The case against Christian B: Experts examine evidence as paedo becomes prime suspect in Madeleine’s disappearance
DETECTIVES in three countries are hoping that among the 400 calls they received on the 2007 disappearance of Madeleine McCann is one piece of evidence that will nail their prime suspect.
Pulitzer-prize nominated reporters Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan spent years examining all the evidence for their book, Looking For Madeleine.
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In an article for The Sun in 2017, on the tenth anniversary of the day the three-year old vanished from a holiday apartment in Portugal, the pair concluded that Madeleine HAD been abducted by a foreign paedophile burglar.
This week German police revealed they believe Madeleine is dead but do not have enough evidence to nail paedophile Christian B for the killing.
In our exclusive Maddie casebook, Summers and Swan re-examine the mystery and piece together ALL the evidence that points to German Christian being the abductor.
SOLVING the mystery of Madeleine McCann’s fate was like looking for a needle in a haystack, according to the man heading Scotland Yard’s investigation.
For 13 years, the frustrated police forces of several nations have found clues, small pointers.
Have they now at last found the elusive needle itself? Maybe. Just maybe.
There are hopes that Madeleine’s heartbroken parents Kate and Gerry — and millions around the world — may finally see the case solved.
Christian B — currently serving a seven-year sentence in a German jail for the rape of an American woman in Portugal in 2005 — may prove to have been responsible for the heinous crime of abducting, and likely killing, Madeleine.
Hans Christian Wolters, the state prosecutor in Braunschweig, Germany, claims to have evidence not made public that Madeleine is dead.
Christian, 43, has admitted nothing. He has not even been interrogated in depth about Madeleine.
Current appeals to the public by the German authorities and Scotland Yard indicate key bits of the jigsaw have yet to be found.
What, though, suggests they may have got their man?
We have compiled some of the many facts that suggest the police may at last have found him.
By May 2007, when Madeleine vanished, Christian had been living on and off around Praia da Luz for more than ten years.
He already had a record in Germany as a sexual predator — a conviction for “performing sex acts in front of a child” when he was only 17.
HE ‘KNEW ALL ABOUT’ WHAT HAPPENED TO MADDIE
Having gone to live in Portugal, he had been extradited to Germany to serve a further sentence for other crimes against juveniles.
Later, back in Praia da Luz, he had money, appeared to be working — as a waiter at one point — but that was a front for his life of crime.
Christian reportedly took advantage of the annual influx of summer holidaymakers to commit multiple burglaries.
He did time for stealing petrol and made shady deals buying and selling cars.
He allegedly bragged that he “knew all about” what happened to Madeleine — although that does not mean he was her abductor.
A reported boast is far from being conclusive evidence. The police need much more if they are to put Christian in the dock.
German officials suspect he murdered Madeleine. Scotland Yard, cautious as ever, continue to treat it as a missing person case.
But there is much more that links Christian to the crime.
The mask
BETWEEN 2004 and 2010 there were numerous break-ins all within 40 miles of Praia da Luz, during which an intruder either assaulted, tried to assault or, in one case, attempted to abduct young girls.
In an incident involving two young British girls, aged eight and 11, a man entered their apartment as the parents slept.
The intruder got into bed with the younger daughter, who asked: “Is that you, Daddy?”
The man said: “Yes.” But she knew it was not her father. The older girl then woke and saw what was happening.
The man, who was wearing a mask and spoke English with a foreign accent, walked out of the room.
Christian had reportedly worn a mask in 2005 when he allegedly raped a woman in the Algarve.
People clearing out premises that he had vacated found, among other things, wigs and costumes.
The birthmarks
WHILE living in the Algarve in 2004 Hazel Behan, then 20, was raped by a man armed with a machete.
He was “dressed all in black, wearing a leotard and a black leather mask.”
She also remembered the man who raped her had a distinctive mark at the top of his right thigh, perhaps a birthmark or tattoo.
Christian reportedly has birthmarks all over his body and scars on his right leg.
Mrs Behan — now married with children — also remembers that her rapist had blond eyebrows and “piercing blue eyes, even in the dark”.
In his mugshot Christian clearly has blue eyes.
The attacker, she added, “spoke English, with like a German accent.”
She told her story at length, in chilling detail, five years ago — long before the current police appeal for information about Christian.
The white van
ON May 3, 2007 — the day Madeleine vanished — or the day before, Derek Flack, who lived in Praia da Luz, was heading to the shops with his wife when he saw a man watching apartment 5A — the room where the McCanns and their children were staying in the Ocean Club complex.
He noticed a second man either in or beside a dirty white van parked on the other side of the road.
Brit Derek thought the first man’s gaze appeared fixed on the apartment and its veranda. He went to the police after Madeleine disappeared.
Christian owned a Volkswagen T3 Westfalia camper van which was seen in police photos.
