Madeleine McCann: The hit-and-run theory explained

0:00Hello, Ed Conway here. Here is what might sound like a slightly random question. What do AirPods, bananas and a pair of shoddily made running trainers from the 1970s have in common? On the surface, not very much. But on my podcast, Stuff Matters, I will uncover the deeper stories behind each of them. You will see how together they tell a fascinating new story about the world we live in. The first full series of Stuff Matters is out now. Just search for it on your podcast app and follow. Her whereabouts remain unknown. The chief suspect in her disappearance is due to be released from prison next week.

0:38But the search for Madeleine McCann continues. And now Sky News has tracked down the woman at the centre of a potential hit and run. That's next. Hello, Ed Conway here. Here is what might sound like a slightly random question. What do AirPods, bananas and a pair of shoddily made running trainers from the 1970s have in common? On the surface, not very much. But on my podcast, Stuff Matters, I will uncover the deeper stories behind each of them. You will see how, together, they tell a fascinating new story about the world we live in. The first full series of Stuff Matters is out now. Just search for it on your podcast app and follow.

1:23Almost 20 years on, the disappearance of Madeleine McCann remains a mystery. Hi everyone, Neil Patterson here with the Sky News Daily and I just want to take you back all the way to May 2007. A three-year-old Madeleine was on holiday in Praia de Luz. Now that's a lovely little village in Portugal's Algarve region in the south. She was there with her twin younger brothers, her parents and her parents' friends. Now the latter went out for dinner, leaving the three kids alone in their holiday apartment. When they returned to check on them at 10pm, Madeline was nowhere to be found, and there have been no confirmed sightings of her ever since.

2:02There have, however, been a number of suspects, including briefly the McCanns themselves. There have been multiple theories investigated, including that she was struck in a hit and run by a German woman then living on the island. Sky News has tracked that woman down. Our Crown correspondent Martin Brunt was the reporter responsible. Look, before we turn to Har Martin, what is the current state of the investigation? And what is the situation with the main suspect, Christian B?

2:32Martin Brunt:He is in jail at the moment, but he's about to be freed. He's being released from a rape sentence. He's come to the end of a seven-year sentence for raping an elderly woman in the village in Portugal, Prada Luz, where Madeleine vanished. But he's still the suspect, and according to the German prosecutor, the only suspect in the Madeleine case. And the prosecutor has for the last, what, three or four years made it very clear that he believes Christian B, as he's known under German privacy laws, is the abductor and the murderer of Madeleine McCann. and he says he has evidence to support that, but he also says he doesn't have quite enough evidence to arrest him or to charge him.

3:22Martin Brunt:So because Christian B is now or just about to come to the end of his current rape jail sentence, he will have to be released. But over the course of this investigation, there have been other suspects, and you've been looking into one of the other theories surrounding the disappearance of Madeleine. I've gone back seven years to 2018 when I was told about the theory of the hit and run accident. And I explored it then. And for a number of reasons, we didn't run the story in 2018 principally because while we were doing it, Christian B emerged as a rather more likely suspect in the Madeleine case.

4:04Martin Brunt:But the theory was this, that Madeleine had managed to get out of the apartment and had walked into the road and a passing car had hit her. Now, the theory was that the driver of the car was a German woman who had a previous conviction for drink driving. She was in 2018 an alcoholic and she panicked and because of her previous conviction thought that if she was caught in this new hit and run, then she would go to jail for a very long time. So with the help of her English boyfriend, they covered up the hit and run accident and got rid of Madeline's body. That was the theory. And I have to say it was a theory that was favored largely by the Portuguese police.

4:57Martin Brunt:One thing Portuguese police wanted to do was to ask German authorities to mount an undercover operation against the German woman who by 2018 had gone back to Germany to live. But the German authorities, because they then had Christian B emerging as a more likely suspect, refused to get involved in an undercover operation. And as far as I can tell, that hit and run theory was investigated initially, but then fizzled out. Now, we, Martin, are clearly not naming this German woman for legal reasons, but we have been looking for her. In 2018, I simply couldn't find her. I knew her name. I knew the name of her English partner, who I knew had gone back to England when she went back to Germany.

