by Blake Ellis
But soon after, when she came down with the flu and was bedridden for a week, she forgot how to walk. Then came the frightening phone calls Chrissie received from the nursing home, when Doreen became increasingly aggressive toward the staff and the other residents. One day she either tried to, or actually did, hit a man with her walker. Another day, she attempted to strangle her roommate. When Chrissie tried to speak with her over the phone, Doreen pretended to be fast asleep.
Her family was worried about what else would happen to her there. Chrissie had to do something. So she moved her eighty-two-year-old mother into yet another nursing home, the third unfamiliar place she had entered in a mere three years. Here, at least, Doreen experienced small “moments of respite from the horrors that only she could see.”
• • •
Something had taken hold of Chrissie.
For the life of her, Chrissie can’t remember what made her do this. It was the only time in her nearly sixty years of life that she’d resorted to ranting online, four years after she discovered her mom’s tragic obsession. Hunched over her laptop after a long day with her mother at the nursing home, she says she lost control of her fingers as she angrily pounded the keyboard.
My mother, a smart, educated, in-charge woman who was a lonely widow living in the small town of St Albert, Alberta, Canada, surviving on a small pension, fell for this scam! Unfortunately, my mother was also exhibiting early signs of Alzheimer’s. She didn’t realize that sending $59 every week was adding up. She didn’t understand the silly amulets she sometimes received in a lovely velveteen bag were nothing but a two cent piece of junk! I’ve read other rip-off reports about this place and it still angers me 4 years later how this company has manipulated people’s emotions to make money hand over fist.
. . .
Did it bring my mother luck? health? wealth? happiness? No, No, No, No!
Doreen died two days later.
• • •
It feels surreal to us how this story unfolded from that first psychic letter we pulled from a pile of junk mail. Even the characters we discovered along the way could easily be culled from a mystery novel. The gun-toting postal investigators who dug through Dumpsters. The curious accountant holed up in a nondescript office space in Shakespeare’s birthplace. The Swiss businessman who was part of an alien-worshipping religion. The mailing genius who supposedly met his untimely demise in a Parisian motorcycle accident. The harrowing French drive that almost killed us too. The mysterious man with all the mailboxes. The shady attorney with the Monaco high-rise. The male crime reporter who somehow ended up writing fantastical letters in the voice of a female psychic. The dancing Hawaiian sushi chef in the same strip mall where millions of dollars were once sent to Maria. The pot of jelly that brought Maria out of hiding. The filmmaker convinced that this was all part of a broader global satanic conspiracy. The self-proclaimed secretary for the psychic, based in Romania. The supposed childhood friend who tried to lure us to the beaches of Thailand. The missing people miraculously found.
As we filed away our notebooks once and for all, we knew where the letters had originated so long ago, and with Maria on—or near—her deathbed, we were pretty sure the infamous Maria Duval scam was finally coming to an end. There was one big question that remained. Even after our incredible journey and all the discoveries that we’d made along the way, we wondered: Did Maria understand the sheer magnitude of the scheme, a heartless and practically unstoppable con that couldn’t have existed without her? We still weren’t sure she fully grasped her pivotal role in all of this.
We remain struck by the twisted irony of it all. In the two years that Maria Duval consumed our lives, she transformed from a beautiful, glowing young woman to a weak, frightened old lady.
Just like her victims. Just like Doreen.
Both Maria and Doreen had started out working hard to earn their money, running their own small businesses. They were strong, independent women who deeply valued their appearance. And their final years were marked by a painful decline.
We were left to wonder if Maria, who was now holed away in her gated house, afraid to show her face to the world, would perhaps have done this all differently. Did she have any last regrets or see herself as a defiant martyr proud of all the good she believed she had done? Was she remorseful, ashamed of the pain she had caused so many?
