Madeleine McCann: A Never-Ending Search 14 Years Later
When Kate McCann and Gerry McCann went home on Sept. 9, 2007, they told the reporters crowded around to witness their departure from Portugal that their decision to leave in no way meant that they had given up searching for their daughter Madeleine McCann, who had been missing for four months.
They were reluctant to go, Kate recalled in her 2011 book Madeleine, but going back to their lives in England was "what was right and fair" for their twins, Sean and Amelie, who at 2 years old were still unaware that something so devastating had happened. Their big sister's fourth birthday had solemnly passed on May 12, nine days after she disappeared.
The McCanns and three other families had arrived on April 28 for a sunny holiday at the kid-friendly Ocean Club in Praia da Luz. They were all supposed to go home on May 5.
This is the final installment of a three-part series. Read parts one and two here.
Instead, when Gerry, a cardiology specialist, and Kate, a GP who practiced part-time, returned to the Leicestershire village of Rothley, Portugal's Polícia Judiciària had just officially named them suspects in their daughter's disappearance, suggesting that Kate at the very least hid Madeleine's body after a fatal accident in their apartment.
The McCanns adamantly maintained their innocence and vowed never to stop looking, remaining hopeful that answers would be forthcoming—even if the truth was devastating.
Through every frustration and disappointment that followed, Kate and Gerry had to keep a semblance of a normal life for the sake of their other children, now 20-year-old Sean and Amelie.
That became somewhat easier as time went on, but life was never more than, as the couple put it on their blog in 2024, "relatively normal and enjoyable" again.
"The search goes on...to find our Madeleine," the McCanns said in a May 3 post on their Find Madeleine website marking 19 years since their daughter disappeared, "to achieve some justice, to make the world that bit safer."
As they noted on the same grim occasion in 2025, "The years appear to be passing even more quickly and whilst we have no significant news to share, our determination to ‘leave no stone unturned’ is unwavering. We will do our utmost to achieve this."
It also would have been their eldest child's 23rd birthday May 12. Kate and Gerry noted last year, "No matter how near or far she is, she continues to be right here with us, every day, but especially on her special day. We continue to ‘celebrate’ her as the very beautiful and unique person she is. We miss her."
The McCanns did not speak out in September when Christian Brueckner—who was named a suspect in Madeleine's disappearance in 2020 but was never charged in connection with the case—was released from Germany's Sehnde prison after serving seven years for the 2005 rape of a 72-year-old woman in Praia da Luz.
His release was anticipated after he was acquitted in 2024 of five other sex offense charges, according to BBC News. Last June, Portuguese police announced "a broad range” of new searches in the McCann case, including a dwelling where Brueckner, now 49, was living in May 2007.
But 19 years ago, the Polícia Judiciària still had questions for everyone who'd been on holiday with the McCanns.
Matthew and Rachael Oldfield, David and Fiona Payne, Dianne Webster (Fiona's mother), and Russell O'Brien and Jane Tanner—the group Kate and Gerry were having dinner with the night Madeleine disappeared, dubbed the "Tapas Seven" in media reports—had been asked by police not to discuss the case with the press. But fed up with tabloid speculation and insinuations, as well as leaks that seemed to becoming from the cops who warned them to stay silent, they flatly denied that they had done anything other than try to help the investigation.
There was "categorically no 'pact of silence' or indeed anything secretive between us—just the desire to assist the search for Madeleine," they said in an October 2007 statement. "From day one, the police in Portugal told us not to discuss our statements. It is incredibly frustrating for us that the fact we have done as we were asked to by the Portuguese police is still being looked upon as suspicious. Everything we have done, and continue to do, has been to help with the search for Madeleine and to end this nightmare for Gerry and Kate."
Eddie Mulholland/Shutterstock
Talking to the BBC in April 2008, Rachael recalled, "We were made to understand we could face two years prison for speaking out, so as a group we've not said anything from day one...We would have loved to have put the record straight."
