Never Quit Looking — Case File
Missing Person
Case ID#: 0203
VICTIM’S PHOTOGRAPH
Missing
Renè Hasèe
May Also Be Known As: Rene Hasee
Unidentified Person Notice: In English, unidentified individuals are often known as “Jane Doe” or “John Doe.” This means the victim’s true name is currently unknown.
Biological Sex: Male
Age at the Time: 6
Country: Portugal
Date Missing: June 19, 1996
Brief Overview: Renè Hasèe was a 6-year-old boy who disappeared while on a holiday with his family at Praia da Amoreira, Portugal.
Public Awareness Notice: This case file is provided for public awareness and responsible information sharing. If you have relevant information, please contact the appropriate law enforcement agency.
Victim Description
Physical Description
Date of Birth
Circa 1990
Age
6
Age Group
Child (6 to 9 Years Old)
Biological Sex
Male
Hair Color
Blonde
Eye Color
Blue or Gray
Skin Complexion
Fair or Light
Ethnicity
Caucasian or White
Nationality
Germany
Language(s) Spoken
German
Physical Build
Physical Build
Slim or Thin
Height (ft’ in”)
4'0"
Height (cm)
122 cm
Description of Events
Disappearance
Date Last Seen
June 19, 1996
Note: René’s disappearance date is given variously as June 18, 19, and 21, 1996, across different sources. June 19 appears most consistently.
The Incident
It was meant to be a peaceful family holiday, waves lapping at the Algarve coast, the smell of salt and grilled seafood in the air. For six-year-old René Hasee, it was the kind of summer every child dreams of.
René lived in Bergheim-Elsdorf, Germany, with his mother, Anita, a 37-year-old postal worker, and her partner, Peter. In the summer of 1996, the three of them traveled to the sun-washed southern coast of Portugal, near the small town of Aljezur, staying not far from Amoreira beach.
On the evening of June 19, 1996, after a meal at the nearby Paraíso do Mar restaurant, the family set out for a walk along the beach around 6:00 p.m. René shed his shirt and trousers to play in the sand while Anita and Peter followed a short distance behind at a relaxed pace. Accounts differ slightly on exactly how far ahead he’d wandered, somewhere between 20 and 30 metres, but all agree it happened in full view of his mother, in the space of a moment. As Anita later described it to a German newspaper, it was as though he’d “been swallowed by the earth.” Despite an immediate search by the family and, later, local authorities, nothing was found except the clothes René had shed in the sand.
Anita and Peter alerted the Portuguese police right away, but the investigation was hampered almost from the start by an early assumption that René had wandered into the ocean and drowned. Anita has said local police showed little interest and told her he’d probably drowned; this account has been disputed by at least one GNR officer who was stationed at the Aljezur post at the time and disagrees with that characterization of the response. Regardless, reports indicate that no formal case file was created at the time, despite the family’s claims of having requested a thorough investigation.
René’s family has remained skeptical of the drowning theory ever since. René was reportedly afraid of the water and preferred playing in the sand rather than swimming. His father, Andreas Hasee, who was not on the trip, has emphasized his son’s cautious nature and said it wasn’t like him to have wandered into the sea alone. Andreas later brought in an outside specialist to review the sea and tide conditions that day, concluding that drowning was unlikely, since the currents at the time should have carried a body back to shore rather than out to sea. Investigators also noted that René’s footprints in the sand ended abruptly well short of the waterline. To this day, there is no evidence confirming that he ever entered the water at all.
“He was a lovely boy, my first child… I think of him every day and imagine what sort of man he would have been and what we would have done together,” Andreas Hasee has said.
René’s case went cold for over two decades. It resurfaced in June 2020, when German federal investigators contacted Andreas directly to tell him they were reexamining his son’s case, part of a broader review triggered by the naming of Christian Brückner as the prime suspect in Madeleine McCann’s disappearance. Brückner had moved from Germany to Praia da Luz in 1995, the year before René vanished, and was already a convicted child sex offender at the time; he would have been about 19 when René disappeared. That reopened inquiry drew coverage from several major outlets across Europe, but it has not produced any confirmed breakthrough, and the case has since gone quiet again.
