I helped Madeleine McCann investigation – Christian B revelations could be tip of iceberg… he's the rarest of monsters | The Sun
FOR 15 years, the disappearance of Madeleine McCann has devastated her family and baffled police across the globe.
This week, there was fresh hope the crime could be solved after German prosecutors charged prime suspect Christian B with a string of sexual assaults against children and women in Portugal, spanning 17 years between 2000 and 2017.
The convicted paedophile, who was 30 at the time of Madeleine's disappearance, has twice been convicted of sex crimes against young girls.
However, former detective Dr Graham Hill – who was sent to the resort of Praia da Luz, Portugal, to advise local police in the days after her abduction – believes the new revelations could just be the "tip of the iceberg".
"What people need to do is to park up the Madeleine McCann case and look at him as a sex offender in his own right," he tells The Sun.
"He's a man that's been committing sexual crimes for long periods of time.
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"The likelihood is that he would have committed many, many offences, most of them would have gone unrecorded and unreported. This would be just the tip of the iceberg for him."
Abduction 'spontaneous'
As founder of the Child Exploitation Online Protection Centre (CEOP), Graham – who fronts a new true crime series, The Murder Detective, on C+I from this Sunday – is Britain’s leading expert on the abduction and sexual abuse of children.
He believes the person who took Madeleine did not set out to do so initially, but seized the opportunity during a burglary.
“It tends to be an opportunistic crime. I think it was a random thing that she was taken,” he says.
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“There are millions of people across the world that have a sexual interest in children, but the number that will actually abduct a child is very small which is why the crimes are so rare.
“But child abduction is often spontaneous. Offenders have been thinking sexually about children for long periods of time and then they're confronted with a set of circumstances that leads them to act on it. They don't necessarily go out seeking the child.
“In the McCann case there was evidence of a burglary or break in, so I think someone went in there to commit another kind of crime, to steal, rather than take a child.
“Christian B has previous for sexually abusing children but he’s also a burglar and a risk taker, who was known to Portuguese police and was living in the area at the time.
“If I'd been investigating this crime, he would have been a suspect for me early on and he should have been top of their list.
“I’d like to know if the Portuguese police knew about him? And if they did, what did they do to eliminate him from the investigation?
“And when the Portuguese police passed their information to the Metropolitan Police for their investigation, did they include Christian B's name in that suspect list?”
Graham, who was sent to help in his role as CEOP behavioural expert, also revealed the heartbreaking first words he heard from Gerry McCann, the distraught father of the three-year-old.
“When I arrived in Portugal, I had a meeting with Gerry McCann and the first question he asked me was, ‘Do you think she's dead?’” he says.
“That's a difficult question to answer but I had to tell him that, statistically, children who are abducted by a stranger usually end up murdered or dead within three to six hours.
“It’s a fallacy that people abduct children and keep them locked up because the logistics of doing that are almost impossible. You’ve got to feed the child, keep them clean, keep them quiet and people who abduct children don't plan in that way."
Murder hits home
Graham's considerable expertise in serious crime is the backdrop to five-part series Murder Detective, in which he re-examines harrowing homicides with the help of the senior investigating officer (SIO) in each case.
Graham, formerly an SIO himself on numerous high profile cases, says he wanted to take viewers through each piece of evidence and help them build a picture of how each crime was solved.
“These are all SIOs that I know and they all picked the case they wanted to feature in their episode,” he says.
"The one that really hit home most for me was the case of Dean Mayley, a 24-year-old man with special needs, who had been protected by his family for many years.
“Only a few months before his death, he was allowed to go out on his own and travel on a bus to visit relatives. But he was attacked, robbed and stabbed to death in a West London street, in 2014, by four teenagers.
“The way in which the family talk about the crime and the investigation is so emotional and SIO Matt Bonner, from the Metropolitan Police, who's dealt with lots of high profile cases said this stood out for him as his most successful case, because of what it meant to the family.”
Police basics missing in Milly case
Despite his own expertise, Graham decided not to include child murders in the series because of notoriety.
“Child abduction and murder is really rare so to pick out those cases, you'd have to go to the most famous one, like Milly Dowler, April Jones and the Soham murders.
“We may visit those in future series but on this one, I picked the officers and they picked the cases.”
Graham was not an investigating officer on the case of 13-year-old Milly Dowler – who was murdered in March 2002 – and he believes killer Levi Bellfield would have been caught much sooner if police had followed one basic procedure.
“There are some really good lessons with the Milly Dowler investigation because one of the things that wasn't done right was the house to house investigation around where she was last seen, in Walton-on-Thames, Surrey,” he says.
“A house to house has to be managed in a particular kind of way. You don't just go bang on doors, you have to methodically go through the voters register and eliminate people.
"That wasn't done thoroughly enough because if it had been, they would have found that one of the houses was empty.
“If they traced the landlord, he could have given them the name of the woman renting it and that woman was Levi Bellfield's girlfriend.
“Everyone thinks murders are solved by CSI type techniques such as fingerprinting, blood spatter analysis and so on but actually, sometimes murders are solved by someone banging on the door and doing the basic, traditional policing techniques. They are still the bedrock of those investigations.
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“Sadly, because that wasn't done, Bellfield wasn't caught and he went on to commit more crimes.”
Murder Detective premieres on Crime+Investigation on October 16 at 9pm, with a new episode every Sunday. All episodes available to stream on Crime+Investigation Play from October 16.
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