Madeleine: Paedophile Gives DNA Sample

Madeleine: Paedophile Gives DNA Sample


8:42pm UK, Thursday May 28, 2009
A convicted British paedophile, named as a person of interest in the Madeleine McCann case, has given a DNA sample to German police.





Raymond Hewlett has served jail terms for child sex crimes

Raymond Hewlett, 64, was living in Tavira, a coastal town between Faro and the Spanish border, when Madeleine disappeared on May 3, 2007.
Tavira is about an hour's drive from Praia da Luz, where the youngster vanished while on holiday with her family in Portugal.
He gave a saliva sample to police in his hospital bed at the University Clinic in Aachen where he is being treated for throat cancer.
It was connected with a 1975 indecent assault allegation being investigated by West Yorkshire police, and not with the disappearance of Madeleine.
A West Yorkshire police spokesman said: "We are looking for him.
"We want to speak to him in relation to an incident in 1975.
"We have requested a saliva sample to be taken on our behalf as part of our inquiry. It is a routine matter for us."



Madeleine and how she would look aged six


Meanwhile, two retired British detectives employed by the McCanns hope to interview him about her disappearance in the "near future".
Last weekend, Dave Edgar and Arthur Cowley flew to Aachen to quiz him about his movements around the time that Madeleine went missing.
But having failed to gain access to him they were about to fly back to the UK when Hewlett emerged from hospital in a wheelchair and agreed to see them.
McCann family spokesman Clarence Mitchell said: "The investigators are pleased to hear that Mr Hewlett has agreed to speak to them.
"An interview with him will be arranged and will take place in due course.
"We will not be going into public detail about where or when that interview will take place.
"Mr Hewlett has again denied any involvement in Madeleine's abduction, and if it helps to eliminate him from the private investigation then he has done the right thing by indicating that he will speak to the investigators currently helping Kate and Gerry McCann."

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Alex

In Britain, as in Australia, physical evidence will have been kept which was taken from the crime scene. It is not disposed of as soon as the first court case is finished. This evidence will be kept as well as pristine as possible, and if it is of a suitable sort (such as a sperm sample) then DNA will be taken from it.

In Australia, much of the old evidence has been already gone over for DNA, and the results have been recorded, so when new DNA enters the database, there is an automatic search done against existing crime scene DNA, suspects DNA etc. This has resulted in old crimes here being solved. We have had a problem with contamination in one instance where someone was thought to have committed the rape and murder of young mother and her small child, but he was not able to have done, even though his DNA came out. Going back over the labs records they found that cross contamination had occurred.

I believe that Britain operates in much the same way as Australia with regards to old crime scene evidence and the DNA database.

So in a nutshell, the police want the DNA because they have DNA from the crime scene that they want to match to. ANd it will most likely already have been processed with the results in the system.

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Alex, the sperm/specimen is stored in a way that is appropriate, it may even have been frozen. You can get DNA from specimens that are thousands of years old, just so long as the specimen has been stored properly.

Scientists do after all take DNA samples from Egyptian Mummies, and DNA has been taken from insects stored in amber that is extremely old.

It seems you are suggesting that the DNA had to be tested in 1975. No it doesnt, the specimen just needs to be preserved, and as I said, in Britain, evidence from crime scenes is preserved for many years, and then tested at later dates when better testing techniques become available.

This article http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/politics/lawandorder/5037895/Thousands-of-cold-cases-could-be-reopened-thanks-to-new-DNA-technique.html is interesting.

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AlexG wrote:"DNA Boost" will work only if you have a previose profile of "low copy number testing". This was developed at 1998 or something near that data. Not 75.
You couldn't store organic liquid material on 1975 and expect it to be reliable today. Only way is if the had hair or nails or bone on the archive. Pretty impossible to keept all of that stuff on a time when they didn't have computers.

Egyptian Mummies have bones, specimens that are thousands of years old are fossilized.

But of course i can't provide you proofs about what i'm telling, once again. So yes, you most lilkely are right and i most likey i'm wrong. It's only my oppinion.

Alex, I understand it is the Yorkshire Police that have requested a swab of Hewletts DNA for a crime that was committed in 1975. I hardly think they would have requested it unless there is something that can be gained.

