Will the Maddie McCann case be solved?
Dear Reader,
Quite a few readers shared their thoughts on last week’s newsletter - How should Jews remember October 7th? Germans know the answer - in the comments section. You can join the debate here.
I also recently appeared on the ‘Guten Tag’ podcast to talk about migration policies after the Solingen terror attack. You can listen here or watch it here.
Sincerely,
Jörg Luyken
A little over four years ago, I was asked by a British newspaper to go down to the city of Würzburg to find out what I could about a man who had just been named as a suspect in the most famous missing person’s case in the world.
A day beforehand, prosecutors in Braunschweig had said Christian B.*, a then 43-year-old native of the Bavarian city, was suspected of murdering Maddie McCann, the British toddler who went missing from a hotel room on Portugal’s Algarve coast in 2007 and whose body has never been found.
A case that most people had written off as one of the great criminal mysteries of the 21st century had suddenly been given new life.
Significantly, German investigators were treating the case as murder, while British and Portuguese police had always treated it as a missing person’s case.
Braunschweig prosecutors gave no indication of why they were treating it as a murder inquiry. But they did say that they could place the suspect near the scene of the crime via his phone data and asked members of the public who had seen his car on the night of her disappearance to come forward.
I was far from the only journalist commissioned to cover the story.
Fleet Street’s finest had been sent on a European ding dong to sniff out the back story on a man who had been found guilty of sex crimes while a teenager and later lived as a drifter on the Algarve, where he made ends meet through a mixture of petty theft and odd jobs.
The British press pack were in a fevered race to get the first “scoop” on this shady character. Within days an anonymous ex-lover had remembered how he had told her he “had a horrible job to do” on the night before Maddie’s disappearance. He was soon linked to nearly every cold case from Saxony to Belgium.
But, just how trustworthy new reports on such a salacious story can be, became apparent to me within a few hours of my arrival in Bavaria.
A local TV reporter told me that a man claiming to have known Christian B. during his childhood was auctioning off quotes to journalists.
A picture of the house that the murder suspect grew up in was published in a British tabloid below “quotes” from his former foster mother, allegedly given at the front door. I had already been to the house - the family had sold it years previously.
A year later, the jamboree moved to Hannover, where prosecutors ordered the police to dig up an abandoned garden once rented by the suspect.
Police officers had put up large screen fences around the perimeter to prevent people from looking in. Prosecutors were staying tight lipped on what they hoped to find.
It was hard to eek more than a couple of sentences out of this new development. But journalists had been flown in from abroad. To fill out their copy, they again had to rummage through the suspect’s past.
There were the Syrian neighbours who obviously had no idea who he was; the passing acquaintances who gave some details about his pet dog and his favourite beer; a man who claimed to know some “dark secret” but was only prepared to give it up for cash; and the people who actually knew him - and had no interest in talking to the press.
It wasn’t just British newspapers throwing money at this absurdity. I met a Norwegian news team who had been pulled off a story in Warsaw to drive nine hours to shoot a couple of minutes’ footage with a police spokesperson. They looked like they had lost the will to live.
While all this was going on, Christian B. was already in jail.
At a 2019 trial in Braunschweig, prosecutors convinced a judge that he was guilty of the rape of an elderly American woman at her beach home on the Algarve fourteen years previously. Decisively, a hair found at the scene of the crime matched his DNA.
Then, in 2022, Braunschweig prosecutors announced charges against Christian B. in five separate cases of sexual misconduct, three of which were rape. All of the crimes were allegedly committed on the Algarve between the years 2000 and 2017.
The trial in those cases started in March. Last week, the court gave its verdict.
And it was quite some verdict.
The judge didn’t just clear Christian B. on all counts, she ripped the prosecution’s case to shreds.
“If someone is portrayed in the media as a sex monster and child murderer, then it is obvious to the witnesses that that person must be guilty in this case,” said presiding judge Uta Engemann.
Heavily implying that the decision to publicly name Christian B. as a suspect in the Maddie case had led victims of other crimes to conclude he was also their tormentor, Engemann dismissed the testimonies she had heard as “essentially worthless.”
The acquittal obviously wasn’t to some people’s liking. Members of the public reportedly stormed out of the gallery when Engemann said it wasn’t her job to play to the media or “pub chat.”
In one of the rape charges, Christian B. only became a suspect after the Irish victim saw his picture in newspapers in connection with the Maddie case. She said that she immediately recognised the “piercing blue eyes” of the man who attacked her in 2004. (The perpetrator had worn a mask during the crime, meaning that she hadn’t seen his face.)
But Judge Engemann said that she couldn’t possibly convict someone based solely on a victim believing she recognised his eyes so many years later.
“The accused does not even have piercing blue eyes,” Engemann stated, according to an account in the Braunschweiger Zeitung. “He has medium blue, monochrome eyes. Nobody in this courtroom can seriously claim that they would recognise someone with inconspicuous monochrome eyes from a photo.”
However, the judge reserved her most scathing criticism for the prosecution’s case in the other two rape charges.
In both instances, prosecutors hadn’t been able to find a victim. Instead, their case was based almost exclusively on the testimony of two of Christian B.'s former associates from Portugal’s criminal underworld. They claim to have found homemade VHS recordings of two rape scenes at his Algarve home, but have never been able to produce them.
Judge Engemann slammed their testimonies as “completely implausible.” Pointing out that one of the men, Helge B., had sold his story to the Bild Zeitung for €5,000, she said he had “no problem lying to the court,” had repeatedly changed his story, and seemed intent on putting his former accomplice behind bars.
Braunschweig’s prosecutors refused to attend the reading of the verdict last Tuesday, citing “official commitments.” Some have suggested that they were too embarrassed to face the rollicking they knew they were about to receive.
This emphatic verdict is fascinating.
Not only does it raise questions about the viability of the Maddie investigation, it also contradicts the evaluation of Helge B.’s testimony that a different judge at the Braunschweig court came to in the 2019 rape trial against Christian B.
Back in 2019, the court said that it found Helge B. fundamentally reliable: and the justification here would seem to be important. The judge pointed out that it was only thanks to Helge B. that they had linked the hair in the victim’s bedroom to Christian B. in the first place. Only once Helge B. went to the police in 2017, years after finding the alleged VHS, did police match the hair to Christian B.’s DNA.
In other words, a fairly major part of Helge B.’s testimony would seem to check out. (Unfortunately, I can’t say whether it was one that Engemann addressed in her ruling as the written ruling hasn’t been published yet.)
For their part, Braunschweig prosecutors say that judge Engemann is biased (they tried to get her removed from the case in July) and have said they will appeal the verdict.
They have been keeping their cards very close to their chest on the Maddie investigation, which is still dragging on four years later. It is clear though, that they planned to use Helge B. as a witness. He claims that Christian B. confessed his guilt to him shortly after she went missing, saying “she didn’t make a sound.”
Prosecutors have brushed off concerns that the recent verdict has put the Maddie investigation off track. “Another judge may see Helge B.’s testimony differently,” a spokesperson said, adding that Helge B. isn’t going to be their central witness anyway.
Just what the prosecutors know that they are still keeping quiet is a mystery. At this stage, the only known solid fact linking Christian B. to Maddie is a phone call he made on the night of her disappearance in the holiday resort the McCanns were staying at. That’s not going to be enough for a conviction.
Time is running out. Next September, Christian B. will be a free man again. Either Braunschweig prosecutors are keeping a major piece of evidence up their sleeve, or they are heading for an even worse humiliation than the one they received last Tuesday.
*In Germany, it is illegal to publish the full name of a defendant in a criminal case.
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