Fifteen years have passed since a child went missing from a Portuguese vacation destination. The appearance of a new suspect has given people new hope for answers and closure.
On May 3, 2007, Madeleine McCann, a three-year-old from Rothley, Leicestershire, vanished from the Portuguese tourist destination of Praia da Luz on the Algarve. Her case is still open, and the public and media continue showing great interest.
In May 2021, their daughter’s 18th birthday, Kate and Gerry McCann reiterated their desire to be reunited with her in a message they made on the Find Madeleine website.
“Every May is tough – a reminder of years passed, of years together lost, or stolen. This year it is particularly poignant as we should be celebrating Madeleine’s 18th birthday.”
“We hang on to the hope, however small, that we will see Madeleine again. As we have said repeatedly, we need to know what has happened to our lovely daughter, no matter what. We are very grateful to the police for their continued efforts.”
Finding the truth, according to them, is still “important” after marking another somber anniversary earlier this year.
The recent appearance of a fresh suspect in Germany has revived hopes that the mystery would eventually be solved. This serves as a reminder of the case’s developments.
The McCanns, wealthy doctors Kate and Gerry, their children Madeleine, age three, and her siblings, ages two and one, went on vacation with seven other families on April 28, 2007, to the Ocean Club in Praia da Luz, a hamlet on the southwest coast of Portugal.
The adults in the group met up on May 3 at 8.30 p.m. to go out to supper at the resort’s outdoor tapas bar following a relaxing spring vacation by the sea. To ensure that someone checked on the kids every half-hour, the parents left them behind, sleeping in their flats with the doors unlocked.
At ten o’clock, Kate McCann finished her turn and went back to her apartment. She sprinted back to the restaurant, yelling, “Madeleine’s gone! Someone’s taken her!” 60 employees and other visitors swiftly called the police after searching the facility and calling for the girl in vain until dawn.
Hundreds of volunteers joined the search for the missing girl over the next few days as the case quickly gained notoriety. Border police and airport workers were alerted. The Portuguese authorities would later come under fire for their actions during the crucial initial hours of the investigation, when the trail may still have been warm.
They were accused of making fundamental errors like failing to interview every resort guest or conduct a house-by-house search of every local residence, acting slowly to erect roadblocks, and possibly compromising forensic evidence at the crime scene through carelessness and incautiousness.
The parents revealed their “anguish and despair” over Madeleine disappearing, a worst-case scenario for any parent. At first, the police said they thought Madeleine was still alive and had been taken from the room by a stranger.
Police released a description of a suspicious individual they had observed the night the girl vanished on May 26. One of the McCanns’ eating partners, Jane Tanner, reported seeing the suspect nearby the apartment when she checked on her kids. The suspect was described as a Mediterranean man with dark hair and beige pants. Later, Scotland Yard came to consider the sighting to be a red herring.
The search continued throughout the summer amidst a furious media frenzy and massive fundraising efforts. The McCanns established Madeleine’s Fund on May 15 to fund additional research and maintain the case’s high profile.
Generous donations came from celebrities like Richard Branson, Simon Cowell, J.K. Rowling, and Coleen Rooney. By May 30, the patient had become so well-known that they were being flown to the Vatican in Sir Phillip Green’s Learjet to meet the Pope.
Robert Murat, a local man who later became the case’s first suspect, had his home and car searched, his swimming pool drained, and his electronic gadgets seized, but no proof linking him to Madeleine was discovered. Therefore the case was quickly dismissed.
As irritation with the lack of progress rose and the media started to speculate about whether the McCanns themselves had been involved in the case by June, the Portuguese police finally conceded that they had failed to protect any potentially valuable evidence at the site.
While others alleged anomalies in the McCanns’ version of events, wild tabloid rumors indicated the pair and their associates may have been swingers and that the McCanns, as doctors, may have been accustomed to sedating their kids.
Roy Greenslade of The Guardian later referred to the severity of the antagonism towards the parents as “no journalistic accident, but a sustained campaign of vitriol against a grief-stricken family,” singling out The Daily Express and Daily Star for specific censure.
In July, British police sent over two springer spaniel sniffer dogs to look for DNA after former South African police officer Danie Krugel’s aid, which claimed his portable “matter orientation system” could help discover Madeleine, was discredited.
According to Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan’s book Searching for Madeleine, relations with the local authorities would finally deteriorate as they resent British interference in a Portuguese investigation (2014).
Madeleine had been missing for 100 days at the end of August, and detectives finally acknowledged that she might never be discovered. Also, they informed the McCanns that the case was now being investigated as a murder rather than an abduction.
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When Portuguese police questioned the McCanns in September as “arguidos” (suspects), the parents were informed that the dogs had found Genetic evidence from the missing girl in the boot of their rental car for their vacation—questions that had previously been leaked to the British press. They categorically denied any involvement in her disappearance.
