When Detective Chief Inspector Mark Cranwell of Operation Grange took the stand at Leicester Crown Court he revealed an extraordinary decision that went against every established practice of the long-running investigation into the disappearance of Madeleine McCann. Faced with a 24-year-old Polish woman named Julia Wandelt who had spent years insisting she was the missing child and subjecting the McCann family to an unrelenting barrage of contact, Cranwell authorised a DNA test he would normally have refused.

Wandel is accused with her co-defendant Karen Spragg of stalking Kate and Gerry McCann and their adult children Sean and Amelie after bombarding them with hundreds of calls, messages, voicemails and letters between 2022 and earlier this year and even appearing at the family home to demand a DNA comparison that she believed would confirm her idenтιтy. Madeleine vanished from the family’s rented apartment in Praia da Luz, Portugal, on the night of 3 May 2007 at the age of three while her parents dined nearby, launching an investigation that has continued for nearly two decades under the Metropolitan Police’s Operation Grange.

Cranwell told the court that thirteen individuals had previously claimed to be Madeleine yet DNA had never been taken from any of them. The policy was deliberate: officers would only seek a sample if they genuinely believed the person might be the missing girl because they did not want to create a precedent that would encourage countless others to come forward once the media reported that testing was available. He also harboured major concerns about the emotional impact on the McCann family; simply informing them of an intention to test someone who was almost certainly not their daughter risked raising false hopes and causing further psychological harm after years of unresolved grief. Police had already judged that Wandelt was not Madeleine on the basis of her appearance and the fact that she was two years older than the missing child would have been. Still, when Cranwell learned that Leicester police were about to arrest her on stalking charges he decided the sample should be obtained upon arrest in the hope that conclusive scientific evidence might bring her campaign to an end. The comparison was performed and it proved beyond any doubt that Julia Wandelt is not Madeleine McCann. In April this year Cranwell went to the custody suite and told Wandelt face to face that her DNA profile did not match Madeleine’s, stating clearly “You are not Madeleine McCann.” She responded by asking whether he really wanted to find Madeleine and he answered that he did. Despite the irrefutable result Cranwell remained wary that she might later accuse police of tampering with the sample and that she might never accept the truth. The court has already heard how the alleged behaviour left the McCann family frightened and distressed by interactions they described as creepy and deeply disturbing. Wandelt and Spragg, the latter a 61-year-old from Cardiff, were said to have devised increasingly bizarre schemes to collect Kate McCann’s DNA themselves, including searching through household bins and taking cutlery from restaurants the family had visited. Both women deny the stalking charge and the trial continues. The decision to break protocol underscores the intensity of the pressure the alleged campaign placed on a family still searching for answers nearly twenty years after their daughter disappeared, while the DNA result itself has provided one rare moment of absolute clarity in a case otherwise defined by uncertainty and false claims.

Source: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/oct/14/secret-dna-test-confirmed-alleged-stalker-was-not-madeleine-mccann-says-officer