A Deal with the Devil

by Blake Ellis

  Given this man’s vengeful motives, Jean-Claude told us that nothing “Patric” said could be trusted and that anything he claimed to know about Maria was also likely suspect, given their single meeting over one drink so many years ago.

  The Bizarre Businessman Revisited

  JEAN-CLAUDE SPENT MUCH of our hour-long conversation berating us for our portrayal of him in the articles we’d published months earlier, even comparing us to Maria Duval, in an unexpected way. “Maria Duval would never do any of this to people; she was very kind, a very kind person. She would not lie. She would not tell stories that were not true,” he said. “I hope you can look at yourself in the mirror and be happy and proud, but if I were you I would not be.”

  He told us it was completely unfair to connect him to Maria’s letters, since he claimed his company was nothing more than a fulfillment center for all kinds of businesses, including the Maria letters, comparing the circumstances to how the postal service facilitates mailings but is not involved with their contents. And it was true that he had never been ensnared by the various government actions over the years or charged with any wrongdoing. But for someone not involved with her letters or her operations, Jean-Claude had somehow gotten to know Maria pretty well.

  While at first he told us that he didn’t want to speak with us about her, saying she was the one best suited to do that, he gradually began to open up. He told us he’d met her decades earlier, when her local reputation was building in the South of France and she was dealing with a company in Monaco—where we’d traveled to in search of the shadowy attorney Andrea Egger.

  “She was an entertaining person,” he said, saying that they enjoyed wine together over the years and that she was full of great jokes.

  He also definitely didn’t doubt her powers. “She’s been in this for a long time and she has the most amazing testimonials from the police and locals there, they all know her as someone who can help people,” he told us. “I met people and they told me stories and I got goose bumps. . . . It’s amazing what she can do with her gift. She’s not a fake.”

  When we asked if he’d ever received a personal reading from Maria, he said that she would occasionally send him a written one, but that they were too long and technical for his liking. “I don’t know if it was one of the things she sends the others,” he said, presumably referencing the letters at the center of our investigation. He said he prefers in-person consultations, and he told us that he’d had a “once in a lifetime” experience with a different psychic in Geneva.

  Although he seemed to know a lot about Maria and appeared to have spent a good amount of time with her, he said that Jacques, whom she was in business with for many years, knew her much more closely. “They met before I met both of them,” he told us. “I know it was a long story behind it. He always worked with psychics and I always knew they were good friends.”

  And unlike what Antoine told us about her name becoming a runaway train, Jean-Claude didn’t make it sound like anyone had taken advantage of her. “She’s not naive in business; she’s been in business a long time,” he said. Though to hear Jean-Claude tell it, this was a compliment, since he didn’t view anything she’d done as a scam.

  He said that not only was Jacques a close friend of Maria’s, but that he was the brains behind the entire operation. This description sounded a lot like that of the “mailing genius” we had heard him referred to as before. Jean-Claude also confirmed Jacques’s 2015 death, saying that he’d sent flowers to his family but did not attend the funeral. Given Jacques’s integral role in the business, Jean-Claude believed the letters would struggle to survive without him.

  The Fading Myth

  IN A FEW years, a lot had changed for the Maria Duval letters.

  In late 2014, the US government began its strongest efforts to date to shut down the scam for good, temporarily freezing its North American operations and eventually wiping out the US business two years later.

  Around the same time as the US government’s lawsuit, the Swiss company Infogest, which had long been linked to the letters, appeared to go bankrupt. Then Jacques Mailland, the man who seemingly kept the letters alive for so long, died in a motorbike accident in 2015, leaving the scam’s operations in uncertain hands. And perhaps most important of all, the woman at the center of the scheme was becoming increasingly ill.

  With all of this taken together, it would make sense that the scam’s once widespread reach would be fading. Already we had noticed other traces of the scam beginning to disappear. Maria Duval websites around the world went inactive. Consumer complaints about new letters became rare. The long-standing trademarks for her name were allowed to expire. It seems she hadn’t made a media appearance in years.

  It was possible that the Maria Duval letters were still going out in far-flung locations abroad—perhaps Romania, where those weird emails had come from. But no longer did it appear to be the massive scam that it once was.

  • • •

  It was Maria’s real psychic fame that had made her such a valuable commodity. And much of what made the scam so successful was the fact that there really was a woman out there named Maria Duval. There had always been a glimmer of reality in the myth, perhaps more than we ever would have thought. So if Maria really was dying, we were starting to suspect the scam could die with her.

  As she became sicker and sicker over the years, she was apparently no longer willing or able to be the public face of the scam and defend it to the world. And without the woman herself, the letters were losing their power.

  We still couldn’t believe it. More and more, Maria reminded us of the sick and elderly people her letters so heartlessly targeted.

  Along our journey, we had heard the stories of so many of her victims. On one of the very first days of our reporting, we learned of an eighty-eight-year-old US military veteran who’d sent Maria at least eighty-eight checks, each for $45 (adding up to nearly $4,000), in the hope of winning the lottery so he could afford a room in an assisted-living facility.

