Saturday April 28th - the first night

This is the day that allegedly all of them went to the Millennium restaurant for dinner, with their children.

But what happened after dinner? Let's try to pin this one down if we can !!

Stella wrote:This is the day that allegedly all of them went to the Millennium restaurant for dinner, with their children.

But what happened after dinner? Let's try to pin this one down if we can !!

So what sources do we have?
Telephone - Kikoratan's analysis
The book: -
And: Textusa's excellent article quote:
The McCanns say they arrived on Saturday, 28th, at 14.30; the others, before them. Plenty of daylight left.

So what did they do? Go to the beach? Walk around and check out the surroundings, see a little of the little town they were going to spend their holiday?

At least, that is what I would do. I would check-in, just place the luggage in the apartment without unpacking, and take hubby and the kids to see the Ocean Club, the village and the beach. And if all hurried, put on the bathing suits and head for the beach. After all, holidays are al about novelty, aren’t they? But, that’s me. Yes, I know I’m weird.

So, for me, if you’ve arrived at 14:30 on a sunny day at PdL, by 15:00 you’re on the beach. Maybe not in a bathing suit, but certainly you’ve walked and checked where it was in relation to the hotel, what is the best path to get there, etc...

Naturally, if you’re new in town, you want to know the town.

But the McCanns, on that first day, checked-in, unpacked THOUROUGHLY, and then went to the Tapas Bar (how they would just loooooove that place…) to hear a lecture about all the activities; and would you believe it, when it was over, it was dinner time. Time flies when you’re listening to a lecture, everyone knows that.

For hours on ALL the activities for the forthcoming days. For hours. All they wanted to hear about was tennis and… well, tennis. Was there any other activity?

You know, tennis is that unknown and complex sport that has so many interesting details that require hours to explain, and then hours to listen to. Very, very interesting stuff. You have the service, the backhand, the grass, which makes tennis faster, then you have… No, too, too complex, it would take me hours to explain. Seriously. Ask the McCanns.

So, naturally, they were surprised that it’s was already dinner time.

So you’re on holiday and it’s your first meal out, what do you do?

If you take a poll at hotel receptions to what is the most often asked question after a check-in, you’ll get 50% stating that it’s “do you know any good restaurants around?” and the other 50% that it’s “which restaurants nearby do you recommend?”

I’m obviously exaggerating. They’re also asked, although not as frequently, “what is interesting around here to visit/go?” and “where is the most lively area around?”.

If you take another poll, this time to hotel customers about what is the expected reaction to the most frequent asked question, you’ll get a 100% answer which is what anyone who has walked into a hotel has already experienced: the receptionist whisks up a photocopy of the town/city map, proceeds to scribble, mechanically, and circles around various spots. Usually in ink, so it ruins the paper, and none of the circles fall at the hotel they’re working at.

Oh, and I’m forgetting, they were in a restaurant! The Tapas. One they were to use so, so often. But, unfortunately, it was closed for dinner. Closed on a Saturday.

On a Saturday, I repeat, in an activity and location that lives off tourism. But closed is closed, you can’t do anything about it. That can only mean one thing, and one thing only: lack of clients. And that, in turn, means that they go somewhere else...

Apparently nobody at the Ocean Club would recommend a restaurant other than the Millenium. About a 500 metres walk, so we can only assume that there was no other near, or most likely, the only one open that night. unquote
[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

Stella, I'm getting quite an enormous link here. I'm leaving it for clever you to deal with! I didn't want to copy the whole article since I can't get the essential maps with it for some reason.
Begin at the beginning and already we're smelling sea bass.

I understood that the holiday package included dinner at either the tapas bar or the Millenium.

if that is correct, then that is why they ate at the millenium on saturday since the nearer alternative was shut.

I think that was the case Pauline. Because of the limited number of places in the Tapas restaurant many guests had to travel across the resort to the Millenium.

I have read a number of textusa posts and have found them to be trying to make good points but often missing the simple explanation as in this case.

uppatoffee wrote:I think that was the case Pauline. Because of the limited number of places in the Tapas restaurant many guests had to travel across the resort to the Millenium.

I have read a number of textusa posts and have found them to be trying to make good points but often missing the simple explanation as in this case.

