Olive Press editor Jon Clarke recalls the week he started probing the German paedophile during the Covid lockdown in June 2020

IT is exactly five years ago this week that a German suspect was named as the prime suspect in the abduction of Madeleine McCann in 2007.

As police begin to pack up after a detailed three-day search in Portugal this week linked to the British toddler, I can’t decide if this is the last throw of the dice or just one more attempt to try and get a conviction over the line.

It was Wednesday June 3, 2020, that German police and prosecutor, Hans Christian Wolters, held a bombshell press conference in Braunschweig, in Lower Saxony.

Seemingly a critical turning point in what is the world’s biggest missing persons case, the following morning I was on my way to Portugal – in the heart of the Covid lockdown – to start digging for clues.

German investigators had classed it as a murder inquiry and my former bosses at the Mail on Sunday in London immediately called me into action, given I’d been probing the case from Day one in May 2007.

It was an incredibly complicated time to be heading to Portugal. While the journey time was still around four hours, the draconian pandemic regulations in Spain prevented anyone from leaving their own town, let alone the province.

So I needed to get an official letter of commission from London and when I got to the border a call had to be made to the Home Office, in Lisbon, no less, to confirm I was a bona fide regulated journalist.

Incredibly it was only the fifth time in history the border between Spain and Portugal was closed and I arrived to find ONLY five vehicles, all lorries, queuing at the border. 

Both sides had armed police and both nationalities peppered me with questions. But finally, we were in and on the morning of June 5 two days later I first knocked on the door of the rental home where Christian Brueckner lived at for 10 years just outside Praia da Luz.

The first journalist to arrive on the scene, I met his next door neighbour, Monika, a 60-something German lady, who told me he had only ever been the ‘loveliest’ neighbour, incredibly charming and someone she regularly had a coffee with.

At another home he had stayed at on the other side of the village, in Bensafrim, the new British tenants were far less friendly and soon put up a sign saying simply: ‘Journalists do not touch the bell or knock the door: DO NOT DISTURB’.

It was to be the start of another intensive period of trying to discover who had abducted the British toddler back in May, 2007, and eventually led on to my book; My Search for Madeleine, which is about to be updated and republished.

By the time that came out in 2022, Brueckner had been named an ‘official suspect’ or ‘arguido’ in Portugal, as well, and British police had publicly backed the German BKA insisting they had their man.

On the face of it, it certainly seemed to be the case: detectives had found proof that a pay-as-you-go mobile number registered to Brueckner had been used in Praia da Luz for half an hour with a mystery caller on the evening that Maddie went missing. It was de-registered the following day, I can reveal.

He was also a prolific burglar, who had lived in the area for over a decade, and had previous convictions for sex offences and child abuse.

Currently in prison serving a seven year sentence for the sadistic rape of an American pensioner IN Praia da Luz in 2005, he was described by the German prosecutor as extremely dangerous.

I soon discovered he had also been charged with battering an English girlfriend in a busy bar in the resort one Christmas, and had done the same back in Germany on various occasions.

Then it emerged he was being probed for five other sex offences around the Algarve area between 2000 and 2017. These included two child sex offences and three rapes, one of them a savage masked attack, also filmed, on Irish woman Hazel Behan in 2004 on the Algarve.

He had also allegedly told another girlfriend the night before Maddie went missing that he had a ‘horrible job’ to do the next day and wouldn’t be around for a while. While I long thought this was a classic ‘flyer’ from the Sun newspaper, I now believe this conversation to be true.

And finally, that week, I was tipped off about another home he frequently spent time inland, where he had a girlfriend in 2007. A German woman who looked after teenage orphans.

Her name was Nicole Fehlinger, and the Olive Press was outside the rundown rural home in the tiny village of Foral, on the morning of June 6.

Owned by a rather eccentric Portuguese/Australian lady called Lia, she told me Nicole was a tenant who had long left ‘owing thousands’ and that Brueckner was a really dangerous man, who walked around with a gun, no less!

It was to be the start of the most exciting few months of my journalistic career as I bit by bit tried to piece together who this mysterious German was.

A man, who despite living in the Praia da Luz area for over ten years, and with a long track record for sex crimes, was not deemed to be worth putting on a list of 600 possible suspects by Portuguese police back in 2007.

A man who had also committed various other crimes in Portugal and even told a judge that he had previous convictions for paedophilia in Germany.

It was when I got a tip off to visit a former housemate of his in Orgiva, near Granada, in Spain, that  I really started believing for sure he was guilty.

It felt like searching for a needle in a haystack looking for the man, Michael Tatschl, an Austrian carpenter, ‘somewhere around Orgiva’.

Eventually my search was narrowed down to the hamlet of Los Tablones near where the famous Dragon Festival took place, with Brueckner, it emerged, a regular visitor.

And then I struck lucky and found the home he shared with a former girlfriend for many years. They had now separated and he wasn’t there, but somehow we were able to get him on the phone, back near Graz.

Speaking to me for the first and only time, the former housemate of Brueckner’s in Praia da Luz, ‘Micha’ Tatschl told me: “I’m sure he snatched Maddie. I know he did it. He was a pervert and a very strange man.”

It was to be the first of a number of his former associates, cell mates and pals who came out to insist he had committed one of the crimes of the century.

As the current round of searches, led by the German BKA, start to come to an end, I wonder if we will ever see the German paedophile convicted over Maddie.

Despite claims that German detectives, supported by their Portuguese counterparts, have found ‘nothing of value’ this week, it is far too early to say.

Obviously they are searches that should have been done by the Policia Judiciaria in the weeks after Maddie vanished and, to quote the words of well-respected former police boss Jim Gamble, they ‘blundered’ badly.

But, at least they are finally being done and putting a further spotlight on the movements of a very dangerous sex offender, who lived under the noses of law enforcement in both Portugal (and Spain) for well over a decade.

“I’m so delighted they are finally looking in the right place,” South African detective Danie Krugel, who had helped in the early months of the search in 2007, told the Olive Press.

He had been called in by the McCann family to use his successful patented search device, which works on quantum physics.

“We used DNA from Maddie’s hairbrush and over four days and four nights we kept pinpointing the area east of Praia da Luz, where police have been searching.

“I wasn’t allowed to do any actual investigation back then and had to give all my findings to the Portuguese police, but I kept telling them to bring in the cadaver dogs and shovels.

“It was a real shame that when they did eventually bring in the dogs, the whole investigation changed focus, and they never searched the area. I pray they finally find something now.”

What is certain is the hotlines at both Scotland Yard and the BKA headquarters in Wiesbaden will be ringing off the hook this week.

In the days after the public appeal went out back in June 2020, police in England alone got 270 calls and emails linking to their prime suspect… so there is still a chance that someone crucial might come forward now.

But the bottom line is police need to know two key things: with whom did Brueckner talk to on that feted night. And, where is her body buried?

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