[the truth]

whats your thoughts on the whole 5 year madelaine search campaign?

personally I was always amazed how it became such a tabloid event, lead by celebrity detectives, of course david beckham had to be involved, then the parents meeting the Pope during the weeks after she disappeared etc

Did all this help or hinder their chances of finding the girl?

Im far more old fashioned and would have preferred a professional forensice, low key police detective hunt. My theory is, if she was stolen away, then the scum who took her, would never have handed her over or set her free, with the entire world watching. the whole hype would surely have scared him to death and made him think, Im never going to give her up or let them know where she is.

this is one major reason why detective hunts are not celebrity lead and are usually low key, collecting the evidence and interviewing key witnesses and joining up the dots

theres no exact pattern, perhaps the parents were so desperate theyd try anything, perhaps as was hinted they had no confidence in the police involved, but it all seemed very strange. the more tabloid it became, the worse the police seemed to get and the farther away they seemed to get from tracing the evidence.

I for one, after watching all documentarriess, still found it unclear exactly what happened and how far away madelaine and the kids were from the parents at the time of the alleged kidnapping

On 17 June, after Madeleine was found to be missing, Chief Inspector Olegário de Sousa said that the presence of so many people in the apartment from which she disappeared, had complicated the work of the scientific team. He added that this could have destroyed all the evidence and could prove to be fatal to the investigation.[38

your thoughts?