In a chilling new development, German authorities have discovered a hard drive filled with images they believe may point to the heartbreaking truth: Madeleine is dead.
A chilling prison confession
It’s one of the world’s most haunting mysteries — Madeleine McCann, the bright-eyed 3-year-old who vanished while on a family vacation in Praia da Luz, a resort town in Portugal’s Algarve region.
Her sudden disappearance in 2007 launched a global manhunt, drawing headlines and conspiracy theories for years. At one point, suspicion even fell on her parents, Kate and Gerry McCann.
And nearly two decades later, the case remains as chilling and unresolved as ever.
But in recent years, the focus has shifted squarely onto one man — Christian Brueckner, a 48-year-old German national with a disturbing past.
In 2020, Brueckner was officially named a suspect. He’s currently serving time in a Portuguese prison for the 2005 rape of an American woman in the same region Maddie went missing. And now, the case against him seems to be intensifying.
A former prison cellmate, 50-year-old Romanian national Laurentiu Codin, delivered explosive testimony last year in a German courtroom. According to Codin, Brueckner once bragged about abducting a child while in Portugal.
“He told me that in Portugal, that he had stolen there… he was in a region of hotels where people are there, not sure how you say, rich people, where rich people live,” Codin recalled.