A compilation of Christian Brueckner statements
Anastasia Meckesy, former lover of Christian Brueckner
“He said that he ‘knows what happened to little Maddie from England.’ He said she was ‘probably handed over’ to someone after being taken and, if she were still alive today, they would have found her by now’”
“He liked taking me to the beach in his Jaguar. He didn’t like the town beach in Lagos. It would always be the West coast beaches, the isolated ones.”
“Other people get joy out of films, music, socialising, that sort of thing. But for him, if there was no money to be made out of something, then there was no point doing it."
Nicole Fehlinger, former lover of Christian Brueckner
“I have nothing to do with the disappearance and am not involved in the case. I was his lover, not his accomplice.”
Dieter Fehlinger, father of Nicole Feringer
'He told me: “I work, I get money, because I have a special business. I transport grass [cannabis] in my van. In my van I can take 50kg of grass, nobody can see it.”
“I can transport children, kids, in this space. Drugs and children, you can transport them in this van, it’s a safe space in the van, nobody can find them. Nobody can catch you.”
Helge Busching, former friend of Brueckner
Discussing Maddie’s disappearance: “He said she didn’t scream. She didn’t scream, that’s what Brueckner said, and then I looked at Brueckner and thought, “What are you telling me now?””
“I knew from Christian that he uses tools to break into holiday resorts, hotels and holiday homes to steal from tourists. There were passports on the table. There was all sorts of stuff lying around – cameras, suitcases, everything that tourists have with them. I also found a lock pick set. You can use it to pick any lock, including security locks.”
When asked how Brueckner might’ve entered the hotel room, Helge said, “Through the door. Easily. He can open any door”.
Ken Ralphs, acquaintance from caravan park
Ralphs said he knew Bruecker because they both parked their camper vans at Barranco beach. He claimed Brueckner tried to recruit a mutual friend to steal a child.
"We were sitting around the fire one night after a meal, we had a few beers and during the early hours of the morning my friend began to cry. I asked him what the matter was and, eventually, he confessed to me he was getting involved with Christian to steal a child from Praia da Luz from a rich family."
"I said you can't get involved in kidnapping a person for ransom, that's ridiculous, then he explained - 'no, it's not like that'. Christian had a customer, a buyer lined up, a German couple who couldn't have children."
Michael Tatschl, former friend and criminal partner
"I was staying at his house and camping in a van in the garden. We spent a lot of time together and had good fun. He was always quite criminal. He liked to brag about the crimes he had done and planned to do, and how he aimed to steal as much money as he could until he reached his dream of having €1 million. Then he would stop.”
"It was rich pickings there in Praia da Luz. He was always breaking into apartments in the area and bragging about it to me. He was a very good burglar and would easily climb up to first floor apartments when tourists were out. He would climb up to the first floor and steal everything, lots of money, valuables and so many passports. In fact hundreds of passports and lots of watches. Rolexes and other expensive watches. He had a hiding place in the house in the rafters in the roof. He had all the money and passports hidden up there."
“Brueckner broke into houses, tourists' houses, at night when they were not there. And he would even break in when they were sleeping and also if they were up on the first or second floors. He scaled the walls. Once he told me he broke in and three teenage girls were sleeping in the living room. He was naked. One of them woke up when a phone rang and screamed. The girl's father heard the scream and came, so Christian had to run and jump off a balcony.”
“He was always bragging about money and making money. He even talked about selling kids, maybe to Morocco. I think he probably sold Maddie to someone. Maybe a sex ring. That was my suspicion because he wanted money.”
“I was living with him at the time. He was my best friend. I know he did it.”
He said whilst in prison Brueckner had asked two friends to remove incriminating evidence from his house. This is where a camcorder was found that had footage of Brückner raping a 72-year-old tourist. The video was destroyed, but the two gave testimony of the videos they saw.
“That’s how I found out he was a sick b******. It was of this elderly lady who was chained to a wooden post and she was being beaten and raped.”
Brueckner was later arrested for the rape based on Taschl and Busching’s testimonies which were corroborated with forensic evidence.
After serving prison time together in 2006, Brückner moved into a campervan and Tatschl left for Orgiva, Spain. Five months later, Madeleine disappeared.
