by Blake Ellis
“So I rewrote the letter. He crumpled it up, and threw it in the garbage and said, ‘When can you start?’ ”
He’d been a copywriter ever since. We asked him how difficult it had been to make the transition from reporting important, fact-based news to creating made-up, fantastical stories in an attempt to solicit money. To our surprise, he didn’t seem to see as much of a distinction as we did. “When I worked as a reporter, I was in the storytelling business, just like I am now,” he told us. “My stories used to be ‘Main Street is on fire, here’s an interview with the man who just lost everything.’ Now my storytelling is more, ‘Once upon a time, long, long ago on a planet far, far away. . .’ ”
He started out writing letters and manuals all related to the sale of overseas lottery tickets. But soon he was taking on all kinds of assignments, from lip plumpers to diet pills, all with the same goal: to convince people that whatever he was advertising was about to change their lives. “I was taught very early that I never sell products, I sell solutions. I’m always selling the dream, in other words,” he said. “I’m going to tell you both to close your eyes and just imagine how great it’s going to feel when all your brand-new furniture is loaded up in the new truck and you’re moving to a new neighborhood and waving goodbye to the neighbors you hate.”
The jobs where he could really let his creativity and writing juices flow were for psychics like Maria. These writing jobs let him impersonate someone completely new and get into character each time he sat at his desk.
“I wrote one for a psychic: ‘Did you feel it? Last night, actually early this morning, maybe two or two thirty, it was like a cold breeze went over my body. Did you feel that? If you did, it’s possible we shared a psychic experience.’ ”
He once wrote about how Maria would stay up all night thinking about the recipient, and about how she was hearing voices from guardian angels. “The guardian angel told me something specific about you that you need to know—send me 25 dollars and I’ll tell you the same secrets that the guardian angel whispered in my ear,” he remembered writing.
For another letter, this one on behalf of Maria, he asked recipients to place their own hand on a drawn outline of a hand, saying Maria had become so flooded with work that she had gathered a team to help her analyze the energy from the handprint. We had seen a letter a lot like the one he was describing within the government lawsuit—with the outline of a hand and instructions for recipients to place their own hand on top. “So that I can get a sample of your vibrations and energy, please place your hand upon the image below and count slowly to 7,” it stated.
He received many requests to write these kinds of letters as the mail-order psychic business boomed in the nineties. He wrote Maria Duval letters for two entirely different companies, in two different countries, most recently flying to Russia to help write letters for her around five years ago. Of all the psychics he wrote letters for, he said that Maria Duval was the only one that had grown into a true franchise, with different operations pumping the letters out from different locations.
Explaining how he determined whether his work had been successful, he told us that some of his best letters hooked at least 10 percent of those they had gone out to, while a dud would receive a response only 3 or 4 percent of the time. He said that while some copywriters liked to work on a royalty basis, receiving ten cents for every dollar that came in as a result of their letter, for example, he sometimes chose to receive a flat fee for his services.
He claimed that his work was all about delivering his recipients a masterfully told story, without making specific promises he knew could not be kept. He explained that he was one of many Maria Duval copywriters, and that each one had his or her own style. While some letters crossed the line, such as those boasting that the recipient would win thousands of dollars the next day, he claimed he never did that. “I know that’s illegal because I’m promising something you can’t deliver,” he told us. He said he had also turned down jobs when he learned a specific letter would go only to people in their nineties.
“I started raising my rates to the point where they couldn’t afford me.” He would tell agencies his fee was $100,000, he said, about a job for which he would have previously charged $20,000. “ ‘I have to have money for the bail and the lawyer; I need to have that up front.’ ” This would always scare them off, he said.
He also claimed that some of the best mailers he had worked with refused to send letters to addresses of people over a certain age, and they would cut off recipients who sent too much money. “There are mailers who have the conscience to say, ‘Hey I’ll take a nickel from everyone, but I won’t suck a person dry.’ ” Other companies he worked for kept a list he described as “don’t ever mail them again,” which contained the names of those who demanded that they be left alone, those who informed the sender that whoever the letter was trying to reach was dead, and those who preferred to receive money first before sending any of their own to a psychic.
Our hunch was that this sympathetic side of the business probably had more to do with avoiding authorities, such as officials who might be tipped off by a well-meaning bank employee or family member, than with any sort of moral compass. But this perspective was interesting nonetheless. It showed how easy it was for a person inside this business, whether a copywriter or someone at the helm of an operation, to justify the work he or she did. As Jacques had told Willem, the Dutch journalist, “you have true people and you have crooks.” “When you cheat people, that is wrong,” he had said, apparently convinced that all the people receiving Maria’s letters were happy with the attention they were getting and how the letters made them feel, something Maria herself had echoed in interviews.
