Anguished mother: I don’t want to know what he has done
Parents kicked out adopted son as teenager after crime spree
THE prime suspect for the abduction of Madeleine McCann was kicked out of home as a teenager because his adopted mother could no longer cope with his spiralling criminal behaviour.
Speaking for the first time, Christian Brueckner’s mother Brigitte insisted she does not want to know what crimes her depraved adopted son has committed, saying: ‘I don’t know anything about it. I don’t want to know anything about it.’
Kind-hearted Brigitte and her husband Fritz adopted Christian as a baby after he was given up by his birth mother. But when Fritz was seriously injured in a car crash in 1992, Brigitte was unable to cope with caring for both her brain-damaged husband and the increasingly delinquent teenager.
Christian was sent to a children’s home for disruptive teenagers, but soon sank into a debauched life of crime and sex offending.
In 1992 he committed a burglary and a year later molested a six-year-old girl in a playground, only stopping when she began to scream.
Five months later, he approached a nine-year-old girl and dropped his trousers.
It marked the beginning of an appalling 27-year criminal career.
Last week German police announced that they were investigating the 43-year-old on suspicion of murdering three-year-old Madeleine, who disappeared from a holiday apartment in the Portuguese holiday resort of Praia da Luz in 2007.
Brueckner is also being investigated in connection with the disappearance of a five-year-old German girl who vanished from woods in northern Germany, in 2015.
Inga Gehricke – often referred to as Germany’s Maddie – vanished during a family barbecue. Brueckner lived 48 miles away in a caravan on scrubland by an abandoned box factory.
Police are also examining potential links to the disappearance in 1996 of another German youngster, René Hasse, six, who vanished from Amoreiras beach in the Portuguese coastal town of Aljezur – 25 miles from Praia da Luz.
And yesterday the Belgian authorities said they are investigating whether Brueckner might have been involved in the murder of 16year-old Carola Titze in July 1996.
The teenager, whose mutilated body was found six days after she vanished while on holiday at a Flemish resort in De Haan, West Flanders, was allegedly seen at a disco with a German man, who was never traced.
The Mail on Sunday has seen Brueckner’s 19-page police file, a shocking catalogue of 17 convic‘unkempt tions, including theft, assault, drug trafficking, violations of the weapons law, child abuse, possession of child pornography and rape.
Astonishingly, he has been extradited back to Germany from abroad to face justice no fewer than three times: twice from Portugal and once from Italy.
Given his repeated offending, the file provides a vivid physical description of Brueckner who has a pockmarked face, pierced ears, a five-inch scar on his lower back, an eight-inch scar on his right arm, birthmarks all over his body and hands’, including chewed fingernails. It even details a distinctive scar on his groin.
The file – and the testimony of his friends and acquaintances – provides a picture of an itinerant and dangerous sexual offender who appeared to flit between Germany and Portugal at will, committing serious crimes wherever he settled.
Brueckner was born Christian Fischer in 1976 but given up by his birth mother and adopted by the Brueckner family, who lived in Bergtheim, a village near the Bavarian city of Wuerzburg.
Neighbours yesterday said the family had difficulty controlling him and the situation became impossible after Herr Brueckner, who has since died, was confined to a wheelchair after the car crash.
‘The Brueckners were a lovely couple, very kind. But what happened with their boy Christian is a catastrophe,’ one neighbour said. ‘They took him in as a baby and brought him up as their own.
‘He was often in trouble and he got worse and worse as he grew into a teenager. As the man of the house, it was Fritz who disciplined the boy. Christian needed a firm hand. But after the accident he could not do that any more.
‘Brigitte, the mother, did her best, but she could not cope with the boy and look after her husband.
‘Christian had been in trouble and that is when he was sent to a reform school for delinquent teenagers in Wuerzburg.’
Another neighbour added: ‘If what I read is true it will destroy his mother. Brigitte and Fritz did everything they could for him when he was a boy.’
A third neighbour told the German newspaper Bild that the home where Brueckner was sent had a bad reputation: ‘There were only bad young people there.’
At his trial for the child sex offences in 1994 at Wuerzburg District Court, Brueckner was asked by the juvenile judge what he thought about his actions.
He replied: ‘I didn’t think anything.’ He was given a two-year sentence but fled to Portugal with a girlfriend in 1995 before it was completed.
He worked for a sales company, fitting awnings and swimming pool covers, and with his then girlfriend rented a remote whitewashed farmhouse on a hillside near the beach where the McCanns would later play during their week’s holiday.
In 1999 he was arrested and extradited back to Germany where he served out the remainder of his youth sentence for the child sex offences. The following year he was back in Portugal – but his life became increasingly chaotic. Neighbours described an ‘angry’ car dealer who raced along the quiet country roads. He collected lost balls from golf courses to sell and stole diesel from parked trucks and boats in nearby marinas.
Then, one hot evening in early September 2005, just 18 months
‘They had difficulty trying to control him’
‘I got the feeling that he enjoyed torturing me’
before the abduction of Madeleine, his offending took a horrifically depraved turn. Less than a mile from his farmhouse was the home of a 72-year-old American widow, who had lived alone with her cats for 17 years following the death of her Austrian husband.
Brueckner knew the widow’s villa – Casa Jacaranda – having regularly stopped there to pet the cats on his way to the beach.
At about 10.30pm, as she watched TV, the woman was grabbed from behind, dragged upstairs to her bedroom where she was tied-up, gagged, blindfolded and raped. Brueckner, who wore a mask and was armed with a ‘curved sabre’, beat the pensioner with a metal, flexible object. ‘I felt that he enjoyed torturing me,’ she later told police.
Two of Brueckner’s acquaintances stumbled across evidence of his horrific crime when they burgled his farmhouse the following year, but apparently failed to tell the police about their find until many years later.
They stole his camcorder but were horrified to find a film sequence in which an older woman was bound and masked and whipped then raped. A second film showed a young woman tied naked to a wooden beam in the house. Brueckner is understood to have courted a string of young women during his 12-year stay in the Algarve and had a year-long relationship with a British expat.
He disappeared from Praia da Luz shortly after Madeleine was snatched as she slept alongside her twin siblings in May 2007.
German police last week revealed Brueckner took a mobile phone call, placing him in the resort between 7.30pm and 8pm on the night she vanished.
He initially settled in Hanover and became a notorious figure in the city’s backstreet bars, often leering drunkenly at women and wearing an ill-fitting and pungent suit. ‘I remember him,’ said Diana Bieler, who worked at the Cuban-themed bar Havana, where Brueckner was photographed in April 2011. ‘He used to come to the bar twice a week, always on his own. He always had beer and looked unfriendly.
‘He was a dirty man, and I did not talk to him. He always smelt and always looked tense.’
It was his habit of drunkenly boasting in bars that may have sealed his fate.
In 2017, he apparently suggested that he was responsible for Madeleine going missing while drinking with an associate in another German bar.
Shockingly, he then allegedly showed his fellow drinker a video of him raping a woman. The associate informed German police who passed the new information to New Scotland Yard.