EP05 - Madeleine McCann: The Chief Suspect

Jon Clarke describes Christian Brueckner’s journey into the Algarve – a place that he made home within the now infamous ‘Yellow House’. Donal and Jon dissect Brueckner’s involvement in an intriguing and confusing court case in Portugal that raised more questions than it answered, against the backdrop of serial sexual offences in the area of Praia De Luz around the time of his arrival.

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 --> 00:55

Donal:            So Christian Brueckner the teenage years has given us a road map to his future despicable and extraordinary offending history. Key to that was his journey with a young girlfriend to the Algarve, explain that journey and how and why it ended?

00:56 --> 02:38

Jon:                So, he met… err…  this, by all accounts an attractive German girl who was actually around his age, and I think he met her either through the halfway house or through the borstal where he was actually put for, in fact, he left early as we know because he didn't finish his sentence, he basically absconded. I should point out that although, it was a borstal it was sort of like a prison for juveniles, they were able to go out, and there were some freedom for them they could go out and he was able to do his driving test. Of course, once he got his driving test, passed in March of that year 1994, he was able to effectively, I don't know… if he stole a car, again we don't really know if he stole a car, I doubt he bought a car, we don't know if he stole a van. But what we do know is that he got in his err… in a car, a vehicle, and he drove from Germany, and he went South. He decided he was going to Lagos, he drove South through France, across the Pyrenees, through Spain, don’t know if he went down through the Costas, we don't know how long this journey took. What we do know is that sometime in 1995, he met a fellow German mechanic a very nice chap called Bernard Piro, really softly spoken German guy in his 60s now, absolutely passionate about cars, expat in Portugal now for nearly 30 years. He and his wife Elka, a charming lady and they themselves had two children, and their children were born and brought up in Portugal. So, they were very dyed-in-the-wool absolutely 100% happy living in the expat life in the Algarve. We know that Christian was living there with his girlfriend, and they'd been there I’m guessing up to a year, maybe eight months to a year.  Christian offered his services as a mechanic and Bernard, I think, he gave him a few little jobs here and there, and I think Christian got other little bits of work working on cars with other people in the area, don’t forget he’d done two years of the mechanic’s course. He did know what he was doing.

02:39 --> 02:45

Donal:             How did the German authorities discover that he was in the Algarve?

02:46 --> 04:03

Jon:                The German authorities obviously knew that he’d absconded, so they’d put out through Europol a European Arrest Warrant. I don't think they knew where he was, they had no idea where he was, as you know that Interpol or Europol as it is here in Europe put out this warrant that goes on the systems in all different countries, and it was sitting there, so he was picked up in 1999. So, he'd been there for some years, he was picked up randomly at a police checkpoint for some offences and it was difficult to know exactly what those offences were. It's very difficult to actually understand what he’d done wrong, various offences was the best I could get. I find it very strange that the Portuguese authorities haven't kept details of these offences, they called them various light offences, what were they? Knowing that it wasn't illegal to look at child pornography until 2007, what could light offences be in Portugal? It’s very difficult to find this information and I think this goes back to the heart of the problem. Maybe with the Madeline McCann case, is that so much is being erased from the PJ files that whole case was handled so badly that we don't really know, but what we do know is that 1999 he was arrested and photographed in a police station on the Algarve looking very debonair, very suave, pictures taken left and right, full face and it listed on there that he is wanted in Germany for various child sex offences, that was made clear. He was then taken to a prison in Evora and kept for a couple of months before he was finally extradited.

04:04 --> 04:18

Donal:             Part of the story is, of course, that he had absconded from this juvenile detention centre, serving, and finishing a sentence, ostensibly for some child sexual abuse offences. Is he been brought back to finish his sentence or are there other new crimes on the horizon? 

