On May 3, 2007, Kate and Gerry McCann put their three children down for bed: two-year-old twins Sean and Amelie and three-year-old Madeleine. The McCanns were on vacation from their home in Rothley, Leicester in England and spending the week in Praia da Luz in the country of Portugal with several family friends. Kate and Gerry left their three children in apartment 5A of the Ocean Club Resort, where the family was staying, and headed to the resort restaurant to meet their friends for dinner at about 8:30 PM. The restaurant was approximately 50 meters (about 55 yards) away from their apartment where their children slept.
Throughout the next hour and a half, the McCanns and their friends dined and took turns checking on each other’s children. At approximately 10 PM, Kate returned to apartment 5A to find Madeleine gone. Thirteen years later, Madeleine has never been found, and the slew of questions regarding her disappearance have only become more complicated. Was the young girl abducted by a stranger and thrust into the world of human trafficking? Do her mother and father know more than they’ve told investigators? Or was Madeleine a victim of opportunity for a burglar or pedophile?
For part one, click here
Madeleine Mccann
On May 5th, another tourist, Martin Smith reported having seen a white man carrying a little girl wearing pink-ish pajamas. The child was blonde and around Madeleine’s age, walking briskly around 10PM on the night she went missing. He thought that the man looked awkward, like he wasn’t used to carrying children. Smith was confident in his sighting and felt very clear about what he’d seen. The police felt very strongly that this was connected, particularly in tandem with the Jane Tanner sighting.
As the police continued to question people around Praia da Luz, they ran into 34-year-old Robert Murat. Murat was living at his mother’s house, about 150 yards from the McCann’s apartment. When he noticed the police outside, he offered his help. Fluent in both English and Portugese, Murat offered to help with translating while police canvassed the area. Police agreed; however, it wasn’t long before journalists became concerned with Murat’s behavior.
In hopes of obtaining more concrete evidence against Murat, police asked Jane Tanner for her help. They set themselves up, disguised in a commercial van, with Tanner inside with police, while Murat walked across the street. Tanner positively identified Murat as the man she saw the night of Madeleine’s disappearance. Murat soon became an official “arguido.” In Portugese, this means suspect, and the term is often used in the McCann case. The police were quick to seal off Murat’s home, searching it, seizing evidence, and taking photos. A thorough search was performed of the house and grounds. Computers, phones, and videotapes were taken, and gardens were dug up, thinking there might be evidence, or even remains.
During the search, Murat was being interrogated at the police station. He denied any involvement in her disappearance. He said that he was in his mom’s kitchen that night, where they talked the whole night. The police were not having it. They said, “who stays in their mother’s kitchen all night long?” Murat replied, “I did. My mother and I are close.” He was interrogated for 19 hours. They eventually let Murat go, finding no concrete evidence tying him to Madeleine’s disappearance. He did however, remain a strong suspect.
16 days after Madeleine’s disappearance, Gerry and Kate remained frustrated with the lack of movement in the search for their daughter. Fearing that her story will lose steam and fall to the back of people’s minds, the couple started Madeleine’s Fund to get donations in order to keep the investigation moving. They created a website where people could post clues, sightings, or information. It continued to attract attention from across the world. Her face was on televisions, newspapers, and magazines in almost every country. Tips began to come in from across different continents.
One particular promising sighting took place in Morocco: At a gas station in Marrakesh, a city in Morocco, a couple saw a young girl with a man that looked very similar to Madeleine, one week after she disappeared.
“She had this pretty face and long blonde hair…she had a little sad look on her face.” The woman also heard the little girl ask the man, “Can we see mommy now?”
By the time police arrived, the security footage at the gas station had been taped over. On June 10th, Kate and Gerry head to Morocco, in hopes of finding Madeleine, knowing that a young girl with light eyes, light hair, and fair skin would stand out there. Unfortunately, the police and the McCanns were disappointed. During the summer of 2007, police pursued hundreds of sightings, but nothing was ever substantiated. With no new evidence and unsure of where to look next, police decide to revisit the earliest evidence: Kate’s statement about the condition of the window when she checked the room, and Jane Tanner’s sighting. They also set about answering a devastating, but important question: Was Madeleine dead or alive when she left apartment 5A?
British police dogs were brought in. Eddie and Keela were both Springer Spaniels that had a very high success rate in detecting blood and human remains. Eddie is a cadaver dog that will only alert to the scent of human remains, and Keela is strictly a blood dog that alerts to even a faint scent of human blood. The dogs were released into apartment 5A with free reign to search. Eddie alerted on a wardrobe in Gerry and Kate’s room. He also alerted on the floor behind a sofa, and on the curtains on the window behind the sofa. Keela was then brought in and showed great interest in the area behind the couch.
