Am I the last person on the planet...
... who thinks vigilantism is stupid?
I present to you the case of Madelein McCann, a beautiful little girl missing from her family's vacation in Portugal since May 3.
Oh, yes, the line for the parental lynch mob forms to the right.
The entire thing is becoming a circus, and if the people "participating" had their say, it would obviously be a bloody one.
There are laws in place in Portugal which expressly forbid talking about and/or releasing details of an official investigation. What does this mean? This means we know nothing aside from what can be garnered by outside observation.
We know that Madeleine is gone. We know that her parents have been questioned, named as suspects, and then allowed to return home. We know that DNA evidence was/is being processed at a lab in the UK.
Seriously, that's about it. Oh, but wait... this is the internet. This is the age of "cybersleuthing" - a fancy techno-geek term for sewing-circle gossip on message forums and mob mentality lemmings on true crime blogs.
Here's what we've been "told" and what a lot of otherwise intelligent people are holding as gospel, despite the fact that we know, again, nothing.
Kate McCann killed her daughter in a fit of rage. Gerry McCann overdosed her on sedatives - everything from Calpol (the European version of Tylenol) to Benadryl (and apparently, if you've ever given your child Benadryl, for any reason, you're lucky you didn't kill them) to Phenagran (which is sold OTC in the UK specifically for the purpose of easing severe nausea and helping sick children sleep). Immediately after killing her, they buried her body somewhere close (or they put her in a freezer, or they hid her in an ice chest at a grocery store, or they threw her in a suitcase and kept her with them, or they pickled her in red wine...). Three weeks later they dug her up (or thawed her out, or pulled her out of her brine). They put her in the trunk of a car they rented three weeks after she disappeared (they replaced the spare tire with her body, or they put her in one of those giant ziplock bags). Then they buried her behind a church, or they threw her off a cliff into the ocean, or they've got her stashed in their freezer...
Am I the only one who thinks this is all absolutely insane?
Ignoring everything else, just the "fact" that the police reportedly (according to the newspapers at any rate) think she was in that trunk three weeks after she disappeared? Three weeks after she died? This is the gross part, folks, and I do apologize for it, but... does anyone know what a dead body looks like after three weeks? What an unembalmed dead body looks like after three weeks?
This is where it's going to get nasty, guys. If you've got a weak stomach, skip the next paragraph.
I've never seen one at that stage of decomposition myself, but I do know that my uncle (a retired mortician and former coroner for one of the largest counties in Illinois), his son and my brother (both very "tough" boys, ages 18 and 20 at the time) were sent to a house to retrieve the body of a man who hadn't been seen in a week - this was in September, so not even summer. What they found was a "puddle" (my uncle's exact word... and he'd been doing this for more than 20 years by this point) of a green, moldy substance, infested with not only maggots but roaches and all manner of flies, in the rough shape of a body, barely holding on to the bones, that had melted into the floor.
Okay, if you looked away you can look back now.
Seriously, if that's what that guy looked like after only one week (and he had not been a small man), what would a small body look like after three? And can you even imagine the stench? Or the sheer amount of DNA evidence that would be left wherever those remains had been?
And we're supposed to believe that a few hairs and a little bodily fluid (which could be urine, could be sweat, could be saliva) and maybe a little bit of blood (not even enough to get a 100% match, according to the lab in the UK) is all they found?
If that's all they found in a trunk where they claim a three-week-dead body was kept... then they're either blind, or she was never there. At least not at the time and in the state the newspapers claim.
This is just logical, to me. It's not physically possible for her body, if she'd been dead for three weeks, to have possibly been in that trunk and only left minuscule trace evidence behind. No way.
I'm sorry for going off about this, but it's driving me nuts. I'm very rapidly coming to the conclusion that about 95% of what we're being told about this case is being made up, on the spot, by reporters whose only "sources" are anonymous posters on crime blogs and forums, for no reason other than selling newspapers.
Oh, and fanning the already flaming minions of the lynch mob that far too many "cybersleuthers" are becoming... and it's driving me insane.
