EP03 - Madeleine McCann: The Chief Suspect

With the lead suspect now in his sights, Jon Clarke tracks down an old friend of his, ‘Micha’, who provides an exclusive and shocking insight into the depraved mind and world of Christian Brueckner.

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 --> 00:45

Donal:             So, Christian Brueckner – when did the door really open for you in relation to this prime suspect in the Maddy McCann case.

00:38 --> 02:22

Jon:                 It certainly happened for me to really understand exactly who this guy was when I           got a phone call from one of the reporters working in Praia Da Luz,

for The Mirror. He called up and said they’d worked out that when Brueckner was in prison in Portugal for stealing fuel, he had been in prison with, at the time his flatmate, a guy called Michael Micha – Tatschl, in fact, called Michael Tatschl, we didn’t know he was called Micha then, but his name was Michael Tatschl. It’s a funny story I was sitting on my bed reading a book all about this town called Órgiva, and it’s a sort of an alternative community a bit like the Glastonbury of Spain, tucked away in the hills between Granada and the sea, in these very sort of deep valleys and high mountains kind running up to the Sierra Nevada mountains, snow capped mountains. I’m reading this book about Órgiva and all the quirky things that happen there by an English writer actually, its quite a funny book and I was thinking about serialising it in the newspaper at the time. So, I get a phone call from Martin at the Mirror, and he said, Jon, I need you to go to somewhere called Órgiva, Orgeeeev… Orgiva…. Or…; like mate its Órgiva it’s like a place I know really well because the Olive Press started there, we actually launched from this town, and we knew the town pretty well. He said, Well I need you to go to Órgiva, and I’m like, What? Why? And then he explained that this guy Michael Tatschl had been in prison for eight months with Brueckner, Christian Brueckner and he was living he believed in Órgiva. And I was like no way you can’t…you won’t believe it, I’m just literally sitting here reading a book about Órgiva its so, so random that’s such a coincidence. So he said, Well how far is it,’ and I said, Its probably about three hours for me,’ and he said, can you get there, can you go and see if you can track this guy down? Yeah, of course, fine, no problem. I looked at the Facebook page before I left, on this Facebook page there’s this guy, tattooed guy, with like a skull tattoo on his neck and he was basically staring at the camera, his nose was pierced, his nipples are pierced, and he’s got his finger up like that, staring at the camera.

02:23 --> 02:48

Donal:             At that stage you figured he wasn’t a member of the establishment, his credit record wasn’t perhaps pristine, and he may have been living slightly off the grid. Strange coincidence you were drawn to the area reading the book, and you were being asked to go to the area by the Mirror to investigate this guy who had been in jail with Brueckner.

02:49 --> 04:13

Jon:                 They worked out that Christian had been in prison in 2006 for most of the year, eight months from April. He and this guy Tatschl had been caught stealing fuel from cars, and vans, and lorries in Lagos, in Portimao, various towns around the Algarve. And they’d been caught red handed late at night the two of them and they’d been slapped straight in prison because they wouldn’t give them any address, they refused to give up the yellow house they were living at in in Praia Da Luz as you know they had this yellow house just outside Praia Da Luz, Christian Brueckner obviously didn’t want to give his address because he knew what was inside the house. And of course, Micha Michael Tatschl also knew exactly what was inside the house and what there was, was lots and lots of things that were stolen… we’ll come onto that later, but they knew they couldn’t give an address, so they said they met a few weeks earlier. They were camping in a car park next to each other in their vans and just sort of got chatting and became pally. That’s how they ended up doing this fuel theft thing and they were just doing it as a pastime to get enough fuel for themselves, you know to sell on to a couple of their pals, their new age pals, their van lifer pals. What was interesting was that all the pack that were based in Praia Da Luz, this is some weeks later now all the pack that was still there from the Mail, Arthur from the Mail, you’ve got Sarah from the Sun, Martin at the Mirror, and I forget who was on for the Telegraph. It was a long drive for them to get all the way to Spain to Andalucía and, of course, it was in Covid. They just figured it would be easier to ask Jon to have a look. So, it was great I was sort of put on from all the papers to go and do this mission to go and locate this kind of lunatic with his finger up and his tattoos and nipples pierced. 

