Maddie McCann: The outrageous police interview that smeared Kate and Gerry as suspects

Etan SmallmanSat, May 16, 2026 at 8:52 AM UTC

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Channel 5’s new drama intends to correct the supposition and innuendo that engulfed Kate and Gerry McCann after their daughter went missing in 2007 - Eddie Mulholland

Four months after Madeleine McCann – a three-year-old girl from Leicestershire – vanished while she and her family were on holiday in Praia da Luz, Portugal, in May 2007, the investigation into her disappearance was in chaos.

The Portuguese Polícia Judiciária (PJ) had admitted that a failure properly toF secure the scene meant vital forensic evidence could have been destroyed. It had been revealed that neither border nor marine police had been given descriptions of Madeleine for many hours after her parents, Kate and Gerry, raised the alarm.

On August 11, detectives had publicly declared that Madeleine might be dead, suggesting they were no longer channelling resources into a “missing persons” investigation. And then, on September 6, officers hauled Kate in for 11 hours of questioning before making her and Gerry officially “arguidos” – suspects – on September 7.

The detectives’ focus had suddenly switched from finding the child and her abductor to investigating her parents on suspicion of covering up Madeleine’s accidental death inside their holiday apartment and concealing her body.

A trace of blood had allegedly been discovered in the car that the couple had hired 25 days after Madeleine disappeared, with the “clear suggestion”, said the McCanns’ spokesman in 2007, that Kate had been responsible for her daughter’s fate.

You may think there is nothing more that can be said about perhaps the most famous missing-person case in the world, but the makers of a new Channel 5 drama believe otherwise.

The one-hour Under Suspicion: Kate McCann centres on this turning point, using official statements and public-domain police reports from the two days of interrogation more than 18 years ago – and, says writer Philip Ralph, as little dramatic licence “as humanly possible”.

It comes as the case is once again in the headlines, with news earlier this month that the Metropolitan Police is trying to bring German suspect Christian Brueckner to stand trial in Britain for the abduction and murder of Madeleine.

Director Paula Wittig says that, despite the wall-to-wall coverage of the arguidos episode – described by the Daily Express at the time as “the day the jeering started” – “what was reported was speculation, was not based on fact and was not in any way privy to what had gone on inside that room”. (Express Newspapers would later pay the McCanns £550,000 in damages.)

On our video call, both writer and director say they hope the drama – starring Laura Bayston as Kate – can act as a corrective to the tsunami of supposition and innuendo that engulfed the couple.

Kate McCann is played by Laura Bayston (right) in the upcoming docudrama. The McCanns were kept informed throughout filming - Eddie Mulholland/Orchard Studios production Press

“There is no evidence that the McCanns had anything to do with Madeleine’s disappearance,” says Ralph, who wrote BBC and Netflix docudrama Einstein and the Bomb (2024) and BBC docudrama 8 Days: To the Moon and Back (2019). In fact, he points out, British forensic scientists had warned that DNA tests on the sample from the McCanns’ hire car were “inconclusive” just days before they were made suspects. The arguido status was lifted in 2008, and the PJ formally apologised to the couple in 2023 for the way it handled the case.

When asked to come on board, Ralph told producers he would only do it if he was allowed to write a drama that made it clear “there [was] no truth” to the accusations.

Ralph feels that the attempt by police to snare the McCanns “is a piece [of the puzzle] that, in all of the noise around the case, is never discussed”. Why not? “Because the kind of mythical Medea-esque ‘mother who kills their child’ narrative is too juicy. It’s something primal in people’s interest to say, ‘Here’s this mother, and did she kill her child?’”

He adds that, because the case played out in Portugal, the British press was not constrained by the kind of reporting restrictions that would have been in place back home, and they “went to town on it”.

Wittig – the director of Sky true-crime docudrama Black Widow (2024) and BBC One’s Sharon & Ozzy Osbourne: Coming Home (2025) – believes another aspect is that the public would “rather wrap it up in some sort of ending” than accept an even more terrifying prospect: that the perpetrator got away with it. “It’s the most heinous crime. People don’t want to think that this could happen,” she says.

The production team kept the McCanns informed throughout the process and, says Wittig, spoke to “people close to them to make them aware of what [the production was] doing and to give them the opportunity to raise any concerns”. In the event, the couple provided no feedback.

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What would have happened had they asked that the programme not be made at all? “There’s always a kind of moral quandary,” says Ralph. “And for me, the question is, ‘Will this [drama] make the situation worse?’ I very quickly came to the conclusion: I don’t think this will make it worse. That was my kind of arbiter, basically. But had they said, ‘Don’t’, I would have found it very difficult to have continued.” Adds Wittig: “The fact that we have stuck so closely to the truth should demonstrate our intentions.”

