Nicholson designed a unique theme which incorporates a banner from the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children that updates automatically with pictures and details of missing kids. In that way, bloggers can show their support and help bring children home safely. Jackson designed a distinctive theme which gives families and friends the opportunity to set up a blog devoted solely to the search for their missing loved one. Both of these themes are available free and ready to be downloaded. The more bloggers that take advantage of these themes, the greater the chance that those who have gone missing will be found. “Blogs are simply the fastest and easiest way to broadcast information globally,” Bartol said. “Even children who have been taken into foreign countries can be recognized by people who have visited a blog with an alert displayed,” Nicholson proudly acclaims. “Together, we can make a difference in supporting this wonderful pursuit,” Jackson adds.

The polio survivor’s disappearance immediately raised suspicions of foul play.
How such cases are investigated, however, varies because the sheer volume of reports means police must prioritize them.
Most missing people eventually turn up - despite the certainty of family members who say their loved one would not just pick up and go.
Last year, TPD received 852 missing adult reports, and 802 of those people, or 94 percent, were found. This year about 129 adults have been reported missing.
Police consider several factors - including age, mental capacity or history of disappearance - in determining how extensively to investigate.
“They’re not always missing people, but just don’t want to be found,” said TPD Detective Greg Wright. “It could be that the individual that’s run away or simply missing doesn’t want contact with the family. We’ve encountered plenty of that.”
Before defining a missing persons case, Wright stressed, police must gauge how suspicious a case is.
“Not every case is assigned and worked,” Wright said. “That’s the only way we can manage the caseload.”
A detective 30 years ago might extensively work a case, but now vacation, compensatory time and staffing must be factored in.
Family frustration
Also missing is 62-year-old Elnora Charles, last seen Nov. 15 by son James Pulliam, 39. Pulliam gave her a ride to Gary’s Towing, 5131 E. Drexel Road, to pick up her car. Charles’ home is on North Country Club Road.
Pulliam reported her missing when she did not answer his phone call the next morning. Two days later, police found Charles’ car, a light-colored 1980 Chevrolet Caprice, on Mount Lemmon.
Police said they do not suspect foul play - although they do think her disappearance is suspicious. They have no suspects or leads, said Detective Bill Young. They were able to confirm reports by family members of Charles having a history of mental illness, but they don’t know if that played a role.
Police received a report from a family friend that Charles had been spotted in December, Young said.
“It’s a botched investigation by the TPD and the Sheriff’s Department,” said stepson James Lacy, 49, who still thanked those assisting in the search.
He said there is “no way our mother drove to Mount Lemmon,” and said his mother doesn’t have a history of instability.
TPD Sgt. Tony Sabori said investigators believe that Charles might have gone to Mount Lemmon.
The family wants clearer answers. Pulliam and Lacy said they were unhappy that they did not receive case information until several weeks after Charles was reported missing.
“It’s important to our family,” Pulliam said. “I’ve got kids that keep asking me every day: ‘What’s going on with grandma’s case?’ ‘’
Young said, “We’ve done as much on this case, if not more on this case, than any homicide investigation, even though it’s just a missing persons case.”
Privacy issues
Some families of missing people turn to private detectives. But even if detectives find the person, they sometimes can’t say that they found them.
Agencies have more stringent regulations related to privacy than in the past, Tucson private detective James MacIntyre said.
People are entitled to some privacy, he said, and a person found must be asked if he wants to be contacted. Law enforcement must also check the client’s motivation.
“You’ve got to look at the rights of not only the family or the unit that is reporting the person missing. You’ve got to respect the rights of the missing person as well,'’ MacIntyre said.
It is hard to say sometimes if family members of missing people are victims.
“If they feel they’re a victim, they feel they’re are a victim,” said Rick Trevaskis, who runs the private investigation service Metro Detectives, 2030 E. Broadway, Suite 24. “As far as the codes or the laws they might not specifically be a victim. They aren’t eligible for victims’ compensation.”
Trevaskis said investigators can work only with leads they have, and that families need to understand those limits.
“I can only guarantee them that we will work diligently toward their case,” he said. “If the results are not there, they will not come. That is a tough thing to deal with.”
As a private detective, Trevaskis may charge from $50 to $75 an hour on a case.
When a private investigator who knew Kay Read offered his services, the police did not provide information on the case, her brother, Wes Read, said.
TPD homicide detective Kevin Hall said police cannot stop families from hiring a private investigator. However, he pointed out legal pitfalls of having two investigations - duplicate interviews and possible contamination of evidence in a criminal case.
Families do not always agree with how law enforcement makes case decisions, especially when feelings run high. Some, said MacIntyre, might fear how law enforcement will handle the missing person if he or she is found.
“It’s a whole range of emotions,” he said. “It could be that the individual missing comes from a dysfunctional family. It’s a control situation sometimes.”
In Read’s case, family and police continue the search.
Read is described as 5 feet 5 inches, 120 pounds, with brownish-blond hair. The day of the disappearance, police said, someone tried unsuccessfully to use one of Read’s ATM cards at a local bank.
“It’s a case where we don’t know where we are going,” said Wes Read, 60, of Peoria, Ill. “We’re still grasping for straws.”
Despite that, Read said he wants police to allow not only the family but also willing volunteers to do more to help in the process.
“They keep us at bay, doing their job,” he said. “I’m not the type to sit back and be patient.”
Unsolved homicides are never closed, according to prosecutor Kathleen Mayer of the Pima County Attorney’s Office.
“Sometimes they (families) get frustrated, when they get repeat notices, and the cases don’t seem to get resolved,” Mayer said. “Agencies continue to work on them as they get more information, but they don’t always keep victims apprised of that.”
And sometimes in a missing-persons case, it can’t be established that a person was slain.
Mayer speaks with sympathy about the despair of never finding an answer.
“In my conversations with these families, it’s just the heartache of not knowing what happened to their loved ones.”

