"Become" important?
It was (or should have been!) important, pretty much from the moment Grime set to work.
If you look at the original schedule of searches Mark Harrison, part of whose job was supposed to have been to determine the schedule of searches, first drew up, you will find he made no mention of:
The McCanns' rented villa, unsurprisingly, as Madeleine never lived there.
The McCanns' rented hire car, unsurprisingly, as the McCanns hired it 3 weeks after Madeleine vanished
Clothing. Unsurprisingly, in part because Grime never had, at least a cadaver dog, trained to inspect clothing
In part because no clothing was seized until fully 3 months after the crime
In part because uncorroborated cadaver dog alerts are inadmissible as 'evidence' in English courts
In part because, even if a slight trace of Madeleine's blood had been found on any clothing, that would scarcely have been incriminating, with innocent explanations of how it got there:
Madeleine, sat on Mummy's knee or Daddy's knee.
Has a nose bleed or other minor abrasion
Blood transfers to clothing.
Hardly incriminating.
Of course, any trace of blood would have had to be minute, since blood visible to the naked human eye wouldn't have required a dog to find it.
Took a look at Grime's modus operandi in the Bianca Jones case, and you will find it exactly repeated from Praia da Luz.
FindLaw's searchable database of Court of Appeals of Michigan decisions since
caselaw.findlaw.com
According to Grime, on December 4, 2011, he took his dogs to an enclosed warehouse that contained 31 vehicles. Grime was told that Bianca was in one of the vehicles at the time of the carjacking, but was not told which vehicle was involved. Morse alerted Grime to the presence of the odor of decomposition in the back seat and trunk of a silver Grand Marquis. Keela later screened the car and did not alert Grime to the presence of human blood.
Grime testified that, after the vehicle screening, he took the dogs to an administrative building to screen the items removed from Dungey's car. Grime did not know where the objects were located in the building, and the objects had been placed in a room filled with “all sorts of things.” Morse alerted Grime to the odor of decomposition in Bianca's car seat and a bag containing Bianca's blanket. Grime later took the dogs to Dungey's house. Morse alerted him to the odor of decomposition in a room that contained bunk beds and a closet without a door.
There you have the uncanny parallels with Praia da Luz. The line-up of vehicles, much longer in Detroit than in Praia da Luz. The repeat of the pattern of stuff tested, in one spot, taken to a different spot, and tested a second time. In Praia da Luz, it was clothing, sniffed by the dogs in the McCanns' rented villa, bundled into bog-standard cardboard boxes (in disregard of principles of cross-contamination of a death scent) and taken to a gym in Lagos, there to be spread out on the floor for both dogs to trample over and one dog to bark and pick certain items up in his mouth.
Immediately following that debacle, everything was returned to Kate and Gerry, without ever being forensically examined.
Yet, from that debacle, came a canard poor Kate lives with to the present day of 'death scent on her clothes', accompanied by fevered speculation of 'how it got there' ....
