Senior Madeleine McCann detective reveals new evidence and theories on prime suspect Christian Brueckner – as he is poised for release

A senior detective in the Madeleine McCann case has revealed new evidence and theories on prime suspect Christian Brueckner who is poised for release. 

Brueckner will be freed on Wednesday after serving a seven-year sentence for the rape of a 72-year-old American woman in Praia da Luz two years before Madeleine vanished.

In 2020, German authorities declared Christian Brueckner their prime suspect for the abduction and murder of Madeleine, but charges have yet to be formalised.

Brueckner has also previously been convicted of unrelated counts of child sexual abuse and drug trafficking.

ITV’s new documentary Madeleine McCann: Searching For The Prime Suspect, follows criminologist Dr Graham Hill, a former senior Met detective who was sent to Portugal in the early stages of the investigation, as he returns to Praia da Luz for the first time.

In the show, Dr Hill revisits the scene of Madeleine’s disappearance, speaking to experts, people who knew Brueckner and looking around the places he stayed, unpicking the main suspect’s extensive criminal history.

Rob Hyde, a journalist in Germany who has covered the case extensively, was interviewed by Dr Hill and gave a chilling warning about the potential dangers of him being freed.

He said: ‘Brueckner has always been very, very successful at running from the police, he’s also got convictions for forgery of documents, and he is connected to the criminal underworld. 

‘There are places in the world with no extradition treaties with Germany, I think there is a high chance he will make his way somewhere else.’

Mr Hyde has pieced together a timeline of Brueckner’s movements across the world before and after Madeleine’s disappearance.

He said: ‘It’s complicated, he was all over the place. He flitted between Germany and Portugal, but even that isn’t the entire story. 

‘He would also go off to other places, just making it incredibly difficult to keep track of him.’

Brueckner was born Chrisitan Fischer in Wurzburg, Bavaria, and took the name he uses now when he and his two brothers were adopted by Brigitte and Fritz Brueckner, after their troubled mother gave them up.

At the age of 15, whilst living with his adoptive parents who were physically abusive, he was convicted of his first crime – a burglary.

In 1994, two years after his conviction, Brueckner’s adoptive parents put him in a children’s home after Fritz was left seriously injured in an accident.

And it was while there that he was found guilty of his first sex offence, abusing a child in the home when he was 17. 

Before being caught, he went on to sexually abuse a nine-year-old.

He was sentenced to two years in prison for ‘sexual abuse of a child, attempted sexual abuse of a child and performing sexual acts in front of a child.’

But shortly afterwards, he travelled to Portugal, where he found jobbing work in hotels and garages before eventually being tracked down by police and extradited to Germany.

After serving his sentence he returned to Portugal and in 2004 he was said to have raped Irish tour guide Hazel Behan at her apartment in Praia da Rocha on the Algarve coast – close to where Madeleine vanished from three years later.

In 2005, he raped 72-year-old American woman, Diana Menkes, who was living in the Algarve and who has since died.

In 2007, the same year Madeleine went missing, Brueckner left Portugal and didn’t return for nine years, instead basing himself in Germany where his offending ‘spiralled’.

Mr Hyde took Dr Hill to the kiosk Brueckner ran in Braunschweig, in north-west Germany, for 18 months after Madeleine went missing.

‘A person who worked there told me about the news piece about the Madeleine McCann case running on the TV, Brueckner then flips out, starts shouting “das mädchen ist tot” – the girl is dead.

‘And he makes a really odd comment, which is “yes, pigs can also eat human flesh, you know”.’

Elsewhere in the documentary, Dr Hill spoke to Dieter Fehlinger, the father of Brueckner’s ex-girlfriend, who said the criminal made a disturbing comment whilst showing him around his Volkswagen van in Portugal in the spring of 2007.

At the time, he was modifying vehicles to transport large quantities of drugs.

Mr Fehlinger, who was visiting his daughter at the time, said: ‘He invited me inside his camper van. 

‘He said to me there was a hiding place inside, 50kg of marijuana would fit in easily, he built it. 

‘And then he said, it was “so big that you could hide a small child inside”.’