Nadia, who has been missing for the past two weeks, was last seen leaving her campus dormitory on March 9 at 11:30 p.m.

According to news reports, Nadia e-mailed a friend, saying she planned to go skating. But police said she left her wallet, cash and credit cards behind. She was wearing a long winter coat and boots when she was last seen, police said.

On Saturday, Nadia’s father Mohammed, spent seven hours yesterday with a small team and a search dog going through Carleton’s tunnel network. “Nothing, we didn’t find a single thing,” he said.

“We are currently interviewing friends and family and are looking at information from other sources, including video cameras,” Ottawa Police Sgt. Uday said. Police don’t suspect foul play was involved in her disappearance.

Nadia’s parents said Nadia wasn’t quite herself when she came home to Brampton over March break.

Dr. Ray Harron, who made a name for himself as an expert lung X-ray reader in asbestos and silicosis lawsuits, said CSX Transportation failed in legal documents to demonstrate that he acted with criminal intent when he diagnosed railroad workers with the incurable lung ailments.

His lawyers asked that all complaints against the doctor be dropped.

“The facts alleged in the (complaint) specifically regarding Dr. Harron neither support the claim that he had fraudulent intent nor a claim that he knowingly joined any RICO conspiracy,” his attorneys Jerald Jones of Clarksburg, Lawrence Goldman of New York City and Ron Barroso of Corpus Christi, Texas, wrote in court filings.

The response from Harron and his attorneys was a long time coming. In October, CSX’s law firm, Huntington-based Huddleston Bolen LLP, filed court documents stating they had spent months searching for Harron to serve him with papers in relation to the ongoing lawsuit. Firm employees couldn’t locate him. Neither could deputies with the Harrison County Sheriff’s Department. Private investigators also could not find the doctor even after searching his homes in North Carolina, Texas and Florida, according to court records.

In fact, lawyers with Huddleston were so worried about Harron’s whereabouts that they filed documents with the federal court in Wheeling, warning that the doctor — who has duel citizenship in Ireland, Jamaica and other Caribbean countries –might have fled overseas.

But earlier this year, Harron reappeared. He filed a response in U.S District Court Judge Frederick P. Stamp Jr.’s court challenging CSX’s claims against the doctor and demanding that the complaint be dropped. They also asked that the doctor be removed as a defendant from a lawsuit between CSX and a major Pittsburgh-area asbestos litigation firm, Peirce, Raimond & Coulter, also known as Robert Peirce & Associates.

The lawsuit, which was filed in 2005, alleges the Peirce firm filed numerous asbestosis claims against the railroad company on behalf of CSX employees, including several that the firm knew were improper.

The railroad company’s lawyers expanded the lawsuit in July 2005 to include Herron, who they said conducted bogus readings of thousands of employees’ chest X-rays and diagnosed lung diseases asbestosis and silicosis in some workers in exchange for getting paid a flat rate per X-ray.

In their court filings, Harron’s lawyers said CSX failed to prove those claims, saying there was no evidence Harron worked with anyone else or plotted to defraud the company or engage in any pattern of racketeering activity, nor did he have the “requisite state of mind” required for a RICO case.

“In order to commit a RICO conspiracy an individual ‘must adopt the goal of furthering or facilitating the criminal endeavor,’” the document stated, adding, “The amended complaint is devoid of specific factual allegations that show that Dr. Herron adopted or even was aware of any such ‘criminal endeavor’ by the lawyer-defendants.”

CSX directly rebuffed that statement in a response the company’s lawyers filed in federal court. The railroad’s response agreed that laws relating to RICO conspiracies require that defendants have a goal of furthering a criminal endeavor but pointed out there were many ways to do that, including by “agreeing to facilitate only some of the acts leading to the substantive offense.”

“It is not necessary for the defendant to know all of the details or the full extent of the conspiracy,” CSX’s lawyers wrote, later explaining that at a minimum their complaint presents enough facts that would allow a person to reasonably infer that Harron knew of the Peirce firm’s alleged scheme to pursue false personal injury claims against the railroad company.

“Harron worked with (the Peirce firm) for at least four years and was hired ‘because of his willingness to read unusually large numbers of X-rays at one time,’” CSX’s lawyers stated. “He was also compensated on a per X-ray, as opposed to hourly, basis, thereby enhancing his financial incentive to read as many X-rays as possible without regard to established medical protocols.”

Harron’s lawyers said CSX’s allegations of wire and mail fraud could not be substantiated because the railroad company had no way to prove the X-rays or the results mailed through U.S. Postal Service were false.

“The alleged misrepresentations, that the claimants had asbestosis and/or that their X-rays were consistent with asbestosis, were not ones plaintiff CSX could justifiably or reasonably rely upon in light of its access to information that would reveal these statements were false, if they were false,” Harron’s response stated.

Harron’s lawyers said CSX could have requested copies of the chest X-rays in question and have their own radiologist read them. But the company did not. As a result, Harron’s lawyers said, the railroad company cannot assert that that mail fraud or wire fraud took place.

Harron’s lawyers pointed out that CSX is challenging only 18 X-ray readings from nine people taken between 1999 and 2003.