04:19 --> 05:20

Jon:                 No, he's been brought back to finish the rest of his sentence. So, I think he served fifteen or sixteen months of his two-year sentence, so they wanted him to serve the rest of seven or eight months and that was that. The very fact that the Portuguese police and we've seen these photographs, because Martin Fricker at The Mirror managed to unearth them of him, but then went on Portuguese television, suggested that they’re taking pictures of someone and they're saying that he was involved in various sort of minor offences. They must have been interested in what he was doing whether they just thought well, we can’t be bothered to prosecute, because we haven't got enough police, or whether they thought these aren't serious enough offences or maybe they thought mmm…maybe we should just get rid of him quickly and cover this whole thing up as best as possible. Bernard was shocked that this guy that seemed very nice, that had settled into expat life for a number of years on the coast, doing odd jobs and picked up golf balls in the golf club, he worked in bars, and there he was suddenly being extradited back to Germany for serious child sex offences. 

05:21 --> 05:33

Donal:             So, effectively you've got his friend Bernard and his girlfriend, who are shocked that he's been incarcerated in a Portuguese prison prior to his extradition to finish his sentence for child sexual abuse offences.

05:34 --> 05:54

Jon:                 I don’t think they actually knew what he’d gone back for, we know now. I don’t think they had any idea, but they must have assumed it was something fairly serious. Later when he came back, and he came back fairly quickly as soon as he got out of prison in Germany, he came straight back to Portugal. I think they just assumed it was something fairly minor and he didn't want to talk about it I don’t think. 

05:34 --> 06:09

Donal:             How long is he in the Portuguese prison before he’s extradited? and how long does he serve in Germany? And then after that what does he do?

06:10 --> 07:28

Jon:                 First of all, it’s quite interesting I’ve got a lot of detail in the book about it, but it's still a bit vague as to exactly what he was doing in those two or three years before he was finally extradited back. He drove around a lot and got away with probably quite a lot of things. One of the reasons he was picked up was to do with the insurance on his car, he hadn’t got his car, German car, registered. That’s something I come back to later in the book, actually, it's very strange it's called an insolence offence which I find really odd. Is just not getting his car registered onto Portuguese plates, to me it seems like a very, very, minor crime. When he was actually imprisoned later on in 2006 in Portugal, he was taken out of prison for a court case that involved this insolence offence. This is where it gets really odd because I discovered that there were four different prosecutors, lawyers, in this court case, a translator a judge, all in this specific hour-long court case about whether or not he registered his car into Portuguese it doesn't add up Donal, it does not add up. Eventually I tracked down one of the lawyers who represented him, she was quite evasive she just didn't want to sort of speak about it at all. I just said to her that look… isn't it bizarre to have so many lawyers and prosecutors involved in this case, so many different people. One person was weirdly from Lisbon, was on a screen they had a link up on a screen, I mean come on why do you need that for a case for as simple for not just registering your car.  

06:10 --> 07:35

Donal:              Its nearly the equivalent of a parking fine because in the UK if you bring a car across jurisdictions your kind of given a year to do it, it’s a magistrates hearing. 

07:36 --> 07:49

Jon:                 Its very odd I mean, and I even put it to Sandra who's one of the senior journalists at RTP in Portugal, who had done a lot on the Madeleine McCann case, and I met the very first day. She kinda just sort of brushed it off as if it's like… what's the big deal! I'm thinking well to me that just doesn't stack up. 

07:50 --> 07:35

Donal:              Is there some sense that there are other crimes around him at the time, there other associations because as you alluded to he was being picked up for the extradition, he was being picked up for the insolence not registering his car in Portugal, there was also a talk of other lighter offences and in the context of Portugal, and its sex offences, and a very liberal attitude child pornography that stage you're suggesting that, and knowing his behaviour that could be something around that which certainly something which attracts the attention, bizarre attention, of all these lawyers and magistrates and judges on this peculiarly very minor offence, about re-registering a car.

