Rape of widow, child sex abuse ...and torture
GERMAN police have built up a chilling file on the life and crimes of Christian Brueckner and his potential links to Madeleine McCann’s disappearance.
The catalogue includes rape, kidnap, torture and child sexual abuse as well as burglary, robbery, drug dealing, handling stolen goods and fuel theft.
Speculation was growing yesterday that investigators will soon have enough evidence to add abduction and murder of Madeleine to the dossier.
Brueckner is believed to have grown up in Wuerzburg, in Bavaria. He first moved from Germany to Portugal with a girlfriend when he was 18 and on the run from the police.
The pair drove to Lagos on the Algarve, about seven miles from Praia da Luz – the resort where Madeleine was snatched.
“We didn’t know anything about Portugal,” he said in a court statement. “We went to Lagos because we liked the name so much.We had a tent with us and camped in the wild.” The couple held a number of low-paid jobs.
But four years later, his past caught up with him and he was arrested and extradited to Germany to serve a youth sentence for a sex offence.
After his release, he returned to Portugal where he was jailed for diesel theft and suspected of carrying out crimes such as handling stolen passports.
Brueckner was also convicted of drug dealing and theft in both Germany and Portugal.
Less than two years before Madeleine vanished, he tortured and raped a 72-year-old American widow in Praia da Luz. Masked and armed with a “sabre” he burst into the victim’s home via a patio door while was she watching television.
He grabbed her by the hair and dragged her to her bedroom. In an act of appalling savagery, he beat the woman with a long, metal object while she was bound, blindfolded and gagged.
“I felt that he enjoyed torturing me,” she told the investigators. It later emerged Brueckner had filmed the attack.
After raping her, he led the victim to the kitchen where he demanded money. He grabbed 100 euros before leading her to the bathroom and ordering her to stay put while he escaped.
After a few minutes, she went to her study to call a neighbour and realised the masked attacker had stolen her computer.
Police recovered a vital clue in the bedroom to the attack – a single body hair which later tested positive for Brueckner’s DNA. Evidence also emerged from two of his associates who had broken into his home and stole the camera.
It contained the rape of the victim along with scenes of a teenage girl tied naked to a beam. They got rid of the camera but later made detailed statements to police.
In 2017, Brueckner was arrested on a European arrest warrant while living in Italy, and extradited back to Germany.
He was jailed for 15 months for sexually abusing a young girl and later charged him with the rape of the American widow.
Brueckner dismissed the testimony of his associates as “not believable” and claimed the single body hair “transferred” into the victim’s home after he stroked her cat. But he was jailed for seven years last December.
His traumatised victim, now 86 and living back in the US, was too frail to give evidence but said she is terrified and cannot sleep.
His defence team have launched an appeal on the grounds he should not have been charged with the rape. They say he was extradited in connection with a different crime.