Kate McCann will regret one thing for ‘the rest of her days’ about Madeleine’s disappearance

Three-year-old Maddie vanished from the family's holiday rental in May 2007.

Kate and Gerry McCann have been trying to find their missing daughter Maddie since May 3, 2007, when she vanished from their apartment while on a family holiday in Praia da Luz, on the southern coast of Portugal.

Both parents had been sitting in a restaurant about 100 yards from the bedroom in which Madeleine was sleeping.

It was only when they returned to the apartment later that night did they discover that the child was missing.

Seventeen years on, Kate and Gerry McCann have refused to give up on the search for their daughter.

In Kate's 2011 memoir, Madeleine: Our Daughter’s Disappearance and the Continuing Search For Her, she opened about a 'bitter regret' that she and Gerry have harboured since the night of their daughter's disappearance, after discovering a small but pivotal detail.

The mother-of-three revealed that she had requested a specific table at the Ocean Club restaurant the night she disappeared that would allow the group a full view of the apartment in which their kids were sleeping.

Following Madeleine's disappearance however, Kate discovered that what had been written by the member of staff in the reservation book could have alluded to the fact that there were unsupervised children in the nearby apartment that night.

"To my horror, I saw that, no doubt in all innocence and simply to explain why she was bending the rules a bit, the receptionist had added 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," she wrote.

Kate added: "We now bitterly regret it and will do so until the end of our days."

In recent years, police have honed in on one main suspect.

47-year-old Christian Brueckner is currently on trial in Braunschweig, Germany accused of several sex crimes including the rape of an unidentified woman aged between 70 and 80 in her holiday home in Portugal, and the rape of a girl believed to have been at least 14 years old at his home in Praia da Luz.

Prosecutors spent three years investigating Brueckner before dramatically naming him as a suspect in 2020.

According to reports last year, Bruckner is said to have visited a reservoir that had previously been searched by police “some days” after Madeleine went missing.

A former friend of his is said to have informed police, and the tip-off tallied up with photos and videos of Bruckner near the reservoir and influenced investigators to carry out thorough searches of the area.

Brueckner opened a Hotmail account in January 2007, just four months before Madeleine vanished in Praia da Luz.

The court heard how Brueckner used the account to write a vile fantasy about raping a mother and her young daughter: “It was a very detailed story about a five-year-old girl and her mother who are kidnapped and taken away in a van,” Detective Stampa said.

“It was about violence and brutality and them being abused sexually – one is raped in front of the other.”

A copy of the sickening fantasy story was found on a laptop Brueckner used in Portugal in 2017.