by Blake Ellis
Hello, Ms. Duval,
We’re journalists from CNN in the United States. We are currently writing an article about you and the letters sent in your name around the world, and we’d like to give you an opportunity to share your perspective on the story.
Please contact us as soon as possible, since it’s very important that we speak to you—and if at all possible, in person.
Sincerely,
Melanie Hicken,
Blake Ellis
The Sister
WE WOKE UP the next morning still on a mission to somehow get to Maria.
We piled into Julia’s hotel room to strategize after another quick breakfast of espresso, bread, and cheese. While the two of us were relegated to a dark box of a room, which contained little more than two beds, Julia’s room was drenched with sunlight and had views of charming red rooftops nearby. It also had a desk and several chairs, all of which made it a much more conducive space for our sleuthing.
We quickly dumped out our file folder full of the documents we’d brought along on our trip, and spread them over Julia’s queen-size bed. Looking for any last clues, we returned to the personal business filings for Maria Gamba Duval that we’d discovered shortly before leaving for France. We’d been in such a hurry during our initial review of these documents that this time we noticed a new name: Marie-Françoise Gamba.
Wondering who this woman could be (and guessing it must be a fake name or a relative of Maria’s), we turned to our laptops and were surprised to quickly find a French phone listing online. Our marathon calling sessions to date had resulted in so many dial tones that we were even more surprised when an elderly sounding, French-speaking woman picked up the phone soon after Julia punched in the number.
Julia, also startled, quickly put the woman on her speakerphone, as the two of us anxiously stood over her shoulder listening. Julia introduced herself as a journalist and asked about her connection to Maria. Upon hearing her response, Julia looked up at us with big eyes and muted the line.
It was Maria Duval’s sister, Julia whispered.
Again, and this time more than ever, we desperately wished we could understand every word this woman was saying. We did recognize a few words, though, the most important of which were “Switzerland,” “Jacques,” “letters,” and “Infogest.”
Getting more and more excited, we started shoving notes and questions in front of Julia, scribbled on the back of the very business filings that had given us this woman’s name. When we eventually returned to these filings months later, we were amused by the crumpled pages full of hastily written questions. But at the time, Julia took page after page from us, asking each question of Maria’s sister in succession.
“Do you talk to your sister often?”
“Is your sister still involved with any businesses?”
“Where did your sister get all her money?”
“Tell your sister there are still letters being sent out in her name.”
Julia, who we were quickly learning was a master multitasker, jotted down her own notes and responses as she spoke with Marie-Françoise. When she hung up the phone, we were champing at the bit for a full recap of the conversation. Maria’s sister had provided us with another small breakthrough.
She’d told Julia that she spoke with her sister almost every day, and that Maria was not in good health. She hadn’t said whether her condition was the result of some kind of sickness or simply old age. Also, she’d seemed shocked when Julia explained that the US government had filed a lawsuit against Maria alleging mail fraud. After hearing a description of the letters and the money they asked for, Maria’s sister called it an “escro” (short for escroquerie), a French word for “scam.” “There’s no way my sister created the letters,” she told Julia.
She had a possible explanation for everything that we hadn’t heard before, though: She said that many years ago, Maria had sold the rights to her name to a Swiss company, which her sister thought was likely Infogest, and that Maria didn’t have anything to do with what happened afterward. Although she didn’t remember names of specific businessmen, her sister told us that Maria “was involved with a Jacques.”
What Maria’s sister told us about this business deal seemed plausible. What seemed less believable was the idea that Maria, given the YouTube videos and media interviews in which she publicly acknowledged and defended the letters, had absolutely nothing to do with them.
Soon after our call with Maria’s sister, we called back Maria’s close friend Françoise Barre, the former mayor of Callas whom we’d spoken to weeks earlier. She still wouldn’t meet us in person but agreed to speak with us over the phone. “She had her company that took care of her,” she told us, suggesting that a business arrangement had been made to oversee the letters and the money they brought in.
When Julia told her that the letters were being used to deceive people, she actually didn’t seem surprised. “Yes it’s possible,” she said. “Yes, yes, she told me a long time ago, ‘I no longer have control over them.’ ”
On a more personal note, she again stressed to us that Maria was a good person, calling her “loyal and competent.” She was unwavering about her psychic abilities. “She has an extraordinary power for divination to predict the future,” the former mayor asserted. “She told me, ‘You will be mayor.’ ”
Now in possession of this additional evidence tying the psychic to the scam, we were even more eager to speak with Maria. Her sister, before our call ended, told us something that made it seem like it might be worth another try.
She said that, given Maria’s health, she would be very surprised if the psychic was actually in Rome. And she would know, we figured. After all, she claimed to speak with her sister almost every day.
The Pot of Jelly
WE WERE HESITANT to return to Maria’s house a second time. Still fresh in our minds was the email from Maria’s son, Antoine, warning us to stay away from his mother.
