I investigated Madeleine McCann’s abduction – I fear there’ll never be a trial

Yet a former senior UK detective, who assisted the original Portuguese investigation, worries that the obstacles to ever prosecuting Brueckner remain huge.

Dr Graham Hill was head of behavioural analysis at the UK’s Child Exploitation and Online Protection command in 2007 when he was sent to the Algarve to assist Portuguese police trying to find three-year-old Madeleine. He is one of few criminologists in the world specialising in men who abduct and then abuse children.

Hill agrees there is strong circumstantial evidence against Brueckner, as he fits a “very rare” profile. The paedeophile was named as an arguido – official suspect – by Portuguese authorities in 2022.

“He has a deviant sexual interest in children,” Hill tells The i Paper. “He’s got a very skewed or almost non-existent moral code, which will allow him to act in ways that other people wouldn’t. He’s a nighttime burglar who breaks into houses when people are in the properties – a risk-taker.

“On top of that, he was living in a small coastal town less than a four-minute drive from where Madeleine went missing. If that doesn’t make him a very good suspect, I don’t know what does.”

This week a police source told The Daily Telegraph: “If the evidence is strong enough to extradite the prime suspect and try him here, that is what we would seek to do… Clearly, there are numerous hurdles but our priority at the moment is to amass the strongest evidence we can against that prime suspect.”

Some have pointed out that Brexit could prevent the British authorities from putting Brueckner on trial here, because Germany does not allow extraditions to non-EU states. But Hill worries there is a more fundamental problem before that becomes a concern.

Madeleine has never been found, there do not appear to be any firm witnesses, and it is unlikely there is any conclusive forensic evidence. “We’ve had the Portuguese investigation, the German one and a UK police review for a number of years. None of them seem to have come up with any concrete evidence,” he warns.

To lodge a request to extradite a crime suspect, the UK must be ready to charge that person immediately if they enter the country. “You can strongly suspect someone’s committed a crime, but if you haven’t got the evidence, you can’t prove it,” says Hill, a visiting professor at Birmingham City University.

“If the Germans haven’t got enough evidence and the Portuguese haven’t either, how are the British going to have it? It seems a bit far-fetched to me… If they had a smoking gun, they would have used it by now.”

Why efforts to prosecute Brueckner have been frustrated

Brueckner was identified after a former associate, Helge Busching, told police that the pair had discussed the McCann case at a festival in 2008. Brueckner allegedly remarked that “she was not screaming” when she was kidnapped.

Police only paid attention to Busching’s report about this in 2017. According to reports, Brueckner was convicted of child sex crimes in 1994 when he was a teenager and again in 2016.

Revealing his identity in 2020, German prosecutors said they had found information about his two cars “suggesting that he may have used one of these vehicles to commit the offence”. He had re-registered one of them in the name of another person the day after McCann vanished.

Sadly, the authorities also concluded Madeleine was likely to be dead. British police continue to treat her disappearance as a missing persons case.

Lead investigator Hans Christian Wolters could not have been firmer in his statements about Brueckner, saying in 2020: “If you knew the evidence we had you would come to the same conclusion as I do.” In 2025, Wolters reiterated his belief that it was the “fundamentally dangerous” sex offender who “killed Madeleine McCann”.

When German authorities chose to name Brueckner, it may have looked to the public like a prosecution would soon follow. Instead, Hill suggests it may have indicated they had “run out of ideas”.

“They made a calculated decision to go public… They were hoping to get new information,” he says. “That’s something you do when you’re really boxed into a corner… That was their last roll of the dice.”

The British criminologist, who spoke with Wolters for an ITV documentary last year, thinks prosecutors became “overconfident” they could link the suspect to Madeleine – especially when another man testified in a separate trial in 2024 that Brueckner had admitted he “found a kid and took the child” in Portugal.

But Brueckner was later acquitted in that court case on three charges of aggravated rape and two of sexually abusing children, all in Portugal between 2000 and 2017 but not related to Madeleine.

The Metropolitan Police established Operation Grange to review evidence about her disappearance in 2011. Hill, who was contacted by the team last year, believes its numbers have dwindled from seven or eight staff originally to two detectives working on the case part-time.

Brueckner refused to be interviewed by the Met before his release from a Hanover prison last year, having served seven years for raping a 72-year-old woman in Praia da Luz in 2005. He continues to deny having anything to do with Madeleine. “I want them to stop this witch-hunt against me and give me back my life,” he told Sky News last year.

In a letter published by The Sun, he wrote: “Was I or my vehicle clearly seen near the crime scene on the night of the crime? Is there DNA evidence of me at the crime scene? Are there DNA traces of the injured party in my vehicle? Are there other traces/DNA carriers of the injured party in my possession? Photos? And, not to forget, is there a body/corpse? All no, no no.”

Hills expects that Brueckner’s legal team would argue he could not be given a fair trial after being “convicted in the court of public opinion”, but he is confident a judge would be able to direct a jury strictly enough to allow a prosecution to go ahead.

How the original Portuguese investigation failed

All these years on, Hill is frustrated that failings in the first few weeks of the investigation into Madeleine’s abduction have prevented anyone ever appearing in court.

He was sent to Portugal several days after her disappearance to advise local detectives on the typical behaviour of child abductors and how to identify suspects. “The quality of the investigation done by the Portuguese police, let’s be honest, it was poor,” he says.

“When you haven’t got a suspect for a crime, particularly a child abduction, you do what’s called ‘suspect generation’. You trawl all your systems looking for sex offenders, convicted nighttime burglars, people convicted of sex crimes against children. You make lists, you prioritise them and you cross-check them, and you generate suspects who you then eliminate as you go through your investigation.

“If the Portuguese police had done their job correctly, they would have found Brueckner on at least two or three of those lists.”

Instead, Hill recalls how Portuguese detectives developed “tunnel vision” over a British man named Robert Murat, who later secured libel damages from Sky and newspapers that had implicated him.

Police later named the toddler’s parents, Kate and Gerry McCann – doctors who left Madeleine and their two other children in their apartment while they ate at a nearby tapas restaurant – as suspects. Hill said the family should have been eliminated as suspects in the first couple of days by interviewing them with a lie detector, a standard practice for the FBI.

Murat and the McCanns were cleared formally months later, but vital time had been lost.

“It went from bad to worse,” says Hill. “All along the way, they got taken down blind alleys, to the detriment of the investigation, which allowed Brueckner to slip through the net.”

He adds: “With child abduction, when you start badly, you almost never recover. It’s unlikely now that Madeline’s body will be found. Forensic opportunities no longer exist.”

A Met spokesperson has said that “a dedicated team continues to examine the events” and “remains in close working discussion with policing colleagues in Germany and Portugal”, as well as “supporting and updating Madeleine’s family”.

If there is one piece of evidence Hill thinks could have solved the case with more focus and more luck, it was a sighting that night of a man carrying a child wearing pyjamas.

“That person has never been traced,” he says. “I think that person is the person that abducted Madeleine McCann. They should have focused on that sighting.”

@robhastings.bsky.social