Madeleine McCann's Case: What to Know 19 Years After Her Disappearance

Madeleine McCann was only 3 years old when she vanished from a Portuguese holiday apartment 19 years ago.

On May 3, 2007, Kate and Gerry McCann went on a family holiday at the Ocean Club in Praia da Luz, Portugal, with their three children — Madeleine, Amelie and Sean. Later that evening, the couple joined a group of friends for a dinner at a restaurant approximately 100 yards away from the ground-floor apartment where the siblings were sleeping.

They periodically checked on their children throughout the night, but Kate discovered Madeleine was missing at 10 p.m. They alerted the authorities, while the resort initiated its missing-child search procedures.

"Words cannot describe the anguish and despair that we are feeling as the parents of our beautiful daughter Madeleine," Gerry said the next day, per ABC News.

He added, "Please, if you have Madeleine, let her come home to her mummy, daddy, brother and sister. As everyone can understand how distressing the current situation is, we ask that our privacy is respected to allow us to continue assisting the police in their current investigation."

"It might not be physically searching, but we have been working really hard and doing absolutely everything we can, really, to get Madeleine back," Kate said.

Two days after Madeleine disappeared, Portuguese police said they believed the young girl was abducted. They later named local resident Robert Murat as a suspect but was cleared in July 2008 due to insufficient evidence.

Madeleine's parents were also made arguidos, or formal suspects under Portuguese law, in September 2007. They remained under suspicion for months before the status was lifted in 2008.

Amid the case, Kate and Gerry released the 2011 book, Madeleine: Our Daughter's Disappearance and the Continuing Search for Her.

"The decision to publish this book has been very difficult, and taken with heavy hearts. My reason for writing it is simple: to give an account of the truth," the matriarch said in the book's official description.

At the request of Home Secretary Theresa May, Scotland Yard officially launched Operation Grange to further look into the Madeleine McCann case in May 2011.

"Your ordeal is every parent's worst nightmare and my heart goes out to you both," then-British Prime Minister David Cameron told the McCanns in a letter published by The Sun. "I am acutely aware of the frustration you must feel as more time goes by and yet no news is forthcoming, and I sincerely hope this fresh approach will provide the investigation with the new momentum that it needs."

By October 2013, Scotland Yard detectives had identified 41 potential suspects, in addition to the four suspects quizzed by police in July 2014. A BBC Crimewatch special also resulted in police receiving almost 1,000 phone calls and emails related to the case.

More than 13 years after Madeleine vanished, police identified German prisoner Christian Brückner as a prime suspect in the case. The man, a previously convicted rapist, p------, burglar and drug trafficker, was living in Portugal at the time of the British child's disappearance.

In June 2024, authorities discovered Christian's Hotmail account which, they said, was directly related to Madeleine's disappearance. He was never charged in connection with the case but was convicted in the 2005 rape of an American woman in Praia da Luz, serving prison time until September 2025.

Amid the probe, a Polish woman named Julia Faustyna came forward with claims she is Madeleine. She insisted she had evidence, but a 2023 DNA test proved otherwise.

In December 2024, she went to the McCann's Leicestershire home demanding Gerry submit to a second DNA test. She was convicted of harassing Madeleine's parents but was found not guilty of stalking.

A document from the Epstein files released by the Department of Justice included an FBI tip alleging Jeffrey Epstein's closest confidant, Ghislaine Maxwell, was spotted with a young girl resembling Madeleine in 2009.

"In September 2009 I was living in [location redacted]. It was a Sunday and very quiet. I turned off from my street onto the main road and found myself walking behind a woman and a little girl," part of the intake report, dated July 7, 2020, read.

It added, "There was also a middle aged man with them but he was walking much further ahead. When I got up close to the girl I noticed she looked like Madeline McCann. The woman was trying to hurry her along and seemed agitated that I was there. The little girl held her hand over her right eye the whole time we were walking along. She kept on turning round to look at me. I turned off after a while. I reported it to the web sight as a sighting as I found it was odd. Didn't think about it for years till saw the Fb post about Ghislaine Maxwell, and the theory of her taking Madeline McCann. The woman I saw looked just like Ghislaine Maxwell. I reported the sighting to the police but thought I would report it to you as well."

Authorities have not publicly linked Ghislaine to the case.

Nineteen years after the case began, the investigation into Madeleine's disappearance is still ongoing with no major progress has been made so far.

In March, Operation Grange received $116,414 (£86,000) in funding to continue the operation through 2026–2027, a significant reduction from the $142,534 (£108,000) allocated in 2025.