and not what they did as a family. But what were their routines when it came to other, murkier things, like sleeping patterns, cell phones and sedatives? Drawing intangibles out of the darkness, van der Leek sews the vexing loose ends from several conflicting stories into a definite - if not definitive - end-result.