Kate and Gerry McCann discuss Madeleine one year on

The McCanns have given an emotional interview to ITV1 one year since Madeleine disappeared in which they revealed the extent of their pain and talked about their continued hope she will be found despite fearing the worst in the first few days she was missing.

Cameras followed them from January until April as they launched their campaign to introduce an Amber Alert system across Europe and spoke about being made arguidos – with Gerry describing it as feeling like they were “in the middle of a horror movie really, a nightmare.”

And they talked about their leaked statements to the press and their regrets at not questioning Madeleine further when she told them she had cried the night before she disappeared.

Madeleine, One Year On: Campaign For Change is the only TV programme the McCanns agreed to be filmed for in the run up to the anniversary. Footage includes the couple in their home in Rothley and travelling to Brussels and Washington as they pursue their campaign.

On the change in focus of the police investigation and becoming arguido suspects Kate said: “As soon as I realised the story or theory or whatever you want to call it, was that Madeleine was dead and that we’d been involved somehow. It just hit home. They haven’t been looking for Madeleine. And it was just I mean, just, I just felt yet again my daughter’s had such disservice and I just, I mean I was obviously upset by that, very upset and I was angry you know.

“And I just thought she deserves so much better than that, and I thought I’m not going to sit here and allow, allow this you know.”

Gerry said: “Pressure that, such as I’ve never felt before because you’re under attack in one way or another.

“The speculation takes you to the worst places and at that point you know the worst place would have been being charged, potentially being put in jail, certainly being detained to face charges that could have taken I don’t know years to materialise, being separated from Sean and Amelie.

“These sort of things were going through your mind and you’re, because it’s a system that you’re unfamiliar with, you don’t know what could happen.”

“I started thinking well if they’re saying that about us being involved with Madeleine,” said Kate, “you know it’s not long before they say what about Sean and Amelie, what about their other two children? And I can remember saying to Gerry’s mum and Gerry’s sisters, do not let anyone near them and they were like – ‘don’t you worry’, you know, and it was back again to the sort of lioness and her cubs. You know I’d just do whatever it took to protect them.”

“It felt like you’re in the middle of a horror movie really, a nightmare,” Gerry
said.

“When I was going in to become arguido, because I felt angry, I felt strong. I wasn’t scared. I felt like I was going to fight the world to be honest. My daughter was worth more than all that and I would do whatever it took to fight
for justice and truth,” said Kate.

Their arguido status means that the McCanns are still not allowed to talk about what happened inside the police station but it was widely reported that Kate was being offered a deal: admit accidentally killing Madeleine, and face a reduced sentence.

Kate said: “No, I’d have fought to the death to be honest at that point. There
was no way I was going to be railroaded into something.

“I felt almost invincible at that point. I just don’t know what kicked in. You know I just thought my children deserve that, Madeleine deserves that. Someone has to be fighting for Madeleine.”

On their decision to leave the children in the apartment while they dined at the tapas bar Kate and Gerry explained how on the first night they had eaten at a restaurant called the Millennium half a mile away from their apartment.

Kate said: “But that [the Millennium] was, that was a good walk away and we didn’t, we didn’t have a buggy or anything with us so we did go and we took all the kids. It didn’t open til half six or something and our kids usually go to bed around seven so they were really tired and they were walking but you’ve got to remember they’re only little.

“So we ended up having to carry them and trying to carry three of them between two, you know and we decided we couldn’t do that really. It wasn’t, wasn’t fair and it wasn’t you know, it wouldn’t have been good for anybody.”

Gerry explained: “And it turned out our apartments were right next to the tapas which was literally from the back of ours, like fifty yards, maybe sixty. And, and then so we said well why don’t we just try and eat there?”

Kate added: “Just seemed like a good idea…”

And on the decision to do regular checks on their children Gerry said: “Two of the other couples had been on Mark Warner holidays before and they have a baby listening service which essentially is where someone goes round the apartments. They don’t actually go in, they just listen outside.”

“And it wasn’t till quite late on that we realised there wasn’t a baby listening service. But I guess we were just doing our own baby listening service, only we were going inside and checking,” said Kate.

Gerry compared it to having a meal in the back garden while the children were asleep upstairs.

