madeleine mccann, impressions on the case.

impressions.

just like everyone else i too pick up things people do, what together could fit as getting an impression of who they are.
i am aware that people can be showing different versions of themselves, it is very common, most of us will keep different standards to different situations. people are also more than just moulded by their occupations.
most in a combination of nature and nurture and your own life experiences.

we only accept you can breaking the patterns of expected behaviour through large emotional events. what we see is as much part of our communication to others as what we say.
only it is hard to really know if what you see is real, so the picture versus the inside of someones head.

the strange thing is that nurture, or better known as upbringing, trains us to become liars, what in itself is not that bad, i mean when everyone behaves as their minds pleases in a moment, it would hard to stay sane when around each other.
so there are many moments in a day where we simply act and mostly guided by expectations.

as it can be very nice to know what is really happening, or happened, and we could know how honest people really are. and we do not.
there is a ongoing endeavour to find a way to check if words said and behaviour expressed goes together with what really matters.
many systems are made, and a lot even used, some even look very usable during a first study, but in real time use none ever was good enough to tell what is true and what is not.
the human as a standard is simply hard to get, and we have a long standing history of finding ways to fill the gap of expectations and our own mind with solutions such as telling lies, half lies, staying silent, telling something different than asked for. and because we are used to do that always and everywhere we are pretty good at that.

and it is a quite versatile system from behaviour, expressions, languages, emotions, state of mind, a drop of intelligence, but you need not that much of it. besides the large raw picture that makes us recognisable as humans, we often have also special effects mingling in for the areas we lived in, sometimes even different within a family, or group of friends, the work places can have its own complications and gifts to it as well.

many can even quickly change from one loose pattern to a very different one.

on top of that our minds and senses who have to deal with others have some difficult things too. humans are in itself not a species that excel in eyesight, hearing, smelling, tasting or even feeling. we do not have very versatile bodies too, and on top of that also a pattern of personal handicaps in fields like listening, understanding, observing, memorising, and many more. our minds love to fill gaps from expectations, if it is about hearing sounds, or words, looking at things, smelling things, or feeling things, and even observations are usually at least half based on that. and to all of that we like to think, believe, conclude or take it for our version of for granted, and put that in our memory that loves to keep it easy, so we usually take just some glimpses from a event, and way to often offend our own system by mixing things that better not be mixed at all.
and all of that is also influenced by everything you can think of.

and we would not stop at that, we like it too to present our output onto others, at least i have to plead guilty to that. and we also have an urge to know, usually up to a point we can decide we did have better know of it.

what does that mean for the case of madeleine mccann?

everything, because the majority of the information in this case is from impressions, not only our own, but all kinds. impression is just a word for the overall result of anything after it has been through a human as a system, and we are quite fond of them.

so what follows is my own impression, from my own all but perfect system. and it is mostly about my impressions about the parents as parents and persons, and how they had their role in this case.

first it is hard to get it into a full impression, because all you have to work from is second hand information, others decided to film them, show the words they said, what moments end up on screens. i have some people in my life that i know from both, so i know them person to person, and also from second hand looking and listening to them on screen.
so from that experience i know this is very different.

more things first, i do not have to like or dislike anyone in this case, they are not part of my life or circles, so i can reserve my impressions to be of a more functional way in relation to this case itself. so i can like or dislike behaviour or things people do very well. i have little problem with that, because both have a large element of choice. you can change behaviour if you want, what would be different when it is about how a body looks or not. and it is usually not something that changes anything functional. clothing is also something that results from choices. and can be functional. something like wearing earrings itself would not tell much, but the habit of wearing them and when is an option by choices. things that are simply there and cannot be easily changed are usually not needed to find an answer, and by that not very functional.

i am used to work with margins, like when i look for bits that are important, how a person reacts to it and when not. i do not expect people to be as honest as it could be, there are often a lot of personal boundaries and other for them important points to cover, that looking for an ultimate truth is not very functional.

