Madeleine McCann Update: Police Collect Items in New Search, Keep Hopes Low

Months after a hoax was debunked and a cell phone seized, police make another move in the ongoing Madeleine McCann

By Andrew Roberts

It has been a while since Madeleine McCann's ongoing disappearance grabbed headlines. In the months since a hoax involving a woman claiming to be the missing girl happened, police have also raced against time to make the connections with their key suspect and give one last try in solving the nightmarish case. 

According to Sky News, German authorities took a final stab at connecting prime suspect Christian Brueckner to the missing girl's case. The authorities searched the Barragem do Arade Reservoir which the convicted sex criminal reportedly called his "little paradise."

Police tempered hopes that this was the big break, with German prosecutors telling local papers "don't expect too much." The German search was the second of the area following Portuguese authorities finding several items after a three-day search back in May. These findings were given to German police. Brueckner is currently in prison for the rape of a 72-year-old woman, with plenty of allegations following after he was connected to the McCann case. He has denied his involvement.

Elsewhere, there hasn't been any new details on the phone belonging to a woman who claimed to be the missing McCann. Julia Wendell, a Polish woman who had claimed she was missing British child Madeleine McCann. Not only did she come out with her claim, facing death threats after it gained attention, but she would also eventually have a DNA test that showed she was not McCann and would support her family's claim that she's their biological daughter. Then police in the U.S. reportedly seized a phone allegedly belonging to Wendell into their possession. The Orange County Sheriff's Department reached out to Polish law enforcement in Wroclaw, alleging the phone belonged to Wendell and was left while she sought "safe haven" in California.

According to Radar, a source reported that the phone was voluntarily handed over to the police with a search and seizure taking place. These details were confirmed by Dr. Fia Johansson, the private investigator that helped Wendell go from Poland to California after she start to receive death threats.

"We are not going to make any comments about the case," Sgt. Mike Woodroof told the outlet. "Our investigation is taking a deep look into it and we're going to let them do their investigative duties and then from that point let the judicial system take over – if it needs to."

The news follows the reveal of Wendell's DNA test results, proving that she was not McCann and that her claims were unfounded. The 21-year-old does believe she is McCann or is sticking to the claim at this point, but a DNA test taken earlier in the month proved otherwise.

"She is absolutely 100 percent from Poland. She is a small percentage of Lithuanian and Russian but the test results show she is Polish," Johansson told Radar. "We learned a few things, one being that Julia's mum is in fact now believed to be her mum, so she is not Madeleine McCann."

Wendell issued an apology to McCann's parents after the results were determined, but she has vowed to keep digging for information. "At first she didn't want to believe the DNA results, she was saying 'What if someone changed the results?' but I told her, 'Stop this now,'" Johansson added. "I can understand as a psychologist why she didn't want to believe her mother is her real mother. But I told her – she must stop this fixation now that she is Madeleine McCann and accept the result of the DNA test and start to move on with her life."

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