The script is based in large part on detailed notes taken by the detectives who interviewed Kate. (Gerry’s separate police interview is not portrayed in the drama.) The programme also highlights the flaws in the DNA evidence taken from the rental car and the apartment in which Madeleine was sleeping.

Credit: Channel 5

“A large amount of the population will probably still have in their mind that there was conclusive DNA evidence, that Madeleine’s DNA was found in the boot of the car and [blood traces] in the apartment,” says Wittig, “and that is not correct. I think as a starter, just to get that information clearly out there is very important.”

The PJ, says Ralph, “took a tiny piece of very fragmentary evidence and ran with it because of the kind of pressure that they were under” to find the culprit.

Wittig also suggests that the McCanns’ composure during their public appearances raised unjustified suspicions. “People really turned on Kate and Gerry because of their slightly stoic approach to their media appearances. Kate had been advised not to show emotion to the press for the safety of Madeleine. And I think that the public has been very quick to judge them on the basis of that.”

Kate also gave a succession of “no comment” answers to police – still the subject of fevered discussion online – after she had been declared a suspect. “Paula and I were really adamant that that should not be seen as what ‘no comment’ answers are often presented as in drama, which is an admission of guilt,” says Ralph, “but much rather almost an admission of defiance from Kate McCann because this is absolute nonsense that she’s being presented with.”

‘People turned on Kate and Gerry because of their stoic approach to the media,’ suggests director Paula Wittig - Steve Parsons/Pool/PA Wire

Wittig would like the drama to be a way into looking “at Kate as a whole person, as a woman, as a mother, as the victim of a crime who found herself in the most unimaginable, horrendous nightmare you could ever possibly think of. There’s a real opportunity to open people’s eyes to that”.

The film is elegantly shot, despite Wittig conceding it “wasn’t a huge budget at all”. But, she says, “How it was made stylistically was absolutely driven by the story. The way that it’s filmed, in such a kind of visceral, vérité documentary way, is done intentionally to very much make you feel like you’re in the moment.”

One character absent from the film is Insp Goncalo Amaral, who was not at the crucial September interviews. But one month after Kate’s interrogation, he was removed from the case and demoted from his post as chief of the police in the Algarve town of Portimão. In 2008, he published a book in which he alleged the McCanns were involved in their daughter’s disappearance. They sued him for libel in Portugal and were awarded £358,000 in damages, but an appeal against the decision was later upheld by the country’s Supreme Court. In 2009, he was convicted of falsifying documents in a case involving another missing girl.

Insp Goncalo Amaral was sued by the McCanns for libel after alleging they were involved in their daughter’s disappearance. In 2009, he was convicted of falsifying documents in a separate case - Jose Sena Goulao/EPA

The switching of the spotlight on to Madeleine’s parents did not just inflict untold trauma on an already devastated couple. “What was 100 per cent clear in terms of the investigation,” says Ralph, “was, because they turned the focus of suspicion on to the McCanns, they were no longer looking for Madeleine.”

In the film, Bayston’s Kate replies to the proposed deal – a shorter sentence if she admits to hiding and disposing of Madeleine’s body after her accidental death – with incredulous fury. “I am not going to f---ing lie and say I harmed my daughter!” the character screams. “What about my little girl?! If I confess to their made-up crime, just to get them off the hook for failing in their investigation, then that real kidnapper just gets away with it – and I will never see Madeleine again.”

But in Ralph’s view, the crucial period covered in the documentary has a significance even beyond a family tragedy.

“The legacy of those two days in September 2007 set the template for the post-truth world we live in now. The case that the PJ had against the McCanns has been absolutely comprehensively quashed and debunked. And yet, still to this day, it’s in the narrative.”

And, while sensationalist tabloids stoked the fire in 2007, today the McCanns would have to contend with social media. That, says Ralph, would make the situation “far, far worse”. “Speculation and judgment would be more rapid and extreme because of social media,” he says. “And, I think, in lots of ways, in 2007, they were sort of the canaries in the coal mine.”

The programme concludes unusually for a drama – by giving an email address for Operation Grange, the Met’s ongoing inquiry into Madeleine’s disappearance. “It goes back to the not wishing to do any further harm,” says Ralph. “And part of that is Gerry and Kate are still looking for Madeleine. So that’s the appropriate place to end this film.”

Under Suspicion: Kate McCann is on Channel 5 on May 20 at 9pm

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Source: “AOL Entertainment”