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http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/politics/wales/3382287/DNA-breakthrough-in-murder-committed-62-years-ago.html

a link which might provide with some answers to how they can solve cases years later with dna taken at the crime scene. Even if the criminal as died!!!! this particular case is 62 years old,and scientist say they can solve it with the use of dna testing.

also another case 33 years old..........where they kept scrapings from underneath the victims nails in a paper bag at the police station!! they got them out years later,tested them and bingo,up pops someones dna match....hes arrested now and in jail.He was done for it in 2008,the crime took place years earlier.

http://www.oregonlive.com/news/index.ssf/2009/04/portlands_oldest_homicide_solv.html

Just found this report released tonight which is quite interesting.


So did Raymond Hewlett snatch Maddie?



By
David Jones
Last updated at 8:06 PM on 29th May


The British paedophile's likeness to the sketch of a Maddie
suspect is uncanny - and he admits being just an hour away on the day
that she disappeared. He furiously protests his innocence. But as this
chilling dispatch reveals, he has a truly horrifying past...and some
disturbing questions to answer

Addressed to an internet agency which peddles stories to low-brow media outlets, the email seemed absurdly far-fetched.
During
a road-trip through Pakistan a decade ago, the woman informant wrote,
she and her husband had stumbled upon the secret lair of Osama bin
Laden.







Under suspicion: Raymond Hewlett, left and an artist's impression of a Maddie suspect


When they tried to report their sensational discovery to U.S. authorities, nobody would listen.
Oh
yes, she added almost as an afterthought, and while travelling through
southern Portugal more recently, the couple had become friendly with a
British man whom they later discovered to be a serial child sex
attacker.
What's more, they now suspected him to be the monster who abducted Madeleine McCann.
Quite
whether the tipsters (a down-to-earth, middle-aged couple named Alan
and Cindy Thompson, who spend their summers in East Anglia and their
winters abroad in a camper van) really did have a close encounter with
the Al-Qaeda leader is open to question.
Extraordinarily,
however, when their claims about the McCann case were closely checked,
it turned out that they were telling the truth.
Thus, a few
days ago, began the latest twist in a seemingly interminable saga that
never fails to astonish and perplex; and which, until then, seemed to
be rapidly running out of steam, for all the best efforts of
Madeleine's parents Gerry and Kate McCann and their team.
It
has shone an unwelcome torch on the activities of the man the Thompsons
met on their trek through Portugal, 64-year-old Raymond Hewlett - a
thoroughly vile character with a record of serious paedophile offences
dating back to the Seventies.
Despite the somewhat
haphazard manner in which his name comes to be in the frame, detectives
retained by the McCanns are taking his possible involvement in her
disappearance seriously.
Last Monday, the former British
police officers, Dave Edgar and Arthur Crowley, attempted to interview
him in a German hospital, where he is recovering from an operation to
remove a tumour on his oesophagus.




Artist's impression: The McCanns recently released a picture of what Madeleine could look like today