“These claims are based on allegations that Dr. Harron ‘reversed’ his conclusions for nine individual claimants — initially reading their X-rays to show no asbestosis and then, sometime later, reading different X-rays to show asbestosis (albeit at the lowest level perceptible in a chest X-ray.)”

They said asbestosis is a progressive disease that gets worse over time. So, they said, it doesn’t prove anything if Harron read an X-ray once as testing negative for the disease and later read it as having positive signs of the ailment.

“It is entirely possible that Harron read both X-rays accurately and the individual’s disease had progressed in the intervening period,” his lawyers wrote. “This is especially likely since the second B-reads by Dr. Harron always showed the lowest possible level of lung damage to support a finding consistent with asbestosis, not a level consistent with significant or advanced disease.”

CSX’s lawyers beseeched Stamp to not grant Harron’s requests. The company’s lawyers said requests for dismissal are “not warranted unless it appears to a certainty that the plaintiff would be entitled to no relief under any state of facts which could be proven in support of a claim.”

CSX’s lawyers said Harron’s lawyers mischaracterize the nature of the RICO and fraud allegations and “impermissibly relies on facts beyond the scope of the amended complaint.”

“Specifically Harron’s motion assumes that (the Peirce firm) complied with the mediation order and provides CSXT with the X-rays on which the fraudulent claims were based during the course of the underlying litigation even though the amended complaint contains no such allegations,” CSX’s response to Harron reads, adding, “More importantly, even assuming that (the Peirce firm) produced a single X-ray on which each fraudulent claim was based and that this fact is properly before the Court, which it clearly is not, Harron’s assertion that ‘CSX could easily have’ discovered the existence of fraud ‘by having a different radiologist read’ the X-rays is simply incorrect.

“At most, an independent review of the X-rays would have revealed that Harron’s diagnoses were questionable. It would not, however, have revealed that Harron had reversed his own prior diagnoses despite the objectively unchanged condition of the claimants’ lungs, nor would it have revealed the egregiously high rate at which Harron identified asbestosis in the X-rays he read for (the Peirce firm.)”

But police said they were unable to corroborate the employee’s account so they have not publicized the information. The employee’s description of the man’s clothing also did not match what Fleischmann was wearing, said Julie Hill, a police spokeswoman.

“We have talked to hundreds of people … including Fuel Pizza employees,” said Hill. “They talked to every business, taxi cab, you name it. They have canvassed all over the place.”

Fleischmann’s father, Richard, and a private investigator told the Observer Sunday that workers had seen Fleischmann at Fuel Pizza before it closed at 3 a.m. They heard that last week while talking to workers at the restaurant, according to the private investigator, Joe Paonessa.

Kyle Fleischmann went with a group of friends to the Buckhead Saloon for drinks late Thursday, Nov. 8. His friends left between 11 p.m. Thursday and 1 a.m. Friday, but Fleischmann stayed.

Fleischmann called his sister, Noelle, and hung up without leaving a message about 2:20 a.m., Paonessa said. He left Buckhead alone a few minutes later.

Fleischmann began making more calls around 3 a.m., but got no one. Cell phone signals indicate he was still in the uptown area, Paonessa said.

Fleischmann was discovered missing after he failed to show up for work Nov. 9. Anyone with information should call police at 704-336-3949 or Crime Stoppers at 704-334-1600.

The challenge was part of “declarations” made by over 25 participants, drawn from the West African sub-region, who recently concluded a-three-day training works hop on “An Understanding of the African Human Rights System,” held at the Paradise Suites Hotel in Gambia.

The journalists further called for “the requisition of the state parties concerned to report any action they have taken on murder cases of journalists.

“That the African Commission should this year, 2008, declare an annual ‘African Press Day,’ during which certificates and awards be given for best practices, (like the day Dele Giwa was murdered in Nigeria).”

It was also declared that the commission should “consider the disadvantaged and less privileged people, such as women, children and other vulnerable groups of persons, who continue to suffer worst form of human rights abuses unimaginable on t he African continent.”

The program, organized by the commission’s secretariat, with funding from Open Society Initiative for West Africa (OSIWA), dealt mainly with human rights journalism, focusing on the African Charter on Human and People’s Rights and the work of the African Commission.

By Friday afternoon, investigators found no further evidence and will end the investigation, according NMSU Police Chief Jaime Chavez.

“While there was no new information to cause this review, NMSU remains concerned about all students, faculty and staff and will actively pursue unsolved cases,” Chavez said.

NMSU would not confirm what cold case they are investigating, but the address where investigators were seen digging — 714 Standley Drive — matches the last known address for Edyth Warner, then 35, and her then-11-year-old son, Nicholas Smith, who disappeared Feb. 23, 1991.

The case is the only missing persons investigation at NMSU since the remains of Joanne Dodge, an NMSU student who went missing in 1981, were found in 2005 in her car submerged in Burn Lake.

Warner, an art student, and her son left their home by foot the day they disappeared. Warner left behind her car and 3-year-old son, Andrew. She took almost $1,000 in cash and $10,000 in gold coins, according to statements her husband made to police.

Henry Warner, Edyth Warner’s husband at the time, thought when she disappeared she might have taken her son to visit family in California. The couple was having marital problems. The two were missing for about a week before he reported it.

In 1991, investigators were quoted as saying they didn’t suspect foul play.

Randle Dewees, Edyth’s father, said he had been contacted by NMSU police about reopening the case.

“I’m glad,” Dewees said, said in a phone interview from his California home Friday. “Maybe they’ll stumble onto something.”

Dewees, 84, still alert, has kept meticulous notes on the case, and has been a critic of how police originally handled it in 1991.

