Hope in a storm: the McCanns' 13-year hunt for missing Madeleine

Many people would by now have done what Kate McCann admits she once considered, climbed deep into a hole and not come out again.

The worst event any parent could suffer should have been when their three-year-old daughter disappeared; but the experience of the McCanns in the 13 years and one month since that moment redefines all understanding of reaching a nadir.

Accused of killing their own child, of selling her to pay off debts, relentlessly pursued by the media, named in online conspiracy theories, forced to watch Portuguese police close their inquiry after little over a year, libelled, vilified, and most recently left powerless to stop a Netflix documentary retrace their lives in an exploitation of the vogue for the true crime genre.

All of that and much more has been thrown at this couple from Leicestershire since the night when they returned to their holiday apartment in the Portuguese resort of Praia da Luz, to find Madeleine, the eldest of their three children, was no longer where they left her lying asleep in bed.

Throughout, it is hope, relentless and at times pitiable, which has helped keep their human spirit flickering.

“You don’t realise how strong you are until you have no option,” said Kate McCann on the 10th anniversary of Madeleine’s disappearance. “Our hope of Madeleine being out there is no less than it was 10 years ago … there is still hope.”

Fitting then that the publicity they created surrounding that grim anniversary in May 2017 contributed to a significant breakthrough in one of the world’s most infamous missing child cases.

“We could spend all our time and energy trying to defend ourselves by correcting inaccuracies and lies,” they said at the time. “But then we would have no strength left to look for Madeleine, look after our other children and to live our life.”

So instead they used interviews to keep their hope alive, and to encourage the public to believe they could still help by responding to the police appeal for information.

As a result of these pleas, significant information was received by police, and detectives have in the last three years carried out extensive work to reach the point of identifying a German paedophile as a suspect.

Today there are few places in the world where Kate and Gerry McCann’s faces are not recognised. Even more so that of their child, whose image is frozen in time; a gorgeous, smiling young girl with shoulder-length blonde hair, a button nose and a smile.

Until their ordeal started on the night of 3 May 2007, while they were on holiday in Portugal, the two doctors from Rothley in Leicestershire had a comfortable, busy life working and looking after Madeleine and her twin siblings.

“Before Madeleine was taken we felt we had managed to achieve a little, perfect nuclear family of five,” Gerry McCann has said. “We had that for a short period.”

That brief life ended abruptly during a family holiday with friends to the resort in Praia da Luz. At 8.30pm on the evening of 3 May, the couple left their three children asleep in their ground floor apartment and went to dinner at a tapas bar, a short walk away. The parents checked on the children during the evening until, at 10pm, Kate McCann returned to find Madeleine had gone.

In the hours, days, weeks and years since the disappearance of their daughter, it has become one of the world’s most notorious unsolved crimes.

Pictures of the McCanns trailing Madeleine’s cuddly toy around Portuguese beaches searching for her filled the newspapers in the days afterwards.

But it was not long before the onslaught against them would begin. Only a month later, as the McCann’s held a press conference in Berlin, seeking information about the disappearance, they were asked directly by a reporter if they had killed their daughter.

Back in Portugal on 7 September, Kate McCann emerged from her car at the policia judiciária station in Portimão and was booed by the waiting crowd. It was a sign of what was to come.

She and her husband were officially named as arguidos (named suspects) in connection with Madeleine’s disappearance later that day, a shadow which remained over them for 10 months until in July 2008 they were cleared. The Portuguese attorney general, having reviewed the entire police investigation, ruled that there was no evidence to suggest that they, or Robert Murat, the local businessman also named a suspect, had committed any crime.

Gerry McCann said of their treatment by the media: “We expected the storm to calm with the passage of time but it continued day after day.”

In the face of such an onslaught, the couple continued to search for their daughter, year in, year out, using every opportunity to ensure her disappearance remained a live issue.

Over the years, they have hired private detectives, and have had their hearts lifted, then come crashing down, as sighting after sighting of a child matching Madeleine’s appearance came in from more than 100 countries.

Yet still they continued to campaign to keep up the hunt. In 2009 when a report into the case was commissioned by the home secretary at the time, Alan Johnson, and written by Jim Gamble, the then head of the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (Ceop), it was left on a Home Office desk with no action taken. But the McCanns pushed for it to be the forerunner of a full reexamination of the case.

In a 2011 open letter in the Sun newspaper, Kate and Gerry appealed to the then prime minister, David Cameron, to launch an independent review of all information relating to the disappearance of their daughter.

“It is not right,” they wrote, “that a young, vulnerable British citizen has essentially been given up on”.

Speaking to Women’s Hour on Radio 4, Kate McCann again displayed her tenacity. “I feel that she’s still out there. There’s nothing telling me to stop or slow down. I truly believe she’s out there and if we can get the help we need, we can find her and bring her home.”

Shortly afterwards, Scotland Yard said it would be opening a new inquiry into the disappearance, after a direct intervention by Downing Street.

“The parents have never given up hope, they have pushed and pushed. It is they who have been key in keeping the candle lit,” said Gamble.

In the time since the Met launched Operation Grange, the McCanns have known and been reassured that the search for their daughter was being subjected to the full scrutiny of experienced detectives, who have kept the inquiry open, and have had their efforts funded by the Home Office, most recently last year, with another £300,000.

“I think that has helped them, knowing that officers from the Yard are committed to leaving no stone unturned,” said Gamble.

Over recent years the McCanns have kept a low profile, attempting to get on with their lives and look after Madeleine’s siblings, Sean and Amelie.

Whenever a development takes place, they speak of that ongoing hope, that they will find their daughter. They have held on to the extraordinary stories of survival of other abducted children who are found alive years later; like that of Jaycee Dugard, taken at the age of 11 from near her home in Meyers, California and found alive in 2009 after her abductor visited a parole office with her at his side.

“Some of the scenarios with other people abducted and kept are just so unbelievable that you think, how can that have happened? And that’s probably what’s going to happen with Madeleine’s case,“ Gerry McCann told Sky.

But the price of success in one sense may now become clearer for Kate and Gerry McCann. As their determined quest may be reaching some kind of conclusion – it might not bring their daughter back to them alive.

The Metropolitan police investigation has always been termed a missing person’s inquiry, because there was no evidence the child had come to harm.

But on Thursday, German prosecutors in stark terms made clear they were investigating the 43-year-old paedophile on suspicion of murder – and that they believed the British girl to be dead.

After so long, the McCanns may have to face yet another exploration of what it means to reach rock bottom.

But whatever comes, Gerry McCann indicated this week that it will be better than the torture of not knowing.

“We will never give up hope of finding Madeleine alive,’ he said of the latest developments, “but whatever the outcome we need to know as we need to find peace.”