Looking haggard and screaming obscenities at waiting journalists,
the wheelchair-bound Hewlett refused to be questioned by the McCann
team, changing his mind only after they had flown home to Britain. The
police officers plan to return to Germany.
As Mr Edgar remarked, this is the first time
since they took over the inquiry from the Spanish investigations agency
Metodo 3 last autumn that they have felt the necessity to confront a
suspect.
'It looked at one stage like he might die,' Mr Edgar, a former RUC officer, explained.
'The
last thing we want is for the speculation to continue and for people to
say he has taken the secret (of Madeleine's abduction) to the grave.'
Meanwhile, Hewlett's emergence has prompted West Yorkshire police to
seek leave from the German authorities to quiz him about an unsolved
attack on an eight-year-old girl in 1975.
Hewlett's defiant response this week was to supply a DNA sample which, he insists, will clear him of that assault.
Unfortunately
it is unlikely to be of use in the Madeleine inquiry, for the
Portuguese judicial police are not thought to have gathered any
unidentified genetic material from the McCanns' apartment, against
which it might be matched.In any case, the inept 'PJ' - as the Portuguese police are known -
are unlikely to be joining the queue to interview Hewlett in hospital,
for they are clearly uninterested in him, or any other new suspect, for
that matter.
n recent days, they have reportedly rebuffed
several other new informants, informing them that they are wasting
their time because the little girl is dead.
Furthermore, I
am told the PJ ignore clues passed to them by Messrs Edgar and Crowley,
and when the private detectives visit Portugal they are tailed as if they were the criminals.
The
question is, by failing to investigate Hewlett (who has served three
prison sentences for sexual assaults on children, once rendering his
victim unconscious by smothering her with a rag soaked in
paint-thinner; a method which some surmise might have been used to
subdue Madeleine), could they be missing an opportunity to solve the
McCann mystery once and for all?
Understandably, given all
the false dawns they have endured over the past two years, the McCann
camp remain cautious when discussing Hewlett's possible involvement.
However,
spokesman Clarence Mitchell speaks of the 'eerie similarities' between
the former Scots Guardsman and an artist's sketch of the gaunt suspect
with lank, shoulder-length hair, who was seen near the McCanns' holiday
apartment in Praia da Luz on and around May 3, 2007, when Madeleine was
snatched from her bed.
Mr Edgar says: 'From the information I've seen, he wouldn't be at
the top of our list, but he is definitely of interest to us and we need
to eliminate him.'
There are huge blanks in Hewlett's
story, but he seems to have started wandering during the early Nineties
after being released from his last jail term, for abducting and
assaulting a 14-year-old girl in Cheshire.
After a period
in Ireland (where he is suspected of attacking at least one other
child), he journeyed overland through France and Spain to southern
Portugal.
Home was a battered blue Dodge truck, which
Hewlett, a dextrous mechanic, converted into a camper using parts he
cannibalised from other vehicles.
He shared it with his pony-tailed German girlfriend, Marianne Schmuecker, who, at 33, is half his age.
Significantly,
perhaps, the Mail has learned that he sold the Dodge to Portuguese
travellers for 300 euros, not long after Madeleine vanished, and
replaced it with a white Iveco model.




Haggard: Raymond Hewlett in Germany following
his operation to remove a tumour from his oesophagus refused to speak
to private detectives hired by the McCanns

If traced, his old camper could contain valuable forensic evidence.
Hewlett has at least two grown-up children
from his first marriage - a daughter named Gina, 41, to whom he wrote
self-pitying letters from prison, and a son Wayne, 40, who this week
described his father as a 'monster' who beat him savagely when he was a
boy.On the road, however, he sired six more offspring by Marianne, who, one friend recalls, 'always seemed to be pregnant'.

The
oldest, David, was killed last December, apparently falling out of the
van as the family drove through Spain en route to Germany.

The Spanish authorities are investigating the incident and may charge Hewlett with negligence.

According
to the friend, the family preferred the Costa del Sol to Portugal, but
Hewlett grew tired of dodging Spain's 'social police', who asked
questions about the children's welfare and wanted to know why the older
ones didn't go to school (Marianne taught them herself).

By
2006, the family had decamped to the Algarve, basing themselves in a
car park beside a supermarket in Tavira, a former fishing town between
Faro and the Spanish border.

It was one of the few places
where they weren't chased away by the authorities. They were allowed to
wash in the supermarket toilets.

Since Hewlett and Marianne
had so many blonde, blue-eyed children, their circle of bohemian
friends were keen to help them, and one English woman gave them
hundreds of pounds to buy their new mobile home.

In return
for such favours, Hewlett would mend their vehicles while Marianne
would don a pink bunny suit and play the flute on the town's Roman
bridge, instructing her children to collect money from tourists.
But Hewlett was no easygoing hippy. Friends recall him as an
overbearing 'control freak' who never let Marianne and the children out
of his sight.
He was also furtive and 'never let one hand
know what the other was doing'. Nor did he socialise much, preferring
to chain-smoke cigarettes, and sometimes cannabis.
One
friend says his children were 'immaculately' turned out and
well-behaved. But another says they were 'cowed and mute', and now
fears Hewlett may have abused them, too.
None of his close circle in Tavira had any idea about his sordid past - nor that he was wanted by police in England.
Rumours
began to circulate only last summer, when he sneaked back to Britain
because he needed documents to obtain free overseas hospital treatment
and claim his old age pension, due next year.
One source says: 'He was driven by a friend and the police must have
learned he was in Britain, because they raided the house he was staying
in during the night.'
It is unclear whether the police arrived too late and Hewlett had fled, or whether they let him go.





