The parents of Madeleine McCann, who went missing on May 3, 2007 at age 3, have agreed to DNA test a 21-year-old Polish woman claiming to be the missing child.
This month, Julia Faustyna gained attention on social media after she posted videos and posts claiming to be McCann, according to the New York Post. Reportedly, Faustyna claims that she is unable to remember part of her early childhood and is unsure of her age because she’s never seen her birth certificate. Some reports identify her under the name “Julia Wandelt” or “Julia Wendall.”
“I don’t remember most of my childhood but my earliest memory is very strong and it’s about holidays in hot place where there was a beach and white or very light colored buildings with apartments,” she said, adding that she does not remember her family. Faustyna’s Instagram account, called “iammadeleinemccan” where she is posting many of the claims, has accumulated over 1 million followers.
To recap, McCann went missing over 15 years ago while on vacation with her family in Praia da Luz, Portugal. She was asleep in her bed in the family’s apartment they rented for the trip when she vanished. At the time of her disappearance, her parents had left Madeleine and her siblings in the apartment to meet up with friends nearby. At around 10 p.m., mother Kate McCann went to check on the children to discover that her daughter was gone. McCann has never been found and her disappearance was the subject of a popular 2019 Netflix series, “The Disappearance of Madeleine McCann.”
Reportedly, Faustyna claims to have heard of McCann from her grandmother a few months ago.
“I have similar eyes, shape of face, ears, lips, I had the gap between the teeths [as Madeleine],” she said in one post that included a side-by-side photo of herself and McCann. She’s also pointed out that both herself and McCann have the same dark smudge on their right iris.
In one post, Faustyna reportedly wrote that she “started doing [her] own research,” and “connected the dots” after she learned what happened to McCann many years ago.
“I need to know the truth. I need [a] dna test and I need to talk with Madeleine’s parents,” she wrote.
The Post noted that “representatives for the young woman making the stunning claims admit that her background is ‘messy’” and that “she needs help.”
In April 2022, a German sex offender was officially declared a suspect in the case. The man, Christian Brueckner, 45, was working in the town where McCann disappeared. He is reportedly serving a sentence for raping a 72-year-old woman at the resort in 2005.