04:14 --> 05:14

I kind of duly got on the road, slightly fearing it wasn’t going to be the easiest door knock, if indeed I could even find him. And the first thing I noticed when I stopped for a coffee en route, was that he actually left in 2016. I don’t think there was much chance that he was going to be their but anyway you always go you never know, and you might find some good friends of his, so I got there and again it was one of these times where Órgiva was almost in semi-lockdown and everyone was in masks if you were allowed out and police were everywhere making sure that people were behaving themselves and not  doing anything. Somebody said, look if you’re trying to find someone like this, this kind of new age traveller there’s only one place to find him and that’s the metal bar. And I was like, Christ that rings a bell. We used to have an office in Órgiva all the years ago and I remember there was this bar on the edge of town where you didn’t dare go unless you at least had your nose pierced. It was where you know, you had dogs tied up all around the area and there were lots of dreadlocks, and it was the place where all the local hippies, and crusties, and metallers and punks all hung out. You’ve not been anywhere like it, Donal. It’s a kind of craze capital of Spain.

05:14 --> 05:16

Donal:             It sounds like something out of Mad Max the movie.

05:17 --> 07:56

Jon:                 Yeah, it is, and this Metal Bar really is a bit like Mad Max. I’m not going to do these guys down because a lot of them are really decent guys and err…. Anyway, I got to the Metal Bar, and it was actually amazingly open. and there were quite a few people sort of outside smoking weed, you know and just chilling out. And there were, indeed, lots of dogs outside, and I went in and chatted to the bar man who was Spanish, and he was actually the owner, a really nice bloke and friendly, and everyone inside was pretty friendly, I got a coffee got some breakfast and err…. I just said look do you know this guy? And I kind of just showed him a picture on the phone and he said, oh yeah that’s Micha. Oh, right OK so you know him. Yeah, Micha he comes here every year he’s lived here for years, lovely guy couldn’t be nicer, really sweet guy, sweetheart, you know funny. I thought OK great that’s nice to know. He said, well he lived with an English girl called Emma who was an artist. And I was like OK any more clues? And he couldn’t really give me any more clues. I sort of hung around a little bit and chatted to a few more people. And eventually someone else came in and said, yeah, yeah, he was here at Christmas, he was over at Christmas with his kid and his wife, or his new girlfriend, and I was like, OK right interesting, where was he staying? Oh, I think he was staying down near Emma’s place? And I said, Oh, where’s Emma’s? And he said, well that’s down near Tablones, Cigarrones which is one of these three new age settlements they’ve got around the town. And I thought, that’s interesting, she’s at Cigarrones, that figures, that would be the place to go. I kind of got on the road and I drove down, I should explain Donal, its an unusual town where you have around 5,000 people living in Órgiva, and then you have about fifteen hundred people living in three new age settlements that are built in the mountains around Órgiva. One of them you can’t get to by car at all, you’ve got to park your car half a mile away and walk up, you know into the mountain, so I sort of just headed down to this place. Cigarrones was one of them, but it’s a big area. I mean you’re looking at ten kilometres square, that goes all the way down a river, it’s a massive, huge area. So, it’s kind of like a needle in a haystack. Nobody could tell me either, where Christian Brueckner or Micha Tatschl had lived, or indeed where Emma lived. I’m like you know, Emma she’s an artist, everyone knows her, she’s been here for years. They just shrugged their shoulders. The Spanish just don’t give a shit you know, and they weren’t interested, and they really didn’t mix with that community, and they didn’t want anything to do with it, no one knew where Emma lived. Its about midday or one o’clock now, and I’m thinking Christ this is not great. I sat in the car, and I got his Facebook page up and I went through his photos. He’s got quite a lot of photos, quite a lot of friends, and there’s one particular photo where he’s clearly standing in a very typical shack, sort of, Spanish style veranda. I didn’t notice that he was standing in front of three huge dope plants like massive, as tall as him almost. But what I’m noticing was in the background you could see these hills, there’s a sort of line of hills. In the middle of the hills, there’s a sort of firebreak right through the middle of it, I looked at that and I think that’s interesting, and I look up and there’s the same line of hills with the same firebreak.

