The medium-slash-private-investigator who had been helping the Polish woman claiming to be Madeleine McCann has apparently got a history of assisting in unusual cases.
Stockholm-born Dr. Fia Johansson - who is often referred to as the Persian Medium - is, according to her website, a celebrity medium, film producer, master entrepreneur coach, and keynote speaker. She has been featured in Forbes, The Wall Street Journal, Fox, CBS, NBC, and ABC for her wide array of work with helping solve difficult cases with law enforcement and intelligence agencies.
As of recently, Dr. Johansson has been assisting Julia Wandelt - a 21-year-old woman from Poland - who racked up quite the following on Instagram as she repeatedly claimed she could legitimately be the missing British girl. While DNA results have revealed that Wandelt is not Madeleine, Dr. Johansson believes she is still connected to the case in some way.
Madeleine disappeared from a vacation apartment in Portugal in 2007 while her parents, Kate and Gerry McCann, were at a nearby restaurant. They made sure to regularly check on their children, who were sleeping at the time. Despite extensive searches and appeals in the following years, no trace of Maddie's whereabouts has been found.
Speaking on the comparison images between Wandelt and McCann, Dr. Johansson told Sky News Australia: "She has this mark in her eyes... that I can see when she's talking to me. I looked at the eyes and said 'oh my god that's exactly the mark'. The two have a distinctive brown smudge on their right iris. Maddie's was due to a rare condition called coloboma - and share some other similar features evident in childhood photos."
Dr. Johansson had given Wandelt sanctuary in the US due to the extreme amount of death threats she has received since claiming to be the missing girl. While Wandelt is certainly the most notorious case that Johansson has worked on, she claims to have worked with big names in the past.
In fact, Dr. Johansson said in an interview with The Sun that she'd helped actor Jamal Trulove get acquitted after he was wrongly accused of murder in 2010. She also revealed that she'd solved her first case about a missing girl when she moved from Iran to Sweden.
"I remember that I could sense the place where she is but because it was in another language I couldn't understand what she was saying. The lawyer grabbed some paper and made me write what I heard and it turned out to be a place in Sweden," she revealed.
"They thought it was impossible for me to know anything about this case - I hadn't been in the country before, I couldn't speak the language. But they said they would extend the investigation and sure enough 10 days later they found Jessica’s body," Dr. Johansson said.
Eventually, this led to her taking an interest in crimes, and Dr. Johansson went to a police academy to study the law and crime scene investigation. As a medium and private investigator, she charges $35 a minute for her advice or $2,500 for a one-hour meeting.
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