If innocence has a face, then surely it is Meline McCann’s. Since the night she disappeared, her anguished but unbroken parents, Kate and Jerry, have never let the world forget their daughter. Please, please do not hurt her. Please don’t scare her. But the evil that befell Maddie may now have a name, Christian Buckner.
Good evening, I’m Liz Hayes. In recent criminal history, there is no mystery more heartbreaking or baffling than what happened to Meline McCann. Police forces in three countries have spent 13 years and tens of millions of dollars searching for a breakthrough without even the barest glimmer of hope. But now that breakthrough appears to have come in the most dramatic way.
In recent weeks, police in Germany and Portugal have searched sites where sex predator Christian Buckner is known to have operated. I see a lot of clues and a lot of evidence that he is a psychopath who has an escalating fantasy of violence which finally maybe ended in abducting and killing Mie McCann. Yes.
Tonight, experts trace Buckner’s criminal history through Portugal. Living a stones throw from where Madeline was taken. his menacing bolt hole in Germany where he buried damning evidence of his crimes beneath the body of his dead dog and exclusive police records of an alleged pedophile chat room revealing his depraved and criminal mind.
Who doesn’t want to catch something small and use it for days? I will document exactly how they will be tortured. We’ll follow Brookner’s trail of shocking crimes, expose the bungles, incompetence, and at times incredible luck that may have let a psychopath escape. In the critical first 48 hours, there were a lot of blunders and a lot of mistakes.
But we also revealed the extraordinary breakthroughs that could finally bring justice to a little girl forever lost. I think that this is the strongest lead I’ve ever seen since the first beginning of this investigation. You can place Christian Buckner at the scene. Yes, we think so. We have enough evidence to say our suspect killed Mel McCann.
Tonight, cracking the case of Maddie and the Monster. It is the night of May the 3rd, 2007. Apartment 5A on the ground floor of the Ocean Club Resort in Pra del Duj. It is where British doctors Kate and Jerry McCann have been staying for nearly a week with their young children, including three-year-old daughter Meline.
They joined friends for dinner at a tapis bar within the resort complex just a short distance from their apartment. Having earlier checked their children a number of times, at around 1000 p.m., Kate McCann again goes back to the room. She finds Maddie missing and the ground floor window opened. So begins an unimaginable nightmare for Jerry and Kate McCann.
Please tell us where to find her or put her in a place of safety and let somebody know where she is. The distress her family and her parents and I think that touched everybody’s hearts. Former head of homicide at Scotland Yard, Simon Foy was a member of Operation Graange, the UK investigation into Maddie’s disappearance. And the thing just grew and grew and grew.
And in the midst of that, the Portuguese tried to construct um an investigation. Uh and and it’s not easy in those circumstances. The disappearance of little Maddie McCann electrified the community of Pra deluj. Hundreds of local people joined the search for her. As their mayor, Hugo Pereira remembers, they worked tirelessly together with the authorities, joining in the desperate search to find the child.
They spared no efforts in the following days to try to find Maddi. The Portuguese people did all they could, but the Portuguese police hopelessly divided between three different forces committed grave mistakes that would compromise the investigation from the very beginning. If it’s not solved in the first two days, it’s very likely that this is going to be a cold case forever.
Criminal profiler Mark Hoffman suspects Maddiey’s abductor escaped amidst the confusion at the Ocean Club and surrounding Pra deluj. The first 48 hours after murder or abduction, these are the golden hours for the police or law enforcement to solve this crime. The police chosen for the ground search were not trained for the job.
They were essentially security guards. Portuguese police, they were not used to this kind of cases and to this to to the amount and size that this case would grow into. In Pra deluj, Kai Feldhouse, heading up the investigative unit of Germany’s build magazine, watched as the chaos unfolded. In the critical first 48 hours, there were a lot of blunders and a lot of mistakes.
Too many people were running in and out of this apartment. Too many people were bringing their DNA into the place where they were supposed to be look for other DNA. The Macan’s apartment was not forensically sealed. Unbelievably, it was cleaned and rented again before DNA samples were taken, and DNA that might have still been there was potentially contaminated by police dogs taken into the apartment.
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This was the worst investigation, criminal invest in investigation, because all the samples were contaminated. Crime reporter for Portuguese TV, Sandra Filggeras, was at the scene on the first day of Meline’s disappearance. The dogs that were sent to the flat to look after Meline were sent before the forensic.
So the most part of the samples that were collected and they were more than 600. They were uh made of dogs things. What no one knew at the time, least of all the local police, was that just over a kilometer from where Madeline disappeared, lived a monster. Christian Buckner, a sex predator who’d raped a young girl in Germany and who then fled to Portugal, where he’d raped an elderly woman in Prauge just 2 years earlier.
