Courtney Allan
Legal

The devastating discovery about Madeleine McCann that still haunts Kate

The disappearance of Madeleine McCann has been on the mind of the world since her family's holiday to Portugal in 2007.

Madeleine went missing from her a holiday apartment while her parents and their friends were dining close by in the same hotel.

In the year that Madeleine would’ve been 15, Netflix has released a documentary called The Disappearance of Madeleine McCann, that is full to the brim with detail about the case.

Robbyn Swan, who co-wrote Looking for Madeleine, in 2014 is featured throughout the documentary and mentioned a detail that the family have been unable to get out of their heads since they learned of it.

Swan said that it was “the stuff of nightmares” for Kate and Gerry McCann.

In Kate’s book about the case, Madeleine: Our Daughter’s Disappearance and the Continuing Search For Her, she reveals a harrowing thought.

As the group’s children would be asleep in the hotel apartments at dinner time, the parents requested that they dined at the same table every night, as this table had the best view of the apartments.

It was only once Madeleine disappeared that Kate discovered the person who wrote the booking down noted that the children would be unsupervised in the rooms in the reservation book. This means anyone who worked at the restaurant or any nosy members of the public knew that the children were left alone.

Kate wrote in her book:

“To my horror, I saw that, no doubt in all innocence and simply to explain why she was bending the rules a bit, the receptionist had added the reason for our request: we wanted to eat close to our apartments as we were leaving our young children alone there and checking on them intermittently."

A tormented Kate added, “We now bitterly regret it and will do so until the end of our days."

According to Swan, this discovery was one of the most upsetting to the McCann family. Intimate knowledge about the clan had been left in the open.

Despite the documentary bringing light to a variety of theories, the family will never know whether or not that information was the last piece of the puzzle that led to Madeleine's disappearance.

Have you watched the Madeleine McCann documentary series on Netflix? Let us know in the comments.

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Kate McCann, Madeleine McCann, The Disappearance of Madeleine McCann, netflix, crime, disappearance