Madeleine McCann

In the above linked article re cadaver dogs, it does say they can detect the scent of a corpse that has been only briefly in a location decades later. In Madeleine’s case there was cadaver scent in apartment and in car boot, but of course that might be nothing whatever to do with Madeleine having been dead in either location. An explanation could be a previous death in the apartment and the McCann’s dragging scent into the boot by way of an item having had contact with cadaver scent chemicals in the apartment. The scent could have got there originally by a person occupying the apartment having visited a deceased relative laid out in a mortuary and bringing scent back. Maybe said person having attended a funeral before departure for their holiday.

All sorts of potential explanations. The latter being quite conceivable. When my aunt died from a stroke we all touched her when she was laid out, including her grandchildren who kissed her forehead. One of those grandchildren departed later that day for a trip to Spain with his friends, staying in an apartment. If a cadaver dog had been brought in for any reason to the hotel, the spaniel would surely have detected that scent.

Musicrules

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121768590#Comment_121768590

Oh yes and someone else could have owned the cuddly toy and died with it before Madeleine. Or in the car......

What added to the suspicion was the desperate attempts to discredit the cadaver dogs. Why would they have done that? The dogs could have helped find out what happened to Madeleine. She could have been hurt in the apartment and then taken. The McCann's couldn't have known that the dogs findings were right or wrong. Why were they so hostile to the alerts by the dogs?

Remember, the dogs were highly trained as was their handler. They assisted with many cases in many countries. They weren't out to 'get' the McCann's. They were out to find the truth. For some reason the McCann's didn't appreciate this.

LambshankRedemption

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121768660#Comment_121768660

This is the last thing I will say on this particular theory.

Going from the NetFlix documentary, the Portuguese police already had made the McCanns suspects. If you were a suspect in a murder and cadavar dogs were brought in and indicated there had been a dead body in an apartment you had been in, and you knew you did not kill someone, wouldn't you want to discredit the cadaver dogs too?

Musicrules

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121768775#Comment_121768775

This wasn't just some random person. They weren't suspects in killing someone down the pub. Trying to alleviate suspicion on themselves should have been the last thing on their minds. Why did they jump to that instead of seeing if they could find what happened to their daughter with the help of the dogs?

Think about it, if you knew you had nothing to do with it but your daughter was missing, wouldn't you think the dogs might be able to explain what happened and help find her? Someone else could have killed her in the apartment.

LambshankRedemption

wouldn't you think the dogs might be able to explain what happened and help find her? 

Yes, if dogs could talk.

silliussoddius

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121768847#Comment_121768847

And if the witnessed whatever happened.

Musicrules

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121768847#Comment_121768847

The dogs did talk. They pointed to a major clue in finding Madeleine. She may have been killed in the apartment. As innocent people, their first reaction would be to follow that lead to try to find their daughter. Why was the McCann's first reaction to try to discredit the findings instead?

My very first introduction to Internet chat boards came not long after Madeleine’s disappearance and some curiosity got me on board during a live Internet relay chat. I found the experience extremely disturbing, and didn’t look near Internet chat for a long time.

One man alleged to be a surgeon. And described what he’d be capable of doing to his own family in x situation. Went into great graphic detail about how to dispose of remains if one panicked after an unintended death. He insisted that when practising medicine, and especially surgery, you learn to be very dissociated and detached in your approach to human flesh and don’t equate it to a human being, otherwise you would never be able to practise your craft.

Now that was probably all bullsh1t, the guy was probably just trying to shock/impress me. But it is possible he was a surgeon. I take a big interest in science/biology/pathology/medicine and have a good grasp of terms used. He too could have been a guy with a good grasp of the subject and be a high IQ London cabbie posing as a surgeon for all I know. The possibility is that he was an actual bona fide surgeon, and was factually describing the skill of personal detachment a surgeon possesses when it is called upon. He was pointing out that the possibility of the unthinkable.

The retired forensic pathologist, Marie Cassidy, often describes the complete detachment she has when doing her vital work. She could never think of the corpse as having recently been a sentient being, even though she’s far from being sociopathic. As she viewed it “the worst has already happened, my job is to find out how and why”.

Detachment is practised in other professional situations too, especially by first responders.