It’s really important to understand that many child molesters are not pedophiles. Mark Hoffman says that from the moment three-year-old Madlin McCann arrived in Brookner’s domain, she was as much a target as his elderly victim. They like to abduct easy victims. And if you ask me, elderly women and children, this is not a contradiction.
This is one of the biggest similarities. At the time of Maddie’s disappearance, Portugal did not have a sex offender registry, but authorities there were made aware of Christian Buckner’s history the year before. While facing a local court on theft charges, Buckner told the Portuguese judge he had a criminal record for child sex offenses in Germany.
Is it correct that he made an admission to the court about his criminal past? Yes, it’s very true. It’s very true. He admitted that he did commit a felony of involving uh sexual offenses. Public defender Sarapam Vieiraa represented Buckner in 2006. Intriguingly, Buckner also told the court he had no home address in Portugal despite having already lived there for more than 10 years.
I believe that at the time the sexual offense that he was convicted didn’t appear in his criminal record in Portugal for one simple matter. He was not a resident in Portugal. Therefore, there was no trace of his past. Rather than reveal his residence, Buckner chose instead to stay in prison, a term that lasted 8 months.
He said, “Nobody can know about that address.” Brookner called to a friend, a German friend from the prison, and he asked that friend to go to that house to take all the computers and pen drives and cameras that he had there. Whatever Buckner was hiding there was never found. He was released from prison in December 2006 and returned to Prauge just months before Maline McCann was taken.
He was a a convicted child molester when Maline McCann disappeared. Right. Um and he never got into focus. So, how can it be that there’s a convicted tried molester living close by close proximity few kilometers? And it was it was like the first but not by far not the last mistake that has been made. Within days of Madame McCann’s disappearance, Christian Buckner slipped out of Portugal and headed for Germany.
A monster no one knew on the move. 60 Minutes presents with Liz Hayes. June 4th, 2020. After 13 years that have baffled police investigators in the UK and Portugal, German authorities make a stunning announcement in the case of Merlin McCann. The public prosecutor’s office is investigating a 43-year-old German national on suspicion of murder.
We are assuming that the girl is dead. Their suspect is 43-year-old Christian Buckner, a sex offender currently in a German prison for the rape of a 72year-old woman. Christian B, I mean, he is a serial offender in many past cases. He was criminal and he was in prison and he did it again and again and again and again 17 or or 18 times.
It’s 1995 and 19-year-old Christian Buckner arrives in the Portuguese coastal town of Pra Deluj. He lives in this house just over a kilometer from a resort called the Ocean Club. In time, it will become one of the world’s most infamous crime scenes. Brockner comes here seeking a safe haven, fleeing Germany, where two years before he was convicted for the sexual assault of a young girl.
He was 17 years old. He raped a child. He got the sentence and then he escaped from Germany and he came to Portugal. When you talk to this to to these people that knew Christian Brookner at that time, they all qualify him as a disturbed man that had strange behaviors that no one understood very well.
In the years that followed, Buckner made his living as a smalltime drug dealer and thief. He was a criminal. He was responsible for more than 20 burglaries in the same area in Prius. Buckner’s targets were holiday homes and hotels. He was always looking for uh houses with the same description of Ocean Club where Meline went missing.
He was always going to the first floor to windows that were easy to open. But beneath the mask of a petty criminal lurked unimaginable evil. Yeah. When I look at his criminal record, I see a lot of crimes, but I see clearly two categories of crimes. Financially motivated crimes. But he also had a darker side. He was into violence and torture and rape against vulnerable, weak, easy victims.
Stalking the coastal roads and tourist resorts, we now know Buckner wasn’t just looking for houses and apartments to rob. He was also hunting for victims. And in 2005, he struck It was a truly awful crime. The rape of a 72year-old woman. This is not just rape. This is one of the most brutal ways of rape um which are possible.
Buckner broke into his elderly victim’s house and over a period of hours tortured and sexually assaulted her, inflicting extreme cruelty. According to police files, that included beating her with a metal rod. The accused forced the naked, bound, and gagged woman to stand up and beat her repeatedly on her chest, lower abdomen, arms, and buttocks with a metal object he had brought with him.
The attack revealed Buckner targeted victims of any age, from children to the elderly, as long as he deemed them to be weak and vulnerable. And in what became his hallmark as a psychopath, he videotaped the entire assault. The video though would eventually be his undoing. It’s about violence.
