For Kate's Sake, don't give up

bluj1515 wrote:http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/top-stories/2009/11/03/for-kate-s-sake-don-t-give-up-on-maddy-mccann-115875-21793604/
For most of us, the events in Portugal’s Praia da Luz three summers
ago are now a blur – a distant unhappy memory of lighting candles,
prayers and appeals for a little girl snatched from a holiday apartment.
But
then something happens to remind us of Madeleine McCann and once again
we catch our breath and try to imagine the misery her parents, Gerry
and Kate, experience every day as another reminder of their missing
daughter emerges in a child’s laughter or a little girl’s sudden
captivating smile.
This will be their third Christmas without
Madeleine and the maxim “time heals” could hardly be less fitting. If
anything the ordeal of not knowing worsens with every bogus sighting
and false claim. Yet still brave, strong and united they refuse to give
up hope.
“If you know what has happened to Madeleine,” Kate and
Gerry said this week, “it’s still not too late to do the right thing
and come forward.”
There’s no blueprint for how couples should
manage an ongoing nightmare. The rule book on dealing with the pain of
a missing child has yet to be written.
But at home, when twins
Amelie and Sean are attending lessons at the school where Madeleine
would have been their watchful big sister, Kate spends hours sifting
through paperwork, searching for simple overlooked clues. When Gerry
returns from work he joins her.
At one time I believed this
need to scour every last detail might have been a ritual to assuage the
guilt, real or imagined, any parent would feel over a child’s
disappearance.
But three years on it doesn’t seem futile or pointless.
Children
do, against all odds, reappear and might have done so earlier had every
stone been turned or every minute detail properly examined.
A policewoman’s hunch led to the discovery of Jaycee Lee Dugard a few months ago.

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Snatched at the age of 11
from a bus stop in America’s South Lake Tahoe we now know had there
been more thorough searches of her captor’s property her 18-year
imprisonment in Phillip Garrido’s filthy garden sheds may have ended
sooner.
If anything has given succour to the McCanns it’s the story of Jaycee Lee.
But
it’s also helped persuade the cynics, who feel the couple have been
pointlessly banging their heads against a brick wall, that they could
be wrong.
And right now, as they face another difficult Christmas, the family need all our support.
The
chilling reality is that someone knows what happened the night
Madeleine disappeared. They understand the motive and the way her
abduction was orchestrated.
It would be terrifying if, in our
lifetime, despite all the advances of modern technology, high-speed
communications and sophisticated policing skills, a three-year-old girl
was able to disappear off the face of the Earth without a single human
being’s knowledge.
The McCanns have already backed a
Europe-wide alert system for snatched children. Now the Child
Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (CEOP) has gone further with
a global campaign targeted at kidnappers and paedophile rings.
And
for those of us who have pushed Madeleine to the furthest recesses of
our memory we’re reminded, thanks to age-processed pictures, of how she
might look now.
For years America looked at similar photographs of Jaycee Lee Dugard and despaired.
She wasn’t delivered back to her family by a miracle but by the sloppiness of an over-confident, arrogant criminal.
Everyone makes mistakes. And one day, the person responsible for Madeleine’s disappearance will too.

Pedro Silva wrote:WE WILL NEVER GIVE UP, WE WILL NEVER STOP, WE ARE IN THIS QUEST UNTIL SWEET MADELEINE IS FOUND, UNTIL SHE RETURNS TO HER HOME. WE ARE RIGHT BEHIND YOU, SUPPORTING YOU IN EVERYTHING YOU DO, SUPPORTING YOU 100% IN THIS QUEST.

Rosiepops wrote:I have no intention of giving up on Madeleine or Kate and Gerry and for as long as they need me, for what good it will do they have my support and I will do anything I can to help them search for their beloved daughter