The Disappearance of Madeleine McCann (2019) s01e06 Episode Script
Dark Places
1 There was a sighting of the family up in the Atlas Mountains, this mother carrying on her back a child, a blonde child, that absolutely looked like Madeleine.
A couple from Spain was on vacation in Morocco when they snapped the photo.
Clara Torres says she's been kicking herself for not turning it over to police sooner.
I got a call from my father and he said he'd like to meet me.
So I went to the house and met up with him in his study.
If I even went into that office, it was 'cause I'd done something wrong or, you know, something good was happening.
He sat me down.
He said, "Son, have a seat.
" He broke the news that he'd like me to come out of what I was doing in the business and throw myself 100% at helping in whatever way my father and I could.
I wanted to follow my dad and help my dad and help Kate and Gerry.
We flew into Morocco on my little little jet, myself and my son Patrick.
The adrenaline was pumping because we've got a girl here who we believe could be Madeleine, as it looked almost identical to her.
I said to my son, "Go out and just try and find someone that can speak English that we can hire to drive this car and take us up into the Atlas Mountains.
" I remember saying to my father, "Look, I've got no experience in, you know, investigative work or anything.
" I was, like, a bit nervous.
I spoke to someone and I was just straight with him.
I told him what I was doing.
I said, "Look, we'll give you some money.
We need you to help us.
We need you to try and find this girl.
" And so we jumped in the car and drove right up into the Atlas Mountains.
The thing that shocked me, in the middle of these mountains, in the middle of Morocco, was the amount of blonde-haired kids.
So after a few hours of literally just driving around and talking to people, we ended up tracking down this little family.
We were sitting looking at this lady carrying this child, which was the photograph that this tourist had taken.
I took a picture and I sent the picture back to Kate and I said, "Kate, I'm sorry.
It's not Madeleine.
" The way I used to put it, "We're searching for a needle in a haystack that may not exist.
" So it's tough.
It was very clear we weren't getting anywhere very fast, so I thought we need to go out and find some top quality people that knew how to do this competently and effectively.
So I met Método 3.
They're a privately-owned private investigation company, not frightened to step over the line and do what had to be done to try and find Madeleine, and, uh, I said, "Go for it.
Delve into what you know you can delve into below the surface of what's going on and the criminal factions in that area, in Portugal, in Spain, and in Morocco.
Find out what you possibly can.
" And they went about it, I have to say, with great gusto.
Perhaps you should never judge a book by its cover.
We're taught that from an early age.
He looked gaunt and wild-eyed.
I had always had a thing for investigations.
When I was really young, I loved police movies, James Bond movies.
But from where I came, it was not easy to get into, so it took me quite a while.
I had been in Método 3 around a year and a half when the Madeleine case came in.
The reputation of the agency was really high.
Really high.
It was one of the most known companies in Spain and Europe.
We had a big meeting in Brian Kennedy's office.
That's the first time I met Gerry and Kate.
I was talking about the different possibilities of what could have happened that day, and of course I had to talk about the possibility of an organised group of criminals that could have kidnapped Madeleine.
And Brian Kennedy at that moment told me, "Please, we have to stop for a moment," and I saw Kate and Gerry, they were crying.
At that moment, I realised that of course they have nothing to do with the disappearance of her daughter.
When you meet the persons, it becomes personal for you.
From that moment, I left for Portugal and I spent almost eight months non-stop out there and trying to search for any clues.
The Spanish detective agency hired by the McCanns has 20-25 people currently working on the ground in Portugal.
I remember that he caught me with a camera and I was trying not to show my face.
Despite one of the investigators trying to avoid the cameras, the man, who is around 30 and working for the McCanns, hasn't gone unnoticed.
The first thing that Método 3 did was creating a hotline to try to obtain leads.
It has been very emotional watching them at the interview this morning.
I think this is to promote the hotline that they've set up.
Tell us about why they were there doing the interview.
There was a very simple reason for doing this interview.
It was done at the advice on the advice of our private investigators, who are now working on the ground in Spain.
They want people to call this new anonymous, confidential helpline.
Let's hear what they had to say about what they're hoping will come out of starting the hotline.
Please help us.
Please help us as a family.
Please help us find Madeleine.
I strongly believe that Madeleine is out there.
I don't believe Madeleine has been taken away from us permanently.
I don't believe that.
I don't feel it.
Please, if you know any information at all or you suspect anything, no matter how small, please you know, just find it in yourself, really.
Have that courage to make that call to the new number.
Thank you.
You did a really good job in getting Kate's true personality out.
I think that was good.
I think now we need to get on with finding her, you know? You have to understand, the investigation in Portugal was not focused in finding Madeleine.
It was focused on finding evidence to blame the parents of Madeleine.
So people that could have an idea, who have seen something, they were not interviewed.
Yes, hello? Who am I speaking to? You're speaking to Julián.
They forward the calls to my personal number 24 hours.
I was taking phone calls at five in the morning, six in the morning.
I'm calling you from Zambia.
Good morning.
Is this the Madeleine hotline? I live in Nottingham, Nottinghamshire.
There was a lot of tips of people that thought that they saw her.
"I was in a supermarket and I saw a car and I think I saw Madeleine.
" My wife and I were returning from France and I saw a man, a young man, and he's carrying a little girl and I thought, "Well, that child looks like Madeleine," but then for all I know, hundreds of children might resemble her.
You have to understand, in these cases, people usually want to help, of course, and they want to help so hard that they start seeing things that are not there.
I'm actually I'm a clairvoyant from Scotland and I've actually helped police before For 25 years, I've been seeing things before they happen.
The problem is that of course 95% of the people that call were mediums.
I saw a picture of Madeleine.
She was being looked after by somebody called Lisa.
I've seen crazy, crazy things, people moving a pendulum in front of me and I was over there sitting and I was like, "What the hell am I doing here?" But, like, who knows? I am asking for your help to find Madeleine.
If you have any information, get in touch and you will be compensated.
Thank you.
Even if somebody says they've had some sort of metaphysical revelation, you can't discount anybody or anything.
You may not believe in such things, but you don't know what's behind it.
You could sleep more easily at night.
There must be nothing worse than thinking, "That may be Madeleine and nobody's checking it out.
" To give a notion of the sheer avalanche of sightings of the missing Madeleine McCann, there have been thousands and thousands of reports from 42 countries.
Possible sightings of Madeleine McCann a girl matching the four-year-old's description And on one day alone, she had been seen in places 2,500 miles apart.
There were multiple reports, even on the day that she disappeared.
I remember that in one day, the child had been seen in Zurich, then in Rio de Janeiro or in other places, in Morocco.
A lot of information, a lot of it contradictory.
