Madeleine McCann's mom says restaurant note may have led to her disappearance
The disappearance of toddler Madeleine McCann is one of those missing persons cases that, despite almost two decades of high-profile global coverage, tragically remains unsolved.
Multiple investigations by Portuguese, British, and German police agencies have failed to find out what happened to the three-year-old girl, who was left alone in a hotel room with two younger siblings while her parents went to dinner in May, 2007.
Her parents, Kate and Gerry McCann, had been enjoying a meal with a group of friends who were on vacation with them when their daughter vanished, at some time in the 55 minutes between 9.05pm and 10pm.
But despite initiating a large-scale search of the Praia da Luz resort in Portugal and calling the police within a matter of minutes of her disappearance, their daughter was never found. And the McCanns have blamed one chilling mistake for their tragedy.
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That is, a note they had left with a restaurant they were going to every night with seven of their friends, called Ocean Club. The whole group, who had seven kids in total would put their children down to sleep at around 7pm.
This group would then go to the Ocean Club and have a meal together, with the parents leaving periodically to check on their little ones. Handily, this restaurant had seating that faced out onto their apartments.
Kate, now 54, wrote in her 2011 memoir Madeleine: Our Daughter’s Disappearance and the continuing search for her about the horrifying mistake they made that the McCanns will have to live with for the rest of their lives.
As their group was planning on dining in the same restaurant each night so that they could have a clear view of the holiday lets where their children were sleeping, they had asked the staff if they could reserve the same tables every evening at 8.30pm.
But after the horror of her daughter's disappearance and the failed searches to locate her, Kate discovered that their reservation may have tipped off Maddie's kidnappers.
The staff at the Ocean Club had written down their request to have the same tables, sadly also mentioning that this was so that the group could keep an eye on their sleeping kids, who were unattended.
Kate wrote in her memoir: “To my horror, I saw that, no doubt in all innocence and simply to explain why she was bending the rules a bit, the receptionist had added the reason for our request: we wanted to eat close to our apartments as we were leaving our young children alone there and checking on them intermittently.
“We now bitterly regret it and will do so until the end of our days.”
Sadly, it seems that the McCanns may never truly know what happened to their daughter in that Portuguese resort 19 years ago, with a number of red herrings and a shoddy investigation by local police making it impossible to retrace her kidnapper's movements.
This mystery has led some to cast the eye of suspicion the McCanns over the years, with baseless conspiracy theories that claim their involvement, despite police finding no evidence of this.
These conspiracy theories were retread in the UK this week with the release of a new dramatized Channel 5 documentary about the couple and their daughter's disappearance, called Under Suspicion.
This show has come under fire for reigniting a debate that only exists in the minds of armchair experts, even forcing the McCanns to issue a statement in the week that their daughter would have turned 23.
They said on May 20: "We have not given, or been asked for, our consent and have had no involvement whatsoever in its making. We fail to see how it will help. Programmes like this, always have a negative impact on our family."
Topics: Madeleine McCann, True crime
William Morgan