“The first thing they get is a nice warm and fuzzy feeling that someone still writes to them,” the Canadian copywriter told us, agreeing with the idea that the good these letters do can outweigh the bad. The desperation among recipients is also what makes the letters so successful, he explained. “Because when Mrs. Jones, who’s seventy-five, when the kids are gone and grandkids are gone . . . and the first thing [she reads] is [her] name. [She thinks], ‘It’s so nice that somebody writes to me.’ That’s the number one thing.”
“You do get people who say, ‘I’m so glad you contacted me—I’m at the end of the tether,’ ” he said. “You realize, all these people want is a friend. . . . Yeah, I shouldn’t be talking to people, but where are their kids, where are their friends? Why aren’t they talking to them? You go to a senior community and see how many people never leave their room. Those are the people I’m going to mail to because they need a friend.”
“Do you ever feel bad about doing any of this?” we asked.
“Yes, to an extent,” he said, “but at the same time, I’m sorry, but I think I’m doing good and giving people someone to talk to. If they didn’t talk to me they would talk to someone else—and hopefully someone legitimate, but I can’t control that.”
Still, he acknowledged that the letters didn’t always have such noble intentions. “The biggest fear of women over age seventy is falling and breaking a hip. So a psychic will always say, ‘You need my advice so you don’t run into any medical catastrophes.’ I know what your fear is. Am I playing on it? Yes. You learn ways to spin your tale and spin your yarn so that they say, ‘I’m going to get something out of this.’ ”
He was also well aware that many of the people receiving his letters were a little too gullible, telling us the story of a woman who sent back her order form with her American Express Platinum card attached. With it came a note explaining that she couldn’t figure out how to fill out the order form, so could they please do it for her and send her card back when done? “I never look at it as ‘These people are too stupid to live.’ That said, you would be amazed at the stupid stuff people will do,” he said.
He even gave us a glimpse into his writing process for each letter, saying that he drew on his broadcast reporting skills, writing letters in an
active voice that begged to be read aloud. “I sit down and I close my eyes and I compose it in my head and then I start to type,” he began. “I will write the whole thing, a four-page letter, an eight-page letter, and then I walk away and the next day I’ll read it out loud to myself and notice places I’m not strong enough. . . . [I’ll] make changes, and it’s done.
“A lot of writers go over a hundred drafts; they bleed over every word. I don’t do that.”
We asked him whom exactly he was writing these letters to, envisioning him sitting at his laptop and getting into his Maria Duval character.
He answered us quickly, rattling off a detailed answer. “She’s about sixty-five, she’s widowed, she probably has four or five kids; [she] may even have grandkids. She lives alone in a small apartment, lives on a small pension. She’s not educated, but understands her world, probably thinks she didn’t get the right breaks at the right time. . . . What I’m going to convince her is that Maria’s going to make the rest of her days easier. It’s been a hard sixty-five years. I’m gonna make it easier.”
We immediately thought of Doreen.
The Nucleus
THE MARIA DUVAL letters may have been written by all sorts of copywriters over the years, but we were at least sure that they’d started with Infogest, the Swiss company that Jean-Claude had founded all those years ago.
Near the end of our international calling spree, we spoke with a man named Lukas Mattle, who had once been listed on business filings as a director of Infogest. It appeared that Lukas had gone on to run a driving school, whose website featured a witch on a broomstick with wheels and the motto “Driving Is No Witchcraft.”
We gave him a call to see what he knew.
Lukas was driving through the mountains of Switzerland and his cell phone was going in and out of service so it took several dropped calls to get through to him. He spoke very little English, but we were able parse out something that piqued our interest. He said that he had worked at Infogest for a while but that the company—and Maria—were “finished.”
We quickly started peppering him with more questions. What did he mean by “finished”? Did this mean Infogest was out of business? And if so, how were the Maria Duval letters still being sent out? Unfortunately, he was either playing dumb or had no idea what we were saying, because all he would say was “I don’t know”—even when we asked him if he could understand us.
We tried to confirm this new information on our own. We called Infogest’s Swiss telephone number, and the line was disconnected. A more comprehensive search of business records showed that the company was indeed liquidated in 2014, the same year of the US government’s lawsuit. So who was calling the shots now if Infogest was “finished,” and Jacques and Jean-Claude really were out of the picture?
As we returned home from work each night, we found it nearly impossible to quiet our racing minds. Out to dinner with family, watching TV, walking to the subway, at the gym, we would recheck our email on our phones, desperately hoping for the clue we had been waiting for. The holidays were approaching, but it was hard for us to think of anything else but our investigation. No longer outside observers, we were living fully inside this alternate universe full of conmen and shell companies. Before and after work, and all throughout the weekends, we emailed and texted back and forth constantly with each new theory that popped into our heads. Our loved ones were also wrapped up in the mystery, since it was all we could talk about. They were eager for us to find answers as each new crazy story or clue emerged.