07:57 --> 08:12

Donal:             Here you are geographically tracking. I mean this is like FBI, CIA looking for Osama Bin Laden and you’re looking for Micha, Brueckner’s pal or, more likely, Emma his former girlfriend, and tracking down this is the photograph, these are the hills, this is the fire line, OK where is he?

08:13 --> 09:28

Jon:                 I kind of worked out I was about three or four hundred metres above where this picture was taken, I think the detectives at Scotland Yard would be proud of me. I then worked out if I walked down this track and then left a bit I was more or less at Emma’s house. I look in and there’s, this sort of new age settlement almost, and there’s this kind of very attractive hippy girl tending plants in the boiling hot heat, and I said, oh um do you know Emma? And she’s like, oh it rings a bell, but you’d better come in and talk to the owner of this plot. So, I went in, and it turned out it was what’s his name… from goodbye to all that, famous book…. Robert Graves’ grandson and I knew he lived around Órgiva because he always lived there and he’s quite a free spirit his grandson. So, I went in, and he comes out actually and he wasn’t particularly friendly.  I’d always wanted to meet him you know the family are interesting, the son Thomas Graves wrote a brilliant book about Majorca, and music and of course, Robert Graves was brilliant, I Claudius and Goodbye to all that. And his grandson is clearly an interesting fella, free spirit but he just said, yeah Emma lives just up there, that’s her house there. So, I kind of walk down towards Emma’s house. Outside as I got there were two very willowy teenage girls, I’d say probably eighteen, nineteen. And I said, hi is Emma here? and she said, yes that’s my mum come in. So, she opened the door walked in and walked me through, yeah, she’s sitting in the back garden, she’s here.

09:29 --> 09:31

Donal:             This isn’t normally the invite which reporters get you know like….

09:32 --> 10:52

Jon:                 Not normally, what you’d get on a doorstep no, and so there I was walking through the house towards the back garden, its actually a really nice house, in fact, very Andalusian style and I walked out on to the veranda and there’s Emma and she’s sitting with a guy called Ben, who’s another local ex-pat. English ex-pat, they’re drinking cider actually, its about 4 o’clock I guess by this time, and its boiling hot but they’re drinking cider in the shade in the garden, smoking roll ups, getting into the spirit, and then suddenly I’m introduced. Hi, I’m Jon from the Olive Press, do you remember me? I’ve been here for years now. Yeah of course, we know the Olive Press we get it in town you know, it’s still available in the town and yeah, we read it… and we just got chatting. And like any good journalist Donal, you’ve done it for years you break the ice. It must have been a good fifteen, twenty minutes before I even brought up her ex-boyfriend, by the way do you know this guy, Michael Tatschl? and she said, yeah, yeah, he’s my ex-boyfriend he’s a bit of a fruit loop, he’s a bit mad, you know, but nice, free spirit, interesting, fun, but you know has his foibles etc. He’s actually back in Austria he’s got a new girlfriend Cynthia, but we stay in touch. Well, ok, did you know that Micha was a very good friend of Christian Brueckner? She’s like…Oh my god you’re joking I had that feeling, I’d been watching the news and I’d been reading all about it, been looking at the case and I really recognised that guy. It’s like the penny was dropping for her, she’s realising that not only had she known this guy, but he had been in her town, her village probably in her house. 

10:53 --> 10:58

Donal:             Is this now drawing you in? You know, the start of a journey which is going to get to a conclusion where you can decide this is our main man.

