The Mammoth Book of New Csi (2 page)

There were two initial theories about what had happened to Madeleine. One was that she had been kidnapped by a gang who would sell her for adoption. The other was that she had been snatched by a paedophile ring. A top forensic expert said that the layout of the Mark Warner holiday complex made it a “perverts’ paradise” – with plenty of hidden corners where paedophiles could watch children unobserved. The police could not even say whether Madeleine was alive or not. Chief Inspector Olegário de Sousa said that so many people had been in the apartment that night, any forensic evidence the police might have gleaned from the crime scene had been lost. However, there would soon be plenty of work for crime scene investigators to do.

Lori Campbell, a journalist from Britain’s
Sunday Mirror
, drew the attention of the police to Robert Murat, a dual British-Portuguese national who had been staying nearby at Casa Liliana, his mother’s villa. He had been acting as a translator for the police and was said to be particularly concerned about the case because he had recently lost a custody battle over his own three-year-old daughter. Rachael Oldfield, Russell O’Brien and Fiona Payne said that they had seen him in the Praia da Luz complex on the night Madeleine had disappeared, though his mother said that he had been at home with her.

On 14 May, Casa Liliana was sealed off. The swimming pool was drained and videotapes, mobile phones, computers and the two cars used by the Murats were taken away for forensic examination. There was speculation that the villa had a secret basement. A laptop and hard drives were also taken from twenty-two-year-old Sergey Malinka, an associate of Murat’s who had set up a website for him. The two had been in frequent phone contact since Madeleine’s disappearance. With no other clue to go on, this was found to be suspicious.

On 15 May, Robert Murat was named as an
arguido
, or official suspect, which, while falling short of actually charging him, granted him the right to remain silent. While Portuguese detectives flew to Britain to interview Murat’s estranged wife, British detectives flew to Portugal with their own sniffer dog and hi-tech scanning equipment to search Casa Liliana once again. Desperate to find a clue, the vegetation was razed to the ground. Even so, no evidence linking Madeleine to Murat could be found. Nevertheless, it was ten months before his possessions were returned to him and, finally, four months after that, his
arguido
status was lifted.

By that time, the case had taken a shocking turn. On 7 September 2007, Kate and Gerry McCann were named as formal suspects and given
arguido
status. This was prompted by new crime scene evidence. Madeleine’s blood, hair and other DNA evidence had been found in the car the McCanns had hired twenty-five days after Madeleine had disappeared. However, the Leicester Police who had been helping the Portuguese detectives with their enquiries said that the forensic evident was “very flaky”.

“The preservation of the crime scenes carried out by the Portuguese police was very poor,” a police source who had dealt with the British Forensic Science Service in Birmingham told the
Daily Mail
. “Every man and his dog has been to the crime scene at the apartment, and used the McCann’s hire car. It means it’s very hard to pin down where any fluids or other sources of DNA came from in the first place. And as for Madeleine’s hair being found in the hire car – well, of course it could be. Hair stays around for ages, and sticks to clothes. So Madeleine’s hair has been found in the boot? So what.”

Another leading forensic scientist told the
Daily Telegraph
: “If they are spots of blood, it could not be from a car used by the McCanns twenty-five days later. That doesn’t make sense. The blood would have dried and it would not transfer as spots unless the child is alive. It would be fragments, but that is not what the police are saying they have. This is the prevailing view among other forensic scientists I have spoken to.”

There were other claims that analysis of the hair could show whether Madeleine had been drugged on the night she disappeared, supporting the theory then circulating that she had died after being heavily sedated. But toxicology could only show signs of drugs or medicines she had taken over the preceding months or years. It could not show what she had taken on the specific night. In the event, samples of Madeleine’s hair were tested. They showed she had not received any medication for at least eight months. Her brother and sister were also tested and no traces of sedatives were found in their systems.

Naturally, the McCanns protested their innocence. Although they had not been charged, they paid for independent forensic tests to be performed on the hire car, which they had garaged in the home of tycoon John Geraghty nearby. However, British forensic experts considered a fresh examination of the car a waste of time.

