I fled criminals in the UK for a quiet life abroad, only to meet Christian Brueckner among Portugal's drifters - but police STILL won't listen to what I have to say about the chief Madeleine McCann suspect

In 2004, Ken Ralphs left the UK with his wife Hazel for a new life in Portugal.

But unlike many expats who choose sunnier climbs over Britain, Ken was not motivated by weather or the cuisine.

Instead, he was fleeing for his life - a decision that would see him cross paths with Christian Brueckner, the chief suspect in Madeleine McCann's disappearance.

Ken, now 59, had responded to a police appeal over the horrific 1999 murder in Stockport of small-time drug dealer David Barnshaw, who on September 20 was bundled into his own car, forced to drink petrol and burned alive.

The shocking case shone a spotlight on Manchester's criminal underworld, and through his close work within the local community, Ken came across a phone number he thought would be of interest to the police investigating the killing.

This information led to several arrests, but the accused were acquitted.

Over the course of the investigation and subsequent trial, however, a life-changing error was made and Ken's identity as an informant - which he was promised would remain confidential - was disclosed to the defence team.

Speaking to the Daily Mail in 2004, Ken said this resulted in him being branded a 'grass' by local gangs.

His food truck business was petrol-bombed, Ken and Hazel's foster son was attacked as he walked home from work, and they received death threats.

The couple were forced into police protection, but - deciding that this was no way to live - Ken sued Greater Manchester Police for the blunder and was awarded £134,000 for negligence and breach of confidence.

'No amount of compensation can ever pay for the scar that the police blunder has left on our lives,' he told the Daily Mail at the time, as his story featured on the front page of the newspaper, as well as the Mail On Sunday.

Ken and Hazel used that money to buy a campervan and drove south from the UK to Portugal to escape the threats. Little did they know at the time, however, that they were escaping the frying pan - and into a fire.

As Ken was going through his ordeal, Brueckner - a German petty thief, drug trafficker, paedophile and rapist - was playing his trade in Portugal.

He resided in the Algarve, Portugal's southernmost region known for its Atlantic beaches, golf resorts, holiday homes - and also its off-grid drifter community.

But to many in the UK, the region is also known for the 2007 disappearance of Madeleine McCann, a three-year-old British girl who on May 3 that year vanished without a trace from the Ocean Club resort in Praia da Luz.

She had been there with her parents, but was left at home as the adults dined with their friends at the resort's tapas bar - earning them the nickname the Tapas Seven.

The investigation into Madeleine's disappearance has ultimately been fruitless, but in 2020, German prosecutors announced they have 'concrete evidence' that the 46-year-old criminal had abducted and killed the youngster.

Portuguese prosecutors also formally identified Brueckner as a suspect in 2022 after it emerged that his yellow and white VW T3 Westfalia campervan was reportedly spotted near the Praia da Luz resort in Portugal around the time Madeleine vanished.

Brueckner, who is currently on trial in Germany for separate crimes, is believed to have been moving between southern Portugal and his homeland from the mid 1990s, scraping a living from odd jobs such as selling cars and bar-tending.

While in Portugal, he fell in with the Algarve's drifters and went on to commit a series of crimes - and has since been convicted of counts of child sexual abuse and drug trafficking, all unrelated to Madeleine McCann. He is serving a prison sentence in Germany for raping a 72-year-old American woman in the region.

Formal charges against him in the McCann case have never been brought, and he has always denied having anything to do with the three-year-old's disappearance.

Ken, however, is adamant that the German has a case to answer.

Brueckner had already been living on-and-off in the Algarve for a number of years by the time that Ken and Hazel arrived in their campervan in 2004 and joined the drifter community living on campsites and beaches in the picturesque region.

They lived off the compensation won by Ken, who would also earn money through helping others living in motorhomes by fixing and maintaining their satellites.

Ken had been a community champion in Greater Manchester where he had previously been an elected representative of a local political party.

He had also worked in partnership with Manchester Police to fight crime under the Crime and Disorder Act, and as a result, he was streetwise.

Because of his previous work - combined with his more recent experiences in Manchester - he was wary of who to associate with.

