New toxicology tests commissioned by the McCann family show that the McCann twins, Sean and Amelie, were not sedated on May 3, the night Madeleine McCann went missing. If the tests prove to be truly objective, this puts a hole in the Portuguese police theory that Kate McCann sedated Madeleine to make her go to sleep, resulting in a fatal overdose; the police had also claimed that the twins were sedated, and that was why they didn’t wake up during the search for Madeleine in the chaotic minutes after her disappearance. Read the story about the tests here.

The police have made increasingly more absurd campaigns in the five plus months since the case began; at one point, they even alleged that Madeleine had fallen down stairs at the resort and hit her head, and that the McCanns, fearful of being faulted for negligence, covered up the fall. But it’s ludicrous to think that two intelligent parents with no criminal record would launch a massive international campaign of deception in order to cover up a simple accident like a fall down the stairs, and that their friends, also physicians, would risk their own medical practices, reputations, and families in order to cover up the death.

In an earlier post, I linked to a number of video interviews with Kate and Gerry McCann. See the interviews here.

There are still, of course, many unanswered questions in this case, including contradictions in the McCanns’ early accounts of the events of May 3. But this latest news just goes farther in showing that the police originally responsible for the McCann investigation–several of whom are facing charges of torturing witnesses and falsifying evidence in a separate missing child case–have launched a smear campaign against the parents that has very little to do with fact. The campaign has been so successful and far-reaching that even folks like Anne Enright, who was announced last week as the winner of the Booker Prize for her novel The Gathering–have been eager to weigh in on the case. Enright’s unflattering opinion piece directed against the McCanns was published, of all places, in the London Review of Books. A more nuanced article about the public spectacle that the McCann case has become, penned by Elizabeth Renzetti, appears in today’s Globe and Mail.

Then, everything about the McCanns’ story is odd – fictional, perhaps, both in the sense that what they’re saying may be fiction, and because they’re now characters in a story we’ve created for them. Or rather a thousand stories, involving the same characters and a few varied settings, like the world’s most morbid game of Clue.