René’s case went cold for over two decades. It resurfaced in June 2020, when German federal investigators contacted Andreas directly to tell him they were reexamining his son’s case, part of a broader review triggered by the naming of Christian Brückner as the prime suspect in Madeleine McCann’s disappearance. Brückner had moved from Germany to Praia da Luz in 1995, the year before René vanished, and was already a convicted child sex offender at the time; he would have been about 19 when René disappeared. That reopened inquiry drew coverage from several major outlets across Europe, but it has not produced any confirmed breakthrough, and the case has since gone quiet again.
Multiple Victims?
Maybe
Additional details
Related Vehicle
Description
The following vehicles are linked to Christian Brückner, a key person of interest in the Madeleine McCann disappearance and possibly René Hasee’s disappearance. Both cars have been recovered by police, but witnesses are asked to keep them in mind when considering information that may assist police.
- Early 1980s Volkswagen T3 Westfalia Camper Van (recovered): White upper body with yellow skirting. Brückner acquired it around 2006–2007 and kept it until 2015.
- 1993 Black or Aubergine-Colored Classic Jaguar, Model XJR6 Supercharged Sedan (recovered): Well-maintained. Brückner bought it secondhand after his release from prison in 1999 and used it in Portugal from 2000–2007. It was re-registered in Germany under his friend’s name (Alexander Bischof) on May 4, 2007—the day after Madeleine disappeared; however, the car was still in Portugal at the time.
License Plate
- VW campervan – Portuguese Plate
- Jaguar – German Plate
Related Persons
Description
Christian Brückner, a 49-year-old German national born on December 7, 1976, first emerged as a key person of interest in 2020. He has a criminal history stretching back more than three decades, starting with petty crimes and escalating over time into serious sexual offenses. Described as a drifter, burglar, and handyman, he has convictions for burglary, theft, drug trafficking, rape, sexual assault, child abuse, and possession of child pornography.
His record goes back to his teenage years. At 15, he was convicted of burglary in 1992 in Würzburg, Germany. Then in 1994, at 17, he was charged and convicted for the first time of sexually abusing a six-year-old girl. He served part of that sentence before fleeing to Portugal’s Algarve region in 1995, the year before René disappeared.
He stayed in Portugal until 1999, when he was arrested there and served a couple of months for petty theft, then was extradited back to Germany to finish out the rest of his two-year sentence from the 1994 case. Once released, he went back to Portugal and lived on and off between Lagos and Praia da Luz until 2007, just after Madeleine went missing.
He managed to stay off police radar for a few years, until 2006, when new theft charges landed him another nine months behind bars. After his release, phone records placed him in Praia da Luz, near the Ocean Club resort, on the very day Madeleine vanished in 2007. Several witnesses gave police descriptions of a suspicious man seen in the area that night, descriptions that appear to match Brückner. There’s also information suggesting he was burglarizing hotels and holiday apartments around that time, raising the possibility that he originally entered the McCanns’ room to steal something, and the abduction may have been opportunistic rather than planned.
After Madeleine disappeared, Brückner left Portugal and went back to Germany. In 2011 he was sentenced to twenty-one months in prison on drug trafficking charges, then released again. In 2015, he sold his camper van, which police later seized as part of the investigation into Madeleine’s case. The following year, in 2016, he was found guilty of child abuse, sexual abuse of a child, and possession of child pornography.
It wasn’t until 2017 that investigators first zeroed in on a possible connection to Madeleine, after he reportedly let slip while drunk to a friend that he knew something about her case. As that investigation unfolded, it also came out that Brückner had actually been flagged as a potential suspect early on in the original McCann case, but was overlooked at the time.
He was arrested again in 2018 and convicted in 2019 of raping an elderly American woman in her apartment in Praia da Rocha, Portugal, back in 2005. DNA evidence is what identified him in that case, though he denied it and tried to appeal. He ended up serving nearly seven years for that crime.
In 2024, he was acquitted of separate rape and sexual abuse charges tied to unrelated incidents between 2000 and 2017. He was then released from prison on September 17, 2025, after authorities said they no longer had legal grounds to hold him. Since then, he’s been living on state benefits in a small town in northern Germany, under police surveillance, while residents protest and push for his relocation over safety concerns. Just days after getting out, he was seen at a nightclub, an appearance that reportedly unsettled other people there. In October 2025, he broke his silence to the media, denying any role in Madeleine’s disappearance with a four-word denial: “I didn’t do it.” He’s also claimed investigators might try to “kill” him to keep him quiet, casting himself as a victim of the state.
