Bound, blindfolded, beaten with a pole and raped... attack by Brueckner on US widow, 72, that years later alerted Maddie police
DETAILS emerged yesterday of the horrific rape of an American pensioner by Madeleine McCann suspect Christian Brueckner.
The German, who was given seven years in jail for the sexual assault, is reported to have blindfolded and then beaten the 72-year-old with a metal pole after breaking into her house near Praia da Luz.
He is then said to have carried out the degrading rape, videotaping the whole ordeal and ripping off his own mask at the end of the attack before stealing cash and a computer, according to evidence heard at Brueckner’s trial last year in Braunschweig, near Hanover.
Details of the rape case first emerged in a local newspaper, but were then reported by two of Germany’s biggest media organisations – Bild and Der Spiegel – after Brueckner’s name was linked to the McCann case.
Police in Braunschweig, who are leading the investigation, refused to comment directly.
However, according to widespread reporting of the case yesterday, a witness told how he had seen a horrific video of the sexual attack – which happened just a year and a half before Madeleine disappeared. The witness, an acquaintance of Brueckner, said the elderly woman was bound, masked and whipped before being raped.
He said: ‘Then the man sat on the bed and pulled the mask off his face. I thought: That can’t be!’ He said he immediately recognised Brueckner.
The witness told the court he had also seen a second video film, showing a younger woman tied naked to a wooden beam, crying out to be released and saying she had been raped, and that in it Brueckner was sitting on a sofa.
The witness stole the video tapes during a burglary in 2006 and said he later destroyed them, horrified by what he had seen but years later reported the contents to police.
His testimony prompted detectives to trawl cold cases and they came across the report of the American widow.
On the night of the attack, in early September 2005, she had been watching television news coverage of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans.
At around 10.30pm she went into her office to compose some emails when she was grabbed from behind, dragged up several stairs to her bedroom and tied up with a rope and raped.
She was also beaten with a metal, flexible object.
‘I felt that he enjoyed torturing me,’ she told the investigators.
The ordeal lasted more than 15 minutes and the widow suffered a broken jaw and injuries to her shoulder.
The victim, who was 86 at the time of the trial, was unable to travel to Germany to give evidence. But an investigator visited her at home in the US when she told him how the attack still haunted her.
‘After that she couldn’t sleep, couldn’t turn off the lights at night and was afraid,’ he said.
She said she did not recognise her assailant as he was wearing a mask but said he was muscular and spoke poor Portuguese.
After the brutal attack he demanded money. She went to the kitchen with him and gave him 100 euros from her purse. He also took a computer before vanishing. The woman said she hid in the bathroom for ten minutes before running to her neighbours who called police.
The court heard DNA linked a body hair found on the woman’s bed to Brueckner, who was living less than a mile away from the woman.
He denied the attack, claiming the hair could have been transferred to the woman’s bed on the back of her cat after he petted it outside her house, which was on his way to the beach.
In court Brueckner was said to have come across as ‘eloquent’ and was seen leafing through legal texts as evidence was heard.
He wore a plain grey shirt and jeans that were slightly too big for him, it was reported.
He denied the offence and said the witness was a liar. He said he could give the names of former lovers who would testify as to the ‘normalcy’ of his sex life.
Brueckner was handed a sevenyear jail term, it was reported. But it is understood he appealed arguing the trial was unfair because he had been extradited from Portugal, in 2017, on a different matter.
Lawyers argued he could only be prosecuted in Germany for the offence to which the European arrest warrant was issued for. The case is understood to be ongoing.
‘He enjoyed torturing me’