"The next time I saw him was in late May or early June 2007 and he arrived in Spain with his big American campervan, the Winnebago, the one with the swimsuits. He knew that I was living there and he knew I had connections to the marijuana world and could help him make money.”
"We all wondered where he’d got the money from. I remember specifically having a conversation with an English guy who lived there and we both said how on earth could have had that vehicle? We assumed a big drug deal or something like that. Now I suspect it was Maddie. He was only there that time for a couple of days and went on back to Germany selling marijuana.”
"Christian was always on the dark web. I don’t know exactly what he did but I suspect it involved drugs and pornography.”
Laurentiu Codin, Prison Cellmate
“He told me that in Portugal, he had stolen [a child] there. He was in an area of hotels where rich people live. And when he went to the hotel area, there was an open window somewhere, he told me, and this was the reason he asked me whether fingerprints could be left when he went out of the window. He said he went into the flat because of money and said that he didn't find any money but found a kid, and took the child, and that two hours later the place was surrounded by police and dogs.”
"And he then went away, out of the area, I am just saying what he told me... and he took the child in Portugal in his car, and in the time when the police and dogs were there at the house, he drove away, and he was gone.""He left the area. He then said that there was another person with him who he had argued with and that they had split up."
“He asked me if the DNA from a child can be taken from bones under the ground.”
He also alleged Brueckner told him of abusing young girls on a bus he owned after snatching them.
“There was talk of a girl, I don’t know if what he said was true or not. He said that he had a bus and that he had taken her with it. He said he kept some of them, but not others, but he never said that he had killed them. We’re talking about girls, not boys. Not all at once, always one at a time. He told me about two. He said that he had taken someone, had sex with her but he didn’t kill her.”
Asked by the judge how old his victim was, Codin said: “I don’t want to get it wrong, but it was very young, tiny. I mean young.
“Each time when we were together he spoke about it because he was convinced that I was a paedophile.”
He claimed that Brueckner was concerned about leaving evidence at crime scenes, such as hair or traces from climbing over a balcony, and that Brueckner had asked him to burn down his box factory after leaving prison.
Christian Brueckner's chatroom log
Christian B: catching something small and using it for days, that would be it…
Panikspatz66: that is not undangerous
Christian B: if one is destroying the evidence after
Panikspatz66: mm
Christian B: i will exactly document how i will torture her
Panikspatz66: cool
Marina F, former lover of Brueckner
"Christian wanted to take in little girls in Portugal… he wanted to foster children. He knew the (German) state pays a lot of money to do that. I got the feeling that he already had a little girl in the house!”
The court showed a letter which Brueckner had written whilst in Prison asking her to clear out his rental home in Praia da Luz. She initially claimed not to remember the request, but eventually admitted she had indeed gone with his friend, Christian Post, to undertake the clean up.
Christian Post, friend of Brueckner
“Now I know about his paedophile past, his rapist past. I’m 100% certain it was him. I think he found [Madeleine] by chance and just took her on the spur of the moment.”
“Christian asked me to go to his home and clean up and move things to his friend Bernard’s house. When I got there his girlfriend Marina was already there preselecting things to take. She was putting things into bags and I was putting them in my van. Then I saw some CDs stacked on top of one bag and I allowed myself to take a peek at two or three of them. Each of them were carefully hand-written with labels in a CD pen."
“There were these CDs which were labelled, which suggested to me that there were things which involved young people. I only saw it quickly and I found it all too creepy so I threw these away. I didn’t watch them personally. I just saw the labels then made a decision. It was labelled by pornographic practises, types of sex – some involved dogs. I then threw them away. I can’t remember the full details but there were some things like this, and I didn’t want to risk transporting something like this.”
“I threw away a stack of CDs, at a guess 60 or 80 of them, stacked in three big piles. I wrapped them up in a plastic bag and dumped them in a big bin just outside Praia da Luz. I didn’t break them or destroy them, I just put them in this big bin on the national main road (the N-125) between Praia da Luz and Sagres. I have no idea what happened to them.”
“His house was full of stolen stuff and particularly passports. He kept them next to the chimney. They were in three piles and there were 80 to 100 of them. Certainly more than 60. I asked him where he got them and he said he had stolen them on tours at night time. He called them ‘tours’, the words he used. He was a burglar and he went around looking for places with unsecured windows. I don’t know if he went out daily or weekly, but he said the passports were one of the results of his tours.”