As for René Hasee, there’s no clear direct evidence tying Brückner to his case. The connection really comes down to proximity, shared nationality, and opportunity, since Brückner was living in the Algarve at the time René disappeared. Whether he had ever targeted boys isn’t clear either; his known convictions mostly involve female victims, though some of the child abuse charges weren’t gender-specific. He would have been about 19 when René vanished. René’s father has said he hopes the investigation into Brückner might eventually bring answers, but no charges have been filed in that case.
Note: Brückner has not been convicted in connection with either René’s or Madeleine’s disappearance, and he’s already been ruled out in Inga’s case. He remains, under the law, presumed innocent of both.
Places of Interest
Disappearance
City
Praia da Amoreira, Alijezur, Faro
State or Province
Algarve
Country
Portugal
Latitude & Longitude
37.3477127,-8.8529138
General Location
Town or City
Map of Other Key Locations
Photo Gallery
Related or Similar Cases
The unsolved vanishings of Madeleine McCann (2007, Portugal), René Hasee (1996, Portugal), and Inga Gehricke (2015, Germany) have haunted investigators and families alike with their striking similarities.
All three children, René (6), Madeleine (3), and Inga (5), looked strikingly alike: fair skin, blonde hair, blue eyes. Each was young and slender, and each vanished during a family outing in a spot popular with tourists or vacationers, beaches in René’s and Madeleine’s cases, a wooded area in Inga’s. The disappearances all happened in late spring or early summer: June for René, May for the other two. In every case, the family was away from home on holiday, and a parent had looked away for just a moment.
René and Inga came from German-speaking families, while Madeleine’s family spoke English, though a German-speaking suspect could plausibly have interacted with all three. Christian Brückner, who has prior convictions involving children (including one against a six-year-old girl), has been linked circumstantially to René and Madeleine simply because he was in Portugal around the time each went missing. Even so, the connections are thin. Nothing directly ties him to René beyond that overlap in timing and location, and he’s actually been cleared in Inga’s case. Once Brückner is ruled out for Inga, her case starts to look less like the other two: it happened in Germany rather than Portugal, there was no beach involved, and there’s no remaining link to Brückner at all. That makes her disappearance something of an outlier, and raises the real possibility that it isn’t connected to the other two at all. The cases could all be unrelated, or maybe only some of them are linked.
Nearly thirty years after René disappeared, with Madeleine’s and Inga’s cases still open too, the families are still waiting for answers. Whether one person is responsible for all three or these are simply tragic coincidences, the cases are a stark reminder of how quickly a child can vanish even in places that seem safe. Anyone with information is encouraged to come forward, since even a small detail could end up mattering. As of October 2025, the families haven’t given up hope, but none of these cases has been solved.
Inga Gehricke
Relationship: Inga Gehricke, a five-year-old German girl, disappeared on May 2, 2015, almost exactly eight years after Madeleine, during a family barbecue at a forested area in Wilhelmshof, Saxony-Anhalt, Germany. She helped carry drinks over to the sports field, then wandered off with the other children to gather firewood for a campfire. She was last seen playing at the edge of the forest around 7:00pm. When the other children came back with the wood, Inga wasn’t with them anymore, and she hasn’t been seen since. She had blonde hair worn in braids, blue eyes, long eyelashes, and was missing her two front upper teeth. She stood about 120 cm, or roughly 3’11”, tall.
The case was officially closed in 2019 after extensive searches turned up nothing, despite more than 2,000 tips coming in and a €25,000 reward being offered. In February 2025, police launched new searches in the area, though no breakthroughs have come of it. Brückner was initially looked at because he owned property nearby and was involved in a traffic incident the day before Inga vanished, but investigators ruled him out in October 2024.Your Attractive Heading
Case ID#: 0205
Madeleine Beth McCann
Relationship: Madeleine McCann, a three-year-old from Rothley in the UK, vanished on May 3, 2007, while on holiday with her family at a resort in Praia da Luz, Portugal, about 25 miles from the beach where René disappeared. Her parents, Kate and Gerry McCann, had left her and her twin siblings asleep in their ground-floor apartment at the Ocean Club while they had dinner nearby at a tapas restaurant with friends, starting around 8:30pm. They say they checked on the children periodically throughout the evening, but by around 10:00pm, Madeleine was gone.
