EP08 - Madeleine McCann: The Chief Suspect

In the aftermath of a new documentary on the case, Jon Clarke explains shocking fresh information that he’s uncovered regarding Brueckner’s activities and potential links to an international crime ring. Donal and Jon discuss the legal jeopardy that Christian Brueckner now faces and the prospect of a possible conclusion in the Madeleine McCann investigation.

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

00:38 --> 01:12

Donal:             Jon, picking up from our last episode, I was shocked and appalled by the overt nature of Christian Brueckner’s disclosure to Dieter. He had an RV, a huge RV with hidden compartments. And he boasted that he used one of the compartments to smuggle in cannabis across Europe. And it was also big enough, he said, crucially, to smuggle a small child. That seems to be the closest we get to this overarching theory of international child snatchers, I never really believed that these crimes were committed on that scale, Jon, but this puts a new perspective on that possibility.  

01:12 --> 03:17

Jon:                 Well yes exactly it's… it's very depressing isn't it. Over the last couple of weeks there’ve been some exposes and reports that, particularly in Germany on a national network, there's been a documentary that looks at further links into Christian and the links that he had to child trafficking and snatching. And, in particular, there's one really pretty horrific conversation that we haven't really discussed, but that was a Skype chat from 2013, where Christian was arrested for molesting the five-year-old daughter of his girlfriend at the time in Braunschweig, in Germany. This was going back to 2015. When the police came to his house, they snatched his computers and his various devices and what not, they found on his computer one Skype chat with a guy called Panikspatz and Christian went under the name Holger Wahnsinn which means Holger, I'm a Sinner. In this conversation he talks about very clearly snatching a young girl and trapping her for days. And this has been published and it’s in my book the conversation, but what's really interesting is that the German TV investigators have tracked down who this Panikspatz is. The most sinister of all he's clearly a long-term friend of Brueckner’s, who was a client of Brueckner’s they swapped videos, photos, he may have been buying videos and photos off Brueckner, and even more sinister he's an undertaker. He is a very serious high-profile undertaker in a town in Southern Germany who knows everything there is to know about getting rid of bodies. His identity was protected because they were concerned that what could happen to him, but they exposed this guy as one of Christian’s regular Skype chats. That conversation is very sinister and there can be no doubt what they're talking about, and at one point and I extrapolate he uses the word mmm…mmm or MM. The question here is that there’s a lot of debate about this on the web sleuths’ forums: is he talking about Maddie McCann? Like Maddie McCann. Is it, this is something else you'd like to do like Maddie, and he doesn't deny it. So, it's open to conjecture Donal, but it certainly shows further how involved Christian B is and was in predilections of seizing and snatching children.

03:18 --> 03:33

Donal:             So, we’ll come back to the latest developments but among them was, of course, new revelations from Nicole, Christian Brueckner’s girlfriend at the time. And I know she has on/off denied that she was Christian Brueckner's girlfriend.

03:34 --> 05:11

Jon:                 That's right we can actually now say that now with all certainty now, of course, I’ve been saying that in my book for a year, and it's out there. She’d said and quite clearly it was at her house where this Winnebago was parked when her father, Dieter had that critical conversation with Christian about smuggling drugs in his Winnebago. She actually sued Bild newspaper in Germany, for claiming that she was a girlfriend of Brueckner’s. They paid out on it. Well now she's admitted to the Mail on Sunday in England that not only was she dating him at the time, but she said that he was living in her house, she said that he did have a strange fetish for prepubescent children, she said he was very secretive in the way he behaved. Also, she admitted that on the night that Madeleine McCann went missing, she had a long phone conversation with him, and he was on a long journey, moreover. She said he was coming back from a town called Tomas, actually it's Tomar in the north of Portugal I discovered not Tomas. And it's about a four-and-a-half-hour journey from Praia da Luz. She doesn't give him an alibi because quite simply she says he was driving back from this town, on this long drive with his Winnebago, but she doesn't remember if he arrived. She didn't see him that night, she didn't see him the next morning, she didn't know if he arrived and then left early the next morning, or what happened but she did have that conversation with him. And now this is something that the German police are absolutely fascinated about. They've interviewed her three times already. I understand they're going to be interviewing her again in the next week or two, to say what on earth are you going on about, you said you weren’t dating him you were just a friend, you met him five or six times was a quote that we've heard a number of times, you hardly knew him.

05:12 --> 05:38

Donal:             So, here's where we are – we've got our chief suspect he's in jail in Germany in relation to another crime, his girlfriend places him in the country. One other huge development is the German investigators have suggested they know the identities of two people they suspect directed Christian Brueckner to kidnap, by order, Maddie McCann. 

