As Christian Brueckner, the main suspect in the disappearance of Madeleine McCann, is released from prison, we examine the four questions that remain unanswered in the investigation into how and why the little girl vanished
It is now 18 years since three-year-old Madeleine McCann vanished from an apartment in Portugal where she was staying with her family while on holiday.
Her parents Kate and Gerry McCann had left the toddler asleep in a bedroom along with her two-year-old twin siblings while they went for dinner with friends at a restaurant nearby. They took turns in checking on the children throughout the evening but at 10pm, distraught mum Kate discovered Madeleine had disappeared from Ocean club apartment 5A.
Despite years of investigations and extensive searches for her, she has never been found and no one has been charged with her abduction or murder. And today, the prime suspect in the little girl’s disappearance has today been released from prison after serving a sentence for a separate crime.
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A new ITV documentary looks at the evidence linking convicted criminal and sex offender Christian Brueckner to Madeleine’s suspected abduction and highlights the questions that remain unanswered in the devastating case that has been dubbed “the world’s most intense investigation”.
Three days after Maddie, as she was affectionately known by those close to her, vanished in the resort of Praia da Luz in May 2007, senior detective Graham Hill was sent to the Algarve to help with the investigation. At the time he was a senior detective with Surrey Police with extensive experience in child murder cases.
A few hours after arriving there he went to the British consulate and then went to meet Kate and Gerry. Devastated Gerry asked him if he would be able to give some indication if Madeleine was still alive. He had no choice but to tell the desperately worried dad that statistically children who have been abducted are normally dead within three to six hours.
Hill soon lost faith in the Portuguese investigation even before they made Kate and Gerry suspects around four months in. He believed they should have been searching for known criminals and sexual predators and thinks that as a result possible links to other cases were overlooked.
In 2020 German prosecutors announced they had a suspect they were calling Christian B who they believed was involved in the missing girl’s disappearance. He had been living in Praia da Luz when Maddie disappeared and was finally convicted on DNA evidence in 2019 for the rape of a 72-year-old in the same area 18 months before Maddie disappeared.
His seven year sentence for that sexual offence has now come to an end but despite still being the prime suspect in the McCann case, he has walked free because there is not enough forensic evidence to charge him at this point.
In a new ITV documentary, Madeleine McCann: Searching For The Prime Suspect, Hill, who for the last 20 years has studied men who abduct, sexually abuse and murder children, returns to the Algarve for the first time since she went missing to examine all the evidence.
One of the world’s leading specialists in the field, criminologist Hill says individuals of this darkest nature are mercifully uncommon. “There are millions of men who have a sexual interest in children but there is only a very rarefied group of men who will abduct, sexually abuse and then murder that child,” he states. His return to the resort and his interviews with experts in the fields of psychiatry and the justice system raises four crucially unsolved mysteries surrounding the investigation and German criminal Brueckner.
Who was the man carrying the child in pyjamas?
On the night Madeleine disappeared, a couple who were leaving a bar near the ground floor holiday rent the McCann’s were staying in saw a man carrying a little girl wearing pyjamas.
The couple were walking up an unlit road on the right, the man was on the left. The most significant detail about this ‘sighting’ was the time – 10pm – which was around the time Kate discovered Maddie was missing.
As Hill looks up the road in question he ponders why the identity of the man has never been uncovered: “You would have thought that with all the media coverage, that man would have come forward by now and said, ‘that was me, my daughter fell asleep in a restaurant – I was taking her home’. But that person has never been identified, which should ring alarm bells.”
Why did it take so long to make Brueckner a suspect?
In 2007 Brueckner was living in a house that overlooked Praia da Luz. It takes just four minutes by car to drive to the apartment from the farmhouse he was staying in. He would also often stay in his camper van on the nearby beach.
By the age of 17 he was already a convicted sex offender. He was caught exposing himself to a six year old and while awaiting trial struck again, this time to a nine year old. As Brueckner was a known criminal and sex offender with a long record, the documentary asks why it took authorities 13 years to make him a suspect?
Earlier this summer, German police launched a huge search of the farmhouse he stayed in because they thought it was the most likely location Brueckner may have hidden traces of Maddie, according to the documentary. They found some animal bones and old clothes but ‘nothing of much relevance’. Two guns were also discovered but they couldn’t connect them to the suspect.
Why did Brueckner leave Portugal in 2007?
Hill says that while tourists go to holiday resorts for sun and to relax, they attract evil for other reasons: “People don’t realise somewhere like Praia de Luz is the perfect hunting ground for criminals and predators,” he says.
Brueckner would regularly move between Germany and Portugal and would “flit” between other countries, possibly to try and hide his criminal activity. Looking back to track his location over the years was difficult because he moved around a lot. However in 2007 – the year Maddie went missing – he left Portugal and didn’t return for nine years, which Hill describes as “significant” and an “unanswered question”.
Did the Portuguese police miss vital clues?
Portuguese police had arrested Brueckner multiple times for break ins and burglaries. During one arrest for theft of diesel, he told the judge in 2006 he had a previous criminal record in Germany for theft and sexual offences. However, the new ITV show reveals this wasn’t recorded by the judge and the court conclusion doesn’t reflect that he told them about the sex offence either. Apparently there’s no way of checking if he was on sex offenders list back then.
Forensic psychologist Mauro Paulino provides profiling expertise to detectives in Portugal. He says the lack of knowledge about Brueckner’s past was a “critical mistake”.
If the intelligence system had worked, police in the Algarve would have known that he was a sex offender living in the area close by to where Maddie vanished. Because judges in 2006 in Portugal didn’t pay attention to “case linkage” it created an “opportunity for a new victim, a new crime,” according to Paulino, who explains that these “characteristics in offenders are linked with a high risk of re-offending”.
In 2017 Brueckner was convicted in Germany on a separate case of sexual abuse of a child and possession of indecent images. The pictures put him on the radar. In 2024 Brueckner faced three charges of rape and two counts of child sex abuse between 2000 and 2017 – all in Portugal.
Despite the discovery in the suspect’s abandoned factory in Germany of USB sticks – allegedly containing hundreds of sickening and “blood curdling” child abuse images, some involving Brueckner – he was acquitted because of technical irregularities with the search warrant.
The judge also ruled that witness testimony may have been compromised by media reports portraying Brueckner as a paedophile.
Madeleine McCann: Searching For The Prime Suspect airs Wednesday 17th September at 9pm on ITV1 and ITVX