i also learned some techniques, most never been a true system to make use of. like listening with a fixation on what they really say, not what my mind makes it into what i think they say.
also that people who are in their maximum state of an emotions more often tell true words.
building up a picture from the words spoken is another one. it means first feeding your mind with the surroundings and use them as a basic background, you cannot go to the left if there is a building or wall in your way.
another one i do like is trying to look from as many angles as possible to the same information around people. often i have to make use of others to tell me how, because i only have my own restricted perspectives of course.
but most others techniques you can not that easily use on second hand stuff. and that is the one big shared reality, we are all just onlookers. all with our own not calibrated minds and by that a lot of variation possible.

so to start with my impressions, one first example. when i started to look more to each person, and ended up with kate mccann, my impression of her is, that when she gets mad or at least angry, my mind accept most of what she says as being true. when she is not mad or angry it gets much more of a mix, more pretentious, more covering of the expectations of others and even the positions of others too.

it looks and sounds natural and i used these moments to work from, and my impression is, when she reached in the top of her emotions she tells the truth. i still accept margins, and that means i could gone somewhere wrong. and that is simply okay, because i am not setting it in concrete, but use such things as a perspective, my mind simply cannot unlearn the standard that starts with the ‘wat iff? angle’. it is still a work under construction, but there is not really a nice blue print plan.

so when i just put that as a working line on a piece of paper and looked again at many material, i started to look more specific into what it exactly was about.

well my impression is that you get kate easily mad when it is suggested she killed her daughter, and she shows, again in my impression that in a way people do usually when they think something is unfair to hold against them.

it is possible to kill someone by your own direct actions that included the intent to kill someone, you can kill someone as a direct action, but without intent, direct actions can also be just the first step that set a ball rolling and kill someone in the end, you can kill someone because your actions grew out of proportion why you did them. there are a few more but all have in common there is a direct result from an action to the killing of someone.
the majority of people will feel guilty or at least somehow responsible.

another form is someone that got killed because you did not do a task, or duty you had. so direct connection between the killer and the victim is not always needed. like being not there when you have a duty of care, and that would make you still responsible for the killing itself as a result.
this option would easily fit in this case, but it is not the only one.

i did not use terms as murder or manslaughter because that is a hindsight conclusion in a case. killing is simply all actions or not actions that result in being guilty or responsible for it.

there can be another possibility in this case, what would in my opinion would fit better in this case if i start with kate her reaction to all suggestions she killed her daughter, with of without intent.

both parents are medical doctors, so both have also the basic medical training, so if madeleine died in unit 5a as the result of an accident, both must be seen as capable of understanding the kind of trauma that lead to the death of their child, even with a hell of emotions that bit can be overwritten by their training, and it does not even have to be instantly when one of them found her, there could be opportunities later on to understand the kind of trauma.
this could lead to understanding from the circumstances and the trauma, that even if they had been standing almost next to madeleine, the same thing could have happened and it would even then have been out of their hands to have any chance of saving her.

by logic there still can be a feeling of guilt because they have been not near their child, but they could very well have had the possibility to understand the trauma would in all other circumstances be of the same lethal form. but there would no longer be room to feel guilty about the death itself. realising you could not change that outcome, could make you lose feeling guilty for that part.

and if that is what came together i can understand why kate gets so mad and angry, when the suggestion is out, that she could have changed the outcome, when she knows she never could have.

accidents never have intent, there can be a lot of different things going on before the accidental part gets in, but never with intent.
still things can also be accidental, and still without intent to let an accident itself happen, but there can be still being responsible. not only when you are around, but also being absent and not fulfilling a duty of care can make it still culpable.

but many times the same outcome can be the result from these different starting points.

and feeling guilty can also be on some elements that are part of that. but it have not to be an ongoing feeling of guilt. if you can explain it to yourself and understand it, i can see how she came to words like, i know it did not happen because we where not there, i know , because i was there. and also could very well explain why she feels so offended and get in expressing that mad and angry, because she knows, but cannot tell it, but there is nothing that in her mind still is giving a feeling guilty.

so only an accident with a trauma that was lethal, that took place in circumstances it would not matter who was where, because that could not have give a different outcome could fit with her later behaviour when suggested that differently.

