In a gripping session at Leicester Crown Court the senior investigating officer for the long-running search for Madeleine McCann revealed that an alleged stalker’s insistent claim to be the missing girl had been definitively destroyed by a DNA comparison that detectives had never wanted to perform and had only authorised against their own carefully established procedures in a last desperate attempt to protect a family already shattered by nearly two decades of unanswered questions. Julia Wandelt, a 24-year-old Polish national, is accused together with her co-defendant Karen Spragg of mounting a sustained campaign of harᴀssment against Kate and Gerry McCann and their now-adult children Sean and Amelie.

Between 2022 and earlier this year the court has heard that Wandelt bombarded the family with hundreds of telephone calls, messages, voicemails and letters and even appeared at their home demanding a DNA test that she was certain would prove she was the three-year-old child who vanished from a holiday apartment in the Portuguese resort of Praia da Luz on 3 May 2007 and has never been found. Madeleine’s disappearance remains one of the most intensely scrutinised missing-person investigations in modern British history; the Metropolitan Police’s Operation Grange continues to examine leads more than eighteen years later while the parents have never given up hope of learning what became of their daughter. DCI Mark Cranwell, the officer leading that operation, told the jury that thirteen people had previously presented themselves as Madeleine yet DNA samples had never been taken from any of them.

He explained that the force deliberately avoided testing individuals who were not regarded as credible possibilities because he did not want to set a precedent that would encourage a flood of further claimants once the media reported that police were willing to examine DNA from almost anyone who asked. Cranwell spoke of his genuine major concerns about even approaching the McCann family to discuss the possibility of testing someone who was extremely unlikely to be their daughter; such a conversation, he feared, could raise false hopes and inflict fresh emotional damage on parents who have already endured years of public speculation, private grief and the constant ache of not knowing. Police had already concluded that Wandelt was not Madeleine because of a clear lack of physical resemblance and because she is two years older than the missing girl would have been.

Nevertheless, once Cranwell learned that Leicestershire officers were preparing to arrest her on stalking charges he made the difficult decision that a DNA sample should be taken at the moment of arrest in the hope that scientific proof might finally persuade her to stop her behaviour towards the family. A comparison was duly carried out and it conclusively proved that Julia Wandelt is not Madeleine McCann. In April of this year Cranwell visited Wandelt while she was in custody and informed her of the result with the direct words “You are not Madeleine McCann.” During that conversation she asked him “Do you really want to find Madeleine?” and he answered simply “Yes.” Even after receiving the definitive scientific evidence Cranwell remained convinced that Wandelt might still claim the sample had been tampered with and that there was a real possibility she would never accept she was not Madeleine no matter how clear the proof. Earlier evidence in the trial has painted a disturbing picture of the fear and distress inflicted on the McCann family by what were repeatedly described as creepy and deeply disturbing interactions with Wandelt and her 61-year-old co-defendant Karen Spragg from Cardiff. The jury has been told that the pair devised increasingly bizarre plans in their determination to obtain Kate McCann’s DNA without consent, including going through the family’s bins and removing forks from restaurants where the McCanns had eaten. Both defendants deny a single count of stalking and the trial continues as further testimony is expected about the cumulative impact of this prolonged ordeal on a family that has already suffered more than most can imagine. The revelation that police broke their own long-standing policy in an effort to end the harᴀssment underscores both the intensity of Wandelt’s campaign and the extraordinary lengths to which investigators were prepared to go to shield the McCanns from further torment while still safeguarding the integrity of the wider search for Madeleine. Nearly twenty years after a little girl vanished from her bed on a Portuguese holiday the case continues to generate false hopes, obsessive claims and emotional strain for those left behind, and the DNA evidence presented in court has now closed one particularly persistent and distressing chapter even as the larger mystery remains unsolved.

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