Tabloid Fodder

British papers also picked up the leaks from the secret investigation, repeating many of the charges and elaborating on them with little or no evidence. One headline that dominated the front page of the Daily Express read MCCANNS OR A FRIEND MUST BE TO BLAME. The source: a waiter who served the couple at the tapas restaurant that night. The Express daily and Sunday papers alone published close to 100 front-page stories on the McCann case, in increasingly critical tones. In April, when the McCanns went to Brussels to campaign for a European version of the American Amber Alert system, Portuguese papers published leaks from their interrogation in which Kate said that the night before the disappearance, Madeleine had asked why she didn't respond to her crying. Those accounts were picked up in the British media.

For the tabloids, suffering from steadily declining circulation, the story was the perfect lure for its largely working-class, elderly readership. Maddie stories routinely increased sales by 2 or 3 percent. The McCanns sued for libel and in March settled out of court with the Express group of two Sunday and two daily papers for 550,000 pounds—$1.1 million dollars—paid into the Find Madeleine Fund, and front-page apologies from all four papers. Ironically, even the apologies bumped up circulation by an estimated 4 percent.

Still, the truth of the case remained obscure. The McCanns were legally bound not to discuss what had transpired when they were interviewed by the Portuguese Judicial Police. But in the ITV interview, they implicitly acknowledged accounts that the police tried to get them to admit that their daughter had been accidentally killed. "As soon as I realized the story or theory or whatever you want to call it, was that Madeleine was dead and that we'd been involved somehow, it just hit home," Kate said. "They haven't been looking for Madeleine. And it was just, I mean, just, I just felt yet again my daughter's had such disservice and I just, I mean I was obviously upset by that, very upset and I was angry you know. And I just thought she deserves so much better than that, and I thought I'm not going to sit here and allow, allow this."

In Portugal, the wheels of justice clumped along. Key officials involved in the early decisions to make the parents arguidos were dismissed, and police publicly admitted that the DNA samples were inconclusive. In early February, an official admitted that it had been a mistake to name the McCanns arguidos.

None of that stopped the British tabloids from continuing to publish speculation—making the McCanns convenient public targets. In February, a 9-year-old girl from Yorkshire named Shannon Matthews went missing on her way home from school. Shannon's family, living on welfare, complained that they weren't getting the sort of coverage and public support for their daughter that the more affluent McCanns had received. A few weeks later, Shannon was found hidden in her uncle's house and members of her family, including her mother, were eventually charged for offenses relating to her disappearance. (It emerged also that her stepfather had applied to the Find Madeline fund for financial aid; he was later charged for possession of child pornography in an unrelated case.)

Lost in all this has been any real focus on finding Madeleine. The only solid lead that anyone has come up with has been an account by one of the McCanns' friends that she saw a youngish man with a child in his arms that evening near the resort. The FBI has produced an artist's rendering of the person. "The McCann case reminds me of a full mailbox stuffed with junk mail and no information," says Candido de Agra, head of the University of Porto school of criminology. "And what is the junk mail? Games of prediction, media terror and those who talk endlessly about the subject. A collective nonsense nourished by the media and by the ignorance they support, as well as by morbid thirst for prolonged narratives."

That thirst is nothing new, of course. In the 19th century, Britons were transfixed by the case of Constance Kent, who was accused of slitting the throat of her 3-year-old half brother. She was just 16 at the time of the crime and was initially acquitted after a botched police investigation. She later confessed, although it seems likely that she was not the real killer and may have been shielding a family member. After she was released from prison in 1885 at the age of 41, she emigrated to Australia, where she became a nurse. She died at age 100--a world away but never forgotten. The case has inspired a score of writers, starting with Charles Dickens ("The Mystery of Edwin Drood."). The latest is Kate Summerscale's "The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher," which is selling briskly in U.K. bookstores this week. A good story never grows old.

With Christopher Werth in London and Antonio Oliveira e Silva in Paris

© 2008