We pulled up to her property and parked in the same spot as before, next to the same large stable. We were still in the car, discussing our game plan, when we suddenly noticed that her gate was opening, and a large white van was beginning to pull out from the entrance. Determined not to lose our chance, we swung open our car doors and sprinted across the street without even grabbing our notebooks.
As the van turned out of the driveway and began down the main road, we frantically flagged down the startled driver. An older man cautiously rolled down the window, likely curious to know what three young women and a man with a video camera could possibly want from him. When we asked him about Maria, he said he was her gardener, and that she was in Rome and he didn’t know when she would be returning. “I don’t know about her business, and she doesn’t want us to,” he said.
Before we could ask him any more of our questions, other cars started to approach behind him on the one-lane road, and he quickly pulled away—leaving us standing there alone.
With nothing to lose, we left the middle of the road and continued to the gate again.
If Maria really wasn’t in Rome, as her sister suspected, then this was a pretty well-orchestrated cover-up, with even her gardener being told the same story—or at least told to tell it to anyone who came knocking. But how would Maria have known we were coming? Antoine was the only one besides her sister who knew we were in France. Could he have tipped her off?
We were convinced Maria had to be in that house. We walked the perimeter of the property trying to spot a light on in one of the rooms or a face looking out at us from a window. We craned our necks, jumped as high as we could to try to see over the fence and the large concrete wall. We held our phones above our heads attempting to take zoomed-in photos with our cameras. Still, we still saw nothing.
So we returned to the main gate and tried the same buzzer from the day before, pushing it again and again. This time there was no answer.
• • •
Fresh off the futile effort to find Maria at her home, we returned
to Callas’s town hall the following day, to see if the friendly woman who’d given us Maria’s address might have more to share.
We took the quick drive from our hotel and parked at the bottom of a hill that led into town. We then walked through narrow alleys dotted with flowers and ornate doors and shutters as we followed the small wooden signs for Maire (mayor) before eventually reaching the town hall, which was tucked away at the top of a steep cobblestone street overlooking the rolling hills and vineyards of Callas.
It was a busy day inside, with only two people manning the front desk. We sat across from a painted mural of the town, trying to read the various flyers and brochures advertising senior fitness classes and other local events as we waited to be seen. When we were eventually called in, we were greeted by a different woman than the one we had spoken with on the phone. This middle-aged blond lady said she had actually worked for Maria more than twenty years earlier. As an intern.
Thinking about our own college internships at newspapers and magazines, we thought that working for a psychic seemed very odd, so we were dying to hear more about this unique apprenticeship. Unfortunately, she wouldn’t go into much detail about what she actually did for Maria as an intern. She explained that she worked at Maria’s house, the same one we had tried to visit, and that she was unaware of any complaints against her.
Of course, she wasn’t the first person we’d talked to who had worked for Maria. The former mayor said she had been the psychic’s personal secretary for many years, the same title Jacques Mailland had used to describe his relationship with her as well. And there was a man referred to as her business manager in the local newspaper article heralding her retirement. For a small-town psychic, she had gathered quite the army of people around her.
When we asked this town hall worker about the last time she’d seen the psychic, she told us one of the most confusing things we had heard thus far. Quite casually, she said that Maria actually came by the town hall around the holidays to pick up a pot of coulis. Since coulis is a pureed fruit or vegetable sauce similar to jelly, we thought we must have lost something in translation when Julia relayed the conversation to us. Could a single pot of jelly really be enough to convince a reclusive celebrity to venture into town?
Julia asked the woman if she was understanding her correctly. Yes, the woman explained. As part of a senior citizen program, every resident over the age of sixty was given a pot of coulis at the end of the year. They just had to come into the office to collect it.
The Lover
THIS WAS AN interesting—and amusing—development. But it didn’t get us any closer to figuring out where Maria was these days.
We still couldn’t find anyone in Callas who had seen her since her jelly pickup in December. Her friend the former mayor also hadn’t seen her in a while, nor had Maria’s sister. It seemed especially strange when Maria’s neighbors, whom we tried talking to after accosting her gardener in the middle of the street, didn’t seem to even know who she was, let alone if she was home.
Increasingly desperate, we set our sights on the man who had been named as her business manager in the local newspaper article. At the time, we hadn’t thought much of it. But as we ran out of other options, we became determined to find this man. Our online research showed that he owned a business nearby and provided us with an address that took us to the middle of an industrial park that reeked of sulfur.
We knew this man had some sort of business in this center but didn’t know where it was. There were rows of buildings in the complex, and since most were empty, we were excited to see a glimpse of people inside one of them. It ended up being a packed yoga class, and when we barged in and interrupted it the instructor wasn’t even fazed, telling us the business we were looking for was around the corner, all while shouting out new poses to her class of older women.
