We were used to only hearing about Madeleine McCann as the date of May 3 approached, the day of her disappearance in the Algarve almost 16 years ago. The case of the most wanted girl in the world had entered a ‘valley’ period, especially after the name of Christian Brueckner, a German pedophile serving a sentence in a German prison for raping an elderly woman in Portugal, came out in 2020. The German Prosecutor’s Office believes that Brueckner kidnapped the little British girl and killed her shortly after her.
This week the case has reawakened with force after a young Polish woman named Julia Faustyna assured on her Instagram profile that she is Maddie, providing photographs of her physical resemblance and common facial features. In a few days she has added 900,000 followers to her cause, getting Kate and Gerry McCann, “my real parents”, as she says, to undergo a DNA test to clear up doubts. The Police discredit her version and maintain that the girl is dead, although her body still does not appear.
Mayo
CARLOS COSTA / AFP
Madeleine McCann was 3 years old when she disappeared from her bed on the night of May 3, 2007 in apartment 5A of the Ocean Club resort in Praia da Luz, in the Portuguese Algarve. The girl slept next to her brothers (Sean and Amelie, two-year-old twins) while her parents, both doctors by profession, dined with some friends at a restaurant in the same vacation resort no more than 100 meters from the apartment. . Neither of them woke up all night, prompting Portuguese police to question whether the three children had been sedated, a point Madeleine’s parents have repeatedly denied.
police mobilization
REUTERS/Carlos Vidigal
Portugal launched an unprecedented search operation. More than a thousand agents were mobilized throughout 2007. Airports and ports throughout the country and the borders with Spain were monitored. The case was also investigated by Scotland Yard, but between the Portuguese and English police there was more competition than cooperation. They both agree that Maddie is dead, but her body is still missing almost 16 years later.
traces of blood
EFE/Luis Forra
The case took an unexpected turn two months after Maddie’s disappearance, in July 2007, when dogs specialized in detecting traces of blood from the United Kingdom identified biological traces of the little girl in the apartment in the Algarve and in the car that the family had rented.
The parents are suspicious
AFP PHOTO/ JOAO CORTESAO
The Portuguese inspector Gonçalo Amaral, first in charge of the investigation, defended that the girl died accidentally at the hands of her parents and that they simulated her disappearance, a hypothesis that clashed head-on with that of the kidnapping, supported by the family and the English police. Amaral was removed from the case in October 2007 and after being left out, he wrote a book, ‘Maddie: the truth of the lie’, directly implicating Kate and Gerry McCann in the girl’s accidental death. Maddie’s parents tried unsuccessfully to stop its publication in court.
Archive and reactivation: Christian Brueckner
REUTERS
In July 2008, the Portuguese Prosecutor’s Office decided to close the case of Madeleine McCann’s disappearance and exonerate her parents from suspicions of involvement due to lack of evidence. But in 2020 it was activated again thanks to the German clue that points to a new suspect: Christian Brueckner, a 45-year-old man who was 29 at the time of the event. The German suspect, who is currently incarcerated in Oldenburg for sexual assault committed in the same tourist area where Maddie disappeared in 2007, she was near Praia da Luz that May 3, as revealed by the positioning of her mobile.
After years of clues, theories and suspects that have gone nowhere, the most solid hypothesis is defended by German investigators, who believe that McCann was murdered by Brueckner, an unscrupulous sexual predator with a long list of drug trafficking charges. , pedophilia, and sexual crimes committed between 2000 and 2017 in Portugal. He is the first and only defendant in the case. Last November Brückner wrote a letter from his German prison where he denies the accusations and points out that there is a plan to set him up.
media disappearance
ARTURO MARI / ROMAN OBSERVER
Maddie’s is the most mediatic disappearance of a minor to date. The McCanns came to be received by Pope Benedict XVI and hired a public relations team to manage dealings with the press. Movies, TV series, documentaries and books have been made about the case. The parents created a foundation to help in the search for their daughter with which they raised more than 1.5 million euros, but they used part of the money to pay two installments of their mortgage, which at the time generated a new controversy about the use they were making of the donated money. Almost fifteen years later, the case has accumulated 12,000 pages of official information, more than 2,000 police investigations and a list of more than 600 suspects.
The sudden appearance of Julia Faustyna
INSTAGRAM
The case has been ‘asleep’ for a long time, waiting for the media to remember the anniversary of the event, as every May 3rd, and talk about Maddie and her strange disappearance again. But she has ‘awakened’ with the surprising irruption of Julia Faustyna Wandelt, a 21-year-old girl who lives in Poland, is adopted and claims to be Madeleine. Maddie is two years younger, but Julia argues that her age could be wrong.
His Instagram account (iammadeleinemccan) where he provides images of the similarities with Maddie and her parents does not stop adding followers. In just a few days she is already close to 900,000. Such a stir has been caused that she has arranged for Maddie’s parents, Gerry and Kate McCann, “my real parents”, as she claims, to undergo a DNA test. The representative of the young woman assures that the adoptive mother does not want to help her daughter to discover her true identity.
Freckles, spots in the eye, gestures…
INSTAGRAM
The girl is convinced that she is Maddie and is based on her physical resemblance and the presence of exceptional features, such as a small mole under her left eye, a series of freckles on her legs and even a rare eye condition known as coloboma. , a kind of groove in the central part of the pupil. She also says that they share the dimple and similarities in the smile and in other facial gestures. Does that mean that, as she claims, she is Madeleine McCann? The police think not.
False testimony?
METROPOLITAN POLICE SERVICE PHOTO
Scotland Yard believes that we would be facing a new false testimony. To corroborate this thesis, experts from the London police force have used robot aging to see if there is a similarity. And they maintain that it does not look like anything. Furthermore, they believe that Maddie has been dead since shortly after her disappearance. Added to this are the statements on Tuesday by Francisco Marco, former director of the Method 3 detective agency, who on his day investigated Madeleine’s disappearance.
In an interview on the Catalan radio station RAC1, Marco has advanced that he has carried out biometric research (behavioral or physical traits such as fingerprints, facial patterns, the palm of the hand, retina, iris…) and has compared his evidence with other photographs from Julia Faustyna and do not match Madeleine’s features, according to her analysis. “I can think that she is a fraud, but I cannot say it without evidence,” he commented on the radio.
lots of maddies
AFP PHOTO/ABDELHAK SENNA
During these ten years Maddie has been ‘seen’ in New Zealand, Malta, the United States, South Africa and several cities in Spain… One of the times that gave the most talk was a photograph taken by some Spanish tourists in a village near the city of Tetouan, in Morocco, in which a girl similar to Maddie appeared. But that blonde, European-looking girl with blue eyes and light skin was not the most wanted girl in the world. The McCann family, who has always defended that her daughter is alive, continues to search, waiting for the DNA test and to feel another disappointment or the greatest joy in her life. Maddie would be 20 years old this May 12.