A senior detective in charge of the long-running search for Madeleine McCann has told a court how he chose to ignore standard operating rules and order a DNA test on a woman who had spent years insisting she was the missing child, purely because he hoped the scientific result might finally stop her from tormenting the McCann family. Detective Chief Inspector Mark Cranwell of Operation Grange gave evidence at Leicester Crown Court that Julia Wandelt, a twenty-four-year-old Polish national, was among thirteen people who had previously come forward claiming to be Madeleine, the three-year-old girl who vanished from a holiday apartment in Praia da Luz on the Portuguese Algarve in May 2007. Cranwell made clear that the Metropolitan Police had always refused to take DNA from such claimants unless there was already a credible basis for believing the person might actually be Madeleine.

The policy existed for two carefully considered reasons. First, any public suggestion that officers were willing to test almost anyone who simply declared themselves to be the missing girl would almost certainly encourage a wave of further claims, each one consuming time and resources. Second, even raising the possibility of a DNA comparison with the family risked creating hopes that could prove psychologically damaging if the outcome was negative. In Wandelt’s case the physical differences were already apparent: she looked little like the child last seen nearly two decades earlier and was two years older than Madeleine would have been. Nevertheless, once Cranwell learned that Leicestershire Police were about to arrest her on stalking charges, he authorised the taking of a DNA sample at the moment of arrest specifically so that a comparison could be performed. The laboratory result was definitive. Julia Wandelt is not Madeleine McCann. In April of this year Cranwell visited Wandelt in custody and told her the outcome in unambiguous language: “You are not Madeleine McCann.”

When she asked whether he truly wanted to find Madeleine, he answered that he did. Even after delivering the scientific proof, Cranwell told the jury he remained concerned that Wandelt would simply claim the sample had been interfered with and would continue to refuse to accept she was not the missing girl. The background to the DNA decision was a sustained campaign of contact that prosecutors have described as creepy and deeply disturbing. Between 2022 and the early months of this year Wandelt and her co-defendant Karen Spragg, aged sixty-one and from Cardiff, flooded Kate and Gerry McCann and their adult children Sean and Amelie with hundreds of telephone calls, text messages, voicemails and letters. The pair also travelled to the family’s home and demanded a DNA test. The court has already heard that their plans grew increasingly strange, including schemes to obtain Kate McCann’s DNA by going through the family’s household waste and by removing cutlery from restaurants where the McCanns had eaten. Both defendants deny a single count of stalking and the trial is continuing.

Cranwell’s decision to authorise the test stands as an exceptional departure from the protective boundaries that have governed Operation Grange for years. By choosing to obtain and compare the DNA, the detective sought to close one particular source of distress for a family that has already endured almost twenty years of public attention and private grief. The laboratory finding itself is now an established scientific fact, yet the courtroom proceedings demonstrate that the emotional and practical consequences of Wandelt’s actions have not disappeared with the result. For the McCanns the experience of repeated unwanted contact, the necessity of involving police and the courts, and the knowledge that another person had built an elaborate idenтιтy around their daughter’s disappearance have added further weight to a tragedy that began on a Portuguese holiday and has never truly concluded. The jury must now consider the full extent of the alleged behaviour and determine whether it amounted to criminal stalking. Whatever the eventual verdict, the DNA comparison ordered against protocol remains a clear and final answer to one woman’s claim, delivered by an officer who calculated that the risk of setting a precedent was outweighed by the hope of ending the harᴀssment once and for all.

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