Le podcast n'est que la version audio, lancée en 2021, du documenteur de 2020.
Bien des podcasts sont des projets commerciaux. l'argent, la loi et la publicité ont leur influence. Ils suggèrent qu'ils apportent des réponses, la "vérité". Dans chaque podcast, il y a au moins une personne, ou une entreprise commerciale, qui fait des choix influencés par ses propres opinions, ses objectifs et, la plupart du temps, par le simple fait de gagner de l'argent.
L'émission télévisée américaine "48 hours" se présente comme un documentaire sur les crimes. Elle a peu à voir avec la qualité de l'information. tout dépend du nombre d'yeux, et maintenant d'oreilles, qui n'échappent pas aux publicités. 48 hours ne toucherait pas à quoi que ce soit qui pourrait leur coûter en raison des informations apportées, ou qui pourrait donner une image négative sur les publicités qui financent.
Au début, on parle d'une station balnéaire, d'une station sûre. L'Ocean Club n'est pas ce que le public imagine comme étant une station balnéaire. Et l'appartement de vacances occupé cette semaine-là par les McCann ne fait pas partie d'un centre de vacances.
Un centre de villégiature est généralement un terrain qui est physiquement séparé du reste du monde. La plupart ont des clôtures, voire de hauts murs comme le complexe "Tapas"', qui n'inclut pas les appartements et est en même séparé par une allée piétonne.
Dans les immeubles la location de certains appartements, à certaines époques, était gérée par l'Ocean Club, mais ils étaient détenus par des propriétaires très divers, la plupart de ces complexes étant le résultat de plans d'investissement tels que la multipropriété.
L'Ocean Club a conclu des contrats avec plusieurs tour-opérateurs, comme MarkWarner, Thomas Cook, etc. Dans ces contrats figurent des activités sous-traitées, des packages que les touristes peuvent acheter. L'Ocean Club n'est pas un centre de villégiature, mais une société supervisant les installations et l'hébergement.
Un vrai centre de vacances donne normalement un accès exclusif aux installations.
Les "documentaires" ont parlé de villa, d'hôtel ou de chambre d'hôtel dans un centre de villégiature. alors qu'il suffisait de regarder pour voir qu'il n'en était pas ainsi. Cela a donné lieu à de nombreux malentendus dès le départ.
Il ne s'agissait pas non plus d'un complexe de luxe, haut de gamme. En 2007, on pouvait louer un appartement comme le 5A à partir de 250 euros pour une semaine, c'est le package acheté par les touristes auprès du tour-opérateur qui faisait monter les prix.
La grande différence entre un complexe hôtelier et un simple immeuble dans une rue est l'accès. Un complexe hôtelier dispose généralement d'un accès contrôlé, ce qui n'est pas le cas dans une rue ordinaire. L'appartement 5A ne faisant pas partie d'un complexe hôtelier, la sécurisation est pure fiction.
48 heures comme beaucoup d'autres émissions, a implanté dans l'esprit des spectateurs un lieu de villégiature sûr qui n'existait pas. Le 5A n'était qu'un appartement au rez-de-chaussée d'une rue ordinaire, utilisée pour se rendre au supermarché, à la plage, etc. De plus, tous les touristes devaient passer par cette rue pour accéder aux installations du complexe Tapas.
Et ce n'est là qu'un des mythes que le podcast de CBS "Puzzle" diffuse et que les médias continuent d'alimenter.
Transcription du podcast.
TV Journalist : We have breaking news in one of the world's most infamous missing persons mystery. A German prisoner has been identified as a new suspect in the disappearance of Madeleine McCann from a holiday resort in Portugal 13 years ago.
Peter van Sant (reporter) : It is every parent's greatest fear.
Kate MC off : Please, please do not hurt her. Please don't scare her. Please tell us where to find her. PvS: Three-year-old Madeleine McCann, taken from her bed with no clue left behind.
Gerald MC : We don't know where she is. We don't know who's taking her. We don't know why.
PvS : A massive search. A global media storm. And an international investigation. Days turned into months. Turned into years with no answers.
KMC : That hope is still there. There's still hope that we can find Madeleine.
PvS : It's a mystery that has been compared to a jigsaw puzzle with too many pieces missing. Until now.
