Madeleine McCann: a step closer to the truth?
Ten years after Madeleine McCann disappeared, her parents made a fresh appeal for information, said Gordon Rayner in The Daily Telegraph. The broadcast may have elicited “more sympathy than hope” from those watching. But last week, the police revealed that the appeal – in 2017 – had resulted in a key tip-off. For the past three years, the Met Police have been working with their German and Portuguese counterparts to track the movements of “a 43-year-old drifter”, who has become the first person to be publicly described by the Met as a suspect in the case. Sources in the media identified him as Christian Brückner, a child sex offender with a long criminal record, who is currently in jail in Germany for, among other offences, raping a 72-year-old American woman in the Portuguese resort of Praia da Luz, two years before the McCanns went there on holiday in 2007.
Although the evidence seems to be circumstantial, the German police are convinced of the case against Brückner, said The Guardian. He was first convicted of child sexual abuse as a teenager in 1994. To escape a youth custody sentence, he fled to Portugal, where he took various odd jobs and supplemented his income by breaking and entering hotels and holiday homes, and dealing in drugs. Dividing his time between Portugal and Germany, he settled in a house on the outskirts of Praia da Luz. He raped his American victim in 2005, in a vicious and apparently planned attack; but he was only jailed for that crime last year, after one of his former associates found a video tape he had made of the attack, and went to the police. And though by 2007 he had moved out of the house, he was still in the area: mobile phone records show that he was on the phone for 30 minutes in Praia da Luz on 3 May, the night Madeleine vanished. The next day, he de-registered his car, a Jaguar; it seems he then cleared out of the Algarve, and moved back to Germany, where he was later tried for various crimes, including the sexual abuse of a minor.
Prosecutors in Germany are now regarding Madeleine’s disappearance as a murder inquiry, said The Times. And German police are investigating links between Brückner and a five-year-old girl known in the German media as “the German Maddie”. Inga Gehricke went missing from a family barbecue in Saxony-Anhalt in 2015, when Brückner was living around 60 miles away. Of course, he may end up as one of a long line of suspects who are later discounted. Madeleine McCann’s parents, Kate and Gerry, have always said they believe that their daughter is alive. But they are intelligent people: while their hearts screamed out for the best, their heads must have feared the worst. Ultimately, what they have always wanted is truth, justice and, in time, peace – and perhaps they are a step closer to getting all three.
And yet the McCanns have not only had to endure 13 years of not knowing the fate of their eldest child, said Barbara Ellen in The Observer: they have also had to face 13 years of “relentless criticism, speculation and abuse”. Even today, people are attacking them for having left Madeleine and her twin siblings alone in the apartment that night, while they had dinner around 100 yards away – though countless parents have done the same. This reserved and dignified couple (both doctors from modest backgrounds) were described as “cold” and “unnatural”, because they did not emote in public; at the same time, they were accused of being publicity-hungry money-grubbers, for trying to make sure their daughter’s case never went cold. At one point, they had to endure the horror of being named as suspects by the Portuguese police, a shadow that remained over them for ten months – and did much to fuel the trolls online. The mass trolling was appalling, said India Knight in The Sunday Times. But perhaps at first, people felt they had to “other” the McCanns, in order to assuage their own fear. If they’d accepted that the McCanns were a normal middle-class couple, they’d have had to accept that what happened to them could happen to anyone – and that was unbearable.
“Prosecutors in Germany are now regarding Madeleine’s disappearance
as a murder inquiry”
The McCanns’ desperation to keep their daughter’s case alive is understandable, said Tanya Gold on UnHerd. Now, after 13 years and a £12m investigation, they may be close to a resolution. But there has been something “gruesome” about the way the press and the public have feasted on it. If people are interested in the suffering of children, I wish they would read up on child poverty, and campaign against it; I wish they would pray for the return of all the children who go missing each year. But that is too much to hope for. “Reading about Madeleine McCann is easy; caring about children you’ve not been forced into imagined intimacy with” by a cynical media and their despair is rather harder.