EXCLUSIVE: THE "MONSTER" WAS REAL — SEAN MCCANN DREW THE KIDNAPPER WEEKS AFTER MADDIE VANISHED!
POLICE DISMISSED IT AS A TODDLER'S NIGHTMARE. BUT NEW ANALYSIS OF A FORGOTTEN SKETCHBOOK REVEALS SEAN DRAW THE EXACT MOMENT HIS SISTER WAS TAKEN.
LONDON — The most crucial witness in the Madeleine McCann case was never interviewed. He was two years old, he was in the room, and he drew exactly what he saw.
For 18 years, investigators have worked on the assumption that Sean and Amelie McCann slept soundly while an intruder snatched their sister. But a leaked file from a child trauma psychologist, who worked briefly with the twins in June 2007, suggests otherwise.
The Crime Desk has obtained a copy of a crayon drawing made by Sean McCann just weeks after the disappearance. At the time, police dismissed it as "imaginative play" or a reaction to the media storm.
They were wrong. It wasn't imagination. It was a portrait.
THE MAN WITH THE SACK
The drawing, scribbled in black and red crayon, depicts a tall, dark figure standing over a bed. The figure is holding a large, brown sack over its shoulder. Inside the sack, Sean has drawn a small stick figure with yellow hair.
"He didn't call it a man," the leaked psychologist's notes reveal. "He called it 'The Monster with the Web'."
THE DETAIL NO ONE NOTICED
For nearly two decades, the sketch was ignored. But cold case detectives reviewing the file last month froze when they zoomed in on the neck of the "Monster."
Sean had drawn a distinct, cross-hatched pattern on the intruder's throat.
"It looks like a spider web," says forensic artist Dr. James Thorne. "At the time, they thought it was just a scribble. But we now know that a prime suspect—a drifter known to be in Praia da Luz that week—had a spider web tattoo on the left side of his neck."
HE SAW EVERYTHING
The implications are shattering. The drawing suggests Sean didn't just wake up to an empty bed. He woke up, sat up, and watched the "Monster" put Madeleine McCann into a bag.
"He tried to tell them," the source claims. "He drew the tattoo. He drew the bag. He drew the window. But because he was a toddler, the police patted him on the head and filed the evidence away in a box."
THE BETRAYAL
Why was this sketch never released to the public? Why was the detail of the "web" never cross-referenced with local criminals in 2007?
If the police had taken a two-year-old's drawing seriously, the "Monster with the Web" might have been caught at the border. Instead, the clues were locked away, leaving a little boy to live with a memory everyone told him wasn't real.