A Deal with the Devil Read online

  You have my solemn word.

  Your devoted friend,

  Maria Duval

  The Scam

  WITH CHIN-LENGTH PLATINUM blond hair, dark lips, and a secretive expression on her face, Maria stares directly at her victims through the pages of each letter.

  She boasts of her extraordinary powers and worldwide reputation. She claims to have a spiritual gift passed down to her by her uncle, a minister who was heralded as a saint in the small Italian village where he lived. These extraordinary psychic powers, the letters explain, have helped her find countless missing people and catapulted her to international fame.

  She tells of books she has written, secret psychic meetings she has led, and thousands of television, radio, and newspaper interviews she has given. She claims that she has provided guidance to Hollywood stars, who pay as much as $700 for a single consultation; several American presidents; and many other political leaders. In fact, she says that many of the world’s richest and most famous celebrities never make a decision without consulting her first and that she is the only psychic ever to have been granted an audience with the pope.

  Citing all these accomplishments and fame, she tells recipients how lucky they are to have been chosen by her. And the letters really do look handwritten, with notes excitedly scrawled in the margins and circular stains that make it appear she was sipping coffee while writing down her visions.

  Filled with personal details from each recipient’s life, the letters predict huge lottery winnings and other life-changing events:

  Goldie: There are 3, yes THREE Friday the 13ths in 2009. So, 3 opportunities to win a large sum of money! And that’s not all: Two of these Friday the 13ths are in consecutive months and they’re coming up in just a few weeks: Friday, February 13th and Friday, March 13th! This exceptional phenomenon happens only once every hundred years. There are even many people for whom this will never happen in their lives, but you are one of the lucky ones. Yes, this is going to happen to you Goldie, but only once in your lifetime and it’s only a few weeks away!! But first, you must possess the tools and know-how to be able to take advantage of this unique chance which is never, ever going to happen again in your life.

  Of course, most people of sound mind would simply dismiss a wild prediction like this. They might even get a good laugh before promptly tossing the letter in the trash, along with credit card offers and other pieces of junk mail. But Maria’s letters prey on the very people who no longer have the ability to determine fact from fiction. Many of these victims are battling the crippling mental effects of Alzheimer’s disease or dementia, already struggling to remember the people around them or what they ate for breakfast, just as the letters arrive in their mailbox. Others are so lonely and desperate for companionship that they cling to Maria and her promises without thinking twice. Some, who are watching their savings dwindle, are worried about how they’ll manage to pay for their last years or whether they’ll have anything left to leave behind for their family, so the promise of a windfall is especially tempting.

  After reading letters that included such personal details as birthdays, hometowns, and astrological signs, we finally understood how the letters could seem so prescient, especially to people who were already desperate to believe.

  You were born under the sign of Taurus. In Chinese astrology, you were born under the sign of the Rabbit. You are mainly under the influence of Venus. In addition, being born on May 22, 1927 in Kansas City, at 12:00 I can already see some aspects of your personality. Like everyone, you have some faults.

  Once the specifics about a victim’s life are established, letters like this go on to detail personality traits, worries, and regrets that could be helped by Maria.

  • I can also see that you have some great qualities. Among other things, you are generous, sensual and also, sensitive.

  • I see that, at this time, you are having money problems and you might quickly need $2,500. It’s a matter which seems to me very important for you at present. I see such a sum could do a great deal for your happiness. You need more money in order to live in the style you would like, and to be more generous to the people you love.

  • I can also see other periods of good luck and many opportunities which came your way. Unfortunately, you were unable—or did not wish—to recognize them and grasp them. You simply let them slip away. I can also see several large sums of money which were within your reach, but there again, you were “wearing a blindfold.” You ignored the right moments to act. You also started things at the wrong time. I cannot tell you exactly how many “only chances” slipped through your fingers, but I can tell you that it was a considerable number over all these years. You missed excellent opportunities which were cast your way . . . and which could have changed your future.

