They're Right To Fight For Their Innocence

BY Jan Moir Daily Mail

How strange it was to see Kate and Gerry McCann, this time wrapped up in winter clothes, dominating news bulletins once more. Walking together towards a Portuguese courtroom, they looked gaunt and emotionally scalded; still haunted by their poor, missing Madeleine.
It was a reminder that while time has moved on for us, for them the clocks stopped on a sunny evening in spring nearly three years ago when their daughter disappeared from their holiday apartment and vanished from the face of the earth.
This, of course, was the beginning of an enduring nightmare for the couple, who also have four-year-old twins. For the sake of these other children, more than anything else one suspects, they have had to somehow carry on as normal.





Christmas, they said recently, was a particularly painful time. It is scarcely credible that they manage to get through it all, although their matching pinched expressions tell their own story.

For the McCanns, the dread fight continues, not only to find their daughter, but - even now - to try to clear their names. For out there in the internet ether brews a persistent whispering campaign against them, fuelled by the fireside fanatics who take a voyeuristic delight in every child-in-peril story, from Baby P to Sarah Payne.


And across the courtroom from them sits another man who seeks to do them harm.
The McCanns are back in Portugal, peeling open old wounds as they continue their libel case against Portuguese investigator Goncalo Amaral.

He is trying to overturn the banning of his book The Truth Of The Lie in which he questions the McCanns' account that Madeleine was taken while they were eating with friends. Indeed, he goes further and accuses them of covering up their daughter's death.
The McCanns' great fear, they say, is not just what people think of them, but that if they think Madeleine is dead, they will stop looking for her.
'It is the book that is on trial, not us,' said Mr McCann.
Yet that is not quite true, is it? Nothing in the Madeleine McCann case is ever that simple.
Part of the problem is that the McCanns can be difficult to like. His belligerence and her icy composure don't play well with an audience looking for histrionics and emotional meltdowns on camera. It's not like this in the movies!
And there are moments when, even though his wife clearly sees publicity as a necessary evil, Gerry McCann can appear to enjoy the limelight a little too much for comfort.
There were - and are - moments when the energy and occasional fury he ploughs into the campaign to find his daughter seem to be a conduit for his own feelings of guilt. Sometimes, as he rages, it is almost as if it was our fault that Madeleine had gone missing.
Yet, faced with the sullen recrimination of the Portuguese police which continues to this day, what was his option?
And if the McCanns really are guilty of accidentally killing their own daughter and covering it up - and I don't for a moment believe this to be the case - would they be embarking on this new, difficult, high-profile legal fight? Would it not be more likely that they might dismiss the book as rubbish and just get on quietly with their lives? Proving innocence is most important to the innocent.
The couple made a terrible mistake. They left their children alone. Yet although thousands of parents have done this, the McCanns - despite what Gerry says - will for ever be on trial in the court of public opinion until Madeleine is found, dead or alive.
Or - and this is a long shot - whoever did this is finally shamed by a sudden, flaming spark of decency in an ossified soul, and somehow finds it in their conscience to supply a piece of information, anonymous or otherwise, that might end the living torture of this wretched, blighted family.


Read more:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-1243368/JAN-MOIR-A-love-story-Yes--way-settle-old-scores.html#ixzz0cpMbmkkM

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I placed this in here because I thought it suited being with the court case posts.