Dr Totman I Presume

One of the characters of this drama who people seem to struggle to reconcile is Dr Julian Totman who with his wife (both GP’s living in Salisbury) and 2 year old son were staying at the Ocean Club this week.  It has been remarked just how many doctors were at this rather charmless resort in this off-season week but setting that aside Dr. Totman seems a relatively uncontroversial figure.  He seems to have enjoyed tennis and played against Gerry on a number of occasions.  Unlike the Tapas 8, he opted to avail the night creche facility provided by Mark Warner to look after his toddler in the evening and consequently was in the habit of carrying his sleeping son back from the off-site facility along a route that would take him across the road that Jane Tanner reported seeing Tannerman at around 9.15pm.  He was wearing beige coloured trousers and a dark jacket and though he was carrying his kid towards the apartment blocks rather than away but otherwise was a good possible fit for the Tannerman sighting. 

What seems to have happened is that Totman contacted the GNR (the local police) in May 2007 to tell them he thought there was a good chance that he was Tannerman.  I don’t think there is any record of whether he spoke to Gerry or Kate about it.  Given that he knew him through tennis, it would seem an obvious thing to do.  I presume that the GNR passed this information onto the PJ (can anyone confirm?), but they seem to have done little with it.  It seems possible, that the PJ had already largely discounted Jane Tanner’s evidence which was notoriously changing so they may have felt it was of secondary importance.  Because of their secrecy rules we cannot be very sure how the Portuguese regarded Totman.  The file was also apparently passed to the Leicestershire Police who outrageously seem to have put it in a box somewhere and quietly ignored it.  To my knowledge there has been no investigation of how and on whose instructions this egregious “mistake” happened.  What is clear is that the decision to bury Totman was of absolutely critical importance to the McCanns.  Many people have been skeptical of Jane Tanner’s Tannerman testimony from the off but nevertheless officially and in the public imagination it remained central to the claim that Maddie had been abducted.  It also deflected attention from the Smith’s sighting which of course was dangerous for Gerry firstly given Aoife Smith’s worryingly accurate description of Gerry’s clothing and then in September, even more awkwardly Martin and Mary Smith’s testimony that Smith man was most probably Gerry McCann.

Totman only officially came to light in October 2013 – more than 2 years after Operation Grange had been established in May 2011.  Why it took 2 years for a team of 29 police officers and 8 civilians to check the files that had been accumulated by the Leicestershire Police remains an unexplained mystery.

So where does that leave us?

I confess I haven’t looked at Totman in great detail.  I am skeptical of the theories that implicate him in any widespread conspiracy theory. I think he is most probably an honest witness and was indeed bringing his child back from the night creche at around this time. What I suspect happened was:

Jane Tanner was indeed somewhere on the street around 9.15pm on Thursday 3^rd.  I don’t think she was there to check on her child or that she passed by Gerry and Jez standing outside 5a.  I have a feeling she was there to play her part in the hoax abduction that they had initially scheduled for 9.00-9.30pm.  I suspect that the plan was somewhat delayed by the surprise appearance of Jez Wilkins who may have prevented Gerry from jemmying the shutters.  Once Jez had gone on his way, Tanner may also have seen Totman returning from the night creche delaying the plan a little more.  In my view, the evidence is very strong that Gerry was really seen by The Smiths at around 9.55pm walking towards the beach.  I have argued elsewhere that it would have been relatively easy for Gerry/Smithman to have avoided The Smiths had he wanted to, which he surely would have had he really been carrying Maddie’s corpse.  It would also have not made the slightest bit of sense to actively encourage Irish tourists to come forward with whatever they had seen had Gerry really been carrying Maddie’s corpse.  I therefore think Gerry may well have been carrying a decoy down towards the beach in order to validate the abduction hoax.  The decoy would most plausibly have been a sedated Ella O’Brien, though a sedated Amelie McCann may also be a possibility. Exactly how this was choreographed is still clouded in confusion and I suspect it was similarly confusing to those involved at the time.  There are indications, from some independent witnesses that Kate first “raised the alarm” at around 9.30-9.45pm which may have been the original plan.  It looks like Gerry’s Smithman run was delayed, probably due to Jez Wilkins’ and Julian Totman’s appearance and maybe some other unknown issue.  Kate may therefore have had to raise the alarm a second time, to a wider audience at around 10.05pm once Gerry had returned and this then became the official time that Maddie’s discovery was supposed to have happened.

I suspect that Jane Tanner created Tannerman by stitching together a number of things that she had seen or experienced.  I think Gerry’s original plan had been to use The Smiths as his independent witnesses to validate the abduction and that it was to a large extent Jane Tanner herself who without fully consulting Gerry came up with Tannerman.  I have previously commented on the highly unusual way that Tannerman was supposedly seen holding the child – characteristic of how people hold a child’s corpse, but not how they typically hold a sleeping child (usually over the shoulder).  It would be nice to know from Totman how he was holding his child that night.  My instinct is that Jane described Tannerman as holding the child in that what as she was recalling how she herself held Maddie’s corpse somewhere along the line. (Both she and David Payne make Freudian slips to this effect). When to their great surprise the Irish family Gerry encountered on his Smithman run didn’t immediately come forward, Tannerman became central to substantiating the abduction hoax, especially given the shutters had not been jemmied in any way.  The fact that the Smith’s did come forward on 26 May seems to have (very sensibly) been kept secret from the McCanns.  On the presumption that the Smithman sighting was shared with the Leicestershire Police who seem to be largely working on the McCann’s behalf, it is possible that the McCann’s had been tipped off by the LP about the Smiths, though maybe not the full details.  However, as they did not officially know, nor had it been publicly revealed, they would not have been able to publicise the fact. Once the details of the Smith sighting became clear, it became even more vital to maintain the fiction of the Tannerman sighting so the LP quietly buried the evidence that Totman had provided.  Totman only came to public light in October 2013 two years after Scotland Yard in the form of Operation Grange came to take over the case in May 2011.   By that time Tannerman had largely served its purpose and people were questioning how many times the description had changed and pointing to the negligible window of opportunity that Tannerman would have had to execute the “abduction”. The Smithman sighting been largely defused by the insistence and constant repetition in the media that Gerry was sitting with the Tapas 7 friends at 10pm and therefore any resemblance to him must be purely coincidental.  It also served a purpose in showing that Operation Grange was actually doing something.  In fact to date after GBP12m and 8 years of inquiries, rediscovering Totman’s testimony that had been so conveniently buried by the Leicestershire Police remains pretty much the only achievement of Operation Grange to date.

Anyhow those are my thoughts as to how Totman might fit in.