Lindy Mcdowell on the Madeleine Mccann mystery
HAVE they found the man who took Madeleine Mccann? Police in the UK, Portugal and Germany are appealing this week for information about a new suspect — the latest development in a story which has gripped, fascinated and divided millions of armchair detectives since the evening 13 years ago when the threeyear-old disappeared.
There have been many other suspects in the case. This one is different.
The evidence against German paedophile Christian Brueckner (43) may only be circumstantial.
But it’s powerful and persuasive. Brueckner, currently in a German prison, was convicted of the rape of a 72-yearold American woman living in the Algarve after he’d reportedly shown a video of the attack to someone who then went to police.
Crucially, that same witness claimed that Brueckner had boasted of knowing something about the Mccann case.
Brueckner, who’d been living in Portugal in 2007, has other convictions for sex offences against young girls. He was known to steal from hotels and holiday apartments in Praia da Luz, where the Mccanns were staying. He was in the area on the night Madeleine disappeared. He’d received a phone call not long before she was reported missing.
The next day he re-registered his Jaguar car in the name of another person.
He resembles a photofit of a man said to have been seen acting suspiciously near the Mccanns’ apartment.
It may be pretty convincing, all this, to you and me.
But for investigating officers solid evidence is required.
There’s no need to rehash here the timeline of events that followed the little girl’s disappearance in 2007.
The world entire knows the story. The endless twists and turns.
Madeleine’s parents Kate and Gerry have rarely been out of the headlines. Their search to find out what happened to their daughter has been relentless.
They’ve been sorely castigated for leaving their three small children alone that night.
Leaving the children was undoubtedly a grave mistake. But as parents we all make mistakes.
There but for the grace of circumstance...
But it was that circumstance, that twist, that was the cornerstone of so much debate about the case. Right from the beginning the story was bigger than ‘child goes missing’.
The amount of money being spent on the case — now over £11m — was also criticised. The Mccanns had connections in high places. Not without some justification, the question was asked: would the Government have put the same funding and effort into the search for a working-class child?
Whoever you blame there, though, it can’t be two parents desperate to discover what happened to their own little girl.
The Madeleine Mccann story from start to finish has been woven with claim and counter-claim, embroidered with rumour and wild supposition. There have been countless books, TV programmes, allegations and theories.
Even the investigators clashed. Frequently.
And somewhere in the midst of all that it was as though Madeleine herself got sidelined.
There has, though, been one calm voice of genuinely authoritative insight.
Belfast man Jim Gamble (right), the former top police officer and now leader in child protection, is a frequent media commentator on the case.
Jim’s foremost attribute isn’t just his expertise. It’s his humanity. You listen to him and what you are hearing is not only a man who knows the ins and outs of the case, but one who never loses sight of the human tragedy at the centre of it.
I’ve just finished reading The Five by Hallie Rubenhold, a book that tells the story of five women murdered in London in 1888. Very little has ever been written about their lives. Their deaths, however, — a different matter.
The five women were the victims of Jack the Ripper.
The book is a reminder of how the tragedy of lives lost is often eclipsed by the clamour of whodunnit.
Have they found the man who took Madeleine Mccann? Time will tell. But two things we know.
For the investigators who require conclusive proof, it will only be over when it’s over.
For the family of Madeleine Mccann, it’s doubtful it ever will.