‘He's calm, clever and dangerous': The battle to convict Madeleine McCann's prime suspect
The red dust kicks up again as police vans rattle along the narrow rural tracks east of Portugal's Praia da Luz, while the global press pack strains to peer beyond the cordons. For many, the scene is painfully familiar.
Eighteen years ago, the search for three-year-old Madeleine McCann gripped headlines worldwide after the toddler from Rothley, Leicestershire, vanished from her bedroom at the infamous Ocean Club holiday resort. Now, in this same arid Algarve scrubland, the echoes of that disappearance in May 2007 still linger.
But this time, nearly two years after the last search in 2023 – the most extensive since 2008 – a different urgency hangs in the dry air. Experts speak of a ticking clock, a new pressure driving this latest effort.
The catalyst behind this three-day scramble? One man: German paedophile Christian Brueckner. More specifically, the need to keep him in the German prison from which he is set to walk free on September 17 at the age of just 48, despite his disturbing back catalogue of sadistic crimes and his status as the prime suspect in Madeleine's disappearance. Chillingly, a leading German psychiatrist told a court last year that Brueckner had been tested and scored 99 per cent on a scale of dangerousness.
Some 30 German police officers, joined by forensic experts and supported by Portugal's Polícia Judiciária – the national criminal investigation police agency – began fresh searches on Tuesday across a 26-mile area in pursuit of new evidence in Madeleine's case. Chainsaws, hedge trimmers and pickaxes are being used to clear thick foliage and access crumbling ruins, while mounds of earth are shifted across the barren fields.
Equipped with radar capable of scanning 15ft below the surface, the team is expected to continue this extraordinary operation – scouring 20 privately owned plots and draining wells – until Friday.
Currently serving a seven-year sentence for the 2005 rape of a 72-year-old American tourist near where Madeleine vanished, Brueckner has been the official suspect in the British toddler's disappearance since 2020 – yet he has always protested his innocence and has never been formally charged.
Now it seems this heartbreaking British case has become the only means left for German authorities to keep the sex offender behind bars.
'It's now or never,' read a headline in Germany's Bild newspaper this week. Summing up the race to keep Brueckner imprisoned.
Meanwhile, Brueckner has made his feelings perfectly clear in an extraordinary interview with German journalist Ulrich Oppold, where he described looking forward to 'a nice steak and beer' upon release. Refusing to answer any questions about Madeleine, he instead admitted he planned to flee if released from prison.
Few offenders are as instantly recognisable as Brueckner, with his ghostly complexion and pale blue-eyed stare. His chequered criminal history makes for disturbing reading.
In 1994, a teenager of 17, he was first convicted of sexual abuse of a child, attempted sexual abuse of a child, and carrying out sexual acts in front of a child. But he fled to Portugal with a girlfriend to avoid completing a youth custody sentence, and a European arrest warrant was issued.
The pair split, and drifter Brueckner became adept at odd jobs, finally settling in his run-down house on the edge of the Praia da Luz resort in the mid-1990s. He would frequently return there over the years to come, and has since been linked to the disappearances of seven-year-old Jair Soares and 16-year-old Belgian Carola Titze, both of whom went missing during this period.
In 1999, he was finally arrested by Portuguese police and sent home to serve his youth sentence, begging questions as to how a sex offender known to the Portuguese was not later tracked.
Over the next nearly two decades, he flitted between the two countries, often dodging criminal proceedings ranging from drug dealing and sexual offences to theft. In his later rape trial, witnesses spoke of a life of crime, stealing from tourists and climbing 'through open windows in one or another holiday flat'.
The particularly heinous rape for which he is currently jailed happened in 2005, two years before Madeleine's disappearance. His elderly victim's flat was half a mile from the McCann's apartment. Late one evening, Brueckner entered her home, where he beat her with a 30cm scimitar, a short, curved sword, before forcing himself on her.