On September 9, despite being suspects, the McCanns returned to Britain. A day later, Portimao’s Policia Judiciaria chief inspector Tavares de Almeida signed a nine-page report stating that Madeleine McCann had died in their apartment in an accident and that the tapas dinner and rota checks on the McCann kids had been part of a cover-up, that the family’s friends had misled the police, and that the McCanns had hidden the body. Afterward, a public prosecutor ordered Kate McCann’s journal, Gerry McCann’s laptop, and the group’s phone records seized.
Chief Inspector Goncalo Amaral was reassigned and dismissed from the case on October 2 after asserting that the British police were merely looking for information that would benefit the McCanns. The following summer, he would release a book called Maddie: The Truth of the Lie, which would spark a protracted legal dispute over libel with the McCanns until March 2017.
In a video released that November back in London, Gerry McCann asserted that his family had been monitored by a “predator” while vacationing at Praia da Luz. Their dining plans for the evening of Madeleine’s disappearance were noted in the resort’s guest book, which was open to all guests at the front desk, according to his wife.
On January 20, 2008, the pair published a sketch of a “creepy man” they claimed other tourists had reported seeing lurking at the Ocean Club. The McCanns’ acquaintances were re-interviewed by Portuguese police in Leicestershire in April, one month before the fateful night’s first anniversary.
After that, on July 21, Fernando José Pinto Monteiro, the attorney general of Portugal, declared that there was no evidence connecting either the McCanns or Robert Murat to the disappearance and dismissed the matter as unsolved.
The McCanns continued to promote their cause even after the trial went cold, and there was no sign of a resolution. They released computer-generated images of what Madeleine might look like now that she had aged on November 3, 2009, and denounced the distribution of previously secret Portuguese police files detailing potential sightings of their daughter to British newspapers in March 2010.
In May 2011, the McCanns released their book about their ordeal, titled Madeleine, which was serialized in The Sun while the tabloid spearheaded a campaign requesting that British Prime Minister David Cameron conduct a fresh investigation. And he did.
The Metropolitan Police’s Operation Grange, launched by the then-home secretary Theresa May, was overseen by commander Simon Foy and included a team of three detective inspectors, five detective sergeants, 19 detective constables, and six support staff members.
In 2013, Scotland Yard publicly announced a new inquiry in July and reported identifying 41 potential suspects in October. In the same month, BBC Crimewatch published an e-fit photo of a person of interest spotted in Praia da Luz in May 2007 with a youngster that matched Madeleine’s description.
Investigators promised to make new arrests when they first arrived in Portugal in January 2014. After searching the area in June and interviewing four residents the following month, they came up empty-handed. The probe would be officially thrown out of contention for the foursome in April 2017, before the UK government announced it would continue to finance it until 2020, admitting it had already spent £10 million in its first four years.
Without being able to prove the case beyond a reasonable doubt, that expenditure allowed police to investigate almost 8,000 potential sightings, translate tens of thousands of documents, gather 1,027 exhibits, take 1,338 statements, and look into 650 s*x offenders and 60 individuals of interest.
When German media reported that Christian Brueckner, a 43-year-old prisoner with a history of child abuse and drug trafficking, had been named as a new suspect by the public prosecutor of the German city of Braunschweig, the Madeline McCann case went dormant before abruptly exploding into life in June 2020.
At the time of Madeleine’s disappearance, he lived in a Volkswagen camper van in the Algarve. Since then, one woman has claimed she spotted a girl who might have been Madeleine speaking German in a Portuguese supermarket in 2017.
In July 2021, German investigators reported that they had discovered an abandoned cellar beneath his former allotment near Hanover where she may have, theoretically, been held captive. They said they are operating under the assumption that Madeleine is dead and investigating his movements as a murder case.
Hans Christian Wolters, the prosecutor in charge of the Brueckner case, has declared that he is “quite sure” that the prisoner is accountable for her kidnapping.
He told the BBC: “If you knew the evidence we had, you would come to the same conclusion as I do, but I can’t give you details because we don’t want the accused to know what we have on him – these are tactical considerations.”
The McCanns can continue to fund a private investigation to find their daughter long after the police search is officially over, should they wish to, since Madeleine’s Fund still had £773,629 to spend as of March 31, 2020.
On April 21, 2022, Mr. Brueckner formally designated “arguido” in the lawsuit. The McCanns’ libel complaint against Mr. Amaral, the former chief inspector who had looked into the disappearance, was dismissed by the European Court of Human Rights on September 19.
After objecting to Mr. Amaral’s book and related media appearances in which he repeatedly implied they were to blame for the disappearance, the couple tried to claim that he was accountable for tarnishing their reputation and violating their rights to respect for their private lives and for being presumed innocent.
Although judges rejected their initial claim in 2017, they claimed in their case that Portugal’s Supreme Court had neglected to provide them with the required remedy for the alleged libel by Mr. Amaral.
The McCanns had three months from the date of the judgment to file an appeal.