I don't agree. Textusa points out that the McCanns particularly did want to establish they didn't know the area at all. Now Gerry had been to Portugal at least twice for golfing weekends. Where is never said, I'd like to know. Around PdL is pretty well golfing paradise. Payne had at least acquaintances there who sorted out mobiles for them after the 3rd.
They did know where Chaplin's was - right next to the church which they pretended not to know about on the night of the 3rd. So for some reason it was important to them to NOT know PdL at all.
One reason might be the apartment block that Amaral also was interested in. That's also near the church. Then there was a woman who worked for OC who lived in one of those flats, I believe. She was consistently called by Kate - it had to do with her witness statement. I know this is vague, but it was in a topic to do with interfering with witnesses by the McCanns.
The Smiths' sighting was also in a part of PdL they 'didn't' know - busiest night life area at the time.
Kate also mentions various 'expeditions' (supermarket) to outlying regions as being rare excursions out of the compound.

So to go back to the 28th, they went to the Millennium. No problem. After that they had breakfast at the flat, no big deal.
Still - what did they do all day? Arrived at 3, unpacked (how long was that going to take?) lecture and dinner.
We need to look at the phone records for one.

According to Kate, this was the day they went to the pool. She says on p47 that the others had arrived a few hours ahead of them (Matt, Rachel, Jane and Russell) and they met them there. Isn't this supposed to be when she took the infamous pool photo with Maddie, Gerry and Amelie?

Welcome meetings are usually held late afternoon, so all the different guests have time to arrive before hand. With three kids I would have thought arrive at 3, pool, welcome meeting and dinner would easily fill the afternoon/evening. Everything takes a lot longer with kids.

Just found this link which has a more detailed summary of the events of that day.
[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

Uppatoffee: this photo was allegedly the last one taken of Madeleine in the early afternoon of 3rd May. There's a long topic called "The Last Photo: the key questions".

Thanks Marian. Think I was confusing the dates of the playground photo and the pool photos.

uppatoffee wrote:

Welcome meetings are usually held late afternoon, so all the different guests have time to arrive before hand. With three kids I would have thought arrive at 3, pool, welcome meeting and dinner would easily fill the afternoon/evening. Everything takes a lot longer with kids.

I agree. Doing anything with three children under four can be a major challenge, as I know from my own children.

Arriving on holiday with kids, I'm usually exhausted after the journey to the airport, the wait at the airport, keeping the kids amused on the plane and then the journey to the resort. Some holiday makers might have the energy to investigate the place on arrival; others would appreciate the kids taking a nap so they could do the same!

I can't for the moment find Kikoraton's phone analyses, but from the McCannfiles: Kate made 9 phone calls on the 28th from 14.30 onwards.
Gerry none, Gerry made four calls on the 29th. Kate five. None from either on the 30th. Duration of calls not given.

This is the mobile activity of Murat and GM in the days leading up to 3rd May 2007:

The poster who has examined the phone traffic is Kiko. Some time ago he posted up this very detailed analysis on here, this is a copy of that post. It starts from the alarm being raised and working backwards.

Kikoratton:

"Robert Murat turned his mobile back on after a long silent interval at 2320 on 3 May. One of his first calls was from Sergi Malinka, his computer guru. But at least one hour before KM raised the alarm, Sergi and his friends were chatting profusely by phone, leading me to wonder whether word of “something” had got out before the official announcement by Kate.
The vital piece of evidence, however, is this: RM’s mobile phone silence had begun at 1545 on 2 May, and ended at 2320 on 3 May just after KM’s shout. That’s 31h 35m of silence. Gerry had been taking numerous calls made to his voicemail box on 2 May, and effectively the last of these was at 1549. He postponed listening to this until around 2015, at which point he turned off his mobile. He took just one incoming call at 1224 on 3 May, then his mobile fell silent again until 2314. Since he didn’t make a single outgoing call during that period, and used voicemail to eliminate any possibility of identification of his callers, we can say that his period of silence (compare the figure with Murat’s) was of 31h 25m.
This is inexplicable unless you come to the conclusion that GM and RM were in cahoots, and the silence was akin to the military golden rule, of communications silence to avoid any possibility of compromise before the action kicks off.
I then consider in more detail those 12 voicemail messages which GM received on 2 May. The PJ never found out who they came from, but by any standards it was a busy eight hours for Gerry, no doubt with pen and paper in hand to take down detailed instructions and timings. As I’ve said, he postponed listening to the last two for some reason. KM’s claim that Gerry was so busy at work that he had to keep in touch with his department, is given the lie by the fact that he didn’t actually speak to anybody, and never responded with a single outgoing call.
Putting all of this together, I’m satisfied that the tragic event had not only taken place by 0800 on 2 May, but that sufficient time had passed between the event and 0800 on 2 May for Gerry to start to receive detailed plans beginning at that time.
So theoretically, death around 2345 on 1 May is still possible, although we have no indication of frantic phone communications during that night as we would expect. Which leads us neatly to those six contacts (texts or calls?) on KM’s mobile from 2216 – 2228 on that evening. (According to Mrs Fenn’s account, the crying of Madeleine started at 2230).
Might that really be the time of the tragedy? I doubt it. Look at it this way: wouldn’t we have expected some normal, “chatty” contact between the two McCanns and their Tapas chums, or with family, on 1 May and 30 April? We have absolutely none. 48 hours without mobile contact. I believe that represents 48 hours during which something very concealed was going on. And then suddenly Kate has to make six contacts in 12 minutes just before the long period when, according to Mrs Fenn , Maddie was crying. I don’t believe there is any logic which points to the tragic event happening at that time.

