I am excerpting part of an article written by another woman in Australia who had been falsely accused of murdering her child.
“Regarding Madeleine McCann, the ‘Dingo baby’ mother recognises police hostility, ‘forensic’ discoveries and a hysterical public as very similar to what happened to her:
This for me, bringing is a difficult time of year the kind of anniversary that any parent would dread.
It is just over 27 years since my baby daughter, Azaria, was snatched by a dingo - a wild dog - and carried away into the darkness of the Australian outback forever.
The unusual circumstances, and the frenzied speculation that followed, made it one of the most notorious cases of a missing child the world has known, and it ended in the greatest miscarriage of justice Australia has ever seen.
Damned by police hostility, “forensic” discoveries and an increasingly hysterical public, I was jailed for murdering my own daughter, despite a mountain of evidence to the contrary.
It is a state of affairs that Kate and Gerry McCann will recognise only too well.
And, as they reluctantly refocus their lives from the search for Madeleine to the case for their defence, I can say with some confidence that they have good reason to be worried.
For the parallels with my own case, while not exact, are inescapable.
Once again we have newspapers and TV stations obsessed by a single story. I can see the same public-longing for a neat solution to a tragedy. There are detectives under huge pressure.
And at the heart of it, there is a woman who has failed to play the emotive, feminine role scripted for her in this terrible soap opera.
The rush to judgment seems irresistible; but if I have learned anything it is this: that, from our position in front of the TV screens or outspread newspapers, we ordinary members of the public do not - and cannot - know the truth of what occurred that May night in Praia da Luz.
It was August 1980 when I took that fateful August camping holiday at Ayers Rock in the Northern Territory with my then husband Michael, our two boys, Aidan, six, Reagan, four, and, the latest addition to our family, Azaria, aged just nine-and-a-half weeks. We were staying at the public campsite, in the shadow of the mountain.
The simple, crucial facts are as follows. Azaria and Reagan were inside the tent asleep and I was outside, preparing food for Aidan. Three people heard Azaria cry. When I went to check, I saw a dingo emerge from the tent and disappear. I saw that Azaria was gone.
“How did it feel?” It is a question I have faced repeatedly, as you might imagine, and now, with the McCanns taking up airtime even here in Australia, I am being asked it once again.
Anyone who has actually been through the loss of a child would know that it is a question not worth asking - because there is no answer that others could understand. There are no words I could use. It is indescribable.
Like the McCanns, I was accused of behaving irresponsibly. How could I leave my children - even momentarily - in a tent that was not zipped up? This, after all, was the outback.
Yet we had been told it was safe at Ayers Rock, even though we later learned that there had been attacks around that time.
The result was the worst judgment call of my life.
I have little doubt that the McCanns feel the same way, even though the distance between their restaurant table and Madeleine’s bed was shorter than the length of my back yard at home.
What happened subsequently to destroy my life was nothing to do with a “judgment call”, however, and everything to do with the circumstances that now threaten to drag down Kate and Gerry.
I understand the spectre of forensic evidence looms large for them. It was key to putting me behind bars in October 1982, and it is this aspect of my case that must be particularly alarming for the McCanns.
They have been told there is “body fluid” and “DNA” in their rented car. I was told there was a lot of my child’s blood in our car.
But in my case, at least, these findings were far from forensic. The “tests” had been incompetent. Rigorous analyses conducted later showed the “blood” to be no more than copper dust, spilt milkshake and a sound-deadening chemical that was over-sprayed from the wheelarch of the car.
The most they found was a small patch of “nose excreta” with some blood attached. In other words, somebody had picked their nose and wiped it on the car seat.
In another strange echo, the McCanns’ fate appears to be in the hands of scientists from England - just as mine was.
When they flew to Darwin, to give evidence, their contribution proved both incompetent and fatal.
One man claimed there was a small female handprint in blood on my baby’s growsuit. That was just the dust and not even a handprint. The other man was the so-called dingo expert from London who, it emerged, had never ever set eyes on a dingo.
Even when forensics are abused, people have a tendency to go along with it.
And by the time they find out that you were innocent all along, your reputation is ruined. I was spat at and abused in the street. I was continually followed by the media. For years, I was the most reviled woman in Australia.
Looking back, perhaps the clearest comparison of all with the plight of the McCanns is the atmosphere of speculation and the terrible appetite for quick answers.
There comes a point where the public is so worked up, it wants solutions even though there aren’t any; the next installment, when there isn’t one.
There is only one truly solid fact out in the open, and that is that Madeleine has gone missing. ...”
thanks for posting and thanks for the ping. I remember that time vividly. As one of the very few in my own circle who never thought Lindy to be guilty, I eventually refused to discuss the case at all. Almost everyone I knew behaved as prosecutor, jury and judge. The Press showed no mercy. A fair trial was out of the question.
The ‘expert’ who provided the forensic evidence was later totally discredited due to the uncovering of other faulty analysis. I admire Lindy tremendously. IIRC her husband was a lay-preacher, there was an air of almost religious persecution behind the public hatred...fantastic stories circulated that the name of her child had been chosen from biblical sources - Azaria was translated to mean ‘sacrifice in the desert’ - I was utterly ashamed of the Australian public.
How Lindy survived this dreadful ordeal, four years in jail, the breakup of her family, the loss of her little baby, I cannot imagine.
I remember that! God, what those parents went through :(
Looking back, I think about all the times my ex and I took our young children camping. Bears, mountain lions, bikers, and gang bangers hang around Angeles National Forest campgrounds.
Something tells me that the Mc Canns had nothing to do with Madeleine’s disappearance.