05:39 --> 06:55

Jon:                 Yeah, this is something that I'm now developing with the German journalist team, behind the documentary and with the BKA police, that there's a very sinister Eastern European crime ring that's involved in people smuggling and child pornography and we have the names, and we are starting to look into this. I don't want to say too much at this stage, Donal but we’ll keep you posted on how this goes. But it's something that I'm very concerned about, and I will be taking all steps, very high security steps to make sure that we do this in the best possible way. There have been quite a lot of interesting developments behind the scenes. I can tell you now that Hans Christian Wolters, the Chief prosecutor, has reached out to me to speak to me in the next few days and I'm off to Portugal again to look at a number of critical leads on the case. And I think it's established from the German documentary now, that, and indeed to me, it was said it was going to be this month, but I think it will be this spring he will be arrested and charged with three offences. One of which is labelled as category one sex crime in Germany which, and I’ll explain in a minute, will put him in prison for life, but first of all you bring attention to the fact his phone was at the scene. The documentary they've got a technician who proved that in fact the phone was indeed within five hundred metres of Praia da Luz. So, they know he was there, and his phone was there at that time

06:57 --> 07:02

Donal:             So, we know he was there, there was a triangulation of a number of masts which were able to locate him within five hundred metres.

07:03 --> 07:20

Jon:                 At the time there was only one mast, they couldn't triangulate the call, you can nowadays, normally do it. But because there was only one mast, the next mast was so far away in Lagos they couldn't pinpoint exactly where it is. Normally, when you triangulate calls you can pinpoint if someone is standing in a street outside or if someone's in a house because of course, their phone is one part of that triangle. 

07:20 --> 07:26

Donal:             For somebody who was involved in such illicit activities why was he not more phone surveillance aware?

07:27 --> 08:46

Jon:                 There's been another documentary that's been made, and it was due to come out in November, and then it was coming out in January, it’s now being put back another couple of months, by a British police investigator on Channel 5. And he says, well, possibly the phone was being carried not by Christian, but by another person in the village. He was about to suggest at least the British papers printed that this was going to suggest that Christian wasn't there at all that he had an alibi, he was actually staying thirty minutes away in another town with a girlfriend. I know who this girlfriend is, and I'm not going to tell you here, but she apparently was having a fling with him for the week or ten days while she was on holiday around the time that Maddie went missing. But critically, the so-called claim of an alibi falls down because she doesn't remember where he was on the night of May the third. She was seeing him around that time, and so of course so was Nicole, and so were other girls. There was another German girl who also turned up in a court case, the Diana Menkes court case, was seeing him in Germany, so he was seeing so many women but critically this alibi just doesn't exist. Now the police have spoken to this girl at length. I can tell you now and they have interviewed her twice they are not worried about this so-called alibi, they know that Christian was in the village, they know he’s 100% guilty, they are certain of it, and they will continue pursuing this.  Now, we’re not going to necessarily get an arrest on Maddie until the autumn, but we can, I can tell you now, there will be three cases of which he’ll be arrested and charged in the next few months.

08:47 --> 09:04

Donal:             So, effectively, for the German police, it’s ever-decreasing circles. We've got him located in the area, witnesses are beginning to speak, the noose is tightening around him on the Maddie McCann kidnapping. In respect of the immediate prosecutions that are on the horizon, what's it looking like?

09:05 --> 09:46

Jon:                 The three cases in Portugal that they are likely to arrest him on are likely to come together because they're all sex crimes, and one of them is called category one. Now, of course, Diana Menkes was the seventy-two-year-old that was sadistically raped and tied up and videoed perhaps for Christian to sell on the dark web which is what many people and what I certainly think’s possible. This other crime of Hazel Behan is category one, and I understand that if they find him guilty of category one, in Germany they call it, it’s a hard one to pronounce, Sicherungsverwahrung, and the Germans will probably say that’s ridiculous, you sound ridiculous. But that's called preventative detention and that would mean that he is then held on a special licence where only a kind of special panel of judges can allow him to leave.

09:47 --> 10:08

Donal:             If we accept that if he's done for the category one and the other offences, it might be that it will become absolutely apparent to Christian Brueckner that he's going to spend the rest of his life in jail. If he spends the rest of his life in jail, is it not likely a possibility that he's going to come out and say, OK hands up, this is what happened, this is what I did, I’m now going to be the most notorious sex offender on the planet. 

10:09 --> 10:51

Jon:                 This is exactly the theory that I'm running on, and I think the German police, although they say they know he did it and they have other evidence, what they want is for him to come forward and just admit it. It's interesting that Jutta, my co-journalist in Germany, had seven letters written to her from him in prison. Among one of those letters and you raised the point, he claims that the German authorities have offered him a sort of witness protection, immunity from prosecution type of deal where he can go to this one particular high security prison in Germany, that Jutta says that apparently there is only twenty prisoners, and they never get out and there’s a sort of armed guards on every corner and you know, they’re saying apparently, that once he’s in there he’ll be looked after. You get everything you want TVs, videos and any food you want, and you can can have that, but you have to sort of come clean and admit on what you've done, that's how I see this progressing.

10:51 --> 11:07

Donal:              What he’s being offered, potentially, he’s claiming he’s been offered a sweetheart deal, you're going to be facing life imprisonment anyway, but if you come clean on Maddie and, crucially and this is for Gerry and Kate McCann, give them some closure and perhaps point to a place where a body might be found.

