Anatomy of a Revelation
The story:
Madeleine McCann suspect and ex had secret Portugal compound guarded by fierce dogs
As is the way with the Tabloid press, at each iteration the story became more lurid. Household pets became a pack of savage dogs, of a type which inevitably have the most powerful bite in the world; the perfectly average and unremarkable villa became a secret hidden compound, and all the usual nonsense took over.
The story was syndicated or churned round the English speaking world, and possibly further.
A brief screen shot makes the point.
Using the old Counter Intelligence service technique of red arrows to track leaks of information we find, to no one’s surprise, that they all point back to the usual suspects. . . –> Jon Clarke and the Olive Press.
Fair enough, we might argue. Clarke has followed the story almost from the beginning, and still seems to be active and keen to push the McCann version of events, so what is extraordinary about that ?
Well this.
We track back and find that Clarke had published this exact story in his own newspaper, the Olive Press, more than a YEAR earlier, 8th June 2020 to be precise, and that he posted a short YouTube video of a visit to the property in question, also dated 8th June 2020. 2, 3
The Portuguese Journalist Sandra Felgueras through her Sexta às 9 TV show presents the whole thing, of which the YouTube Video is a clip. Clarke seems now to be a regular on her show.
In the YouTube video is a figure we believe we can identify as Clarke himself, now shorn of his 1980s leftie-student long hair, standing next to a silver car, near to two friendly looking dogs. On her show Sandra interviews the Stenard family there, and later speaks to a boy who was alleged to have been living there. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=scPh64slUbs
The video takes us round the plot, shows us the pool, the orchard, vegetable garden, the garage, and much more. The location is clearly indicated, allowing anyone to find it on Google Maps, or Google Earth.
The area is laid out in the manner typical of southern Spain and Portugal where once previously agricultural or unused scrub land has been re-designated for “Urbanisation”. Roads are laid out to create a right angled grid pattern with roads exactly 200m apart, allowing for plots of 100m. x 50m., resulting in 5,000m2, (half hectare, one and a quarter acres), which is often the minimum plot size on which it is permitted to build in rural areas.
Many of the plots by now have villas and pools, others have been turned over to productive fruit-culture, the houses are numbered, water and electricity supplies are in place, the major roads are metaled, the side roads graded and compacted.
Apart from a few teasing comments the video attracted little interest. Neither it seems did the article in Olive Press. And there the matter rested. A non-story, nothing to see here, move along please . . .
Now we turn and look in a different direction.
In 2021 Andy Lines, the Chief Reporter at the Daily Mirror put on his LinkedIn page
“Bored. Am only working on the periphery of the coronavirus epidemic. Anyone got any decent stories out there ? Andy.Lines@mirror co.uk. All ideas/thoughts/tips very welcome! 4
Lines has worked variously for the Mail, the Daily Express, The Daily Record/Sunday Mail and now the Daily Mirror. Given this spread of employment and networking it is certain that he is known to Clarke, professionally and very possibly personally.
Clarke is second on the list of contacts on Lines’ page, and Clarke himself admits to working for the Daily Mail from 1996 - 2000
Clarke had a ready-made story, which almost no one had bothered to read, and almost every one of those who did would have forgotten.
Now it can be presented as a Revelation
Now it can be syndicated and churned across the world – for money.
All that is needed is some photos, the addition of some Tabloid adjectives, and a bit of embellishment.
It can be brought up to date with uncheckable quotes all adding weight to the simple LIE that this is a recent event and not a warmed-up story from over a year before.
But Clarke cannot use the photos from the original article, or the video as they show a large villa, pool, parking area and friendly dogs, and the whole thrust of the re-hashed story is that this is hidden and secret. And a Compound. So much more exciting than an unremarkable villa with a pool on a standard plot in an unknown identikit urbanisation.
Instead of driving the four hours with a camera all the way back to Portugal from Ronda, Spain (where Clarke lives), how much easier to use Google Maps street view, take a couple of screen shots, crop them heavily, put your own name stamp on them, and present them as up-to-the-minute reportage on which you can no doubt claim copyright payments every time they are reproduced.
And so it came to pass.
On 26 July 2021 Andy Lines published the story in the Daily Mirror. Both the cropped image from Google Maps street view and the aerial shot are attributed to The Olive Press, Spain 5, 6
It was then churned by The Mail which ran a longer article, dated July 2021, before doing the rounds of all the other Tabloids
In it they included a screen shot of the Google Maps “satellite view’ [in fact taken from a small plane] showing the area, and demonstrating clearly that this is no more a secret hidden compound than any house on any urbanisation anywhere.
The cropped image taken from the “Street View’ of the garden area of the plot is also clearly marked and attributed to The Olive Press. Thus :– “ 📷 Image: Olive Press Spain”
In the Mail article within two sentences the number of dogs increases from three to four. Household pets become the highly unlikely most savage Kangal shepherd dogs with the most powerful bite in the world. The fact that this breed exists largely in Turkey is not mentioned.