Surely she would have changed course long ago if she had known that this was how it would all end, with her name now synonymous with fraud and greed rather than the selfless benevolence she long proclaimed, with countless businessmen raking in far more money than she could ever imagine, with millions of lives destroyed in her wake. We would like to believe that she never would have signed that first fateful contract, the arrangement her son described as a deal with the devil.
If Maria really was a psychic, wouldn’t she have seen this all coming?
Afterword
IT SOUNDED LIKE something out of a movie. The publication of our book was rapidly approaching when we heard from Maria Duval’s son that something shocking had happened. The US government had sent an investigator and two attorneys all the way to Maria’s tiny town in the south of France.
French police joined the same USPIS investigator who first discovered this scam, at the same gate that we became so familiar with two years earlier. As Antoine described the scene, police entered Maria’s home with a money-sniffing dog that roamed her large property and garden. The police opened drawers, seized her computer, took piles of documents, and pulled bank account records for both Maria and her family. US officials had once written that they didn’t even know if Maria was a real person. Now the key investigator was at her house. Antoine claimed the raid was all about recovering proceeds from the scam, but he said they didn’t find a cent. During an hours-long Skype conversation, he insisted that his mother had only a few thousand euros left in her dwindling accounts. He also finally revealed the extent of her sickness, saying that she had been battling the effects of Alzheimer’s disease for several years.
With this mission to France, the US government had been hoping to get answers from Maria. Instead, according to Antoine, Maria couldn’t remember her name when asked by police, and was deemed incompetent by investigators based on a physician’s assessment of her condition. She was therefore unable to sit for an interview. So Antoine went instead, sitting in a room in the local police station for six hours talking to the postal inspector, two attorneys from the Department of Justice, and French police who officially conducted the interview.
They asked him a lot about the money his mother made. They were also very interested in the businessmen. Antoine said three names kept popping up: Jean-Claude Reuille, the retiree holed away in Thailand; Lucio Parrella, the Swiss man who had been one of the most recent contacts we could find for the scam but claimed his only involvement was to help sell her books; and Andrea Egger, the mysterious attorney in Monaco. Up until this point, we had never heard the US government mention these names. Their public filings to date had focused on lower rungs of the scheme, and we hadn’t been sure whether any investigation was ongoing after the scam had been shut down in the United States. If what Antoine was telling us was true, it meant that the US government was finally investigating the people we believed were central to this scam. Antoine said that when asked if he would be willing to testify in any legal proceeding that may take place in the United States, he said yes.
At the end of our conversation, Antoine told us something else. Perhaps because of how angry he was about the government’s focus on his mother instead of the businessmen, he said he would finally let us see Maria. At first he offered to set up a Skype call where we could simply wave hello and goodbye, but when we asked if we could return to France to meet her in person instead, he agreed.
Three weeks later, we boarded a plane in a daze. We landed at the same airport in Nice, this time careful to take the toll roads as we drove to the same hotel. As the hours to our meeting ticked down, we still wouldn’t
let ourselves believe that this was actually going to happen. It was a Saturday in early May when we rang the same doorbell we had cursed so many times before. Once the gate opened, we drove down the long, narrow driveway and took in our first glimpse of Maria’s home, which was surrounded by overgrown grass littered with statues of naked Greek gods, monkeys, and elephants. We had made it to the other side.
The day unfolded almost like dream. The night before, we had made a list of all the ways this meeting could go horribly wrong—even ending in our untimely demise. Instead, Antoine, his wife, and two of his daughters greeted us with smiles and led us toward Maria’s house. At the top of the stairs stood Maria, the woman who had been our sole obsession for years. She wore blue Crocs, cartoon-covered socks, faded leopard-print leggings, a chunky black sweater, and a red necklace. She looked at us with a blank stare as we took turns shaking her hand.
It was clearly the same woman, but she was a shell of herself. Her eyes were confused; her large lips looked almost deflated; her lipstick was drawn outside the lines; and the defensive, confident woman we had seen in the past was nowhere to be found.