  In the months and years that followed, we continued to hear more of these stories. For one Charlotte, North Carolina, man, the name Maria Duval brought back memories of the months he spent trying to tear his then 101-year-old aunt from the psychic’s grasp. He told us he was shocked to discover she had sent Maria $6,000 in a single year. From across the globe in Belgium, a story reached us of an elderly man and his wife, who would walk to the post office multiple times a day to mail check after check to Maria. They stayed awake at night, carefully reading their mail to ensure that they had followed all the requirements and deadlines. “My father passed away three years ago,” his daughter wrote to us, “his last few years made more difficult by his manic depression and his obsession about his receiving a large sum of money, thanks to Maria Duval.”

  The Irony

  MORE THAN ANY other victim, Doreen and her tragic story continued to return to us as we investigated Maria.

  As we sat across from Chrissie at her winter home in Arizona, hearing about her mother’s early days, the woman she described was nothing like the gullible victim she eventually became. Doreen would have been horrified to see her future self throwing away the money she had worked so hard to save.

  As with Doreen, behind so many victims was a former self who would have known better. In Doreen’s case, she was always a frugal woman. At a time when many women were relegated to the kitchen, Doreen proudly took control of her family’s finances. She ensured all bills were paid on time. She made smart investments for her and her husband Eric’s golden years. She spent most of her life working, starting on factory assembly lines at the age of sixteen, before later manning the cash register at local department stores, founding her own small business, and managing a local tax-preparation firm.

  Born in Edmonton, England, an industrial town on the outskirts of London, in November 1930, Doreen entered the world a smiling baby with bright blond curls. Soon everything seemed to crash down around her as World War II and the bo
mbings that came with it raged on across the United Kingdom, forcing her family to send her away to the safety of a relative’s house as a young girl.

  Three years after the war ended, her life having returned to some sense of normalcy, she met her husband while working at an electric cable manufacturer. He was an apprentice to an electrical engineer and was in her building for a job he was tasked with. Doreen was eighteen; he was nineteen. She was short with light blue eyes, he was tall with dark brown ones. She was a social butterfly and loved attending party after party. He preferred being outside camping and hiking, or playing cribbage at home. They married a few years after meeting.

  Chrissie describes her mother as social, strong, and controlling. When we asked her if Doreen was adventurous, she laughed at the thought, before remembering one giant risk her mother did take: in 1965, with four young children and two corgis in tow, Doreen and Eric picked up their life and moved four thousand miles away to a country they had never even visited. At the time, England was still rebuilding from the war, and both Doreen and Eric were struggling to get ahead. They were immediately drawn to the idea of starting a new life in a country with a strong economy after watching a documentary-style film that had advertised the promise of Canada.

  They shuffled all their kids into a taxi, and then onto a train. From there, they promptly boarded a large ship destined for Toronto.They would spend two long weeks before coming up the Saint Lawrence River. Once in Toronto, they boarded a plane to their final destination of Edmonton, Alberta—which just happened to have the same name as Doreen’s hometown in England.

  In Canada, they moved into a new suburban development with rows of cookie-cutter homes. Theirs was a four-bedroom stucco bungalow with a large, grassy backyard, a luxury compared with what they’d been used to in England. They lived a solidly middle-class life there, giving their children new clothes for school and taking regular road trips in their family’s Ford Meteor.

  It was in Canada that Doreen and Eric realized their dream of launching their own business, a small store called Robinson’s Pet and Hobby. Housed in a local shopping mall, the store became a hodgepodge of art supplies and small animals. Guinea pigs, fish, hamsters, and birds shared space with knitting tools, paint, and other crafts. Doreen taught the occasional art class and groomed dogs in the back room, and Eric held diorama-making competitions for local schoolchildren. Their kids were expected to help out around the store as well, cleaning pet cages or following around any mischievous-looking children who Doreen worried might take off with a piece of merchandise. They were paid not in money but in items pulled straight from the store’s shelves.

  In both her work and her personal life, Doreen was undyingly sensible, sometimes to a fault. Childhood accidents prompted a careful Band-Aid, but little sympathy. Her children received their first bikes as gifts, but when they outgrew them they were expected to earn their own money to buy new ones. When they threatened to run away, she would offer to help them pack their bags. She didn’t believe in saying “I love you.” Decades later, her grandchildren were equally fearful of receiving one of their grandma’s “famous disciplinary looks.”

  Her family members knew that all this came from a place of love and that she cared deeply for them. Chrissie remembers the time she fell on a piece of glass, slashing her wrist wide open, and how her mother promptly but calmly used the first aid skills she’d learned during her teenage years in the Sea Rangers, a British sailing and rowing organization for young women, clamping Chrissie’s wrist tightly and shoving her into the car. “With instructions to hold my hand high as she packed me in the car, I witnessed my mother speeding for the first time in my life, honking the car horn madly at every intersection on our way to the hospital,” Chrissie told us. “Through any of our emergencies, our mother never hesitated, broke down in tears, or became faint.”