 10:59 --> 13:12

Jon:                 It was like a lightbulb moment, I tell you what. The first time I was told go to Órgiva, Christian Brueckner we’d found already established that he’d been hanging out in this place called Barao de Sao Joao and it was a really weird place near Praia Da Luz, and it’s really alternative as well. I mean there’s loads of alternative places near Praia Da Luz. This is one place and he’d been here a lot, and he’d had a girlfriend there; he was drug dealing there. Of course, he hung out with new age travellers and van lifers. I kept thinking all the time I’m sure there’s a connection, there’s going to be a connection with Órgiva, there’s got to be a connection with Órgiva. His lifestyle, everything about it suddenly fitted in. I thought I know this area like the back of my hand, I know this area really well this is our DNA. So, we kind of sat there and I was like you know, how do I get hold of him? She said, well I’ve got his number, and I said, OK. She said, Ok I’ll give him a call and I’ll get your number, and I’ll give him a call later, by this time I had a cider in my hand, and I think it might’ve been a second cider. We were getting on pretty well and I said why don’t we call him now? And she said, well my battery’s gone. She showed me, and her battery had gone on her phone, sure enough. And then she said look I’ll go and charge it. It took a full bloody half an hour before this phone even got up to five per cent. She got his number out and said OK. I said, it’s only five per cent, it’s probably going to go halfway through the call, shall we she said, why don’t you call from your phone. So, I was like OK.  Great got the phone out, put the number in the phone, and sat there with the phone on the table, it’s the weirdest kind of interview I’ve ever done. I mean, it’s probably not, but it’s certainly one of them. We get on the loudspeaker and sure enough Micha answers the phone, so Emma said, Hi Mish how’s it going blah blah blah ….and he said, yeah alright you know, I got the baby. I’m looking after the baby anyway, she started chatting and she said I’m here with Jon you know from the Olive Press, do you remember the Olive Press? Yeah, he actually remembered the Olive press, which was great. So, he’d obviously lived there for three years in Órgiva. So we just chatted away about that for a bit and after about five minutes, it must have been about five minutes. I just sort of said Micha you were a friend of Christian Brueckner weren’t you?” And he went like errr…. Christian yeah, oh my god, you know bad man, really bad man, terrible all the things he did, and I was like, well actually I’m err… I’m actually, you know, investigating him. Yeah well, I mean he was bad news like, and then just on cue, there was a sort of loud scream in the background and his child woke up and he said, look I’ve got to go I’m going to have to go and get her back to sleep. He said can you call me back in half an hour? and I was like “Yes of course Micha, yes of course.” 

13:13 --> 13:18

Donal:             It’s very unusual to make, journalistically, to make a connection to somebody that close, who was happy to talk to you.

13:13 --> 13:25

Jon:                 I just point out I just remembered now that before his daughter woke up, he said, and I know he did it and we all looked at each other…

13:26 --> 13:28

Donal:             And did it… obviously meant that the only crime in town the whole world was talking about is….

13:29 --> 13:30

Jon:                 Madeleine McCann…

13:31 --> 13:41

Donal:             So, after one or two glasses of cider and some good conversation, anticipating your second call with this key connection, like, seven steps removed from Kevin Bacon, one step removed from Christian Brueckner, this is very close, will he call back?

13:42 --> 13:49

Jon:                 Very, very nervous you know that he’s not going to pick up very excited and nervous at the same time.

13:48 --> 13:50

Donal:             And how soon afterwards did you get the second call?

13:51 --> 14:57

Jon:                 It was probably around forty minutes, normally when somebody says thirty minutes you give them at least five minutes grace. I think we must have waited about forty minutes, err…. we definitely waited a bit longer than asked and called up and he just picked up straight away, I couldn’t believe it I was really, really pleasantly surprised and he was in an equally good mood as before, bearing in mind the last thing he said to us was ‘I know he did it’ I kind of more or less straight away picked up on that. I didn’t want to beat around the bush, so I was like, you know, what do you mean? And he was like well I’m sure he took Maddy, I’m certain of it. He was always on the dark web, he was always up late at night, he talked about kidnapping children and how much you can make by selling them in places like Morocco. What? He said, yeah, he talked about it, he said he wanted to be a millionaire by the age of forty, he wanted to retire, he wanted to make lots of money, and this was a really good way to make money. You can imagine Emma, very nice woman, mother of two, listening to her ex-partner, of some years, telling her this, and we were like going, well you were living with him I mean….Yeah I was living with him he was… you know he became a friend, obviously didn’t do any of this stuff with him, but I know he was a brilliant burglar the house was full of stuff that he’d taken, cameras, watches, piles of passports, as well…

14:58 --> 15:19

Donal:             It must have been extraordinary to you to hear for the first time that Christian Brueckner is talking to a close friend about kidnapping children, and this is an advance, and people often talk about this it’s so, Grimms fairy tale there’s always a bogey man kidnapping kids and then selling them on. To hear it in relation to the prime suspect in the Maddy McCann story is just extraordinary. 

