To all those people whose loved ones are still missing.
All days are nights to see till I see thee
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE SONNET XLIII
Thanks to Wensley Clarkson for showing me the way, and all my friends and family for accepting that I had to say ‘No’ rather more than they are used to. Thanks to Marlon for countering my Luddite tendencies and simply being there. Also thanks to Brian Cowan and Ross Miller at the charity Missing People, formerly known as the National Missing Persons Helpline, Linda Campbell at the Salvation Army, Samantha Shaw at the Children’s Society and Maxine Hamilton Bell at Safe In The City in Manchester, for giving me endless help in my research.
Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Madeleine McCann
I Miss My Sweet, Gorgeous Son
I Just Want My Husband to Come Home
Why Hasn’t Anyone Found My Mum?
I Loved My Mum and Dad, but I Missed My Birth Parents
My Son Did Not Run Away From Home
I Didn’t Know If My Little Girl Was Dead or Alive
I Found My Dad 30 Years Later
We’ve Never Stopped Waiting For You To Walk In
My Big Brother Is Out There Somewhere, Living Like a Saint
My Dream Came True When I Found My Half-Brothers
I Ran Away and Hated It
Your Mother and I Think About You Every Day
I Was Reunited with My Mother and We’re So Alike
Epilogue
Resources and Helplines
Copyright
A book about missing people is inevitably an intensely intimate endeavour. I spent three months interviewing mothers, wives, fathers, sons, daughters, brothers and sisters about the loved ones that had disappeared from their lives, including birth parents and some relatives who were found. In one case, I actually interviewed the teenager herself who had run away from home. Writing this book was a daunting task in terms of discovery about people’s lives. Missing people disappear for all sorts of reasons – there is no one easy answer. The harsh reality is that, in some cases, people go missing and years later there may still be no explanation.
However, the relatives of the missing always have an unbearable burden to shoulder. These are the very people who generously let me into their heartache, turmoil and grief without making me feel like an intruder. Often, I shared their anguish and determination to carry on searching. At other times, I shared the joy of their reunions. I was, at all times, honoured to be part of their journey.
These are stories of lives that have been shattered by a disappearance but, more than that, these are the tales of relatives who have refused to give up on their missing loved ones. They are still fighting to find out where they are and what happened to them. They are brave, ordinary people whose lives have been irrevocably transformed by circumstances beyond their control. I admire their fortitude. Fate has dealt them an extraordinary and tortuous pathway. They navigate it with grace.
They struggle between searching for the truth and accepting the not knowing. It is an uneasy dynamic. I can only hope that they find some peace and that the stories in this book in a small way acknowledge and affirm both their own lives and those of the missing.
Towards the end of this endeavour, four-year-old Madeleine McCann went missing. The unprecedented coverage of her disappearance has brought deserved attention to the issue and I have included her story because a book about missing people would be incomplete without it.
All stories are true. However, I have had to change some names in order to protect the participants and have indicated where this is the case in the text.
Rose Rouse
February 2008
It’s Madeleine McCann’s fourth birthday, 12 May 2007. A white card with the words MUMMY, DADDY, SEAN AND AMELIE WILL SEE YOU SOON is tied to a pink balloon and released into the pale blue sky in Leicestershire, not far from the village of Rothley where the McCann family live. Her great uncle, Brian Kennedy, is responsible for releasing that balloon and the 39 others, which fill the sky with their pinkness and their prayers of hope.
The awful truth is that Madeleine isn’t actually with her mummy, daddy and twin siblings to celebrate this birthday because she was abducted nine days earlier.
The McCanns are a modern 30-something, middle-class couple with three children. Gerry McCann is a consultant cardiologist; Kate McCann is a GP. At home, they have a nanny because they both work. At the end of April 2007, they flew to the Algarve in Portugal with a group of friends and their children for a two-week holiday. They were all staying in apartments at the Mark Warner Ocean Club Resort at Praia da Luz. Everything was wonderful – the kids had activity clubs, there was a beach nearby, the adults could mix playing with their children and having some time on their own – until the unimaginable happened.
On Thursday, 3 May, the McCanns were eating dinner with their group of eight friends in the resort’s tapas restaurant, which Gerry described as ‘like having dinner in your garden’. What he meant was that the restaurant was a stone’s throw away from their apartment. As usual, the children – Madeleine and the two-year-old twins – were asleep in one of the bedrooms and the McCanns were checking to see that they were fine every half an hour. Just as they had done most evenings. Just as their friends were all doing. They had decided not to use the resort’s babysitting service because they didn’t want strangers to be involved with caring for their children. They also left the patio doors open, which allowed easy access to the bedroom where the children were all sleeping. Viewed retrospectively, this may appear to be a strange decision to make, but the McCanns thought they were in a secure haven and they considered it less of a fire hazard to leave the doors open.
At 9.30pm, Gerry checked on their three children and found they were all sleeping peacefully. However, at 10pm, when Kate went to check, Madeleine had disappeared. She was no longer in her bed. Gerry and Kate were immediately plunged into a terrifying new universe; a dark, dark place that they had never in their worst nightmares imagined. Their gorgeous little girl – who would become famous through the photograph released showing her blonde and smiling by the swimming pool, radiating happiness on the afternoon of 3 May – was missing and they had no idea where she was. They knew straight away that she had been abducted rather than wandered off on her own.
Within ten minutes, the police were called. Within 24 hours, the entire village, tourists and locals alike, were searching for Madeleine. Sniffer dogs were brought in and the border police with Spain were notified. Yet accusations that the Portuguese police were not doing enough quickly began to appear in the press. The media arrived in Praia da Luz realising that here was a story that would touch the hearts of people everywhere. At this stage, however, not even