In his first television interview, Brueckner’s former associate Helge Busching recalled the moment he appeared to let slip details of his involvement in the three-year-old’s disappearance.

Mr Busching, who had committed crimes with the suspect including stealing solar panels and diesel, said he made a remark at a festival in Spain just a year after Madeleine vanished that he says has never left him.

‘I told him I don’t understand how somebody can rob little children from a hotel,’ he recalled.

And then, he says, Brueckner answered: ‘She was not screaming.’

When Dr Hill asked Mr Busching what he thought that meant, he said: ‘I was thinking, yeah, how you know this…yeah he have to do something with this.’

He added: ‘I want Christian to go behind bars for this. This was him, I am 100 per cent sure. 

‘He can say “I am innocent”. I know what he was doing, I saw it with my proper eyes. I know he’s a dangerous man.’

Mr Busching said what he heard chilled him so much that he feared asking any more questions, and he said Brueckner then left the festival suddenly that night.

He said he left a voicemail for Scotland Yard later that same year, but his message was lost in the 60,000 that poured in at the time.

It was not until 2017 that detectives finally listened when he called again and his testimony became part of the case against Brueckner, passed to German prosecutors who would later name him their prime suspect.

He also told Dr Hill about finding a stash of disturbing videos in Brueckner’s Portuguese home, just a year after he raped the 72-year-old, showing him violently raping a woman and a girl who he estimated to be around 14.

Mr Busching said Brueckner had a specialty – breaking into hotel rooms and holiday homes.

He believes Brueckner may have tried to burgle the McCanns’ apartment when he stumbled across Madeleine.

‘Christian knows the Ocean Club very well. He was working there in the Ocean Club as a pool boy. 

‘And I think Christian, I think, was thinking, okay, go in one apartment and take some stuff from this apartment. (But) this time, he don’t take baggage, luggage, he takes her.’

Next, Dr Hill met ex-pat Ken who used to bump into Bruekner camping at beaches around the time Madeleine went missing.

Standing in the spot where he first laid eyes on him, he told Dr Hill: ‘Now, when all the motor caravans used to park where we’re stood now, he’d be a loner and he’d park on the hill where the sun’s going down.

‘Many an evening he would spend there, of course because he sold his drugs there and he wanted to be out of the way so he was discreet.

‘I knew him reasonably well but I kept my distance because he was part of the criminal fraternity. Didn’t want anything to do with him.’

When asked if it comes as a surprise to him that he has a sexual interest in children, he mentioned ‘the way he used to look at young girls’ and called him a ‘predator’.

‘More than just a pedophile, he’s a pervert,’ Ken added.

The ex-pat also said Brueckner ‘should have been made a suspect three hours after she [Madeleine] went missing’, adding: ‘I just don’t trust the guy, he gives me the creeps. He’s got a criminal record longer than a telephone directory.’ 

Mr Hyde also showed Dr Hill highly disturbing online Skype chats between Brueckner and another pedophile, known as Frank S.

The chats were discovered in 2014 by German police who raided Frank’s home for child pornography as part of an investigation into pedophile rings.

In one of the chats, Frank – going by the username panikspatzss – sent a message which said: ‘Logical. Maybe you caught a little one during that time.’

The bloodcurdling response from Brueckner – going by the username crazy derholder which translates to ‘crazy helga’ – reads: ‘But you don’t have any benefit, unfortunately. If so, I’ll make a lot of films… hehe.’ 

‘Oh yes, do it,’ came the response from Frank, which was followed by another vile remark from Brueckner saying: ‘I’ll document exactly how she’s being tortured.’ 

When Frank simply replied ‘cool’, he said: ‘Well let’s see, don’t just talk – do it too! hehe.’

In another depraved Skype chat, Brueckner asked: ‘Do you have new films?’

‘No, unfortunately not yet. I barely had any time during the week,’ read Frank’s reply.

Referring to plans to abduct a child, Brueckner then said: ‘Capture something small and use it for days, that would be…’.

But when Frank didn’t reply, he seemingly grew desperate and sent another message saying: ‘Has that put you off now?’.