“The old hands had no interest in this,” Dewees said. “But this is the second or third time it’s been brought up (to reinvestigate).”

Since 1991, he has visited Las Cruces several times to talk with police. His last visit was in October 2004. He has spent $25,000 to $30,000 on lawyers and private investigators, he said. He hired two psychics in attempt to find his daughter. Strangely, both psychics directed them to search an area in the desert about 12 miles north of Las Cruces.

Dewees said he has never been hopeful the pair would be found.

For years, Dewees said, he maintained a contact list for people who had lived near 714 Standley Drive at the time of his daughter’s disappearance. He said he has since lost track of most of them because they’ve moved several times.

Dewees also kept track of Warner, who officially divorced Edyth Warner, but now has only a vague idea of where he lives. He said he hasn’t seen his other grandson, Andrew, since the disappearance.

He believes Andrew does not know of his maternal grandfather.

Dewees said he talked with two officers on Friday and that they will be visiting him at his California home on Monday.

Renee Ruelas-Venegas can be reached at rruelas@lcsun-news.com

It was the day his Spanish private detective agency, Metodo 3 – paid an estimated £50,000 a month to help find Madeleine – moved from cramped premises above a grocer’s shop specializing in sausages in Barcelona’s commercial district to a multi-million-pound site of offices in a grand villa on one of the city’s most prestigious boulevards.

When a taxi driver drops me off at Metodo’s new premises, he tilts his finger against the tip of his nose and says “pijo” – meaning stuck-up or snobbish. Pointing to the restaurant on the ground floor, he says: “That’s where people who like to show off go – so others can see their Rolex watches and designer clothes.”

It is in his office on the second floor that Marco has agreed to meet me, the first British journalist, he says, to whom he has ever granted an interview. When I point out that he was filmed by a Panorama documentary crew in November claiming he was “very, very close to finding the kidnapper” of Madeleine, he corrects himself: “Well, apart from that.” Marco will tell me later how who he has spoken to, and what he has or has not said, has been misunderstood.

But first I must wait, taking a seat at a long, highly polished boardroom table surrounded by pristine white-leather chairs. At one end of the room, discreetly lit shelves display an impressive collection of vintage box cameras and binoculars. Stacked against the walls are modern paintings waiting to be hung. It feels more like an art gallery than the hub of one of the most frantic manhunts of modern times.

There is no discernible ringing of telephones; little sign of activity of any kind, other than a woman searching for a lead to take a pet poodle for a walk and the occasional to-ing and fro-ing of workmen putting finishing touches to the sleek remodelling of the office complex.

It is not clear whether this is where the hot lines for any information about Madeleine are answered. Opposite the boardroom is an open-plan area of around half a dozen cubicles, equipped with banks of phones and computers. Most are empty when I arrive; admittedly it is lunch time. But I cannot ask about this.

“We won’t answer any questions about Maddie. Maddie is off limits – is that understood?” Marco’s cousin Jose Luis, another of the agency’s employees, warns me sternly.

Catching me eyeing the setup, he is quick to explain that Metodo 3, or M-3, bought the premises earlier last year. Though I say nothing, I get the distinct impression he wants to make it clear that this was before M-3 persuaded those involved in decisions regarding the £1m Find Madeleine Fund – partially made up of donations from the public and partly from business backers such as Brian Kennedy – to sign a six-figure, six-month contract with the firm, whose financial fortunes now seem assured by the worldwide publicity they’ve since received.

“All the remodeling work took months, so we only moved in on December 14,” he says, hesitating slightly before adding: “Moving is better at Christmas.” The implication that this was a quiet period for M-3 is strange, as it was exactly the time Marco is reported to have said his agency was “hoping, God willing” that Madeleine would be imminently reunited with her family. Marco has since denied he said this.

I cannot ask him to clarify what he did say, or whether talking about an ongoing investigation is potentially detrimental. Instead, I am left to discuss the matter with a handful of other private detective agencies in Barcelona, the private-eye capital of Spain. What they tell me is disturbing.

I expect a certain amount of rivalry, and some of what they say about M-3 could be dismissed as jealous gossip. But they claim otherwise.

They say there is nothing they would like more than to see M-3 succeed in solving the mystery of Madeleine’s disappearance. But they worry that M-3’s inflated claims of progress in the case is making a laughing stock of the rest of them. References to Inspector Clouseau cut deep. They are proud that, unlike their UK counterparts, Spanish private detectives have to be vetted and licensed. They must also have a specialized university degree in private investigation. More importantly, in a profession where discretion is critical, they worry about the effect of such public declarations on the progress of any investigation. It is in the days following reports that the Find Madeleine Fund is considering sacking M-3 that I talk to Marco – though of course I cannot discuss this with him.

Clarence Mitchell, the spokesman for Kate and Gerry McCann, Madeleine’s parents, says he believes M-3 “put themselves forward” for the task, as did a number of other companies. Just a week after the four-year-old’s disappearance from the McCanns’ holiday apartment in Praia da Luz in the Algarve on May 3 last year, Portuguese police had announced that official searches were being wound down. Initially, the British security company Control Risks Group, a firm founded by former SAS men, was called on for advice. Mitchell confirms that the company is still “assisting in an advisory capacity”, but he says that the reason the

Spanish detective agency was hired was because of Portugal’s “language and cultural connection” with Spain. “If we’d had big-booted Brits or, God forbid, Americans, we’d have had doors slammed in our face, and it’s quite likely we could have been charged with hindering the investigation, as technically it’s illegal in Portugal to undertake a secondary investigation,” Mitchell explains. “But because it’s Metodo 3, [Alipio] Ribeiro [national director of Portugal’s Policia Judiciara] is turning a blind eye.” Portuguese police are reported to dismiss M-3 as “small fry”.