I don’t want to point fingers at the parents, but it can’t be entirely dismissed as an impossibility. It is improbable, but it is possible than an unintended death occurred, and a very bad momentary decision was made to take the focus off them as being partly responsible. If Madeleine were found disturbed or sleepwalking it is possible, for example, that she was dropped when trying to lift her back into bed and suffered a rapidly fatal injury.

However I’d be inclined to think this highly improbable because the immediate emotion of losing your child would surely cause at least one parent to be extremely emotionally distressed and wanting to call the authorities to afford the beloved child dignity in death. Unless the bonds between the couple were unusually more powerful than the bonds between parents & child.

On balance I think the cadaver dog detected a scent of death, but that the death had nothing directly to do with the McCanns.

nc6000

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121744751#Comment_121744751

Yeah, children change in appearance as they get older but what about her very distinctive eye? That wouldn't change.

mosii

If one dog picks up a scent, and there is doubt about that dog, then bring in another dog, maybe 3 o 4 dogs at different times. If they all pick up a death scent then there is a good chance that remains were there at some stage, why rely on only one dog. My opinion for what it worth, no way Mcanns Involved .Brueckner was a high possibility , a know criminal and pervert, disposed of poor child somewhere impossible to find, so many tunnels around the area where she went missing. Bruckner lived and worked in the area ,he had extensive local knowledge. Only my opinion .....

Gusser09

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121770493#Comment_121770493

Agreed. If she had been sold to a couple Bruckner would reveal this to try and secure an early release deal.

briany

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121768890#Comment_121768890

Might be because Amaral took the sniffer dog thing and basically said to the McCanns, "Look, if you confess now, you won't get as harsh a sentence.", or at least this is what the McCanns claimed after the fact. Now, it's not too hard to believe because Amaral later went on to write a book outlining his theory on how the McCanns covered up Madeleine's death. I forget without checking if this was before or after he was sacked from the police force.

So, if I think I'm innocent, but the police seem to have their minds made up that I did it, then yes I'm probably going to question the evidence which appears to implicate me. It may shock some to learn that police don't always operate totally above board and have been known to extract confessions from innocent parties after hours of interrogation. Getting legal counsel is just good practice no matter how innocent one is.

With regard to the sniffer dogs, it's often said that they can only point to something that might be worth investigating, and are not evidence in themselves. As far as I know, the sniffing of cadaverine in the car boot did not turn up a positive match for Madeleine's specific DNA. Even if it did, there would still be room to cast doubt it since skin flakes get everywhere, apparently. You really need a body, it would seem. For a more cut and dry example of where sniffer dogs come up trumps, refer to the recent Satchwell case.

cnocbui

Cadaver dogs can not do a fraction of what some here are claiming. The very same dogs when used on cases after their MMC jaunt, were utterly and completely useless, providing false positives several times. So bad were these false positives that the UK government wasted £20 million investigating a woof in order to find nothing, in one famous instance.

Both dogs gave positive indications in the MMC case, and just as in later cases where they gave false positives, no actual forensic evidence was recovered, not from the apartment, nor the car.

The unbelievable levels of credibility being given to these dogs actually terrifies me, because judicial authorities might actually be stupid enough, one day, to declare a dog barking as incontrovertible evidence of guilt, as happened in the US with at least one person convicted on the say so of a dog. This is despite the same country putting a cadaver dog handler behind bars for falsifying and interfering with evidence.

Eddie and Keela became the primary source of income for their handler, whose income would never have been a fraction of what it was without positive responses, but thankfully for him the dogs did bark on every single case they were employed in, as far as I can tell, and no evidence was found in most of those cases.

There is cadaverine in saliva, putrescine in sperm. A dead body takes two days, minimum, to start producing cadaverine, putrescine and other chemical markers of death, not minutes or hours, so even had MMC died in the apartment, there would have been nothing to detect. The apparent positive indications from the apartment were a scientific impossibility even had she died in the apartment.

briany

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121770507#Comment_121770507

Yeah, I'm pretty sure that a known rapist and child predator like him wouldn't start going, "Oh, I can't tell you that. I promised that couple I'd never reveal their identity!" as if he suddenly had a code of ethics. People like him would only want to have ethics by way of keeping up appearances, something that's totally out the window with his current conviction. He'd certainly tell all he knew, if he knew anything.

LambshankRedemption

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121770845#Comment_121770845

I completely disagree.

