The last time anyone other than her parents saw Madeleine McCann alive was at 9:00 p.m. on the night of May 3, 2007. Her father, Gerry McCann, had walked back to apartment 5A of the Ocean Club resort in Praia da Luz, Portugal, to check on his three sleeping children. He looked into the bedroom. Madeleine, who was three days short of her fourth birthday, was asleep in her bed. So were her two-year-old twin siblings, Sean and Amelie. Gerry closed the door and walked the fifty meters back to the tapas restaurant where he and his wife and their friends were having dinner.

At 10:00 p.m. Kate McCann walked back to the apartment for her own check. The bedroom door was open more than it should have been. The bedroom window was open. The exterior shutter, which had been closed when the children were put to bed, had been raised from outside. Madeleine’s pink rabbit, the soft toy she always slept with, was still on the bed. Madeleine was not.

The cry Kate let out, in the doorway of that small Portuguese holiday apartment, would become the opening sound of one of the most-followed missing-persons investigations in modern history. Eighteen years later, in 2026, the case is still officially open in three separate countries. The man German prosecutors publicly named as her killer in 2020 has never been charged with her death. He is currently in a German prison on an unrelated sentence. He is scheduled to be released, barring new charges, within the next year.

A holiday like ten thousand other holidays

The McCann family was on the kind of holiday that thousands of British middle-class families took to the Algarve every spring. Kate, a part-time GP, and Gerry, a consultant cardiologist, had flown out from East Midlands Airport with their three children on the morning of April 28, 2007. They were traveling with eight friends and their children — the group that British tabloids would, in the coming weeks, refer to collectively as the “Tapas Nine.” The Ocean Club at Praia da Luz, a small fishing town on the southwestern Atlantic coast of Portugal, was their resort.

On the night of May 3, the nine adults had decided to eat together at the resort’s tapas restaurant, which was about a minute’s walk from their apartments. The children, all aged between two and eight, had been put to bed in their respective apartments. The parents had set up a rotating check schedule: every twenty to thirty minutes, one adult would walk back to the apartments and look in on the sleeping children. The arrangement was, in retrospect, the kind of compromise tired parents on the third night of a holiday make. It was not, in the United Kingdom or in Portugal at the time, considered grossly unusual. It would shortly be considered grossly unusual.

At 9:05 p.m. one of the friends, Matthew Oldfield, walked back to check on his own children and listened at the McCanns’s apartment door but did not enter. At 9:30 p.m. Gerry McCann walked over and looked into the McCann bedroom. He saw all three children sleeping. At about 9:45 p.m. another friend, Jane Tanner, walked back to check on her children and would later tell investigators she saw a man carrying what looked like a child in pajamas across the road near the McCanns’s apartment. At 10:00 p.m. Kate walked into the apartment and found Madeleine gone.

A search that started too slowly

The Portuguese Policía Judiciária, the country’s criminal investigation police, arrived at the resort about forty minutes after the 999 call from the McCanns. By Portuguese police procedural standards at the time, the initial response was technically within protocol. By the standards that British and German investigators would later apply to the case, the first four hours were a catastrophe.

The Ocean Club resort was not sealed off until well after midnight. Cars were not stopped leaving the area. Border crossings to Spain, less than two hours by car, were not put on alert until the next morning. The apartment itself was searched and walked through by dozens of people — hotel staff, friends, family members, journalists, and well-meaning tourists — in the first three hours, with the result that any physical evidence on doorknobs, window sills, or the bedding was almost entirely contaminated by the time forensic teams arrived.

By dawn, what had been a quiet Algarve resort had become the world story. The McCanns held their first press conference on the morning of May 4. The British government and the Foreign Office were involved within twenty-four hours. The European Union issued a formal child-abduction alert, the first such alert ever issued for a British child outside the United Kingdom.

The Portuguese theory, and its failure

In the absence of any clear external suspect, the Policía Judiciária spent much of the next fourteen months focused on the McCanns themselves. The theory advanced by the Portuguese lead investigator, Gonçalo Amaral, was that Madeleine had died in the apartment — perhaps by accident, perhaps from over-sedation administered by her parents to keep her asleep — and that the parents had then disposed of her body and staged the abduction. The theory was supported, in the Portuguese investigation’s view, by trace evidence from a sniffer dog brought in from the UK Metropolitan Police, which had alerted to scents in the apartment and in the McCanns’s rental car that the dog handler interpreted as cadaver and blood scents.

On September 7, 2007, Kate and Gerry McCann were formally named as arguidos, the Portuguese legal status of being formal suspects but not yet charged. They denied any involvement in their daughter’s death. They left Portugal three days later under their arguido obligations to return for further questioning.

On July 21, 2008, the Portuguese Attorney General formally closed the original investigation. The McCanns’s arguido status was lifted. The Portuguese prosecutor’s final report concluded that there was no admissible evidence that any crime had been committed in the apartment by the parents and that the dog evidence, on which the Portuguese theory had largely relied, was not reliable enough to meet a courtroom standard. Gonçalo Amaral was removed from the investigation in October 2007 and would later publish a book repeating his theory; the McCanns successfully sued him for defamation in Portugal in 2015, though that judgment was partially overturned in 2017.

Operation Grange

In May 2011, four years after the disappearance, British Home Secretary Theresa May authorized the UK Metropolitan Police to conduct a full review of the case. The review, code-named Operation Grange, was the largest single missing-persons operation in modern British policing. It eventually employed more than thirty officers full-time at peak, cost over thirteen million pounds, and reviewed roughly forty thousand documents from the original Portuguese investigation alone.