Trad Wolters : He accused is a sex offender with several previous convictions. Who has already been convicted of sexual abuse of children.
Mark Hoffman (german profiler) : His name is Christian Brückner. He absolutely matches the profile of a person who could potentially abduct and or kill a little girl like Madeleine McCann.
PvS : Was he anywhere near the resort where this crime took place?
MH : He lived in a house run about one mile away from where Madeleine was potentially abducted. Hans Christian Wolters : It's one part of the puzzle you can say. But there are some pieces missing for this puzzle to complete it.
MH : His cell phone was tracked at the crime scene or at least next to the crime scene the night Maddie disappeared.
Jim Gamble : That call puts him in the area at the time the crime was committed.
MH : On his property in Germany they found used bead rives with pictures and videos of child abuse.
JG : It's when you put those things together that you get that clearer focus where the jigsaw becomes much much more complete. For the first time in 13 years I have to say I actually felt here is a credible suspect.
Kate MC : We would like to say a few words to the person who is with Madeleine. Madeleine is a beautiful, bright, funny and caring little girl. She is so special. We need our Madeleine and Madeleine needs us. Please give our little girl back.
PvS : It's been more than a decade of waiting for Kate and Gerry McCann.
GMC : We will leave no stone unturned in the search for our daughter Madeleine.
PvS : Years of searching since their daughter disappeared on May 3rd, 2007.
KMC : We have to be hopeful. It's what keeps us going and keeps us focused.
PvS : Now they finally may be closer to finding out what happened to Madeleine. This past June in Braunschweig, Germany, prosecutor Hans Christian Wolters held a press conference and made a stunning announcement. German police had a suspect, 43-year-old Christian Brückner. He also had devastating news.
HCW : We assume that the girl is dead.
PvS : He declared that Madeleine McCann was likely dead.
It's been said that German prosecutors are always very tight-lipped. You must have some strong evidence that allowed you to make that statement to the public.
HCW : We have strong evidence that Christian B killed Madeleine McCann.
PvS : But you don't have a body, correct? There's no body.
HcW : No, we have no forensic evidence.
PvS : Then how can you be so certain?
HCW : We have other evidence.
PvS : Just as German law does not allow vultures to use Brückner's full name, he also cannot say what that evidence is.
Jim Gamble : I heard the news that the Germans had a credible suspect. And my first thing was, here we go again.
PvS : Jim Gamble was head of the UK's Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre and involved in the early investigation.
JG : Madeleine's case was complex.
PvS : Over the years, he has seen countless leads end up as dead ends. But this time, he believes the Germans may be on the right track.
JG : Everyone, including myself, who's touched this case, is more hopeful with the German case than we've been in 13 years.
PvS : Back in May of 2007, British doctors Gerry and Kate McCann were on vacation with their family in PdL, a resort town in the Allgarve region of Portugal.
Jane Hill : The coastline's beautiful, the sun shines beautiful.
PvS : Jane Hill is a BBC news anchor who covered Madeleine's story.
JH : It was just a regular, relaxed week in the sun.
PvS : The five members of the McCann family including Madeleine and her younger twin brother and sister stayed at the Ocean Club. They were joined by several other families.
JG : The Ocean Club Resort was seen as a place where families went, they'd gone there for generations. It was seen to be family friendly and safe.
KMC : We're having a great holiday. We had lots of fun.
PvS : Especially fun for Madeleine.
GMC : She might look like Kate, but in terms of personality, she's much more of a McCann. She's very extroverted and lively.
Kmc : She's very sociable.
PvS : But their idyllic holiday would soon come to an end. On May 3rd, at around 8.30pm, the McCanns left their sleeping children alone in their unlocked apartment and went to meet friends at the resort's tapas bar about 50 yards away.
JG : That was their routine behaviour, they'd been doing it all week.
JH : And the friends would take turns. So every 15 minutes or so, one of the adults from the group would go back and just check on their sleeping children and check that everything was okay.
PvS : At 10pm, when it was Kate's turn, she found the twins sound asleep. But this bed, Madeleine's bed, was empty.
Jane Tanner : Kate said to me, Jane, Madeleine's gone, Madeleine's gone.
PvS : Jane Tanner was one of the friends who was dining with the McCanns.
JT : It's the least thing you'd ever think in a million years that a child is going to be abducted in a safe family resort.
