Three years before Madeleine McCann’s disappearance from a Portuguese seaside town, a young Irish woman claims she encountered the three-year-old’s suspected killer.
In 2004, Hazel Behan arrived at Praia da Luz for a working holiday.
Then 20 years old and always surrounded by her friends, Behan said a man she believed was Christian Brueckner broke into her apartment while she was alone in the middle of the night, and brutally raped her.
“I laid in bed and I fell asleep, [when] I was woken by somebody calling my name,” Behan told 60 Minutes.
To this day, she doesn’t know how a stranger knew her name, but she knew something was terribly wrong.
“I thought I was going to die,” Behan admitted to Tara Brown.
“He stood above me with the knife so I just thought he was going to just chop my head off. That sounds so dramatic but that’s exactly what was going through my head.”
The man, wearing a balaclava, dragged her across her apartment, raping her twice in her bedroom and once on the breakfast bar.
Wielding a knife to threaten Behan, he also struck her with a black leather whip. He set up video cameras to record her in compromising positions.
After a shocking ordeal of physical and sexual violence, the man took off and never came back. But the traumatic memory of that night remains with Hazel Behan 21 years on.
“Whether he killed me physically or not, spiritually, I was gone. I was done that day. I didn’t exist anymore,” she said.
More disappointment followed when Behan reported the attack to Portuguese police. She said the investigation was lacking, and felt the police did not believe her.
“The apartment was essentially how I had left it.
“The bloody sheets were still on my bed. My fingernails were still on the bed. They never collected them.”
Behan said “in the weeks that followed, they followed me, just to see if I was a slut, to see how I behaved”.
The police in Portugal may not have given the attack on Behan a second thought, but when UK police released a photo of suspected killer Brueckner in relation to the 2007 disappearance of Madeleine McCann, Behan instantly knew he was the same violent man she encountered in 2004.
Behan, who previously waived her right to anonymity, took her rape allegations against Brueckner to a German court, giving evidence of the traumatic night in harrowing detail. But 48-year-old Brueckner was acquitted, with the presiding judge saying there was insufficient evidence for a conviction.
Yet Behan still believes the man in the photo whom the UK police identified as Madeleine McCann’s suspect, is the same violent man that attacked her in 2004. And his acquittal from the case she put forward was not because she identified the wrong man, but because of poor investigation on the part of the police.
Behan said McCann’s disappearance was a consequence of the Portuguese police’s shortcomings.
“I believe he’s the person who took her. I believe he’s the person who carried out crimes on me. If they had investigated my crime, I believe that Madeleine would still be at home with her parents,” she said.
Christian Brueckner is serving a 7-year sentence for raping a 72-year-old woman. He is set to be released in September.