Even more bizarre is the change of the “facts” from 2020, to 2021.
Nota Bene: for those who have not been following this saga, this is a McCann story, so no one should expect it to make any sense, or be internally coherent, let alone be verifiable from independent sources.
In 2020 it is said that the owner of the property is one Lia Silva, who let it to Nicole and Nicole’s boyfriend – Roman who was violent towards her. Despite this Nicole was involved in fostering children who lived in the villa [with the savage dogs with the world record bite ?]. When they left leaving a large rental debt, the owner had to clear away drug paraphernalia, which, in the best traditions of dealing with all traces of evidence in this case, she destroyed.
In this 2020 Olive Press version Brückner parked his Westphalia camper van outside the villa, and people were very frightened of him because he carried a gun. In spite of this he was employed in the restaurant diagonally opposite and did odd jobs for local people in return for showers, which we assume he was not permitted to take in the villa. We are told the villa has now been rented out to two Brits.
By 2021 the story has changed. Roman is now omitted, and Brückner becomes the boyfriend of Nicole Fehlinger. The story is now attributed to Herr Fehlinger,
Now we find that Nicole had access to ANOTHER “compound”, which no one else had been aware of, and this was the compound which was guarded by the savage dogs.
Herr Fehlinger, Nicole’s father, describes it . .
'"It’s an overgrown property of over 5,000 square metres. It was a secure area with fencing and four aggressive Kangal dogs were there day and night. The area is completely overgrown, not visible. No one could get in or out, only my daughter and perhaps Brückner with her.”
The secure compound is on land very close to the house where Nicole lived on the Algarve, 38 miles from Praia da Luz.’
So it is nothing more than another plot on the urbanisation. Same size. Fenced. With a dog. Like tens of thousand of rural plots in southern Portugal and Spain.
We look in vain to identify a ‘completely overgrown’ plot very close to No 89, and are entitled to ask why Nicole would have exclusive access to it, except of course to feed the four savage Turkish Kangal shepherd dogs with their world record bite. The whole area looks well tended, which given that the price for a plot may be around €30-50,000 is perhaps not surprising.
But then Clarke submits the cropped Google Maps Street View image with the caption including the typo
“The Agarve [sic] plot that police may look at”, and Lines publishes it inviting us to believe this is the hidden secret compound. As it is repeated round the world, other papers fall for the same fraudulent representation.
But that image is taken from the more major of the roads – Google did not take street views of the minor ones – and is the garden area of the very villa he has been talking about, but with the villa and the road name cropped out. As is the Bed&Breakfast directly opposite.
It is emphatically NOT a hidden secret compound.
See appendix for the exact point at which this image was obtained. 7
But it is from the Olive Press.
Not to be taken too seriously.
Not very absorbent.
And strangely not very good for lighting fires.
Why does any of this matter ?
Why do we care that Jon Clarke publishes nonsense of this sort ?
Why do we care that the tabloid gutter press continues its acknowledged role of disinformation and distortion ?
Why should we care that the people of New Zealand, Australia and New York are fed nonsense ?
Is this a simple case of revisiting and revising an old story when more facts become available ?
OR is it a deliberate ‘massaging’ of the facts to make a previous story fit the ‘official narrative’ better ?
You choose.
But before you do, perhaps you should also be aware that Clarke has just published his own book, of which an excerpt has been published in The Sun and The Scottish Sun
https://www.thescottishsun.co.uk/news/7619216/madeleine-mccann-prime-suspect-lair-shallow-grave/
From that extraordinary Chapter we see that Clarke is following the new official story, that Christian Brückner abducted Madeleine at the time and date specified so precisely by the McCanns, using unknown and unspecified means to enter and exit, and without being seen or leaving any forensic trace.
Clarke now introduces yet another element into the story.
‘I think it is highly likely that if B snatched Maddie he drove her inland to the village of Foral where she was kept for one or two weeks – perhaps by a group of paedophiles – before being driven across an unmanned border into Spain.” 8
This is of course more in line with the first “official story” of child trafficking rings which emerged early on in the investigation, but is not even in line with Clarke’s own previous story, either version 1 or 2, about the secret hidden compound in Foral.
He also sticks to the Tabloid journalistic idiocy of the “Unmanned border”, ignoring the fact that Spain and Portugal joined the Schengen zone which bans all border controls in June 1991.
We shall have to wait for the full text to be released, if we can bear to read it.
Appendix
1 Screen capture from
2 First Article Olive Press, June 2020
3 Screenshot of the article, Olive Press June 2020
4 Linked In. Andy Lines
5 Cropped Google Street view image
6 Image superimposed onto full screen version
7 Google images of Foral