PvS : When Tanner heard that Madeleine had disappeared, she says she remembered that earlier in the evening as she walked near the ocean club, she passed a man who had caught her attention.
JT : As I was walking up the road, this man was walking across the top of the road, carrying a small child. The thing that I noticed the most was he was holding her and I could see the bear's feet and the bottom of the pyjamas.
PvS : Tanner told the Portuguese police what she had witnessed that night, but investigators didn't appear to take immediate action.
JH : There was quite a laissez-faire attitude. She's wandered off somewhere, she's probably got lost, we'll find her, she'll come back. And that was one of the criticisms that the police activity didn't really get going until the next day.
Journalist : Police in Portugal are investigating claims that a three-year-old British girl has been abducted.
PvS : By that time, Madeleine's disappearance was making headlines across the world.
JH : I'm Jane Hill, live in the Algarve, where there is still no sign of... My editor took me off air the day after she disappeared and said, get on a plane to Portugal.
PvS : Hill was one of the first British journalists at the scene.
PvS : Why did this capture people's attention so?
JH : It is every parent's nightmare, isn't it?
PvS : In some ways, Madeleine was more than a daughter to the McCans. She was their miracle. Unable to conceive, the couple endured a series of grueling in vitro fertilization procedures until Kate finally became pregnant with Madeleine. What was it like for Gerry and Kate when Madeleine was born?
Jon Corner : Well, they were walking on air, quite frankly.
PvS : Family friend John Corner spoke to 48 Hours back in 2007.
JC : The bond between Kate and Madeleine was... is something amazing, really.
GMC : Please, if you have Madeleine, let her come home to her mummy, daddy, brother and sister.
PvS : Within days, Madeleine's face fueled one of the largest international searches for a missing child in history.
JH : Madeleine's face became so familiar. She became ubiquitous. It was heartbreaking because photographs were released that the family had taken on that holiday.
GMC : It's obviously extremely difficult.
JH : Every day me and my team were there. We just watched the press pack grow and grow and grow.
PvS : As the cameras followed the McCanns everywhere, it seemed Kate was never without Madeleine's pink stuffed animal.
KMC : But it's something that Madeleine has with her every night and she's upset or not well when she has cuddle cast. And so it provided me with a little bit of comfort. It's something of Madeleine close to me.
PvS : Days passed and the McCanns grew frustrated as the Portuguese police conducted their investigation and shared very little.
JH : Portuguese police are not allowed to reveal any details of an ongoing investigation. Not just to people like me, to the family involved. And what happens when you have no information? You get rumour, gossip, speculation. There was no proof of anything. That's the trouble.
Journalists : It's almost a week since Madeleine was abducted from her holiday apartment. The X-PAT community and the Algarve were the first to join the search for Madeleine. And six days on, they still feel compelled to carry on the hunt.
A lady : I cried yesterday. I'm crying now. I'm just very upset about it.
JH : There were rumors circulated all the time. I can't tell you what a rumor mill it was. And you would think, where is this coming from?
PvS : A week after Madeleine's disappearance, suspicion fell on a man who lived just down the street from where Madeleine had vanished.
Journalist : Why are you just so happy to be one journalist?
PvS : Tell me, who is Robert Murat?
Jim Gamble : Robert Murat is a British X-PAT who lives in Praia da Luz. So he had local knowledge and he spoke Portuguese and engaged with a number of reporters and others in proximity to the investigation and offered himself up to provide help by way of translation or advice.
PvS : Police quickly named Murat a suspect. Witnesses say Murat showed up at the ocean club after Madeleine disappeared and claimed he was acting suspiciously. Murat's mother said that wasn't possible.
Murat's mother : They couldn't have seen him. It was her moonlight.
PvS : Then the public began to turn on the McCanns for leaving their daughter alone. Did it go from, we feel so sorry for you, to how could you have done that?
JH : There were people saying that. I recorded an interview with a man from the Algarve Tourist Board. He said, I mean, you keep an eye on your suitcase. Why would you not keep an eye on your child?
PvS : It's a question Jane Hill had to raise when she became the first reporter to interview Kate and Gerry McCann.
JH : A lot of people in the last three weeks have said, I can't imagine doing such a thing. I wouldn't be able to leave three children in that situation. How do you deal with those sort of comments?
