A Deal with the Devil Read online

  Dr. Lichtenberg said that scare tactics like this can be incredibly effective, and in many cases they are employed as a last resort to get a victim’s money. “It’s all sweet and nice as long as the cash is coming, and if that stops it can get very dark,” he told us. “The path of least resistance is to just send more money.”

  Listening to Dr. Lichtenberg talk, we realized that this scam truly used every tool in the book. Other popular schemes seemed to rely on one main emotion. Schemes promising lottery wins rely on hope. Romance scams, in which fraudsters develop fake relationships with victims, rely on loneliness. And so-called grandparent scams that convince family members to wire money to a loved one they claim is in crisis rely on fear. But Maria’s letters use a combination of all these emotions.

  This is what made the scam so powerful. The letters appealed to the most base emotions of fear, loneliness, and hope—making it nearly impossible for victims to resist.

  • • •

  The most tragic story we encountered was that of the young British girl who reportedly drowned with Maria’s letter in her pocket. She was only seventeen years old at the time of her death.

  Found screaming for help as she was subsumed into the river Wear in Sunderland, a city in northeast England, Clare Ellis ventured into the water on a cold December night in 1998 for unclear reasons. “When we arrived she was still alive and shouting, but we couldn’t find any ropes long enough to reach her and there weren’t any lifebelts,” police constable Kim Maynard told a newspaper reporter at the time. Maynard reportedly jumped into the rushing water in an attempt to save the girl, but she was already unconscious. “I managed to get hold of her and started pulling her in, but by that stage she had stopped shouting and I couldn’t feel a pulse.”

  Maynard, a thirty-eight-year-old father of two, told reporters that the water was so cold that it took the wind out of him. He used a lifeboat to bring her to shore, where he attempted to resuscitate her. But it was too late. After being rushed to the hospital, she was pronounced dead a few hours later.

  In the wake of Clare’s death, which media reports said the coroner ruled the result of hypothermia, her parents were curious about what had driven their daughter into the water that night. Her mother had a disturbing theory.

  “She was writing to a psychic woman. She said the woman had magical powers,” she told a reporter, suggesting that letters from this psychic had pushed her daughter over the edge. Her parents told reporters that over the past few months, Clare had become uncharacteristically fixated on all kinds of clairvoyants, and that she had recently secured a new job at a clothing factory that they’d hoped would help take her mind off this newfound obsession.

  In the days, weeks, and months that followed her drowning, newspapers and tabloids across the United Kingdom pounced on the story, with headlines ranging from sensational to heartless:

  DEAD TEENAGER’S PSYCHIC FIXATION

  RIDDLE OF DROWNING ‘SPIRITGIRL’

  RIVERDEATH GIRL IN PSYCHIC RID

  It was an article from a few years later that eventually zeroed in on Maria Duval as the psychic from the letters. “In Clare’s pocket was a letter from French psychic Maria Duval, to whom she had been writing in the weeks leading up to her death,” reported an article in the Evening Chronicle.

  Clare’s mother told the paper that her daughter had “spent a fortune” on Maria’s talismans and that her behavior was becoming more and more concerning. She was convinced that the psychic’s unshakable grip on Clare had played a role in her death. “These things just shouldn’t be allowed,” she said. “We even got letters from this woman for months after Clare had died. Clare used to be a happy girl but she went down hill after getting involved with all this.”

  The Address

  Maria Duval

  c/o Destiny Research Center

  1285 Baring Blvd., #411

  Sparks, NV 89434-8673

  On the surface, the obscure address to which victims from all over the United States had once been directed to send their money appeared to be the address of an actual person.

  No. 411 could be a unit in a retirement village or apartment building. Some quick research on Sparks would show that it was a middle-income town just down the highway from the casinos of Reno, where retirees flock for cheap gambling. It’s no wonder someone might believe Maria herself was opening each of his or her heartfelt letters and handwritten checks from her own home there.

  The image of Maria unsealing each envelope from her living room, looking through each person’s letters, photos, and locks of requested hair, helped her build trust and a personal connection to her victims. Some of them even sent her Christmas gifts every year, along with long, handwritten notes that they hoped would give Maria a window into their lives.

