Lost at Sea: The Jon Ronson Mysteries

by Jon Ronson

  “How old were you?” I ask.

  “Ten,” he says.

  The family moved to California, where Bandler became “a juvenile delinquent. Then I discovered it wasn’t the Harley that was scaring people. It was the look in the eye.”

  He says he was diagnosed as a sociopath. “And, yeah, I am a little sociopathic. But it turns out I am right. And my illusions were so powerful they became real, and not just to me.”

  He says NLP came to him in a series of hallucinations while he was “sitting in a little cabin, with raindrops coming through the roof, typing on my manual typewriter.”

  This was 1975. By then he was a computer programmer, a twenty-five-year-old graduate of the University of California, Santa Cruz.

  It’s surprising to me that Bandler would cheerfully refer to NLP as a sociopathic hallucination that struck a chord with the business world. I’m not sure he’s ever been that blunt about it before. But I suppose, when you think about it, there is something sociopathic about seeing people as machines—computers that store desires in one part of the brain and doubts in another.

  “See, it’s funny,” he says. “When you get people to think about their doubts, notice where their eyes move. They look down! So when salespeople slide that contract in, suddenly people feel doubt, because that’s where all the doubt stuff is.”

  “So where should a salesperson put the contract?” I ask.

  “They’ve got to buy themselves a clipboard!” he says. “When you ask people to think about things that are absolutely right for them, they look up! So you put the contract on a clipboard and present it to them up here!”

  These were the kinds of ideas Bandler was typing in Santa Cruz at the age of twenty-five. The book would eventually be cowritten with linguistics professor John Grinder and published under the title The Structure of Magic.

  Throughout the interview, I’m sitting on a low, dark red leather sofa with Bandler standing above me. “If I was standing and you were sitting,” I ask, “would I be forming different opinions of you?”

  “Yeah,” he says. “Of course.”

  “So are you deliberately positioning yourself in my hopes-and-desires eye line?” I ask.

  There’s a silence. Bandler smiles to himself.

  “No,” he says. “My leg hurts. That’s why I’m standing up.”

  The Structure of Magic was a huge hit. “Time magazine, Psychology Today, all of these people started seeking me out in Santa Cruz,” he says. “And I started getting interest from places I really didn’t expect, like IBM.”

  He designed sales-training programs for businesses across America. They made him rich. He bought a home in Hawaii and a mansion in Santa Cruz. He was hailed as a genius. The CIA and military intelligence squirreled him in, which is how I first heard of him. Had he really smuggled a tiny girl into Special Forces and got her to “model” a world-class sniper?

  “It wasn’t a little girl,” he says. “It was a ten-year-old boy. And that’s not as great as it sounds. You can teach a ten-year-old boy to pretty much do anything.”

  But by the early 1980s, things were spiraling downward for him. His first wife filed for divorce, claiming he choked her. According to a 1989 Mother Jones profile, he began to warn associates, “All I need to do is dial seven digits and with my connections with the Mafia I could have you all wiped out without even batting an eye.”

  He struck up a friendship with his cocaine dealer, a fifty-four-year-old man named James Marino. By 1986 he was living in a house built by Marino. A few doors away lived Marino’s girlfriend, Corine Christensen.

  In early November 1986, James Marino was beaten up, and he got it into his head that Corine had organized the beating so she could take over his cocaine business. Marino was paranoid, and he infected his friend with the paranoia. Bandler phoned Corine up, recording the conversation: “Why is my friend hurt? I’ll give you two more questions, and then I’ll blow your brains out. . . .”

  Eight hours later, Corine Christensen was shot in the head at her home, and twelve hours after that Bandler was arrested for the murder.

  I’ve been worried about bringing this up with him. Bandler may be quite brilliant and charismatic but he also seems overbearing and frightening. And although Paul McKenna himself strikes me as likable, his team of overzealous (literally overzealous) assistants scattered around the hotel are forever eyeing me with suspicion if I appear anything less than completely thrilled. Plus, earlier Jaime the PR rep cornered me in the corridor and said, “A few people have reported to me that you’ve been asking about banking and finance. You aren’t going to be writing about how NLP can be misused, are you?”

