It was a warm night in mid spring and the Ocean Club resort on Portugal's far south coast was buzzing. Lights around the pool twinkled as the McCann family, from Leicestershire in England, gathered to enjoy the evening with friends while their three kids slept off the sun and sea nearby.
Then, in one moment, everything changed.
At 10pm on Thursday May 3, 2007, Kate and Gerry McCann's eldest daughter Madeleine, a few days away from turning four, was discovered missing from her bed.
Those who witnessed the chaos that night describe Kate pacing back and forth almost catatonic with fear as she looked for her lost child and tried to protect her 18-month-old twins, Sean and Amelie. Gerry was bent over, peering under cars, behind shrubs.
"You're in this quiet little holiday resort that seemed idyllic," Gerry has said of the moment. "[Then] We couldn't get the darkest thoughts out of our minds, that somebody had taken her and abused her. I remember being slumped on the floor [calling] some of my family members and just saying, "pray for her".
In the back of everyone's mind was simply this: were they still hunting for a lost little girl, or should they be looking for a body?
Millions of dollars have been spent trying to answer that question. But almost 15 years later Madeleine is still missing and details of what happened that night remain a mystery.
Madeleine's legacy
Now, Britain's Metropolitan Police has announced the dedicated $26 million task force Operation Grange, that was set up in 2011 to solve the case, is running out of money. While investigators will continue to accept tips, there are "no plans to take the inquiry further".
When the investigation winds up Kate and Gerry McCann will be back where they began in 2007: funding their own search for their "lovely daughter", this time from a fund of donations said to be worth about $1.3 million.
"We will never give up hope of finding Madeleine alive," Gerry has said. "We need to know, as we need to find peace."
Kate said in 2017 she will do "Whatever it takes, for as long as it takes," to find her daughter.
Yet even though investigations are no closer to charging a suspect, the hunt for Madeleine – who would turn 19 on May 12 – has already left an important legacy that experts believe has changed the way police approach investigations into missing children, including William Tyrrell and Cleo Smith, and even Shayla Phillips, the subject of Australia's most recent missing child hunt.
The three most important influences drawn from the Madeleine McCann case according to Xanthe Mallett — a forensic anthropologist and criminologist from the University of Newcastle who specialises in the behaviour of paedophiles — are the early use of a strong image, the creation of a "perfect victim", and an investigation strategy that prioritises multiple lines of inquiry.
The image
As news broke of Madeleine's disappearance in 2007, Mallett was watching TV with a group of colleagues from the forensic investigation centre where she worked in England.
As the story unfolded on the screen Mallett emphasises how important early images of Maddie were building a public profile for the media and British public to get behind, helping underscore the urgency of the search.
The now iconic photo of Maddie's sweet face — messy bobbed haircut and fringe, her wide blue and green eyes with a distinctive brown mark in the right — was deeply affecting. The fact that the little girl shared such a strong likeness to her mother emphasised their bond, and the unfathomable loss.
Everyone who saw the picture felt invested in Maddie's story and wanted to know what would happen next. The result is that the disappearance of Madeleine McCann has become one of the most widely-reported missing persons cases in history.
The "mediatisation" of Madeleine McCann was helped further by the fact that social media platforms including Facebook and Twitter had just launched, in 2004 and 2007, offering novel new ways for promoting the story.
Kate and Gerry, too, understood from the start that the will to invest effort into finding Madeleine was related to keeping her story in the news.
Maddie's parents were "pillioried" for their media focus, Mallett says, but "they knew if Maddie slipped off the front page the likelihood of her being found diminished significantly, so engaging with the media and keeping her front and centre, was their best chance of getting her back."
The media narrative built Maddie's disappearance as a mystery: how does a child simply vanish? The media — and crucially, also the police — continued to invest in finding the answer.
Their regular press conferences marking investigation milestones and anniversaries were accompanied by more emotive images – often featuring the couple side-by-side holding a photograph of their daughter, reminiscent of something biblical in the way it was constructed, subtly emphasising the idea that Maddie represented a "perfect victim".
The use of an early iconic photograph is a tactic that has assisted the campaigns for William Tyrrell and Cleo Smith, too, says Mallett.
"We all know the boy in the Spiderman suit," she says. "These are images that stay with you."
A 'perfect' victim
Defining Maddie as what criminologists call a "perfect victim" – someone who in the eyes of the public is totally blameless for their situation – helped build a sense of urgency to find her, Mallett says.