Frank said: ‘No why’, to which Brueckner said: ‘Because you didn’t get in touch anymore.’ 

In 2016, two years after the Skype chats were found, Brueckner’s name surfaced again in connection with a disused factory he owned in Neuwegersleben, Germany.

‘This was his secret getaway. This is where he wanted to carry out horrible things away from prying eyes,’ said Mr Hyde as he showed Dr Hill around.

Police searched the factory in January 2016 after a policewoman, who lived nearby, alerted them that she had been on the premises and noticed the levels of soil had been changed and there was a ‘foul smell’.

Buried under the body of a dead dog, officers found a supermarket bag full of USB sticks containing ‘hundreds of the most vile and sickening and bloodcurdling’ acts of child sex crimes – some involving Brueckner himself.

Investigators also found over 70 children’s swimming costumes hidden in his Winnebago which was parked on the site.

‘I would almost hazard a guess those swimming costumes were stolen from holiday complexes across the Praia da Luz area,’ said Dr Hill.

Brueckner was deported back to Germany in 2017 after he was caught in a playground in the Algarve allegedly exposing himself to children.

Whilst serving his seven-year sentence in a German jail for raping the 72-year-old woman in Portugal, he began writing to British newspapers about Madeleine’s case.

In one letter, he doesn’t profess his innocence and instead goads the papers and authorities by asking where the evidence and DNA is to place him as the abductor and asks where the body is.

The documentary asks if Portuguese police missed vital clues that would have led them to Brueckner earlier.

He had been arrested multiple times from break-ins and burglaries, but previous sexual offence do not seem to have been picked up.

Whilst in front of a judge for stealing diesel from lorries he was asked if he had a criminal record and told them about his convictions for theft and sex offences back in Germany.

However, it is said the court didn’t include those convictions in the trial conclusion documents.

Dr Hill questions if this slip up meant that Brueckner was not included on Portuguese police’s list of sex offenders, which they used to find and question known predators in the area when Madeleine disappeared.

In 2024, he was finally brought to court in Germany on three charges of rape, including the attack on Hazel Behan, and two counts of child sex abuse between 2000 and 2017, all committed in Portugal.

Speaking about facing him for the first time, Ms Behan said: ‘I was facing him for the duration of the two days that I sat testifying. That’s probably only about six or eight feet from him. 

‘I felt like a leaf in the wind. I felt extremely vulnerable.’

She is convinced that Brueckner is the masked man, who broke into her apartment in Praia da Rocha in 2004, tied her up with rope before recording himself raping, whipping and insulting her for five hours.

Ms Behan said: ‘I have been challenged on how I could identify somebody by seeing their eyes. I am 100 per cent convinced that he is the person who did this to me.’

However, a major set back for the prosecution saw Brueckner acquitted of the crimes he was on trial for.

All the material seized from his factory, including the USB sticks containing footage of him committing rape, was excluded from the case because of technical irregularities with the search warrant.

Dr Hill said: ‘That is damning evidence against Christian Brueckner that if they had been able to put that into the trial, could have been the difference between a guilty and a not guilty.’

Leading British psychiatrist Dr Readerman, who was asked to assess him during the trial, found he was in the top league of dangerous offenders with a high risk of committing more crimes.

Dr Hill asked German prosecutor Hans Christian Wolters if he still believes Brueckner abducted Madeleine, he said: ‘That is still the case. Since 2020, in the last five years, our investigations have not resulted in any exonerating evidence of Christian B being involved.

‘He has no alibi. There is only evidence that incriminates him. He is the prime suspect and, above all, he’s the only suspect. 

‘We really only have evidence that points to him as the perpetrator. But as to whether we can prove it, prove it in a court of law, that is the big task that lies ahead of us.’

Ms Behan also believes he is the person who took Madeleine two years after she was raped.

‘I firmly believe that the German police would not say that he murdered that little girl if he didn’t,’ she said. ‘When I think of Madeleine I feel really sad. For him to be the last person potentially that this little girl could of seen in her world, that’s horrendous.’