It’s about playing God. It’s about power. It’s about dominance. This is not just about sex or rape. This is about torture. Local police investigated, but the case went nowhere. An opportunity that could have alerted this sleepy community to a monster on the prowl was lost. The victim felt ashamed and too afraid to tell even her friends.
She didn’t talk about her being raped to anyone. But was this elderly woman Buckner’s first victim in Portugal? Unnervingly similar was the terrible ordeal suffered by young Irish woman Hazel Behan. In 2004, she was raped in her groundf flooror apartment near Praaluj by an attacker she described as being young and German and who also filmed the attack.
Two violent assaults within 2 years, both bearing the same hallmarks of a psychopath. Then on May the 3rd, 2007, in the same small corner of Portugal, the little girl whose face would haunt the world disappeared from the Ocean Club, a stones throw from where Christian Buckner was living. 60 Minutes presents with Liz Hayes.
How’s it going? Bad with me. One took a little girl. It is 2013, 6 years after Meline McCann’s disappearance. These are the words of Christian Buckner, now the prime suspect in her abduction, allegedly in a pedophile chat room. Catch something small and use it for days. Oh, if the evidence is destroyed afterwards, I will document exactly how they will be tortured.
Well, let’s see. Not only talking, but also doing it. If I look at his life and his criminal records, he’s quite clear about his fantasy about abducting, torturing, and children to to name it. And this could be a serial killer in the making. And this absolutely is a red flag. Yes. To Mark Hoffman, Christian Buckner absolutely fits the profile of a psychopath.
a psychopath who in 2007 lived just over a kilometer from the resort where Madeline was abducted and close to where he brutally raped a 72year-old woman and videotaped his crime. In reality, they don’t start with like murder or rape. And this is sometimes the end of a long process of an escalating fantasy because if you think about it, murder or homicide is like the purest form of domination because they choose if the victims live or die.
They play God. Christian Buckner left Portugal in 2007 during the desperate early search for Meline McCann. The dark pieces of his life were assembled from incidents, crimes, and evidence that remained unconnected. The new day of searching has now begun until German investigators finally joined the dots this year.
There are forensic police here, police with ground penetrating radar and also police divers. After bolting from Portugal, Buckner moved first to the German city of Brunswick. An insider who knew him, speaking anonymously, says for years he ran a kiosk next to a kindergarten. There’s a kindergarten and a junior school next door.
They spent their pocket money on sweets here. He gave the kids lollies for free. Lollies. Brackner has a string of girlfriends. always very young, charming on the outside, but says a neighbor, he is brutal with his teenage lovers. He was very bad with women. If they didn’t do what he wants, he just hit them.
As I learned from his ex-girlfriend, she had once shown me that she had strangulation marks on her neck, that he had strangled her. That’s it. Violence in the relationships. Absolutely typical for psychopath and absolutely typical for people with profile of Christian B. But even more chilling, Buckner’s friend says he talked of creating a dungeon in this his rented cottage, just like the one Austrian pedophile Joseph Fritzell used to imprison and abuse his daughter for 24 years.
That one with a blue roof. He lived there. He had a cellar and he said he wanted to line it with heavy plates like the guy in Austria. And searches by German police in July this year did indeed uncover a hidden cellar in a property Buckner once owned. May 2015, almost 8 years to the day from when Madeline McCann went missing, another little girl, Ingga Garrick, disappeared.
The location was just 2 hours drive from where Buckner was living. A dark van similar to the one he owned at the time was seen leaving the abduction site, but Ingga was never found. Her case and many others are now being re-examined. I think that there are more victims of our suspect of other crime. But do you fear that you are dealing with a serial killer? I don’t know. I don’t know.
Um I’m not I’m not able to to to judge this. On June the 4th this year, prosecutor Valters announced Buckner was the prime suspect in Mattie Mccan’s abduction and probable murder. Do you have irrefutable evidence that Maline McCann is dead? We have strong evidence that Melie McKenna’s dead and that our suspect killed her, but uh I’m not allowed and I’m not able at the moment to tell you all the details of our evidence.
You don’t have a body obviously. Yes, we we don’t have the body and no parts of the body, but we have enough evidence to say our suspect killed Melan. And can I ask you this? How long ago did you realize that Maline McCann was dead? It was sometime in the last 2 years when we realized that she’s dead. Whatever is fueling the certainty of German prosecutors now, it began with Kate and Jerry McCann and their unfl flagging appeal to the public for information.