GMC : I think, you know, no one will ever feel more guilty than us. If we thought for a minute that someone could abduct your child, of course you would never have left them.
PvS : Portuguese investigators also began eyeing the McCanns. Three months after Madeleine vanished, specially trained sniffer dogs were flown in to scour the family's vacation rental. Traces of blood were detected inside the apartment and in the trunk of the McCann's rental car. Partial samples of the blood were recovered and sent to a British lab for DNA testing, but the results indicated that the blood found in the apartment did not belong to Madeleine. And the results from the DNA in the rental car were inconclusive.
Jim Gamble : Well I've seen the letter from the forensic science lab the forensic tests didn't say this DNA is Madeleine McCann's because actually the full analysis of that says that up to half the forensic scientists in the lab would have had similar DNA characteristics. It was not a complete DNA sample. What's more the car wasn't actually retained by the McCann's until weeks after Madeleine had gone missing and if you were to believe that Madeleine was in the boot of the car they must have either killed her and or hidden her sometime earlier recovered her body whilst the media were surveilling them, hidden it in the car then moved it to a place where they could dispose of it where no one could see that happen and then bring the car back. It just doesn't add up the forensics don't add up.
PvS : And yet four months after Madeleine vanished...
Justine McGuinness : Today Kate McCann has returned to Portimao to be questioned by the Portuguese Portuguese police?
PvS : Portuguese police declared the McCann's arguidos suspects in their own daughter's disappearance. The enormous media coverage in this do you believe in some ways that pressured Portuguese authorities to say we have our real suspects it is Kate and it is Gerry.
Jim Gamble : Well I can't speak to that you'd have to talk to the senior investigating officer from the Portuguese police but in my opinion do I think that that type of pressure would focus the attention of the senior investigating officer of course.
PvS : 48 hours reached out to the Portuguese police for comment but they did not reply.
Jim Gamble : The McCanns should have been suspects day one minute one hour one. I don't believe for one second the McCanns committed this crime but what I'm saying is your attention should be first of all to look at the parents and actually to rule them in or rule them out not to wait until you're months down the line where you have exhausted all of your other ideas and to then say well actually it must be the parents because that's not fair on anyone.
PvS : Surprisingly almost immediately after being declared suspects the McCann's were allowed to fly to the UK returning home for the first time without their daughter.
Gerald MC : We have played no part in the disappearance of a lovely daughter Madeleine.
Kate McCann told her family that Portuguese investigators had pressured her to sign a confession in which she was to admit that Madeleine had died accidentally and that Madeleine's disappearance had been staged. Kate refused. 48 hours spoke to Kate's mother in 2007.
Mrs Healy : Kate why would I sign that confession you know? If an accident had happened Madeleine had fallen, Kate and Gerry wouldn't have hidden that. Elle a raison, encore aurait-il fallu qu'ils soient là quand l'accident est arrivé !
PvS : When the McCann's were named as suspects in Portugal were they seen as suspects in the UK as well?
Jane Hill : I'm sure there were people in the UK who did think that they had had some involvement and that was reflected particularly in the some British newspapers
PvS : Some began running unsubstantiated sensational storylines.
Jim Gamble : And what happened is the war of the tabloids began to take place.
PvS : The onslaught of wild accusations continued for months effectively portraying the McCann's as killers.
Jim Gamble : And then you get the armchair detectives and with social media you've got the geeks, freaks and morons. But when you've got this world of bile at being created online then people continually feed it.
PvS : It wasn't until the following summer in July 2008 that Portuguese investigators cleared the McCanns. By then Gerry and Kate had spent nearly a year under a cloud of suspicion.
Kate MC : It's hard to describe how utterly disperning it was to be named Alguido and subsequently portrayed in the media as suspects in our own daughter's abduction.
PvS : The police also cleared Robert Murat but what had happened to little Madeleine? The McCann's remained singularly focused on finding out.
Kate MC : I think there's a really good chance she's still alive. I guess I feel she's out there.
PvS : More than two years had passed since Madeleine McCann's mysterious disappearance, and Portuguese investigators were no closer to knowing what happened to her. As head of the UK's Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre, Jim Gamble knew he had to take action.
