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Madeleine McCann Is Not Missing Suzanne Pilley

by | 16th, May 2010

SUZANNE Pilley is not Madeleine McCann. But she is missing.

Suzanne Pilley was just yards from her work in a city centre street in broad daylight, when she simply vanished. Richard Bath investigates the case of the woman who went missing 12 days ago.

She is 38. She was on her way to work in Edinburgh. And she disappeared. What of her?

No drugs, no alcohol, no stress, no mental health issues, no debt, no violence, no job loss.

Sylvia Pilley says her daughter’s vanishing “has just been like our worst nightmare – we almost cannot believe it is actually happening.

Every morning you wake up and wonder, is this really happening? You never think it’ll happen to you. You see it on the television with other people, and you feel sorry for them, but you don’t really understand the grief. We just don’t know what’s happened. We just want to find out, get to the bottom of things and put our minds at rest.”

Did you see her face on the national news?

As the face of Madeleine McCann became a cause célèbre among the many children abducted each year, so the smiling photos of exuberant everywoman Suzanne Pilley have become the face of the disappeared. It is a strange and macabre sort of fame she and her family neither sought nor want. For the rest of us, it is an unwelcome reminder that even in the middle of the day, in the middle of one of the busiest streets in the capital, no-one can take their safety for granted.

The disappeared have only one face – the one the people they left behind delivered to the police. The face does not change. But we look. And we read the potted stories beneath each picture of a missing person. We study their measurements. And we realise that most are aged 16 and if they don’t want to be found then they won’t be.

Madeleine McCann: The Full Picture

We do not truly connect with the missing person unless we know them or have had someone we love go missing. Suzanne Pilley has not become “the face of the disappeared”. She is a face that exists in another world, often just on the telly as the police make an appeal and the distressed relatives ask for help.

In real life people change. It’s only their “last pictures” that remain the same…

spotter: Bat E Bird

The story in pictures:

madeleine-mccann-letter

Image 1 of 184



Posted: 16th, May 2010 | In: Reviews Comment | TrackBack | Permalink