  Then she looked me in the eye and added, “Some people are concerned.”

  And that’s just because I was asking about banking! What’ll happen if I ask about murder—not the pretend murders Bandler jokes about onstage, but a real one?

  Still, they aren’t in the room now.

  “Tell me about the murder trial,” I say.

  He doesn’t pause at all. He tells me what he told the jury—that James Marino did it. There were two men in the house when Corine was murdered—the famous Richard Bandler and the lowlife James Marino. Yes, he was there. He lifted her head, which is how her blood ended up on his shirt. Why do I think the police went after him?

  “With me, the DA gets to make a big reputation,” he says. “But if it’s some thug drug dealer, you’re not going to make any mileage.”

  The trial lasted three months. The jury acquitted Bandler after five hours of deliberation. On the stand, Bandler blamed Marino and Marino blamed Bandler. There was no way for the jury to know which of the two was telling the truth. Furthermore, James Marino was at times an unbelievable witness, frequently changing his story. Sometimes he was upstairs when Bandler shot her, sometimes he was downstairs. Plus, as the Mother Jones profile pointed out, who had the greater motive: the man who had been beaten up, or the man who was righteously indignant on behalf of a friend who had been beaten up?

  “It took the jury longer to pick a foreman than to decide if I was guilty or innocent,” Bandler says. “The guy was a convicted felon! We caught him lying, falsifying evidence. . . .”

  It is at this exact moment that Paul McKenna and the entire upper echelons of his company troop cheerfully into the room.

  “The other guy was their stool pigeon they used to bust dope dealers!” Bandler is now hollering at me. “I mean, excuse me! A lot of very dirty things went on through that trial.”

  Earlier today Paul McKenna got a compulsive blusher onstage and cured her of her blush. I am like the blush lady now, sitting on the chesterfield sofa, Bandler towering over me, yelling about the murder rap, while Paul McKenna and his managing director look anxiously on.

  I change the subject. I say, half joking, that being an NLP genius must be awful: “To know in an instant what everyone’s thinking by their winks and tics and barely perceptible sideways glances and eye movements,” I say, “you must sometimes feel like one of those superheroes, ground down by their own superpowers.”

  “Yeah,” Bandler replies, suddenly looking really quite upset. “It’s called the supermarket.”

  He pauses.

  “You walk into a supermarket and you hear someone say to their kid, ‘You’re never going to be as smart as other kids.’ And I see the kid’s eyes, pupils dilating, and I see the trance going on in that moment. . . . It became a burden to know as much as I did. I went through a lot of things to distract myself. I used to just sit and draw all the time. Just draw. Focus on drawing to keep my mind from thinking about this kind of stuff.” And then he goes quiet, as if he is falling into himself.

  • • •

  I SUPPOSE PEOPLE shouldn’t judge gurus until they need one. Luckily, I do, a bit. And so on Wednesday I use my ninety minutes with Paul McKenna to get him to cure me of my somewhat obsessive, debilitating conviction that something bad has happened to my wife and son when I can’t get ahold of them on th
e phone. I’ve always suffered from this. If I am in America and I can’t reach them on the phone, I become convinced that Elaine has fallen down the stairs and is lying at the bottom with a broken neck, and Joel is reaching up to grab the electrical cord of a newly boiled kettle. I have panicked unnecessarily about this all over the world.

  Paul McKenna does Richard Bandler’s Swish technique on me. He gets me to picture one of my horrific imaginary scenes. I choose my son stepping out in front of a car.

  He spots, from my eye and hand movements, that the mental image is situated in the top right hand of my vision, big, close to my eyes.

  “Part of the neural coding where we get our feelings from, and ultimately our behavior, comes from the position of these pictures,” he explains. “Pictures that are close and big and bright and bold have a greater emotional intensity than those that are dull and dim and farther away.”

  “And Richard Bandler was the first person to identify this?” I ask.

