15 years after the disappearance of Madeleine McCann: her last hours, the frustrated investigations and a new suspect
Madeleine McCann was three years old when she disappeared from the apartment where her family was vacationing in Praia Da Luz, Portugal, while her parents were having dinner with friends at a nearby restaurant. The reconstruction of that tragic night, the discarded suspects, the harsh accusations against the parents, and a mystery that already seemed impossible to solve has a new clue.
The clock at Tapa’s restaurant in the Ocean Club tourist complex in Praia da Luz, one of the most famous seaside resorts in southern Portugal, marked five minutes to ten at night when Kate McCann got up from the table she shared with her husband, Gerry, and some friends and walked 50 meters to apartment 5A, where their three young children slept.
It was a ritual that Kate and Gerry — a married couple of British doctors — performed almost every night of their vacation on the beaches of the Algarve: after enjoying the day with the family, they fed Madeleine, 3, and the twins Sean and Amelie, put them to bed, and when the boys fell asleep, they went to eat at the nearest restaurant. They sat at a table overlooking the ground-floor apartment, and every half hour one of them would walk those few steps to see how the boys were doing. They were always found asleep.
But on the night of May 3, 2007, the penultimate night of the family’s stay in Portugal, Kate was confronted with a different scene that left her distraught: the boys’ bedroom window was open and Maddie was not in her bed. She searched the bathroom and the rest of the apartment, but to no avail. She screamed. Madeleine was gone.
At that moment, the still unsolved case of the disappearance of a child began, which has had the greatest impact in the world.
It immediately sparked an unprecedented publicity campaign to find this 3-foot-tall blonde baby with a distinctive feature: blue-green left eye and green right eye with a brown spot on the iris.
A substantial reward was offered for information leading to her discovery, with contributions from Harry Potter author JK Rowling, pop mogul Simon Cowell and businessman Richard Branson. Famous soccer players such as David Beckham and Cristiano Ronaldo also asked for help in finding her.
In the fifteen years since, the search for Madeleine McCann’s whereabouts and the hunt for her killers has cost more than $15 million, involved the Portuguese, British and various European police forces, led to the interrogation of more than 600 people, had four suspects ruled out for lack of evidence, and even targeted the girl’s own parents as possible perpetrators or accomplices in her alleged death.
The last hours
It was nine days before Maddie’s 4th birthday when she disappeared. The family would be celebrating it at their home in Leicester, England, where she planned to return two days after the fateful night of May 3.
That morning, as they ate breakfast in the apartment, Madeleine asked her father, “Why didn’t you come over when Sean and I were crying last night?
Kate and Gerry made light of the matter, although after their daughter’s disappearance they often wondered if the boys had cried that night because someone had tried to break into the apartment and frightened them.
The day passed like any other holiday. The last photo of Madeleine Mackan was taken that afternoon, at exactly 2:29 p.m. Kate took it with her camera pointed at Gerry, Amelie and Maddie, who were sitting at the edge of the resort pool. She is wearing a pink dress and a white hat.
They played in the water for a while, and then the parents took the three boys to the Kid’s Club for some time alone, where they were left in the care of the staff. At six in the evening, Kate picked them up and brought them back to the apartment for a bath before dinner, while Gerry went to a tennis lesson.
The father returned shortly after seven, when the boys had eaten and were about to go to bed. Tired from the day’s activities, the three soon fell asleep. Madeleine was wearing short-sleeved pink and white pajamas.
With the boys in bed, Kate and Gerry showered and dressed for lunch at the complex’s restaurant, where they had met some friends at eight-thirty. Before leaving, they would later say, they peeked into the boys’ bedroom. Everything was fine. After nine, Gerry walked from the restaurant to the apartment and saw that they were still asleep.
Desperate search
Maddie’s disappearance revolutionized the entire complex. Shortly after 10 p.m., the caretaker called the Praia da Luz police, while staff and guests searched everywhere for the girl.
The police reacted quickly: an hour after the report, they notified Interpol and ordered the closure of the border with Spain and the Portuguese and Spanish airports. CCTV footage from the complex was also seized for analysis.
Gerry and Kate were the first to be interviewed. Gerry said he had seen the boys asleep around 9:30 p.m., Kate described the scene — with the bedroom window open and Maddie missing — that he found just before 10 a.m.
Her testimony began to raise doubts when confronted with the testimony of the friends they had eaten with at Tapa’s. The times didn’t add up, although of course no one had looked at the clock to record the exact times Kate and Gerry left the table to go see their children.
The next day, an intensive search was conducted around the complex with sniffer dogs, but the result was null. Photos taken by tourists staying at the resort were also examined in an attempt to identify suspects.
Security camera footage provided a possible clue. A man — unidentified — was seen carrying a bundle that could well be Maddie, asleep or perhaps dead.
Meanwhile, the Portuguese media reported that the police had two hypotheses: a kidnapping by an international pedophile ring or a kidnapping by an illegal adoption ring.
