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A Polish woman who made headlines for claiming she was Madeleine McCann, the 3-year-old British girl who vanished during her family's vacation to Portugal in 2007, has released new DNA test results.
Julia Wandelt, 23, who goes by Julia Wendell or Julia Faustyna, shared new test results that she says "strongly support" her theory that she's related to Gerry McCann, the father of the missing child. Wandelt previously launched the @IamMadeleineMcCann Instagram account questioning whether she was the missing child in 2023, but DNA tests determined she wasn't actually the daughter of Gerry and Kate McCann, rather that she was of Polish, Lithuanian and Romanian heritage.
The 23-year-old pubicly apologized to the couple for the ordeal, but returned to Instagram under her new account, @AmIJuliaWandelt, and shared new DNA results that she said were submitted to an unnamed "world expert" in the field who said her DNA matched some of Madeline's key features including eyes, teeth and voice. Wandelt has shared several posts identifying the McCanns as "my parents" and feels that her “actual DNA results show that I am part British, part Irish.”
Wandelt said the evidence "strongly supports that Gerry McCann could be Julia Wandelt’s biological father," however, the McCanns have "refused" to participate in the DNA testing. The 23-year-old said her "source" analyzed “hair obtained from the floor of the crime scene in Portugal,” as well as “saliva obtained from the bed quilt at the scene,” which allegedly showed a 69.23% match.
“The genetic evidence strongly supports that (Gerry) McCann could be Julia Wandelt’s biological father, as the data aligns perfectly with a parent-child relationship,” the source claimed. “If this analysis is accurate and properly derived from their DNA samples, the relationship between McCann and Julia Wandelt is biologically consistent with that of a father and daughter.”