The trial heard Wandelt has claimed to be Madeleine, whose disappearance during a family holiday to Portugal in 2007 has never been solved, since 2022.<\/p>\n
The results of a DNA test carried out after her arrest in February of this year “conclusively proved” she is not the missing child, but, under cross-examination, Wandelt told the court she was still “50-50” about her identity.<\/p>\n
The trial heard Wandelt previously claimed to be two other missing children before asserting she was Madeleine.<\/p>\n
Giving evidence, she told the jury she had limited memories of her childhood and “could only remember abuse” after experiences with her step-grandfather.<\/p>\n
She began to reach out to the McCann family through Glenfield Hospital, where Madeleine’s parents worked, in June 2022 and then the Metropolitan Police’s investigation into the missing child.<\/p>\n
Police looked into Wandelt’s claims and called her to “reassure” her she was not Madeleine, the court heard, but contact moved on to directly attempting to reach the McCanns, whose personal details had been included in a leaked Portuguese police file and posted online.<\/p>\n
Mrs McCann was subsequently “bombarded” with more than 60 calls and messages on one day, the court was told.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The trial heard Wandelt has claimed to be Madeleine, whose disappearance during a family holiday to Portugal in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":249578,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[49,50,51,47,52,48],"class_list":{"0":"post-249577","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-headlines","8":"tag-headlines","9":"tag-news","10":"tag-top-news","11":"tag-top-stories","12":"tag-topnews","13":"tag-topstories"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/249577","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=249577"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/249577\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/249578"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=249577"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=249577"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=249577"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}