Welcome to the trial UK, the McCann Stalkers. I'm Caroline Cheatham.

And I'm Claire Dauphin. Today we have the defence case for Karen Sprague, which took just less than one minute to outline to the jury.

And we have the moment that Julia Van Delt failed to turn up to

court because the prison service didn't send any transport to pick her up. We also hear

the allegation that Operation Grange, which is the investigation looking into the disappearance

of Madeline McCann, is in a state of almost inertia, with no officers working on it full-time.

Plus how Julia Van Delt's defence barrister said she was treated like a nutter by the police.

And that the people who are concerned about what happened to Madeleine McCann are not all conspiracy theorists.

Welcome to episode 10, crackpots and nutters. Claire, it's Tuesday, it's November 4th and effectively this case is pretty much over. The evidence has

certainly all been heard. So what's happening now is the barristers are doing their best to persuade the jury of their arguments.

So we're going to come today to all of that.

First, though, we should just start with Karen Sprague's defence, which happened in the last couple of days and was brief.

Yeah, it really was.

We said last week that we knew she wasn't going to give evidence in her own defence,

which is, of course, her right.

It's not her job to prove that she's innocent.

It's the prosecution's job to prove her guilty.

And so unlike Julia Van Delt, she chose not to go into the witness box.

Instead, what we had, Caroline, was a statement which was read

on her behalf from a woman called Susan Ahern. She's a care worker and she's known Karen Sprague for

40 years. She described herself as Karen Sprague's best friend. Yeah, so it was read actually on her

behalf by Karen Sprague's barrister.

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