  These letters are endless. For many recipients, Maria quickly becomes their closest confidant, prompting them to respond with heartfelt letters of their own. Often carefully written in perfect cursive reminiscent of another era, these responses from her elderly victims tell a story of desperation and loneliness, detailing everything from upcoming doctor’s visits to growing financial troubles.

  In one, dated May 9, 2014, a devoted follower said he was almost brought to tears when he heard from her.

  “Something tells me that I can trust you. I almost know how I will feel. I’m already thinking what I would do with ALL this money. The number one thing. My wife would not have to work anymore and would drive a NEWER car. So I would too. We could install AIR CONDITIONING in our house,” he wrote, underlining the word “install” for emphasis.

  After signing the letter “Your Friend,” he scrawled a note at the very bottom of the letter: “I forgot! A good amount of this money would go to the BANK.”

  Like many others before him, this man didn’t realize he was actually just another victim. Maria Duval hadn’t been thinking of him. In fact, she had no idea who he was. That supposedly handwritten letter that had brought him to tears? It was one of millions. Other letters just like it had been sent to people all over the United States and the rest of the world, translated into all different languages. And the letter he wrote back—addressed to Maria—was later found in a Dumpster in Long Island, New York. As part of a US government investigation, letters from hundreds of victims were found in this same Dumpster, eventually becoming physical evidence that we were able to read through ourselves, giving us key insight into just how devoted Maria’s victims really were.

  Investigators also found personal photos and even locks of hair in the Dumpsters, all of which had been requested by Maria’s letters as a way to gain psychic contact. The only thing missing were the payments that had been sent with these personal mementos. After all, her advice didn’t come free. After she’d hooked victims with her claims of selfless benevolence, they were instructed to send her payments, usually around forty to fifty dollars, in exchange for lucky numbers, specialized guidance, and magic talismans.

  In one letter, Maria spends multiple pages describing a magnetized photo of herself, which she says will allow her to establish her “first mediumistic contact” with the lucky recipient. When the magnet is flipped over, a photo of “the most powerful pentacle” appears, which Maria says will ward off misfortune.

  I am asking you to keep my magnetized talisman on you, or near you, always. (You are going to understand why later.) It is really going to help change your life in a positive way, if you follow the advice I am about to give you. Everyone to whom I’ve given this magnetized talisman in the past has thanked me.

  Her letters are filled with explanations of charms like this. The thousand-year-old talismans of Love and Luck, which she said had been passed down to her from her grandfather and had helped save one of her own romantic relationships many years ago, and the centuries-old Five Forces Precious Stone, which Maria claims possesses ancient forces that will protect those who wear it from “negative influences” wherever they go. In other letters, she tells of “vibratory crystals” speciall
y marked with each person’s name and unique number. She says she received these irreplaceable gems in a secret package and only later learned that her assistant had brought them to her all the way from Paraguay.

  They are wrenched from the mountains by volcanic eruptions and erosion, falling into rivers where they are sought for their beauty and their “powers.” The crystal is a “living” stone that has a heart, a sort of atomic battery, with the power to harness and redirect energy. When you come into contact with this “battery,” you feel this mysterious energy penetrate and spread through your body. This pure energy can channel your thoughts and then change the course of events! As soon as you wear your Vibratory Crystal, your mind instantly sharpens, you feel your energy levels surge and you feel charged with renewed strength and the resolve to move mountains! Nothing can stand in your way! You are going to find it easy to harness that strength to get whatever you want from life and resolve all your problems.

  For the millions of people who have sent in money, these talismans have served as physical proof that Maria Duval exists and, more important, that she is looking out for them. From family members, we heard stories of recipients who refused to leave their homes without one of these trusty talismans in their pockets or around their neck. Others couldn’t sleep without one under their pillow.

