A woman on trial for allegedly stalking the parents of Madeleine McCann claiming to be their missing daughter sent them a letter signed “Madeleine x” and said she remembered being abducted from their holiday apartment in Portugal.
Julia Wandelt, from Poland, is accused of stalking Kate and Gerry McCann over a period of two and a half years by contacting them hundreds of times and accosting them at their home, leaving them upset and worried about their safety.
The prosecutor outlined how Wandelt also turned up at a Leicester police station and erroneously claimed to remember being abducted from the apartment in Praia da Luz in 2007, having described “being abused” by a man, adding: “Someone injected me with something that made me feel paralysed.”
The details were put forward during the second day of the opening of the trial, in which the jury were previously told that Wandelt was definitively not Madeleine and was instead a manipulative conspiracy theorist who understood the upset she was causing to the family.
Leicester crown court was played an audio recording on Tuesday of a visit by Wandelt, 24, and her co-defendant Karen Spragg, 61, to the McCanns’ house in December last year, in which Kate McCann appeared to plead with the pair to leave, saying: “You’re causing us a lot of distress, now stop it.”
In the recording, made by Wandelt herself and later collected as evidence by the police, Wandelt and Spragg could be heard shouting at Madeleine’s mother as she attempted to enter her home. When Kate went inside, they then banged on the door, the court was told.
In a transcript of a second recording read to the jury, the defendants confronted Gerry as he returned home shortly after. He was recorded as saying: “You are not Madeleine … I don’t want this, please do not hassle us and leave the premises.”
After Spragg, who is from Cardiff, shouted demands for a DNA test, Gerry said: “The police are well aware of Julia and her situation. We are not having a discussion. Please leave, you are not welcome.”
The following day, the defendants returned to their address to post a letter through the door, addressed to “Mum (Kate)” and signed “Madeleine x”, which the prosecutor, Michael Duck KC, described as a “final, cruel signature”.
She also wrote Kate a message that she wanted to “hug” her and the McCanns’ two adult children, Duck told the jury, adding: “It would be difficult to think of anything the McCann family would like less.”
Messages sent by Spragg in the aftermath of the confrontation showed “not one ounce of regret”, he said, reading a text in which Spragg told a friend “Kate cried and Gerry was horrible” and another she sent to Wandelt as the pair made further plans to harass the family, which read “lol we do our stakeout again”.
The prosecution also explained how the pair made “increasingly bizarre plans” to collect Kate’s DNA, which included going through the McCanns’ bins and taking forks from restaurants that they had eaten in.
They were arrested at Bristol airport on 19 February, as Wandelt made a follow-up visit to the UK and Spragg waited in the car. Both defendants deny a count of stalking causing serious alarm and distress.
The trial continues.
