A young woman who claimed to be Madeleine McCann has been convicted of harassing the missing toddler’s family.
However, Julia Wandelt, 24, was cleared of stalking the couple.
A Polish national born three years after Madeleine, Wandelt said she suspected she had been abducted and brought up by a couple who were not her real parents.
She was having mental health issues at the time and had been abused by an elderly relative.
The relative looked like an artist’s drawing of a man who was once a suspect in the Madeleine case, which she stumbled across during internet research on missing children.
She went to Los Angeles and told a US TV chat show audience: “I believe I am Madeleine McCann.”
Madeleine was nearly four when she vanished from the family’s rented holiday apartment in Praia da Luz, Portugal, in May 2007.
She had been left sleeping with her younger twin siblings, Sean and Amelia, while her parents, Kate and Gerry McCann, dined nearby with friends, making intermittent checks on the children.
Image:
Julia Wandelt. Pic: Go Get Funding
Madeleine is the world’s most famous missing child – the subject of three international police investigations that have failed to find any trace of her.
Wandelt claimed to have a blemish in the iris of her right eye, like Madeleine’s, and to resemble aged-progressed images of her.
Over three years, she attracted half a million followers on her Instagram account, iammadeleinemccan, and posted her claims on TikTok.
Police told her she was not Madeleine and ordered her not to approach her family, but she ignored the warning.
She turned up at the McCanns’ home and sent sinister letters and messages repeatedly begging for a DNA test.
The McCanns and their children gave evidence in the five-week trial at Leicester Crown Court, describing the upset Wandelt had caused them.
The court heard Wandelt claimed to have memories, induced by hypnosis sessions, of being abducted and of living with the McCanns as a child, including feeding Madeleine’s brother and playing ring-a-ring-a-roses.
Wandelt called and messaged Mrs McCann more than 60 times in one day on 13 April last year, claiming to have a memory of the mother stroking her head.
When Wandelt was arrested earlier this year, a DNA test proved she was not Madeleine.
In the witness box, Wandelt denied her claims were driven by a desire for money or fame.
She said she was not a liar and never intended to cause the McCanns and their children harm.
Trial judge Mrs Justice Cutts said the maximum sentence for harassment was six months’ imprisonment.
“I think it also is a fact that Julia Wandelt has been in custody since her arrest in February of this year,” the judge said.
“So she will have been in custody in fact for longer than the maximum sentence.”
Prosecution counsel Michael Duck KC said a restraining order was sought against Wandelt because there had been “plain harassment” against the McCann family.
The court was told a deportation order had already been served against Wandelt and that it was a matter for the secretary of state whether she remained in custody.
Wandelt’s co-defendant, Karen Spragg, 61, from Cardiff, was found not guilty of stalking and harassment.