We decided to turn to the most recent traces of Maria and the letters, searching for any proof of letters that had gone out since the US lawsuit was filed in 2014. This led us to Russia, where we found a flurry of Maria Duval activity: complaints, news articles, and, most notably, a Russian website offering psychic guidance. Using a much different template from her US websites, this site, with a muted purple background, featured a doctored version of one of the photos on Flickr from her Russian press conference (in which she was wearing the same chunky necklace and black, cleavage-baring top), next to an astrological chart. Across the top of the page was a toll-free number people could call to supposedly reach the clairvoyant, and there was an online form asking for personal information and how Maria could help, whether it be with money, wealth, or health.
There was also a page full of testimonials, which featured photos of real people next to each glowing review. Curious who these people were, we used a tool that allowed us to search images on Google that indicated where each specific image had appeared online. These cheesy photos were nothing more than stock images.
All of these traces of Maria Duval in Russia led us back to Jacques.
As we discovered earlier, a number of copyrights had recently been filed for Maria Duval ads in Russia and Ukraine. Listed as the registrant for these copyrights was the same company that Jacques had represented two years earlier at the shady marketing conference in Marbella, Spain, before his untimely death. It was also the same company listed as the most recent contact for Maria’s US website.
To gather more information, we decided to call a man named Lucio Parrella, who appeared to work at the company. We were surprised when he acknowledged that he currently sold rights to Maria Duval’s books, yet he also claimed to have nothing to do with Jacques and to know nothing about her letters. When we asked why his company’s email address was listed as the contact for Maria’s website, he said he had no idea and was working on getting it removed. Then he let it slip that Jacques might have been the one to put it there.
We were finally starting to form what seemed to be a very plausible theory: If Jean-Claude really had retired in 2006 as he’d said, maybe Jacques was the one who’d kept the scheme going for practically another decade. And with Jacques so recently deceased, it was quite possible that there wasn’t anyone in charge anymore.
Much of the evidence we’d seen of letters going out, from online complaints and trademark filings to news reports, was from before Jacques’s death. This left us wondering what Jacques’s death meant for the future of the letters. And for Maria.
One thing was clear: many of the people we tracked down seemed to be nothing more than cogs in this massive machine. It was likely that their involvement in the scheme earned them money, even if it was simply being paid to put their names on official filings. These were the people used to keep investigators at bay, the fall guys if the ship went down.
It was no wonder that this was such an impossible case for law enforcement agencies to solve. There were so many companies. And so many people. And the money and the letters seemed to have gone through an endless number of hands. The Maria Duval “fraud in a box” had been passed around the world for decades, leaving valuable letter templates in the hands of an unknown number of people and operations. Now, with no clear leader, copycats appeared to be out there who used crude copies of images and letters found online to perpetrate their own versions of the scam.
We were confident that the Maria Duval scheme had started decades ago with two enterprising businessmen who were no longer the nucleus of the operation. Yet as we packed away our large notepad with the sprawling business web scrawled across it, we knew the story wasn’t over. Maria was very much a real woman out there somewhere. But we still knew little about why she’d let herself get caught up in such a heartless fraud. Was it money? Love? Ego?
It was with her that our journey began, and it was with her that it must end. We needed to uncover the real story of the psychic herself.
The Windfall
WE STARTED WITH the same French address we had seen over and over again.
So many people had been adamant that Maria Duval was real that we’d begun to wonder whether the address from all the trademark filings could really be her home address. We looked up the town of Callas to find it was populated by a mere 1,900 people—small enough that town officials ought to know whether she lived there.
We called the phone number listed for the town hall of Ca
llas and asked the woman who answered whether she knew of a psychic in her town named Maria Duval. To our surprise, she immediately said yes. In fact, she gave us a new address for Maria and told us that she was usually home, so we should try reaching her there. The employee then informed us by email the next day that Maria had actually come into the town hall that week.
It all seemed too easy. With this pivotal new information, the only way to continue our hunt would be to go to France. To date, our luxurious reporting trips from past investigations together had taken us to Houston, Texas, to gather information about a predatory government debt collector and to Ferguson, Missouri, to investigate the town’s failing justice system. We were sure that traveling to the South of France to look for a psychic would be a tough sell to our bosses.
Expecting our editors to laugh at the idea of sending two reporters to French wine country, we pitched the trip to them in December, two months after finding that strange letter from Patrick Guerin. Yet they turned out to be just as wrapped up in the mystery, agreeing that our traveling there was the only way to truly see the story through. Still in disbelief that we were actually going to France, we quickly booked our flight and hotel before our editors changed their minds.
Before we left, with the assistance of our French-speaking colleague Julia Jones, we made one last round of calls to anyone we thought might have information about this elusive woman. Of all the people we called, it was the former mayor of Callas who had the most information to share. Françoise Barre, who had been mayor for nineteen years, just also happened to have been Maria’s personal secretary for a decade. “I’m a very realistic person. I’m an accountant; I took her appointments; I was her secretary,” she told us. “I’m very prosaic. I was mayor of my small town for three mandates, and I think people see me as having a good head on my shoulders, I’m not one to tell tales.”