“All of the evidence should have been taken out of it by the police,” said Leicester Police. “But saying that, of course, in England the police would have kept the car as well, because we’re so careful about preserving forensic evidence for potential court cases.”

Sir Alec Jeffreys, the originator of DNA fingerprinting, offered his services as an expert witness to the McCanns. He pointed out that Madeleine’s parents, brother and sister, who carried similar DNA, had all been in the hire car, so it would be nearly impossible to establish anything positive.

“There are no genetic characters in Madeleine that are not found in a least one other member of the family,” he said. “So then you have an incomplete DNA profile that could raise a potential problem in assigning a profile to Madeleine, given that all other members of that family would have been in that car.”

One of the useful clues from the crime scene was Madeleine’s favourite cuddly toy, a pink cat. Kate McCann tucked Madeleine up with it, but later it was found on a shelf too high for Madeleine to have reached. This meant it had been handled by whoever took Madeleine and it might have yielded vital forensic evidence. Yet the police let the McCanns keep the pink cat. They used it as part of their “Find Madeleine” campaign and took it around Europe and North Africa as they followed up reported sightings. Many people had touched it when they visited the Vatican and the shrine of Our Lady of Fátima in Portugal. After one newspaper said that it looked a little grubby, Kate McCann put it in the washing machine. So any useful forensic evidence had long since been lost.

Then came news that a trace of blood had been found in another apartment at the Praia da Luz complex. The blood was sent to the Forensic Science Service in the UK, along with bloodstains found in the McCanns’ original apartment. But it was impossible to assess its significance. Even if it had been Madeleine’s blood, there could have been an innocent explanation, such as someone squashing a mosquito after Madeleine had been bitten by it.

The Leicester Police said the evidence collected by the Portuguese police against the McCanns was so insubstantial that it could not lead to their prosecution. Nevertheless, the case was passed to a local prosecutor who, in turn, passed it on to a judge who authorized the seizure of Kate McCann’s diary and Gerry McCann’s laptop. The Portuguese authorities were eager to read his emails and see what websites he had been visiting. But, again, this line of investigation met a dead end. Eventually, on 21 July 2008, the McCann’s
arguido
status was lifted and it was decided to “close the file on the investigation concerning the disappearance of the minor Madeleine McCann due to lack of evidence that any crime was committed by the persons placed under formal investigation”.

The files have been archived but they will be reviewed periodically and could be reopened if new evidence emerges, said Portugal’s Attorney-General Fernando José Pinto Monteiro.

Again the case had moved on. In June 2007, it was revealed that another DNA sample had been retrieved from the McCanns’ apartment that did not match anyone in the family. But by the time a British CSI team had been brought in with special ultraviolet equipment that could detect a spray of fine particles of blood, they found that the apartment had been cleaned up and reoccupied. The Portuguese authorities said they brought in a specially trained sniffer dog that could detect the scent of a dead body and had been in situ for two hours or more. It was said to have identified the presence of a corpse, but British police dog-handlers said that this was unlikely as the odour of death dissipated within a month.

In 2011, Kate McCann put the case back in the news with the publication of her book
Madeleine
to raise money for the search. As a result, Scotland Yard reopened the case and assigned thirty detectives to the investigation.

O
N
20 M
AY
1999, the sleepy bush town of Snowtown in South Australia came to international attention. Some 75 miles (120 km) north of Adelaide, it had a population of just 600. On the corner of the High Street and Railway Terrace was a disused red-brick building that had once been the Snowtown branch of the State Bank of South Australia. Like many rural branches, it had been closed long ago. Even so, it attracted an unusual amount of visitors. In this quiet town, people had begun to notice vehicles belonging to strangers parked nearby. This eventually incited the interest of the police, who were involved in a year-long investigation of a growing number of missing-persons cases in the state. On 20 May 1999, they decided to take a look inside the bank. Behind the 4 in. (10 cm) steel door of the bank’s vault they found six black plastic barrels that gave off a stomach-churning smell.

Detective Steve McCoy recalled: “The stench was unbearable. It was the stench of what I would say was rotting flesh, rotting bodies, human bodies. It was putrid. It permeated your hair, your clothing, everything you had on the stench got into. It was horrific.”