She was right. Around the corner and just down the road was a home construction business. A friendly younger man watched us through the window as we walked in the door, and he was surprisingly forthcoming. He told us that the man had indeed been Maria’s manager, but that there was more to their relationship than that. They had been involved in a romantic affair for many years, he said, but the manager was a married man, and he had left Maria in 2009 (the year after the article we’d found had been published), ending their relationship.
He then handed us a bright yellow Post-it note containing this man’s personal phone number, which we called as soon as we piled back into the car. When we got him on the phone, he wasn’t happy to share any personal details. Speaking to us in a loud, gruff voice, he was adamant that he had never had any personal relationship with Maria, telling us he worked at her house for only a month as a construction manager and hadn’t spoken to her in ten years. We asked him why Maria would have lied about him being her business manager. He said she was an important person at the time and probably thought it would make her sound more official if she had a manager. This sounded like something she would do, he added bitterly.
He said he knew nothing about the Maria Duval letters, and that he had been outraged when he’d seen his name in that article listed as her manager. He told us that he’d called the newspaper to demand a correction.
After our call, we remembered that Alain, the chatty archivist, had printed out all the most recent articles about Maria for us. We quickly flipped through the printouts and found the article in which the business manager was listed. Placed at the bottom of it, there was a correction noting that this man was “no longer the manager for the astrologer and clairvoyant Maria Duval.”
The Son
WE HAD SEVERAL days left in France and were at a complete loss of what to do next. Part of us wanted to scrap the whole endeavor, happy to spend the rest of our time in the South of France tasting wine at all the beautiful vineyards we kept passing.
We had spoken with everyone from Maria Duval’s gardener to her alleged lover and business manager. We had gone to her house. We had hand-delivered a note to her mailbox. We had left multiple voice mails on her machine. We had even spoken with her sister. Nearly out of ideas for how to reach Maria, we turned back to our limited interactions with Antoine, Maria’s son.
When we received that initial email from him on the way to the airport, we had quickly replied, asking him if he would be willing to speak with us and answer some questions about his mother and the letters. In response, he’d sent us a gruff message asking what we wanted to know. So we promptly sent him some questions and again asked to speak with him, but he didn’t respond, even after multiple follow-ups.
Before leaving on our trip, we had created an extensive dossier on Antoine, complete with large photos of him and his family members, along with phone numbers that were listed for him. We called the numbers to no luck. Nearly out of options, we cautiously considered showing up at his doorstep.
• • •
We were both intrigued and concerned when our research on Maria’s son showed that he was a member of the international secret society known as the Free and Accepted Masons, or Freemasons.
All we knew about Freemasonry was that it was a centuries-old international brotherhood shrouded in mystery that elicited images of intricate symbols and underground meetings. Researching this group took us on yet another detour. The United Grand Lodge of England, viewed by many as the organization’s headquarters and the place where it all started, describes Freemasonry on its website as a “non-religious,” “non-political” charity dating back to the 1700s or even earlier and boasts of famous past members including Winston Churchill, Buffalo Bill, and Harry Houdini.
Freemasonry is a society of men concerned with moral and spiritual values. Its members are taught its principles (moral lessons and self-knowledge) by a series of ritual dramas—a progression of allegorical two-part plays which are learnt by heart and performed within each Lodge—which follow ancient forms, and use stonemasons’ customs and tools as allegorical guides. . . . Freemasonry instils in its members a moral and ethical appro
ach to life: its values are based on integrity, kindness, honesty and fairness.
Reading this noble mission statement on various Freemason websites, one wouldn’t think the group was anything to be afraid of. Outside of the organization’s own description, however, it was easy to find countless conspiracy theories about the suspected nefarious activities taking place behind the walls of this group’s mysterious meeting lodges. These theories included wild claims that Freemasons were Satan worshippers, ritualistic murderers, or even part of the Illuminati—a notorious secret society associated with frightening conspiracy theories that made us think of a Dan Brown novel.
We also found an interesting article about Freemasonry and its reputation in France specifically. It appeared that this group was much more controversial in France than in the United States. “The way the French see it, Masons are a fifth column at the heart of French society, a cabal of powerful politicians, businessmen, and intellectuals with a hidden agenda that is difficult to pin down because it’s, well, hidden. Nobody knows quite what the Masons are up to, but everybody suspects they’re up to something,” stated a Bloomberg News article headlined “France: Where Freemasons Are Still Feared.”
Antoine seemed to be so involved with this community that he had even trademarked his own Masonic organization, which described itself as a spiritual, symbolic, philosophical, and occult group. The information on its website was very difficult for us to decipher—and not just because it was in French. “According to the traditional principles of the Order, the three Great Lights surround the Square, the Compass, the Rule and the Sacred Book which are on the Altar of Oaths, the Naos, in the center of the Lodge, a very strong place and very enlightened,” it stated in one place, reminding us of some of the spiritual and psychic gibberish we’d read in Maria’s letters and heard in her interviews.