it also would be a lot easier to tell your own mind, that not being there in 5a, but dining happily in the tapas restaurant with friends is not something that really has a role in it all.

still looking at the mother kate, i do not see a person that is good in acting, talking around the bushes, yes, but i never seen anything that gave me the impression, she ever would be able to take it off, to act her normal self knowing her child is already dead. and certainly not to keep that going for days.

her outburst that thursday evening after the alarm fits with just been told there was no need to search, that madeleine was already dead, it was their fault because left alone, and they had to protect all they had. with as the best argument keeping the twins as theirs.

all i have seen in the first few days, all the pictures and words said fit easily with a situation madeleine was dead, and they both know it, that raw fighting mode is very hard to act, this have not been trained and experienced actors, there never surfaced anything criminal in their past. hurting herself, maybe having to be restrained to stop that, such marks being on her. this is not common behaviour seen in cases of missing children, i must say, i only have experienced cases where children been found within hours. but the first hours would be not different. mothers of missing children can have outbursts of violence, but they reserve that usual to the father, the officers that take down the first information, most of such situations are a emotional whirlwind, with all kinds of emotions but there always is an undertone of just hopelessness.

and i never have met a mother that only one solution put up for why the child is missing, and i spoke later on with some about the first hours, and all said, they would start to think about everything very bad, but always cut that off, and did not want to finish any thought in that matter fully. they could not let their minds go there. most describe it as a black hole where every thought would walk in, and be stopped off before they could even allow themselves to think more into it.

and some when you see them in the first hours are just looking to be an empty bag, spineless, but there are also who are very capable and coherent but still you see their mind going everywhere and nowhere at the same time. there is no unique set of behavioural aspects, you can use to conclude on what happened and if a mother has a role in it.
i did meet mothers of children who have died, and that was different, more a sense of finality that could not be believed and could not be accepted.

and it is hard to really type people we still know very little about. and only the first 48 hours we may see still some bits of their original personality, they had assistance out there the next day, together with media training, and instructions you lose that.
but parents of a missing or dead child do not need a book with how to present in the role of a parent of a missing, or dead child for dummies, because they simply are already that.

and the emotions of fear, angst, missing, death, are not so very different, most will show a mix of at least sadness, some anger, some hopelessness and helplessness, still you would not take it as grieving when a child is only missing, maybe because most parents are telling themselves that the child must be still alive.

and even parents who have killed their own children, even with intent, still can show true grieving. when there is a direct role, with of without intent, they also can be grieving for their own guilt in it. and there are certainly people who grief more for the loss of their past life, their future freedom or chance of a happy normal life too.

and it is hard to write it out in words, because we all react much more from instinct and our own experiences to read an emotional situation. and we are not very often put a lot of thinking in the what if it was me who was in that same situation. it lands very quickly in the box that is too horrible to think about. and it is very hard to keep track of your own emotions.

like all the mothers who told online how they did feel when they had a short term lost child situation, but they usually have no idea how that looks to people around. most have not even a realistic idea about that, the whirlwind of emotions in their own minds would not directly be translated into expression of the correct emotions. we have words for that out of control , or out of your mind.
so when you have to take a witness statement of people that are asked for help and even more often like a store manager, they come with first impressions that they could not get directly what was the matter, because desperate people looked to be asking for help with a laughing expression on their face, or very calm and collected. others do not ask for help but get in a kind of rant while doing it in a shrieking manner, mumbling silently some words, or just standing there and have tears rolling over their faces. most can not even say coherent words about what is the matter.
even there you never get an impression of something that has been finalised, as we see in grieving when a child is dead, if that in itself already is accepted or not.

and people who kill their children accidentally or with intent do stupid things, from a father who put his daughter in a quite careful way in the trunk of his car and drove to a police station to tell he killed his daughter. others walk simply out, others keep vigil next to the body, some holding it, and talk to it as if it was still alive. others buried it under the terras or in the garden, drove to water or woods and left it. even there is nothing very unique, but still there is, when they talk about that impression they do know there is a point of finality reached.
and that is not something that will always be from words said, or behaviour.