Jim Gamble : Madeleine disappeared on the 3rd of May 2007 while on holiday with her family in Portugal. We produced a viral video called A Minute for Madeleine McCann. If you know who is involved and you're keeping this secret. The video that said it's never too late to do the right thing and if you know something, go to your local police.
PvS : I understand that the video was in seven different languages, is that right?
JG : Yes it was. In Chinese, in Arabic, in Spanish. If you're keeping this secret, please. I mean, it was downloaded in every part of the world.
PvS : And as the views ticked up, so too did the number of potential leads. Give me a sense of the number of sightings that we're pouring in from all over the world during these years.
Jim Gamble : There's been a number of sightings of Madeleine McCann, you know, Australia in parts of Africa, across Spain, Portugal and beyond.
Jane Hill : All turned out to be nothing. The trail went cold.
PvS : But things were about to heat up. In 2010, Gamble was asked by the British government to officially review the case. When Portuguese police began this investigation, you believe they made some fundamental errors.
Jim Gamble : I do think they made some critical errors.
PvS : Gamble says Portuguese investigators failed to take a close look at everyone staying near the ocean club at the time.
JG : And it was clear that, you know, the searches were ad hoc. The fact is that all of the details of all of the people who'd stayed in that apartment block or had been in proximity to the time hadn't been captured.
PvS : Gamble also found that cell phone data around the ocean club the day Madeleine went missing hadn't been properly analysed.
JG : The telephone companies captured all of that information in 2007. Yet there was absolutely no evidence that any of that cell size data had been investigated.
PvS : In June 2010, Gamble finished his case review and submitted recommendations to the British government. But for almost a year, nothing happened until...
JG : Gerry McCann wrote an open letter on the front page of a popular tabloid to the Prime Minister and in a day Operation Grange was commissioned.
PvS : Operation Grange became one of the largest and most expensive investigations in British history. The full weight of Scotland Yard was now brought in to assist the Portuguese investigation.
Jane H : There was a sense in the UK that this was almost a fresh start. Let's regroup, let's see what wasn't looked at, let's go through witness statements, let's see whether we can make fresh appeals for information and really revitalise this.
PvS : That meant taking another look at every possible scenario of what might have happened that night.
JG : Could this be that the child simply walked away? Could it be an abduction? Could it be a burglary that's gone wrong? Could someone have broken into the room? Might they have been disturbed by Madeleine? And could they have responded out of fear, out of anger? Nervousness and taking her away.
PvS : There was one dark scenario that weighed most heavily, the possibility that Madeleine had been kidnapped by a sex offender.
Kate MC : Obviously that was our biggest fear, but just the thought of someone so lovely and beautiful, our child being subjected to something like that was enough to destroy us.
PvS : Operation Grange solved one early mystery, the identity of the man seen in this police sketch whom that family friend had reported seen. Scotland Yard determined it was just a man on vacation with his child. Age progression technology was also used at the time to further the investigation.
JG : I have on many occasions looked at images of children who have been found and the likeness sometimes is remarkable.
PvS : By 2016, the number of alleged Madeleine sightings had grown to more than 8,600, spanning more than 100 countries. Scotland Yard investigated every credible lead, but none led anywhere.
Jane H : How could it be that years later there was still no trace of this little girl? How was that possible? Nothing.
JG : What we're waiting for over these years is all these bits start to fall into place, the cell site data, information about suspects, other sex offenders in the area. We're waiting for that last piece to fall into place.
PvS : Then this past June, from a small German city, some startling news.
Journalist : German police revealing that a convicted sex offender currently serving a jail sentence is now the prime suspect.
PvS : After years of dead ends, finally a promising suspect, this 43-year-old German man. A look into his past would reveal a monster.
Gerald MC : On the anniversary of her birthday, they are by far the hardest days by far.
PvS : In 2017, Gerry and Kate McCann marked a grim anniversary. It had been 10 years since their daughter disappeared.
Kate MC : Whatever it takes for as long as it takes, but there's still hope that we can find Madeleine. Gerald MC : So certainly from my point of view, you know, somebody knows what's happened. PvS : Little did the McCanns know, more than 500 miles away, in Braunschweig, Germany, police had received a game-changing new tip. German prosecutor Hans Christian Wolters.
HCW : In 2017, a person contacted the German police and gave us the name of Christian B.