The story of this little girl, snatched from her bed while on holiday, described a scenario of intense vulnerability that triggered deep emotion in anyone who heard it regardless of whether they were a parent or not.
"Of course all victims are innocent but, unfortunately, we do tend to rank this idea. You'll hear conversations like "Oh well, you know, they were doing something risky"," Mallett says. "The perfect victim is somebody who was harmed through literally no fault of their own."
Once again, this aspect of the William Tyrrell and Cleo Smith cases was successfully emphasised as a method for galvanising ongoing public interest and support.
When we have our perfect victim, our "good guy", human biology comes into play, Mallett says. The loss of a child is something we can all relate to, and it reaches deep into the human psyche, exposing existential fears about safety and survival.
"If something's happened to a child, I think that pretty much rocks everybody," Mallett says.
Humans are hardwired to protect our youngest – biologically, they represent our future and when they go missing this tears at our sense of order in the world.
The investigations that follow abductions take us deep into the lives of these children – we learn about their personalities, we see their bedrooms and backyards, and study images of their favourite toys.
Following Maddie's disappearance Kate carried around a pink soft toy belonging to her daughter and spoke of the last time she was with her daughter — reading her favourite book If You're Happy and You Know It together.
We follow investigations into their disappearances like the minutes of a sporting match. There are good guys and bad guys and the entire community becomes bonded by the emotional investment in "victory" for our team.
Yet the McCann case also exposed inequalities in the way missing person cases are handled. Gerry and Kate, both doctors, had the intelligence and insights to drive a media campaign and their privileged middle-class background also matched stereotypes about what a "perfect victim" might look like.
"Millions of dollars have been poured into [the search] and it's unique in that sense because while every missing child deserves to be found, there are lots of missing children and very few of them receive this level of investment," Mallett says.
The investigation strategy
From the beginning, the search for Madeleine McCann faced a series of sliding doors moments that became torturous "what ifs".
- What if the holiday apartment had been properly sealed off as a crime scene to preserve evidence and early investigations by Portuguese police had been more focused?
- What if crucial clues, such as reports of a man leaving the resort carrying a sleeping child, had been quickly followed up?
- What if Madeleine's parents had never been labelled as key suspects, throwing the investigation off track for weeks?
- What if Scotland Yard had opened its own investigation far sooner than 2011?
These are questions that Graham Hill has spent years pondering and says he has never shaken "serious misgivings about the quality of the search strategy".
Hill was a British detective and expert in predatory sex offenders when he was seconded to Portugal to help search for Madeleine.
He met Kate and Gerry to discuss the case, but had little comfort to offer. As the days ticked on the chances of finding Madeleine alive fell exponentially with most abducted children killed within six hours of disappearing.
"It was a difficult conversation," Hill wrote in an article for The Conversation. "But I was struck by how focused the McCanns remained throughout."
Mallett says that one of the lessons to emerge from the McCann case is the importance of running several simultaneous enquiries: "Exploring the possibility of abduction as well as misadventure as well as the child simply wandering off or something happening within the family."
With the first 48 hours crucial in maximising the chance a missing child will be found alive, there simply is not time to run only one line of investigation, then switch to the next if it is unsuccessful, Mallett argues.
This strategy of multiple investigations was helpful in finding Cleo Smith, Mallett believes, adding that the very early offer of a large reward was another clever initiative.
"Only a few days into her being missing a large reward was offered," she says. "That is very unusual and even if it didn't have a direct impact what it did do is keep Cleo in the public's mind and keep people talking about her."
Finding the perpetrator
Of course, all of these strategies feel meaningless if the child isn't found or if a perpetrator isn't brought to justice.
And notwithstanding Mallett's advice to run multiple lines of inquiry from the get-go, when a child goes missing suspicion almost always first turns to the family.
Criminologists like Mallett are trained to pick up subtle shifts that can be crucial in suggesting guilt or innocence. But Mallett and her colleagues never wavered from a belief that Kate and Gerry were innocent.
"When a caregiver is responsible for the death of a child they tend not to use the name because it almost personalises the individual," she says. "They refer to them as "he" or "she" as a way of psychologically distancing themselves. If a parent is doing that when a child is missing it's a red flag."
Kate and Gerry never stopped referring to their daughter by name. In the first emotional press conference following their daughter's disappearance, Gerry asked for "any information related to Madeleine's disappearance, no matter how trivial" and begged, "Please, if you have Madeleine, let her come home to her mummy, daddy, brother and sister."
