EP02 - Madeleine McCann: The Chief Suspect

Jon Clarke takes us through those named officially as suspects by the police in the immediate few months following Madeleine’s disappearance, and how Christian Brueckner entered the frame and flipped this infamous investigation on its head once again. 

Jon Clarke’s book, ‘My Search for Madeleine’ is available via the link below:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/MY-SEARCH-MADELEINE-Reporters-Harrowing-ebook/dp/B09F85HG7S

Transcript

00:39 --> 01:06

Donal:              Back in the early stages of the investigation, missing child, family, and Robert Murat are within the orbit of the investigation. But never too far away, rationally, would be the sense that here we have a seaside resort, transient community, and this may be a magnet for sex offenders. How did the force publicly demonstrate to journalists on the ground, that they were investigating and eliminating, all these sex offenders in the area, or in the wider area?

01:07 --> 03:09

Jon:                 They’d said they knew who the local offenders were, they were checking them they were going around speaking to them, but, of course, they said that they knew that someone had kidnapped her, and they knew where she was and they were talking to the kidnappers. We started to realise there were a lot of these strange people living within some ten, fifteen miles of Praia de Luz, and we went around and tried to meet some of them and investigate some of them. It was at this point that the journalist I was working with at the Sunday Mirror, she found Robert Murat strange, he had been really pretty odd when I’d first arrived. It was a bit unusual the way he had been so forthcoming and gushing about information. So, she felt that it was her duty to report him to the police. She contacted Leicestershire police about him. I supported her, I guess. She mentioned Soham. If you remember the two girls in Soham, and Ian Huntley the caretaker who’d taken an uncanny interest in the case, right from the beginning, and asked lots of questions of the journalists and he became pally with everyone. He did show these sorts of traits. I just think he was being friendly, now I look back, but I think she was right to maybe raise up the flagpole to Leicestershire police. She didn’t report it, she wrote to Leicestershire police, spoke to them, sent an email, they contacted her, interviewed her, they then asked her to report to the local police and she went and spoke to the GNR officer, who referred her to a PJ Officer. GNR is the local, very local, police and the PJ is the Policia Judicial who were running the investigation. They immediately thought they ought to look into this and that’s when they started to focus their attention on to Robert Murat. I must stress the Sunday Mirror didn’t run any stories, actually at all on this. I think it broke on the Monday. I remember Ian Woods at Sky, I remember him reporting outside Murat’s house, about how he’d been arrested. And the Sunday Mirror, she didn’t get to run anything at all until the following Sunday and by then it had probably moved on so much, I don’t think she reported anything. I think she was doing it out of a duty Donal, I think a lot of the journalists there… we were just trying to do, like we often do, people sort of, malign us, just think we’re out to make a fast buck or get the best story but sometimes we do act humanly, and we try to sort of solve things.

03:10 --> 03:25

Donal:             Robert was an early arguido, then the family, naturally, were under suspicion because traditionally that is what happens and, then of course, they were made arguidos after the cadaver dogs. Explain how they both left the reckoning as suspects and then how the investigation developed from there?

03:27 --> 04:48

Jon:                 Once they made Murat a suspect, as you say an arguido. It’s like a kind of an official suspect really. It’s a weird case it means that you’ve also got the right to legal counsel and gives you some protection under Portuguese law.  I don’t quite understand it really, to me it just means that you are in world of the eyes, and the worlds press, and they think you might be guilty but that’s not what they say, and so at one point they kind of overlapped. The McCanns were arguidos, as well Murat. Don’t forget I was back in Spain as well, I was backwards and forwards a lot to start with, but I was also launching a newspaper. When the McCanns started to get investigated, I wasn’t there so much, so I don’t know so much the nitty gritty around it. I just know I just didn’t believe it for a second, I…I… just couldn’t get my head round why they were accusing the family when I…. just…just…could not see it. I couldn’t understand it not for a second, that there was any chance that it was the family that were involved in this. But I knew having lived in southern Spain for some years having seen how the police sometimes worked in Southern Spain, I figured it was the same in Portugal, it was an easy option. And someone mentioned this poor girl Joanna, who’d gone missing a couple of years earlier just vanished, same police force with the mother supposedly beaten up to get a confession. I just thought look, come on, this is so obvious, and then they had the Casa Pia case came out, that was horrendous. Institutionalised paedophile ring going on for twenty, thirty, years so…I just… my head went down Donal.  I just thought I don’t want to know about this case now and it was upsetting me a lot at this point, and I just…just… tried to kind of focus on what was happening in Spain and other stories.

04:49 --> 05:10

Donal:             So, when you kind of returned to the story at this stage, the case had run dry Murat and the McCanns were no longer arguidos and the Portuguese police had reached a brick wall and said they’d gone as far as they could, the family were trying to finance their own investigation. Explain how you came back into it and how you have ploughed this furrow since.

