Annie Walton Doyle
Kate McCann believes a ‘horror’ note in a restaurant reservation book may have led to her daughter Madeleine‘s disappearance.
The three-year-old mysteriously vanished from her holiday apartment in Praia da Luz, Portugal, 17 years ago.
Madeleine’s disappearance remains shrouded in mystery to this day and has been described as ‘the most heavily reported missing-person case in modern history’.
The missing girl’s parents, Kate and Gerry McCann, have committed themselves to the search for their daughter.
Her heartbroken family took to the Finding Madeleine website amid the 17th anniversary of her disappearance and shared a heartbreaking update.
Prior to this, Kate made a shocking claim about what may have led to her daughter’s disappearance.
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Madeleine vanished from her bed in a holiday apartment on the evening of May 3, 2007. The resort was situated in the Algarve region of Portugal.
She and her twin siblings were asleep as Kate and Gerry dined at a nearby restaurant with friends.
A huge search was ignited after her parents discovered she had disappeared – extending across continents.
Despite the case receiving widespread attention, Madeleine’s whereabouts remain unknown.
However, there have been numerous updates.
BBC Panorama reports that a delegation of senior officers travelled from Lisbon to London in 2023 and met with Madeleine’s father.
They reportedly apologised for how detectives had investigated the case and treated the family.
The McCanns have not commented on the apology.
One of the German prosecutors on the investigation, Hans Christian Wolters, says the apology is ‘a good sign’, explaining: “It shows that, in Portugal, there’s development in the McCann case.”
German prisoner Christian B was officially named as a suspect in the investigation in 2022.
He is currently on trial in Germany for unrelated s**ual offences, allegedly committed in Portugal between 2000 and 2017.
The suspect in Madeleine’s case is already serving a seven-year prison sentence for the r*** of an elderly woman in 2005.
Christian B has denied all the charges against him and any involvement in Madeleine’s disappearance.
Before updates were made in the case, Madeleine’s mother opened up about an important detail on the night of her daughter’s disappearance.
In her 2011 memoir ‘Madeleine: Our Daughter’s Disappearance and the Continuing Search for Her’, Kate divulges a revelation she unearthed a year after police documents became public.
The missing girl’s mother was left horrified after finding a note from the holiday apartment complex while scanning through the police files.
In her book, Kate explains how on the holiday where Madeleine went missing, her group of nine would go to a tapas restaurant every night.
Initially, it was complicated to accommodate such a large party, however, they managed to get a blocked booking which was ‘pencilled in’ for the rest of the week.
After combing through police documents, Kate became concerned at how accessible the restaurant book was to the public.
“The note requesting our block booking was written in a staff message book, which sat on a desk at the pool reception for most of the day,” she wrote (via The New Zealand Herald).
“This book was by definition accessible to all staff and, albeit unintentionally, probably to guests and visitors, too.”
One specific detail in this note particularly alarmed Kate – it detailed how the McCanns left their children in the holiday apartment alone.
“To my horror, I saw that, no doubt in all innocence and simply to explain why she was bending the rules a bit, the receptionist had added the reason for our request: we wanted to eat close to our apartments as we were leaving our young children alone there and checking on them intermittently,” she continued.
Kate explained how the group of nine would do their own ‘child-checking service’ while dining at the tapas restaurant instead of bringing the children along to dinner or requesting the apartment complex’s own child service.
“We now bitterly regret it and will do so until the end of our days,” Madeleine’s mother concluded.
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