Next, the dogs were brought into an underground car park. There were 10 cars lined up. Only one caught the attention of the dogs. It was the rental car belonging to the McCanns that had been rented out approximately 25 days AFTER Madeleine’s disappearance. Eddie alerted to the lower part of the driver’s door. Keela, brought on the following day, alerted to the same vehicle. The car was thoroughly searched, and samples from both the car and apartment were sent out for forensic testing. The police immediately came to the conclusion that Madeleine had died inside of apartment 5A, and that her body had been transported in the McCann’s rental vehicle. This brought the investigation into a different light, where both Kate and Gerry were now under suspicion.
Kate and Gerry...Grieving Parents or Something Worse?
This is where things start to change for the McCann’s- before, they had the support of everyone who knew about the case, as it was an international story. Now, the public was beginning to turn on them. Amaral said that the McCann’s behavior had been odd since day one. The Portugese police said that they were initially suspicious due to Kate’s actions as soon as she found that her daughter had disappeared. “They’ve taken her!” The police found this statement strange and weren’t sure who she was referring to, and why she chose to say “they’ve” instead of “someone has taken her.” Amaral continued to say that he felt that there was no evidence at all that pointed to a kidnapping.
Another concern by police was that the twins had slept through whatever had happened that evening. They reported that even as investigators came in and were moving around the apartment loudly, the twins still slept. They wondered if the children had possibly been medicated. In Kate’s second statement to police, she emphasized that the couple made sure that their medications were put out of reach of the children when they left them for the evening. Included in these listed medications was Calpol. Calpol is a medication used often in Britain for children, when they’re being fussy. It’s directed towards aches and pains, but many parents reportedly give it to help soothe children and help them sleep. Madeleine’s grandfather said once in a television interview that Kate used to give this medication to the twins and Madeleine to help them sleep.
Amarol’s theory is that Madeleine woke up that evening and heard her father talking to someone outside of the window in the living room area. He believed that she climbed up onto the couch, but was still dizzy from the Calpol that she’d been given prior to her parents putting her to bed. The dizziness caused her to fall behind the couch and bleed. He believed that Gerry came in and found her, panicked, and hid her body until later when they were able to move it to the trunk of the rental vehicle and dispose of the body. He believed that Kate running to the restaurant and yelling was an act, to cover up an accidental death. This became the center of the police investigation.
Four months after their daughter’s disappearance, Gerry and Kate are brought back into the police station and advised to bring a lawyer. Kate was interrogated for almost 11 hours until her lawyer told her to stop answering questions. The police accused her of impeding the investigation, but she stayed silent. During Gerry’s interview, he denied all of the accusations. He said that they’d brought meat into the rental vehicle that had leaked, as well as had dirty diapers in there. The police countered this statement, saying that Keela, the blood dog, only alerts to human blood. Police did not believe the McCanns. Portugese authorities officially named Kate and Gerry as arguidos. Friends continued to protest, saying that the McCanns were loving and dedicated to their children, and would never hurt their children.
This is when the onset of worldwide blame came down on the McCanns. The press crucified the couple for leaving their children in an unlocked apartment while they went to dinner, when the resort offered a childwatch service. They implied that the friends that traveled with the McCanns may have known what happened, but were covering for Kate and Gerry. Kate and Gerry defended themselves, saying that they’d decided not to leave the children at the Kid’s Club because they didn’t want to have to wake the children up to bring them home, and disturb their sleep.
At this point, Kate and Gerry made the decision to leave Portugal and go back to England. Scared of the possibility of being imprisoned, as well as their safety being jeopardized, the couple took Sean and Amelie back home. This caused investigators and the news to condemn them even more. The McCann’s return home was televised, and news reporters captured them exiting the plane. Portugese investigators soon received a call from Martin Smith (the guy who saw a man carrying a child on the night maddie disappeared). Smith said that as he watched the televised coverage of Gerry and Kate exiting the plane, holding their twins, he realized that Gerry was carrying his son just like the man he saw was carrying the child on the night of Madeleine’s disappearance. He believed that the man he saw that night could have been Gerry McCann.
Which makes no sense. In all the reenactments the person is carrying the child in their arms like you’d carry a large blanket- arms out in front of you with the child laying on her back. In the photo of Gerry exiting the plane, he is carrying a sleeping child the same way I carry my kids when they’re sleeping- on my chest/shoulder. And I’m very comfortable carrying kids. As is Gerry, I’d imagine.
After forensic results were received from the test samples sent out from apartment 5A and the McCann’s rental car, while Madeleine’s DNA was present, there was nothing to suggest that she was killed in the apartment or transported in the vehicle. While Amaral had built his theory beginning with the cadaver and blood dog, the forensic evidence did not support it. Frustrated with the lack of concrete evidence to support his theory, during a phone interview with a British journalist, Amaral slandered the British police that had been assisting them, accusing them of pandering to the McCanns, doing whatever they requested, seeming to be protecting the family rather than trying to discover the truth.
