Jaguar-driving wannabe playboy who was actually a drug-dealing drifter — and child sex predator
CRUISING the Algarve in his classic Jaguar, Christian Brueckner posed as a fun-loving playboy.
The German drifter spent 12 years pursuing a bohemian lifestyle – but not long after Madeleine McCann vanished in 2007, he left Portugal and returned to his homeland.
It was in a German bar exactly ten years later – on the anniversary of the three-year- old’s disappearance – that Becks- drinking Brueckner turned the spotlight on himself.
As Madeleine’s face flashed up on the bar’s television screen, he reportedly turned to his drinking partner and claimed he ‘knew all about’ the case. He is alleged to have said something to suggest he knew what had happened to Maddie, according to a report on Sky News.
Later, it is claimed, he showed his companion a video of himself raping an elderly American widow in Portugal in 2005. The friend contacted German police.
Brueckner – who chose a moniker for his Facebook page that means ‘madness’ in German – swiftly became of interest to the detectives probing Madeleine’s disappearance. It was three more years before his name became public.
Photographs obtained by the Mail show blue- eyed Brueckner enjoying a night out in a Hanover bar in 2011. Wearing a pinstriped blazer, the self- styled Romeo appeared to be enjoying himself with a group of friends. One picture shows him cradling a small dog.
Last night one friend told the Mail that Brueckner’s ‘life situation’ was ‘a bit chaotic’, but added that ‘if everything is true then he was indeed a master of illusion’.
In fact, despite the Renaissance man image he seemed desperate to cultivate, Brueckner, 43, has long tried to hide a gruesome life of crime ranging from petty thefts to horrific sexual assaults.
Born in 1976, Brueckner was raised ‘in a home’ according to German news magazine Focus.
He committed his first burglary in his home town of Wuerzburg in Bavaria when he was just 15.
Within two years, he was convicted of sexually abusing a child, earning him a two-year youth sentence in 1994. A report by Germany’s Der Spiegel claimed he served only part of this term.
Brueckner went on to notch up convictions for drug dealing, driving under the influence and without a licence, the news magazine reported. As a young man, Brueckner is said to have dreamed of emigrating with his girlfriend of the time. After turning 18 – and acquiring a driver’s licence – he took off to the Algarve town of Lagos with his girlfriend, the German newspaper Bild reported.
It quotes him as saying: ‘ We didn’t know anything about Portugal. We went to Lagos because we liked the name so much. We had a tent with us and camped in the wild.’
He eventually settled in Praia da Luz – the picturesque resort where the McCanns took their three children on holiday.
Brueckner stayed there for 12 years, telling families he was working as a caterer and odd-job man. In truth, he was dealing cannabis, trafficking drugs and burgling holiday homes and hotel rooms.
He was briefly locked up for diesel theft, and is also said to have traded passports and stolen goods, according to Bild.
He initially lived in a dilapidated house accessed by a dirt road. ‘In terms of furnishings, it was a typical bachelor’s apartment,’ said one acquaintance. After a decade on the Algarve, Brueckner burgled a 72-year- old American widow and subjected her to a violent sexual assault, which he recorded on camera.
By this time Brueckner is thought to have been living in a rented whitewashed villa on a remote hillside – above the beach where the McCanns played during their week’s holiday.
Neighbours described him as an ‘ angry’ car dealer who raced along country roads. They say that when he vanished, he left behind a collection of exotic clothing, including wigs and fancy dress. Brueckner left Portugal after Madeleine disappeared on May 3, 2007. The previous month, he had moved out of the villa and into a VW Westfalia campervan. Police have now linked this vehicle to Maddie’s disappearance.
Brueckner also retained his prized 1993 Jaguar XJR6. Scotland Yard has now revealed that the day after Madeleine vanished, Brueckner re-registered the classic British car to someone else, even though he was still driving it. After
‘A master of illusion’
returning to Germany, Brueckner continued stealing and drug-dealing. In October 2011, a district court in the northern state of Schleswig- Holstein sentenced him to one year and nine months for a crime involving ‘narcotics in large quantities’. The term was initially suspended.
By 2014, Brueckner was living in Braunschweig, near Hanover, where he boasted to friends he had opened a local shop. He claimed he worked from seven in the morning until midnight but the business, along with his relationship, failed and he began to hit the bottle and live on benefits. In 2016 he was sentenced to one year and three months’ imprisonment for ‘sexually abusing a child in the act of procuring himself and possessing child pornography’.
After his bar-room claims about Madeleine in May 2017, Brueckner appears to have returned to the Algarve. Within a month he was held under a European Arrest Warrant and extradited back to Germany. That September, he was sentenced to another year in prison for the sexual abuse of a child according to Thomas Klinge, spokesman for the Hanover public prosecutor’s office.
After his release in August 2018, he later told a court, he was homeless, spending nights sleeping on park benches. He travelled to Milan – but within a month he was arrested and extradited to Germany yet again, this time to face trial for drugs offences.
In October 2018, he was convicted of dealing drugs and sent to prison in Kiel in Schleswig-Holstein, where he remains to this day. Prosecutors also had enough evidence to charge him with the horrific sex attack he had filmed 13 years earlier.
His rape trial took place last December. Reports of the proceedings descibe Brueckner as ‘eloquent’ and state he leafed through legal texts as evidence was heard. He called what had happened to the traumatised pensioner a ‘bad deed’, but denied any role in it.
In court he repeatedly mentioned the names of ex-lovers, insisting they would testify as to the ‘normalcy’ of his sex life.
He branded witnesses as liars and claimed that DNA from a strand of hair used to convict him must have ended up on the victim’s bed after he had petted one of her cats. Yet as so often before, the court rejected his denials and Brueckner was sentenced to seven-and-a-half years, pending the outcome of an appeal.
One trial witness described Brueckner as someone who ‘always paid attention to his appearance’.
As the Madeleine case enters a dramatic new phase, there will certainly be a lot more attention paid to him now.