Woman guilty of harassing Madeleine McCann's parents

A POLISH woman who claimed to be Madeleine McCann has been found guilty of harassing the missing girl’s parents by turning up at their home and sending sinister letters and messages repeatedly begging for a DNA test.

- SOPHIE ROBINSON, JOSH PAYNE, STEPHANIE WAREHAM and MATTHEW COOPER

Julia Wandelt, 24, who now faces deportation back to Poland, put her hands to her face when jurors returned a guilty verdict for the harassment of Kate and Gerry McCann yesterday, but a not guilty verdict for a charge of stalking.

A five-week trial at Leicester Crown 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 younger brother Sean and playing ring-a-ring-a-roses.

Jurors heard that Wandelt, who had an emotional outburst while Mrs McCann gave evidence against her, tried to persuade “anybody prepared to listen” that she was Madeleine, and that she had been kidnapped from Portugal and abused with other girls in Poland.

Wandelt called and messaged Mrs McCann more than 60 times in one day on April 13 last year, claiming to have a memory of the mother stroking her head and saying she would find her before the abduction.

Her co-defendant, Karen Spragg, from, Caerau, Cardiff, was found not guilty of stalking and harassment.

Wandelt, who sat beside Spragg in the dock, gasped at the verdicts, while Spragg cried. Wandelt and Spragg held hands in the dock before the verdicts were handed down, after the jury deliberated for more than seven hours.

Trial judge Mrs Justice Cutts pointed out immediately after the verdicts that the maximum sentence for harassment was six months’ imprisonment.

The judge said: “I think it also is a fact that Julia Wandelt has been in custody since her arrest in February of this year. So she will have been in custody, in fact, for longer than the maximum sentence.”

Before the judge reconvened court to discuss her sentence, Wandelt appeared to be sobbing in a room behind the dock.