Mitchell says the decision to hire M-3 on a six-month contract from September was taken “collectively” by Gerry McCann, and the family’s lawyers and backers, on the grounds that the agency had the manpower, profile and resources to work in several countries. “You can argue now whether it was the right decision or not,” he says, referring to widespread reports that M-3 will find its contract terminated in March – if it hasn’t been already – and not just because the Find Madeleine Fund is dwindling. “But operationally Metodo 3 are good on the ground,” he insists.

It was M-3, for instance, who recently commissioned a police artist to draw a sketch of the man they believe could be involved in Madeleine’s disappearance, despite Portuguese-police claims that the sketch had “no credibility”.

Clearly, the McCanns are desperate to keep Madeleine’s disappearance in the public eye. And the release of photofits by M-3 will help to achieve this. The McCanns insist, however, that they are not engaged in a bidding war for interviews with American television.

But when 35-year-old Marco finally breezes into his company boardroom and throws himself into a chair opposite me, I do not get the impression that the prospect of losing the contract that has brought his company such notoriety is playing much on his mind.

Marco slaps on the table a 144-page pre-prepared dossier of articles written in the Spanish press about himself and M-3. He goes on to list some of those in the city he says I have already been speaking to about his company. Had my movements been monitored? If so, why would a private detective agency be interested in this at a time when they were supposed to be tirelessly searching for the most famous missing child in the world? This confounds me until, after talking to Marco for half an hour, I conclude that what motivates him – as much as, if not more than, his professed desire to present Madeleine with the doll he boasts he carries around in his briefcase to hand to her when he finds her – is a sense of self-regard, self-publicity and money.

In most of the many pictures of himself included in the material he hands me, Marco looks a little nerdy. He wears the same serious expression, slightly askew glasses and suit and tie in nearly all of them. But when we meet he has a more debonair look. He is wearing a black polo-neck jumper underneath a sports jacket, sharper, and better-adjusted half-rimmed glasses, and a fringe that looks as though it has been blow-dried. It is as if his image of how a suave private eye should be has finally been realized.

In contrast to the other private eyes I meet, however, Marco is anything but relaxed. While most of them sit back easily in their chairs, trying to size me up, Marco leans towards me as we talk. He presses his hands hard on the table, almost in a prayer position, to emphasize a point, and has an intense, slightly unnerving stare.

He seems eager to please. He summons a female assistant on several occasions to bring me material, including a book he has recently written, to illustrate what he is talking about. Even when I make it clear this is not necessary – aware that these distractions eat into the time we have to talk – he insists, partly showing off.

When I ask about his background, Marco summons her to photocopy the first pages of his doctoral thesis on private investigation: he has a master’s degree and a PhD in penal law. He gets strangely agitated when she can’t find it, telling her to carry on looking, then mutters that he will have to look for it himself. Eventually he starts to reminisce about his youth. As a teenager, Marco says, he was so keen to become a private detective that he would get up at 5am to follow people on his scooter and record their movements before starting and after finishing his studies. His mother, Maria “Marita” Fernandez Lado, founded M-3 in 1986, when he was a boy, and he used to help out in the agency every holiday.

I hear several different accounts of what Marita was doing before she set up the agency. According to her son, she was working on a fashion magazine when, by chance, through Marco and his brother’s boyhood love of sailing, she met and became friends with a private detective. “From that moment, she decided she wanted to create her own detective agency, and wanted it to be a big company with big cases, a real business. She wanted to change the public image of a small private detective concerned with infidelities,” Marco says.

In Spain, private eyes are sometimes called huelebraguetas – “fly [zip] sniffers”. One of the reasons Barcelona has always been the home of so many of them, Marco explains, is that Catalonia – traditionally one of the wealthiest regions in Spain – had many rich families wanting to safeguard their inheritance. So parents would employ “fly sniffers” to check out the backgrounds of the people their sons or daughters wanted to marry. M-3 took a different track. It started specialising in investigating financial swindles, industrial espionage and insurance fraud. His mother was the first private detective, Marco says, to provide video evidence used in court to unmask an insurance fraudster: she filmed a man reading who had claimed to be blind. Marco also speaks about how in the early 1990s his mother had helped advise the Barcelona police, who were setting up a new department dedicated to investigating gambling and the welfare of children. He says his mother advised them on how to track adolescents who had run away from home, helping them to trace 15 or 16 of them at that time. (It is when I try to bring the interview back to this subject, to see if these were the children the agency has talked about finding in the past, that the interview grinds to a halt.)

But the agency almost came to grief early on, when police raided its offices, and Marco, his mother, father and brother were arrested and briefly jailed in 1995 on charges of phone-tapping and attempting to sell taped conversations. They were never prosecuted, as it was clear that the police had entrapped them.

Their big break came nearly 10 years later, when M-3 was credited with tracking down one of Spain’s most-infamous spies, Francisco Paesa, a notorious arms dealer and double agent also known as “El Zorro” (The Fox) and “the man with a thousand faces”. Paesa fled Spain after being charged with money-laundering. His family claimed he died in Thailand in 1998 and arranged for Gregorian masses to be sung for his soul for a month at a Cistercian monastery in northern Spain. Acting for a client who claimed to have been defrauded by Paesa’s niece, M-3 traced the fugitive to Luxembourg. At the behest of the Spanish national newspaper El Mundo, the agency then traced him to Paris. Paesa remains on the run, however.