  In reality, these “talismans” were pieces of junk, mass-produced in places like China. We later held one of them in our own hands, a flimsy gold disk the size of a coin with a crude angel imprinted on top. It was nothing more than what a quarter might have gotten you as a child from a gas station vending machine. Government investigators found a number of these reportedly magical talismans discarded in those same Long Island Dumpsters outside a business involved with the scheme, some even bearing “Made in China” stickers. They determined that these worthless trinkets had been bought in bulk by the scam’s operators and kept on hand en masse to accommodate the demand from victims.

  It’s almost impossible to find another case of consumer fraud that has touched more people, as many recipients responded to the letters so many times they ended up giving thousands of dollars, wiping out modest monthly Social Security checks, and draining bank accounts. The scam is so widespread that it’s hard to know just how many have been affected and just how much money has been stolen. US officials estimate that in the United States and Canada alone, the scheme has raked in more than $200 million from more than 1.4 million victims—a number that is already sixty times the number of victims of the infamous Bernie Madoff Ponzi scheme.

  It’s unclear when exactly the Maria Duval scam started, but the earliest evidence we found dated it back to the 1980s. Since then, a laundry list of government agencies across the globe have attempted to put an end to it, from the US Department of Justice to the mayor of the tiny town of Wolfurt, Austria.

  But somehow, it has raged on for decades.

  As investigative reporters, we were typically drawn to corrupt politicians or dangerous criminals. But it was this scam’s unbelievable power, which had allowed it to grow so massive and seemingly unstoppable, that hooked us. It was eventually what helped us hook our editors too, convincing them that this was not your average scam. Even then, we knew there must be something bigger at play.

  The Victims

  IT IS NOT until you meet Maria’s victims that her power is truly understood.

  And since so few of them even realize they are being deceived, it is often through their family members that their stories are told. Like Doreen Robinson, whose daughter Chrissie gave us a window into how such an unlikely target for this scam ultimately became the perfect victim.

  A petite, unassuming woman in her late fifties, with curly blond hair and a charming Canadian accent, Chrissie warmly welcomed us into her adobe-style home facing a canyon of cactus-studded mountains in the heart of Arizona, where she and her husband, Scott, flee to escape the frigid Canadian winters. Sitting nervously across from us at her wooden dining room table, she started the story with the painful final chapter.

  By the end, Doreen was on too many medications to remember. There were a couple for her high blood pressure. There were the blood thinners, the shots of vitamin B, and a medication meant to slow down the debilitating disease transforming her into an almost unrecognizable version of herself. In the final stretches, as tears ran down her cheeks and she yelled “No, no, no!” over and over again from her nursing home bed, she was prescribed pills for her increasing anxiety and depression. Chrissie would later discover that her mom had begun scribbling “help me, help me, please help me” in barely coherent handwriting deep in the pages of her beloved address book.

  In healthier, happier years, Doreen was fiercely independent. Chrissie recalled how Doreen refused to leave the house without the perfect shade of poppy-red lipstick that was always matte, never shiny. In the fall of 2014, she spent her final days lying in a hospital bed dressed in a drab hospital gown. Her face was frighteningly pale and her lips thin and bare. Doreen was in one of fifty rooms in the dementia unit of a Canadian nursing home. Although the room was initially generic and sterile, Chrissie had tried to make it feel more like home. She decorated it with three intricate needlepoints of beautiful angels Doreen had won awards for just years earlier. A calendar sat near her bed that showed each passing day crossed out, along with a collection of books and a smattering of old photos of young Doreen and more recent shots of her and her family. She’d had a strong and feisty personality, but the disease attacking her brain now robbed her of everything that made her the woman she once was. Eventually, Chrissie remembers, it took away even her sense of irony and laughter, leaving “nothing but shadows in her mind’s eye that caused her endless anxiety and fear.” Most strikingly, her eyes lost any flicker of life, returning the loving looks from her family with a hollow, blank stare.