'I knew who to choose to socialise with,' Ken told MailOnline. 'If you didn't like your neighbour, you could simply start your engine the following morning and move to another beach. You could pick and choose your friends wisely.'

He said that 99 percent of the people who arrived in caravans were 'decent lads'. Many were surfers, he said, or expats like he and his wife.

But there was also an underbelly of criminals, Ken said, and he quickly learned who to avoid - including drug dealers and suspected paedophiles.

'I've got millions of friends out here [in Portugal] that are nothing like them,' Ken said. 'Even the people that live off-grid today are decent people.

'It's just the odd one that hides [that are the issue],' he added.

One person Ken met early on was a man who MailOnline has chosen not to name for legal reasons, and who for the purposes of this article will be called John.

John was living in the Algarve with his wife and two young children, and was struggling to make ends meet. He had set up a small camp on a beach, with a tent, mostly hidden from view from any road or dwelling.

Ken said he and Hazel would often take food to their camp so the family could eat, and soon got to know them well.

It was through John that Ken formally met Brueckner for the first time, at Praia do Amado - a beach around 10 miles from Praia da Luz.

While Ken said he had seen the drifter at other locations in the region since he had arrived in 2004 - at car boot sales, in town centres, or in other camping spots on the region's beaches - John was the one to introduce them formally.

Recalling his first impressions of Brueckner when he first met him in 2006 - a year before Madeleine vanished - Ken said: 'He was a good looking lad. He was slick, his hair was combed back, nice and tidy. He looked very clean.'

Pictures from Brueckner's time in Portugal show the young German smiling for the camera with other motorhome owners.

'He spoke very well - posh English. He seemed very educated,' Ken added. 'I didn't have any reason to think he was the monster I've since learned him to be.

'He's a monster in disguise,' he said.

Brueckner was one of the people to know where John's secret camp was, Ken said. 'They were knocking about with each other,' he recalled.

While he had some suspicion that Brueckner was an unsavoury character, he added: 'I didn't know of his past criminal activities. There's no way in God's earth I would have been around him at the time if I had known.'

In the time between 2006 and 2007, Ken said Christian went off somewhere else, leaving Ken to get to know John better and focus his efforts on helping his family.

But one night in April 2007, around a week before Madeleine vanished, Ken said he and John were sitting around a campfire drinking some beers together having spent the evening with their families.

By this point, Brueckner had returned to the Algarve, and he had been around the camp earlier too with the group - and at one point even had John's young daughter on his knee, 'bouncing her up and down,' Ken said.

He recalled John saying that his daughter 'loved' Brueckner, and that the German had 'even looked after her for us' when John and his wife had left the camp.

Ken and Hazel were planning on going back to the UK in a few days, he said, and so they took some photos of the group that evening - unsure if everyone would still be there when they returned to Portugal.

His camera was later stolen from his van.

After Brueckner left the site, and after the others had turned in for the night, Ken was left alone with John, who he said started to get emotional, telling the British expat how difficult life had become and the struggles he had supporting his family.

It was then that John revealed to him a shocking secret, Ken said.

The desperate father revealed to him that Brueckner had spoken about a plot to kidnap a young girl and sell her to a family - suggesting it as a way to make some quick money - and that John could get in on the plan.

'We sat by the fire until the early hours of the morning,' Ken recalled to MailOnline, 'and that's when [John] started to cry and confess.'

The expat said he initially tried to comfort an 'obviously depressed' John, before John asked Ken if he could tell him the 'secret'.

'[John] told me Christian was planning to take a child from Praia da Luz,' Ken said.

'He then clarified it was not ransom, but that it was to take a child to sell to a German couple who could not have children of their own.

'He assured me the child would not be harmed,' Ken said, adding that John 'told me Christian knew many people who will pay good money for a child who cannot give birth, and that the child would be taken from a rich family with more than one child [of their own] so the parents would not grieve as badly.'

After this shocking revelation, Ken pressed John for more information.

He said John explained Brueckner 'worked at the [Ocean Club] restaurant, and that he had been planning events for months.'

