Madeleine McCann

Well, they'd have to link Bruckner to Madeleine beyond reasonable doubt. At this point they can't do it, regardless of what "everyone believes" or "everyone in this forum believes" or whoever "everyone is"….

One can't just indict and convict without any form of evidence and the Germans would if they could. This is why they are looking and digging. All we know is that the Germans do have evidence to at least point into the direction that Madaleine is dead, however death is neither confirmed nor is there a body.

What suprises me is that no DNA, no fingerprints, no fiber was found if somebody entered via the window. Either the police in Portugal was doing a bad job, - which I think they did, or Bruckner didn't leave anything at all, came in some form of hazmat suit and gloves….

As far as I know they have no proof of death. They have just indications, apparently strong indications pointing into this direction. I don't know much more and neither do I know what kind of indications they have. I am guessing it's most likely pictures on that USB stick or some hard drive, however the pictures may not show everything.

The Portuguese police haven't considered all the options from the beginning.

If a child is abducted, the motives could in general be one of the following:

• child trafficking
• child molestation
• asking for random money.

Especially the latter could have been at least a motive, the McCanns were both doctors and most likely had some means. Trafficking would have also meant road blocks right from the start.

Apparently DNA wasn't collected wearing gloves. The apartment was rented out after a couple of weeks or a month, and then later on examined again….

As far as I know there were British sniffer dogs trained on human remains in the apartment and they picked up some scent and gave a bark alert to a human cadaver in the apartment as well as in the McCann's rental car. Thus the McCanns were under suspicion, and the Tapas 7 may have been involved as well.

Sure, the dog alerts are not evidence in a court room. The dogs can only point the police into a certain direction to investigate further. One thing is certain, the trained dog didn't give a bark signal for no reason at all. However the explanation might be a different one. A different guest staying there before? A different tourist renting the car? All possible.

I also think your opinion regarding the McCanns is biased and you also seem to disregard the fact that they left the door unlocked, only checked up every 30 minutes, etc… It's the McCanns behaviour and their lack of parenting which made this all possible.

If there is evidence that the McCanns covered up an accident in which Madeleine died, they'll go to jail.

If there is evidence that Bruckner did it, he'll go to jail, or stay in jail.

This is regardless of what anybody in this forum thinks on who "certainly" did it. Here in this forum we can only discuss the little evidence or facts we know of.

The one detail I find noteworthy is that each time somebody checked up, the door was at a 45 degree angle. The wind blowing via a possible open window woulnd't do that, it'll be either 90 degrees open or nearly shut or shut. It's entirely possible that Bruckner was already in the apartment, especially since one of the adults didn't properly look into the room.

German police have a 80gb hard disk drive. On it is proof that Madeline is dead. That’s why they reported that she was dead.

Another way I'm trying to think through the idea of whether they were criminally negligent is to imagine there was no abduction, but say a small fire broke out in the apartment and the three kids died from smoke inhalation. I have to say I am leaning towards criminally negligent in that circumstance.

If not to the police, the McCanns sure would have to have an awfull lot of explaining to do to their other two children, and there would at some point have been one or the other accusation from one of the children. As a parent the McCanns should have known better, doctor's degree or not. There is sadly no excuse for their behaviour no matter what way one would look at it.

What also bothers me about the case is that Bruckner wasn't the only unsavoury character, sex offender or child molester in the area, there were a couple of others as well, a Swiss guy, even Clement Freud was considered who owned a property in the area. It's also possible Bruckner was close to some of them. We don't know, it's been a long time.

As far as I know about the case the matter was never really answered on whether the window was closed or open, and if closed also locked. Different people said different things, even said that they couldn't be certain.

I personally find this odd anyway. If I was so dumb as a parent to leave the children alone and unsupervised, and the door unlocked, I would at least have made sure that at least the window looking to a dark empty car would be locked with certainty.

Did the apartment not have vented rolling metal shutters? They are pretty much standard in Portugal. The whole idea of them is you have the shutters down and as they can only be raised from the inside you can leave the window open to let air in and keep cool.

Yes, they do.

The story is over 5 years old. Thu 4 Jun 2020

I would also consider that if Bruckner did it, he probably didn't even enter via the window but had a spare key to the apartment. He did odd jobs around the apartment complex and was familiar with lots of things. Since he was a child molester he would have known that this complex was used by families, and he would most likely have in his fantasies singled out one apartment he could easily enter unseen. He may have had a chance to get a spare key once, and maybe not by himself, but via somebody he knew.

The window would have been a difficult obstacle for him if the shutters were down. The shutters are housed in a box and rolled up and down. Many properties on the European mainland have them, in France, Belgium, Spain, Portugal and even Germany but in the UK and Ireland they are either extremely rare or don't exist at all. They shut completely and keep light completely in. They can be opened from the outside, but only at a considerable noise and physical effort as well as time and a chance to leave DNA evidence. This would have taken Bruckner around 5 to 10 minutes to complete as they are not easy to move from the outside. And then there was the likelyhood of beeing seen. Bruckner would have known better than that. I'd say, if he did it, he'd have a spare key and entered through the door.