  It was later, after we’d first written about the scam, that a woman told us that her elderly father had been convinced that Maria was his pen pal. “The letters my father received were directed at his loneliness after the passing of my mother,” she wrote. “They implied a ‘relationship’ between my father and ‘Maria.’ . . . When I discussed this with my dad he was under the impression that it was a ‘nice woman who lived in Nevada’ [Sparks] who he was getting to know, through letters. . . . My dad isn’t tech savvy so they were ‘pen pals.’ ”

  Smart enough to know that this was a scam and furious at whoever was taking advantage of her father, the woman was determined to hold him or her accountable. She thought she would finally have the opportunity when she arrived in Reno on a business trip.

  “I actually did some research and found a street address in Sparks and attempted to confront these predators,” she said. “However the street address led me to an industrial park, with no clear address that I could find. My GPS navigation was telling me I had reached my destination while I was in a desert[-like] area where there were no building [sic]. I asked a few business people in that area, they were of no help, although they did say I wasn’t the first to come looking.”

  We later retraced her steps ourselves, looking for anyone who had heard of this “nice woman from Nevada” and any clues to how this elusive French psychic was connected to this random American town.

  From the Reno-Tahoe airport, with its schizophrenic mix of cheesy slot machines and rustic grizzly bear statues, it was only a ten-minute drive to Sparks. A highway filled with semitrucks cut through a flat, barren landscape with the occasional casino, Holiday Inn, or Denny’s popping up into the sky. A deserted water park welcomed us off the freeway. From there, the streets started to look less desertlike, full of planted trees and grass lawns outside generic, modest-size homes.

  Our GPS directions took us closer to our ultimate destination than they had apparently taken the woman from the email, yet we still ended up in the middle of a run-down, yellowing strip mall surrounded by small, dusty brown mountains that looked nothing like the beautiful, snow-capped mountains around nearby Lake Tahoe.

  MetroPCS. Heroes Games and Hobbies. The Dawg Wash. PJ’s Discount Liquor. PC Service Center. A dark unit that we discovered was a church after peeking in the window. And a storefront simply labeled “Mattress.”

  None of these businesses were located at the specific address we were looking for, but we decided to pop our heads in anyway and ask whether any of the store owners or employees had ever been asked about or heard of a woman named Maria Duval.

  As the sounds of off-key horns and loud drums from a marching band practicing at the high school across the street combined with angry rap music blaring from a car in the parking lot, we entered the game and hobby shop. Behind a computer, a red-haired man in glasses looked at us skeptically as we approached—two women in our late twenties who didn’t exactly look like gaming aficionados.

  When we asked him if anyone had come into his store looking for a woman named Maria Duval, he barely looked up from his screen and gave a small shrug. “People don’t come here looking for people,” he said, looking around at the war games (think Dungeons
& Dragons and Magic) and intricate model kits on the shelves around us. “I really wouldn’t have noticed something like that—it’s not in my realm of interest.”

  Next, in PJ’s Discount Liquor, a man with piercing eyes looked down at the clock on his cell phone and told us no one had come in looking for Maria other than us—at least since eleven that morning.

  The MetroPCS store was closed, and the mattress store was by appointment only. But at the Farmers Insurance office nearby, a friendly-looking man sat at the front desk. When we warned him we had a peculiar question for him, he replied, “It wouldn’t be my first today.”

  He looked a lot like your stereotypical insurance agent: smiling and balding with a bushy gray mustache. And he was the first person who was genuinely intrigued by why we were there. He said that unfortunately he hadn’t heard of Maria, and that he would have remembered that name, making an eerie UFO-like sound for effect. When we told him he wasn’t too far off with that sound—that she was supposedly a French psychic—he joked, “Well, she would know you’re looking for her then.”

  After hearing our explanation of the scam, he told us that his wife worked at a nearby credit union and often tried to intervene when she suspected elderly customers were withdrawing large amounts of money to send to scammers. “It’s tragic that people fall for that stuff. . . . They should bet on me instead. I could sell them life insurance.” With life insurance, at least they’d be guaranteed a payout, he explained.

  After the cheery insurance agent, we were met with mostly confused looks from employees at the other nearby stores. A wiry-looking middle-aged woman at an eye doctor and glasses shop barely listened to our question before giving us a curt no. A man at the dry cleaner’s carrying a pile of clothes on hangers also hadn’t heard of Maria. A cluttered computer repair shop transported us back to the 1980s. It was stuffed with outdated monitors, and cheap advertisements were painted on its windows, along with an American flag. We shuffled up to the register and stood near what looked like a high schooler with a backpack who was waiting on some sort of repair. When we asked the owner about Maria, he said he had never heard of her, and that his store had been around for thirteen years.