Portuguese police re-interviewed all seven that month (in the U.K.) and once again the common memory from the night of May 3, 2007, was that Kate was hysterical and Gerry was equally devastated.
"I've never heard a man make the noises he made," Dianne Webster told police, "and Kate, Kate was just...you just can't put into words how they were."
As Madeleine's fifth birthday approached, Kate wrote that if she had known a year prior that her daughter would still be missing after 12 months, "I'm sure I'd have gone under."
Joe Giddens/PA Wire
But while she shared that it took her years to be able to glean much pleasure from anything, unable to even go to dinner or concentrate on a movie or soccer game, and Gerry too had good days as well as horrible ones, they had to press on because Sean and Amelie needed them.
In her book, Kate called her then-6-year-old twins "remarkably well-adjusted, well-rounded and emotionally in tune."
"Unfortunately for us, a new normality is a family of four," Gerry told the BBC in 2017. "But we have adapted and that's important. The last five years, in particular, has allowed us to really properly devote time to looking after the twins and ourselves and of course carrying on with our work. At some point you've got to realize that time is not frozen, and I think both of us realize that we owed it to the twins to make sure that their life is as fulfilling as they deserve."
Alban Donohoe, Pool/AP Photo
Kate and Gerry were officially cleared, along with fellow suspect Robert Murat, on July 21, 2008, Portugal's attorney general's office announcing there was no evidence that Madeleine had come to serious harm.
At the same time, the PJ said they were halting their investigation.
Kate wrote that she and her husband weren't sorry to hear it, that they were "far from convinced that there was any real investigation taking place anyway." They had already hired private investigators to continue the search.
Three days after the announcement that they were no longer suspects, Gonçalo Amaral—the PJ's former chief investigating coordinator who had stepped down from the McCann investigation in October 2007 and retired from the force in June 2008—released a book about the case that floated the theory that Kate and Gerry had covered up what really happened to their daughter, as well as shed a more flattering light on his department's actions during the course of the investigation.
The couple sued Amaral for libel in 2009, launching a process that stretched on for years: They went to trial in 2014, and in April 2015 a Lisbon judge awarded the McCanns more than $500,000 in damages—money they stated would go right to Madeleine's Fund, which has helped finance search efforts since 2007—and banned further sales of the book, The Truth of the Lie. However, arguing that the book was an account of a widely documented police investigation, Amaral won his appeal the following year, clearing the way for his book to go back on sale.
The McCanns appealed to Portugal's Supreme Court, which refused to take it up in 2017. They called the decision "extremely disappointing," but said all that they'd ever really wanted was for British and Portuguese authorities to be doing all they could to find their daughter.
Meanwhile, London's Metropolitan Police formally opened their own investigation into Madeleine's disappearance in May 2011, calling it "Operation Grange"—and Portuguese prosecutors followed suit that October.
DPA/ZUMApress.com
In October 2013, Scotland Yard ruled out one once-promising lead: They had finally managed to confirm that a man the McCanns' friend Jane Tanner saw at 9:15 p.m. on May 3, 2007, carrying a barefoot child in light-colored pajamas was just another vacationing Brit with his own kid.
Later that month on an episode of the BBC's Crimewatch, Scotland Yard shared new composite images based on the accounts of another couple who reported seeing a man awkwardly carrying a child fitting Madeleine's description on the street about 500 yards away from the McCanns' apartment, headed in the direction of the beach, closer to 10 p.m. that night. According to the Met, more than 300 calls and 170 emails came in directly after the program aired.
But whatever information was relayed, it did not lead to any notable developments. And so would be the case for years.
Ahead of the 10th anniversary of Madeleine's disappearance, Kate and Gerry told the BBC's Fiona Bruce that they did still have hope that their daughter might be found, noting that sometimes miracles happened—such as the discovery in 2013 of three young women in Cleveland who'd been held captive for a decade, or the fact that Jaycee Dugard, kidnapped at 11 in 1991, was found alive 18 years later.