Jane Tanner was a friend of Kate and Gerry's.
She dined with them in the evenings.
Her sighting was a big turning point for the investigation.
For Jane to have seen somebody, I think it was 20 past 9:00Â or something, walking across the street with a child that looked like Madeleine for me was the prime evidence.
That was the only bit of evidence we had, the only true witness.
I think the starters were about to arrive so I thought, "I'll go and do I'll go and do a check.
" It had been sort of 20 minutes or so before we'd last checked.
I just walked out of the restaurant.
At the top of the road, I just saw somebody walking across the top of the road and that person was carrying a child, carrying sort of across the body like that.
I suppose, in hindsight, you'd probably think somebody would carry them more against the shoulder.
I think it's important that people know what I saw because, you know, I believe Madeleine was abducted.
I think up until then, there'd been some ridiculous drawings done by the Portuguese police.
It made sense to find somebody who knew what they were doing to draw a proper picture.
So we did some investigations and found this FBI artist.
I trained as a portrait painter.
A portrait must reveal more than the outside geography of a person.
You want somehow to catch that spark, something of their personality and character.
So I bring that to inform the work I try to do to help the police.
Jane came and spent the day here and, uh many tears were shed by both of us that day.
It's all about the attitude of this man, quickly, purposefully marching forward, carrying this limp child.
There are two little dear little legs, child's legs hanging down over his arm, um, wearing pink, frilly, patterned, floral pattern pyjamas and two little bare feet hanging down.
She was convinced that this was Madeleine's abduction.
And she was blaming herself, of course.
Why didn't she intervene? Jane struggled and struggled, but eventually had to give up.
She could not remember the the the actual face.
That was the stumbling block.
It's a private horror in their heads.
When they have unburdened themselves of this, they've told me and I've made it visible, it's a great relief.
Um It's That's it.
It's out on paper.
That is the evidence.
We thought this was who had taken Madeleine so we thought, "Well, let's get this character out there," and we got that picture distributed, as far as we could.
Kate and Gerry McCann have broken their silence The parents of Madeleine McCann have released an artist's impression of a man they believe may have abducted their daughter.
A friend vacationing with the family in Portugal says she saw this man carrying a child the night Madeleine disappeared, but didn't see his face.
Private investigators in Portugal are illegal.
Being a private investigator, you don't have to follow the book of rules.
It gives you more freedom to investigate than being a cop.
I had always a big board, uh, where I wrote all my suspects.
It was a lot of people, I recall.
Julián was very good to work with.
I'd be out there for weeks at a time, following possible suspects.
Julián was someone that was very thorough and very energetic and he was unforgiving with certain things.
When we were pursuing people, he would rather speed to chase up with them so he could find out where they were going rather than be careful.
And to watch what he's doing 'cause he doesn't want to get stopped.
He was the type that would go all out.
Patrick Kennedy, he was a young kid at that time.
We spent hours together, doing some stakeouts, surveillance.
He was a quick learner, yeah.
We found out names and addresses of paedophiles in the Praia da Luz area.
We'd follow them.
We weren't allowed to do that.
We needed the permission of the police to do that, but, you know, quite frankly, I didn't care and neither did M3.
We just wanted to get on with it.
There was several places that we went that were crazy.
One of the sightings that they told me was that Madeleine McCann was in an abandoned home.
I was walking and looking everywhere, trying to find something that related to a little kid, a doll, clothes, something.
But, no, I couldn't find anything.
Julián and I were following a guy who lived in a pig farm and there was something that came through, saying that they believed he had something to do with Madeleine's disappearance.
You're thinking, "Could Madeleine be in that house?" It was difficult not to kick the door down and have a look.
Flying over the apartments from the east and after a couple of seconds, the villa where Robert Murat lives quickly comes into view.
A 33-year-old male living in the area of the events was named as a formal suspect.
When I got over there, the person that we look more into was Robert Murat.
Everyone was pointing at him.
We didn't know what the PJ had against him.
We only knew he was arguido so we thought there has to be some evidence against this guy.
Hello, mate.
You all right? There's so many people that had a feeling that Robert Murat was involved and I said, "Let's just go and meet him.
" I did meet with a gentleman called Brian Kennedy, who, uh, was, um, a multimillionaire who had links with the McCanns.
He was over there to find the solution to the story and, um, I assume, believing that I had something to do with it.
I went out to meet him.
I just had a very pleasant dinner and had a chat about it and I was talking to Robert about, "Look, it must be terrible to be accused of something that you weren't involved with.
" All the time, of course, gathering information.
Actually, I think there was an offer of a job or something because I couldn't get work.
I couldn't do anything, could I, so Literally, I had no chance of doing anything.
"Would you like to work with us and helping us find Madeleine?" I then found out that he had tried to bug the meeting with people in the garden trying to record the conversations.
We put some trackers on Murat's car and he found them.
Sometimes you have to do things that that are on the verge or on the border, no? So he wasn't there to help me at all, and that was the really frustrating part of all of this case, is we had nobody.
Related to Murat was Malinka, Sergey Malinka.
Pictures of Malinka.
That's his building.
That's the shop that he work.
Malinka was suspected by the police, but they don't have enough evidence to declare him an arguido.
He was a computer technician living in Praia da Luz.
A Russian.
I've been coming here as often as I could because it's quite a special place.
It sort of leaves you alone with your thoughts.
Whatever you see after the black mountain there is Praia da Luz itself.
It's a very beautiful village and it always will be my first home in Portugal.
But this is a place where I got hurt quite badly.
Sergey Malinka, a 22-year-old Russian.
He is the latest person to be talking to police We have a strictly customer relationship.
But it's not the place that hurt me.
It's the people.
The Correio da Manhã newspaper reports that the computers apprehended from Sergey Malinka had their hard drives erased.
It was almost impossible to live a normal life after I was interviewed by the police because wherever I go, I would be looked at.
For example, you go into the coffee shop and you order a coffee.
Then you just look around and you see people looking at you and then they'll look away and then something clicks in and look back at you again, but with a judging look, so to speak.
"This is the guy that we saw.
" The active suspect makes a phone call to somebody exactly the night of the disappearance.
Of course, it raises suspicion.
Actually, this is my room, that balcony where my room were at the time.
I've been called paedophile, I've been called sexual predator, I've been called Russian Mafia, human trafficker.
It was just just bang out of order.
What particularly do you want to set the record straight on? First of all, I'm not 30 years old, uh Second, I don't rape little kids.
Uh, I'm a normal man.
I don't do any of this kind of stuff.
Third, my criminal record has been clean always.
Uh, I'm a resident of this country so they would have checked it before they would give me a card.
Uh, and I simply feel hurt by media, the way they describe me.
