Police made an horrific discovery in a remote factory owned by Christian Brueckner, the prime suspect in Madeleine McCann’s disappearance, which included a large number of girls’ swimming costumes
Convicted sex offender Christian Brueckner was released from prison in Germany this week, despite remaining the prime suspect in the disappearance of Madeleine McCann.
The 49-year-old had served a sentence for the rape of an elderly woman in Portugal, near to where Maddie vanished eighteen years ago. He has a long criminal record stretching back to when he was just a teenager and police have been investigating the paedophile for years.
A new ITV documentary hears from legal and criminal experts as well as investigative journalists who have been following developments in the case. It details evidence and allegations against Brueckner in an attempt to ascertain if he really was capable of abducting and murdering three year old Maddie.
READ MORE: Madeleine McCann suspect Christian Brueckner’s sickening online chats with paedophileREAD MORE: Four unanswered questions in Madeleine McCann disappearance as prime suspect walks free
Leading criminologist Graham Hill returns to the Algarve for the first time since 2007 when the little girl vanished from a holiday rent in Praia de Luz where she was staying with her family.
Her parents Kate and Gerry McCann had put their daughter to bed along with their two year old twins and went for dinner at a local restaurant nearby with friends.
They regularly checked on the sleeping infants but when Kate went back at 10pm she discovered Maddie wasn’t in her bed and was nowhere to be found in the ground floor apartment. She raised the alarm and a huge search got under way led by Portuguese police.
Hill, who was then a senior detective in Surrey police with extensive experience in child murder cases, was sent to Portugal to help with the investigation. Speaking in Madeleine McCann: Searching For The Prime Suspect, which aired this week, he says his offers to help at the time were being rebuffed and he was concerned that “mistakes were being made”.
As he returns to the case for the documentary he talks to journalist Rob Hyde who has been tracking Brueckner since 2020 when German police named him as their chief suspect in the case.
The development followed their own investigations and dealings with the offender whose mobile phone records had proved was in Praia de Luz the night Maddie went missing.
Hyde tells Hill about a crucial incident in 2016 when police had been alerted to a disused factory in central Germany which Brueckner owned after buying it in 2008. The pair travel to the location which is now fenced off and look around the eerie, derelict structure, which still contains a battered old car of his.
“It was his secret get away. It was where he wanted to carry out horrible things, away from prying eyes,” Hyde claims. Police had been tipped off by a colleague who had been on the remote premises. While there she noticed that the levels of soil on the ground had been altered and there was a foul smell inside. When they searched the buildings, they made a grim discovery.
Under the body of a dead dog they found a supermarket bag full of USB sticks which according to Hyde contained “hundreds of the most vile, sickening and blood curdling acts of child sex crimes”. Some showed Brueckner involved, others were collections.
Hill believes the things police found at the box factory clearly suggest Brueckner had an ingrained way of sexualising children. “This man has been fantasising about children from a sexual point of view for decades,” he says.
“He felt so strongly about the items that he had on those memory sticks that he felt compelled not to destroy them for good but to bury them. For me that’s quite significant.”
Investigators also found over 70 children’s swimming costumes hidden in his Winnebago which was parked on the site. Hill thinks they had been stolen from holiday complexes across the Praia De Luz area.
Brueckner had moved to Portugal in 1995 after being convicted of his first child sex offence the year before when he was still a teenager.
He regularly flitted between Germany and Portugal in the following years but left the Algarve where he was living in a farmhouse on the outskirts of the resort in 2007 – the same the year Maddie disappeared. He didn’t return until nine years later which was very uncharacteristic based on his historical movements.
The discovery of the chilling items at the factory site wasn’t the first time Brueckner had come to the attention of authorities in connection with sexual child abuse. Two years before when investigating paedophile rings, police discovered a disturbing Skype chat on a device during a raid.
It was between a man called Frank S and Brueckner, who posted under the name Crazy Derholger. In it the two paedophiles were discussing having sex with “something small”.
Brueckner writes: “Capture something small and use it for days.” He also states: “I’ll make a lot of films hehe” before posting, “I’ll document exactly how she’s being tortured”.
Hyde believes the interaction between the two displays the “sadistic glee” Brueckner garnered from child sex abuse and says it was a significant lead in the case against him.
In 2017 after Brueckner had been deported from Portugal back to Germany for allegedly exposing himself to children in a playground, he was convicted of the sexual abuse of a child and possession of indecent images.
Police had previously responded to a domestic incident at his flat in Germany and discovered abusive images of a little girl on his laptop.
She was the daughter of a woman he met online who would become his girlfriend. It’s thought he targeted her because she had a young daughter. He had taken the five year old to a park and made pornographic pictures of her.
The laptop contained thousands of other images and videos of child abuse which finally put him on investigator’s radar as their prime suspect in the McCann case.
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 of the USB sticks in the suspect’s factory in Germany, 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.
German prosecutors still believe Brueckner abducted and murdered Madeleine McCann but don’t have enough forensic evidence to prove it in court.
Madeleine McCann: Searching For The Prime Suspect aired on Wednesday 17th September and is available on ITVX.