The acid-filled drums contained partly dissolved human body parts. Among them were fifteen feet, leading the police to conclude that the drums contained the remains of at least eight murder victims. Worse, along with the corpses they found rubber gloves, a bloodstained saw, ropes, tape, handcuffs, knives and electrical equipment designed to give excruciating shocks. It seemed that the victims had been tortured before they were killed.

The following day, three homes in a blue-collar area of northern Adelaide were raided. Three men were arrested and charged with the murder of an unknown number of people between 1 August 1993 and 20 May 1999. The suspects were forty-yearold Mark Haydon of Smithfield Plains, thirty-two-year-old former abattoir worker John Justin Bunting of Craigmore and twenty-seven-year-old Robert Wagner of Elizabeth Grove. Given the horrific nature of the crimes of which they were accused, they were denied bail.

The missing-persons investigation had begun in November 1998 when Haydon’s wife, thirty-seven-year-old Elizabeth, had gone missing. Her brother did not believe Haydon’s inconsistent, even contradictory, stories of her disappearance. Nor did he believe that she would have voluntarily upped and left her two young sons. When her brother went to the police, they found it suspicious that her husband had not reported her missing. Then they noticed that she was connected to two other people who had disappeared – twenty-two-year-old Clinton Trezise, who had vanished in 1993, and his friend, the forty-year-old flamboyant transvestite and convicted paedophile Barry Lane, aka Vanessa, who had last been seen in October 1997. A missing-persons taskforce, codenamed Chart, was set up and Haydon’s house was bugged. This provided evidence that was later used in court.

When it became clear that a good many more than three people had gone missing from Haydon’s immediate circle, the taskforce swelled to thirty-three. They followed Haydon’s car. It led them to Snowtown. As cars from out of town tend to attract attention in small outback towns like Snowtown, the sightings of the other unfamiliar vehicles led detectives to the other suspects.

The barrels found in Snowtown had done the rounds before ending up in the bank vault. They had first been stored in a shed behind Bunting’s house in Murray Bridge in April 1998. Three were then moved to Haydon’s house at Smithfield Plains. Later, one was stored in the back of a Mitsubishi Sigma at Murray Bridge, while five were kept in the back of a Toyota Land Cruiser at Hoyleton on the Adelaide Plains. The barrels had been moved to the bank, which Haydon had rented under the name “Mark Lawrence” about three months before they were discovered, after complaints about the smell. The accused had claimed that the barrels contained kangaroo meat.

Forensic scientists had the distasteful task of trying to identify the victims from their dental records and fingerprints. The killers had made the mistake of using hydrochloric, rather than sulphuric, acid. This tends to mummify bodies rather than dissolve them. Nevertheless, before they had been dunked in the acid, the bodies had been mutilated and dismembered, and were badly decomposed. So the then new and expensive technique of DNA profiling was used. Even body parts that had been marinated in acid for some time produce useful DNA. This could be extracted and compared with hair from combs or samples left on soiled clothing by suspected victims. Soon seven of the eight victims found in the bank vault had been identified.

It turned out that some of the victims had been on Disability Support Benefit. The authorities had not been informed of their deaths and the money was still being collected. Others, who had formally been declared dead, were still, apparently, drawing their benefits. It seemed that the prime reason for the murders was financial as the killers were drawing AUS$100,000 a year due to their dead victims. But there were other more personal motives for the killings. Robert Wagner, for example, was a neo-Nazi who, purportedly, hated Asians and gays. John Bunting, himself an abused child, had a pathological hatred of homosexuals and paedophiles. And the terrifying treatment that had been meted out to the victims in the run-up to their deaths indicated that the killers took a sadistic glee in their crimes.

As if eight victims were not enough, the police, convinced there were more bodies, continued their search. On 23 June, a taskforce of overalled crime scene officers arrived at Waterloo Corner Road in North Salisbury, the site of a semi-detached house where Bunting had once lived. It had since been demolished, but the police were convinced that the site might still yield vital evidence.