In the years following Maddiey’s disappearance, the Macans appeared twice on German TV and each time there were tip offs. The first in 2013, just the name Christian Buckner. It put him on the police radar and inquiries began. One of the bigger mistakes that has been made was that after Kate and Jerry McCann uh came to a German TV show and after this show where they were showing an efit of a person that was seen around the ocean club at the night of the disappearance.
Um apparently there was a hint from a viewer said this eit reminds me a lot of a person I know a German who was living there in the area who’s living in a camper bus. Um, this could very well be him. Leading his team for Germany’s Build magazine, Kai Felthouse recalls the moment in 2013 when Breckner was identified by a viewer and the astonishing blunder that followed when police inadvertently alerted Breckner that he was a suspect.
And then maybe the major mistake investigation happened that the local police sent a letter to Christian B asking him uh to show up as a witness at the police station and tell him about what he knows about the disappearance of Medley Macan. He was alerted that he might be might be involved in this in this crime case.
It was a serious error. Ruckner realized he was in police sites as he told friends. One day I went to the kiosk and he was distressed and said, “Look what I’ve just got.” And showed me the police letter about Medaline Mcken. Brener never did show up for the police, but in 2015 they uncovered a dark clue. Investigators learned he owned this deserted factory in a remote location.
Searching it, they made a grim discovery. Hard drives and USB sticks hidden in a plastic bag buried with his dog on the property of Christian B. They they found material which according to the current information is like 8,000 pieces, videos and pictures. And this is quite typical for these kind of offenders.
They are filming what they do and sometimes they are fantasizing about their crimes every day and every night over and over and over and over again. Brutner’s lair revealed many secrets and not just his ghastly buried trove of videos. There was more. And over there was where his American camper was parked 10 m long. In his camper van, police discovered the swimsuits of little girls.
In 2017, Kate and Jerry McCann’s German TV interview was replayed on the 10th anniversary of Maddiey’s disappearance. This time the public response brought gold. Eyewitness reports that Buckner made a drunken confession about Maddie McCann. Reports too that friends saw the video of Buckner’s appalling rape of an elderly woman in Portugal in 2005.
Evidence which would lead to his conviction in that case. There’s been a couple of witnesses that alerted police and said, “We have seen video. We have seen videos of Christian be raping women.” With Christian Buckner now under investigation, Kai Felt House believes the story he’s been covering for 13 years may be reaching its final chapter.
I think the suspect u who’s been named by the German authorities is the most important suspect in this 13 years of um of the story of the disappearance of Melan. There has never been a proper suspect. But just what is the police evidence in this devastating case of Maddie and the monster? 60 Minutes presents with Liz Hayes in Portugal.
The public prosecutor’s office is investigating a 43-year-old German national on suspicion of murder. Is this the endgame in the case of the mysterious disappearance of 3-year-old Meline McCann? Police teams continue to forensically search properties in Portugal and Germany, looking for evidence involving their prime suspect, sex predator Christian Buckner.
I was sitting in a restaurant with friends when my editor phoned me and you know with the editors phoning at 10 p.m. there’s something serious happening. I think that this is the strongest lead I’ve ever seen since the first beginning of this investigation. But what is the smoking gun evidence that has convinced German authorities they have their man? What you’re saying to me is that you can place Christian Buckner at the scene.
Yes, we think so. We know that the phone number which was used by a suspect uh on the 3rd of May 2007 was connecting in the mast belongs to the ocean club in Pria Douch. Maddie was abducted between 9 and 10 p.m. on the night of May the 3rd, 2007. In the aftermath, Portuguese investigators scoured mobile phone logs for the area that night, but found nothing.
The logs were passed on to the UK Scotland Yard, which set up Operation Graange, a special team of officers tasked with finding Maddie. I speak from personal experience that um there was a phenomenal amount of data relating to personal phone So you’d want to look up a pattern of a of you know did that individual have a phone number? Did that phone number appear? It’s a huge amount of data.
Massive massive amount of data. It is the classic haystack into which you’re looking for not just a needle but the head of a needle. But Scotland Yards Operation Graange also failed to find the needle in the mobile phone logs. It was the Germans who made the breakthrough. A phone number traced to someone with a criminal record for child sex offenses in their country.
Buried in the data is a single call on May 3rd, 2007. Triangulated by police to have been made just outside the Ocean Club. The phone number was Christian Brookness. There has always been speculation that an insider at the tapas bar where the Macans were having dinner tipped off Maddie’s abductor. In their reservation entry, it was noted the Macccans wanted to eat close to their apartment as they were leaving their young children alone.