07:50 --> 09:39

Jon:                 You cannot find the information Donal, it’s so difficult to find this information and I'm not trying to do down the Portuguese media, I think Sandra’s done generally a very good job. I think she was unable to track down the information on this. I need to spend more time, you know what it’s like with these things, you can spend years on these books and digging into this case and in the end, they just won't give you information. Later on, when Bruekner was living in a tiny village of Foral with a girlfriend called Nicole, there was a really strange court case that happened. It involved a mayor and other neighbours and we tried as much as we could to find information and you just couldn't get it, it was just impossible to get that information. Now, I believe the BKA the German prosecutor, and the police, who have been over regularly and again recently actually. I should point out they've been over again now; this is November this was last month in October they’d been back again to get further details. Now the case is now being handled from Porto in the North of Portugal I think they took the police up there as far away as possible from the Algarve because they’re less corruptible up there, and they’re miles away, but the German police were over there in in Porto and indeed Lisbon, and I think they're trying to get, I hope they do have all this background, it will tell the full story of what happened in these years.

09:40 --> 10:13

Donal:              Why was this taken so seriously when it's obviously such a minor offence. Just to put this into context for the listener John is to say is there anything sinister around those light offences which some people wanted to hide, they wanted to manage, they wanted to swerve, which might reflect badly upon Portugal, or were there other powerful people, or child abuse networks around there? These are the questions that this cul-de-sac and these odd events bring us back to when we talk about Madeleine McCann, but we're still back to he's in custody in Portugal, what happens when he is extradited back to Germany? 

10:14 --> 10:57

Jon:                 I don't want to keep continuing going on about it, but we’ll come back to this in one second, but I wanted to say is even after they find him guilty of this bizarre car offence later on in his absence, they then fine him, I think it's about eight hundred euros. They then spend the best part of a year or two trying to collect the money and they go down to different addresses, and they trace him to different places and the police get sent out all over the place to collect this money, this small amount of money for this small fine, that just doesn't make any logical sense. It is this time that supposedly the Portuguese police Gonçalo Amaral and his keystone cops allegedly turn up at one of these addresses to find out that he’s not there. Apparently, they even turned up at prison six months after he'd been released, so, its complete chaos. They're not really crossing the t's and dotting the I’s the system is not working. 

10:58 --> 11:00

Donal:             So, what happens when he's brought to Germany?

10:58 --> 12:07

Jon:                 He's brought back to Germany after two months, and when he gets back, he's taken straight back to this juvenile offender’s institute, and he does serve the rest of his sentence, and I think it's the full tariff two years, he might even have got a little bit more because of absconding. Again, I wasn’t able to find exact dates, but I do know that almost immediately he gets out he does come back to Portugal he is not interested in staying in Germany at all, there's no interest to him there. So in 1999 he arrives and quite quickly ends up in Praia Da Luz or Luz as they call it in Portugal, and that's right near Lagos and of course, that's where Madeleine went missing. And he rents from an English man actually an English landlord a small cottage house about just less than a kilometre from the Ocean Club just outside Luz, now known as the yellow house. It’s a kind of one bedroom cottage with about a hectare or half a hectare of grounds around it in a very isolated spot and he's then in that house by all accounts, 1999 right the way through to 2006. So, he has seven years when he's renting this house, so this is a whole new chapter really but that's where he then spends the next seven years.

12:08 --> 12:20

Donal:             He’s finished the sentence for child sexual offences, he now immediately returns to the Algarve and preposterously, bizarrely, and very importantly for us and for you, he sets upon his new home in Praia da Luz.

12:21 --> 12:47

Jon:                 This was his base, this was his lair, this was where everything happened, this is where he kept all his ill-gotten gains, this is where he kept all his collection of child pornography, this is where he collected and went on the dark web. This is where he stole and then kept wallets and passports, and video cameras, and cameras, and watches. To him this was the nearest he had to a solid home of his own this was his lair, I can't describe it any better way.

12:21 --> 13:01

Donal:             So, this was his home from home, this was his castle, this was also his key to the paedophile kingdom, the paedophile paradise as he saw that Praia da Luz and the Algarve represented for him. The core of the next chapter is the yellow house.

13:02 --> 13:43

Jon:                 That's right we'll go back on the yellow house we’ll have a look at what happened between those years in terms of the amount of families holiday makers, who claims or reported their children being abused, while they were on holiday. Sometimes by people creeping into their rooms and apartments in Praia da Luz, or nearby in other resorts near there. We're talking about an enormous amount of crimes taking place in a very rural backwater, where you would not imagine that would happen and very heavily protected and covered up by the tourist industry in Portugal, I believe by the police and I believe by the judiciary that may well have had a hand in why we didn't know about the very seriousness of what was happening in the Algarve between 1999 and 2007. 