So I return to investigate the calls made by RM’s mobile, and in a 14 minute period between 2200 and 2214 I find six texts apparently being transmitted between his mobile and Michaela Walczuch’s. Now, as an inveterate ex-communications-intelligence jobsworth, I look at those bursts of six messages beginning at 2200 and ending at 2228 and I say “something fishy’s going on here.”
Putting this together with RM’s and Gerry’s coinciding 31-hour silences of the following day, I believe that Murat’s and Walczuch’s mobiles were being used to transmit stuff which was vital to the cover-up of a tragedy which had happened before 2200 on 1 May.
Going back still further, it can be noted that RM booked his flight on 30 April, that the same day was highlighted by phone communications between Jenny Murat and Exeter, and that he flew to Faro and arrived at PdL around 1130 on 1 May. And we should add to the mix an unexplained call to Jane Tanner at the ungodly hour of 0415 on 29 April.

That’s about 600 pages of the phone thread condensed into little more than one page"

There is also a call to jane tanners mobile at 4.30am in the morning on the 29th (I think) April. We are sure this call was from the garrods, their next door neighbours in the UK who arrived in Lagos on the 28th April, hired a car but did not arrive at the Ocean Club until the 30th April booked in a room with no kids but they brought kids. 2 days to drive from Lagos to PDL!!!I think not somehow...where did they go for 36 hours and why the call to JT at 4.30am the next morning

In the interest of integrity, it is very important we keep the facts as accurate as we possibly can here, to keep this website a source of accurate information, which it is and why it is now number one. [You must be registered and logged in to see this image.]

Tanner's phone call was in the very early hours of the 29th, at 4.12 am. No, it has not been confirmed that this was a call from the Gorrods (note the correct spelling, or people could look up the wrong person). I believe that this was only a suggestion, as there is no corresponding phone pings from anyone else in the main group. We need to keep an open mind here.

Kate's first signal is picked up at 14.30 on the 28th and her first call is at 10.16 on the 1st, a call that was later deleted.

Gerry's first signal is picked up at 10.13 on the 29th, which was a text message. The next time his phone is in use is on the morning of the 2nd, where he starts to receive a large number of voicemails starting at 8.07 am.

But where I think we need to delve into, is the timeframe between them being at the Millennium for dinner on the 28th and the time they all went their seperate ways to bed that very same night. Is there anything, anywhere, that describes these events? Thanks for the link to HiDeHo's analysis btw, this will be a great start. How many inconsistencies are there in everyone's statements for this period? Who talks about what they did that night and who does not?

They all agree they went to the Millennium sometime between 6 & 7pm, & spent about an hour there (buffet meal)

Kate: All tired, bath, pyjamas, milk, stories and bed (one hour later than normal)
G&K chat, read & bed.

Gerry: He and K had a bath and then settled in the lounge to watch TV. DP invited them to their apt for a glass of wine but they declined as they were tired. Nobody went anywhere that night.

DP: Can't remember what time they went to Millennium at, how long they stayed there or what they did later on.

DW: Thinks everyone went back to their apartments because everyone was tired.

FP: can't find anything

JT: Kids were cranky & tired, Matt was feeling ill, they went straight to bed

MO: Spent the night throwing up

RO: can't find anything

ROB: Went home early & put the kids to bed & didn't stay up too late, Matt was ill.

I did say 'we are sure....'...this is not saying it definitely was a fact. When analysing them in depth a few months we came to a conclusion that it was most likely to be them under the circumstances. Like with most things it was only a theory based on what we know. I'll make extra sure of my wording in future and double check it word for word, so nobody can ever get the wrong impression!!!

