Madeleine McCann suspect Christian Brueckner's sickening online chats with paedophile

Skype chats between Christian Brueckner - the suspect in the disappearance of Madeleine McCann - and another paedophile reveal his 'sadistic glee' over child sex abuse and his plans to 'capture something small'

The prime suspect in the Madeleine McCann case was today released from prison despite German police believing he murdered the three-year-old in Portugal eighteen years ago.

It is feared Christian Brueckner may flee his homeland, after serving six years of a seven-year sentence for raping an elderly woman in Praia de Luz - the Algarve resort Madeleine vanished from.

A new ITV documentary profiles the child sex offender and investigates the evidence against him which has led him to remain German prosecutors’ only suspect in one of the most high profile missing person cases ever.

Brueckner was first convicted for child sex offences in 1994 when he was still a teenager. The following year he moved to the Algarve where he committed various other crimes, including burglary and theft. He raped a 72-year-old woman in her home in Praia de Luz in 2005 - two years before Madeleine disappeared in May 2007 while on a family holiday.

Her parents Kate and Gerry McCann had put the toddler to bed along with her two-year-old twin siblings, and at 8.30pm went to a nearby restaurant to eat dinner with friends. They took turns checking on the children, but at 10pm when Kate returned to their ground floor apartment she discovered to her horror Maddie had gone.

A huge investigation was launched, but despite years of extensive searches for her, she has never been found and no-one has been charged with her abduction or murder. Phone records have since shown that Brueckner was in the resort the night she vanished. He lived in a farmhouse just on the outskirts of Praia de Luz, but left the Algarve in 2007, not going back for another nine years, something which one of the former senior British detectives on the case, Graham Hill, describes as "significant".

He had extensive experience in child murder cases and was sent out to the Algarve in 2007 to investigate the disappearance. He returns to the resort for the first time since she went missing for ITV’s 'Madeleine McCann: Searching For The Prime Suspect' to profile Brueckner. He speaks to various experts in psychiatry, law and the media to try and work out if he was the type of man who could have killed the innocent toddler and discovers some chilling allegations against the German criminal and his past.

Now a leading criminologist in child murders at the hands of sexual abusers, Hill, speaks to journalist Rob Hyde who has been tracking Brueckner since German police first made him a suspect in 2020. He shows Hill Skype chats between a paedophile and Brueckner that surfaced in 2014, when German cops were investigating paedophile rings. They raided a property belonging to someone called Frank S, who was under suspicion of child pornography, and found the "really disturbing" chat between him and Brueckner who was posting under the name Crazy Derholger.

The two men were discussing having sex with "something small". Brueckner writes: "Capture something small and use it for days," he also states: "I’ll make a lot of films hehe" before posting, "I’ll document exactly how she’s being tortured". An appalled Hyde believes the interaction between the two displays the "sadistic glee" Brueckner garnered from child sex abuse and says it was a significant lead for prosecutors in the case against him.

In 2016, two years after police discovered the sinister Skype chat, Brueckner’s name surfaced again. This time it was in connection with a disused factory he owned in a remote location in Germany. "It was his secret get away. It was where he wanted to carry out horrible things, away from prying eyes," Hyde claims. Police were tipped off by a colleague who was a neighbour. She had been to the factory and noticed that the levels of soil on the ground had been changed and there was a foul smell.

Police made a grim discovery when they searched the buildings. Under the body of a dead dog they found a supermarket bag full of USB sticks which according to Hyde contained "hundreds of the most vile, sickening and blood curdling acts of child sex crimes". Some showed Brueckner involved, others were collections.

Hill believes the things that were found at the box factory clearly suggest Brueckner had an ingrained way of sexualising children. "This man has been fantasising about children from a sexual point of view for decades. He felt so strongly about the items that he had on those memory sticks that he felt compelled not to destroy them for good but to bury them. For me that’s quite significant," he says.

Investigators also found more than 70 children’s swimming costumes hidden in his Winnebago, which was parked on the site. Hill thinks they may have been stolen from holiday complexes across the Praia De Luz area.

Brueckner had by now fled to Portugal, where he was caught at an Algarve playground after allegedly exposing himself to children. He was deported back to Germany in 2017. In the autumn of that year he was convicted of the sexual abuse of a child and possession of indecent images.

Police had previously responded to a domestic incident at his flat in Germany and discovered abusive images of a little girl on his laptop. She was the daughter of a woman he met online, who would become his girlfriend. It’s thought he targeted her because she had a young daughter. He had taken the five-year-old to a park and made pornographic pictures of her.

The laptop discovery uncovered thousands of other images and videos of child abuse which finally put him on investigator’s radar as their prime suspect in the McCann case. A television appeal by Maddie’s parents that year on the 10th anniversary prompted an acquaintance of Brueckner’s to come forward and tell investigators he had made a drunken remark about being involved, allegedly claiming, "she didn’t scream".

In 2024 Brueckner faced three charges of rape and two counts of child sex abuse between 2000 and 2017, all in Portugal. Despite the discovery of the USB sticks in the suspect’s factory in Germany, he was acquitted because of technical irregularities with the search warrant. The judge also ruled that witness testimony may have been compromised by media reports portraying Brueckner as a paedophile.

In the documentary the German prosecutor tells Hill he believes Brueckner is still the prime suspect for the abduction and murder of Madeleine McCann. "He has no alibi, there is only evidence that incriminates him," he says. "He’s the prime suspect and above all he’s the only suspect. We really only have evidence that point to him as the perpetrator." The task now he says is to prove it in a court of law.

Madeleine McCann: Searching For The Prime Suspect airs Wednesday 17th September at 9pm on ITV1 and ITVX