05:11 --> 06:10

Jon:                 I mean, I remember a year, the year anniversary, I wrote a big feature piece about how I didn’t believe the family were involved. It was a piece I’d written when the family were first arrested to say that I just don’t believe it, this is why so I repeated a slightly more in-depth piece a year later on the anniversary saying, I’m sure that someone snatched Madeleine. But that’s when the trolls just sort of went for me. But you ask the question in what way was I involved in the case? So many times, we were brought into the case as journalists through the Olive press to investigate links in Spain, there were so many connections to Spain. I mean, Gerry McCann was convinced that she was brought across the border into Huelva they came over and they campaigned around Huelva and into Seville, I think, and we kept getting calls from people saying they’d seen her here, they’d seen her there, could you look into this guy, could you look into that guy, could you look into this sicko, that sicko. So, we were backwards and forward all over, I mean, I remember at one point I think we had like, in one year something like ten sightings and we certainly done well over a dozen stories between 2008 and 2012.

06:11 --> 06:28

Donal:             When did you begin to start looking at and saying, right the police are in denial, and they’re in denial because paedophilia is bad for business. So, when did you begin to recognise that there was a paedophile in the area who would match the description of an opportunist offender who could have snatched Madeleine McCann?

06:29 --> 07:07

Jon:                 There was a number of really key sightings in the week, or weeks, running up to that day in May 2007. Some of them were like charity collectors, supposedly collecting for an orphanage, to this day no one knows which orphanage there is because there isn’t actually any orphanage in the area. These guys were going door to door, knocking on doors soliciting money. No one could really verify who they were, and they’ve never come forward, saying yes, we were collecting for so and so orphanage. They could have been checking out most likely apartments to burgle or to rob, houses to rob. Or equally, as you say an opportunist, one of them might have seen a child clearly being left around or took a fancy to a child, so that’s group one. 

07:07 --> 07:

Group two is two blonde men who were seen on a terrace just below the McCanns apartment a couple of hours before she went missing, they’ve never come forward never been identified talking in hushed tones. Apparently, one came out and looked furtively left to right, and walked out the alleyway below the McCann’s house. Also, you’ve then got the third interesting sighting which is a local girl, a local expat girl, English girl, ten years old. Twice, three days apart, spotted a man supposedly standing in the street outside the Ocean Club looking up at the apartments just sort of staring.

07:50 --> 07:55

Donal:             So that third sighting by this young child that’s quite unusual describe that to me again?

07:55 --> 08.40

Jon:                 She’s been taken to school by her mother, she has to walk down to catch the bus, just above the supermarket that’s just below the Ocean Club, so we’re talking about 8.30, 9 o’clock she saw this guy ostensibly looking… in her opinion, looking strange and looking straight up at an apartment in the same area. She gave a description and said he was quite sort of pot marked, ugly not a pleasant person to look at and she found this guy suspicious, unusual. It gives a suggestion that the apartments were being watched to my mind, it gives you a sense that people were walking around that shouldn’t have necessarily been there. I mean there was another occasion, I remember that someone had spotted a guy lurking under one of the stairwells the week before, that was odd because it’s so wide open anyone could kind of get in there.

08:41 --> 09.33

Donal:              My concern with this is that the race towards this massive surveillance operation to snatch one kid, is that it serves a couple of needs.  One, it serves to, in many ways, exonerate the parents because if they say that even they weren’t looking after the children, in the way that they would have wished now in retrospect, that actually, with an army of paedophiles surrounding them, and under nearly 24-hour surveillance, there was nothing they really could have done to protect Maddy she was already a marked child. In relation to the failure of both the Portuguese police, and Operation Grange it also serves that need that actually there was such an army of paedophiles that basically, no amount of resources could of helped us to solve the problem, so it exonerates them from all of that. Plus, it gives the imperative to throw more cash at it. At the end of the day its some sleazy paedophile, repeat offender who’s very good at what they do, regularly getting away with sex crimes and that is by far more realistic than anything else.

09:34 --> 10.09

Jon:                 Actually I think you have to remember that at the top of the book in the restaurant very early on, they stayed there for six nights in there, they were going to eat every single night they were going to eat at the restaurant at the same time and at the top of the signing in book the guest book for the restaurant they’d put at the top family leaving children at home, eating dinner every night, going back to check on their children. Anyone could have spotted that and thought oh…well the children are all in their apartments every night on their own. People tip off thieves all the time don’t they, the cleaner would tip someone off about some guests staying with a load of money. I think that someone may well have tipped them off on that restaurant booking system.