This interview was published and met with much public uproar. The Portugese police decided to take Amaral off of the case. They fired his ass. With the lead investigator of the case and the primary supporter of the theory that the McCanns had caused their daughter’s death now gone, the case was open to possibly head in another direction.
New Investigator; New Eyes
At this point, Paolo Rebelo, a senior Portugese police officer took over the investigation. He interviewed the initial investigating officers and started from the beginning. The more he read, the more he wondered if the McCanns should have ever been named as suspects. In July of 2008, the Portugese AG closed the case, citing that there was no new evidence. “My conscience is clean. There wasn’t anything else we could’ve done,” he said, regarding making the decision to close the case.
The McCanns and Robert Murat were no longer considered to be suspects in the disappearance. While Kate and Gerry were relieved, they were still incredibly defeated that the case had been closed. Over the next two years, the McCanns continued their search, without the assistance of law enforcement. They begged and pressured the British government to reopen the case with no response. In 2011 Kate published a book, “Madeleine,” detailing her personal account of the night her daughter vanished and the investigation. She ends the book asking for British citizens to reach out to politicians to open a brand new investigation into the disappearance of Madeleine. In response to the public reaction to Kate’s book, Prime Minister Cameron announced that there would be an independent investigation opened into what happened to Madeleine.
Operation Grange was formed 5 years after the disappearance of Madeleine McCann. The Metropolitan Police are likened to the FBI in the United States. They also released an age progressed photo of what Madeleine might look like as she approached her 9th birthday. This made an incredible difference to the McCanns, to have who they felt were professional investigators and police that they trusted, looking for their daughter. Operation Grange was under the leadership of Inspector Andrew Redwood. Their first task? To review the large amount of information from the Portugese police. Redwood found errors beginning from the moment that the police arrived on scene to apartment 5A.
The apartment had not been properly secured, which could have significantly destroyed evidence. The cell phone records of calls in the immediate area were never checked. Certain people of interest were never investigated. There were artist renditions of eyewitness accounts that were never released to the public. After sifting through the evidence, Redwood made an announcement: they’d identified 38 different persons of interest, from a number of European countries. He also stated that “there is no clear, definitive proof that Madeleine McCann is dead.”
Redwood focused his investigation on the Ocean Club resort, interviewing the staff, making sure to speak to employees that were missed on the original investigation. They found that the reservation book at the Tapas restaurant was open for anyone to read. This included the advanced reservation that one of the McCann’s friends had made for May 3rd. This reservation listed the family’s last names, apartment numbers, and reservation time. There was also a note next to this standing reservation that said that this group wanted a table near the pool so they could be close enough to check on their sleeping children. This made it easy to see that the adults would be out of the apartment and there would be unattended children left inside.
More interviews revealed that a twelve-year-old girl, whose grandmother once lived in apartment 5A, noticed a man in front of 5A who appeared to be staring at the apartment. Another British tourist said that they also noticed a man standing against a fence, appearing to stare at 5A during the McCann’s stay. A particularly detailed report came from a woman named Carol Tramner who was having afternoon tea in the apartment above the McCanns’ in the hours just before Madeleine’s disappearance. She saw a man come out from the McCann’s apartment, close the small gate, and described him as looking “stealthy.” All of these reports strengthen the police’s theory that Madeleine was abducted.
Three sketches of possible “watchers” were released to the public. Redwood’s team also found that in the months prior to the McCann’s visit to Praia da Luz, burglaries had significantly increased, and the Ocean Club Resort fell victim to many, particularly first floor and corner apartments. Apartment 5A was both. Was it possible that Madeleine interrupted a burglary and was taken by someone with no pre-planning? The investigators analyzed the cell phone data from the immediate area at the time of Madeleine’s disappearance and found something interesting: Between 9 and 10PM, there were 3 men with reputations as burglars whose cell phones had been extremely active in Praia da Luz that night. The three men turned out to be Ocean Club Resort employees who had been preying on tourists. They were officially named suspects, and Redwood and his team flew to Portugal to interrogate them. All three insisted that they had nothing to do with Madeleine’s disappearance. There was no evidence that anything was missing from the McCann’s apartment, and as of 2017, no evidence had been found against the three men.