It did not resemble the van Flack described, although reports of mysterious “white vans” are often a feature of child abduction cases.
One such early sighting in the Madeleine McCann case — of a German-registered VW van, a man, and a blonde little girl — featured in news stories last week.
But that vehicle was traced long ago, and the owner turned out to be an innocent holidaymaker with a daughter who looked a little like Madeleine.
A van can be seen in aerial shots of a house in which Christian once lived.
But a police source said it was not a VW but a Renault and its owner is not a suspect.
The pockmarks
THERE is other compelling testimony that someone was watching apartment 5a before Madeleine disappeared.
Tasmin Sillence, a British girl age 12 at the time who had previously stayed in the same apartment, had seen a man lounging against the wall “staring intently at the balcony” on the Monday of the fateful week.
She later saw him the day before Madeleine vanished, again apparently watching the apartment.
A British tourist staying nearby who asked not to be named told private detectives working for the McCanns that she too saw a man watching the apartment on two occasions.
The woman recalled: “I grabbed my daughter’s hand and pulled her towards me because for some reason the man unnerved me.”
And on the afternoon of the day Madeleine went missing, Brit Carole Tranmer was taking tea with her aunt on the terrace when she saw a man come out of apartment 5A, which was directly below them.
Carole, a former secretary, said he closed the gate “very carefully and quietly” and “looked to one side and the other”.
She called the police as soon as news broke of Madeleine’s disappearance.
Her information and that of Tasmin indicates that a would-be thief or abductor had staked out the McCanns’ apartment.
And now the investigators’ focus is on Christian, their descriptions of the suspicious man are striking.
Both women said he was aged between 30 and 40, light-skinned, with fair or light cropped hair, and was either 5ft 10in or 5ft 11in.
‘UGLY, EVEN DISGUSTING’
In 2007, Christian was 30. Reports describe his hair as being blond and short. He is 6ft tall.
There is a final striking detail in the descriptions of the man who appeared to be staking out the McCanns’ apartment.
Tasmin said his face was “ugly, even disgusting”, with small pimples, while the unnamed Brit tourist recalled the face she saw as “very ugly, with pitted skin.”
Reports from Germany in the past few days reveal Christian’s “face is pockmarked”.
Shown a picture of the German, the unnamed British tourist reportedly said firmly: “That’s the man I saw.”
The orphanage
AMONG the investigation files are statements several witnesses made about a man — on occasion two men — who came to their doors asking for money for a nearby orphanage.
There was no such orphanage. The callers requesting donations were scam merchants.
But was the motive more sinister? One of the men said he was looking for cash to help “keep young girls away from prostitution”.
He appeared to one resident to be in his mid to late-20s and spoke English well.
Another recalled: “Due to his appearance and mannerisms, I did not feel he was Portuguese.” His accent “did not sound Portuguese.”
Police thought the accent of one of the fake charity collectors may have been Dutch or German.
One of the scammers claimed the orphanage he was supposedly raising money for was at or near a place a resident remembered as being called something like “Baro St. Hoa”.
There is indeed a hamlet, not far from Praia da Luz, named Barao de Sao Joao.
Christian had a girlfriend there and — as The Sun has reported — was a familiar figure at drug- fuelled parties in woods nearby where he reportedly traded drugs for sex with young girls.
The drugs
DRUG dealing, and the use of drugs, is another feature of Christian’s criminal profile.
The owner of a property he reportedly frequented said that after the villa was vacated she was shocked to find “syringes and used needles and a spoon and bricks of hashish in a shoebox”.
A very sinister use of drugs could explain a mystery surrounding the disappearance.
During the commotion of Madeleine being snatched, her parents’ cries of shock afterwards, as well as the coming and going of policemen, the little girl’s twin brother Sean and sister Amelie had not woken.
Everyone — their mother above all — had been astounded.
Could it be, Kate asked police within days, that an abductor had sedated all three children before escaping with Madeleine?
There is anther factor to consider — an indication that a non-Portuguese man was responsible for crimes in the area.
The year Madeleine disappeared there was an epidemic of burglary — a four-fold increase, in fact, of thefts in and around Praia da Luz.
Could it be that an abductor had sedated all three children before escaping with Madeleine?
Break-ins were common at the Ocean Club, the resort at which the McCann family was staying.
Apartments on the lower floors were often targeted, one of them in the same block the McCanns’ used.
On the night that apartment was robbed, shortly before Madeleine and her family arrived, a man who was probably casing the joint had appeared at the door asking for “the German family”.
In another break-in at the resort, a child had been disturbed — but the thieves fled when the parents came back.
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The phone
FINALLY, there is a clue that establishes almost conclusively that Christian was in Praia da Luz on the night Madeleine vanished.
Analysis of mobile calls shows that the phone registered in his name — number 351-912-730-680 — was used in the town that night, shortly before the little girl was found to be missing.
Christian was there.
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