As the mystery of Polish “Madeleine McCann” Julia Wendell rolls on, Mike Neville – a police officer closely involved in the original investigation – says you just have to accept “weird and wacky people” will approach the police with bizarre claims.
“The trouble is with all these things,” he said, “is you'll get people coming in confessing that they've committed a crime that they haven't done…
“People have all sorts of mental health issues and as senior investigator on a high-profile case you’ve just got to accept that we've sometimes live in a strange world and these things will happen.”
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He made no specific statements about Julia’s claim, which still hasn't been verified by a DNA test.
He added: "Some weird and wacky people will come forward, you've just got to accept that, and this woman claiming to be Madeleine is not unusual.
"Yeah I dealt with a murder case and the family went to see a psychic who then had a vision that the the missing person was in the boot of a car, and in the end when we when we found out what happened to him, he'd actually been in the boots of a – car so you just don't know what's going to happen."
Dr Fia Johansson, who is a close confidante of Julia’s, say there’s “no need” to involve the McCann family in any DNA testing because there are plenty of samples of Madeleine’s DNA “already out there” as a result of previous investigations.
But Mike told Sky News there’s a whole host of evidence relating to Madeleine’s disappearance in May 2007 that went unexamined.
“For example,” he said, “a critical thing was a CCTV camera on a road which leads down to the Sea past a primary school and that could have provided a critical evidence and that was completely missed."
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He added advanced facial recognition software that hadn’t been available in 2007 could be brought in to help settle Julia’s claim – or to scour social media for images of someone else that could be the lost British girl.
Julia claims to have very few memories of her childhood and Dr Johansson found there were no hospital records from the first five years of her life in her home city of Wroclaw, reinforcing her belief that Julia was trafficked to Poland as a child.
Despite the supposed evidence, however, experts have been sceptical about Julia's claim. Super-recogniser Simone Malik told the Daily Star she doesn't believe the woman is Madeleine and said the pair don't look alike "at all".
She said: “I believe that this isn’t Madeleine McCann – obviously DNA is the only thing that would prove it. On first impressions, when I looked at Julia Wendell I didn’t see any kind of family resemblance – at all.”
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