“And… it seemed a fairly natural sort of thing to do, it was so close. As you say you could actually see the apartment and it didn’t feel that different to dining out the back garden. What you wouldn’t do was go upstairs and check on your kids every half hour like…we were doing. But – you just, it was the furthest thing from my mind that something like that happen,” said Gerry.

“I think if there’d even been one second where someone had said do you think it’s going to be okay, it wouldn’t have happened,” said Kate.

“I mean there’s absolutely no way, and I’ve said it before, there’s absolutely no way if I’d have had the slightest inkling that there was a risk involved there, that I’d have done it,” she added.

Gerry said he wasn’t surprised by people’s criticisms.

“You know people will say that they’ve never done that and you know who am I to argue? You know we have to live with the fact that we weren’t directly there and if we were then you know possibly, probably it wouldn’t have happened,” he said.

The couple have received hate mail to their Leicestershire home. In a Christmas card which Gerry read out they were accused of being “thieving bastards”.

It read: “Gerry and Kate, how can you use money given by poor people in good faith to pay your mortgage on your mansion? You ****thieving bastards. Your brat is dead because of your drunken arrogance. Shame on you. I curse you and your family to suffer forever. Cursed Christmas. If you have any shame you would accept full responsibility for your daughter’s disappearance and give all the money back. You are scum.”

The couple recalled what happened on the night that Madeleine went missing.

Kate said she did her check and discovered her daughter had been taken. She said she rushed to the tapas bar shouting “someone’s taken Madeleine”.

“And that’s when the nightmare started,” she said.

Gerry explained: “Everyone knows the fear, I think fear is probably the right word, fear for your daughter, fear for yourself, fear for your family, fear for everything and, and that horrible kind of adrenalin fight, flight.”

Kate said: “And I just remember saying ‘not Madeleine, not Madeleine, not Madeleine’ and I just remember saying that over and over again.”

He added: “Later on there was a period where she hadn’t turned up. It was absolute devastation and total, just total emotion really.”

Kate recalled how the couple searched through the undergrowth early the following morning.

“We were saying over and over again ‘just let her be found let her be found’,” said Gerry.

“It was really hard those first few days. I just feared the worst at the beginning. Probably for the first few days we were like that. I mean just, you’re just like praying and praying that that wasn’t the case,” said Kate.

Gerry and Kate hit back at criticisms that they had shown little emotion in the early days of the investigation.

Gerry explained: “Numbness sort of kicked in and you can’t have that raw emotion 24 hours a day, seven days a week. You just can’t, physically you can’t do it. And I’m sure that’s self-protection as well but also I think the psychological element of kicking in and actually saying we do have some influence in this. So what I think we wanted to do is make sure we’ve done everything absolutely possible to try and help and influence that search.”

“We had…behavioural specialist profilers out who were telling us not to show emotion in case the abductor gets a kick out of it, you know and so you’ve got the pressure of not showing emotion to protect your daughter…” added Kate.

Kate and Gerry also spoke about their anger over parts of the statements they gave to the Portuguese police being leaked.

While they were being filmed for the documentary in Brussels where they were campaigning for a Europe wide Amber Alert system they discovered that parts of their witness statements had been given to the press.

“They’ve had those statements for eleven and a half months,” said Kate. “Why today on all days when we’re in Brussels trying to do something positive have they been given to a journalist?

“And it also appears that you know the bits of the statement which have been chosen which I have to say we’ve told police absolutely everything, because we wanted to give everything to find out what’s happened, but the bits that have been chosen have been picked out of context intentionally to smear us and I think you know the whole thing is to you know detract from what we’re doing today and I feel absolutely gutted. I think it’s an absolute disgrace,” Kate commented.

“I’m really angry. Judicial secrecy should apply to everybody,” she added.

“It’s not coincidence. I think it’s a sad indictment of a system that we’ve had to put up with,” Gerry said.

Kate recalled Madeleine’s comment the day before she went missing.

“Well I can’t remember, we’d just had breakfast. It was, it was sort of fairly early in the morning. She just very casually really said ‘where were you last night when me and Sean cried?’ And we immediately looked and said, you know, ‘when was this Madeleine, was this when you were going to sleep?’And she didn’t answer. And then she just carried on playing, totally undistressed,” said Kate.