We followed her and Antoine farther into the house, starting in her personal office, a small room filled with shelves upon shelves of vinyl three-ring binders, paintings of wizards and crystals, photos of herself, and endless trinkets that appeared to be from all around the world. From there, a hallway filled with even more binders led us into the room we had been waiting for. Antoine described it as the office where she did her consultations, and we immediately recognized it from the YouTube videos, with the Virgin Mary statues, crystal ball, and large wooden desk. While we weren’t able to tour her entire house, the rooms we did see were in disrepair and seemed to be relics from a past life of fame and fortune. As we flipped through stacks of binders full of newspaper and magazine clippings, her face was everywhere. In horoscope columns, on the pages of French Vogue, on clippings about TV and radio shows throughout the 1970s and 1980s. We knew she had been a well-known local psychic but hadn’t ever realized the extent of her fame. Antoine told us that his mother had been paid so well for these media appearances and writings that she had been a very wealthy woman before ever getting involved with the businessmen. He said that everything, including the money, went downhill after she sold her name. We had been skeptical that a psychic could become such a highly paid celebrity, but now it seemed plausible. Maria watched us look through all of these articles without saying anything.
We had been dreaming of this meeting for years and had a list of tough questions we were determined to ask her, hoping Antoine was exaggerating his mother’s condition as a convenient excuse to avoid US authorities. But as we sat across from her in her office, she was happy to be on camera but was unable to even tell us the day or answer basic questions about her life and psychic abilities—repeating herself and struggling to find or complete words. It was clear that the woman with the answers to all of our questions was gone.
She soon left to go upstairs to rest, and we sat with Antoine and his daughter Solène to ask them the questions we couldn’t ask Maria. But her family only knew so much, and still claimed to be unaware of the full extent of Maria’s business dealings, saying they wished they had known what she had gotten herself into sooner so that they could have found out more. Antoine again told us he didn’t know how much money she had ultimately made from selling her name and claimed that the royalties had stopped coming. He remained adamant that she had received only a fraction of what others had. Antoine would of course have an incentive to tell investigators, and us, there was nothing to find. But if she was truly penniless, how was she still living in such a large and expensive house that would surely require pricey upkeep? Antoine said she had purchased the house before getting involved with the letters, and that he and his family had been paying the bills.
Then we asked a question we had long wondered about: whether his mother was really in Rome the last time we had come to speak with her, two years ago. He and his daughter looked at each other uncomfortably and laughed. The voice from the other side of the gate who told us Maria was in Rome had not been that of a housekeeper. The voice was Maria’s. She had been the woman behind the gate all along, and she had created the elaborate lie to avoid us.
If Maria truly hadn’t had anything to hide, why wouldn’t she have talked to us? In her right mind, she wanted nothing to do with us. Now she wandered about her property like a lost child, continuing to come into the room to look at us and shake our hands throughout our visit. The Maria sitting before us had become a scammer’s perfect target, a perfect victim to place on all those suckers lists that the scam in her own name had relied on.
To hear Antoine tell it, Maria had been like her victims long before she suffered from the debilitating effects of old age. And he acknowledged she was never completely innocent. She had fallen hook, line, and sinker for the unbelievable promises of wealth and fame that were made to her by Swiss businessmen. Businessmen who dazzled her with their expensive suits, luxury watches, and pricey cars, which Antoine believes convinced her to sign on the dotted line without fully understanding the contract she was signing or what she was giving away.
She had been drawn to anything that shines, and she had put her trust in dangerous places.
We placed our laptop on the desk in front of Antoine and played an audio recording of Chrissie, who spoke straight to Maria and blamed her for preying on her mother, a confused, lonely, elderly woman. In that moment, even Antoine couldn’t deny the pain his mother had caused by making that deal with the devil—whether she intended to or not.