5:47Martin Brunt:And he had died within a couple of years of going back to Germany. So I knew all about him. I didn't approach his family, because I was more concerned in trying to locate the German woman. And I failed miserably in 2018. But I resurrected my investigation in the last few weeks, went back to Praia de Luz and managed to find somebody who knew the woman, managed to talk somebody into giving me her phone number and eventually managed to contact her by phone in Germany. And how did that conversation go? I mean, presumably you ring up, hello, it's Martin Brunt of Sky News. Not words that people generally like to hear when they're picking up the telephone.

6:35Martin Brunt:Some people like to hear from me, Neil. Not everybody. And you're right, when I phone somebody, it's usually bad news because that's my world. I'm a crime reporter. I did manage to engage her in conversation. And we actually spoke for about 10 minutes. and there was a bit of to-ing and fro-ing before I made it really clear what I was calling about. She didn't sound terribly upset or surprised to be hearing from me. One of the first things she told me was that within a day or so of Madeleine's disappearance, the Portuguese police called on her and her English boyfriend and searched their flat. She got very annoyed at one stage, she said, because on the second visit, they went through her freezer, took all the stuff out of the freezer.

7:22Martin Brunt:And she said to me, she said, I said to the police at the time, what do you think I've done? I've cut her into small pieces and eaten her, which is a rather odd thing to say. But the really intriguing thing was she said that out of the blue in 2018, which was when the police were looking at the hit and run theory, she got a call from police in Germany and they asked her, she said, only about Christian B., who was then becoming a suspect. But again, she said that the German police commissar, as she called him in the north of Germany, called her several times over more than a year and even asked her at one point for her SIM card, the SIM card from her mobile phone that she'd used when she'd been living in Portugal.

8:11Martin Brunt:And she said she sent it to him. And I thought that was a bit odd. And my interpretation of all this was that the police weren't just asking her about Christian B. They seemed to be fishing for more information. What is her explanation of what she was doing at the time? It has been suggested there was a hit and run and that she might have been involved. She said she wasn't aware of any hit-and-run accident, and she said she wasn't aware that she had at any stage been under any suspicion. She said on the night that Madeleine vanished, she'd been working at a restaurant down by the beach, no more than 500 yards from the McCann apartment, and she got home at 10.30 that night.

8:58Martin Brunt:Now, Madeleine was discovered missing at about 10 p.m. So she's saying that she had an alibi. I mean, there's no way of corroborating that. It's very difficult to check any of this. But she clearly said she knew nothing about a hit and run. First she'd heard of it. And she was busy working at the restaurant when it was supposed to have happened. Also from your conversation with this German woman, It seems that she was unaware about the media reports in Praia Delusion elsewhere about the potential for there being a hit and run. Yes. I mean, this is another odd thing. Three months ago, the Portuguese newspaper Correio de Mania had a leak like I did seven years ago about this hit and run theory pursued by the Portuguese police.

9:47Martin Brunt:And it gave an awful lot of detail. Again, like me, it didn't name her for legal reasons, didn't name the Englishman. But I think she would have identified herself from that report, although she was in Germany. And she did say to me, well, you know, I've got friends in Portugal in Prada Luz still. Why didn't they alert me to this newspaper report? it's difficult to believe that one of her friends at least didn't read that report and ring her to tell her. And how did your conversation with her, how did that conclude? Not very well, as you can imagine. And I wasn't surprised because I told her about the newspaper report and I said, surely you must have recognised yourself in that.

