Julia Wandelt: Woman who 'believed' she was Madeleine McCann claimed to be a missing child THREE times
WROCLAW, POLAND: Julia Wandelt, who claimed to be Madeleine McCann, has reportedly asserted to be a missing child three other times. Wandelt, 21, piqued interest when she declared that she was the three-year-old girl who vanished in 2007, but a negative DNA test has now disproved her claim.
Wandelt, who also goes by the surnames Wendell and Faustyna, claimed she was unable to recall her early years. She even insisted that she didn't have a birth certificate. Wandelt recently gained fame when a video of her posing as the missing child, who was taken from her apartment in Praia de Luz while she and her family were on vacation, was posted to social media. But after weeks of rumors, a Canadian DNA test established that she was not McCann as she had no English ancestry.
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'She started to say Dorota wasn't her mother'
A childhood friend who spoke with DailyMail said that Wandelt is "mixed up" and that the McCann claim drama is her fourth missing person story. The friend stated, "When she was in her mid-teens she started to say that Dorota wasn't her mother and that she was really a child who had gone missing in Poland a few years earlier."
German schoolgirl Inga Gehricke, 5, vanished in Stendal in 2015. Wandelt sent pictures to a Polish charity and made the claim to be her, according to DailyMail. Later, Wandelt made a claim that she was the missing 19-month-old Acacia Bishop, who mysteriously disappeared in Utah, USA, in 2003. Both of her claims were debunked since her age didn't add up, and it was later discovered that she and her friend cooked up the Inga story.
'I never said I am Madeleine'
Wandelt has almost entirely Polish ancestry and neither British nor even German ancestry. In response to the DNA findings, she replied, "I have to say I never said I am Madeleine. I always said that I believe I could be Madeleine," according to the Sun.
Wandelt is in reality a privately educated child of affluent middle-class parents from the city of Wroclaw in southwest Poland. Upon learning of Wandelt's antics, a family acquaintance told DailyMail that Dorota, the mother, is "beside herself" and that she is eager to get Wandelt "the help she needs."