We had been given the opportunity to sit right in front of this woman, to stare into her vacant eyes. Every dead end, every twist and turn in our journey had taught us so much about Maria and this scam and had finally brought us here. But unlike the movies, we didn’t get to choose our ending. We now knew that the woman on the letters would never be able to share her story with the world. And even if we had heard her side, it would have been just that: her story, her claims, all colored by her own perception. It would have done nothing more than satisfy our own curiosity. Say Maria felt some level of remorse or wished she could have gotten out of those contracts she had signed so long ago. None of that mattered now. She couldn’t turn back time. No one can ever recover the hundreds of millions of dollars that have been taken from so many victims. Or the billions of dollars taken from so many others by all kinds of mail frauds. Sure, our obsession had started with Maria, but we always knew that this scam was part of a much bigger story.
Across the country, and the globe, we encountered a huge number of individuals willing to prey on the elderly. In many ways, the Maria Duval scam was a perfect case study. It revealed just how many different layers could make up a single fraud, how profitable this kind of scheme could be, how the businesspeople justify their actions, and how victims are so strategically and mercilessly targeted. More than anything else, it showed how a scam could become practically unstoppable. Maria’s letters may be coming to an end. But there are countless similar scams that are still going strong and many others just beginning. Each has its own story. Its own cast of characters. None, however, have Maria, the smiling woman in the photo who made one of the longest-running scams in history all possible.
This will always be her legacy.
Acknowledgments
OUR INFATUATION WITH the Maria Duval letters started two years ago, with our multipart investigation for CNN. It’s rare that a news organization allows its reporters to embark on this kind of project, and we have many people to thank for their trust in us from the very beginning—no matter how crazy it sounded.
Executive editor Lex Haris didn’t flinch when we said we thought we needed to go to France to see this story through, and he was one of the main reasons the two of us became the reporting team we are today, giving us the freedom to pursue out-of-the box but important stories like this one. Our editor, Nicole Ridgway, also believed in the story from the b
eginning and turned our dispatches into a compelling, chapter-by-chapter series that hooked readers and kept them coming back each week.
Julia Jones, our fearless translator and interpreter, joined this investigation before we headed to France and never let the story go. She made every interview happen and asked the hard questions in a way that always got answers. She became so much more than a translator. She has been a third member of our reporting team and one that was absolutely crucial to this entire journey.
Our literary agent, Eileen Cope, approached us soon after our investigation was published on CNN, telling us we should write a book. Even though we had no idea what this would entail, she somehow managed to land us a deal with one of the best publishers in the country, Simon & Schuster’s Atria. She also found us the perfect editor there, Todd Hunter. When we envisioned working with a book editor, we worried about endless revisions and rewrites until the manuscript lost every ounce of our own voice and vision. But this was absolutely not the case with Todd. He understood our vision for this story and every edit he made was intentional, thoughtful, and necessary.
Since writing a book would have been a pipe dream if we hadn’t already published this investigation on CNN, we also want to thank everyone who made the original series possible. CNN’s superstar attorney Johnita Due, who probably read every word of our series dozens of times by the time it was published and who was more excited about every new twist and turn of our adventure than you would ever imagine a lawyer being. Thank you to Ed O’Keefe and Meredith Artley, who both gave this crazy idea so much support from the beginning. And everyone else at CNN who dedicated so many hours to this project: Jordan Malter and Mark Esplin, who joined us in France and captured many of the incredible moments and scenes from our book on camera so that we will have them forever. Antoine Crouin, another fantastic translator who made our meeting with Maria possible. Contessa Gayles and Lou Foglia, who turned our insane Homeland crime board into a creative video to accompany the series. Tiffany Baker, who designed this first-of-its-kind investigation for CNN, and Megan Pendergrass, who brought the wild characters to life through her illustrations. Richard Griffiths and Steve Holmes were also crucial to making sure every word of our series met CNN’s ethical and factual standards. And Jan Winburn, who taught us so much about the importance of writing and storytelling in any investigation.