Detective Redwood revisited the sightings reported by Jane Tanner and Martin Smith. He wondered if, due to the time difference in sightings, Tanner’s being around 9:15PM and Smith’s being around 10PM, if these were two different men. Investigators canvassed the area, and checked with the resort’s Kid’s Club to see what children were picked up from the club that evening and who picked them up. They then followed up by interviewing each of these parents. They were able to find a father that said he had crossed the road, carrying his daughter, at the time Tanner reported. The police felt confident that this was the man that she had seen. This left the Smith sighting. Smith continued to tell investigators that he believed the man to have been Gerry McCann. This doesn’t seem possible though, as Gerry would have been reacting to his wife being unable to find Madeleine at this time. Smith was able to help sketch artists come up with a drawing of a man that was released to the public. The man has never been identified.
In October 2015, the main power and the funding for Operation Grange was significantly reduced. The public felt that there were many children out there who needed the resources that were being spent on a seemingly dead-end investigation.
2020 Update
In June of 2020, UK and German police named a prime suspect: 43 year-old Christian Brueckner. At the time that police named him as a suspect, Brueckner, a German man, was serving a jail sentence for the rape of a 72 year old woman. In 2005, Brueckner raped and tortured an elderly woman in her apartment for hours, beating her with a metal rod. The location of the apartment where she was attacked was in Praia da Luz, not far from the Ocean Club Resort where the McCanns had vacationed 2 years later. Brueckner videotaped the entire attack.
At the time, the case went unsolved. Between the years of 1995 and 2017, Brueckner drifted between Praia da Luz and Germany, preying on tourists and breaking into holiday homes and hotels. Mark Hoffman, a Berlin-based crime and intelligence analyst who studied Brueckner called him a serial offender and a psychopath. He said that Brueckner’s actions were all about violence and control. While many questioned why Brueckner would rape an elderly woman, then abduct and murder a small child, Hoffman said that it made perfect sense. With psychopaths like Brueckner, Hoffman said that the victim choice is not about age, but rather about vulnerability and weakness. This type of predator chooses easy victims.
Finally, in 2019, DNA evidence led to Brueckner’s conviction and jailing for the 2005 rape. Until then, Praia da Luz police knew nothing of Brueckner, and the danger he posed to the community. He had multiple charges of crimes against children in Germany, and was a known sex offender.
During the German police’s continued investigation into Brueckner, they found that his mobile phone was used in the immediate area of the Ocean Club Resort between 9 and 10 PM on the night of Madeleine’s disappearance. The following day, Brueckner de-registered one of two vehicles that he owned. Shortly after, he left Praia da Luz and returned to Germany. German prosecutor Hans Christian Walters, the leader of the investigation into Christian Brueckner, said that there was very strong evidence that Madeleine was dead. Unable to elaborate on the exact evidence, Walters said that within the last two years, they discovered compelling enough evidence that Brueckner was behind Madeleine’s disappearance and murder. The former head of homicide at Scotland yard, who was part of the Operation Grange investigation, knew that German police were very careful about statements they made to the press and the public. He believed that their statement regarding Madeleine likely being deceased was very significant. Walters denied that they’ve located Madeleine’s body, but felt confident that they could place Brueckner at the scene on the evening of her disappearance.
Brueckner’s return to Germany in 2007 brought him to Brunswick. He ran a kiosk that was right next to a Kindergarten. Witnesses said that he often gave out free candy to the children. One of Brueckner’s friends remembered that he would talk about how he wanted to turn the cellar of his cottage into a dungeon, similar to the one that Austrian rapist and murderer Josef Fritzl used to hold captive and torture his daugther. Brueckner spent time in online chat rooms, expressing his fantasies about holding and torturing a child. He told other chatters that he would document exactly how he tortured them.
On May 2, 2015, almost exactly eight years to the day after Madeleine disappeared, a five-year-old German girl, Inga Gehricke, disappeared from a forest where she was having a barbecue with her family. The young blonde girl went to collect wood for a campfire with other children and never returned. This was two hours from where Brueckner was staying. German journalists likened it to Madeleine’s disappearance. A dark van similar to Brueckner’s was seen leaving the abduction site. Inga has never been found.
Brueckner has also been investigated regarding his connection to the disappearance of a six-year-old boy in Portugal. Rene Hasse vanished from a beach in 1996, just 25 miles away from Praia da Luz.
In 2017, one of Brueckner’s friends reported that he made a drunken confession to him about his involvement in the McCann disappearance. The police executed a search on a deserted factory owned by Brueckner and found hard drives and USB ports buried in plastic bags, along with his dead dog. There were thousands of pictures and videos found, however investigators have not released what exactly was found. They also found Brueckner’s large camper. Inside there were several swimsuits belonging to little girls.
While Brueckner remains the prime suspect in the disappearance of Madeleine McCann, police have been unable to formally charge him with her murder or kidnapping. He is currently imprisoned in Kiel, Germany. Kate and Gerry McCann continue to search for their daughter and still harbor hope that Madeleine will be found alive.