  Just two days before her mother passed away, Chrissie almost thought she saw a flicker of recognition in Doreen’s eyes as her family hovered above her bed, talking to her softly and playing soothing sounds of chirping birds, trickling streams, and blowing wind from a CD. And as they tried to grapple with the nurse’s prediction that Doreen likely had only hours, not days, to live, Chrissie wondered whether her mother would prove them all wrong. “Bless her heart, Mum has always liked to be in charge of matters and it wouldn’t surprise us if she stubbornly hung on,” she wrote in an email to her family later that evening.

  Doreen held on long enough to lock eyes with the chaplain who came to her room to pray for her. In those moments, she allowed her granddaughter Chelsea to snuggle up with her in her bed for hours, as Chelsea cried and shared happy memories. They were all crying, comforted by how the horrific confusion that had racked Doreen’s brain for so long finally seemed to be loosening its hold. Perhaps the shadows were finally gone. Maybe now, Doreen could find peace.

  The next morning, a nurse came to the room to begin the process of removing Doreen’s hydration drip—essentially starving her of the water she would need to continue living. Part of Chrissie was relieved that she was able to see her mother once more. But her heart also ached at the thought of Doreen’s body, abandoned by her mind long ago, continuing to fight for much longer. Her muscles were already beginning to jerk and spasm as they reacted to the lack of water and nutrients. So Chrissie carefully crawled into her mother’s hospital bed, laid her head beside Doreen’s and her arm across her body, and spoke softly through her tears, begging her to let go.

  “I finally got up the courage to tell Mum what a wonderful life she’d had, the great plans she’d made for her golden years, and how tortured these past few years had been for her. I urged her to meet her maker, go on to greener pastures.”

  Within hours, she did. Doreen passed away on September 20, 2014, at four p.m. with her two sons beside her, on a warmer-than-usual 60 degree day in September. All the machines attached to Doreen’s crumbling body were removed, and she finally looked at peace.

  Chrissie, who of Doreen’s children lived the far
thest away, had left her mother’s bedside and was in her yard gardening when she got the news. “I answered the phone and my world crumbled in what I knew was coming.” Chrissie was told that her mother’s official cause of death was heart failure.

  Ten days later, at Doreen’s funeral, Chrissie stood in the same church her mother had joined after immigrating to Canada half a century earlier. Chrissie remembers that she wore dark gray slacks and a black knit cowl-neck sweater that hid a bloodred shirt underneath, and she recited an emotional eulogy remembering her mother and sharing memories of the battle with Alzheimer’s disease that had caused her family so much heartbreak.

  Two years after her mother’s death, Chrissie’s eyes darted around and occasionally filled with tears as she searched for the right words to tell us about her mother and her final years. It was during this dark, downward spiral that her mother had lost her radiant smile. Her head filled with inescapable demons. This was the same time when she was ultimately dragged into an obsession that Chrissie will never forget, one that took over much of Doreen’s final years.

  • • •

  Chrissie will never be sure when exactly her mother got her first letter from Maria Duval or how she became a target.

  What she does know is that in the months leading up to her mother’s eightieth birthday, before Chrissie or even Doreen realized that Alzheimer’s disease was slowly and silently infiltrating her once rational mind, Doreen had handwritten at least forty different checks in response to Maria’s letters, which Doreen believed were ending up with the psychic.

  Chrissie suspects that her mother’s obsession with these letters had far more to do with gambling on a cure for her failing mind than with winning a financial jackpot. In fact, Chrissie would later find evidence of an internal battle that Doreen hid from her children for years. She’d kept a Reader’s Digest book full of brain games promising to keep her mind sharp. Not a single page was completed. Chrissie also found scribbled and practically nonsensical attempts to document Doreen’s early years in England, unfinished needlepoints that once would have been simple for Doreen to complete, and a small personal address book in which her inner demons leaped from the page. In one place, she incorrectly wrote her son’s phone number over and over again. In another, she wrote in misspelled fragments of being quarantined in her room at the assisted living facility due to a virus that had broken out there, and how she desperately hoped to get out. On other pages, she furiously wrote her son’s name repeatedly, sometimes followed by the words, “I kneed [sic] new shoes,” and “Help me.”