Molly wrote:They all agree they went to the Millennium sometime between 6 & 7pm, & spent about an hour there (buffet meal)

Kate: All tired, bath, pyjamas, milk, stories and bed (one hour later than normal)
G&K chat, read & bed.

Gerry: He and K had a bath and then settled in the lounge to watch TV. DP invited them to their apt for a glass of wine but they declined as they were tired. Nobody went anywhere that night.

DP: Can't remember what time they went to Millennium at, how long they stayed there or what they did later on.

DW: Thinks everyone went back to their apartments because everyone was tired.

FP: can't find anything

JT: Kids were cranky & tired, Matt was feeling ill, they went straight to bed

MO: Spent the night throwing up

RO: can't find anything

ROB: Went home early & put the kids to bed & didn't stay up too late, Matt was ill.

Excellent work Molly [You must be registered and logged in to see this image.]

We can already see based on the above, RO and FP does not mention that night in any shape or form. DP has a total lapse of memory and admits to it and 3 of them refer to Matt feeling unwell.

What I think is also interesting, is Kate seems to be saying that they all bathed before putting the children to bed, whereas Gerry seems to be saying he and Kate took a bath after putting the children to bed. [You must be registered and logged in to see this image.] Either way it seems going out came before bath time on the first night, but on all the other nights, going out came after bath time. A change of routine maybe? I would have thought after travelling all that way they would have been keen to freshen up before going out to dinner myself.

It would seem that none of them talk about having wine at the Millennium, which is strange. DP does not mention inviting Kate and Gerry back to their apartment for a drink. Then DP, FP and DW, does not mention having a drink in their own place.

I think we can see a few inconsistencies here already. What difference does it make to RoB if MO was feeling ill, did he really need to mention it?

as far as I can recall Kate took Maddie to the pool alone 28th April,there is no mention in the book of anyone else but them going into the water on this date. whether this is the case or not, this is not the date I associate with the poolside photo of Gerry Amelie and Madeleine. The stated date for that photo was later in the holiday, reported by media as early afternoon of 3 May, day she went missing. When it was actually taken and if it was altered as seems likely is another matter. Please enlighten me if I have dates mixed up or incorrect.

They seem to have been remarkably sociable all week, it's hard to understand how they'd arrive back home, put the kids to bed and not get together with the adults. The McCann kids were in bed one hour later than normal (8.45pm), this was the time they would meet for tapas every other night. It's the first night, surely everyone wants to meet & greet, catch up and enjoy some relaxation after the kids go to sleep.

Kate remembers chatting and reading, Gerry remembers watching TV and them both having baths. DP remembers nothing, not even inviting people to the apt and DW "thinks" everyone went to their own apartments. I find it amazing that during the interviews nobody was pinned down, it's the first night, the easiest of all to remember. Where did Kate get the Milk from? Did they buy anything else like NZ wine, nibbles?

You are absolutely right Molly, the first night is always the easiest to remember, as everything is so new and unfamiliar. Which is why I find their statements a bit like a skinny latte. [You must be registered and logged in to see this image.]

I remember posing something a while back, joking about their personal hygiene based on Kates book.....unless I was mistaken she made no mention of a bath that evening 28th and a quick wash the next morning before heading out [ not even a shower ]. After the journey I thought a shower at least ...would have been desired sometime not too long after their arrival in the resort.
Not mentioned in the book does not mean it did not happen, but such creatures of routine and the detailed descrition of their actions usually, I remember being surprised they didnt freshen up.
will have to get the book out of the library again.....dammit.

Thinking about it, neither Kate nor Gerry, seem to be the sort of people to take a bath ever, let alone in a hotel where some baths contain a multitude of germs. If they only ever showered, why mention the word bath in the first place?

A shower wakes you up, refreshes and takes very little time. A Bath is soothing, takes a lot longer and implies relaxation, sleep? Ugh, he's hardly implying they had a long intimate bath together? I need a shower.

30th April a very significant date imo.
In addition to the phone issue,
Maddie removed from creche pm, after 15 mins .
Maddie elsewhere, twins picked up at usual time.
Kate although describing the holiday as following pretty much a routine, still manages to describe most days.
May 2nd not much at all.
April 30th, mentions the tapas meal evening and before that a trip to buy a few items from the local supermarket.

and its the date the McCanns were reportedly seen in Sagres? No mention of any trip there other than the June one, in the bewk.
where was Maddie that afternoon after leaving creche and who was she with?