There was no doubt in my mind Sergey Malinka was hiding something.
He's strange, he's been destroying hard drives, he knows Robert Murat.
I think that came up from some sort of a leak from the police, media leaks, that my hard drives have been erased, but apparently police found something on them so they couldn't have been erased.
I couldn't have erased them.
These sort of facts should be checked and double-checked and triple-checked before they're published.
He wasn't a very savoury-looking character, to put it lightly.
Perhaps you should never judge a book by its cover.
We're all taught that from an early age.
But sometimes you do.
My first experience of private surveillance was when I saw the same cars has been in my rearview mirrors.
I made a list of certain number plates and, yeah, I find out the same cars were following me.
We were chasing him 'cause it looked like he was trying to get somewhere in a rush.
Sergey Malinka was not the type to confront us.
He was the type to get in his car and speed off.
Was he getting up to no good? Was he meeting people that we perhaps have pursued? What was he doing? What was the surveillance that you did on him? How did you approach the investigation? Can you reveal that? Well, there's a lot of things I cannot reveal for what we did! My boss, he told me to call him and to offer him money to talk about the disappearance of Madeleine McCann.
In this sort of situation, you understand that there's two types of people.
One with power and one without.
Or should I say one with money and one without.
I think it's this I think it was here.
Yeah.
Exactly here in the place of this car.
In this situation, I didn't have neither the power nor the money.
It was written here on the pavement.
If you can see, still some red smudges here.
Ten years pass, but it's here, you know? I started with 100,000 and I went till half a million, something like that.
And Malinka was, "Don't offer me money because I don't know anything and I cannot give you anything.
" That's what he told me.
Fala means "speak" in Portuguese.
They thought I'm hiding something.
I know if you look at it, it's just a car, it doesn't mean anything, but for a young guy who always dreamed about this car, it was sort of the greatest achievement I've done in my life, you know what I mean? So I'm sitting on the stairs, actually crying, and This one missed phone call it has pretty much ruined ten years of my life.
That's the only time when they actually broke me in this case.
Really, really hurt me.
We did a thorough investigation on him.
But, um, the more that we look into it, the less I thought he was involved.
Neither Malinka, neither Murat, I don't think they had nothing to do with it.
Nothing.
No, I didn't feel sorry for anybody at that time.
Irrelevant.
What was very relevant was the little girl that was missing, the little girl who'd been abducted.
That's the person that I felt sorry for.
Nobody else.
Portugal, it was a new place for me.
I didn't have my resources that I have in Spain.
I tried to get in touch with people that could give me some idea, clues of things that had happened there because you have to also, of course, look at the background of the police, of the situation, of any crimes related to that or how that place works.
A good source for that, it's journalists.
In Portugal, we just have a comparison with this case.
This case is the case Joana that happened in 2004 here in Portugal, here in Algarve Joana Cipriano was a little girl that disappeared in a very small town next to Praia da Luz.
A little eight-year-old girl from the village of Figueira has been missing since Sunday night.
According to the mother, Joana had left home to buy some food at the local shop.
We thought the case was interesting and very mysterious.
She lived with her mother as well as her uncle at the time.
The mom was doing interviews for Portuguese TV channels, saying she didn't know where her daughter was and that she'd probably been kidnapped.
The police have been searching, but they don't have any leads for the whereabouts of her.
After a week or so, PolÃcia Judiciária, they close, basically, the case and they said that it was Joana's uncle who had killed the girl with the help of Joana's mother.
The immediate story that the mother and the uncle said to the police was that she went out and she didn't come back.
It was their story.
João decided, "I'm going to tell you the truth and Joana entered in our house and saw me having sex with my sister.
" And that they, uh, chop her up, they cut her in pieces, and they put it in a fridge.
And he explained cut by cut.
They separate the arms, the legs, and the head, six parts of the body.
Then he explain, "We put in bags," and they have put bags in the fridge.
They have a little fridge in the room.
And we have found human blood in the fridge.
It was impossible to to say that it was blood of Joana.
But it was human blood.
The case took a horrific turn when João told of how he disposed of his niece's body by throwing it into a pigpen.
They were both found guilty.
Leonor was sentenced to 20 years in prison and João to 19 years.
There's a picture that came through of the mother after she she had "confessed.
" Uh, she was all beaten up, all beat up.
She accused the police of torturing her so she would confess to the crime.
Both confessions seemed very strange.
So we suspected that things didn't add up.
The police chief that was in charge of that investigation was Gonçalo Amaral.
The same one that was in charge of the Madeleine case.
You have to understand, the police in Portugal is very different than the police we have in Spain or the police that we have in other European countries.
Very, very different.
The inspectors will be questioned about these photos Five PolÃcia Judiciária inspectors are accused of assaulting Joana's mother Leonor Cipriano.
The little girl was killed in the Algarve in September of 2004.
She has mask like Zorro, okay? A mask.
And you look for that, "Oh, poor" They were beating her on her eye.
That didn't happen, okay? She has an accident.
Joana's mother maintains she was assaulted during her interrogation, but the inspectors claim that she fell down the stairs.
What I found was like the Spanish police of the '70s.
He acted and he worked like if was the sheriff of the town.
"This is my town.
I do whatever I want.
" Both João and Leonor, all they did at the time was lie, lie, lie.
These bruises, these black marks are interesting.
No one managed to prove that these photos are real.
LET ME ASK YOU A QUESTION: do you think that many people from this country believe that Leonor Cipriano killed her daughter? There are very few people, Gonçalo Amaral.
Very few people.
And how could we believe that a woman with no education, who was beaten by the Judiciary Police and this was proved No, it wasn't proved.
How would she be that smart There was a cloud hanging over Gonçalo Amaral at the time that the Madeleine case began.
He was under investigation himself for his actions in regard to the Cipriano case and the actions of some of his colleagues.
It's better that the people understand one thing.
We were not accused of torturing Leonor.
They said, "Okay, if they don't beat you, they let someone enter in the police to beat you.
" She was taken from her cell at night.
She was then taken to the police's facilities and when she comes back, she's bruised.
And in fact, on the very day the McCann case broke, Gonçalo Amaral was himself made an arguido in the Cipriano case.
Me and two colleagues, we were absolved.
Gonçalo was condemned.
They say that he has forged a report.
They say that he knew it that somebody beat her.
For me, in the case of Joana Cipriano, I was declared an arguido for false declarations.
Not for beating her, but for making false claims about the case.
Oh, you want to talk about that? Do you know how we got those false claims? I'll explain it to you.
It was a set-up by the Public Ministry to constitute me as an arguido to take me to trial.
But this fact of being an arguido in one case and be the coordinator in an investigation, it's not incompatible.