"We tried everything in our power to not have a long, protracted, missing-person case like this," Kate said. "It's devastating and we really threw ourselves into trying to do everything we could to help find her. It looks like that hasn't worked yet. But you know we are still looking forward...We still hope."
Getty Images; Shutterstock; Melissa Herwitt/E! Illustration
Three years later came the announcement that there was a new suspect: a man in prison in Germany for drug offenses who, according to German authorities, had a long criminal record that included convictions for child sexual abuse.
On June 3, 2020, Metropolitan Police Detective Chief Inspector Mark Cranwell said that his office had received information about the man in 2017 and had been investigating ever since in a joint effort with the Polícia Judiciária and Germany's Federal Criminal Police Office (the BKA). By then, only a handful of detectives were still on the case, down from the initial 30 investigators assigned to Operation Grange in 2011.
While Cranwell said their job was to "follow the evidence, maintain an open mind and establish what happened on that day in May 2007," Braunschweig state prosecutor Hans Christian Wolters told reporters the next day, per Reuters, "We assume that the girl is dead. The public prosecutor's office in Braunschweig is investigating a 43-year-old German national on suspicion of murder."
Wolters told the BBC that they had evidence "strong enough to say that the girl is dead and strong enough to accuse a specific individual of murder—that strong."
However, he added, "One has to be honest and remain open to the possibility that our investigation could end without a charge, that it ends like the others have."
A few days later, Wolters walked his assessment back a bit, telling the Sunday Mirror that "a little bit of hope" remained that Madeleine was alive.
Meanwhile, Brueckner, the German national in question, had begun serving a seven-year sentence for the 2005 rape in January 2021 upon completing his sentence in his drug case.
Miguel Villagran/Getty Images
Brueckner's attorney Friedrich Fulscher said at the time that his client denied having anything to do with Madeleine's disappearance and had no plans to cooperate with the German prosecutor's office.
Brueckner—who lost his appeal on the rape conviction in November 2020—broke his silence in the spring of 2021, releasing a statement from prison directed at Wolf and fellow prosecutor Ute Lindemann that alleged unfair persecution.
"Charging someone with a crime is one thing," began his handwritten message, dated May 8, 2021, but released June 14, according to The Telegraph. "It is something completely different, namely an unbelievable scandal, when a public prosecutor starts a public prejudicial campaign before proceedings are even opened. You have proved worldwide, through arbitrary convictions in the past and through scandalous prejudicial campaigns in the present, that you are unsuitable for the office of an 'advocate for the honest and German people who trust in justice,' and that you bring shame to the German legal system."
Despite German prosecutors' grim suspicions, Scotland Yard said in 2020 that they'd yet to see "definitive evidence whether Madeleine is alive or dead"—and that remains the case.
Then-Metropolitan Police Commissioner Dame Cressida Dick told reporters that December that they were working "really, really closely" with German authorities, yet she "would not expect necessarily every single piece of material to be shared with us."
"We're continuing to work very closely with our colleagues in the BKA...and the PJ," she continued. "We do have our small team still working on that and there's no significant change for us in terms of our resourcing or posture...We will continue until the time that it is right, either because much more light has been thrown on this and, or, somebody has been brought to justice. Or, if we feel we have exhausted all possible opportunities. We're not any of those stages at the moment, and the team continues."
FRANCISCO LEONG/AFP/Getty Images
A source close to the investigation told the Telegraph in January 2021, "At this stage there is no evolution. Of course I would like to see an end to this, but there is no reason to think that [Brueckner] could take us to Madeleine, and that is the most important thing."
As the 14th anniversary of their daughter's disappearance approached in 2021, Gerry and Kate McCann posted on the Find Madeleine website, the couple having never joined social media, "Every May is tough—a reminder of years passed, of years together lost, or stolen. This year it is particularly poignant as we should be celebrating Madeleine's 18th birthday. Enough said."
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