"Looking for Madeleine" by Summers and Swan: A Book Review by Pat Brown - Part Three

Today I have finished  reading Looking for Madeleine by Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan and I sadly find I was right about my prediction that this book would be well-written enough to satisfy the masses that the McCanns are innocent of any involvement in their child's disappearance. As I read the narrative, I could feel myself starting to question their guilt and feeling my own guilt rising for ever thinking these two wonderful parents did anything questionable. Bravo, Summers and Swan, mission accomplished.

But, I know what they doing because I have experienced similar responses when I read well-constructed critical reviews of two of my own books, Profile of the Disappearance of Madeleine McCann and The Murder of Cleopatra, reviews written cleverly enough that I started doubting my own theories and wondering how I came up with them at all. I had to go back and reread my books to see what I really had said and then I could see exactly how these critics had deceived me with their reviews, using magician's tricks to obscure the truth. And, when you have an audience who is never going to read the source material (either because it is too much work or the reviewer doesn't bother to footnote where he gets his material or have a bibliography at the back of his book), the critic can blatantly lie as well and the reader will simply accept what he says. For example, a number of my detractors of The Murder of Cleopatra blithely stated I had done little research on her life and death, completely ignoring the extensive bibliography I included in the book (along with many footnotes). I have a wall of books on Cleopatra and Roman and Greek history, architecture, geography, seafaring, poisons, etc (which I read from beginning to end with notes in all the margins) and I have massive numbers of web searches on my computers where I looked for each and every reference I could find on issues related to analyzing the Pharaonic queen's history. Never mind the two trips I made to Egypt. But, "I did little research;" I just made up a theory out of thin air. Likewise, with Madeleine McCann. I read so many attacks taken totally out of context that I had to go and read exactly what I did say and why I said it and when I said it and what I said before and after I said it.Cherry-picking  bits of info and then cleverly creating a narrative around them is the way readers can be deceived into believing what they are reading is factual and honest.

And this is what Summers and Swan do and do well. They cherry-pick facts which will support their narrative that the McCanns are innocent of any wrongdoing. Then, they weave an emotional story around them and find all the supports they can to bolster the "validity" of what they are saying. Any facts that are damning or that would raise questions are simple left out of the book. Glaringly so, to people who have followed this case and read the police files, but to those that know little except what they have seen in the media, they won't have a clue they aren't getting the whole story.

The other technique used by the detractors of the my two books and used heavily by Summers and Swan is the ad hominem attack. Those who attacked my Madeleine book spend a good deal of time trashing my professionalism. Attackers of Cleopatra book claim I can't properly analyze her life because I am not a historian. Summers and Swan infers that all those who question the McCanns are but haters or publicity seekers or incompetent morons.

Finally, Summers and Swan set themselves up, without any previous training, as better detectives and profilers than anyone else who has looked at the case. I have no problem with people who have not been trained analyzing something and then presenting good evidence to support their theory; in fact, I have been sometimes surprised by the good deductive reasoning of some lay people which is why I don't knock people who don't have a degree in a field for making a hypothesis. Sometimes experts are wrong and nonexperts are right. I don't object to Summers and Swan giving their opinion at some point (although for investigative journalists I should think this should be kept to a dull roar) but I do take issue with their incredibly arrogant stance that their deductions are clearly the right ones and those who question the McCanns in any way are one hundred percent wrong.

I won't bother to go into detail on all the inaccuracies in the book, the deceptions, the glaring omissions...I will leave that to other reviewers.  My final thought on this book is simply that it has achieved its purpose; to create a final narrative in favor of the McCanns and abduction. I don't think it matters how well it sells or if it has a bunch of one-star reviews on Amazon because this book isn't about sales but propaganda. I do believe this book was commissioned and the publisher had no issue with putting the book out there because it wasn't going to be Carter-Rucked and might sell well enough for a profit (as long as they didn't have to spend money on publicity which clearly they did not). I find it extremely odd that the publishers did not send out copies prior to publication for reviews - an extremely common practice and one you would think would be done with authors with a name - and I have to wonder if part of the deal was actually an agreement to not encourage major reviews that might put a negative spin on the book. "Haters" on Amazon are not taken so seriously as are book reviewers with major newspapers and magazines. It will be interesting to see if anyone does dare to write a less than favorable review of this book, but there was a deafening silence in reviewland when this book hit the stands and one has to wonder why.

As I stated a few posts back, I will not be doing any more running commentary on the McCann case. I feel this book is the final spin to the public of the McCann's innocence, the trial will finish up (and I doubt in a very positive way, but I hope I am wrong), and Scotland Yard will wind down with either a dead suspect or a statement that they have a good idea of who kidnapped and killed Maddie but they can't get enough cooperation with Portugal or enough evidence to pursue the evildoers to prosecution.   Whether the truth will ever out remains to be seen.