Because if it was, any police officer made an arguido would have to stop working.
After the trial, we noticed that evidence against Joana's mother and uncle was not strong at all.
Why did you keep taking us to places where there was no body? With João, through my investigation, I had the opportunity to watch the video of his confession to the police on how he killed his niece.
If you killed her, you killed her or did she disappear some other way? Did you kill her or not? It's a weird confession because he contradicts himself a dozen times.
We rented a fridge exactly like the one Joana's mother had where they said they had hidden parts of her body.
We were able to prove that the child couldn't fit in those drawers.
So their statements weren't true.
But you're talking of the fridge that Joana's mother had in her house was a small fridge like that so you're talking about putting an eight-year-old girl in a fridge like that.
It was unbelievable.
It was It's relatively It's impossible.
But Amaral, he has a case and a kid goes missing, he puts them in a refrigerator.
Human traces were found in the pigpen.
But again, the results were inconclusive.
No trace of Joana was found on the farm.
Not a hair, not a bone, not a tooth.
No trace of DNA.
We started working on the links between the Joana Cipriano case and the Madeleine case.
You have a town that was, like, 20 kilometres from Praia da Luz.
And the police, they do a mess on the evidence.
The two cases were very similar.
No, I didn't see similarities.
The only similarity you can say is the gender, the gender of the victim.
In general, in these cases involving the disappearance of children the primary suspects are the guardians of that child.
When they see that they don't have any lines of investigation or clues, they blame the parents directly.
It's not a case about finding Joana.
It's not a case about finding Madeleine McCann.
It's a case about finding evidence against the parents.
I remember clearly, a few days after the disappearance of Madeleine McCann, I recall asking myself, "Knowing the investigators, will they change the course of the investigation from a kidnap to start accusing the parents?" And that is exactly what happened.
Before Madeleine disappeared, before the campaign and the controversy, Gail Cooper saw someone.
Gail Cooper was a lady who had had somebody visiting her door that left her feeling, uh, very vulnerable and very suspicious.
Because we reported it to the police back in May, the 7th of May 2007.
He said he was collecting money for a local orphanage in the nearby village of Espiche.
He then went on to say about a road accident three days earlier where three British children had been left orphans and were now being cared for in his orphanage.
Mrs Cooper was staying just a few hundred yards from the McCanns' apartment.
She saw the same man loitering about the resort on three separate occasions, twice on the beach and once when he called at her villa, claiming he was collecting He was quite emotionless, really, very cold to look at, but he was quite agitated, he was moving from foot to foot on sort of the balls of his feet as he was talking.
I thought he was a conman at the time.
One of the detectives went out and took a statement from her, and then we got Melissa to draw a picture of the person that she remembered.
She had been in Praia da Luz about a week before the McCanns arrived and it was an odd thing to have somebody telling you this story about the orphaned British children.
Why were they going to be in an orphanage in Portugal, for instance? Why weren't they immediately brought home by loving aunts and uncles or somebody? She later saw this man striding across the beach and it struck her that he was lingering, um, very closely near the creche.
And it just felt quite well, creepy, I suppose.
There was just something that didn't ring true about him.
He looked gaunt, wild-eyed, his mouth open so that she could see his his large teeth, and the heavy moustache, the heavy eyebrows, that sort of thing.
It was pretty much across every Portuguese and English newspaper, the picture of this guy.
If this man is pretty much anywhere in the Western world, we need to find him and find him quickly.
It was shown to Jane Tanner and Jane Tanner felt there was an 80% likeness to the person she saw.
Could we find this man that had these very distinct looks? The week before the McCanns arrived at the Ocean Club, a family that was staying in the very apartment they rented had a similar encounter to Gail Cooper.
The father of the family met with another charity collector, this one clean-cut and well spoken, and not terribly obtrusive or persistent, but he too was troubled by the fact that he didn't know anything about the orphanage being collected for or where it might be.
And there was more.
On the very day that Madeleine McCann disappeared, there were four more incidents of charity collectors collecting for an orphanage in the area of Praia da Luz.
We got in the car and started driving around, looking for what could possibly be an orphanage, and having consulted various maps and talking to locals, we're coming up absolutely negative.
We talked to the foundation based in the capital, Lisbon, about whether there had ever been an orphanage near Praia da Luz and they said there was nothing like that.
So clearly, those men were committing some sort of a crime, a mini deception.
It may just have been a scam to get money.
Maybe that's all they were, but the indications are that it may have been more than that.
On one particular occasion, just before Madeleine disappeared, a man came to a house in Praia da Luz.
The woman of the house, who was there with her little girl, became troubled because the man concerned was talking to her about orphanages, but not looking at her.
He was looking off to the side and she realised that he was actually staring fixedly at her little girl.
The following day, the woman was upstairs doing the laundry and came down the stairs.
There was the man again with her daughter.
And as soon as she came down the stairs, the man ran away.
Perhaps of particular note in that case, the child involved was only three, just like Madeleine.
For me, there was two lines of investigation.
Only two.
There was a single lone wolf that could have entered, taken Madeleine, and who knows? And the organised group of criminals.
The window of opportunity, it's so small, so small for one person to take her.
Surveillance on the apartment was easy.
They knew their itineraries, when they were getting up, when they were getting back.
They acted on the perfect moment to get inside, take her, and leave, without even leaving a trace.
It gives you the idea that it was a well-organised group.
I went to jail to see João Cipriano, the uncle of Joana.
So we asked him about Madeleine, if he knew anything.
But, um, he didn't give us any kind of information.
I exchanged some letters with João in Carregueira Prison.
"It was my sister Leonor who told me Joana was fine.
" We knew that his cellmate was, uh, was out of jail recently so we thought it was gonna be a good idea to talk to him.
I know that he received quite a lot of money and he has that photo and a few more.
He explained to us in this recording that he had seen, um, a picture of Joana taken after she was kidnapped.
You saw a photo of Joana? Yes, I did.
He must have her there.
In a room that is very a room that is not from somewhere poor.
We believe Joana is alive.
For me, from what I've seen, I have no doubt.
Basically, Joana was still alive.
"Leonor told me she had sold her to a foreign couple.
" There is no way we can prove if this is true or not.
All we know is that Joana is still missing.
The uncle had confessed to him that, um, that he had a lot of money and that he had sold the girl.
The uncle was a drug addict.
A person like that can do anything for money.
We were talking about trying to gain access to that picture, but, um, after this meeting, he didn't want to talk to us anymore.
If I knew, I would have already told the police.
He was afraid of two things.
First, the persons that had Joana.
And, uh, he was also really afraid of the Portuguese police.