The particularly heinous rape for which he is currently imprisoned occurred in 2005, two years before Madeleine's disappearance. His 72-year-old American victim lived in an apartment half a mile from the McCanns. Late one evening, Brueckner broke into her home, where he beat her with a 30cm scimitar – a short, curved sword – before forcing himself on her.
The rape was investigated in Portugal but police eventually closed the case. Brueckner continued living in his house, returning to Germany frequently, and was staying in a camper van several miles away when Madeleine disappeared. In 2020, police said his phone placed him nearby the night she vanished.
It was only much later that a former co-conspirator of Brueckner's, who had stolen diesel with him – for which Brueckner was arrested in 2006 – found a video of the rape and went to police. In late 2019, Brueckner was finally sentenced.
The 48-year-old was first linked to Madeleine's case in 2013 after the McCann's appealed for information on German television's version of Crimewatch, Aktenzeichen XY.
Among some 500 calls, federal investigators received a convincing tip-off. A former colleague had linked Brueckner to a photofit of a man spotted near the site where Madeleine had gone missing.
Then a month after the McCann's television appearance, the local police force in the German town of Braunschweig – where Brueckner was living at the time – sent a letter to Brueckner inviting him to be interviewed as a witness in the 'missing person case of Madeleine McCann'. Journalist Jon Clarke, an expert in the case, who has written the book My Search for Madeleine, explains this was a huge error.
'They messed up, they sent a policeman around to his house and told him he had to appear in a police station three days later to answer questions in the case of Madeleine McCann,' he explains. 'They actually wrote it on the letter, so he was completely warned, and in those three days who knows what happened?'
Germany's Der Spiegel magazine has also highlighted the error, speaking to an officer who admitted: 'This should not have happened and in no way complies with common procedure in such a delicate case.'
Assessing how Brueckner has seemingly slipped through so many cracks, Clarke also believes the number of different police forces involved in Germany, combined with Brueckner's moves around the country, as well as to Portugal and back, have complicated investigations. 'They've not been sharing information between different police forces, and it's been very difficult therefore to piece things together,' he claims.
Nevertheless, Brueckner's crimes started to catch up with him. In 2017, he was convicted of sexual assault of a child in Germany in 2013, the five-year-old daughter of an ex-girlfriend, and sentenced to 15 months in prison. She was assaulted in a public park and graphic photos were later found on a digital camera when police were investigating him for a separate claim of domestic violence.
It was after his release that he is reported to have been in a bar with a friend when televisions showed 10th-anniversary coverage of Madeleine's disappearance, allegedly prompting him to confide he 'knew all about' what happened, and then revealing video of himself raping a woman. The friend is understood to have gone to the police.
The same year, another witness, Helge B, who had attended a music festival with Brueckner in 2008, told police the suspect admitted the killing while they were there, adding that Maddie 'did not scream', although doubts persist about the witness's credibility.
Brueckner was arrested the year after while in Italy and extradited to Germany, this time on a warrant for drug trafficking. He was jailed for 21 months for dealing and then convicted for rape of his American victim.
By all accounts, Brueckner is not stupid. Witnesses in that trial described him as a well-presented and intelligent man who drove a Jaguar, while in court he spoke eloquently, often reading from legal texts.
This week, Clarke spoke to Oppold about his interview with Brueckner. 'He said he was so calm, and knew exactly what he wanted to say. He's very careful,' he explains. 'If you read his prison records, his psychological records, it's very difficult to analyse him because he doesn't let anyone in. He won't say anything. He's clever and cautious.'
In 2020, the German prosecutor announced Madeleine was believed dead and identified Brueckner as the official suspect – the first time his name had been widely publicised.
The evidence for this announcement has never been made clear although, last month, a Channel 4 documentary made in conjunction with The Sun disclosed a catalogue of grim discoveries it claims were made by police in 2016 at a disused factory Brueckner owned in Neuwegersleben, east Germany.
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