Hewlett's partner, Marianne Schmucker, is reported to have had no idea about the paedophile's past
But
he hastily returned to Portugal, where the friend he'd driven with to
Britain typed Hewlett's name into Google and learned the truth about
his past.
The news then reached Alan and Cindy Thompson,
who had met Hewlett a few months before Madeleine's abduction and
remained loosely in touch after returning to East Anglia.
Their
internet searches would have revealed that his name came up in November
2007 during a notorious 'cold case' trial - in which new evidence
causes an old case to be reopened - when Ronald Castree was convicted
of the frenzied sex murder of 11-year-old schoolgirl Lesley Molseed,
more than 30 years ago.
After the murder in 1975, loner
Stefan Kiszko was wrongfully convicted. He had served 16 years for
murder before his conviction was overturned, and modern DNA testing
techniques proved that Castree's semen was on Lesley's underwear. However, Castree's barrister had maintained he did not kill her. He
said there was 'overwhelming evidence' that Hewlett - whose car was
allegedly parked close to the murder scene in the Pennines - was the
'probable' culprit.
Marianne knew nothing of Hewlett's past
convictions until this week, I am told, and discovered the truth only
when the McCann detectives descended on Aachen, where she and Hewlett
have settled with their five surviving children in a council flat.
'She is absolutely beside herself,' one friend says.
Gullibly,
one might think, this friend believes Hewlett and remains convinced he
had nothing to do with Madeleine's disappearance.
So what is the evidence? We know Hewlett was within easy driving
distance of Praia da Luz on May 3, 2007, for he admits to being on the
Algarve on that date, and nowhere on the coast is more than 90 minutes'
drive from the McCanns' resort.




Raymond Hewlett and his third wife, Gabriella in Scotland in 1997

We know he looks like the 'hairy man' with a zapata moustache in the sketch. We
know, too, that he frequently took the sea crossing from Spain to
Morroco, where there have been reported sightings of a girl resembling
Madeleine and where some fear she has been sold to paedophiles.
Moreover, according to one source, Hewlett was adept at smuggling his children aboard the ferry to Tangier.
And as the source remarked: 'Would one more little girl have made that much difference?'
Others
among Hewlett's old travelling circle have also emerged to incriminate
him. The most compelling of these is Cornwall-based antiques dealer
Peter Ferran, 46, who recalls meeting him in a Morocco campsite just
after Madeleine was snatched.
He says Hewlett told him he
was worried that people might think one of his daughters was Madeleine,
because she bore such a strong resemblance to her, and added:
'Madeleine's not in Morocco.'
Hewlett had readily admitted
having been in Praia da Luz 'many times'. He said he knew the layout of
the Ocean Club, where the McCanns stayed, and was adamant Madeleine
couldn't have been taken without her parents seeing.
Yet
there are convincing clues that point to Hewlett's innocence. He
maintains he has an alibi for May 3, 2007 - he and his family were
trading at a flea market.
According to reports this week,
Hewlett must have been mistaken - or lying - because the Fuzeta market
is held only on the first Sunday of each month, and Madeleine was taken
on a Thursday.
However, the Mail has established that there
is also a sale at this site on the first Thursday of the month, though
it usually attracts only gipsies.




Madeleine McCann hours before she was abducted in Praia da Luz

Whatever the truth, he does seem to have been at the market three days after the abduction. For
the Mail has spoken to an English expat who keeps a detailed daily
diary and says he logged the fact that he parked his camper near
Hewlett's blue Dodge on Sunday, May 6, 2007.
He also noted a meeting with Hewlett and his family at another market at Mertola, 30 miles along the coast, on May 18, 2007.
These
diary entries don't account for his movements on May 3, of course, and
certainly not between 9pm and 10pm that evening, when the abductor is
believed to have struck.
Yet as the source - who did not
much like Hewlett and is no apologist for him - asks: 'Is it really
possible that he drove into a small, out-of-season resort like Praia da
Luz in a big blue truck that stood out like a sore thumb without being
seen?
'If he did go there, maybe in another vehicle, could he have taken Madeleine without his family knowing?
'Marianne
may be devoted to him, but I can't believe that if she did know he had
done something so terrible she wouldn't have told someone.'
Any
number of experts would question this bold assertion, for the evidence
suggests that serial child molesters such as Hewlett rarely change
their spots.
That doesn't make him guilty, of course, just
as it doesn't prove the culpability of the 38 other convicted child sex
attackers known to have been lurking in the Algarve when this terrible
crime was perpetrated.