The restaurant was the same that Kate and Gerry McCann were in with a group of friends on the night that Madeleine vanished.

'He said Christian Knows the place inside out and was very clever and he knows what he is doing,' Ken added.

Recalling that night, Ken told MailOnline that he set about trying to dissuade John from going through with the plot, warning him to not fall in with criminals.

He even offered John to join him in his satellite maintenance work to help get him back on his feet.

However, to this day Ken is not sure if he got through to John. Despite his best efforts to get more information out of him about Brueckner's alleged plot, he said John eventually went to bed saying he was tired, and they didn't speak about it again.

A week later, Ken was back in the UK - briefly visiting his father in Stockport - when the news of Madeleine's disappearance broke on the news.

'I was sat in my dad's house having a cup of tea when it came on the news - the breaking news when the news came out,' an emotional Ken recalled. 'First thing I said was 'oh for f*** sake'. My dad asked what's the matter, and I told my dad.'

The news left him in tears, and his father persuaded him to go to the police - despite his past experiences.

Choosing not to return to police in Manchester after his experience in 2004 that caused him to flee to Portugal, Ken said he acted on his father's advice and delivered a statement to another station outside the city.

Ken claims he handed officers there a hand-drawn map of where the tee-pee camp was hidden in Portugal and requested they send it to Portuguese officials involved in the search for Madeleine. He also told officers that John had told him Brueckner was working at Ocean Club, he said.

In a statement to MailOnline, the police station in question said it had no record of any information being provided to officers at the station.

On his return to Portugal days later, Ken went straight to the site of the tee-pee camp - only to find that it had been destroyed by fire - all but a bamboo cage.

'What I got back I wanted to see whether [John and his family] were still at the camp, to try and establish whether he had been involved. If he was still about, I could have questioned him, but he wasn't there,' Ken said.

'It had all been destroyed by a fire - everything had been gutted, totally burnt-out. All that remained was a four-or-five-foot cage, which I found unusual, because the cage wasn't there before when [John] gave his confession.'

After finding the destroyed camp site, Ken searched the other Algarve beaches John was known to frequent, saying he was driving around for hours.

He eventually found another mutual acquaintance, a Frenchman who was also part of the drifter community (and who MailOnline is not naming) at Amado beach - the popular spot for drifters around 10 miles from Praia da Luz.

The Frenchman told Ken that John had left him with his pet dog after leaving for Africa. This was surprising, Ken said, on account of John having no money.

Ken has never seen or spoken to John again.

He also said he spoke to two GNR (Portugal's National Republican Guard) officials and gave them the same information he had given to police back in the UK.

He said the officials told them they were aware of John, but doubted he could be involved on account of him having a family of his own.

As the story of Madeleine's disappearance hit the front pages, the world's media descended on Praia da Luz.

Ken himself said he went down to the Ocean Club resort around that time as investigations were underway, and saw police combing the area.

Nearby, he said, he encountered Brueckner wearing an apron.

Ken said he was 'gobsmacked' to see Brueckner in Praia da Luz, even as the media and investigators were working in the small Algarve town.

'He was working at the Ocean Bar illegally' being paid under the table, Ken claimed.

'This man [Christian] was standing there in his restaurant pinny still working for them illegally at the restaurant - which could have put further people at risk.'

By working there, Ken suggests, Brueckner would have had access to the guest book ledger - something that Kate McCann would go on to express her concerns over in the wake of her daughter's disappearance.

In her book, Madeleine's mother made reference to a block booking being jotted down and how staff were able to read that their children would be alone.

She wrote: 'It wasn't until a year later, when I was combing through the Portuguese files, that I discovered that the note requesting our block booking was written in a staff message book, which sat on a desk at the pool reception for most of the day.

'To my horror I saw that, no doubt in all innocence and to explain why she was bending the rules a bit, the receptionist had written the reason for our request... we wanted to eat close to our apartments as we were leaving our young children alone there and checking on them intermittently.'

In the same 2011 book, 'Madeleine – our daughter's disappearance and the continuing search for her' Kate McCann voiced her fears of foreign paedophiles.