This was the biggest moment for me of the case 'cause it really give me proof that there was an organization working in Portugal, and it also give us a hope of trying to find that network, uh and after finding the network, we could find Madeleine.
A couple from Spain was on vacation in Morocco when they snapped the photo.
Clara Torres says she's been kicking herself for not turning it over to police sooner.
I got a call from my father and he said he'd like to meet me.
So I went to the house and met up with him in his study.
If I even went into that office, it was 'cause I'd done something wrong or, you know, something good was happening.
He sat me down.
He said, "Son, have a seat.
" He broke the news that he'd like me to come out of what I was doing in the business and throw myself 100% at helping in whatever way my father and I could.
I wanted to follow my dad and help my dad and help Kate and Gerry.
We flew into Morocco on my little little jet, myself and my son Patrick.
The adrenaline was pumping because we've got a girl here who we believe could be Madeleine, as it looked almost identical to her.
I said to my son, "Go out and just try and find someone that can speak English that we can hire to drive this car and take us up into the Atlas Mountains.
" I remember saying to my father, "Look, I've got no experience in, you know, investigative work or anything.
" I was, like, a bit nervous.
I spoke to someone and I was just straight with him.
I told him what I was doing.
I said, "Look, we'll give you some money.
We need you to help us.
We need you to try and find this girl.
" And so we jumped in the car and drove right up into the Atlas Mountains.
The thing that shocked me, in the middle of these mountains, in the middle of Morocco, was the amount of blonde-haired kids.
So after a few hours of literally just driving around and talking to people, we ended up tracking down this little family.
We were sitting looking at this lady carrying this child, which was the photograph that this tourist had taken.
I took a picture and I sent the picture back to Kate and I said, "Kate, I'm sorry.
It's not Madeleine.
" The way I used to put it, "We're searching for a needle in a haystack that may not exist.
" So it's tough.
It was very clear we weren't getting anywhere very fast, so I thought we need to go out and find some top quality people that knew how to do this competently and effectively.
So I met Método 3.
They're a privately-owned private investigation company, not frightened to step over the line and do what had to be done to try and find Madeleine, and, uh, I said, "Go for it.
Delve into what you know you can delve into below the surface of what's going on and the criminal factions in that area, in Portugal, in Spain, and in Morocco.
Find out what you possibly can.
" And they went about it, I have to say, with great gusto.
Perhaps you should never judge a book by its cover.
We're taught that from an early age.
He looked gaunt and wild-eyed.
I had always had a thing for investigations.
When I was really young, I loved police movies, James Bond movies.
But from where I came, it was not easy to get into, so it took me quite a while.
I had been in Método 3 around a year and a half when the Madeleine case came in.
The reputation of the agency was really high.
Really high.
It was one of the most known companies in Spain and Europe.
We had a big meeting in Brian Kennedy's office.
That's the first time I met Gerry and Kate.
I was talking about the different possibilities of what could have happened that day, and of course I had to talk about the possibility of an organised group of criminals that could have kidnapped Madeleine.
And Brian Kennedy at that moment told me, "Please, we have to stop for a moment," and I saw Kate and Gerry, they were crying.
At that moment, I realised that of course they have nothing to do with the disappearance of her daughter.
When you meet the persons, it becomes personal for you.
From that moment, I left for Portugal and I spent almost eight months non-stop out there and trying to search for any clues.
The Spanish detective agency hired by the McCanns has 20-25 people currently working on the ground in Portugal.
I remember that he caught me with a camera and I was trying not to show my face.
Despite one of the investigators trying to avoid the cameras, the man, who is around 30 and working for the McCanns, hasn't gone unnoticed.
The first thing that Método 3 did was creating a hotline to try to obtain leads.
It has been very emotional watching them at the interview this morning.
I think this is to promote the hotline that they've set up.
Tell us about why they were there doing the interview.
There was a very simple reason for doing this interview.
It was done at the advice on the advice of our private investigators, who are now working on the ground in Spain.
They want people to call this new anonymous, confidential helpline.
Let's hear what they had to say about what they're hoping will come out of starting the hotline.
Please help us.
Please help us as a family.
Please help us find Madeleine.
I strongly believe that Madeleine is out there.
I don't believe Madeleine has been taken away from us permanently.
I don't believe that.
I don't feel it.
Please, if you know any information at all or you suspect anything, no matter how small, please you know, just find it in yourself, really.
Have that courage to make that call to the new number.
Thank you.
You did a really good job in getting Kate's true personality out.
I think that was good.
I think now we need to get on with finding her, you know? You have to understand, the investigation in Portugal was not focused in finding Madeleine.
It was focused on finding evidence to blame the parents of Madeleine.
So people that could have an idea, who have seen something, they were not interviewed.
Yes, hello? Who am I speaking to? You're speaking to Julián.
They forward the calls to my personal number 24 hours.
I was taking phone calls at five in the morning, six in the morning.
I'm calling you from Zambia.
Good morning.
Is this the Madeleine hotline? I live in Nottingham, Nottinghamshire.
There was a lot of tips of people that thought that they saw her.
"I was in a supermarket and I saw a car and I think I saw Madeleine.
" My wife and I were returning from France and I saw a man, a young man, and he's carrying a little girl and I thought, "Well, that child looks like Madeleine," but then for all I know, hundreds of children might resemble her.
You have to understand, in these cases, people usually want to help, of course, and they want to help so hard that they start seeing things that are not there.
I'm actually I'm a clairvoyant from Scotland and I've actually helped police before For 25 years, I've been seeing things before they happen.
The problem is that of course 95% of the people that call were mediums.
I saw a picture of Madeleine.
She was being looked after by somebody called Lisa.
I've seen crazy, crazy things, people moving a pendulum in front of me and I was over there sitting and I was like, "What the hell am I doing here?" But, like, who knows? I am asking for your help to find Madeleine.
If you have any information, get in touch and you will be compensated.
Thank you.
Even if somebody says they've had some sort of metaphysical revelation, you can't discount anybody or anything.
You may not believe in such things, but you don't know what's behind it.
You could sleep more easily at night.
There must be nothing worse than thinking, "That may be Madeleine and nobody's checking it out.
" To give a notion of the sheer avalanche of sightings of the missing Madeleine McCann, there have been thousands and thousands of reports from 42 countries.
Possible sightings of Madeleine McCann a girl matching the four-year-old's description And on one day alone, she had been seen in places 2,500 miles apart.
There were multiple reports, even on the day that she disappeared.
I remember that in one day, the child had been seen in Zurich, then in Rio de Janeiro or in other places, in Morocco.
A lot of information, a lot of it contradictory.
Jane Tanner was a friend of Kate and Gerry's.
She dined with them in the evenings.
Her sighting was a big turning point for the investigation.
