Has Madeleine McCann appeared? Remember her case with Netflix and HBO documentaries

Year 2007. The McCann family was on vacation in the south of Portugal, in Praia da Luz. Kate and Gerry McCann left for dinner, leaving their children sleeping in their bedroom at the condominium. From time to time, they came over to check that everything was going well. But, in one of those glimpses, they realized that they weren’t. Things were not going well. Madeleine, the eldest of the siblings, 3 years old at the time, had disappeared..

The painstaking investigative efforts yielded few leads, and the case of the disappearance of became one of the most popular in the history of the United Kingdom, the country of origin of the affected family. The parents became the main suspects in the case (some people still think so today), but they were taken into account countless hypotheses and theorieseach one more implausible than the last.

The case is back in the spotlight these days because of Julia Faustyna, a 21-year-old Polish girl who claims that she is, in fact, Madeleine. Julia, adopted, has hardly any memory of her childhood because she was a victim of abuse. She has several physical marks that are quite similar to the ones that she had as the little girl, and due to features and age… The truth is that she could match. After drawing the attention of the parents of the missing woman with an Instagram account that went viral (@iammadeleinemccan), they have agreed to a DNA test. Therefore it is a matter of days to find out.

but this is only the (pen) last chapter of a long series of events, theories, suspects and conspiracies around the figure of the girl 3 years missing. The story of what happened may only be known by Madeleine herself, and we may never find out the truth, but the investigations and possible interpretations of what could have happened have given rise to two of the best series true crime that we can see on platforms today, and that serve to remind us of the case.

‘The disappearance of Madeleine McCann’ (Netflix)

The first of them premiered in 2019 on Netflix, and it is ‘The disappearance of Madeleine McCann‘, During its 8 episodes, the documentary series breaks down the case of the disappearance of the 3-year-old girl, reconstructing the events of the fateful night in which she was lost sight of and providing different theories.

One of them is that of the Portuguese policeman Goncalo Amaral, that affirms emphatically that the girl died in an accident and that parents (who declined to participate in the docuseries and who sued the agent) they hid the corpse.

But the main hypothesis that the documentary handles is that Madeleine was kidnapped and could be alive, although held captive by a network of white slavery and people smuggling. Juan Peribáñez, a private investigator hired by the family, supports this theory, stating that, because of the little girl’s blonde hair, “the value that Madeleine would have on the black market was very high, they were going to get a lot of money.”

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A couple of years later, a new suspect began to sound strongly, and HBO Max took the opportunity to release a new documentary about him on its platform:

‘Who killed Madeleine?’ (HBO Max)

christian bruckner He is a criminal imprisoned in Germany who is serving a sentence for raping a 72-year-old woman in Praia da Luz, the same place where Madeleine disappeared. The police found in his belongings a card with more than 8,000 photographs abusing people (some minors) and animals.

Brückner was in the area on the night of the disappearance. This is confirmed by the location of his mobile phone. The confessed pedophile was seen in a local bar while the news that Madeleine had vanished was broadcast on television. When the image of the girl appeared, Brückner whispered to the person next to her to he knew Madeleine was dead.

The Portuguese police investigated him but they found no evidence and finally ruled him out. He says he doesn’t remember what he did that night.

The three-part documentary recreates itself in composing a macabre and morbid portrait of the criminalwithout contributing much more to the theory of Madeleine’s kidnapping and/or murder by Brückner.