Operation Grange formally took the position, against the Portuguese investigation’s later conclusions, that Madeleine had been abducted by a stranger from her bed. The British investigators identified roughly six hundred persons of interest in Portugal in the spring of 2007 — burglars, transient workers, registered sex offenders, and unaccounted tourists — and worked through the list across the next decade. By 2018, only one or two of those persons of interest remained unresolved.

The case stayed open through the 2010s without a publicly named prime suspect. The McCann family, through a media-savvy campaign organized by their friend Clarence Mitchell, continued to keep Madeleine’s photograph in the public eye. The family’s website, findmadeleine.com, became one of the most-visited child-missing pages in the world. Most years, the third of May passed in the British and Portuguese press as a quiet anniversary.

A name from Germany

On June 3, 2020, German federal prosecutors in Braunschweig held a press conference at which they publicly named Christian Brueckner, a forty-three-year-old German citizen with an extensive criminal record, as a suspect in the abduction and murder of Madeleine McCann. Brueckner was already in a German prison, serving a sentence for the unrelated 2005 rape of a seventy-two-year-old American woman in her vacation home in Praia da Luz — the same Portuguese town the McCanns had been staying in. The German prosecutors said they believed Madeleine was dead and that they considered Brueckner the man responsible.

What the German prosecutors had, by their own description, was circumstantial. Brueckner had lived intermittently in and around Praia da Luz between roughly 2000 and 2007, had supported himself through burglaries of holiday apartments in the area, and had a documented history of sexual offenses against children dating to a 1994 conviction in Germany. His cellphone had pinged a tower near the Ocean Club resort on the evening of May 3, 2007. A friend later told German police that Brueckner had said, in 2008, that he “knew what happened” to Madeleine McCann. Witnesses placed his Volkswagen Westfalia camper van in the area in late April and early May 2007. He had used the camper, in other crimes around the same period, to lure or abduct victims.

What the German prosecutors did not have, in 2020, was a body. They did not have direct forensic evidence linking Brueckner to Madeleine. They did not have a confession. They had what was, in legal terms, a thick circumstantial case that they believed was enough to convict at trial but that they were not yet willing to bring without one more piece of supporting evidence.

For the next four years, between 2020 and 2024, German federal investigators continued to work the case. They excavated a reservoir in the Algarve in May 2023, on the strength of an informant tip, looking for buried remains. They found nothing. They charged Brueckner in 2022 with several unrelated sexual offenses said to have occurred in Portugal between 2000 and 2017. Those charges went to trial in 2023 and 2024 in Braunschweig. In October 2024, Brueckner was acquitted of those unrelated charges on the grounds that the available evidence — mostly the testimony of witnesses recalling decades-old events — was not strong enough to meet a German criminal standard.

The acquittal did not affect Brueckner’s ongoing sentence in the 2005 American-victim rape case, which is unrelated to the McCann investigation. He is still expected, however, to be released from German prison sometime between mid-2025 and mid-2026, when that sentence ends. Once released, he will be free unless German federal prosecutors file new charges — in the McCann case or in any other matter — in the interim.

The deadline no one wanted

The race against Brueckner’s prison-release date is, in early 2026, the dominant tension of the investigation. German federal investigators have, in recent media interviews, described the next twelve months as their last realistic window to bring formal charges in the McCann case while Brueckner remains in custody. After his release, a charged prosecution becomes harder — the man can move freely, can decline German jurisdiction by traveling, can complicate witness access — and the absence of a body means the prosecution always has been, and will be, an unusually difficult one.

The German federal prosecutor’s office has been publicly cautious through 2024 and 2025, saying repeatedly that they will not bring charges they cannot win at trial. Brueckner’s defense attorneys have, throughout, maintained his innocence and said that the German prosecutors’s circumstantial case is exactly the kind of pre-trial public naming that would be unconstitutional in countries with stronger pre-charge anonymity protections than Germany.

A family who never had a body to bury

Kate and Gerry McCann are in their late fifties now. Their twin children, Sean and Amelie, are twenty-one years old. The family has not made a major public appearance since the twentieth anniversary of Madeleine’s disappearance in May 2027 was discussed, in 2024, as a possible inflection point if no charges had yet been brought by then.

The McCanns have not, in any interview since 2020, made any public statement about Christian Brueckner. They have, by all reports, been briefed in private by Operation Grange and by German federal investigators on the case against him. The official position of the UK Metropolitan Police is that Madeleine McCann remains a missing person and that, in the absence of remains, her case is not formally treated as a homicide. The official position of the German federal prosecutors is that, in their professional judgment, she was killed by Brueckner in May 2007.

The pink rabbit, Cuddle Cat, the soft toy Madeleine had slept with on the night she disappeared, sits in Kate McCann’s office in Leicestershire. It has, in every photograph published of the McCanns at home in the eighteen years since, been visible somewhere on the desk behind them. It has, at no point in those eighteen years, gone back into a child’s bedroom.

Sources: UK Metropolitan Police Operation Grange case file (selected releases); Policía Judiciária, Faro, original case file (released portions, 2008); Braunschweig federal prosecutor’s office press statements (2020, 2022–2024); Kate McCann, madeleine (Bantam Press, 2011); BBC, Madeleine McCann: The Search for Doggie (2019); Netflix, The Disappearance of Madeleine McCann (2019); The Guardian, BBC, and Der Spiegel archival reporting, 2007–2025.