For Jane to have seen somebody, I think it was 20 past 9:00Â or something, walking across the street with a child that looked like Madeleine for me was the prime evidence.
That was the only bit of evidence we had, the only true witness.
I think the starters were about to arrive so I thought, "I'll go and do I'll go and do a check.
" It had been sort of 20 minutes or so before we'd last checked.
I just walked out of the restaurant.
At the top of the road, I just saw somebody walking across the top of the road and that person was carrying a child, carrying sort of across the body like that.
I suppose, in hindsight, you'd probably think somebody would carry them more against the shoulder.
I think it's important that people know what I saw because, you know, I believe Madeleine was abducted.
I think up until then, there'd been some ridiculous drawings done by the Portuguese police.
It made sense to find somebody who knew what they were doing to draw a proper picture.
So we did some investigations and found this FBI artist.
I trained as a portrait painter.
A portrait must reveal more than the outside geography of a person.
You want somehow to catch that spark, something of their personality and character.
So I bring that to inform the work I try to do to help the police.
Jane came and spent the day here and, uh many tears were shed by both of us that day.
It's all about the attitude of this man, quickly, purposefully marching forward, carrying this limp child.
There are two little dear little legs, child's legs hanging down over his arm, um, wearing pink, frilly, patterned, floral pattern pyjamas and two little bare feet hanging down.
She was convinced that this was Madeleine's abduction.
And she was blaming herself, of course.
Why didn't she intervene? Jane struggled and struggled, but eventually had to give up.
She could not remember the the the actual face.
That was the stumbling block.
It's a private horror in their heads.
When they have unburdened themselves of this, they've told me and I've made it visible, it's a great relief.
Um It's That's it.
It's out on paper.
That is the evidence.
We thought this was who had taken Madeleine so we thought, "Well, let's get this character out there," and we got that picture distributed, as far as we could.
Kate and Gerry McCann have broken their silence The parents of Madeleine McCann have released an artist's impression of a man they believe may have abducted their daughter.
A friend vacationing with the family in Portugal says she saw this man carrying a child the night Madeleine disappeared, but didn't see his face.
Private investigators in Portugal are illegal.
Being a private investigator, you don't have to follow the book of rules.
It gives you more freedom to investigate than being a cop.
I had always a big board, uh, where I wrote all my suspects.
It was a lot of people, I recall.
Julián was very good to work with.
I'd be out there for weeks at a time, following possible suspects.
Julián was someone that was very thorough and very energetic and he was unforgiving with certain things.
When we were pursuing people, he would rather speed to chase up with them so he could find out where they were going rather than be careful.
And to watch what he's doing 'cause he doesn't want to get stopped.
He was the type that would go all out.
Patrick Kennedy, he was a young kid at that time.
We spent hours together, doing some stakeouts, surveillance.
He was a quick learner, yeah.
We found out names and addresses of paedophiles in the Praia da Luz area.
We'd follow them.
We weren't allowed to do that.
We needed the permission of the police to do that, but, you know, quite frankly, I didn't care and neither did M3.
We just wanted to get on with it.
There was several places that we went that were crazy.
One of the sightings that they told me was that Madeleine McCann was in an abandoned home.
I was walking and looking everywhere, trying to find something that related to a little kid, a doll, clothes, something.
But, no, I couldn't find anything.
Julián and I were following a guy who lived in a pig farm and there was something that came through, saying that they believed he had something to do with Madeleine's disappearance.
You're thinking, "Could Madeleine be in that house?" It was difficult not to kick the door down and have a look.
Flying over the apartments from the east and after a couple of seconds, the villa where Robert Murat lives quickly comes into view.
A 33-year-old male living in the area of the events was named as a formal suspect.
When I got over there, the person that we look more into was Robert Murat.
Everyone was pointing at him.
We didn't know what the PJ had against him.
We only knew he was arguido so we thought there has to be some evidence against this guy.
Hello, mate.
You all right? There's so many people that had a feeling that Robert Murat was involved and I said, "Let's just go and meet him.
" I did meet with a gentleman called Brian Kennedy, who, uh, was, um, a multimillionaire who had links with the McCanns.
He was over there to find the solution to the story and, um, I assume, believing that I had something to do with it.
I went out to meet him.
I just had a very pleasant dinner and had a chat about it and I was talking to Robert about, "Look, it must be terrible to be accused of something that you weren't involved with.
" All the time, of course, gathering information.
Actually, I think there was an offer of a job or something because I couldn't get work.
I couldn't do anything, could I, so Literally, I had no chance of doing anything.
"Would you like to work with us and helping us find Madeleine?" I then found out that he had tried to bug the meeting with people in the garden trying to record the conversations.
We put some trackers on Murat's car and he found them.
Sometimes you have to do things that that are on the verge or on the border, no? So he wasn't there to help me at all, and that was the really frustrating part of all of this case, is we had nobody.
Related to Murat was Malinka, Sergey Malinka.
Pictures of Malinka.
That's his building.
That's the shop that he work.
Malinka was suspected by the police, but they don't have enough evidence to declare him an arguido.
He was a computer technician living in Praia da Luz.
A Russian.
I've been coming here as often as I could because it's quite a special place.
It sort of leaves you alone with your thoughts.
Whatever you see after the black mountain there is Praia da Luz itself.
It's a very beautiful village and it always will be my first home in Portugal.
But this is a place where I got hurt quite badly.
Sergey Malinka, a 22-year-old Russian.
He is the latest person to be talking to police We have a strictly customer relationship.
But it's not the place that hurt me.
It's the people.
The Correio da Manhã newspaper reports that the computers apprehended from Sergey Malinka had their hard drives erased.
It was almost impossible to live a normal life after I was interviewed by the police because wherever I go, I would be looked at.
For example, you go into the coffee shop and you order a coffee.
Then you just look around and you see people looking at you and then they'll look away and then something clicks in and look back at you again, but with a judging look, so to speak.
"This is the guy that we saw.
" The active suspect makes a phone call to somebody exactly the night of the disappearance.
Of course, it raises suspicion.
Actually, this is my room, that balcony where my room were at the time.
I've been called paedophile, I've been called sexual predator, I've been called Russian Mafia, human trafficker.
It was just just bang out of order.
What particularly do you want to set the record straight on? First of all, I'm not 30 years old, uh Second, I don't rape little kids.
Uh, I'm a normal man.
I don't do any of this kind of stuff.
Third, my criminal record has been clean always.
Uh, I'm a resident of this country so they would have checked it before they would give me a card.
Uh, and I simply feel hurt by media, the way they describe me.
There was no doubt in my mind Sergey Malinka was hiding something.
He's strange, he's been destroying hard drives, he knows Robert Murat.