the problem is, that it does not matter if your impression is the result from gut feelings, instinct, other experiences or your hard earned degree in profiling, or a course of deception detection. none of these are delivering an answer that can be used in court.

but what can you do with impressions?

they can however be used together, it is always a mix of all kind of routes, it is not hard information, it is in a way more fictive than we like to think, but it can be used to build a hypothesis in an investigation. and that is very commonly done too.
it is a method to make use of, to show you the next stepping stone, because each hypothesis can ask for very real actions following on in time.

only a hypothesis is besides a more classy word for theory, not to be accepted as truth.
it is much more a looking into a what if’s question.
it works much more as a filter to be of use when you look into a specific line during an investigation.

like when a child supposedly died in unit 5a, you can start from different moments, but a hypothesis is often just a smaller part of a case. you do not have a body, so if the hypothesis is a what if about a child that is supposedly dead, and it is no longer there, it must have been taken out, that means transported, that can tell you how many options there have been, was it by foot, was a car involved, any other mode of transport.
another part can be the question was something used to disguise it was a body, what was available to do that.

it is not that different from our endless discussion when looking into true crime.
it does not matter even how you call it, hypothesis, theory or just a what if, you have to keep a light bulb somewhere in your mind, that tells you, this is still fictional. we make up the hypotheses, or what if questions.
we can use it to see where we have to look for a next stepping stone that would bring the information that translated into facts and circumstances. even when we find such it does still not have to be proof to be truly a part of the case at hand. coincidences do exist.

the problem with hypothetical work is that it is not to see as answer to what happened, it is more a technique, a tool if you want, that can help. but a hypothesis does not tell what really happened, but using a hypothesis can bring you there.

hypothesis are a kind of write ups, that look into a specific line, usually of the first information, and that can be anything, investigations have not much boundaries there, as long as it all is legally sound gathered you can use it. if you hear we have still open investigation lines to follow, they tell they still have a bunch of what if’s that has not resulted in an answer to tell what happened.

during a real investigation, a hypothesis often ends up as a large sheet of paper , or more and more digital version, but a paper version still works great during debrief (= case talk moments) or brainstorm sessions to have hanging on the wall. but they do look like one of these schematic charts with squares that have connections through lines or arrows.

the squares can be filled with information that is already known, but also with impressions and what if’s from possibilities. often in a colour of a specific meaning.
it works great because you can keep track of where you are, and you can very easily walk up and down through it. a story that comes together must do that to both sides, so if you go forward in it, but also when going backward. backwards is a good way to see where you left a bit overly enthusiastic information in the story without looking how you can back it up.

the nasty thing with impressions is that we can get very different ones from our own perspectives. even how much attention you put into getting it into yours can give different outcomes in even your own results.

but if you get your impression together, it can be of help to look multiple times at the same pictures and videos, or statements. citations in the media are to be used as second hand matter, you hardly get the full story it was part of, and you need that to get to what it can mean. so even if the citation is correct, the use of it can be different.

and if you start to ask a question like who is kate mccann?
and divide that in before may 3, 2007 and after, you will find out that we know very little of the person behind that name. even in her own book there is little about herself. i mean knowing she bought new zealand wine, but had nothing against drinking the free with the meal portuguese wine is not very informative of course. and we have no idea who and what is in the book with a little help from others or the editor, it is not really first hand information either.
the dutch translation was not of high quality.

even the character witnesses that are on the rogatory lists because they got in the position of assistants to the processes/investigation, cannot be used to build the picture of who she was, and what kind of expectations we would get from that.

and most video material is not without influences of media training and guidance, or editors choices too. the majority is only there because the pr guru found it a great idea to fix their version of the story into our minds. so it is not very easy to see the real person behind the masks.

so my impression is not set in stone from that, they do look mostly self centred in their expressions, and it had that from the start. there is little attention on madeleine. i have seen other interviews on video of other couples and in the on screen version, and the raw version.
and that showed how much influence an editor can have. so most is material you can keep in mind, but with a lot of margins. the goal is not always very clear why the videos were made, and they are not police interviews, and fluffing a story a bit up would not have the same results.