A second woman has come forward to claim that she is the missing Madeleine McCann, almost eighteen years since the child’s disappearance.
Often regarded as the biggest missing-persons case in modern history, McCann’s vanishing from a hotel resort in Lagos, Portugal garnered worldwide attention in 2007. Near-on two decades later the case remains unsolved, though interest has never wained.
Then just three years old, Madeleine disappeared while on a family holiday. Despite a number of high profile searches, authorities have never been able to definitively say what happened to her.
The overriding theory is that the girl was abducted, with some clinging to hope that she may yet be alive today. Over the years, several young women have stepped forward to claim that they are the missing Madeleine, with one woman in particular, Polish-born Julia Wandelt, attracting attention in recent years.
Wandelt, 22, was arrested on charges of stalking Madeleine’s parents in the UK last week – this after alleging that a new set of DNA test results “strongly supported” her theory that she is related to Gerry McCann, Madeleine’s father.
A second woman has now reportedly come forward to claim that she is Madeleine, telling the MailOnline that she first grew suspicious about her parentage after running into issues with securing ID.
22-year-old Eugenea Collins, from Arkansas, US, said: “I am unable to get any kind of identification. I couldn’t even get any help from the people at the red cross when my house was burned because I have no identification.
“I have never seen an original birth certificate neither. The only thing I saw had someone else’s name wrote on it and they marked that out and wrote mine above it.”
Needless to say, Collins’ claims have led to a discussion online, with a prevailing observation among doubters being that she lacks coloboma, the signature eye defect Madeleine was born with.
“She doesn’t have a mark on her eye and she has photos that seem to be from younger than maddie was when she went missing,” one person wrote in a Reddit thread.
“She has shown pictures of herself at 1 or 2-years-old and she doesn’t seem to have an eye mark at all,” a second person agreed.
Collins also shared DNA results revealing she has largely British and Northwestern European heritage. This, of course, doesn’t specifically link her to the McCann family.
Reportedly, the 22-year-old also stated her belief that her real father is German man Christian Brueckner, the only suspect in Madeleine’s disappearance.