I think that came up from some sort of a leak from the police, media leaks, that my hard drives have been erased, but apparently police found something on them so they couldn't have been erased.
I couldn't have erased them.
These sort of facts should be checked and double-checked and triple-checked before they're published.
He wasn't a very savoury-looking character, to put it lightly.
Perhaps you should never judge a book by its cover.
We're all taught that from an early age.
But sometimes you do.
My first experience of private surveillance was when I saw the same cars has been in my rearview mirrors.
I made a list of certain number plates and, yeah, I find out the same cars were following me.
We were chasing him 'cause it looked like he was trying to get somewhere in a rush.
Sergey Malinka was not the type to confront us.
He was the type to get in his car and speed off.
Was he getting up to no good? Was he meeting people that we perhaps have pursued? What was he doing? What was the surveillance that you did on him? How did you approach the investigation? Can you reveal that? Well, there's a lot of things I cannot reveal for what we did! My boss, he told me to call him and to offer him money to talk about the disappearance of Madeleine McCann.
In this sort of situation, you understand that there's two types of people.
One with power and one without.
Or should I say one with money and one without.
I think it's this I think it was here.
Yeah.
Exactly here in the place of this car.
In this situation, I didn't have neither the power nor the money.
It was written here on the pavement.
If you can see, still some red smudges here.
Ten years pass, but it's here, you know? I started with 100,000 and I went till half a million, something like that.
And Malinka was, "Don't offer me money because I don't know anything and I cannot give you anything.
" That's what he told me.
Fala means "speak" in Portuguese.
They thought I'm hiding something.
I know if you look at it, it's just a car, it doesn't mean anything, but for a young guy who always dreamed about this car, it was sort of the greatest achievement I've done in my life, you know what I mean? So I'm sitting on the stairs, actually crying, and This one missed phone call it has pretty much ruined ten years of my life.
That's the only time when they actually broke me in this case.
Really, really hurt me.
We did a thorough investigation on him.
But, um, the more that we look into it, the less I thought he was involved.
Neither Malinka, neither Murat, I don't think they had nothing to do with it.
Nothing.
No, I didn't feel sorry for anybody at that time.
Irrelevant.
What was very relevant was the little girl that was missing, the little girl who'd been abducted.
That's the person that I felt sorry for.
Nobody else.
Portugal, it was a new place for me.
I didn't have my resources that I have in Spain.
I tried to get in touch with people that could give me some idea, clues of things that had happened there because you have to also, of course, look at the background of the police, of the situation, of any crimes related to that or how that place works.
A good source for that, it's journalists.
In Portugal, we just have a comparison with this case.
This case is the case Joana that happened in 2004 here in Portugal, here in Algarve Joana Cipriano was a little girl that disappeared in a very small town next to Praia da Luz.
A little eight-year-old girl from the village of Figueira has been missing since Sunday night.
According to the mother, Joana had left home to buy some food at the local shop.
We thought the case was interesting and very mysterious.
She lived with her mother as well as her uncle at the time.
The mom was doing interviews for Portuguese TV channels, saying she didn't know where her daughter was and that she'd probably been kidnapped.
The police have been searching, but they don't have any leads for the whereabouts of her.
After a week or so, PolÃcia Judiciária, they close, basically, the case and they said that it was Joana's uncle who had killed the girl with the help of Joana's mother.
The immediate story that the mother and the uncle said to the police was that she went out and she didn't come back.
It was their story.
João decided, "I'm going to tell you the truth and Joana entered in our house and saw me having sex with my sister.
" And that they, uh, chop her up, they cut her in pieces, and they put it in a fridge.
And he explained cut by cut.
They separate the arms, the legs, and the head, six parts of the body.
Then he explain, "We put in bags," and they have put bags in the fridge.
They have a little fridge in the room.
And we have found human blood in the fridge.
It was impossible to to say that it was blood of Joana.
But it was human blood.
The case took a horrific turn when João told of how he disposed of his niece's body by throwing it into a pigpen.
They were both found guilty.
Leonor was sentenced to 20 years in prison and João to 19 years.
There's a picture that came through of the mother after she she had "confessed.
" Uh, she was all beaten up, all beat up.
She accused the police of torturing her so she would confess to the crime.
Both confessions seemed very strange.
So we suspected that things didn't add up.
The police chief that was in charge of that investigation was Gonçalo Amaral.
The same one that was in charge of the Madeleine case.
You have to understand, the police in Portugal is very different than the police we have in Spain or the police that we have in other European countries.
Very, very different.
The inspectors will be questioned about these photos Five PolÃcia Judiciária inspectors are accused of assaulting Joana's mother Leonor Cipriano.
The little girl was killed in the Algarve in September of 2004.
She has mask like Zorro, okay? A mask.
And you look for that, "Oh, poor" They were beating her on her eye.
That didn't happen, okay? She has an accident.
Joana's mother maintains she was assaulted during her interrogation, but the inspectors claim that she fell down the stairs.
What I found was like the Spanish police of the '70s.
He acted and he worked like if was the sheriff of the town.
"This is my town.
I do whatever I want.
" Both João and Leonor, all they did at the time was lie, lie, lie.
These bruises, these black marks are interesting.
No one managed to prove that these photos are real.
LET ME ASK YOU A QUESTION: do you think that many people from this country believe that Leonor Cipriano killed her daughter? There are very few people, Gonçalo Amaral.
Very few people.
And how could we believe that a woman with no education, who was beaten by the Judiciary Police and this was proved No, it wasn't proved.
How would she be that smart There was a cloud hanging over Gonçalo Amaral at the time that the Madeleine case began.
He was under investigation himself for his actions in regard to the Cipriano case and the actions of some of his colleagues.
It's better that the people understand one thing.
We were not accused of torturing Leonor.
They said, "Okay, if they don't beat you, they let someone enter in the police to beat you.
" She was taken from her cell at night.
She was then taken to the police's facilities and when she comes back, she's bruised.
And in fact, on the very day the McCann case broke, Gonçalo Amaral was himself made an arguido in the Cipriano case.
Me and two colleagues, we were absolved.
Gonçalo was condemned.
They say that he has forged a report.
They say that he knew it that somebody beat her.
For me, in the case of Joana Cipriano, I was declared an arguido for false declarations.
Not for beating her, but for making false claims about the case.
Oh, you want to talk about that? Do you know how we got those false claims? I'll explain it to you.
It was a set-up by the Public Ministry to constitute me as an arguido to take me to trial.
But this fact of being an arguido in one case and be the coordinator in an investigation, it's not incompatible.
Because if it was, any police officer made an arguido would have to stop working.
After the trial, we noticed that evidence against Joana's mother and uncle was not strong at all.