15:20 --> 15:34

Jon:                 It was absolute journalistic dynamite and I have never been in my whole career been in a position where I’d heard such a key phrase, or key three or four paragraphs, uttered by someone that could have so much relevance to one of the biggest stories in history.

15:35 --> 15:37

Donal:             Describe what he said again, just in granular detail.

15:38 --> 16:22

Jon:                  He basically said, I lived with him, he was my best friend, I know what he got up to, he was a brilliant burglar, he was also up late at night on the dark web. I’m sure he was selling pictures and photos, and he talked about kidnapping children and selling them. To utter that in this sort of conversation on a phone, on a loudspeaker with two witnesses next to me, who were both like equally stunned by this, scribbling it down in shorthand note, thinking are we hearing this correctly. He was out regularly, and he used to go out at night, he would sneak into apartments, break into apartments, all around Praia Da Luz, he was a great climber, he would take anything he could get his hands on. I genuinely really don’t think he knew that he was going off and potentially molesting children, I like to think that Micha’s a pretty decent person. 

16:23 --> 16:57

Donal:              I mean, that’s hard because Micha’s telling you things that he knew about his best friend, inverted commas, Christian Brueckner, there’s obviously some culpability if that’s your suspicions about your mate they were the suspicions then, then obviously the question is, why are you friends with him? But that’s a matter for Micha. On the Christian story here, he was building a profile of somebody who appeared to have resources beyond that, which was on the grid. This seemed to be quite a sophisticated, one offender, as you say a brilliant burglar and if you add the penchant and skill set to be a really good burglar into being a child abuser and to being a sex offender that’s a really dangerous cocktail. 

16:23 --> 17:07

Jon:                  What I’m trying to do Donal is try and find the exact things he said, because I think its probably quite good if I read out what he told us on the phone. Is that going to be interesting or useful for you?

17:08 --> 17:09

Donal:             Yeah…you know, yes, please, please…yes

17:10 --> 19:03

Jon:                  Because I think we might as well get the exact phraseology of what he said:

Micha said that he ended up staying in his house and camping in his garden and he said they spent a lot of time together, had a lot of fun. He described Brueckner as being very smart and snappy in the way he dressed, and he would sometimes even wear a suit to go out, and always wore good shoes. Then, he talked about having these girlfriends, this German girlfriend who he said was at least twenty years older. He described him as definitely a strange character, well he was always quite criminal. He aimed to steal as much money as he could until he reached his dream of having one million euros. Then he said he would stop; he said he was an excellent burglar, and he knew how to get into any home on any floor, it was easy there in Praia Da Luz. He said, he was always breaking into the apartments in the area and bragging about it to me he was a very good burglar, and easily climb up to first floor apartments when tourists were out. He particularly liked big football games when everybody would be out watching the games in bars during tournaments like the European Championships, he had a field day. He would climb up to the first-floor steal everything, lots of money, valuables, and so many passports. He had a hiding place in the house for them in the rafters. It was his secret stash, and when we were taken to prison, he ordered a friend or a couple of friends to go into the house and clear it up. We carried on chatting and he’d later found out from two other friends of his that when they cleared out the house this is Helga Bushe and Manfred Seyfarth, that they’d found these videos that Brueckner had made on a video camera in which he was in. Reading direct quotes from the book here from our interview he described him, as discovering at this point that he was a sick bastard, that he was a really horrible man. And apparently they said the video was of an elderly lady who was chained to a wooden post and she was being beaten and raped. There was another video of him attacking a second girl. They said, hey Micha what should we do with these? I said I really don’t know, I don’t want to see them, and I think they ended up burning them, but the videos really upset him, and it came as a massive relief when he got to tell the police about it in 2019. He wanted to get it off his chest, he said I told the police all about that story and I hope they verified it somehow.

