by Saul Shackleford

Created on: September 21, 2007

Before I even start writing this article I have to express my utter disgust that this question has even been offered as a debate on helium. Right now the McCann family are going through something that the majority of us will thankfully never have to experience and the last thing they need is websites like this conducting debates of this nature.

Personal feelings aside, lets look at some facts. The three most important factors in a murder case are motive, opportunity, and of course the recovery of a body referred to in English law as Haebus Corpus.

So first up, motive. Put yourself in their position, you are a happy couple both with good jobs and you have three beautiful children. You decide to murder one of them. Why? Short of a total mental breakdown on the part of both parents (because one would not be able to hide it from the other) there is no good reason whatsoever to do this.

There is a lot of speculation over whether she was accidentally killed with an overdose of sleeping pills, and I accept covering up an accidental death through fear of prosecution in a foreign land is possible, if somewhat unlikely, stop and think of the logistics. You have a dead child in your apartment that you have to get rid of, so how do you do it? Neither parent can put her in a bag and drive off somewhere because that would mean the loss of an alibi, so it would involve a third party. Now supposing you actually found someone willing to do this who didn't go to the police at the mere mention of disposing of a dead child, how did they get the body out of there? This is a busy holiday resort and given the high profile of this investigation the is absolutely no chance a stranger could carry a body out of there in a bag without someone coming forward who had seen something. I'd like to mention at this point the discovery of Madelines hair in the boot of the hire car. Does this mean her body was in the boot? Surely not, there are a hundred ways it could have got there considering the car was used by the family on holiday and the boot would have contained beach towels, toys, buckets and spades, all the things a young girl on holiday would be eager to get hold of and there is certainly an innocent reason why her hair was in there.

So what about opportunity? Admittedly her parent had access to her in a private apartment but that still leaves the question of how Madeline apparently disappeared into thin air. As I mentioned earlier there is the question of how they got a dead body out of

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