11:08 --> 11:26

Jon:                 This is what happened you know with Ian Brady and recently with Levi Bellfield, various criminals come forward and admit they've done things while in prison on life, because you know that… I don't know whether they suddenly get a conscience or… but they certainly give the families of the victims some succour to know what happened and to be able to close the case which is what everyone really wants to do here don't they?

11:26 --> 11:39

Donal:             I know the family and for reasons which are very obvious to everybody refuse to accept that Maddie is dead. Where does the German police and most investigators stand on the prospect of Maddie being alive? 

11:40 --> 12:18

Jon:                 Well, the German police believe she's dead. The British police don't want to say that they say it's a missing persons inquiry, and I think the Portuguese police… I don't think they have a fucking clue, but you know… I think that the chance of her being alive is slim, I still think there's a possibility, I think that if he did take her that night and drove to this town called Tomar where I’m going later this week, who knows, she could have been taken out of Portugal that way. I mean I always assumed that she had been taken across the border nearer to Seville and further South, maybe she was taken across up to Galicia and then through Asturias in northern Spain you know, she could have been taken to Germany.  It's no coincidence he was interested in building cellars, he's talked about keeping… trapping people for days.

12:18 --> 12:34

Donal:             If we place Brueckner at the scene in his RV he snatched Maddie by order or however he did this, where under their current crystallisation of evidence do you think he would have brought Maddie to? And is there any theory as to what happened to her then?

12:35 --> 13:05

Jon:                 Assuming that she wasn't taken out of Portugal into Spain and Germany, then Christian had, in fact, another fantastically interesting place. I've found two spots that he regularly camped at by lakes I’ve been taken to one of these spots which has very weird stone circles, an odd place where new age travellers go to, and he regularly went to this one spot. The theory is that he would have just dumped her there, he would have got rid of her dumped her in the lake, he would have got rid of the evidence fast in a place like that, that he knew well where he knew that there was no one around. 

13:06 --> 13:09

Donal:             If he took Maddie out of Portugal what would have been his route and where would have brought her?

13:09 --> 13:31

Jon:                 If he’d had taken her out of Portugal, he may have had orders, and this goes back to the… the claims that I was making earlier, that we've heard that there were two people in particular that ordered this. He would have taken her potentially on a trip through northern Spain, up through France into Germany and, I don't know Donal, I…err… I really don't know; I don't know whether there’s people who order this stuff. The thought of it makes my teeth curl mate, I really don't want to think about it too much.

13:31 --> 13:44

Donal:             On the journey to track down Christian Brueckner, we can all agree he's the chief suspect… do you think he's likely to be charged with the disappearance and, as the German police say, murder of Maddie McCann?

13:31 --> 14:30

Jon:                 When they get him inside for a serious length of time, he's in for seven years, he’ll spend at least another four or five years. When they get another long tariff on him, they're going to put it all to him. They say they've got the evidence; they say it's circumstantial, they say they haven't got DNA, they haven't got a body. I know that they've got some stuff from the box factory, and they've got stuff they've picked up in other places. Wolter said up to twenty thousand items, he didn't say they were all photos and videos, he said there were other items.  Now it doesn't take much to extrapolate that perhaps he was taking notes, he might have taken a trophy, mightn’t he? he might well have been writing this in a diary, he clearly likes writing, he loves scribbling, he likes taking notes, could he have been writing a diary about what happened? Could he have been cataloguing his crimes, serial killers do, don’t they? They’ve pretty much got enough now, I think.

14:31 --> 14:39

Donal:             What has been the impact of the Maddie McCann case? Not only on policing, but also the social impact on other paedophile networks across Europe and elsewhere? 

14:39 --> 14:39

Jon:                 I think one of the greatest things about this case is… its first of all brought a lot of awareness to paedophile networks around Europe. How easy they were to move around Europe. The Germans have been really on top of their game, there’s been so many big arrests over the last few years. A lot of big rings have been closed down. Children have been saved. Now in Spain they’re really up to date on it, their laws have really changed here. Portugal finally in 2009, 2010, confronted its past, it’s so hot on it now, they’re really on top of it, you know they’ve clamped-down on sort of things that people got away with in 2007. Now, it's becoming harder and harder to get away with it and there's much more willingness amongst European authorities to track and trace and properly punish these sorts of people.

15:24 --> 15:37

Donal:             Now for you this has been a difficult journey and you're dabbling in the stuff of people’s souls, and it's a terrible arena to work in because you're discovering horrific stuff but is this the end of the journey for you?

15:38 --> 15:49

Jon:                 Not at all Donal I’ve actually... I've got plenty of leads that I still want to pursue… In fact, I'm back to Portugal again later this week. My goal here is to find out finally who took Maddie.

15:49 --> 15:56

Donal:             Can we have you back when you get any significant leads because I think there's no doubt the public interest in this case is unlikely to diminish. 

15:57 --> 16:02

Jon:                 There's so much coming out every month now there's interesting leads, so, I'd be delighted to give you updates whenever you feel like it.

16:03 --> 16:07

Donal:             Jon Clarke, thank you very much for taking us on this very difficult journey and best of luck.