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Former Met Detective Chief Inspector Peter Kirkham explains how the new Madeleine McCann search is not just the police going over old ground – but warns the chance of a breakthrough is small
There have been several large scale searches connected to the Madeleine McCann investigation in the many years since she disappeared in Praia Da Luz. So what is different this time?
The main difference is that on this occasion, officers are not just working from the crime scene but working back from a possible suspect – Christian Brueckner – too. This provides a very different context for the investigation as a whole and for the searches in particular but the importance of this is often overlooked.
Detectives investigating a serious crime are usually engaged in what is known as a reactive investigation: a crime happens and officers react to it by following lines of enquiry which could explain how it came to happen. Searches connected with a reactive investigation tend to be focused on the crime scene as at least some part of the crime must have happened right there.
But where detectives know someone who they suspect of committing the crime they can focus on lines of enquiry arising from them too. They will know some things about the suspect – such as where they live or work, what car they drive and hundreds of other things – which provide a new focus for searches. Officers engaged in the previous, reactive investigation simply did not know of the potential new locations.
It is hard to know exactly what is going on behind the scenes. The German police who led the investigation centred on Brueckner, have released very little detail to the public. It is, however, clear to me as a former Senior Investigating Officer that most of the searches planned for the next few days arise from lines of enquiry starting with Brueckner and will be at locations connected with him in some way.
This makes the searches “new”, in the sense that the officers conducting the previous, reactive investigation into the disappearance could not have carried them out. As they were unaware of Brueckner as a significant suspect they had no reason to search locations connected to him. This means the current searches are not just the police going over old ground again in case they missed something previously. And it means there is more chance of something new being found, if (and it is a very big if) the suspicions about Brueckner are correct and he was involved.
Officers involved in the searches this week will be equipped with the very latest in technology to assist them. As with almost all technologies, ground penetrating radar and other equipment used in these types of search, improve every year. Officers will no doubt take the opportunity of revisiting some areas searched previously with the less effective equipment previously available.
Out of public sight, there will also have been a huge amount of research carried out into the circumstances of the disappearance. No doubt some gaps in previous searches will have been identified which will be filled over the next few days too.
All of that said, however, when it comes to the fundamental question of whether these searches will finally find some trace of Madeleine and explain how and why she disappeared in 2007, I am still fairly pessimistic. The suspicions about Brueckner, whilst substantial, fall a long way short of being any sort of proof of his involvement. He may well be the best suspect presently known to officers but there are others, known and unknown. Even more fundamentally, we are still not absolutely sure what happened to Madeleine that night. There are several other possible explanations which cannot be eliminated, even after nearly twenty years of international investigation.
I hope the searches find something which moves the investigation forward. Madeleine’s parents and family have suffered from not knowing what happened to her for almost twenty years now. They deserve something after all this time. But, sadly, the chances of these searches providing that something are very, very small.