Chapter 48 – Part 2
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AND NOW - THE STUNNING ADMISSION
After the previous section had been written the following was discovered by a Researcher
in the usual way, following up leads and looking down apparently blind alleys.
“Turning over every stone” in fact.
The first part can still stand, but what follows may help explain or clarify
some of the previously unclear issues
This relates to the article in ABC posted by Clarke on his Facebook page.
THE JOURNALIST IN PURSUIT OF MADELEINE’S ASSASSIN
The British reporter started following the trail of the little girl the day after her disappearance.
“ABC is a Spanish national daily newspaper. It is the second largest general-interest newspaper in Spain, number one in Madrid, and the oldest newspaper still operating in Madrid. Along with El Mundo and El País, it is one of Spain’s three newspapers of record. ABC is known for generally supporting conservative political views. On 25 September 2009, ABC made its complete archives, dating back to 1903, available online, giving modern readers a chance to see contemporaneous news about the Spanish Civil War.”
So although it is published in a small stapled format it is definitively not a Red Top Tabloid.
For Clarke to get his book ‘advertised’ or featured on a double-page spread with full colour photo in a ‘Newspaper of Record’ is the equivalent of a piece in the Daily Telegraph or the The Times. It is beyond price, and will live in the archive forever. This press immortality perhaps explains why he is so proud of it. The Kudos is immense.
The ABC article was written by one of their professional Journalists, JJ Madueño.
Madueño lists English as one of his languages on LinkedIn and other professional sites. Clarke speaks Spanish, refined after 20 years living and working in Spain turning everyday Spanish into Tabloid English.
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Madueño has his own page on Muck Rack. The article Clarke is so proud of appears there.
On that very 3 May 2007, a call to a telephone in Ronda requested his presence. Mobile phones were not so widespread and the major British newspapers were looking to contact Jon Clarke (Cambridge, 1968) in this town in Malaga. He picked up, and was asked if he could go to Portugal. An English girl had disappeared there. << It didn't seem like an important case, but I went. I arrived at half past one in the morning in Praia da Luz >> recalls Clarke about his first contact with the disappearance of Madeleine McCann.
Here it is crystal clear that Clarke is saying – and it is in Spanish quote marks, indicating his direct speech – << I arrived at half past ONE in the morning in Praia da Luz >>.
The place is clear and the time is clear. From the context of the telephone call on ‘that very’ 3rd May, meaning that exact day, we can calculate that he arrived on Friday 4th May. At 1:30 am.
The final printed and on-line article, which has been slightly altered still quotes Clarke as saying
“It didn't seem like a big case, but I went to Praia da Luz," Clarke recalls of his first contact with the disappearance of Madeleine McCann. That same night he met the little girl's parents, Gerry and Kate McCann.”
That same NIGHT from a 3rd May phone call means exactly the same thing. Clarke got to PdL in the early hours of Friday 4th. He was THERE after midnight of the night of 3rd/4th May 2007.
The implications are wide-ranging.
The distance is given as 404 km, plus about 2km in PdL, and another 2km to his rural house outside the small village beyond Ronda. The time is quoted as 4h 11 min from the centre of his village to the roundabout on the main road leading to PdL, so at least 4h 30min in total driving time door to door overnight.
To this we must add a comfort and/or fuel stop, which he describes in detail in the book, and we may note that driving at night on unlit rural roads with the ever present danger of wild animals, boar, ibex, fox, badger, red or fallow deer jumping out of the woods either side is likely to moderate normal driving speed slightly.
Allowing his stated half hour to get ready and take his leave of his family after the alleged phone call, puts the call no later than 20:00 [8 pm.] on 3/5/7, and very possibly considerably earlier.
Ponder that for a moment.
The alarm was raised just before 22:00 [10 pm.] 3/5/7. Portuguese time or 23:00 Spanish time.
Even if we suspect that Clarke is still confusing Spanish time for arrival, this only moves the phone call to some time before 21:00 [9 pm.] 3/5/7 Spanish time. It does not alter the central issue, that the phone call was made not only a significant time BEFORE the report of the disappearance, but also well BEFORE the ’window of opportunity’ for any Abduction given in the signed and accepted statements of the McCanns and the Tapas 7.
Many years ago Clarke was faced with this exact suggestion and reacted in his usual aggressive contemptuous way. The article in the Olive Press by Clarke himself is dated 11th May 2017, and includes –
He suggested I was actually staying there.”
Now, some 14 years after the original events, but only 4 years after that article, Clarke has clearly confessed to a fellow but more senior and respected journalist, and has admitted that he was there, did get there “so quickly” and by extension WAS staying there before his second appearance at 09:45 later that morning.
Whilst research continues to discover several more facts there remains an unease about Clarke’s future.
The ”official story” promulgated and broadcast so early and so long and hard by Clarke was designed to protect those who may have been responsible for the organisation and the selective release of information. Several have specifically denied their involvement in any greater scheme, and specifically of any prior knowledge at all of any “event’ before 10pm 3/5/7.
Clarke’s new admission that the Press telephones were ringing long before that time may be the earth tremor which eventually causes the edifice to crumble.
Many whose reputations and even their liberty depend on that fact’s NOT being known may not be pleased.
And when it is realised that small apparently unconnected pieces of evidence and fully documented personal communication already in the hands of researchers are now validated by Clarke’s admission, some may get very cross indeed. Including the McCanns and their backers.
As they were with the late Brenda Leyland, hounded to alleged suicide; with Mr Bennett, sentenced to imprisonment; with DCI Amaral, pursued through three tiers of courts and impoverished despite being completely vindicated; with several private detectives who allegedly discovered and reported inconvenient facts, who are variously dead in suspicious circumstances or in prison on supposedly unrelated issues.
