More than one case has been built and prosecuted, successfully, on circumstantial evidence alone, and in this case there is no lack of circumstantial evidence.
Like teacherbee - I don't care about the jogging, the makeup, the blogging, but I do care about:
1. The initial lie regarding the shutters - why would you say they had been jimmied, when in fact, and yes I believe this is a FACT, they had not? So - why would you say this? To throw the police off the trail?
2. Why can not 9 people get the timeline right? If a child was really missing and no one was lying, between 9 people, you should be able to pull enough accurate information to come up with a fairly consistent timeline. Given that everyone had been drinking and they were probably in a high state of "emotion" some inconsistencies would be understandable. However, between the NINE of them, there should have been enough to compile a fairly accurate timeline.
3. Leaving the children alone AFTER being advised not too. I don't have links to all the old articles, but a woman who works for Mark Warner was QUOTED as having advised the McCanns not to leave the children.
4. Why would you leave the children AFTER your neighbor had complained about their crying? WHY? Is this also smear and rumor? I think not, the old woman was QUOTED. And when she said she "never said that" she was saying she never said the ADDITIONAL smears that were attributed to her. However, she never backed down from her story of the children crying. I take this a FACT, not opinion, rumor or smear, but just plain FACT.
5. I believe the dogs are ALWAYS right. The problem is that they can't talk and we humans don't always understand what they are trying to tell us. However, in this case, I see the dogs as particularly damning to the McCanns.
6. Why, if your child was missing, would you refuse to answer questions the police asked? Even if you had been doing something that might not have reflected well on your reputation, wouldn't you just ask the police for some discretion on what was leaked to the press so that you could tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth? After all, what good is your reputation, money, status if your child is lost???? This makes me think of the VanDams and the loss of their daughter, and yet they held their heads up and moved forward because the bottom line was that they wanted their daughter back. The McCanns don't have to be like the VanDams, but the McCanns lack of honesty and full disclosure is damning in my opinion.
7. Why would you leave your children alone if you thought someone was watching you? The McCanns are QUOTED as saying they believed they were being watched. If that is true, then they set their children up for what happened. How do you excuse that? The McCanns have ADMITTED this. How do you excuse that?
8. Why has it been so difficult for the PLE to re-interview the Tapas 9? If anyone of them was really concerned about what happened to Maddie, they would have found a way to make themselves available to the PLE without all this dancing around.
I am not trying to change anyone's mind here. I think it is prefectly fine that we have several trains of thought going on. This is a complex case, made more so by the lack of honesty on the parts of the family involved. Please also keep in mind that the evidence collected against the McCanns was collected with the help of British LE. It seems to me that the PLE were not so convinced of the McCanns complicity in this case until after the ENGLISH came to help them collect additional evidence from the apartment. In the beginning, I really believe the PLE wanted to believe this was a case of abduction.
So blaming all the "smears and rumors" on the PLE is inconsistent with the timeline of events as we watched them play out in the media. And, I'm going to wait to see how this plays out because I have a feeling the McCanns are going to have pay back that "defamation" award they recently won from the Daily Express.
So, that's my rant for the day
Salem