The disappearance of three year old Madeleine McCan on May 3rd, 2007 from her family’s vacation home in Praia da Luz,Portugal has left police and investigators wondering for the past sixteen years. McCan´s case is considered one of the most heavily reported missing persons cases in modern times,  mostly because it has yet to be solved. 

The night that McCan went missing, her parents had left her, her siblings and other close family friends’ children asleep in their vacation home while they dined at a restaurant about 180 feet away from the home. At around 10 o’clock that night McCan’s parents noticed she was missing. At first Portuguese police believed McCan’s parents, Kate and Gerry McCan, played a part in her disappearance and had covered it up due to an accident that may have taken place in the home.The parents were issued as suspects in 2007 but were quickly lifted of any suspicion in the case as it was archived by Portuguese police in 2008 for lack of evidence. 

McCan’s parents continued the investigation through private investigators who treated the case as an abduction by a stranger. They found very little evidence but a few leads as there was video footage of a man carrying a child towards the beach around the time of McCan’s disappearance. Around this time Portuguese police reopened the investigation with the new found evidence. However, they continued to pursue multiple leads deemed significant in April 2017. 

With McCan’s whereabouts still unknown, she was presumed dead in 2020. Around that same time, the German City of Braunschweig revealed that there was a new suspect in the McCan case who police were convinced had abducted and murdered the child. 

Even though the main suspect, sex offender Christian Brueckner, has been possibly connected to the  kidnapping of McCan, McCan’s body still has not been found and the case remains ongoing. The open cold case of Madeleine McCan still remains the most heavily reported abduction in current times.