She added: “But we obviously told the police because we thought does that indicate that someone’s been round the night before and that’s what’s woken her up? Which is significant, you know…I’ve persecuted myself over and over again about that statement because you think why didn’t I kind of just hold her and say what do you mean, what do you mean you know? What do you mean you woke up?”

Gerry said: “I think the worst thing is we kind of almost thought about not going. And er, and did. We weren’t sure we were going to get into the tapas, remember, and…”

Kate said: “In fact we were all, we were all going to go up to the Millennium again, that was with the kids, which is what we did the first night. It was just, it was just because the walk was so long and we didn’t have a buggy and the kids were tired by that time and I thought we were, you know we did talk about going up to the Millennium that night.”

Gerry added: “But I mean the worst thing is that you can’t change any of that and it doesn’t help find her.

“I think we’ve actually, despite you know our own guilt, we’ve tried to focus on what we can change and you know in the first few days you know obviously we focused much, much more on the negatives and it doesn’t help.

“It doesn’t help Madeleine, it doesn’t help us and it doesn’t help find her”

Said Kate: “…As Gerry said, the guilt you feel for not being there and giving someone that opportunity, you know but then I just have to kind of reel myself in and think you know I know how much I love Madeleine and I have no doubt that Madeleine knows how much I love her.

“I think – I mean I know that and I’ve just got to think regardless of what all those people say out there, you know those bloggers and people on the forums who obviously get some kind of kick out of being nasty, I know that and I know Madeleine knows that and I’ve just got to kind of keep hold of that really.”

Kate described Madeleine. She said: “She’s, she’s very loving. She’s a very bright little girl. I had days when I’d go to a café with Madeleine and we’d go shopping together and you know she just, you know just say: ‘Oh mummy I like that top’, ‘Oh I love your earrings, mummy’, you know and she’s good company. She’s like my – you know she’s like a little buddy to me you know.”

Gerry added: “She looks like Kate, thank goodness for that, but in terms of personality trait, she’s more like my side of the family I think.

“She’s very outgoing, she was a bit of a ringleader in the nursery and her friends and it’s always bizarre because at times I’d go into nursery and ‘oh are you Madeleine’s dad, so and so’s always talking about Madeleine’. All the parents - you start to think oh my goodness, what’s she been doing? But you know she’s just really outgoing, good fun, bundles of energy and very loving.”

Gerry: “She was a little person becoming independent and a piece of, you know, endless joy.”

Referring to the anniversary marking a year since her daughter went missing Kate said: “It doesn’t feel like a year since I saw Madeleine. She’s just so much, very much still there and she doesn’t seem that far away. It feels like she’s still with me in some way and I’ve never felt that I won’t see her again.”

Gerry added: “She’s still very much part of our life and the twins. We can see how much they love their big sister. I do think that she’s still out there, very much so.”

“Our little girl wasn’t even four, and is now nearly five. She’s the victim and people should not forget that,” said Gerry.

Kate revealed that they often wonder what Madeleine would be like now.

“She was great with Sean and Amelie and that. You know even when …they were born you know…she just stepped into the role really well considering you know she was only 20 months when they were born and she wanted to be involved and help and then obviously as they got a little bit older because the age difference was so close they just played so well together.

“And it was just lovely seeing them together and that’s one thing I struggle with is imagining how they’d be now,” she said.

Kate said she also saw Madeleine’s best friend and it made her wonder whather daughter would look like.

“I see Madeleine’s best friend from time to time,” said Kate. “Can’t help but wonder what would Madeleine be like, would she be that much taller, you know is her hair as long as that? You know and would she be writing her name too? You know she’s there waiting for us. She deserves us to keep going.”

They said the family tried to have as normal a life as possible for the sake of Sean and Amelie but Gerry described it as a “purgatory type existence.”

He said: “Your life is carrying on to an extent, in a quasi-real existence, a purgatory type existence. We are, we are kind of between something real and never finding out. But although it was hard, we decided to re-introduce Sean and Amelie to a degree of normality and normality is that I go to work.”

Kate said: “When we first came back, you know I didn’t cook a meal just couldn’t do it. All the every day things that have to be done, you know there were times in the early days where things like that, I found I resented things like that because it was taking me away from Madeleine you know. How can I hang up washing when my daughter’s not here?

“Whereas now, you know, we have got Sean and Amelie and they, they need a happy normal life and they deserve a happy normal life…”