Missing Madeleine

Three-and-a-half months after she went missing, the Portuguese media reported a whiplash of a new lead: the cops believed that Madeleine McCann was, in fact, dead and her parents were responsible.

(BBC news clip)

Kate McCann is declared a formal suspect in the disappearance of her daughter Madeleine...

In the span of a news cycle-- in England and around the world-- the couple had morphed from the cruelly heartbroken parents of a missing child to suspects. It was a very dark turn of events.

Richard Gaisford , British correspondent: It was only really once, you know, the police brought the McCanns in for questioning. That perhaps it became clear that the Portuguese press weren't making things up.

Kate and Gerry McCann were grilled separately by police inspectors.

They were declared "arguidos"-- a Portuguese legal term that roughly means person of interest -- with the right to remain silent and lawyer up.

John McCann: The pressure on Gerry and Kate, the stress, went skyrocketing up.

According to news reports, the case against the McCann’s consisted of the following:

Bodily fluids and hair, reportedly lab-tested as a DNA match to Madeleine, were recovered from the trunk of a car the McCanns had rented 25 days after the child went missing. The implication?

The McCanns had concealed their daughter's body somewhere and used the rental car to dispose of it almost a month later.

What's more, when so-called cadaver dogs -- animals with a nose for death -- sniffed that rental car they sent up a howl.

And there was another, unsubstantiated but widely reported detail -- something psychological. The cops had supposedly read parts of a diary that Kate McCann had been keeping.

In it, she reportedly complained that Madeleine was "hyperactive" -- an exhausting, demanding child -- and that her husband Gerry wasn't helping out as much as he should.

Did that explain why a stressed-out mother might have given her child a sleeping pill so she could have a relaxing evening out?

A sedative that brought on cardiac arrest, theorized the police, causing a death that the parents then had to cover up before going out to dinner.

Now people thought back to what Kate reportedly first blurted out when she discovered Madeleine gone: "They've taken her."

Was that the start of a cover-up, the secretly guilty mother misdirecting the hunt to phantom abductors? Or, in those frantic moments, were her words lost in translation between English and Portuguese?

The parents stopped their almost daily news briefings. Portuguese law forbids them from talking about their interrogation, but back in England friends and family lined up to voice outrage:

Brian Kennedy, uncle: The notion that either or one of them would or could harm one of their children is ludicrous.

John McCann, uncle: To implicate them in any way is ridiculous.

Even though they bore the official stigma of suspects in a whole-world's-watching murder investigation, the McCanns were allowed to leave Portugal.

With the twins, Sean and Amelie, in arms, the couple did what they said they would never do and went back to England without Madeleine.

(at the airport)

Gerry: While it is heartbreaking to return to the U.K. without Madeleine, it does not mean we have given up our search for her. As parents, we cannot give up on our daughter until we know what has happened.

Gerry McCann may have been forbidden by Portuguese law from talking about details of the case, but he was clear when he knocked down the police's new theory of a crime.

(Gerry at airport)

We have played no part in the disappearance of our lovely daughter Madeleine.

Kate and Gerry McCann, who'd sought the cameras out at every availability to keep their daughter's case alive, now had become victims of the same media beast.

They were hounded from the plane that brought them back to northern England to the front door of their home in Rothley, Leicestershire.

The McCanns would be staked out in the coming days as a Portuguese judge read through some 4,000 pages of police reports turned over to him for a finding.

The judge could require the McCanns to come back to Portugal for more questioning, perhaps even order their arrest on formal charges.

But could it be true? Had the parents themselves killed their child, perhaps accidentally, and then covered it all up with a monstrous PR campaign?

Or was it an abductor -- a little girl stolen from her holiday bed in the night?

Clint Van Zandt: The only thing we know in this case is there is a little girl missing, and we don't know why. That's what we know. Everything else is rumor, innuendo, fabrication.

We asked NBC News analyst Clint Van Zandt, a 25-year veteran of the FBI and a former criminal profiler there, for his read on the case.

For starters, he thinks the Portuguese police botched the investigation with a slow response.

Clint Van Zandt: Statistically, if you don't find that missing child in four hours and it's an unknown predator, you may not get that child back. So you really have to move quick. I am putting her description out to the airport, to the bus stations. I'm going to all the 7-11's. I’m pulling the surveillance tape, I’m interviewing every person in that apartment complex.

Dennis Murphy: In fact, in Portugal, did any of those things happen?

Clint Van Zandt: No. No they didn't. The first responder was slow in getting there. They came and I think treated it like a child who might have wandered away.

Murphy: What does, does this apartment, now a scene tell about itself?

Clint Van Zandt: We're told the Portuguese police went in. They may have thrown some fingerprint dust around or something like that … If that was in the United States or Great Britain we would take the carpet out, we'd take the bed out, we would go in with luminol and go over every wall...

Murphy: Just light the place up, huh?

Clint Van Zandt: Oh, we would. I mean, you know, it would be “CSI” squared.

Video   Kids think they'll see Madeleine soon John McCann explains what Madeleine McCann's brother and sister think about her disappearance. Dateline NBC

Van Zandt says it's important for investigators to work every scenario.

First, the simplest: Did Madeleine wander out of the unlocked apartment and get into trouble of an unknown nature?

Clint Van Zandt: No one can say she didn't go through a front door, a back door, find a way to climb through a window. I don't think anyone can say that didn't happen.

On the other hand, for hours a large search party had combed the resort, the town, the beach, calling out Madeleine’s name and did not find her.

Which makes him think an abduction a more likely scenario.

Murphy: What does experience tell us about predators who steal for their own pleasure?

Clint Van Zandt: The child is usually killed.

But Van Zandt sees another possibility in the abduction theory: a child stolen to be sold as goods to a customer somewhere.

Clint Van Zandt: Unfortunately, it's one of the dirty secrets in this world that children are kidnapped, usually they're put into sexual bondage. And sometimes there are individuals who say, you know, I want a child, not for nefarious purposes but I just want to raise a kid ... and I want a pretty, blonde-haired, blue-eyed, little European girl.

Murphy: Stolen to custom order?

Van Zandt: Stolen to customers' order.

Murphy: And that happens?

Van Zandt: And that happens.

But what about the big bombshell - the parents did it.

This is, sadly, the one that seasoned detectives have the most experience with.

Van Zandt: The McCanns should have been looked at from day one ...

Murphy: Everything in your experience says, look at the parents?

Van Zandt: Look at the parents. I mean, they would have been bulls eye, dead-center for at least one of my investigative teams to rule them in or rule them out.

Murphy: They look good on camera, the stuffed toy, but...

Van Zandt: Doesn't mean a thing. We have to investigate not speculate. And all we've seen is speculation in this case so far.

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