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24th Feb 2023

Woman claiming to be Madeleine McCann ‘overheard’ her mum admit ‘we took her’

Steve Hopkins

‘I don’t know why we have this girl’

The Polish woman claiming to be Madeleine McCann reportedly overheard her mum saying, “she has always been a troublemaker since we took her”, according to a private investigator now working on the case.

Julia Wendell went viral earlier this month after sharing what she claimed is “evidence” on Instagram suggesting she is the girl who went missing in Praia da Luz, Portugal, in 2007. The evidence included some freckles or her leg and an eye defect.

The 21-year-old, who would be two years older than Maddie who would turn 19 in April, has said she does not remember large chunks of her childhood, or the moment she was supposedly taken.

And she’s claimed she was abused by a German paedophile who looks like someone who was once a suspect in Maddie’s disappearance.

Maddie was just four years old when she disappeared from her holiday apartment. No trace of her has ever been found and no one has been arrested. The prime suspect in the disappearance, convicted sex offender Christian Brueckner, has been charged in Germany with unrelated sexual offences. He is accused of five offences between 2000 and 2017 in Portugal. German prosecutors say the investigation into Maddie’s disappearance is ongoing separately.

Julia’s hunt for the “truth” is being aided by private detective and self-professed medium, Dr Fia Johansson.

Read also: Woman who thinks she’s Madeleine McCann now has famous medium working on case

Dr Johansson, who has worked with police in the US on missing persons and cold cases, has sent a team to a town near the Germany-Poland border to find Julia and investigate her claims.

She has now said that Julia overheard her mum admit the family “took her”.

Dr Johansson told The Sun: “What we found after some digging into this is that she overheard her mom saying something along the lines of ‘I don’t know why we have this girl, she has always been a troublemaker since we took her’.

“Since then she started to question what was going on and whether her parents were her true parents.”

Fia said that Julia had found a picture of a man she claims abused her as a child and “when she looked into it the picture looked like the same man as one of the suspects in the Madeleine McCann case”.

She went on to say Julia was “concerned” and had “wondered” why her family would keep the image and “how he was connected to them”.

Fia is trying to get Julia’s family to agree to a DNA test, although she says they have so far refused.

RadarOnline reported she may seek a court order to force them to do so.

Maddie’s parents, Gerry and Kate McCann, are reportedly keen to have the test done.

Earlier this week, Julia’s family released a statement via Polish missing persons organisation Missing Years Ago, refuting her claims.

They said they have “memories” and “pictures” making it “obvious that Julia is our daughter, granddaughter, sister, niece, cousin and step niece”, and that Julia left their family home and took the photos.

The statement also claimed they have tried to help her with therapy and medicine – help that Julia has supposedly denied.

In earlier video posts Julia said her mother was “very angry” at her and that her family, and boyfriend, had shunned her for “setting up this circus”.

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