She wrote: 'Night after night, I read of depraved individuals, British paedophiles, Portuguese paedophiles, Spanish, Dutch and German paedophiles and the horrific crimes they committed.'

According to reports at the time, all employees of the Ocean Club resort in Praia da Luz were interviewed by police during the investigation into Madeleine's disappearance.

However, Ken suggests that if Brueckner was working at the restaurant off the books, he could have been missed by investigators.

In 2020, when Brueckner was officially named as a suspect by German police, Ken said he was left stunned to see the face of the man he briefly knew from Portugal 13 years ago looking back at him on the news.

'I was straight on the blower back to Scotland Yard,' he said, and asked if officers had followed up on any of the details he said he had given police in 2007.

He told them to search for John first and foremost in the hope that he could shed light on whether Brueckner had anything to do with Madeleine's disappearance, recounting again what John had told him a matter of days before she vanished.

Ken was later told that the missing drifter was tracked down by the police.

However, according to the expat, when police did catch up with John abroad, John told the cops he had never met Ken or Hazel.

That's where the investigation into John ended, Ken said, despite there being several other witnesses to them having known each other during their time in Portugal.

Ken told Sky News earlier this year that 'police told me someone had made contact with my friend abroad and he had denied knowing me, but I have a dozen witnesses who will say that he's lying.

'I guess he just didn't want to be interviewed by the police,' he said.

Ken told MailOnline he has made several attempts to learn whether the information he passed on about Brueckner was acted upon.

In 2023, Ken wrote three letters to Scotland Yard's Operation Grange - the team investigating Madeleine's disappearance, which was set up in 2011.

'Why did [my statement] not raise a red flag and why [did] police fail to put two and two together to make Brueckner a suspect in 2007, instead of delaying it until 2020?' he asked in one of his letters dated August 17 last year.

'Police were aware from information I had given about Christian being the waiter who dealt with the restaurant bookings [at the Ocean Club],' his letter also said, before questioning why this was not looked at further.

DCI Mark Cranwell, the Senior Investigating Officer for Operation Grange did respond to Ken's letters.

'I am aware that you are becoming increasingly frustrated with the perceived lack of action by the MPS and Portugal law enforcement,' the reply said.

'However I wanted to reassure you that we have reviewed all the information you have provided. The information is always assessed, analysed and considered in the wider context of the investigation.'

DCI Cranwell added: 'I wanted to reassure you that we have shared the relevant pieces of information with our international law enforcement partners in Germany and Portugal, who in turn make an assessment of the information against their own internal policies and investigation strategies.

'They, like the UK can only work within the boundaries of their internal legislation.'

The senior investigator also thanked Ken for the information he had provided.

The British expat said he has never heard from German investigators following up on the information passed to them by Operation Grange. 

Ken is not the only person to have known Brueckner who has claimed they were ignored when raising concerns about the German.

Last year, it was revealed that a German man named Helge B. approached Scotland Yard in 2008, suspecting Brueckner's involvement.

Speaking to the German tabloid Bild, Helge said: 'I called Scotland Yard in 2008, ringing the Maddie hotline. I told them I know someone who has something to do with it and gave them his name. They noted my personal details, my telephone number, but nothing happened. Nothing! They never even rang me back.

'I thought to myself: I guess they'll be in touch at some point.'

What's more, other past friends of Brueckner's have pointed the finger at him.

Speaking to The Telegraph in 2020, Austrian Michael Tatschl - who was friends with the German since 2000 when they lived in Portugal - said he was certain Brueckner was the one behind Madeleine's suspected abduction.

'I know he did it,' Tatschl told the newspaper at the time.

'I was living with him at the time. He was my best friend and he was definitely a pervert and more than capable of snatching a child, for sexual kicks or money.

'I was sure it was him the minute the police came to find me in Austria.

'They were very clear with me from the first minute. They said 'we are investigating Maddie McCann and Christian Brueckner' and I told them I knew it already.

'I was convinced it was him,' Tatschl added.

And in an interview with the Mail On Sunday in 2021, Brueckner's ex-girlfriend claimed he admitted being close to the McCann's apartment on May 3, 2007.

