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YES: Is the DNA evidence of little Madeleine's death damning the McCann couple, or have the Portuguese police invented the parents' guilt to cover up their own ineptness in handling the case? The tragedy first became news when the four-year-old girl's parents reported Madeleine had disappeared on May 3 from the family's vacation apartment in Praia da Luz.

This started off a frenzy of official searches and zig-zag daily updates from news media, as Portuguese police and international agencies went looking for Madeleine and those who abducted her throughout the world. Rumors over the months reported sightings of Madeleine in other European and African countries.

The little girl's father Gerry, a physician, and mother KateMcCann, made highly-publicized TV appeals for the kidnappers to return the child. Thousands of other appeals in world media and the internet joined in on pleas and publicity. The names of several suspects appeared in news reports, but soon were declared innocent. Then the rumors abruptly stopped, and no trace of Madeleine ever surfaced.

The strange situation became stranger when the Portuguese authorities suddently announced that mother Kate was a suspect. Stranger still, they said her punishment would be only two years in prison if she would confess that she killed her daughter unintentionally by an accident or overdose of sleeping pills.

While the McCann family immediately denied everything, Portuguese authorities claim they have valid evidence, including Madeleine's DNA and blood in the McCann rented car. The police also are said to have found medications often used by families on vacation who want their children to sleep while the parents go out for the evening.

The McCann family is back in England, and plans to spend as much as $200,000 donated by family and sympathizers for media advertising. They continue to maintain they are totally innocent of any complicity in the child's disappearance, and won't give up their hope to find Madeleine.

Maybe no one will ever know the truth about what happened to Madeleine, except those who were actually involved in her disappearance. The questions persist. Was she kidnapped by international thieves who sell children in secret adoption deals? Was she taken by a murderous predator and killed?

All theories may still be considered, but as time goes by, just one unanswered question seems to damn the McCann's as guilty. If you were traveling in a foreign land, would you ever leave your four-year-old sleeping child unattended long enough for someone to come into her room and abduct her? Would the actions leave behind no evidence, no trace of a struggle, no outcry nor any other disturbance?

The most logical conclusion, and as the Portuguese police and their forensic evidence declare, Madeleine died from the simple, but horrific accident of being given an overdose of sleeping drugs by her parents. The tragedy was then compounded by the shocked, heartbroken and confused McCanns. Hoping to cover themselves legally, and to protect their other children from sharing in the guilt, they disposed of the body.

Learn more about this author, Ted Sherman.
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