On the eventing of May 3, 2007, a three-year-old girl disappeared into thin air at a resort on the southern coast of Portugal. Madeleine McCann was on vacation with her parents, Kate and Gerry McCann and her twin two-year-old siblings.....plus a collection of other British friends and their kids. The grown-ups dined almost every evening at Tapas, the restaurant at the resort. Madeleine and the twins had been left asleep in the room, without supervision in the ground floor apartment since 8:30 pm. The parents checed the children throughout the evening, until Madeleine's mother discovered her missing around 10 pm. The first few days were hectic and then the press got word and it grew and grew until the media from all over Europe, Britian and the US congregated on Praia de Luz to cover the missing girl. The Portuguese police were not prepared for the onslaught of attention and criticism that developed as the days passed and no suspects were found. The McCanns' had no faith in the Portuguese police and called their contacts in the UK to help get the work out and to get the British police involved. There were an unusually large number of pedophiles living in the area, so the attention was directed to that population and finally to Robert Murat, a Brit who had a house within view of the McCann's vacation apartment. There was no evidence that Robert had anything to do with the missing girl, but the police needed to solve this case and keep word from spreading and killing the tourist business. Sergey Polinka, a young Russian on vacation, also became a subject on interest because he had been hired by Robert Murat to design a website for him. The case unexplainably became the biggest media circus since Princess Diana was killed. The parents toured Europe trying to get the word out. They raised $2.5 million pounds from celebrities like JK Rowling, David Beckham, etc. Even the British prime minister and Home Secretary got involved and commented on the case. At one point, the Portuguese police started to question the involvment of the parents, and then things got interesting. In our next episode, we will explore the theory that the parents, Kate and Gerry McCann accidentally overdosed Madeleine with sleeping medicine and then covered it up by promoting the abduction scenario.