Madeleine McCann was just 3 years old when she seemingly vanished into thin air. The little girl from England disappeared from her bed while she, her family and their friends were on vacation in a holiday apartment at a resort in Praia da Luz in Portugal in 2007. Madeleine’s whereabouts remain unknown, but interest in the child’s fate has only grown in the years since she went missing.
WTF Moments:
- Madeleine Beth McCann disappeared on May 3rd, 2007 from her bed in a holiday apartment in Praia da Luz, a resort in the Algarve region of Portugal. A group of family friends were traveling together.
- The adults of this travel group was eventually known as the "Tapas Seven"- because they dined at a tapas restaurant each night at the resort.
- Each night, Gerry and Kate left their back porch of their apartment unlocked and took hourly shifts back to the apartment to check on the kids.
- Kate noticed Madeleine was missing from her bed when she went to check between 9:30 and 10.
- Immediately following this horrific discovery, Kate ran back to the restaurant and everyone begins a frantic search for Maddie.
- Witnesses said they saw a man carrying a blonde child about Madeleine's age on the night of her disappearance. Police drew a sketch according to the public description - with zero facial features. Literally just a circle with a bit of hair.
- At the time, The Telegraph reported there had been an unusually high number of assaults on young girls in the area. The report said: "Police identified nine sexual assaults and three 'near misses' on British girls aged between six to 12 in the three years before Madeleine went missing. In one case from 2005, a ten-year-old girl was assaulted in an apartment Praia da Luz, close to the spot from where Madeleine vanished."
- Another theory is that Maddie was taken as part of a bungled burglary in which an intruder panicked and snatched her after she woke up. While Scotland Yard looked into this theory it has always been dismissed by cops in Portugal since nothing else was taken from the apartment.
- It has been claimed Portuguese authorities framed the McCanns in a desperate attempt to save the tourism trade in Portugal. They didn't want people to think that Portugal was the kind of place where children were unsafe, and such horrible crimes could take place, so they pinned it all on Kate and Gerry McCann.
- The two authors who appeared in the Netflix documentary said they believe that Madeleine was the victim of a planned abduction and that she is still alive.
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