Nakscije Miftari recalled Brueckner falling silent when the subject of Madeleine's abduction was raised by friends during a party in early 2014 at their flat in Braunschweig, northern Germany.

'I remember he made no answer to the question. After they went, I asked about Maddie as I did not know anything about her,' she said.

'I asked him about it and he said, 'I know about Maddie, I was near the hotel at the time. I was living in the area at the time. I am not going to say anything more. I am not a stupid guy, I am a businessman.'

Ken's claim that John told him Brueckner was plotting the kidnap to make money also tracks with past comments from another ex-girlfriend.

Speaking to The Mirror in 2020, a British ex-girlfriend of the German said Brueckner's only passion - besides cars - was making money.

'Other people get joy out of films, music, socialising, that sort of thing,' she said at the time. 'But for [Brueckner], if there was no money to be made out of something, then there was no point doing it.'

Like those who knew Brueckner from the past, Ken also believes the German was capable of kidnapping a child - but suspects he did not act alone.

He is of the belief that it was Brueckner who planned the kidnap, but that it was John who entered the McCann's hotel room to take her from the resort, before the pair went to a third person's house to wait out the initial search operation.

However, once the group realised the media attention the case was getting, Ken said he fears they had no choice but to 'dispose' of the youngster.

'John did tell me that the child wouldn't be harmed, so in the back of my mind there's a possibility she could still be alive and she was sold,' he said.

'But in theory, when she was taken back [to a nearby location], I believe she could have been disposed of. When the media identified the mark in her eye, she became a liability in my opinion - and therefore [the group] wouldn't have been able to sell her.'

Asked whether he regrets not going straight to the police after John confessed to him about Brueckner's plot, a tearful Ken told MailOnline that he does.

'I do regret that, it haunts me. It haunts me. I've had many sleepless nights over it, going back over it. Trying to put myself in the same position.

'I've even thought recently maybe I could go through hypnosis to see if there's something there [that I've forgotten]. I'd even be willing to do that.'

He said that if John and Brueckner were behind Madeleine's abduction, the thought of them going free leaves him 'gutted'. 'I've never felt such a loss in my life,' he said.

'I feel in a way I've failed as a community champion. It makes me feel awful. I've tried my best, but matters fall on deaf ears. I don't know what more I could have done.'

Ken said he knows that at some point, he's going to have to move on. 

'I'm just totally astonished and shocked with it all really,' he said of the fact that there is yet to be justice for Madeleine's disappearance.

'I'm hoping this will ultimately lead to a public enquiry. And I'm willing to attend those enquiries so that the truth can be established once and for all, in the hope that Madeleine can still be found - either dead or alive' he added.

Ken said his heart goes out to Kate and Gerry McCann, 'because justice has not been served at the moment. Justice has failed these people.'

He also warned that it is only a matter of time before something else like Madeleine's kidnapping happens again, 'because of the amount of people hidden off-gird'.

Brueckner is currently in prison in Germany having been convicted of rape, but is scheduled for release in September 2025. It remains to be seen if he will be formally charged with Madeleine's kidnapping.

He is currently standing trial in Braunschweig, accused of raping three adult women in Portugal and indecently exposing himself to two girls - aged ten and 11 at the time.

The current trial started in February and has heard from witnesses who say they saw Brueckner in harrowing sex tapes which showed the rape of an elderly woman and a young girl. 

It was also reported earlier this month that British police officers involved in the hunt for Madeleine will be asked to testify in the on-going trial.

Brueckner's defence have tried several times to have witnesses ruled out saying the case is unfair and prejudiced against their client because of the link to Madeleine.

All attempts have so far failed.

MailOnline reached out to the Luz Ocean Club, Scotland Yard, British police and German prosecutors for comment after speaking with Ken earlier this year.

Scotland Yard said it had nothing to add, while the British police station Ken said he had given a statement to in 2007 said it had no record in its archive.

German prosecutors refused to comment on the claims.

MailOnline has received no response from Luz Ocean Club.

Ken still lives in Portugal in a house with his wife, and raises horses on their land.