'Predators and prey'
Mallett, like most experts familiar with the case, is convinced Madeleine was abducted and over the years suspects have ranged from lone wolf paedophiles to organised crime gangs who deliver children to sex trafficking rings.
Mallett does not believe Madeleine was taken "to order" but was more likely the victim of an individual paedophile.
"There are predators and there are prey. It's just part of the animal kingdom, isn't it," Mallett says with devastating simplicity. "And so when there's an opportunity to take advantage of a situation someone will always leverage that."
She emphasises that while an individual's perversion is responsible for some child abductions, money remains "a huge driver for sex trafficking".
"The people who traffic people don't see them as different to any other commodity. They are totally emotionally disengaged," Mallett says.
Following Cleo Smith's abduction police were quick to begin scouring the dark web for any sign of her being offered for sale. While that was thankfully not the case it remains an important consideration whenever a child goes missing, Mallett believes.
"I don't think people understand that beneath the genuine economy is the black economy that views an abducted child as nothing more than an opportunity to access a new source of revenue," she says.
'Born evil'
The latest suspect in Madeleine's disappearance does nothing to bring comfort or closure.
In 2020 German police put forward the name of Christian Brueckner, a 45-year-old convicted paedophile and rapist who was known to live close to the Ocean Club where he also worked casually.
In a rare show of certainty, German public prosecutor Hans Christian Wolters has claimed to be "100 per cent sure" Brueckner was Madeleine's abductor. Yet Wolters also says he cannot reveal the information that has led to this conclusion, saying only that "If you knew the evidence we had you would come to the same conclusion".
Wolters has suggested that ongoing charges mean information implicating Brueckner cannot be revealed, and that despite his sincere believe this is the man who took Maddie, legal complications could mean he is never brought to justice.
Mallett says her understanding of Brueckner builds a picture of "a monster".
Public records portray Broeckner as a man obsessed with pre-pubescent girls, videoed his assaults and murdered his victims after keeping them alive for significant portions of time, she says.
"This man was born evil," Mallett believes. "He is the embodiment of the bogeyman, the worst of the worst, a sadistic psychopathic offender."
Kate and Gerry have consistently said they want to know the truth of what happened to their daughter, "whatever the outcome may be".
Yet Mallett says in some ways she hopes the evidence against Broeckner is not conclusive.
"That poor family, waiting all these years to find out what happened, but the answer is literally their worst nightmare … It would break most people," Mallett says.
How do you pick up the pieces?
As the McCann's face down another anniversary of their daughter's disappearance and another birthday without her, it's clear why they describe May as the most difficult month.
The problem of finding the person who abducted her feels almost insignificant beside the daily task of continuing to live life without her, and with the terrible knowledge of what is most likely to have happened to her.
Mallett, who has spent a large portion of her career working with the families of murder victims says "closure is never a word that they use".
"Even when they've had a resolution, it can help them move on but it will always be with them," she says. "Sometimes even 50 years later you see the trauma. It's intergenerational. It's a pain that travels through the family."
For this reason, powerful bonds can develop between families who have suffered similar tragedies.
Denise and Bruce Morcombe's son Daniel was 13 when he was abducted in 2003 while waiting at a bus stop, and later murdered.
The Morcombes had dinner with the McCanns in England in 2011 and have described the meeting "as like looking in the mirror".
"It was amazing how quickly we communicated even though it was the first time we'd ever met," Bruce has said, adding the couples shared how they coped.
Everyday life for the McCann's is now low profile – apart from their regular and deliberate engagement with the media.
Despite the enormity of what happened in Portugal in 2007, Kate and Gerry McCann have had to carry on parenting their twins who would have little memory of their big sister and yet live with the inherited trauma of what happened to her.
The family is believed to still live in Leicestershire where Madeleine grew up until her disappearance. They have a house in the village of Rothley and the twins – Sean and Amelie, now 16 — attend a nearby Catholic high school.
Gerry, a professor of cardiology, works at the University of Leicester.
Kate, a GP, stopped practising after Madeleine's disappearance to devote time to searching for her, and to charity work, but the COVID pandemic triggered her return to work in hospitals around Leicester.
The story of Madeleine McCann is one that has touched almost every corner of the globe, yet we are still waiting for the final episode. And even if a resolution is reached, it is very hard indeed to imagine there will be a happy ending.
Whether the official investigation into her disappearance by Britain's Metropolitan Police concludes or not, any parent who has lost a child to abduction knows this is a search without end.
