A woman accused of stalking Madeleine McCann’s parents while insisting she’s their missing daughter voiced doubts about her past ‘many times’ to her own parents, a court heard.
Polish-born Julia Wandelt, 24, told jurors she ‘asked them to do a DNA test with me’ after talking to a psychologist about abuse she suffered as a child at the hands of an elderly relative.
‘She made me reflect on my life more and think about everything that happened,’ the defendant said, adding she had almost no memories of her life before the age of nine.
‘I realised I only remember abuse. My friends, they could remember things.
‘I started with asking questions because I just could not believe there was nothing else in the story of what happened to me.
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‘I started asking my parents about everything. What are your blood groups? Is there anything else happened to me you don’t tell me about?’
Wandelt told the court her parents, who had different hair and eye colourings, were reluctant to talk about her childhood and had no early family photographs.
She said she saw a sketch of a previous suspect in the Madeleine case who looked ‘quite similar to the person who abused me’.
He also had the same surname as the man who abused her, which she said was a ‘big factor’ in forming her suspicions.
Wandelt told the court she self-harmed and attempted suicide after the abuse.
She claimed that, while in hospital in 2022, she had a conversation with her father in which he told her the man who abused her had ‘been involved in kidnapping’ so she searched databases of missing people.
Asked whether she found anyone who ‘matched’ her, she said: ‘There were not actually a lot of people my age or around my age, but that is how I found Madeleine.’
She added that she noticed she has a similar mark on her eye to Madeleine.
Wandelt told the court she asked her parents for a DNA test many times but they refused.
‘It made me feel a bit surprised because I didn’t expect them to refuse, especially because at that time I still dealt with a lot of emotional problems.’
Jurors were previously told Wandelt repeatedly contacted the McCanns over nearly a year, at one point bombarding them with 60 calls and messages in a day.
She also allegedly confronted Kate McCann’s aunt at a vigil in their home town and reached out to Madeleine’s sister on Facebook.
The 24-year-old, from Lubin in south-west Poland, denied claiming to be Madeleine for attention or financial gain.
Asked what motivated her, she said: ‘I just wanted to find out who I am. I could not be able to heal from my trauma if I never fully know who I am, what happened to me and if my parents are my parents.’
Wandelt and her co-defendant, Karen Spragg, 61, of Caerau Court Road in Caerau, Cardiff, both deny one count of stalking between June 2022 and February this year.
The trial continues.
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