On May 3, 2007, Kate and Gerry McCann went on a family holiday at the Ocean Club in Praia da Luz, Portugal, with their three children – Madeleine, Amelie and Sean. Later that evening, the couple joined a group of friends for a dinner at a restaurant approximately 100 yards away from the ground-floor apartment where the siblings were sleeping.
They periodically checked on their children throughout the night, but Kate discovered Madeleine was missing at 10 p.m. They alerted the authorities, while the resort initiated its missing-child search procedures.
“Words cannot describe the anguish and despair that we are feeling as the parents of our beautiful daughter Madeleine,” Gerry said the next day, per ABC News.
He added, “Please, if you have Madeleine, let her come home to her mummy, daddy, brother and sister. As everyone can understand how distressing the current situation is, we ask that our privacy is respected to allow us to continue assisting the police in their current investigation.”
“It might not be physically searching, but we have been working really hard and doing absolutely everything we can, really, to get Madeleine back,” Kate said.
Two days after Madeleine disappeared, Portuguese police said they believed the young girl was abducted. They later named resident Robert Murat as a suspect, but he was cleared in July 2008 due to insufficient evidence.
Madeleine’s parents were also made arguidos, or formal suspects under Portuguese law, in September 2007. They remained under suspicion for months before the status was lifted in 2008.
Amid the case, Kate and Gerry released the 2011 book, Madeleine: Our Daughter’s Disappearance and the Continuing Search for Her.
“The decision to publish this book has been very difficult, and taken with heavy hearts. My reason for writing it is simple: to give an account of the truth,” the matriarch said in the book’s official description.