“This was just one of our great achievements. Our biggest successes have never been made public,” boasts Marco. “If you speak to other detectives in Spain, I don’t think they will speak very highly of us because they are envious. But as far as other detectives around the world are concerned, we are the biggest, the most famous; the ones who work well.”

Again in collaboration with El Mundo, and again by following an illegal money trail, M-3 last year tracked down the daughter of the wanted Nazi war criminal Aribert Heim to a farm in Chile. “This was pro-bono work, and we only do it when we have time,” says Marco. The hard-pressed detective did have time just before Christmas, however, to launch a book he had co-written with a Spanish journalist. The book claims that clients of M-3 sacked directors of a charity involved in sponsoring children in the Third World, were victims of a plot to discredit them by people associated with a Spanish branch of Oxfam who were jealous that the public was giving them large donations. The sacked directors are still under investigation for fraud.

It is perhaps because Marco has spent so much time collaborating with journalists in the past that he feels so comfortable talking to the press – the Spanish press, at least – about his investigation into Madeleine McCann. In November he gave two lengthy interviews about the case, one to El Mundo and another to a Barcelona newspaper, La Vanguardia.

In the interview with El Mundo, Marco talks touchingly about how his six-year-old son asks him the same question every evening when he kisses him goodnight: “Papa, have you found Maddie?” Because the little boy is learning to read, the article continues, he knows that his father is “the most famous detective in the world”.

But why, the journalist Juan Carlos de la Cal asks, would anyone in the UK, “the country of Sherlock Holmes, with all its cold-war spies and one of the most reliable secret services in the world”, have chosen M-3 to help? “Because we were the only ones who proposed a coherent hypothesis about the disappearance of their daughter,” Marco replies, explaining that M-3’s “principal line of inquiry” at that time – the article was published on November 25 – was “paedophiles”. He talks about how he “cried with rage” when he investigated on the internet how paedophiles operate.

Apart from these comments made by Marco, little concrete is known about how M-3 has been conducting its investigation. In the same article, Marco’s mother says the agency, which she claims has located 23 missing children in the past, has “20 or so” people working exclusively on the McCann case. M-3 was said at that time to be receiving an average of 100 calls a day “from the four quarters of the globe”, and to have half a dozen translators answering them in different languages. The agency has distributed posters worldwide bearing Madeleine’s picture with the telephone number of a dedicated hotline it has set up to receive tip-offs. The interview was carried out just after Marco returned from a two-week trip to Morocco, a country he describes as being known for child-trafficking and a “perfect” place to hide a stolen child. The north receives Spanish TV, he says, but the rest of Morocco knows nothing about the affair.

Yet in an interview published three weeks earlier in the newspaper La Vanguardia, Marco claimed that the agency had “around 40 people, here and in Morocco” working on the case, on the hypothesis that the child was smuggled out of Portugal, via the Spanish port of Tarifa, to Morocco, “where a blonde girl like Madeleine would be considered a status symbol”. At that time he said he didn’t want to think about paedophilia being involved. Asked how often his agency contacts the McCanns with updates, Marco replies “daily”. He adds that the fee that M-3 is charging for its services is not high. He says that it is “symbolic”.

In the same article – accompanied by a photograph of Marco holding a Sherlock Holmes-style hat – he says with absolute certainty that Madeleine is alive. “If I didn’t think she was alive, I wouldn’t be looking for her!” At first he states categorically that he will find her before M-3’s six-month contract runs out in March. But also in the same article the journalist explains that Marco proposes taking him out to dinner if he does not find the missing four-year-old before April 30. Unless all such statements are “misunderstandings”, Marco is in danger of leaving everyone with hopes that are not fulfilled.

When I start to touch on these themes – the claim, for instance, that M-3 traces around 300 missing people a year – Marco is quick to clarify. He says that, of the 1,000 or so investigations his agency undertakes every year, “between 100 and 200 involve English people who owe money and have fled England for Spain; the same with Germans, etcetera, etcetera”. This makes it sound as if much of the agency’s work

is little more than aiding bailiffs or debt-collecting, though I do not believe this to be the case. But when I ask him to elaborate on the 23 missing children his mother is reported to have said the agency has located in the past, Marco eases himself away from the table for the first time, tilting far back in his chair. He cannot talk about that on the grounds of confidentiality, he says. Shortly after this, his cousin Jose Luis, who has sat mostly silent until now, calls time on the interview with a chopping motion of his hand.

As I leave M-3’s office I pass another door discreetly announcing it is that of a private Swiss bank. As I take a seat in the restaurant downstairs for lunch, I notice Marco’s father, Francisco Marco Puyuelo, sitting close by. I nod at him and smile. He does not smile back. I have heard unsettling reports about Puyuelo.

He is rather menacing-looking, and I feel uncomfortable as he sits staring at me, slowly spooning chocolate ice cream into his mouth.

It is easy to feel a little paranoid in Barcelona. Nearly every quarter seems to have its own private detective agency. Offices are prominently advertised; on the short ride in from the airport

I pass four. The city’s yellow-pages directory has six sides of listings. According to Catalonia’s College of Private Detectives, the professional association to which private detectives working in the region are obliged to belong, of the estimated 2,900 licensed private eyes in Spain – around 1,500 of them actively working – 370 are in Catalonia, mostly Barcelona.

The city has traditionally had a prestigious record for private investigation. One of Spain’s most well-known detectives, Eugenio Velez-Troya, was based in Barcelona, where he helped set up the first university course in private investigation, covering subjects such as civil and criminal law, forensic analysis and psychology.