  “Yes,” he says.

  He chats away to me, in his hypnotic baritone voice, about this and that: his own worries in life, etc. Suddenly, when I’m not expecting it, he grabs the space in the air where my vision was and mimes chucking it away.

  “Let’s shoot it off into the distance,” he says. “Shrink the picture down, drain the color out of it, make it black-and-white. Make it transparent. . . .”

  And, sure enough, as the image shoots away, far into the distance, the neurotic feelings associated with it fade too. This is Paul McKenna “repatterning” my brain. He says this isn’t self-help. I don’t have to do anything. This is reprogramming, he says, and I am fixed.

  “Oh yeah,” he says. “You don’t have to do anything now. It’s worked.”

  A year passes. I don’t have a single paranoid fantasy about something bad happening to my wife and son. I really am cured.

  And so I have to say, for all the weirdness, I become very grateful that Richard Bandler invented NLP and taught it to Paul McKenna.

  Death at the Château

  The Château de Fretay is a hundred-acre estate in the Brittany countryside, with chapels and cottages and a lake and forests. From a distance, the place looks like a dream. Some teenagers from the village tell me that until a few weeks ago they’d go up to hang out with the children of the English couple who lived there. The mother, Joanne, always had an open fire and English breakfasts on the go. The place was so big and overgrown that one time they found a chapel on the grounds that nobody, not even the English kids, knew existed.

  I park my car. There are hundreds of seedlings in little plastic cups in rows on tables, ready to plant but all dead now; abandoned plastic garden furniture is strewn everywhere, as if a tornado had come through; a statue of the Madonna and Child stands in some builder’s rubble; and a swimming pool is filled with rotten green water—two unopened bottles of Heineken sit there poolside.

  I peer in through the window of the main house. It isn’t, actually, a château. There’s nothing castle-like about it. It’s a big farmhouse. It is dark. The doors and windows are police-taped up, as they have been for the past seven weeks, since September 4, so the place is a time capsule of that weekend. There’s a pack of playing cards on the living room table, a beer on the arm of a comfy-looking leather chair, next to a folder filled with complicated-looking business plans. In the kitchen, the dishwasher is still turned on. You get the eerie sensation that Mr. and Mrs. Hall have just gone into another room and will probably return any second and have a fright to see a journalist peering in through their window.

  The village mayor, Pierre Sourdain, a farmer, says he liked Robert and Joanne Hall very much. All the villagers say the same: They were impressive, charming, self-possessed. (Saying that, the people in the village speak no English, and Robert Hall—despite living here for ten years—never learned French.) For years the Halls had been trying to get an ambitious golf project off the ground. They wanted to turn the château into an eighteen-hole golf resort with holiday cottages. That’s presumably what the file resting on the chair was all about, Mayor Sourdain says.

  “It would have happened too,” he says. “They would have made it happen. That’s the kind of man Robert Hall was. It would have been so good for the region.” There’s a short silence. Then he says, less confidently, “I’m sure it would have happened.”

  On the evening of September 4, Sourdain got a call from the gendarmes: Something had happened at the château. It is a French custom for the gendarmes to call the mayor, as the representative of the people, to the scene of a crime or a terrible accident. He arrived to see the oldest son, Christopher, twenty-two, with the gendarmes as they stood in protective suits, breaking up a big block of concrete. Robert Hall was inside the house, crying.

  “After twenty-four hours, concrete is like biscuit,” Sourdain explains. We’re sitting in his office in the village of Le Châtellier, two miles from the château. “So the gendarmes were crumbling it with their hands. And after a while they discovered a ring. They asked Christopher, ‘Is this your mother’s ring?’ He said, ‘Oui.’”

  Robert Hall had told the gendarmes that twenty-four hours earlier he’d had a drunken argument with Joanne during which she accidentally fell, hit her head, and died. Then, during the hours that followed, he set her body on fire, put her remains into a builder’s bag, poured in concrete, and hauled it onto the back of a lorry. All this happened behind the house, near the back gate, next to a row of half-built holiday cottages.