Christian Brooken couldn’t have acted alone. That was the phone call that uh he was doing to someone that helped him that night. I think that someone must have been implicated. It’s very difficult to understand. He could have done this by himself. German prosecutors also discovered that the day after Meline’s disappearance, Buckner deregistered the Jaguar car he owned.
And identicate photos based on eyewitnesses at the Ocean Club revealed a striking similarity to Buckner. But perhaps the strongest evidence German prosecutors may have that Madlin is no longer alive is contained in the 8,000 videos they unearthed in his desolate hideway in Germany. I’m quite sure that they have some good evidence. It could be videos.
I mean he was into child pornography and torture and he did crimes against children at a very early age and according to the current information he also filmed his offenses so you can clearly say what happened there. He is innocent until proven guilty. Christian Breckner’s defense lawyer, Frederick Fulchshire, is tight lipped about whether he has even asked his client about Meline McCann.
So you don’t know if I asked him. Um that’s the first thing. The second thing is uh if I had asked him um I won’t tell you uh his answer because um everything the defense lawyer um talks uh with his client is confidential. Fchure is as strangely cryptic as he claims to be confident in Buckner. Confident certainly that Buckner will never cooperate with the German prosecutors.
before uh my client is cooperating with the prosecutor’s office. Um you can order holy water as a long drink in hell. Whatever the critical new evidence German prosecutors possess, including what they may have unearthed in recent days and weeks, for now they’re keeping it to themselves. Although prosecutor Valters may have given us a hint, we do know that police recovered thousands of files of disturbing pictures and videos that you believe belong to Christian Brookner.
Um, is there evidence on those videos of Meline McCann? At the moment, I’m not allowed to say if they are pictures or if there are no pictures of Meline. Given the German investigators have said very clearly that they believe Maline McCann is dead, uh do you accept that they must have significant information? My experience of working with the German police is that they are very careful um what they say publicly.
They would have recognized the significance of it. they would have recognized the international sensitivity of it and they would probably have recognized the public interest in it and so the fact that they have made that statement is of itself significant. If the German authorities do have video proving Meline’s death, together with the mobile phone trace proving Buckner was in the area, then evidence from an eyewitness conclusively putting him at the Ocean Club between 9 and 10 p.m.
on the night of May 3rd, 2007 would be the last piece of the puzzle. And for Jerry and Kate McCann, the final terrible truth. A truth that may already be known. 60 Minutes presents with Liz Hayes. Every parent of a missing child hopes that their child will be found. Far away from the events being played out in Germany and Portugal, one mother shares her pain with Kate McCann.
Take care, Kate. I was working as a waitress in a local hotel and um my mom was looking looking after Ben that day. It was summer 1991. Ker Needam and her beautiful baby son, 21-month-old Ben, were living on the Greek island of Cos where her parents were restoring a house. Ben was just basically being a normal toddler running in and out of the farmhouse door.
Um playing with his granddad’s um work tools and things like you know spades and thing things like that. And for a a couple of minutes he he just didn’t come back in the doorway. Um and my mom just went outside the doorway and just wasn’t there. There was just no sign of him at all. It was like like he’d vanished into thin air really.
There was no trace of Ben and no witnesses. Then four years ago, a tip off that he may have been accidentally killed by a local man operating a mechanical digger who then buried him in panic. But the man has since died and excavations of the site by police proved inconclusive. You don’t want to think that, you know, your child’s dead after searching for him for for all these years.
Um, so, you know, after all them years and and then the police say, you know, they they believe that he died. It’s very very hard to to accept. It’s the last thing you think about at night and it’s the first thing you think about in a morning and you you’re just living um a nightmare that that you can’t wake up from. You and Ben have been in my thoughts and prayers many times.
Carrie shares a unique and tragic mother’s bond with Kate McCann. It is the pain of not knowing what happened to your beloved child and then perhaps the even greater pain of finding out. For 13 years, the fate of Madame Macccan has been a single unanswerable question. An unresolved case that still causes all touched by it terrible torment.
I wouldn’t like to finish my life without knowing and to have uh the key to this mystery. It’s very disturbing for me. Not only as a journalist, as a person. I think that everyone, every human being should feel the same. We We need to know what happened to Madlin. As you’ve seen tonight, German prosecutors in cooperation with Portuguese police are building their case against prime suspect Christian Buckner.
Soon there may be an answer for Madellin’s parents, Kate and Jerry, and for all of us, no matter how painful that answer may be. I’m Liz Hayes. Thank you for joining me. Hello, I’m Liz Hayes. Thanks for watching. To keep up with the latest from 60 Minutes Australia, make sure you subscribe to our channel. You can also download the 9 Now app for full episodes and other exclusive 60 minutes content.