Why did you keep taking us to places where there was no body? With João, through my investigation, I had the opportunity to watch the video of his confession to the police on how he killed his niece.
If you killed her, you killed her or did she disappear some other way? Did you kill her or not? It's a weird confession because he contradicts himself a dozen times.
We rented a fridge exactly like the one Joana's mother had where they said they had hidden parts of her body.
We were able to prove that the child couldn't fit in those drawers.
So their statements weren't true.
But you're talking of the fridge that Joana's mother had in her house was a small fridge like that so you're talking about putting an eight-year-old girl in a fridge like that.
It was unbelievable.
It was It's relatively It's impossible.
But Amaral, he has a case and a kid goes missing, he puts them in a refrigerator.
Human traces were found in the pigpen.
But again, the results were inconclusive.
No trace of Joana was found on the farm.
Not a hair, not a bone, not a tooth.
No trace of DNA.
We started working on the links between the Joana Cipriano case and the Madeleine case.
You have a town that was, like, 20 kilometres from Praia da Luz.
And the police, they do a mess on the evidence.
The two cases were very similar.
No, I didn't see similarities.
The only similarity you can say is the gender, the gender of the victim.
In general, in these cases involving the disappearance of children the primary suspects are the guardians of that child.
When they see that they don't have any lines of investigation or clues, they blame the parents directly.
It's not a case about finding Joana.
It's not a case about finding Madeleine McCann.
It's a case about finding evidence against the parents.
I remember clearly, a few days after the disappearance of Madeleine McCann, I recall asking myself, "Knowing the investigators, will they change the course of the investigation from a kidnap to start accusing the parents?" And that is exactly what happened.
Before Madeleine disappeared, before the campaign and the controversy, Gail Cooper saw someone.
Gail Cooper was a lady who had had somebody visiting her door that left her feeling, uh, very vulnerable and very suspicious.
Because we reported it to the police back in May, the 7th of May 2007.
He said he was collecting money for a local orphanage in the nearby village of Espiche.
He then went on to say about a road accident three days earlier where three British children had been left orphans and were now being cared for in his orphanage.
Mrs Cooper was staying just a few hundred yards from the McCanns' apartment.
She saw the same man loitering about the resort on three separate occasions, twice on the beach and once when he called at her villa, claiming he was collecting He was quite emotionless, really, very cold to look at, but he was quite agitated, he was moving from foot to foot on sort of the balls of his feet as he was talking.
I thought he was a conman at the time.
One of the detectives went out and took a statement from her, and then we got Melissa to draw a picture of the person that she remembered.
She had been in Praia da Luz about a week before the McCanns arrived and it was an odd thing to have somebody telling you this story about the orphaned British children.
Why were they going to be in an orphanage in Portugal, for instance? Why weren't they immediately brought home by loving aunts and uncles or somebody? She later saw this man striding across the beach and it struck her that he was lingering, um, very closely near the creche.
And it just felt quite well, creepy, I suppose.
There was just something that didn't ring true about him.
He looked gaunt, wild-eyed, his mouth open so that she could see his his large teeth, and the heavy moustache, the heavy eyebrows, that sort of thing.
It was pretty much across every Portuguese and English newspaper, the picture of this guy.
If this man is pretty much anywhere in the Western world, we need to find him and find him quickly.
It was shown to Jane Tanner and Jane Tanner felt there was an 80% likeness to the person she saw.
Could we find this man that had these very distinct looks? The week before the McCanns arrived at the Ocean Club, a family that was staying in the very apartment they rented had a similar encounter to Gail Cooper.
The father of the family met with another charity collector, this one clean-cut and well spoken, and not terribly obtrusive or persistent, but he too was troubled by the fact that he didn't know anything about the orphanage being collected for or where it might be.
And there was more.
On the very day that Madeleine McCann disappeared, there were four more incidents of charity collectors collecting for an orphanage in the area of Praia da Luz.
We got in the car and started driving around, looking for what could possibly be an orphanage, and having consulted various maps and talking to locals, we're coming up absolutely negative.
We talked to the foundation based in the capital, Lisbon, about whether there had ever been an orphanage near Praia da Luz and they said there was nothing like that.
So clearly, those men were committing some sort of a crime, a mini deception.
It may just have been a scam to get money.
Maybe that's all they were, but the indications are that it may have been more than that.
On one particular occasion, just before Madeleine disappeared, a man came to a house in Praia da Luz.
The woman of the house, who was there with her little girl, became troubled because the man concerned was talking to her about orphanages, but not looking at her.
He was looking off to the side and she realised that he was actually staring fixedly at her little girl.
The following day, the woman was upstairs doing the laundry and came down the stairs.
There was the man again with her daughter.
And as soon as she came down the stairs, the man ran away.
Perhaps of particular note in that case, the child involved was only three, just like Madeleine.
For me, there was two lines of investigation.
Only two.
There was a single lone wolf that could have entered, taken Madeleine, and who knows? And the organised group of criminals.
The window of opportunity, it's so small, so small for one person to take her.
Surveillance on the apartment was easy.
They knew their itineraries, when they were getting up, when they were getting back.
They acted on the perfect moment to get inside, take her, and leave, without even leaving a trace.
It gives you the idea that it was a well-organised group.
I went to jail to see João Cipriano, the uncle of Joana.
So we asked him about Madeleine, if he knew anything.
But, um, he didn't give us any kind of information.
I exchanged some letters with João in Carregueira Prison.
"It was my sister Leonor who told me Joana was fine.
" We knew that his cellmate was, uh, was out of jail recently so we thought it was gonna be a good idea to talk to him.
I know that he received quite a lot of money and he has that photo and a few more.
He explained to us in this recording that he had seen, um, a picture of Joana taken after she was kidnapped.
You saw a photo of Joana? Yes, I did.
He must have her there.
In a room that is very a room that is not from somewhere poor.
We believe Joana is alive.
For me, from what I've seen, I have no doubt.
Basically, Joana was still alive.
"Leonor told me she had sold her to a foreign couple.
" There is no way we can prove if this is true or not.
All we know is that Joana is still missing.
The uncle had confessed to him that, um, that he had a lot of money and that he had sold the girl.
The uncle was a drug addict.
A person like that can do anything for money.
We were talking about trying to gain access to that picture, but, um, after this meeting, he didn't want to talk to us anymore.
If I knew, I would have already told the police.
He was afraid of two things.
First, the persons that had Joana.
And, uh, he was also really afraid of the Portuguese police.
This was the biggest moment for me of the case 'cause it really give me proof that there was an organization working in Portugal, and it also give us a hope of trying to find that network, uh and after finding the network, we could find Madeleine.