PvS : According to news reports, Brückner, who German authorities refer to as Christian B, allegedly made a drunken confession to a friend that he knew what had happened to Madeleine. Germany's highest police agency conducted an investigation. And what they uncovered was that Brückner had a long and disturbing background of crime spanning three decades. Who is Christian B?
Mark Hoffman, profiler allemand : Christian B is a criminal who committed a lot of financially motivated crimes like burglary or drug trafficking.
Mark Hoffman is a crime and intelligence analyst based in Germany who has studied Christian Brückner.
MH : He also has a darker side.
PvS : Authorities say he had a history of targeting little girls.
MH : He is a very likely psychopath with no empathy, no deep feelings, who is interested in feeling some sense of power over defenseless victims, especially young children. So he absolutely matches the profile of a person who could potentially abduct and or kill a little girl like Madeleine McCann. PvS : Official documents obtained by 48 hours show that Brückner's life of crime began when he was arrested for theft at the age of 15. Two years later, in 1994, he sexually abused a child in Germany. Brückner fled to Portugal to escape serving his sentence.
MH : He moved from job to job. He moved from crime to crime.
PvS : Until 1999, when he was extradited to Germany to serve his sentence. But he would soon return to Portugal, where Brückner lived out of a VW camper van before eventually moving to this house.
MH : He lived in a house run about one mile away from the crime scene where Madeleine was abducted.
PvS : While living in PdL, investigators say Brückner had returned to a life of crime, often stealing from hotels and holiday apartments.
MH : He was known for burglary in hotel resorts and Maddie disappeared from a hotel resort. So it's possible that this crime may be started as a hotel burglary and it ended as the potential kidnapping and or killing of Maddie McCann.
Jim Gamble says that theory is certainly possible.
JG : The hypothesis that it was a burglar who responded in an opportunistic way is one that I've always thought is credible.
PvS : In fact, just one year before Madeleine disappeared, Brückner was arrested in Portugal for theft. But it is unknown what the Portuguese police knew about his past sexual offense in Germany. 48 hours reached out to them to find out, but they did not respond. But it is clear that Brückner should have been looked at more closely by the Portuguese authorities from the beginning. German investigators now believe they have discovered a key piece of evidence. On May 3rd, 2007, a call was made to Brückner's cell phone approximately one hour before Madeleine disappeared. The cell phone information that you received, do you believe that placed him around the resort area at the time that Maddie McCann disappeared?
HCW : The phone number placed Christian B to the ocean club, but we have to find out which person uses this phone at this time. Normally it was used by Christian B, but we don't know which person used it on the 3rd of May in 2007.
PvS : Gamble says this lead could have been pursued at the time if Portuguese police had only analyzed the cell phone data.
JG : I believe the information that now ties the present suspect's phone to the area would have been available at that time if someone had looked for it.
PvS : And German investigators also learned that immediately after Madeleine went missing, Brückner did something suspicious. He put his car in someone else's name.
MH : He deregistered his car one day after the disappearance.
PvS : Shortly after that, he quietly slipped out of Portugal and returned to Germany once again. Brückner eventually settled in Braunschweig and briefly ran a small general store by a school and kept a low profile.
MH : Pretty often these child molesters, this is like their dirty little secret. They don't talk about it to anyone. But they talk about the crimes and fantasies quite openly to other child molesters.
PvS : As it turns out, Wolters and his team learned Brückner was still operating in the darkest shadows of society. In 2013, he posted in a pedophile chat room on Skype.
MH : This was a Skype chat where he openly discussed his fantasies of torturing little children and using them and raping them for a couple of days.
PvS : Although Brückner's posts made no mention of Madeleine McCann, the search of an abandoned factory once owned by Brückner would uncover photos and videos that would raise more questions.
PvS : As Wolters and his team continued their investigation into Christian Brückner's past, they learned that not long before that alleged drunken confession in a bar, his name had been linked to Madeleine McCann. In 2013, German police had received their first tip that Christian Brückner could be involved in her disappearance.
HCW : There was a first hint to our suspect in 2013, but the police contacted Christian B and there was nothing found to investigate any longer.
