beachy wrote:

Some of you know that there is major illness in my immediate family at present. I have had little time to post of late, and this probably will be my last one for a while, as during the upcoming week we must travel to a city several hundred miles away to consult specialists. This will be a long post; please bear with me.

I am a Christian, and of late I have been reading the book of Job. This morning I was reading the passage where Job’s friends have been telling him that he must deserve everything that has befallen him, lest God would have never let it happen, and God, provoked, speaks to Job directly, telling him that He is God and does not justify himself to men. The voice of God speaks to Job out of the whirlwind:

Who is this that darkens my counsel
With words without knowledge?
Brace yourself like a man.

Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation?
. . . who laid its cornerstone
While the morning stars sang together
And the angels shouted for joy?

Have you ever given orders to the morning,
Or shown the dawn its place,
That it might take the earth by the edges
And shake the wicked out of it?

The wicked are denied their light,
And their upraised arm is broken.

I am convinced that Madeleine Beth McCann is dead, and other than the person(s) who did her in, there is one other who knows everything about what happened to her: God. God is all-seeing, all-knowing, and God, as the Bible makes plain, will not be mocked.

Some comments about what I think is going on, and what may happen next. These are merely my personal opinions. As always, take it or leave it:

(1) I do not know what has happened in this case, nor what evidence the PJ has. If the case is archived, I think the wording will be telling. There were reports in the Portuguese press within the past 10-14 days that the case would be “archived as a homicide.�?Homicide is the killing of one person by another. I was surprised to see this in the press, because I have always believed that Madeleine’s death was a tragic accident that occurred whilst she was alone with her small siblings and that no one else was likely involved, except in the sense that it might well not have happened if she had been properly supervised.

A homicide is not necessarily murder, but neither is it an accidental death that occurs with no one else around. If the case is archived as a homicide, then that means that the PJ and the public prosecutor’s office believe that someone either intentionally or unintentionally killed Madeleine McCann. That would explain, I think, why they would be unwilling to file charges of neglect: It would mean that, in the opinion of the authorities, something more serious was afoot regarding Madeleine’s disappearance.

(2)God alone knows (and I mean that quite sincerely) what we may see coming out in the press about this case in the coming weeks. Spin, we know we can count on. As for the rest of it, the recent bits about David Payne are likely just the beginning. I feel sorry for people like Mr. Payne, because although I believe he should have gone to the police immediately with everything he knows and distanced himself from the McCanns a long time ago, I do not see any evidence that he is a paedophile. If his doctor friends are telling the truth, then he appears to me to be sophomoric, immature, and possessed with surpassingly bad taste, but if those things were crimes millions of Britons, including many of our leaders, would be cramming the gaols to overflowing. That is a long, long way from hurting a child. But it is impossible to prove a negative, and I fear that in coming days many people may be tarred for life, adding tragedy to tragedy in this case.

(3)I hope that a p*ss*ng contest does not develop inside the PJ. I cannot think what Goncalo Amaral meant when he was quoted in a Portuguese paper as saying that Paulo Rebelo did not “consult�?with him about the case, unless he means that Rebelo did not ask for his advice on how to run it, which should have been expected. There are multiple pictures of the two of them together and multiple newspaper reports (I can provide links if anyone is interested) after Rebelo replaced Amaral in which they appear to be talking and behaving cordially towards one another. Considering the gravity of the situation they were in at the time, I do not believe they were discussing only whether Sporting was likely to defeat Benfica. My personal belief from what I have heard and read is that Rebelo asked for Amaral’s help in reviewing everything that had happened prior to October 2007, and that Amaral graciously gave it. Conflict sells books, and it is human nature to think that one could have handled an important matter better than one’s replacement, but I hope that Goncalo Amaral is a better man than to try to manufacture conflict where it does not appear that any existed.

Were mistakes made by the PJ? Doubtless. You always can look back and see them in any case you work, always, always. If I had to stake my life on a guess, I would say that the mistake in this case was staying too long with the abduction theory. But the business about the police not securing the crime scene or closing the border is h o r s e s h i t, in my humble opinion. You can close the barn door after the horse is out, but the manure will remain behind.

I do not understand how so much of the information from the case report happened to be leaked to the press, nor who did it, and especially why no actions were taken to stop it. After keeping the lid on the case so carefully for 9 months, I cannot comprehend why Rebelo allowed this to happen. If he could not have stopped it, something tells me that Mr. Rodrigues, the new director of the PJ, could have. Generally speaking, the police are always the young turks when it comes to wanting a case prosecuted; prosecutors are the cautious ones who are less willing to take chances. (To be fair, remember that I speak as a former member of the police.) If the leaks were designed to put out the most damning information in the file and force the prosecution’s hand, I could understand it. That does not appear to have been the case. Perhaps time will make that one clear to us. Personally, I could use some clarity on that point.

Overall, though, I think the PJ did an outstanding job against enormous odds. They, as well as the British police, seem to have amassed a huge file of information which will prove useful if charges are ever brought. Which brings me to my final point.

(4)Finally, I shall say this: If the temporary result in the Madeleine McCann case is archiving it, that does not make it go away. Cold cases are solved every day. Those of you who have read my posts will remember the case I have written about investigating where a three-year-old boy had gone missing. The child in that case had been gone for more than TEN YEARS. Three previous law enforcement agencies �?the local police, state police, and even the vaunted FBI had all had a crack at it, with no results. I was just a kid agent, too young and dumb to know how complicated it was going to be, and too stubborn to give up.

Once whilst I was working on that case and staying in some motel room God-knows-where with nothing to do, I started thinking about where I was when the little boy was killed. I finally figured out that I was at uni in America, demonstrating against the Vietnam War, sitting in bars on Friday and Saturday nights with my mates till closing time arguing about the meaning of life, making out with my boyfriend in a car parked at a scenic overlook on a mountain not far from campus.

If this case is shelved, somewhere in Portugal this very minute, there is some young person like I was then. A young man studying law at Coimbra who dreams of a career with the PJ and thinks that, if HE had been the one assigned to the Madeleine McCann case, he could have solved it. Or a young girl who refuses society’s traditional ideas of what a young woman should do with her life and wants the badge and the gun. The person who will bring justice for Madeleine McCann is already out there. It may take time, perhaps a great deal of time, but justice will come.

No matter what happens tomorrow, do as the voice out of the whirlwind said to Job: Brace yourselves like men. This is the hour to be brave.