  And there were times when another, softer side of Doreen came out.

  All four kids would look forward to nights curled up on the couch, when Doreen would let them take turns cuddling up behind her knees and by her side. She loved to spoil herself with drugstore romance and mystery novels for her ever-expanding book collection and new supplies for all her artistic endeavors. She was endlessly creative, winning awards for her intricate needlepoints that she would spend months to make, painting nature scenes on canvas of all sizes, and crocheting everything from blankets to baby clothes anytime she heard of a friend or family member welcoming a new baby.

  The fashionable Doreen bought more clothes than she could ever possibly wear, not going out in public without looking perfect. “When I was very small, I remember watching her apply lipstick before going shopping, amazed she could color in the lines of her lips without even glancing in the mirror right beside her,” Chrissie recalls.

  Her sister-in-law remembers how Doreen would insist on walking through the forest with her husband while wearing “the highest of high heels.” “How she never broke her ankle I just can’t imagine, although I imagine Eric was holding her pretty tightly!” she later told family and friends at Doreen’s funeral.

  Throughout their nearly fifty years together, Eric never stopped worshipping Doreen. When Eric was diagnosed with colon cancer, Doreen was his caretaker until the very end.

  He died just after the turn of the century. To keep busy, Doreen quickly booked her days full of social activities, staying active in her church, going on shopping trips, and meeting friends for tea and gossip. Soon after she sold the bungalow where she and Eric had lived for all those years, she moved into a new condo. Despite her insistence that she was fine on her own and even enjoyed her newfound independence, Doreen insisted on holding on to Eric’s ashes and wanted her own to be combined with his when her time eventually came. She seemed happy most days and would never admit to her children that she was lonely, but there were times when she would invent excuses for them to visit her, like needing help hanging a shelf or tending her gardening.

  In the days after Doreen died, her son was going through the many boxes filled with her belongings and was amazed to find a poem that she had shared with his father in the early days of their courtship. At Doreen’s funeral he read the poem aloud as his voice cracked and faltered. It was a beautiful reminder of their parents’ love, the perfect way to remember their mother.

  Here was Doreen, twenty years old at the time, speaking to them, all these years later, as her ashes were combined with her husband’s in a small hole dug in the grass, and the cold breath of her friends and family circled up into the bright afternoon sky.

  I do believe that God above created you for me to love.

  And picked you out from all the rest because He knew I’d love you best.

  I once had a heart called mine ’tis true, but now it’s gone from me to you.

  Take care of it as I have done, for you have two and I have none.

  If I go to Heaven and you’re not there, I’ll paint your face on a golden star

  So all the angels can know and see just what you really mean to me.

  If you’ve not come by Judgement Day, I’ll know you’ve gone the other way

  So I’ll give the angels back their wings, the golden harp and everything

  And just to show you what I’ll do, I’ll go to Hell dear, just for you.

  Love, Doreen, August 17, 1950

  • • •

  When it became clear that Doreen’s mind was failing her, she was one of the first to admit that she should no longer be living on her own.

  She entered an assisted-living facility in the fall of 2010, where she was happy. She showed off her flexibility in yoga classes and made funny faces in photos in which she donned silly, homemade hats. She drank wine and shared stories with new friends. She danced at parties and sang in a painfully off-key voice, declaring to anyone who protested, “So what, I’m enjoying myself . . . pooh to you!”

  There she was free from Maria. But soon enough, other demons took their hold. “A bit like an old black & white TV with damag
ed rabbit ear antennas,” Chrissie wrote in an email to her brothers in the summer of 2011. “She goes in and out & some days are better than others & you have to hold the rabbit ears a certain way and not move at all, even then the picture does the intermittent vertical spin. Lately the TV barely flickers on.”

  As more than a year passed since she first moved into the new facility, there were clear signs that the Doreen her family knew and loved wasn’t coming back. When one of her sons took her to get a new ID card, and Doreen was asked to sign the necessary form, she wrote the word “Signature.” After buying balls of blue yarn and a pattern to knit a baby blanket for her forthcoming great-grandson, she defiantly stated that the pattern was too confusing and that the directions weren’t written in English (which they were). And after repeated bursts of crying, from a woman who rarely cried, and even threats to jump off the roof, she ended up spending much of her time locked in the facility’s “memory lane” ward, where the more severe dementia patients were relegated.

  Then a horrible accident in which Doreen fractured her pelvis after being pushed to the floor by another resident forced her to leave the community she once loved. She moved to a facility that provided full-time care, a nursing home in Edmonton, Alberta, that Chrissie remembered reeking of death. It was here that the realization that Doreen had lost all control of her mind, her body, and even her own decisions dawned on her family. Her children say this is where Doreen’s transformation into a different person was completed.

  It started innocently enough. “One time, she wasn’t happy with what the doctor said and stomped off in the opposite direction, giving an angry glance over her shoulder toward the doctor,” Chrissie recalled during her eulogy. “The only thing missing was her sticking out her tongue.”