I present to you the case of Madelein McCann, a beautiful little girl missing from her family's vacation in Portugal since May 3.
Oh, yes, the line for the parental lynch mob forms to the right.
The entire thing is becoming a circus, and if the people "participating" had their say, it would obviously be a bloody one.
There are laws in place in Portugal which expressly forbid talking about and/or releasing details of an official investigation. What does this mean? This means we know nothing aside from what can be garnered by outside observation.
We know that Madeleine is gone. We know that her parents have been questioned, named as suspects, and then allowed to return home. We know that DNA evidence was/is being processed at a lab in the UK.
Seriously, that's about it. Oh, but wait... this is the internet. This is the age of "cybersleuthing" - a fancy techno-geek term for sewing-circle gossip on message forums and mob mentality lemmings on true crime blogs.
Here's what we've been "told" and what a lot of otherwise intelligent people are holding as gospel, despite the fact that we know, again, nothing.
Kate McCann killed her daughter in a fit of rage. Gerry McCann overdosed her on sedatives - everything from Calpol (the European version of Tylenol) to Benadryl (and apparently, if you've ever given your child Benadryl, for any reason, you're lucky you didn't kill them) to Phenagran (which is sold OTC in the UK specifically for the purpose of easing severe nausea and helping sick children sleep). Immediately after killing her, they buried her body somewhere close (or they put her in a freezer, or they hid her in an ice chest at a grocery store, or they threw her in a suitcase and kept her with them, or they pickled her in red wine...). Three weeks later they dug her up (or thawed her out, or pulled her out of her brine). They put her in the trunk of a car they rented three weeks after she disappeared (they replaced the spare tire with her body, or they put her in one of those giant ziplock bags). Then they buried her behind a church, or they threw her off a cliff into the ocean, or they've got her stashed in their freezer...
Am I the only one who thinks this is all absolutely insane?
Ignoring everything else, just the "fact" that the police reportedly (according to the newspapers at any rate) think she was in that trunk three weeks after she disappeared? Three weeks after she died? This is the gross part, folks, and I do apologize for it, but... does anyone know what a dead body looks like after three weeks? What an unembalmed dead body looks like after three weeks?
This is where it's going to get nasty, guys. If you've got a weak stomach, skip the next paragraph.
I've never seen one at that stage of decomposition myself, but I do know that my uncle (a retired mortician and former coroner for one of the largest counties in Illinois), his son and my brother (both very "tough" boys, ages 18 and 20 at the time) were sent to a house to retrieve the body of a man who hadn't been seen in a week - this was in September, so not even summer. What they found was a "puddle" (my uncle's exact word... and he'd been doing this for more than 20 years by this point) of a green, moldy substance, infested with not only maggots but roaches and all manner of flies, in the rough shape of a body, barely holding on to the bones, that had melted into the floor.
Okay, if you looked away you can look back now.
Seriously, if that's what that guy looked like after only one week (and he had not been a small man), what would a small body look like after three? And can you even imagine the stench? Or the sheer amount of DNA evidence that would be left wherever those remains had been?
And we're supposed to believe that a few hairs and a little bodily fluid (which could be urine, could be sweat, could be saliva) and maybe a little bit of blood (not even enough to get a 100% match, according to the lab in the UK) is all they found?
If that's all they found in a trunk where they claim a three-week-dead body was kept... then they're either blind, or she was never there. At least not at the time and in the state the newspapers claim.
This is just logical, to me. It's not physically possible for her body, if she'd been dead for three weeks, to have possibly been in that trunk and only left minuscule trace evidence behind. No way.
I'm sorry for going off about this, but it's driving me nuts. I'm very rapidly coming to the conclusion that about 95% of what we're being told about this case is being made up, on the spot, by reporters whose only "sources" are anonymous posters on crime blogs and forums, for no reason other than selling newspapers.
Oh, and fanning the already flaming minions of the lynch mob that far too many "cybersleuthers" are becoming... and it's driving me insane.