PvS : While it didn't pan out, just one year later he was back on police radar. According to documents obtained by 48Hours, in 2014, 391 photo files and 68 video files of child pornography were confiscated from Brückner's home while he was living in Braunschweig. During this time, he was also charged with sexually abusing a 5-year-old. He was sentenced to 15 months in prison for committing both offenses. But before serving his sentence, he fled, once again, to Portugal.
MH : If I look at his life and criminal record, it seems a little bit like he was always fleeing and trying to escape law enforcement. So whenever he committed a crime, whenever he was investigated in connection with some crimes, he left the country.
PvS : Brückner would later be extradited to Germany once again to serve his sentence. And then, if there is a house of horrors in this tragic mystery, it may be this one. A deserted factory deep in the woods of Saxony-Anhalt, Germany that Christian Brückner once owned. In 2016, investigators conducted multiple searches of this property. 48Hours has learned these searches were part of a broader investigation into child pornography. And what they found was troubling.
MH : Law enforcement confirmed that they found at least three girls' swimsuits in a Kemper van. So of course, you need to ask the question, who do these swimsuits belong to?
PvS : Investigators have not revealed if they know the answer. But that's not all they found.
MH : On this property, they found USB drives containing pictures and videos, including videos and pictures of child abuse and also videos which he produced himself. And these USB drives were in a plastic bag buried under his dead dog in the ground.
PvS : It seems that Brückner had a long fascination with recording his crimes. In 2018, a witness came forward saying they had seen a videotape from 2005 of Brückner raping a 72-year-old American woman at her home in Portugal. Up until then, the attacker's identity had not been known.
MH : This was not just rape. This was the most... brutal form of rape I ever heard of.
PvS : That assault had taken place close to the Ocean Club and two years before Madeleine McCann disappeared. Brückner was charged and convicted for these crimes in 2019. His DNA, match DNA, found at the scene.
MH : He's definitely a bad guy, he's definitely a psychopath and he's definitely a full-time criminal. But the question is, is he really guilty in the Madeleine McCann case?
PvS : Wolters will not reveal details about his current investigation into Christian Brückner, but he is adamant about one thing.
HCW : We're sure that Christian B murdered Madeleine McCann because of the evidence we have. PvS : And may I speculate that that evidence may include photographs or video of Madeleine McCann?
HCW : You may speculate, but I'm not allowed to tell you if you are right or if you are wrong.
PvS : But despite the evidence he says he has, Wolters admits he needs more of it in order to charge Brückner.
HCW : And in Germany we charge someone only if we are sure that he will be sentenced by the court. If there are doubts, we don't charge him.
PvS : Wolters says one piece of evidence they need is to find the person who made that call to Brückner's cell phone approximately one hour before Madeleine disappeared on May 3rd, 2007.
MH : This might be the only person who could confirm that indeed Christian B was holding his cell phone in his hand that night. And this would be a proof that not just his cell phone was at the crime scene, but that he was at the crime scene.
PvS : Although investigators made an appeal to the public, they have been unable to identify the mystery caller.
HCW : The phone which was used for the call to Christian B was a prepaid phone. So we are not able to find this person in an easy way.
PvS : The McCanns have not commented on Christian Brückner, but they posted this on their website. We will never give up hope of finding Madeleine alive, but whatever the outcome may be, we need to know as we need to find peace.
PvS : Meanwhile, Brückner has remained silent behind prison walls where he is serving a seven-year sentence for raping that 72-year-old American woman. Brückner's lawyer spoke to 9 News Australia.
Friedrich Fülscher : He's innocent until proven guilty.
PvS : Wolters admits that without a body or forensic evidence, this case will be hard to solve, but he is not backing down. And you believe there are people out there, whether it be in Portugal or in Germany, who have information about this case that is important.
HCW : We think that there are people who can help us, and we hope that these people will contact us or the police.
Jane H : I have spent many years hoping that there will be a resolution.
PvS : BBC News anchor Jane Hill, who covered Madeleine's story from the start, hopes this new investigation will finally provide answers, as painful as they may be for the McCanns.
Jane H : I hope that there can be closure in some way for a family that has spent 13 and a half years not knowing what happened to their little girl, not knowing what they can say to her younger brother and sister about where she's gone.
Kate MC : Madeleine is a beautiful, bright, funny and caring little girl. She is so special. We beg you to let Madeleine come home.