“Christian said he climbed up trees or scaled buildings, and he could name specific buildings he targeted. I remember in the resort where Maddie was taken there were trees there and he did say that he was operating in that area but he didn’t go into detail.”
He claims he fell out with Brueckner after he had been asked to visit him in prison with a bag of oranges ‘laced with vodka’. “He said he couldn’t get any drink or drugs in prison and he was desperate for something. He asked for the oranges, which I didn’t think would cause any problems. But when I took them in he was in a really bad mood and short with me. Marina had told him that I had stolen his CDs, saying she had seen me putting them in a separate bag in my van. He was really angry and didn’t believe I’d thrown them away. I didn’t speak to him after that.”
Ralph H, former friend of Brueckner
“He was always in financial trouble, despite all the drugs he dealt around the area. He also stole a lot and I sometimes drove him to his burglaries and waited in the car.
“He would steal everything he could. One time from the hardware store, other times the grocery store. He would work out the parts of shops where there were no cameras. He even dismantled solar panels on the highway in broad daylight. He would put on one of those protective yellow vests like a workman and just get on with it. We also dismantled entire rows of fences at a trade fair in Hanover, and walked off with them. A lot are still here today around my house and at Christian’s own allotment garden.”
“Christian told me about his childhood in Wurzburg, how he missed his biological mother who gave him away and his violent stepfather and the lock-up punishments in the cellar. He developed an inner and an outer demeanour. Two faces exactly. And violence, of course, begets violence.
“He met the right crooks in Portugal, he sold drugs at festivals and met a German woman [Nicole Feringher] with (a similar) criminal energy. She got work in these wealthy households as a babysitter, scouted them out then organised them to be robbed or burgled. She couldn’t get enough of it. Then this fine lady had the contacts to discreetly turn into money. She was a real ice-cold angel, and Christian told me he needed a strong, guiding hand like that. And she even supported his sexual preferences.”
“I realised he had an even darker soul than I could have imagined, particularly when I discovered he had pimped his own girlfriend as a whore on the internet. Clearly nothing was sacred to him and it was then I started to ask him repeatedly about Maddie’s disappearance. I bombarded him with questions about the case and could see he was lying. He didn’t want to talk about it and kept avoiding it. But I didn’t let up and suddenly he lost his nerve and dropped his guard for a moment and brought up the Maddie case, and that was that, I really grilled him on it. He shuffled around and then finally replied irritably: ‘Actually I don’t want to say anything about that’. It was obvious he knew something and had just stopped short of opening up.”
“I didn’t give up however and I drove him into a corner asking him about the child porn and why he needed three computers at his kiosk. Eventually he snapped, became really aggressive and then suddenly he left and climbed over my garden fence without a word and ran away. …and that was that, our friendship was over.”
Thomas Milde, foster son of Nicole Fehlinger (SF=Interviewer)
TM: Nicole is the name of my foster mom. She was not a foster, she was nothing. I thought she is, but she was the same like my mom. She said, “I'm not interested in you”.
SF: But she was getting money from the Germany state to take care of you, wasn't she?
TM: Yeah, that's why she take care of me (laughs).
SF: Only to get money?
TM: I think so. I think so. I was there for 4-5 weeks and we went to the beach in Sao Rafael and made a time to meet and go back. I was late 4 or 5 minutes, maybe 10 minutes, and she was waiting in the car for me and is like, "You are too late, say goodbye", and left me there. For a moment I thought she would come back but she didn’t come back (laughs).
SF: She didn't?
TM: No she didn't and I felt hopeless in another country without a language with my swimming shorts and nothing else. I don't know what to do and then I walk on the freeway 4 hours, 5 hours, 'til the police stops me and catch me because you can't walk on the freeway. But it was the only way to come home. She (NF) said take him.
SF: Do you think that she would be capable of making robberies in order to have a better life?
TM: It is possible that um she'd do it at this time 'cause she was everyday buying some stuff, some toys, some everything.. and um..
SF: She lived in a rich way.
TM: And where comes the money? From where comes the money? She has spent around 5 or 6 thousand Euros a month.