One of the largest private detective agencies in Spain, Grupo Winterman, founded by Jose Maria Vilamajo more than 30 years ago, is based in Barcelona, though the company now has 10 offices in different cities with a staff of around 150. Vilamajo is the only detective prepared to talk on the record; the others prefer to remain anonymous for fear of professional reprisal. He talks about how Barcelona came to have so many private detectives, pointing out that competition in the field is now so intense that it is pushing individual agencies to “specialise”.

Vilamajo is the only private detective apart from Marco to receive me in a spacious company boardroom, which, it strikes me, might be the model on which Metodo 3, anticipating rapid expansion, is basing its new office setup.

I meet the other private eyes either in bars or in their more modest premises, with more cloak-and-dagger decor, though nearly all have an impressive array of certificates praising their work. One has the theme music from the film The Godfather as a mobile-phone ring tone.

All talk of the “different way” M-3 has of operating from other agencies in the city. Most of what they say I have no way of substantiating. Traditionally, they say, M-3 has wined and dined clients more than others, sometimes holding grand “round-table” suppers to which it invites important figures in the community.

One ageing sleuth slides across the table a Spanish newspaper article entitled “Detectives with marketing” , in case I might have missed it. A short piece referring to the book Marco recently co-wrote about the alleged charity conspiracy, it makes the point that the book “is another step in the direction of incorporating marketing into the business of private investigation”.

When I ask what’s wrong with a business marketing itself, my question elicits a long sigh. Suddenly I can see that underlying much of the rancour M-3’s rivals feel towards it is a sense that they are not “old-school gumshoes” working in the shadows. One of their criticisms of Marco is that “he doesn’t know much about the street. He’s good at theory. He’s like a manager, always dressed up in a suit and tie”.

So he has a team of others to do the legwork, I argue. Another long sigh. “Not as many as he claims,” comes the response. On this point, all those I speak to agree. None believes M-3’s claims that it has 40 people working on the hunt for Madeleine, since the maximum number M-3 employs in its Barcelona office, they believe, is a dozen, with another few in its Madrid branch.

But again, I point out, it could have any number of operatives working for it in other countries, namely Portugal and Morocco.

My comment draws a weary smile. Metodo 3 company records for the six years up to 2005 appear to show a decline in the number of permanent employees listed – from 26 in 1999 to just 12 in 2005 – although there could be some accounting explanation for this.

Perhaps the most worrying of the detectives’ concerns is the consistent complaint that M-3 is using its involvement in the search for Madeleine to raise its profile and that Marco’s statements about how close he is to finding the child could be seriously prejudicing attempts to find out the truth. “If the agency fails to solve the mystery of Madeleine’s disappearance, that failure will be forgotten in a few years,” said one. “But M-3 will be famous and, ultimately, that is what they want.”

“They are making us look ridiculous,” says another detective. “The English are looking at us and laughing and we are very worried, very upset about it. They [M-3] are denigrating the ethics of our profession.”

To seek guidance on how private detectives are expected to behave, I visit the president of Catalonia’s College of Private Detectives: Jose Maria Fernandez Abril. After making the point that he is unable to speak about any individual member of his professional association, he proceeds to carefully read me a statement that begins: “Following the media impact of affairs in which detectives belonging to the college are involved…” It clearly echoes the concerns that others I have spoken to voice about the conduct of Metodo 3.

“No general conclusions should be drawn about the profession from the actions of any individual,” Abril reads, before helpfully explaining that this means: “You can’t go around saying you are the best in the world, implying that everyone else is somehow worse.”

More importantly, there are repeated references to how members are obliged to comply with the college’s strict code of conduct, which includes: not stating with certainty the result of an investigation and not revealing information about an investigation without agreeing it first with the client.

In other words, if M-3 was to argue that announcing just when it believed it would find Madeleine would help its investigation, the announcement should have been cleared with the McCanns. Given the deep dismay Gerry McCann is reported to have expressed over Marco’s comments about how close the agency was to finding his daughter’s kidnappers and about her being reunited with her family for Christmas, it seems unlikely any agreement over such statements was ever made.

As I leave, Abril informs me that the college has in recent years organised an annual “Night of the Detectives” supper. This year it will be held in March. He invites me to attend. At the supper, various prizes are presented. Among them is one for the fiction author they believe has contributed most to the public understanding of investigative work. This year they have awarded the prize to Dan Brown, author of the worldwide bestseller The Da Vinci Code.

They are a little hurt that he has not replied to, or even acknowledged, their invitation to attend.All this could be almost funny if I were not constantly aware that the reason I have come to Barcelona is because an exhausted little girl enjoying a family holiday went to sleep in pink pyjamas alongside her twin brother and sister on the night of May 3 last year, then disappeared. The anguish and desperation of her parents account for the Spanish detective-agency’s lucrative contract. The boasting and apparent false hopes fed to them by Marco could yet prove to be his downfall.

Rossana Miliani was last seen on Dec. 7, 2005, in Bryson City. The 26-year-old had told her family she was going hiking.

Little else was known until a store clerk called a private investigator handling the case after reading about Miliani on the second anniversary of her disappearance.

Private investigator Steve Siske said the clerk told him Miliani came into her store that day with a white man she thought was about 60 years old. They bought a backpack, and Miliani seemed nervous, Siske said the clerk told him on Dec. 13.

When Hilton was arrested, Siske said he noticed similarities between Miliani’s case and that of slain Georgia hiker Meredith Emerson.

