Nearly two decades after Madeleine McCann vanished from a holiday apartment in Praia da Luz, Portugal, her parents still live with two overlapping lives. One is public: the longest-running missing-child investigation in modern British memory. The other is private: work, twins now in their twenties, and the ordinary milestones that other families take for granted. The Sun’s May 2026 recap asked where Kate is now; later reporting through summer 2026 fills in a fuller picture.

Madeleine was three when she disappeared on 3 May 2007. Kate and Gerry, both doctors, were dining nearby with friends and checking on the children at intervals. What followed was a Portuguese inquiry, years of international attention, a Metropolitan Police review that became Operation Grange in 2011, and a German line of inquiry that in 2020 named convicted Sєx offender Christian Brückner as the prime suspect. He has never been charged over Madeleine. The official British case remains a missing-person investigation because she has not been found.

Kate left general practice after 2007 so she could concentrate on the search and on Sean and Amelie, then two years old. She has written that she did not want the twins left with sitters in the way that haunted her after Praia da Luz, and that she still marked Madeleine’s birthdays and Christmases. During the Covid pandemic she returned to NHS work in Leicester, helping in hospitals rather than doing surgery. More recent accounts describe her supporting people with dementia and serving as an ambᴀssador for the charity Missing People, including the SafeCall project for young people at risk of going missing. Gerry continues as a cardiologist and academic in experimental medicine and cardiac imaging. They still live in Rothley, Leicestershire.

The family fund they set up soon after Madeleine vanished, Madeleine’s Fund: Leaving No Stone Unturned, still exists to support the search and, eventually, other missing-children work. They have not had more children. On 3 May 2026, the 19th anniversary, they wrote that the search goes on “to find our Madeleine, to achieve some justice, to make the world that bit safer,” and that they “will never give up.” They later thanked supporters again and said May is never easy. They also said they had neither consented to nor taken part in Channel 5’s drama Under Suspicion: Kate McCann, and that programmes of that kind harm the family.

Sean and Amelie were kept informed about the case as they grew up. Amelie has been at university. Sean studies chemical engineering at Loughborough and swims at a high level. He represents Scotland through his Glasgow-born father. In July 2026, with Kate, Gerry and Amelie in the stands at Tollcross in Glasgow, he made the Commonwealth Games 400m freestyle final on debut, finishing eighth after qualifying as the last heat swimmer. He also raced longer freestyle events and has spoken of Los Angeles 2028 as a longer goal. For a family defined in public by absence, that week was rare good news that did not depend on a police briefing.

The investigation has not closed. Operation Grange received further Home Office money for 2026/27, though at a reduced level, and runs with a small part-time team. Total spend since 2011 is reported in the region of £13 million. In June 2026, British officers were said to have received German files on Brückner. He left prison in September 2025 after a separate rape sentence. German 24-hour surveillance was later not renewed. He still denies any role in Madeleine’s disappearance. Prosecutors in Germany call him their only suspect but have not charged him in that case. An appeal hearing over his 2024 acquittal on other alleged Sєx offences in Portugal is listed for January 2027. Talk of a UK extradition exists in reporting; lawyers note Germany can refuse to surrender its own nationals, so a German prosecution is often described as the more realistic path if evidence ever meets the threshold.

That is where Kate McCann is now: still a doctor and a campaigner, still a parent of three in her own accounting, still asking for Madeleine to be found and for the people responsible to be held to account. The twins are adults with their own work and sport. The police file is thinner than it was at its peak, but it has not been shut. Hope and grief sit in the same house, as they have since 2007.