Criminal Profiler Pat Brown

September 19, 2014

"Looking for Madeleine" by Summers and Swan: A Book Review by Profiler Pat Brown - Part Three

"Looking for Madeleine" by Summers and Swan: A Book Review by Profiler Pat Brown - Part One

Published: July 27, 2011

By Pat Brown

Rating: 

What really happened to Madeleine Beth McCann in Praia da Luz, Portugal in 2007? Was she abducted as the Gerry and Kate have claimed or did something happen to Madeleine on May 3 in the vacation apartment and the incident covered up? Criminal Profiler Pat Brown analyzes the evidence and takes the readers through the steps of profiling, developing a theory that is intriguing and controversial.

"Looking for Madeleine" by Summers and Swan: A Book Review by Profiler Pat Brown - Part One

I have finally received my copy of Looking for Madeleine by Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan and I promised that, in spite of my moratorium on commenting on the Madeleine McCann case, I would review this book because my name shows up in it and I predicted months ago that this book was going to be pro-McCann and written cleverly enough to convince anyone unfamiliar with the police files to believe what is contained within this supposedly first "independent and objective" account of the case.

Today I will address the author's claim to be objective and to have done extremely thorough research. I will start with the bit in the book about me because....well, naturally, that was the bit I just had to read. You will find the part about me on pages 196-197.

First of all, it is hard to exactly know where they got their information from because these supposedly professional journalists failed to include any footnotes in their book nor did they have a bibliography at the end. I surely included footnotes when I wrote The Murder of Cleopatra...how else would people verify what I researched and be able to learn more about what others had written on her history? When I read people complaining online, I saw Summers and Swann's reply that these folks need only to read the source notes. Well, I have the book in front of me and they meant this literally. There is a chapter called "Source Notes" within which is explained the they had read from the police files and Gonçalo Amaral's book and they also noted a number of media sources. THIS is NOT a bibliography. Although Summers claimed in his email to me that he had read my blogs and book, he doesn't mention these in his "source notes".....oh, yeah, well, he probably actually didn't read them at all. He mentions my blog, The Daily Profiler, in one of the chapters on haters, but he doesn't directly quote me (because I refused him permission) so he instead paraphrases what I said and does not footnote where he got this information from. I actually had to Google some of the key words to find out exactly which of the 72 blogs I have written on the McCann case they came from and, interestingly, what I came up with was the Stop the Myths site.

As a matter of fact, from what I could Google, most of Summers and Swan's questions to me came directly from the Stop the Myths, a, vicious pro-McCann site, which is why I got warning bells that I was about to be put in a conspiracy theorist or hater section of the book. It would seem to me that when the authors did research, they only did their research on the pro-McCann sites. I got no feeling through our email conversation that the authors had studied my profile of the case and they never asked for an interview early on (they only called me for quote permission right before publication) so that they might really pick my brain for my professional analysis of the case. After refusing to allow Summers and Swan to quote my blog, I suggested that they ask me questions about my take on the case and my profile and they could quote from my answers. They did ask me a few vague questions and these were my answers:

1) When a child goes missing from home, the police are faced with four possibilities: the child ran away, the child wandered away and met with an accident, the child was abducted, or someone in the home removed a live or dead child and is not telling the truth to the police. As Madeleine was not yet four years old at the time of her disappearance, it is obvious she was not a runaway. Although it is possible she could have wandered out of the vacation flat, her body was never found nearby nor was there any evidence she opened either door and walked into the street to then be abducted. The third possibility is that of a predator breaking in and abducting the child which there has never been any evidence to support. The fourth possible cause of Madeleine's disappearance is that something happened to her inside the vacation flat and the parents removed her body and are covering up a crime. 

In spite of the lack of evidence supporting an abduction, the Portuguese police immediately focused on the child being taken by a local predator; this is not uncommon as well-healed distraught parents rarely become suspects in the early days as detectives tend to feel sympathetic toward parents who appear to be a noncriminal type. Because Robert Murat lived only a block away from the flat and exhibited some concerning behaviors, he became an Arguido, a suspect, which is not unreasonable at that point in the investigation. However, it would have been best if the parents had also been considered suspects from the early days of the investigation and then both avenues could have been investigated until evidence narrowed the focus down to one theory. Later on, statements and behaviors from the McCanns and their friends raised the detectives' suspicions that they might have had something to do with what happened to Madeleine, and when no evidence of abduction was able to be found and cadaver and blood dogs hit in the vacation flat and in the McCanns' hire car, the police had no choice but to declare the McCanns Arguidos. To this day, Gonçalo Amaral believes the evidence points to the McCanns' involvement with the death and disappearance of their daughter, as do I. The three-year-long Scotland Yard review has not provided one shred of evidence that any abductor removed Madeleine from the flat and it is concerning that they have never gone back to the beginning of the case and reinterviewed that parents and their friends nor done a crime reconstruction of the night in question.