19:04 --> 19:11

Donal:             You’ve mentioned the so-called yellow house a couple of times now, Jon. So for those who are new to the case, tell us how the yellow house fits into the investigation.

19:12 --> 19:39

Jon:                 The yellow house is really quite a tiny little err… holiday cottage if you like. I mean it’s one bedroom, one bedroom and it might have had a sofa bed, but it sits up a track which is around, as the crow flies, around just under a kilometre from Praia Da Luz, from the Ocean Club and the centre of Praia Da Luz. From there, there’s various footpaths that go down into Praia Da Luz, cross country which he obviously knew very well and used regularly, and that was how he got in and out of town, and that was how he was able to burgle so many places and bring stuff back. 

19:40 --> 19:44

Donal:             But he lived there, and who did he live there with, and what was the time frame just to put it in context.

19:45 --> 20:57

Jon:                 He rented this from 1999 from a British owner he rented it until 2006 so basically seven years by all accounts from 1999, but  it could have even been 1998, it could have been 2000 but until 2006 when they went to prison and that was when his friends, where I actually I worked out there were four people who went into the house to clear it out, to take stuff for him they were Bernhard Piro his mechanic friend who took various cars for him, Bernard took them back to his scrap yard, where he kept his cars, where he repaired his cars. There was Christian Posts his pal who lived by the lake with, and he took a whole bunch of boxes of all his, mostly sort of passports and valuables and videos and stuff. He then told a journalist in Germany, a very good journalist, actually, that he hadn’t wanted to give a lot of this material to the Piros, where he was meant to leave it at the Piros’ house. But Elke and Bernhard Piro had two children and one of them, both of them, were quite young at the time, one of them was a about nine, he just felt he didn’t want to leave this kind of material which was clearly child abuse and animal pornography, and all sorts of horrible things. So, then there was also, as I said Helga and Seyfarth, Manfred Seyfarth, went in and they took whatever they had left, so there was various fuel they stole, they found a couple of other videos and bits and bobs, in which we now is part of the case the police have against Christian Brueckner.

20:58 --> 21:20

Donal:             So, the yellow house was significant that’s where Micha, stayed and befriended, engaged with, and got to know the predilections of Christian Brueckner, and crucially in 2006 he goes to jail. Although he was on the radar of the authorities as a sex offender, one of six hundred. It seems to have slipped the authorities by that Brueckner was actually out at the time of the Maddie McCann disappearance, and therefore should have been a prime suspect. 

20:58 --> 22:34

Jon:                 I think by the time the police did kind of turn up at his yellow house they claim, Gonzalo Amaral claims he went to the yellow house he wasn’t there. Now he wasn’t there because when he’d got out of prison, he’d lost everything in fact the next-door neighbours who were an English couple, an English lady and her daughter gone in and completely cleaned the whole place out. In fact, they filed a missing person’s report wondering where Christian Brueckner had gone to, they were so concerned about this guy vanishing into thin air. You’d think the police might have said, oh yeah actually he’s been taken at her Majesty’s pleasure, but they clearly didn’t know what was going on and nobody had a clue. So, they went and cleared up the house on the orders or the instructions of the owner of the house the British owner. All the stuff they found in there, they wouldn’t tell me they were very prickly with me, actually, but um, they did tell Sandra at Portuguese TV station RTP how they’d gone in and cleared out loads of food from the fridge they’d found, there were basically rats and mice in there, and they cleared out loads of rubbish and junk and they’d put it all in black bin liners and tipped them away and chucked them, and that was that.  That was all the evidence that the police could have used to find against Christian.

22:35 --> 22:38

Donal:             Could you give us the timeline for Brueckner’s movement, just to put it in brief context. 