Hilton has been charged with murder in the 24-year-old’s death.

He also is suspected in the killing of Irene Bryant and disappearance and presumed death of her husband.

John Bryant, 80, and Irene Bryant, 84, disappeared Oct. 21 after leaving for a hike in the Pink Beds area of Pisgah National Forest.

Siske said he briefed officials with the Swain County Sheriff’s Office and the Bryson City Police Department on Miliani’s case Monday.

Officers there said they are now helping the N.C. State Bureau of Investigation.

SBI agents are “considering the possibility of a connection,” agency spokeswoman Noelle Talley said. She declined to discuss any details.

The Bryson City store clerk declined to comment Monday, saying she is waiting to talk to police first.

Anibal Miliani, the missing woman’s father, said he hopes the Hilton case will bring new information, even if it means the worst.

“It has been an ordeal,” he said. “It would be some type of closure.”

Rossana Miliani had traveled to Western North Carolina from her home in south Florida to go hiking, her father said.

Miliani said his daughter called him from the Ramada Inn on the Cherokee Indian Reservation on Dec. 7. He reported her missing on Dec. 20 to the Broward County Sheriff’s Office in Florida. He also filed a report with the Asheville Police Department.

The last transaction on her bank account was Dec. 7 at the IGA Reservation Foodliner in Cherokee. The day before she paid for a cab in Asheville with a bank card and made a purchase at the Red Barn in Waynesville.

Private investigator Siske said he has asked the Byrson City store clerk not to talk to anyone about the case or look at Hilton’s picture before she views a photo lineup to try to determine if the man she saw that day was Hilton.

He said the clerk remembers the man bought a used suit and said something that also appears connected to the allegations against Hilton.

“He tells her ‘I am a traveling preacher. I go from campground to campground,’” Siske said.

Hilton, a 61-year-old drifter, is a suspect in three killings involving park and forest areas.

Authorities have said he led them to Emerson’s decapitated body Jan. 7 in the Dawson Forest Management Area in northern Georgia, about 2 1/2 hours from Bryson City.

Florida officials also have enough evidence to charge Hilton in the killing of Cheryl Hodges Dunlap, 46, whose body was found Dec. 19 in a Florida’s Apalachicola National Forest, state Attorney Willie Meggs said.

Authorities say a masked person suspected in Dunlap’s death used her ATM card three times after her disappearance.

Someone used the Bryants’ bank card to withdraw $300 in Ducktown, Tenn., shortly after their disappearance.

Police in Ormond Beach, Fla., also said Hilton is a person of interest in a killing and dismemberment of a 27-year-old man found Dec. 6 near Tomoka State Park.

Police in February 2006 found Miliani’s luggage in a storage unit. She had paid for one month but never returned.

Still missing are a camera, mobile phone and sleeping bag she bought in Asheville.

She is bipolar. Her family is offering a $5,000 reward.

Siske said similarities — the hiking and forest elements, the backpack purchased in Bryson City, the man’s comment to the store clerk about traveling from campground to campground, and the relatively close distance between the crime scenes — might add up to nothing.

“Is it Gary Michael Hilton? I don’t know,” he said. “But this is just too circumstantial. If it is not Gary Michael Hilton, we need to be looking for who this person is.”
Do you have information?

Contact local law enforcement if you have information about the disappearance of Rossana Miliani on Dec. 7, 2005, in Bryson City or call her father Anibal Miliani at 305-301-0280.

On December 22nd, Josh Szostak went out to hit the Albany bars with some friends. He parked outside the Elbo Room on Delaware and Morton. The group later went to the Bayou café downtown. After midnight, he separated from his friends - and vanished.

“So one of the things I’d like to urge to the general public is to stop and think about where they were the Saturday before Christmas,” Anastasi said. “Where were they that Saturday night? Were they at the Elbo Room? Were they at the Bayou Cafe?”

It’s believed Josh left the Bayou café in downtown, stood at this spot for a matter of minutes looking at his phone, and then he walked along North Pearl Street. Private Investigators say after that someone saw something but has yet to report it, possibly because they fear going to the police.

“A lot of times when we’re interviewing people on the street they are a lot more comfortable talking with us on the street because we aren’t law enforcement,” Anastasi said.

So, his agency has created an email address to send info to, as well as an anonymous non-law enforcement tip line that he says has produced dozens of leads.

The search continues in Albany on Wednesday for Joshua Szostak. Our Britt Godshalk sat down in an exclusive interview with the private investigator hired by the family.

“And we’re following up every single lead that we get,” he said.

Still, there is an element of the case that has continued to mystify everyone involved. The same night Josh disappeared, a Department of Environmental Conservation vehicle was left damaged and abandoned at the Port of Albany. It had been stolen from a downtown garage, steps from where Josh’s cell phone was found. Albany police say they believe there’s a connection although they say they lack the evidence to support that theory. Anastasi is not so sure.

“There’s a million different explanations as to why that phone could have been near the vehicle,” Anastasi said. “You’re talking about a 21 year old boy, man I should say, who had no criminal record whatsoever. He’s not a criminal element. We’re waiting on further DNA evidence and when those come back it will provide us with further leads on this.”

For now, investigators must depend on science… while they wait for that critical lead from the streets.

In the morning, Albany Police will be using recently donated sonar equipment to search the Hudson River. A reward is also being offered.

That tipline number is (518) 424-7236. You can also call the private investigators directly at (518) 424 4700 or email at locatejosh@yahoo.com. Again, all three are not connected with the police and all calls will remain anonymous.