Where are Kate and Gerry McCann now? Madeleine case today

Madeleine disappeared from her bed in a holiday apartment in Praia da Luz on the evening of May 3, 2007, at just three years old.

Her disappearance has been dubbed “the most heavily reported missing-person case in modern history”.

Now, a Channel 5 drama, titled Under Suspicion: Kate McCann, starring Laura Bayston, is due to air, depicting the interrogation of Kate about her daughter’s disappearance.

Madeleine McCann disappearance explained

The McCann family were on holiday in Portugal in May 2007, Kate and Gerry, Madeleine, who was three, and twin siblings Amelie and Sean, both two.

Family friends and their children were also on holiday with them.

The McCann children were left asleep in the ground-floor apartment while their parents dined with friends in a restaurant 55 metres away.

The parents checked on the children about every 30 to 40 minutes until Kate discovered Madeleine was missing.

Madeleine’s disappearance attracted extensive press coverage in the UK and internationally.

Both Kate and Gerry were subjected to intense scrutiny and faced accusations of involvement in the disappearance.

In 2008, as a result of false allegations of their involvement in Madeleine’s death, they and their travelling companions received damages and apologies from Express Newspapers.

In 2011, the McCanns testified before the Leveson Inquiry into British press misconduct, lending support to those arguing for tighter press regulation.

Where is the Madeleine McCann case today?

In the weeks that followed her disappearance, Portuguese police believed that Madeleine had died in an accident in the apartment and her parents had covered it up.

The McCanns were given suspect status in September 2007, which was lifted when Portugal’s attorney general archived the case in July 2008 for lack of evidence.

Kate and Gerry continued the investigation using private detectives until the Metropolitan Police opened its own inquiry, Operation Grange, in 2011.

The senior investigating officer announced that he was treating the disappearance as “a criminal act by a stranger”, which was likely a planned abduction or burglary gone wrong.

In 2013, the Met released e-fit images of men they wanted to trace, including one of a man seen carrying a child toward the beach on the night Madeleine vanished and shortly after this, Portuguese police reopened their inquiry.

Operation Grange was scaled back in 2015, but the remaining detectives continued to pursue a small number of inquiries described in April 2017 as significant.

In 2020, German authorities declared Christian Brückner their prime suspect for the abduction and murder of McCann, with prosecutors saying that they have “concrete evidence”.

Channel 5 drama Under Suspicion: Kate McCann stars Laura Bayston (Image: Channel 5/PA Wire)

Brückner has previously been convicted of unrelated counts of child sexual abuse and drug trafficking, and has since 2019 served a prison sentence in Germany for raping a 72-year-old American pensioner in the Algarve region.

He was released in September 2025 and has not been officially charged with any crime related to the McCann case, and consistently denies any involvement.

Last year, the UK government approved more than £100,000 in additional funding for Scotland Yard detectives investigating Madeleine’s disappearance.

Netflix released an eight-part documentary series, The Disappearance of Madeleine McCann, in 2019, but the McCann family did not support the production of the documentary, refusing to take part and encouraging others not to be involved.

Where are Kate and Gerry McCann now?

According to reports, Kate and Gerry, who are both physicians, still live in the same house they lived in when Maddie disappeared in Leicestershire.

Her 2011 book Madeleine: Our Daughter’s Disappearance and the Continuing Search for Her, gave an insight into her life after 2007.

She revealed how she still buys Maddie birthday and Christmas presents, and the difficultly it was not being overprotective towards twins Amelie and Sean after Maddie’s disappearance.

Kate also quit her job as a GP because she didn’t want her twins to be left alone with child carers and because she wanted to focus her attention on the search.

Kate and Gerry McCann live in Leicestershire today, just over 19 years since the disappearance (Image: Joe Giddens/PA Wire)

She did return to the NHS during the Covid pandemic in 2021, working on the frontline in local Leicester hospitals.

Today Kate works with sufferers of dementia and is an ambassador for the charity Missing People.

Gerry works as a research professor in experimental medicine and a professor of cardiac imaging.

Amelie McCann is studying at Durham University, with twin brother Sean understood to be a champion freestyle swimmer and has even been tipped to represent Scotland at next year’s Commonwealth Games or even compete for Team GB at the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles.

New Channel 5 drama on Kate McCann interrogation

The new Channel 5 drama, Under Suspicion: Kate McCann, will depict the interrogation of Kate about her daughter’s disappearance.

It is set three months after the disappearance, with the media and Portuguese police now treating the McCanns very differently.

The one-off drama maps out Kate’s cross-examination after she and Gerry were named suspects.

A synopsis reads: “In her final interrogation, Kate defies all accusations by answering ‘no comment’ on her lawyer’s advice.

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“As she leaves the police station, we are reminded that this story began with a mother searching for her child, and that no amount of suspicion, however constructed, will diminish her hope of finding her daughter.”

Laura Bayston stars as Kate McCann in the drama, with Joana Borja as Armanda Duarte Salbany Russel, Hugo Nicolau as Inspector João Carlos and Miguel Freire as Inspector Ricardo Paiva.

James Robinson is Gerry McCann, Ruby Ranson, Madeleine McCann and Carlos Agualusa as Carlos Pinto De Abreu.

Under Suspicion: Kate McCann premieres today (May 20) at 9pm on Channel 5.