10:10 --> 10.22

Donal:              What I’m saying is that it’s much more likely that it was an opportunist job on behalf of some fixated preferential paedophile who has done this a million times before rather than an army of paedophiles putting under constant surveillance…

10:10 --> 11.11

Jon:                 It’s unlikely given that in Portugal and indeed in Spain, there were kids wandering around everywhere at night going backwards and forwards to the shops. It’s a lot easier targets than them going into someone’s apartment, and walking up the steps, and sliding the patio door open and finding her, and then sneaking out you know, of course, there are much more easy targets. I think your point is she could have woken up yes correct, she could have walked down the steps, yes, she could have been spotted by someone it’s that time of night 9.30 its dark, it’s getting dusk, anyone could have been driving past. A certain Christian B might have been driving past, let’s face it he’d lived around that area for seven years, he knew the area like the back of his hand, he was still living nearby in Foral, inland, and he was staying on beaches nearby, and staying nearby as he had friends nearby, he could of so easily have been driving past in his VW van, oh there’s a girl walking out she looks a bit confused oh… and bang… As you say opportunism.

11:12 --> 11.27

Donal:              I am suspicious of this big, orchestrated campaign and she was picked to order, and she was put under surveillance 24/7, no amount of protection around this child would have protected her, that’s not just the way these crime paedophile networks operate its much more opportunistic and it’s much more chaotic than that.

11:29 --> 11.40

Jon:                 People supposedly said he had a job to do the next day, so he might have been doing it on behalf of someone, it may have been that that person was taking her to order but I do agree with you though if you look at the Casa Pia network you’ve got a huge network of orphanages and under privileged children.

11:41 --> 12.01

Donal:             Paedophile networks function within institutions. The catholic church, orphanages, schools, where there is a huge population of kids running around and a variety of ages on the street and on the beaches and all of this stuff. That is why paedophiles and sex offenders are attracted to transient communities which allows them to operate in plain sight. I’m suggesting if we’re going to the core of this, it is much more an opportunistic crime. 

12:02 --> 12.32

Jon:                  It is but can I just make one point here Donal though, the fact, the very fact that you could park your car right outside that apartment and sit there with a camera, video camera, binoculars and quietly watch that apartment so close to it that must have been, could have been quite a kick for a sex offender, right? The fact that it’s not a protected closed holiday club with proper security, proper video cameras, gates like you have at schools these days monitoring people coming in and out. That makes it to my mind much easier for someone who wanted to monitor it.

12:33 --> 13.39

Donal:             You now have specialised and targeted the primary suspect in the case today. Explain to me and this is the focus of your book. How Christian Brueckner became a target for you, and, also, the German police?

12:47 --> 14.42

Jon:                 Donal, how many years and how many times have we been at this stage, when we thought someone’s come forward and there’s someone in the ring. In fact, it was the year before that we thought there was a German guy that was involved, and it was a guy called Martin Ney and he had all the hallmarks of being the person who would have taken Maddy, he was a dangerous, predatory paedophile who killed children in Germany. In fact, killed them in four different countries, three years apart, and the previous time was in 2004, and how perfect it would therefore be that it was 2007 that he would have taken Maddie and killed her. The only fly in the ointment being that he was interested in boys. They were all boys. That is what his thing was, and it wasn’t little girls. While he was in the area at the time and let’s not forget he was working for a homeless charity for the catholic church, in and around Lagos and Praia de Luz at the time. He was there, nothing to say that he didn’t know the person who did it, or was involved in some way, or helped or advised. But I don’t think it was him. 

13:40 --> 14.42

It’s a year later that we discover, the German police the BKA out of Braunschweig, which is one of their 16 federal states, announced in a press conference that they were investigating a prime suspect in the case of missing, no… dead, murdered Madeleine McCann. They said it’s a murder case, it came out the blue they announced we know, we want more information on two cars that he may have driven, on, two places he may have lived in. We want more information about people who might have known him, they didn’t give his name initially, they said that we are…. this is a murder inquiry and that was the moment that I just…I couldn’t believe it, we think we saw it on BBC news, middle of the afternoon I was stunned absolutely blown away by it:

“More details are emerging of the new suspect in the Madeleine McCann case who according to German Media is now being investigated over the disappearance of a five-year-old girl in Germany. It’s reported the suspect is being named as Christian B. a 43-year-old man who is believed to have been in the same area of southern Portugal where three-year-old Madeleine went missing while on holiday in 2007.”

12:47 --> 14.04

Donal:             And what was significant about that press conference that I recall, was that for the first time a police force said Maddie McCann was dead, and this was very definitive, and  the family for all the reasons you would understand suggesting that Maddie may still be alive and holding out some hope that she may continue to live an abducted life well into her teens but the police force had declared her as effectively dead.

15:05 --> 15.34

Jon:                 Hans Christian Wolters remember the prosecutor he came forward saying we have evidence to show that Madeleine McCann is dead, and we know who the suspect is, and, in fact, they also gave two phone numbers that had been used on the night that she went missing in the vicinity of the Ocean Club in Praia de Luz from 7.30 for half an hour. A phone call was made between these two phones both of which by the way were burner phones they appealed if anyone knew these numbers, they pretty much thought they knew who the guy is they thought they had their man.