She was a slender girl with blonde hair, blue-green eyes, a distinctive coloboma in her right eye, and a birthmark on her left calf. She stood about 90 cm, or roughly 2’11”, tall.
The case is still open and unsolved. German authorities continue to treat Christian Brückner as the prime suspect, pointing to phone records that place him near the resort the day Madeleine vanished, along with witness descriptions of a suspicious man matching his appearance. A senior detective came forward with new evidence in September 2025, though no charges have followed. Brückner denies any involvement, and he was released from prison that same month after finishing a sentence on unrelated convictions.
Case ID#: 0206
Resources
Articles & Other Written Works
- Vermisste-Kinder, Link.
- International Missing Persons Wiki, “Rene Hasee”, Link.
- Van de Sype, K. (2020) “Duitse politie: verdachte zaak Maddie mogelijk ook betrokken bij verdwijning René (6)”, AD, June 6, Link
- Connolly, K. (2020) “German suspect in Madeleine McCann case linked to two more child disappearances”, The Observer, June 7, Link.
- Boyd, Milo (2020) “Madeleine McCann suspect linked to boy, 6, who disappeared from beach in 1996, Mirror, 5 June, Link.
- Verein Vermisster Kinder, “Rene Hasee”, Link.
- Franco, H.; Godinho, J.; Gustavo, R. (2020) “Maddie case. Christian Bruckner was arrested twice in Portugal”, Expresso, 5 June, Link.
- Godinho, J. (2020) “Caso Maddie: novo suspeito vendeu carrinha a alemães – que foi apreendida há um ano pela PJ e polícia germânica”, Expresso, 5 June, Link.
- Pereira, R. (2020) “Pai de menino que desapareceu no Algarve em 1996 diz que a polícia vai reabrir o caso”, Expresso, 7 June, Link.
- Expresso (2020) “Caso Maddie. Suspeito alemão alvo de nova investigação por crime similar na Alemanha”, 5 June, Link.
- Correio da Manhã (2020) “Suspeito de rapto de Maddie investigado por desaparecimento de menino no Algarve”, Mundo, 6 June, Link.
- Pisa, N. (2020) “‘TOO MANY SIMILARITIES’ Dad of boy, 6, who vanished in Portugal 11 years before Madeleine McCann has ‘no doubt cases are linked’”, The US Sun, 9 June, Link.
- Christodoulou, H. (2020) “Madeleine McCann cops ‘don’t know where body is buried but know how she was killed’’,The Sun, 9 June, Link.
- Southworth, P. and Wighton, D. (2020) “Father of boy who disappeared in Algarve in 1996 claims police are re-opening his son’s case”, Telegraph, 6 June. Link.
- Whitehead, J. (2020) “René Hasee: Madeleine McCann suspect Christian Brueckner ‘investigated over disappearance’ of six-year-old boy”, I news, 13 July, Link.
- Clark, A. (2020) ‘René Hasee vanished 11 years before Maddie McCann. 8 years after, so did Inga Gehricke.”, Mamamia, 5 June. Link .
- True Crime Diva (2018) “What happened to six-year-old Rene Hasee”?, 25 February, Link.
- Sully, E. (2020) “German cops contact family of six-year-old who vanished near Praia da Luz in 1996 after running into the sea while new Madeleine McCann suspect was in area”, DailyMail, 5 June, Link.
Contact Authorities
Police, Relevant Agencies, & Other Useful Personnel
Important Notice
This page is not intended for emergency use. Contact details may change over time, and the information listed below may be outdated or incomplete. If you notice an error or have a correction, please let us know.
To the best of our ability, we have provided contact information for the national police agency or, where that is not available, the police agency serving the capital city. Our hope is that these agencies may be able to direct readers to the proper office, even when a matter falls outside their immediate jurisdiction.
For the most accurate guidance, please contact the relevant embassy in your country or your own country’s embassy or consulate in the country involved.
Contact Information — Germany
Agency 🏢
Federal Criminal Police Office (Bundeskriminalamt, BKA)
Phone Number 📞
561 55010
Website 💻
Emergency Phone Number 🚨
110
IDD Prefix
00
Country Code
+49
Additional Contacts
- Vermisste Kinder (info@vermisste-kinder.de)
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