I also found Kate's "They've taken her" strange. How come she shouted that? Who were "They?" "They" would implicate more than one person. How come Kate thought that? I would have expected an "Madeleine has been taken…" rather than a "They've taken her".

The thing is the public doesn't know what the Germans have on Bruckner. The information is being held back, out of tactical reasons for the investigation, and that's understandable from the viewpoint of police work.

I would suggest the Germans do have something on Bruckner, they do have pictures leading them to believe that Madeleine is dead to a very high probability. What precisely this is, we don't know. However I don't think they have a picture of a dead body, they certainly haven't found a body, and they haven't been able to match anything to Bruckner to have him indicted.

Otherwise they wouldn't be searching and digging. Such an activity is also a cost factor and there needs to be some justification for that as well.

I would suggest that the Germans have either strong circumstancial evidence pointing to Bruckner, but it's also possible that they are looking for some other reason to lock Bruckner away for life, as he's a threat to the public either way.

People always read way too much into this line. "They" is all the bad evil people you've ever nightmarishly thought would take your child. It's probably what I would have said in her position. The plural is irrelevant.

Parents aren't in their kids' rooms 24/7, staring at them. Everyone could be asleep when the fire quickly breaks out, and by the time the parents realise what's going on, the worst has happened. Tragic? Absolutely. Negligent? Maybe the Daily Mail might think so, but put it before a court, and it would be quickly dismissed as a confluence of unfortunate circumstances.

This is why, in the legal definition of child neglect, i.e.,

“It is an offence for any person who has responsibility for a child under 16 to wilfully neglect the child in a manner likely to cause unnecessary suffering or injury to health.” 

https://cpdonline.co.uk/knowledge-base/safeguarding/legal-implications-protections-child-neglect

I think the words 'likely to' do a lot of heavy lifting, because if you do not include those words, you could argue an awful lot of child neglect because this might happen or that might happen. Well, we cannot practically deal in every single improbability as life would essentially become unlivable.

So, to bring this back to the McCanns and their situation…

We can certainly accept that the McCanns wouldn't win any parenting awards for leaving their children sleeping, in their beds, in the unlocked apartment while they went to have dinner at the Tapas bar, one minute's walk away, but that doesn't automatically put them into the criminal-negligence bracket either. To put them in that bracket, you would have to prove that the situation they left their kids in was likely to have a bad outcome.

So that leads us back to probabilities. The surest way we can say if this was a risky venture is to ask how many children have been put in the situation that the McCann children were in, i.e. in their beds, sleeping, in an unlocked apartment, in a quiet resort, with someone checking in every half an hour. You can probably appreciate that we cannot get an accurate survey of that exact situation from everyone who might have previously practiced it. What we can be reasonably sure of, based on the behaviour of the McCann parents, the Tapas 7, and the listening service that the resort had previously offered is that the practice of leaving young children sleeping alone in the apartments of an evening happened enough to be considered fairly common (and perhaps some of these parents ventured rather farther away than the Tapas and were checking less frequently, if at all, I don't know). How many times has that practice led to harm to the children that we know of where children were injured or worse when the parents came back? Again, we don't have exact figures - parents might not remember or want to admit they left their child alone - but I can't find any incidents of harm or presumed harm coming to children in this type of circumstance. I can find a few incidents of toddlers drowning in pools around the Algarve, but these kids didn't hop out of a dead sleep to do it.

Not that I want to limit this to the Praia de Luz. Even if you take the entire world - what has been the statistical outcome of leaving young children in a similar situation to the McCann children? Again, as we can guess, a world survey of this type has not been conducted, but who wants to suggest that it would be likely to have a bad outcome if you run the scenario, with randomisation, 100,000 times?

In summation, people are free to call the McCann parents negligent if they wish. I wouldn't, because I think they've probably beaten themselves up enough, but that's me. As for criminal negligence? No, it doesn't meet the standard at all. And you can make every excuse in the book about why they've not been prosecuted on it, i.e. their class, their social status, their this, their that ….i's been 18 years. If it was as slam a dunk as some make out, it should be easy enough, but it's not happened. It might just be that in all that time, people more qualified and consequential than internet commentators and tabloid readers have looked at the actual legal standard and dismissed the idea out of hand.

They had teams with search dogs the following day scouring the entire resort and countryside. They looked in sewers, drains, bins - everywhere. Once the corrupt local cops were out of the initial response loops and the national Police were called in, things were done more professionally.

The local cops idea of investigation was to beat suspects until they confessed.