22:39 --> 24:56

Jon:                 Again, this is quite helpful that Micha of course helped me try and piece this together and other people have helped to piece this together. In May 2007 Micha had got out of prison and gone to Austria to see his family at Christmas and he’d come back to Portugal in the February of 2007 and Christian by then was not back in his house as you know because as you know they’d changed the locks. But he was living in vans in various beaches around Praia Da Luz and also in the village of Foral. Micha told me that he didn’t want to stay very long because both of them had fines to pay for stealing fuel and he had a fine of I think it was 1700 or 1800 euros and he knew that if you hung around in Portugal too long chances are you’d get picked up. So, he went back to Spain where he moved into, Órgiva, where they had the Dragon Festival in March that year in 2007. Now, I don’t know whether Christian was at the Dragon Festival in March that year, end of March 2007. In April 2007 he does a dummy run, could be what we call a dummy run, taking a van journey all the way from Portugal all the way into Spain to Malaga, to pick up some hitch hikers. German hitch hikers who were doing this charity hitch hike to try and get all the way around Europe for a TV show, for a competition. Now, he volunteers with his van that Bernhard Piro has now got back. It was Bernhard and his son’s van the VW, the famous VW. Christian borrows it drives all the way from Portugal to Malaga where he’s seen in pictures and a video interestingly, in the docks of Malaga picking these three German hitch Hikers up, two men and a girl and driving them all the way down the Andalusian coastline, which is a long way by the way, about three of four-hour drive and then into Murcia and then North towards Castellon. He dropped them somewhere at the border of Almeria Murcia and then they carried on hitch hiking up. He drives back, this is in April 2007, he’s presumably back in the Algarve or in the beaches or in Foral towards the end of April beginning of May. This is something the police have never really managed to completely work out. Recently, since the book came out actually, I’ve been to various beaches where I know he camped on, and the police took that van. When they’ve impounded the van the VW van from the Piros. They took the van down to one of these beaches in particular and took pictures of it with the door open to sort of suggest the door open, the van empty just chuck someone in the van and drive off. And I think that the police think he was on one of these beaches on the night that Madeleine went missing.

24:56 --> 25:37

Donal:              The priority here is that in terms of one, he was living kind of off the grid under the radar with his VW van in and around Praia Da Luz and here you had a sex offender who had a fantasy about becoming a millionaire about selling and trafficking kids who it seemed may have done a dummy run. Now that is building up quite a case. He had a desire to this he seemed to have the facility he seemed to enjoy hanging around the van lifers and at the same time is loved the acquisitive nature he liked cash, he liked money he thought of the idea of retiring, pick the right child and it begins to build up quite a case around one of the key theories around the disappearance of Madeleine McCann. Tell us that key theory that was rumbling around but nobody really had the suspect to fit the theory? 

25:38 --> 26:35

Jon:                  The key theory is the guy lived in the area, knew the area very well, who burgled all the apartments and homes in the area, and we know that many British families complained about their own children being molested by so-called intruders late at night, breaking into buildings all the way around this area. When we couple that with the fact that this is a convicted sex offender based just outside the village that’s got a clear penchant for sexual predilection and dodgy stuff. Why on earth was he not picked up I don’t know, but I want to just really finish taking the words of his best friend Michael Micha Tatschl, who said to me and in his only interview he’s ever given on the case, Christian was always on the dark web he would talk about going on the dark web and always insisted on having good internet in the houses he rented. I don’t know exactly what he did, but I suspect it involved drugs and pornography. He was always bragging about money and making money, he even talked about selling kids maybe to Morocco and it’s for that reason that I think he probably sold Maddie to someone, maybe a sex ring.

26:36 --> 26:40

Donal:              And that really was the key point for you that set you on the trail for Christian Brueckner.

26:41 --> 26:46

Jon:                  At that point I was pretty certain that he was the man.

26:44 --> 26:43

Donal:             So where did the trail take you next?

26:47 --> 26:59

Jon:                 Well, it’s fairly obvious that at this point Donal that I needed to go to Germany. I needed to go to the so-called heart of darkness as I called it in the book, and I needed to understand what created this monster and how he got away with it.