Julia Wandelt, 24, is accused of stalking Kate and Gerry McCann and claiming she was the three-year-old who went missing during a family holiday in Portugal in 2007
A Polish woman accused of stalking Madeleine McCann’s family had to be persuaded by a missing persons charity that she wasn’t three separate disappeared children, a court has been told. Leicester Crown Court heard that Julia Wandelt, 24, “came back with a fresh tale” weeks after the Poland-based charity informed her she wasn’t a child who vanished in Germany.
Iwona Modliborska, who co-founded the charity 10 years ago, gave evidence via video link with the help of a Polish translator on Tuesday (October 21). She told the court that Wandelt started messaging the organisation’s Facebook pages in January or February 2023.
Wandelt sat in the dock alongside her co-accused Karen Spragg, 61, as Ms Modliborska told jurors that it was “not easy” to persuade Wandelt she wasn’t Madeleine.
Wandelt allegedly claimed she was three-year-old Madeleine, who vanished during a family break in Portugal in 2007, while harassing Kate and Gerry McCann from June 2022 to February this year. Describing Wandelt’s initial approach, Ms Modliborska said: “She wanted to find out about DNA tests, how it worked and how much it would cost.”
She added: “For some time she drew comparisons between herself and another girl from Germany, Inga Gehricke. She was asking if she could be that girl and as far as we were concerned we were asking her why she thought she might be that girl. Her biological parents did not want to give her access to her birth certificate and she claimed that when she asked questions about her early childhood she did not get any answers from them.”
Ms Modliborska told jurors that she wasn’t convinced that Wandelt, hailing from Lubin in south-west Poland, was Inga, adding: “We quickly made her stop believing in this because something did not agree with the description.
“It didn’t take long because very quickly we convinced her that she was wrong. Within weeks she returned with a new story – with Acacia Bishop. A few weeks later she wrote about Acacia Bishop to us.
“She sent photographs of herself and Acacia Bishop to compare. There were no similarities and there were no marks specifically that could really indicate it was her.”
The court was told that Acacia was abducted in 2003. Ms Modliborska informed the court that Wandelt “1,000% could not be” Acacia, and the accused “very quickly gave up” on her assertion to be her.
She continued: “That was the end of the conversation.” The witness told the jury that Wandelt subsequently began contacting the charity claiming to be Madeleine, drawing comparisons between their eyes and facial features.
Ms Modliborska said that the accused told her that she suspected she might have been snatched. She said: “Julia was told that she was a quiet girl and did not speak a lot… It was difficult to tell if she could speak Polish.”
She added: “I knew she was not similar to Madeleine. I tried to convince her again but she was well-prepared and it was not easy.
“I knew from the very start that it was rubbish. I tried to make her be aware that she was wrong. She did not accept that.”
Wandelt and Spragg, of Caerau, Cardiff, deny a single charge of stalking. The trial continues.
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