Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
UNTOLD STORY
THE coastal town of Lagos is home to a curious mix of locals, drifters, bohemians and tourists drawn to the sunny, laid-back Algarve.
But even among this community, Christian Brueckner stood out.
The German detested the “scruffy hippies”, as he called them, preferring to dress in old tailored suits.
He also shunned their drug-fuelled lifestyle, at least publicly, saying narcotics made him “lose control”.
Brueckner apparently tried to portray himself as a gent, wooing women with his classic good manners.
But behind the veneer there was a dark side to him, which remained hidden to even his closest friends.
When he first arrived with a girlfriend in tow in 1995, aged 19, he was already a convicted sex offender in Germany.
He had fled to Portugal after serving a two-year juvenile term for abusing a sixyear-old girl in a playground and exposing himself to a nine-year-old girl when he was 17. And that was not his first brush with the law.
Born Christian Fischer in Bavaria in 1976, he was given up by his birth mother and placed in a children’s home, then adopted by Fritz and Brigitte Brueckner from Bergtheim, Bavaria.
He was convicted of his first burglary in nearby Wuerzburg in 1992, aged 15.
His adoptive parents sent him to a reform home for delinquent teens after Fritz was seriously injured in a car crash.
In 1993, Brueckner got an eight-month suspended juvenile term for multiple thefts and driving without a licence.
After serving time for the later sex offences he started his new life in Lagos.
He became a regular in the bars and clubs and was often seen at all-night parties in the hippy village of Barao de Sao Joao. He first came to the attention of Portuguese authorities in 1999, when he was arrested following a bar brawl. He was handed a two-month jail term in Evora, near Lisbon, but was freed after a matter of weeks.
By the time he wooed a lonely 28-year-old English woman newly arrived in Lagos in 2004, he had been in Portugal for almost a decade.
As with previous girlfriends, he turned on the charm and played up to his “gentlemanly” image.
The woman, now 45, told the Mirror: “At first I didn’t actually like him that much. I was 28, he was a couple of years younger. I knew he liked me but I wasn’t interested. But Chris could be very, very charming, very funny and very smooth in the way he talked.
“He always dressed nicely, held the door open, that kind of thing. He drove the nice car – the black Jaguar – was very gentlemanly and spoke properly.
“I was alone in Portugal, no family around and a bit lonely. We became friends in the spring of 2004 and that moved on to us becoming romantic. At first it was great.”
The Mirror told this week how the woman, who does not want to be named, said he later changed.
She claimed
ON DATING CHRISTIAN BRUECKNER