2) After seven years of analyzing this case and traveling to Portugal and Praia da Luz to study the crime location, it is my conclusion that there is no evidence of stranger abduction and the physical and behavioral evidence continues to support my theory that the McCanns were involved with the death and disappearance of their daughter. It is clear after visiting the location of the vacation flat, the the statement of Jane Tanner that she saw both Gerry McCann chatting with a friend on the street at the very time a man carrying a small child away from the flat is unlikely to be truthful. On a street as narrow as that one is between the McCanns' flat and the Tapas dining area, there is no possible way Gerry and his friend did not see either Jane or the possible kidnapper. Scotland Yard's claim on CrimeWatch that Jane really did see a man carrying a child, that this man was a vacationer carrying his child back to his apartment after an evening of childcare provided by the hotel, is not credible  - as the man would have been walking in the wrong direction. Furthermore, this man never came forward for seven years and Scotland Yard has not given out the name of this supposed tourist.

After examining the crime scene and statements and behaviors of the parents and their friends and taking into account the evidence of the cadaver and blood dogs, the evidence points to Madeleine being overmedicated by her parents and having an accident while they were not in the apartment. The sighting by the Smith family of a man carrying a child toward the beach from the direction of the vacation flat has a high likelihood of being Gerry McCann. It is my theory that he temporarily housed Madeleine's body near the beach and in the early morning hours, moved her body to a gravel and rock filled crevice on the Rocha Negra, the large rock that soars above Praia da Luz. Such a burial spot is easily accessible from the beach and a excellent location to hide a body without the necessity of a shovel. Later, when Kate McCann told a Portuguese detective of a dream she had in which she saw Madeleine dead on a slab of rock and the cadaver dogs were going to be brought in, I theorize that Gerry McCann then moved Madeleine's body to a more remote location, possibly a desolate area just west of Praia da Luz near where Gerry's phone pinged over a couple of days, a hilly, shrub area known as Monte do Jose Mestre. Unless Scotland Yard or the Portuguese police search this area in the manner in which they searched three locations (based on the residences and work locations of local criminal suspects) fruitlessly near Praia da Luz, then it is clear Madeleine's body will never be discovered except by accident.

It is the totality of the evidence that leads me to believe the McCanns should be reinstated as suspects. With no evidence of abduction, there is no reason to spend millions of pounds chasing bogeymen all over the world and digging up acres of ground in Portugal when there is not a shred of evidence to warrant such actions.

Summers responded with this:

  I've now read and digested. There will be a problem with length, but I promise you what will emerge will be faithful to what you've written

Lying. Dog. As I suspected, nothing of what I wrote in answer to his questions was included in his book. Instead, he pulls stuff out of context that he found on the Stop the Myths site and then
 ignores my statements that I permitted him to quote. Finally, he libels me by stating "The adventure (my trip to Praia da Luz) produced only substantial self-publicity." (Summers,A, Swann, R., Looking for Madeleine, page 197 - this is a footnote). I learned a good deal in Praia da Luz which could forward the case if investigators took my findings into account.

It seems obvious to me Summers and Swan's only goal in including me in their book was to prove my profiling of the case had no merit and that I was one of the haters. Although they mention my blog on the case, I am quite certain it is to present me something less than a professional profiler and more of a blogger. After tearing apart Nancy Grace, it is then mentioned I was a regular on her show. No where is my book, Profile of the Disappearance of Madeleine McCann mentioned or the fact that the McCanns Carter-Rucked it. And since there are no footnotes, no one can double-check the veracity of the authors version of my commentary nor see in what context such commentary was made.

One of the advantages of being included in the book is that I know more than the innocent reader that not all is as it seems. Any reader unfamiliar with the police files or Gonçalo's book, The Truth of the Lie, or my book, or Tony Bennett's What Really Happened to Madeleine McCann: 60 reasons which suggest that she was not abducted (or informative blogs like that of Joana Morais or Hideho) will likely believe that these two investigative journalists are presenting factual information and not a very slanted, subjective, and possibly commissioned version of the Madeleine McCann case.

Criminal Profiler Pat Brown

September 18, 2104




Published: July 27, 2011

By Pat Brown
Rating: 
(5.00 based on 5 reviews)

What really happened to Madeleine Beth McCann in Praia da Luz, Portugal in 2007? Was she abducted as the Gerry and Kate have claimed or did something happen to Madeleine on May 3 in the vacation apartment and the incident covered up? Criminal Profiler Pat Brown analyzes the evidence and takes the readers through the steps of profiling, developing a theory that is intriguing and controversial.