13:42 --> 13:59

Donal:             It appears that with his arrival in the Algarve there was anecdotally at least a big increase in child sexual abuse offences, particularly targeting tourists and this appears to be an open window. This is a road map towards the abduction of Madeleine McCann.

13:42 --> 15:17

Jon:                 We can't know for certain how many of these crimes Christian Brueckner was involved in. We know there were an enormous amount of child sex abusers living in that area, as many as six hundred at the time operation Grange took over in 2012. We know that there were a lot of reported crimes that went absolutely nowhere. One month before Madeleine McCann went missing a child was sexually abused on a beach, just five miles away and the family, German family, went to report it to the police, the police didn't do anything. They didn't even go out from their office, they didn't leave their office or even visit the car park which was precisely 300 metres away from this beach across a little Cliff, they didn't even visit it.  There's a footpath I walked on recently Donal the van lifers were parked up, and Christian regularly parked up there.  They didn't even bother going out because this little girl to them, well, it's not a crime, is it? what's the big deal?  A little girl gets abused and molested on a beach that’s not a crime, is it? In fact, as I said before 2007, you could still look at child pornography on your laptop in Portugal, and indeed in Spain. It’s a disgrace Donal, at that time the McCann's would have had no idea what they were walking into. What holiday they were booking. They had no idea when they went to that holiday camp, they had no idea not only how poor the security was there but how many dangerous people lived around that area.

15:18 --> 15:27

Donal:             So, Jon, people who booked in the Algarve in general and around Praia da Luz were walking into this cauldron of criminality particularly around paedophiles.

15:26 --> 15:42

Jon:                 This was a hotbed of child sex abuse. This was a hotbed of misdemeanours you just couldn't imagine in a small quaint seaside village in, in southern Europe. Contrary to what the McCanns would have thought, booking their Mark Warner holiday where you’d have security, everything will be taken care of, they had no idea.

15:43 --> 15:56

Donal:              And they had no idea that the abduction of Maddy McCann was really a crime in gestation for a decade beforehand with the arrival of Christian Brueckner, and it was a crime that was just waiting to happen, if not Maddie it would have been somebody else.

15:57 --> 16:49

Jon:                 Indeed, it's a crime waiting to happen people extrapolate…. paedophiles why would they snatch a western girl, and British girl daughter of doctors, why would they do that? it’s just not what they do when there’s so much availability of children around. But hold on a minute you walk through a small gate up eight or ten steps, a sliding door open there's a girl, three years old blonde, pretty blue eyes, waiting for you. She might have stumbled out into the street, opportunity right there in front of whoever it was grab the girl, take her away. If you’re prepared to grab a child on a beach Donal right and your naked apart from a backpack. If you’re prepared to grab a child outside a play park, pull her into the bushes nine years old. If you’re prepared to go underneath the slide 2 o'clock in the morning at a Ferrier have your trousers down, be masturbating in front of four young children. What is it to think that a little extra step of walking up ten small steps and grabbing the child as she slept from a room and putting her in a car or a van and driving off? I don't see an enormous leap of faith between those two cases I see it very clearly.

16:50 --> 16:56

Donal:             This is the wrong man in the right place, in the right location, with the right predilections, this is the perfect suspect for the Maddie McCann case.

16:50 --> 17:30

Jon:     Absolutely perfect suspect, he's living there at the time, he’s on the phone at the time, he's seen around the area at the time. He may well have been doing it for someone else, he may have been doing it for himself, we don't know, that's up to the police to establish. Was this with another group, was he doing it on his own to film it to put it on the dark web to sell, we don't know there's a lot of money out there Donal, it's frightening the more you look into this case the more you realise how much money can be made from these horrific things that happen in dark rooms late at night. It's nothing short of a disgrace the amount of streaming of child pornography that’s happening from Southeast Asia these days, it’s appalling, its grown and it needs to be tackled its horrific.