A woman who falsely claimed to be Madeleine McCann broke down in the dock as a Leicester jury heard she was a conspiracy theorist who could not be the missing child. Julia Wandelt, 24, from Poland, is accused of stalking Kate and Gerry McCann, the parents of Madeleine, who vanished from a holiday resort in Portugal in 2007 aged three.
The prosecution told Leicester Crown Court that Wandelt had launched a three-year campaign of harassment against the McCanns, including calls, messages, and turning up at their home and village in Leicestershire. Michael Duck KC said Wandelt had "no familial link" to the family and that scientific evidence would prove she was not Madeleine. When this was stated in court, Wandelt began crying loudly and tried to leave the dock, but was comforted by her co-defendant Karen Spragg, 61, from Cardiff, who is also accused of joining the harassment campaign. Both deny the charges.
The court heard Wandelt had previously pretended to be two other missing children: Inga Gehricke from Germany and Acacia Bishop from the US. It was also revealed that she used the artificial intelligence tool ChatGPT to create fake pictures, which she sent to Madeleine's younger sister Amelie, now an adult, purporting to show them both as young children.
In messages described by the prosecutor as "emotional manipulation of the first order", Wandelt introduced herself to Amelie as "this girl that went viral saying she thinks she's Madeleine McCann". She claimed to have had hypnosis and experienced flashbacks about being Madeleine, which the prosecution said would have been extremely distressing for the recipient. Wandelt also sent numerous messages, voicemails, emails, and letters to Kate and Gerry McCann, including around 60 calls to Kate McCann's number.
The jury was played a voicemail in which Wandelt said: "If I'm her then everything will be OK, and if I'm not, as you probably think, then I will leave you alone." She also said: "I know I look fat and I know I'm not pretty ... but I know what I know and I know what I remember." Wandelt blamed "large corruption" for why she had not been identified as Madeleine and said the media had made her "look crazy", adding: "Don't give up on our daughter because I'm not a liar and I'm not crazy."
The trial continues.
