Here are a few video clips of interviews with Gerry and Kate McCann, parents of missing four-year-old Madeleine. From the beginning, I have felt that a terrible thing happened to the McCann family. Surely, few horrors can begin to compare to that of having one’s child disappear with no trace. And it seems almost impossible that the couple could have hidden Madeleine’s body amid the intense and constant media and police scrutiny that has followed them since Madeleine’s disappearance from their vacation apartment in Portugal on May 3. To do so would have required that not only the McCanns, but also at least one and possibly more of the friends who were on vacation with them, have knowingly deceived the police an the public for the past four months.

However, this clip from an English-speaking channel in Portugal may shed some light on why many people in Portugal, after an initial rash of support for Kate and Gerry, believe that the couple is hiding something. When asked whether they gave Madeleine sedatives, Gerry tugs at his ear, looks away, and appears very uncomfortable.

In many other interviews, such as this one, Gerry McCann appears to be a sympathetic figure who is speaking sincerely about his missing daughter.

Kate McCann has allowed Gerry to do almost all of the talking in public. But in this interview for what appears to be Portuguese TV, she appeals to Madeleine’s abductors to “put her in a place of safety.” Here is a radio interview with Kate McCann for BBC Radio 4 Woman’s Hour.

And in this video clip from three days after the disappearance, the McCanns express their gratitude to the local community in Portugal. At the time this video was recorded, the Portuguese police were focusing on Robert Murat as a suspect; Murat is a British man who lives with his mother a few hundred feet from the apartment where Madeleine went missing.

Here is Gerry McCann’s statement to the press upon returning to Britain recently. Here, the McCanns discuss the search for Madeleine and the lack of cohesion in missing child procedures and pedophile laws across Europe. This BBC report contains several short clips from various interviews.

It’s possible that we will never know what happened to Madeleine. In my mind, the most horrific possibility is that someone did abduct her and she is still alive and suffering abuse at the hands of her captor. The Portuguese police appear to believe that Kate McCann accidentally killed Madeleine, possibly through an overdose of sedatives, and then hid her body. But the police themselves are under investigation for forcing a false confession in the 2004 disappearance of an 8-year-old near where Madeleine went missing (see my previous post). This case has generated enormous speculation and rampant rumors, but due to Portuguese laws of secrecy regarding ongoing investigations, very little actual information has been released to date.