They were not dismissed as cranks, or fools. They were not merely shrugged off as ignorant of the facts, as ill informed or misguided.
No. They were pursued at enormous expense.
Someone, or some organisation, spent a vast amount of money instructing Carter-Ruck to pursue Mr. Bennett right up to and then actually into the High Court. Forget Kate’s “pro bono” claim. The McCanns may not have paid for the work, but someone did.
Someone, or some organisation, paid a vast amount of money pursuing Dr Amaral through the Portuguese Court of First Instance, the Appeal court, the Supreme court - TWICE - and is now still paying for a case in the European Court of Human Rights.
That is out of the financial reach of normal people, (which is of course why they froze Dr Amaral’s assets and income from the start, hoping he would not be able to mount a proper defence.).
Someone directed Martin Brunt of Sky News to hound Brenda Leyland to her (alleged) suicide.
He didn’t decide to do it on his own. Both MetPol and LeicPol had stated there were no offences to investigate. Someone paid him to do it. And that Someone may also be funding this.
We may never know the true identity nor the motivation of the “Fat controller”, [Chapter 41] –
but Jonathan Lucian Stewart Clarke may inadvertently have taken us closer to discovering his or her identity, and that may not go down well.
If the Security Services were involved in this case, which some believe possible, Jon Clarke might do well to consider the adequacy of his Life Insurance, and pray he does not share the fates of Dr Kelly and Mike Todd.
****
The discovery of this admission and confession does go some way to explaining but not excusing Clarke’s 14-year history of being vague, inaccurate and untruthful about the time of his arrival in Praia da Luz and his various alleged immediate actions once there. He has clearly been under considerable stress caused by the ‘cognitive dissonance’ of having to fit a patently inaccurate account into known and provable facts.
We still do not know or understand much about Clarke’s movements, still less about his motivation nor of his level of understanding of his personal involvement in what increasingly appears to be something far more serious than “Tabloid Journalists Writing Rot”.
Given the time of his alleged phone call, it must have been clear even to Clarke that being called some considerable time before the “Abduction”, let alone the Alert, might make people following this case slightly suspicious.
Was the phone call simply to tell him everything was in place, and it was safe for him to leave because he would arrive after the alert, perhaps with a reminder that he should ring back about 5am so that the stories already on the presses and in the News rooms could be printed and released for the early morning editions?
Clarke has said, very clearly, that he arrived in Praia da Luz about 1:30 AM. [Clarke “Llegué a la una y media de la madrugada’, or alternatively 'that same night', which bears the same meaning but allows for any confusion between Spanish and Portuguese time.]. He has said that, it has been published in a Journal of Record in the name of a highly respected journalist, and he has encouraged his followers to read it.
The onus of explanation now shifts to Clarke.
And as another researcher has suggested – If Clarke was summoned to Praia da Luz just before, at, or even just after the time the McCanns and the Tapas 7 raised the alarm, he may well be guilty of Perverting the Course of Justice by withholding from the PJ right from the start that vital information which could have made an absolutely crucial difference to the course of the entire investigation. Instead of this Clarke told the world that he knew instantly that the McCanns were innocent.
Has Clarke suffered 14 years of chronic anxiety that the PJ, DCI Amaral, the Portuguese Public Prosecutor, Operation Grange, the German lawyer H. Fülscher and the prosecutor H. Wolters, not to mention the Home Secretary and the Commissioner of the Met., would one day find out the truth about his nocturnal visit to PdL, and would therefore realise that the stories that he first arrived at various times later that morning were untrue ?
If so, he can relax.
They do now.
Can Clarke now claim that this whole thing has been a big mistake; a misunderstanding; that the meaning got “lost in translation’ between two people each fluent in the other’s language; that it was written by nothing more than a Tabloid journalist who sensationalised or completely invented the story paying no attention to the facts, purely to increase circulation and sell a foreign language paperback book . . . ?
Let me assist.
NO. He can not.
How can we know that ?
We placed a question on Clarke’s Facebook page. The first question was ’deleted’ within a day, so we replaced it.
We gave Clarke the “right to reply”; the time to explain; to issue an exculpatory statement; to blame others for misunderstanding or misquoting;
or other wording he chose.
It seems he stands by what was written in ABC.
It may of course be that yet again Clarke is blatantly lying or being so ludicrously boastful that he has failed to see that his fantasy cannot possibly fit the ‘official story’.
If so, then he has surely forfeited the right to describe himself as a serious Journalist.
If not, his admission may have fatally compromised the entire 14 year investigation.
REFS:
1. https://muckrack.com/jj-madueno-1/articles
2. https://sevilla.abc.es/andalucia/malaga/sevi-periodista-britanico-madeleine-enf-202110212008_noticia.html
3. Original ABC article in Spanish.
https://sevilla.abc.es/andalucia/malaga/sevi-periodista-britanico-madeleine enf-202110212008_noticia.html
Jon Clarke, 14 años para resolver el misterio de la pequeña Madeleine
El reportero Jon Clarke, editor de una publicación inglesa editada en la Costa del Sol, comenzó a seguir el rastro de la pequeña el día después de su desaparición
Advierte del peligro del presunto asesino, Christian Brueckner, un alemán que vivió en poblados 'hippies' de Granada y podría haber cometido más delitos
J.J. Madueño
MARBELLA Actualizado: 22/10/2021 18:49h
4. https://whatreallyhappenedtomadeleinemccann.blogspot.com/