  Then he stopped. He telephoned Christopher. He said he was going to commit suicide. Christopher called the ambulance, who called the gendarmes, who called the mayor.

  Catherine Denis, from the prosecutor’s office in Rennes, told a press conference later that week that when the gendarmes asked Robert why he burned Joanne’s body and encased her remains in concrete, he explained that she’d always said she wanted to be cremated and laid to rest in a mausoleum and he was simply respecting her wishes, albeit in a somewhat informal way.

  “What did the Halls do for money?” I ask Mayor Sourdain. “How were they living? How were they funding the golfing project?”

  “He told me he was a big success in England,” he replies. “He had lots of businesses there. And sometimes British tourists would rent the château for their holidays.”

  “Do you know if the tourists enjoyed staying there?” I ask.

  “I wouldn’t know anything about that,” he replies. “It would have been between English people. You see?”

  • • •

  FABRICE FOUREL works in a bright office in the nearby village of Saint-Étienne-en-Coglès. Posters advertising successful Brittany tourist endeavors line the walls. I am sitting, he says, exactly where Robert and Joanne Hall sat when they came to him in a flap regarding their golf project, in September 2008.

  “They were lost,” he says.

  Fabrice’s job is to be the middleman between prospective tourist businesses and the labyrinthine French bureaucracy.

  “What were the problems?” I ask.

  Fabrice sighs as if to say, “Where do I begin?” “They wanted to clear some trees. French law says you have to plant three trees for each one you cut down, not necessarily on your property, but in the region.” He pauses. “It was a big problem. In fact, the administration was angry with the Halls because they didn’t follow the procedure. We had to calm everything.”

  “How many trees would they have needed to plant?” I ask.

  “Around twenty thousand,” Fabrice says.

  Fabrice says people basically already have all the trees they want. If you go to people and offer them trees, they tend to say no. And that wasn’t the only problem. The Halls needed sprinklers, enough electricity for thousands of visitors . . .

  “We quickly noticed a gap between the financial needs for such a project and what they had,” Fabrice says. “A project like that could cost twenty million euro.” Twenty-seven million dollars.

  “Was it a big gap?” I ask.
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  Fabrice indicates with his hands a very big gap.

  “But they were really motivated,” he says. “That’s why we didn’t want to say, ‘You can’t do it.’ People have to be a bit crazy to lead these kinds of projects.”

  I ask Fabrice if he knows whether the Halls’ business renting out the château to British tourists was a success.

  “We know nothing about that,” he says. “We know they welcomed people into their house. But we don’t know the details.”

  • • •

  IN AUGUST 2006, Laura Walsh was looking to rent a château for her family holiday when she chanced upon chateaudefretay.com. The site is gone now, but you can still find it on the Internet archive, with its photograph of horses grazing by the lake, plus a list of activities such as fishing, swimming, a games room, a go-karting stadium, cycling, and a weekly treasure hunt.

  Laura phoned Joanne Hall, who told her, “We’re not Center Parcs, but we do our best,” which Laura took to mean they were something like Center Parcs.

  And so, swept up in the lovely-sounding nature of the thing, she offered to pay the full amount up front—$4,000 for a fortnight’s stay.

  “The first thing we saw, as we walked into the bedroom, was what looked like mouse droppings on the bed,” Laura says. “Robert Hall appeared in the doorway. I said, ‘There are mouse droppings on the bed.’ He said, ‘Oh no, no, they’re more likely to be bat droppings.’”

  “How was he?” I ask.

  “Friendly,” Laura says.

  She ran herself a bath and left the bathroom for a minute. When she came back, the bath was empty and the bathroom floor was flooded. They decided to persevere, and went looking for the go-karting stadium.

  “We found it in a clearing in the forest,” Laura says. “It was a mess. A shambles. An overgrown shambles. And in the middle of it was a dead goat.”

  And so on. There were live wires dangling in the outside toilet, the pool was leaking, there was rubble and broken glass everywhere, and so that evening they confronted the Halls.