Prime suspects
Eleven days after Madeleine’s disappearance, the police carried out a major operation at “Casa Liliana”, a house located a few hundred meters from the Ocean Club and owned by British national Jennifer Murat.
The case took a spectacular turn with all the ingredients of a police novel. The suspect, Robert Murat, Jennifer’s son, had previously collaborated with the police as an English translator, interrogating witnesses who did not speak Portuguese. It was some of these witnesses who said they had seen Murat hanging around the Ocean Club on the night of the events.
The police confiscated his computer and took books and papers to see if they could find any clues, but they were not satisfied with that: they searched the entire house with special sensors to detect the possible presence of a buried corpse, and when they found nothing, they went to work, digging up practically the entire garden.
At about the same time, they interrogated Sergei Malinka, a 22-year-old Russian who had spoken to Murat on the phone several times in recent days. They kidnapped his computer and two hard drives and took his statement for almost five hours, until they confirmed that the communications were due to the fact that the young Russian was putting together a web page for Murat.
The main suspect was not so lucky. They beat him during the interrogation to make him confess, but he stood his ground despite the pressure. There was nothing to link him to the case except for uncertain witness statements.
The police ruled him out as a suspect, but by then the Portuguese media had already declared him guilty. He cost them dearly: in July 2008, Murat won a collective settlement of 715,000 euros from the 11 newspapers that had defamed him.
Parents in the spotlight
The Portuguese investigation, led by judicial police inspector Gonçalo Amaral, then focused on Kate and Gerry McCann, whom he declared arguidos (suspects) in the case.
The police theory was that the parents had accidentally killed their daughter and then made the body disappear. It was based on a series of “evidences” that were not entirely verifiable or could not be linked to the crime of which he accused them: the trace of a sleeping pill in Madeleine’s hair found in the McCanns’ car, the blurred image of a security camera that showed a man carrying a bundle that could be the girl’s body, the contradictions about the hours in the statements, and the fact that Maddie’s little brothers had not woken up that night despite the alleged “kidnapping” and the subsequent disturbance.
According to Amaral, to keep the boys from crying in her absence — as they had the night before she disappeared — doctors Kate and Gerry gave them sleeping pills on the night of May 3 in a dose that Madeleine could not tolerate, causing her death. When they saw the dead girl, in order not to be charged with murder, they decided to make the body disappear (she tried to prove it with the security camera recording) and then report a kidnapping to divert suspicion.
He could not prove anything, but by then the McCanns — as in the case of Murat — were in the headlines accused of filicidas.
The case against them was closed and Amaral had to resign from the judicial police. Fifteen years later, the inspector still supports his theory and has even published a book in which he insists that Kate and Gerry are guilty.
Dead Ends
For almost fifteen years, Interpol and the Portuguese and British police received hundreds of complaints and reports of possible “sightings” of Madeleine MacCann, who was “seen” in several European countries and two African countries.
In July 2011, information about a girl from India who looked like Maddie — who must have been 8 years old at the time — caused a huge stir on social media. It was another false alarm.
Portuguese police closed the investigation, but had to reopen it under pressure from the press and British authorities. It also had to hand over copies of all her files to private investigators hired by Madeleine’s parents, who continued to follow possible leads.
London’s Metropolitan Police also continued to investigate the case, launching “Operation Grange,” releasing new sketches of possible suspects, and even investigating all crimes committed around the Ocean Club at the time of Madeleine’s disappearance.
In March 2014, British investigators reported that they were on the trail of a man who had assaulted young British women vacationing in Portugal in the years before and after McCann’s disappearance. Another dead end.
Kate and Gerry also published a book, Madeleine, recounting the fruitless search for their daughter, and Netflix produced a documentary that is still available on the platform.
But Maggie’s disappearance and fate remained shrouded in mystery.
The Last Suspect
Fifteen years after the disappearance of Madeleine McCann, the investigation into the case — which had already seemed hopeless — has regained momentum, bringing an old suspect out of the shadows of the past.
This is Christian Brueckner, a German national who lived in the Algarve between 1995 and 2007 and was near the Ocean Club complex on the night Maddie disappeared. His presence there was recorded by data from his cell phone.
The new-old suspect is currently in prison in Kiel, northern Germany, on charges of sexual abuse, assault, robbery and petty offenses. He describes himself as “a charismatic psychopath and a manipulative narcissist. “
Brueckner was questioned by Portuguese police in 2007 during the initial investigation into Madeleine’s disappearance, but they were unable to prove anything against him. At the time, he had not committed any of the crimes for which he was convicted in Germany.
At the end of April last year, the Portuguese authorities, who had reopened the case, asked Germany for permission to question him.
“Although the possibility is minimal, we do not lose hope that Madeleine is still alive and that we will be able to meet her,” Maddie’s parents wrote on their website when they learned of the news.
Perhaps — although there is little hope — Brueckner’s answers, if he decides to give them, will help solve the mystery of a disappearance that is 15 years old today.