15:35 --> 15.57

Donal:             Now for the first time the German police are isolating and saying they now have the prime suspect in the Maddie McCann case, and they are soliciting as much information as they can to try and get a conviction and a charge across the line. So, for you when did you actually manage to match Christian Brueckner as a name to the suspect the German police were talking about?

15:58 --> 17.14

Jon:                 His name had been put into the ring many, many, years before and, in fact, 2013 they first asked him to come in and speak to them in the police station. In fact, it was in 2016 that they first started investigating him, the police force the BKA police force, and it wasn’t in fact, until 2017 that they got the prosecution and said look what do you think guys you know I think we’ve got a good case here we could prosecute this guy and the prosecutors said, OK yeah, looked at the evidence, yeah great carry on investigating it, we’ll spend some money and put quite a bit of money towards it. So, it was another two years investigation after that, two and a half years until 2020 when they finally announced that they had a lot of the pieces of the jigsaw, and they clearly were missing certain key things. I saw that on that afternoon, and I didn’t know his name, I knew there was a German man of a certain age let’s say 45 or 44 or whatever he was, and I just straight away got on the phone to the news editor of the Mail on Sunday and said, I think I should get to Praia de Luz what do you think? You know, it was during the lockdown, and it was still difficult to travel, I mean the border between Portugal and Spain was shut, first time in years. He said yes just get there as soon as you can, great let’s investigate. To answer your question, it was during the journey sometime later that day or indeed over through the night that his name came out as Christian B. It was the English press the next day that announced his name as Christian Brueckner.  

17:15 --> 17.19

Donal:              And what was the key bit of information that the German prosecutors had that linked him to the Madeleine McCann case?

17:20 --> 17.45

Jon:                 Well, they haven’t really told us exactly. When I interviewed Wolters recently in Germany, he admitted there was certain things they’d got that they hadn’t released. I believe it was quite a lot but what they do have is evidence that he used one of those two phones where the phone call was made just before she went missing. They also had evidence the cars he used they believe he was in that vicinity. They also know his track record and what he was up to at the time.

17:46 --> 18.10

Donal:              So, the starting point here for you, is an understanding from the German police is that Christian Brueckner, fixated preferential paedophile, established despicable sex offender, was in the area at the time Madeleine McCann went missing and this was fresh news because if you have a sex offender in an area where a child goes missing, they must surely have been made suspects from day one but that never happened.

18:11 --> 20.00

Jon:                  No, it didn’t…it didn’t but the German police they said, by amazing fortune the Portuguese police kept the phone records from that night so they could actually get all the phone numbers and go through them and I think Operation Grange had them as well but they hadn’t worked out which numbers went to which person. But it was the German police who said by good German policing; those were his exact words, said, that we were able to work out that one of these phone numbers was a phone number used by a very dangerous German paedophile and sex offender called Christian Brueckner. And they, they’d worked out they traced the two together that he had been indeed there at that exact time and let’s not forget, people might say oh well he lived in the area, what would you expect. No, well actually he didn’t live in the area. He had lived in the area, but he moved out of the area, he’d actually gone to prison, but we’ll talk about that another time. But he’d been out of prison, since he’d been out of prison, he’d been living about 40 minutes away or 35 minutes away in a village called Foral, but he knew the area like the back of his hand and on that particular night he was there, I mean, his phone number was making a phone call. Now to this day Donal we don’t know who he was speaking to. The German police say they don’t know, they appealed to know who he was speaking to, who had that other phone. Christian hasn’t come forward and told us, he hasn’t given us an alibi yet, so we have to try and understand who he was speaking to for half an hour, that’s a long call isn’t it? Thirty-minute call who makes a thirty-minute phone calls, ostensibly outside, because he didn’t have a house at the time in Praia de Luz. So, he’s either in his van nearby, and this is another thing we have to try and understand exactly how close, the police said he was right next to the Ocean Club, but I don’t think they can be really sure of that. It’s difficult to triangulate because there’s only one aerial, only one mobile phone aerial there, so it’s hard to know exactly where he was. They seem to think he was outside the Ocean Club they haven’t explained why yet, that was the point that he’s there, he’s outside, he’s a dangerous man, he’s a convicted sex offender and he’s a convicted rapist and he’s outside the Ocean Club on the night that Madeleine goes missing.

20:01 --> 20.05

Donal:             And so, this is the moment when your manhunt, your investigation into Christian Bruecknerbegins.

20:06 --> 20.21

Jon:                 That’s when it starts. So, from then I’ve been full tilt looking into him and just trying to understand who this man was and just quite how he was able to travel around and get away with so much for so long.

20:21 --> 22.06