Musicrules

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121770493#Comment_121770493

There were 2 dogs.

Musicrules

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121770583#Comment_121770583

The McCann's got their team to really go after discrediting cadaver dogs and tried to show their findings can't be trusted. They used a case in America. It turned out a few years later that the dogs were correct in that case.

But that's the point, whether you trust the findings of cadaver dogs or not, why go after them long after Amaral was off the scene and they weren't suspects anymore?

You can possibly make an excuse early into it, even though I still think that's suspect but to never look into the possibility that the dogs were correct or see that they might help provide answers to what happened is a red flag in my view.

briany

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121772150#Comment_121772150

As I understand it, the findings of cadaver dogs cannot be used as evidence by themselves, rather they can be used to point to a place where evidence may be found. As Martin Grime said, "the dogs are purely there to give a lead to investigators."

So, the dogs giving an alert must be backed up by corroborating evidence. If this does not occur, there is no case to be made of it. In the case of both the sample collected from the apartment and the sample from the boot of the car, it would appear that investigators could not conclusively determine which of the McCanns those even came from nor what bodily fluid produced the sample.

Of the boot sample, the author of Looking for Madeleine says this (paraphrasing)

"20 markers were required for a positive match to Madeleine. Investigators found 15. Now, that sounds very damning until you remember that Madeleine's DNA comes from a mixture of her father's and mother's, so the DNA in the car could equally have belonged to other members of her family."

Both the dogs and DNA gave inconclusive results. The press didn't do the McCanns any favours by amplifying the significance of the findings to the moon in order to sell papers. Not hard to see why the McCanns would try to discredit it when both things were inconclusive yet Amaral seemed set on using them to build a prosecution against the couple.

mosii

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121772120#Comment_121772120

There could be 20 dogs ,the point is if any doubt ,bring in a number of dogs .I was watching the Irish news today about another suspect death ,and they brought in 4 dogs at different times and the dogs picked up the scent at the same place , so high probably of death in that place, common sense......

cnocbui

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121772458#Comment_121772458

If only there had been more dogs!

Want more?

British dogs are vastly superior to inferior Portuguese dogs, they bark at the appropriate times and locations. Portuguese dogs are just boring, all of them just going 'nope.'

mosii

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121772500#Comment_121772500

I agree 100%......They made a dogs bollix of it......

cnocbui

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121772508#Comment_121772508

In case you missed it, all those pictures are of dogs brought to PDL and used on the case, months before Grimes brought his dogs to steal the show and finger paw the McCanns. Most were on the day following her disappearance and the subsequent few days, so fresh on the scene.

lainers99

I thought cadaver dogs couldn’t necessarily differentiate between blood and dead body, they have even said this in relation to the search for the Icelandic missing man in Santry Demesne today. As others have said, the dogs only indicated that the car should be more thoroughly searched, but equally it could have just been a small bit of blood to cause the dogs indication.

mosii

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121772528#Comment_121772528

Yes indeed a right mess. Can i ask what do you think happened to her ?

nc6000

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121772547#Comment_121772547

And in video they released it shows that the dog had little or no interest in the McCann's car and the handler kept calling the dog to the car.

cnocbui

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121772547#Comment_121772547

They can differentiate. Keela was trained to detect blood While Eddie was supposed to indicate for Cadaverine/Putresceine. Both dogs gave positive indications in the apartment. No blood was found where Keela indicated.

I vaguely recall that a tiny little brown dot of dried blood was found on a wall through normal investigative methods involving human Mk 1 eyeballs, but it was traced to a former renter from the Netherlands who nicked himself shaving.

cnocbui

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121772566#Comment_121772566

I think she was abducted. It's an entirely baseless suspicion, but I think someone who worked at the resort might know what actually happened.

Musicrules

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121772302#Comment_121772302

Again, I'm not talking about the dogs, I'm talking about the McCann's reaction to the dogs findings. It's extremely dodgy. They couldn't have known if the dogs were right or wrong but instantly went on the defensive and continued to do so long after they were dropped as suspects.

Musicrules

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121772458#Comment_121772458

There could have been 100 dogs and people still wouldn't believe the McCann's had anything to do with it.

Musicrules

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121772570#Comment_121772570

The dogs started going mad when close to the McCann's car. Ran around the place and alerted at their rental car.