Madeleine McCann Found? Cold Case Heats Up As 21-Year-Old Polish Woman Julia Faustyna Claims to be Infamous Missing Child

By Maddy Casale @madhoops
Published Feb. 23, 2023, 7:25 p.m. ET

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The Disappearance of Madeleine McCann

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Madeleine McCann

For over 15 years, the world has been captivated by the story of Madeleine McCann, a young British girl who disappeared while vacationing with her family around Portugal.

At the time of McCann’s 2007 disappearance, she was just 3-years-old. Since then, the desperate search to find her has come up empty, leading authorities and McCann’s family to presume her dead.

So when 21-year-old Polish woman Julia Faustyna (who has also been listed as Julia Wandelt and Julia Wendell) claimed to be McCann earlier this month via Instagram, it caused quite a stir.

Now, Faustyna’s Instagram, @iammadeleinemccan, has over one million followers who have helped to share the young woman’s story. It has even reached the missing girl’s parents, Kate and Gerry McCann, who have agreed to take a DNA test to see if Faustyna really is their daughter, per The Daily Beast.

This is just the latest news in Madeleine McCann’s ongoing story that has still held the public’s attention even in recent years. In 2019, Netflix even released the docu-series The Disappearance of Madeleine McCann, which delved back into McCann’s disappearance in hopes of reexamining what really occurred. Not only did the show include exclusive interviews with the police force and media members investigating the mystery, but it also helped to renew the fervor to solve it.

Just one year after the docu-series dropped, a potential lead surfaced as investigators identified 43-year-old German national Christopher Brueckner as the prime suspect. Brueckner is a convicted sex offender and drug trafficker who is currently serving a seven-year prison sentence for raping an American tourist. He was believed to have been going through Praia de Luz, Portugal in a camper van when McCann disappeared.

On her Instagram page last week, Faustyna shared a post divulging that she was the victim of a German pedophile, further establishing her potential connection to Madeleine McCann.