10:35Martin Brunt:at which point she got quite irate and put the phone down. And when I tried to get back to her a couple of days later, she again was quite civil to begin with and then very quickly said, don't ring me again, I'm going to block you. Are we wrong to get the impression that perhaps not as much time and resource was devoted to this particular line of inquiry, the hit and run theory? I think that's a fair point, Neil. I originally thought that Scotland Yard had been involved, and I do know that they had contacted the family of the Englishman, the woman's partner. So that led me to believe that Scotland Yard had been part of this investigation.

11:18Martin Brunt:But it was principally a Portuguese investigation, and they don't appear to have given it an awful lot of credibility. To be honest, Neil, I don't think it's very plausible. And one of the reasons is, as Kate McCann has said or wrote in her book, that the idea is quite, to her, ridiculous that Madeleine could have got out of the apartment. because to get out of the apartment, according to Kate, she would have had to have pulled back the curtain, pulled open the unlocked patio door, climbed over a child gate that the McCanns, I think, had either taken with them or had hired that was on the top of the veranda by some steps that went down to the garden.

12:08Martin Brunt:And then, having done all that, opened the garden gate onto the road and, as Kate said, and then closed all of them behind her. She didn't think that was at all plausible. She said it was ridiculous to suggest that Madeleine could have done that. So I think that there's a lot that kind of negates the idea of the hit-and-run theory, I think. But as you say, Martin, any number of questions still remaining unanswered, particularly to the involvement of this individual Christian B. He is going to be released from prison, having served that sentence for the rape conviction. But he remains a person of interest.

12:46And in fact, you were speaking to one of his former associates when you were back in Pride of Luz.

12:52Martin Brunt:Yes. So I spoke to Ken Routh, who's an expat that has taken a huge interest in the Madeleine McCann case, who claims that, you know, he's got certain information that the police have ignored. And I did a report with Ken about 18 months ago in which he told a bizarre story of he knew Christian and he knew another guy. And the other guy had come to him and told him that he got involved in a plot with Christian B to steal a child and to sell the child to a childless couple. And this was all about a week before Madeleine vanished. And Ken's argument was that, you know, this was the real plot. This will explain how Madeleine vanished and why Christian B was involved.

13:39Martin Brunt:So I went back to see Ken last week when I was back in Prior Deluge. And he's kind of extended his theory because he took me to a remote area where a concrete base, a big concrete base of a potential house, the house was never built, had been laid a few weeks after Madeleine vanished. And Ken's supposition is that the plot to sell the child fell apart as soon as the alarm was raised about Madeleine vanishing. And so the child was killed and buried in this newly laid concrete plot. Now, again, I didn't think Ken had an awful lot of evidence to suggest that. But it was something that he'd told Scotland Yard about.

14:24Martin Brunt:and Scotland Yard had written back to him saying that they couldn't just get the local police to go and dig up this concrete base. I mean, I suppose the bottom line, Neil, is what I'm discovering is that the Madeleine case just goes off in so many different tangents. There is still no explanation that we know of to give us any idea of what happened to her. But at the centre of it, Martin, I suppose we shouldn't forget, Kate and Jerry McCann the parents of Madeleine who for however many years now have had no answers as to where their daughter is 18 years and they made the point some time ago and I think this might have been in Kate's book that they will never give up hope of her being found alive they've seen no evidence to suggest not only is she dead but they've seen no evidence to suggest she's come to any harm.

15:24Martin Brunt:So the McCanns cling to the hope and the lack of evidence against any harm, but they also cite examples where other abducted children have been found alive and reunited with their family.

15:42And you can catch Martin's full report over on the website. That's your lot for today. We're back again tomorrow. Hello, Ed Conway here. Here is what might sound like a slightly random question. What do AirPods, bananas and a pair of shoddily made running trainers from the 1970s have in common? On the surface, not very much. But on my podcast, Stuff Matters, I will uncover the deeper stories behind each of them. You will see how together they tell a fascinating new story about the world we live in. The first full series of Stuff Matters is out now. Just search for it on your podcast app and follow.