  The employees at an Asian restaurant with a generic sign, tinted windows, and a confused mixture of cuisines were the most curious about our inquiry. “Why does that name sound so familiar? Is she that missing girl?” asked a young female employee wearing a black restaurant tee.

  Standing next to her, the heavily tattooed Hawaiian sushi chef was more eager to tell us about how the restaurant would soon become the venue for the first competition of dancing sushi chefs in the area, featuring deep house music and island reggae. A man eating lunch at the counter looked at us quizzically when we explained that we were journalists looking into a scam. Then he asked, “Do you guys dress the same, as reporters?”

  Confused, we looked each other up and down and started laughing. Somehow, we had chosen almost identical outfits—denim button-downs with straight black pants and ankle boots. We hadn’t noticed until this inquisitive sushi eater pointed it out. If there was a reporter uniform, we were both definitely wearing it.

  Getting back to the task at hand, we explained to everyone in the room that an address in this very shopping center had once been used by a psychic scammer under the name “Maria Duval” and that this scam had stolen hundreds of millions of dollars from mainly elderly victims.

  “Why Sparks, Nevada? How random is that? It is a little F-ing town,” said the same female employee, who wore dark eye makeup, her hair in a ponytail, and chipped red nails. She said the only reason she lived in Sparks was because her kids were there. “She must have known someone here.” Before we left, she warned us not to continue our hunt once it got dark—especially without a knife or a large can of Mace (which, conveniently, she said we could buy at a store across the street for eight dollars).

  Two doors down from the dancing sushi chef was a small UPS Store. This must have been where all the letters had been going. We entered the one-room office and quickly noticed rows of gold mailboxes tucked away in the back corner. Trying to avoid detection, we walked casually past the employee standing near the store’s entrance and tried to quickly spot mailbox 411 or 409 (the two different numbers that appeared with Maria Duval’s supposed address on the letters).

  401, 402, 403, 404, 405, 406, 407, 408. Then the numbers stopped.

  As we craned our heads to see if we had somehow missed another row, a gruff female employee with shoulder-length brown hair and blunt bangs came over and asked us what mailbox we were looking for.

  Upon hearing our reply, she quickly turned away and went back to what she had been doing, telling us under her breath that the boxes hadn’t been in operation for more than a year and a half, after the store had gotten a notice telling them they would be closed. This made sense to us, since the US government had attempted to put a stop to all of Maria Duval’s US mailings a couple of years earlier as part of the Justice Department’s lawsuit. She gruffly told us we would need a subpoena to ask any more questions (which suggested to us that the store probably had been subpoenaed about this before).

  We tried to explain that we were most interested in hearing about the kinds of people who had come to her store to try to find Maria herself. The employee wasn’t moved. In her efforts to try to get rid of us, though, she did let it slip that a few people (who she said were neither old nor young) had come looking. “They just wanted to meet her,” she said with a shrug.

  We asked her the same question in different ways over and over. We had come so far and hadn’t expected to be showed out the door this quickly. But the woman and even her more cheerful coworker manning the front desk both refused to let us talk to the owner, whom we could see huddled in a back room just a few steps away staring at a computer screen, clearly hearing our inquiries but choosing to ignore them. The woman muttered to her boss in a snarky tone, “I told you, they don’t listen.” Frustrated, we left the store without any answers.

  Sparks was just the beginning of a very complicated trail meant to hide the true origins of these letters. In fact, the documents from the US government’s investigation revealed that these mailboxes had been opened years earlier, not by Maria Duval, but by a businessman all the way from Switzerland.

  Why did he choose Sparks? Nobody knows.

  The Mysterious Psychic

  SO MARIA DEFINITELY wasn’t a “nice woman” living in dusty Sparks, Nevada. But was she a real woman somewhere?

  We started with the basics. A simple Google search revealed a number of women named Maria Duval: A German pop singer whose record covers from the 1960s and 1970s show a young brunette woman with a bouffant hairdo. A Mexican actress in her seventies and an elderly Argentine actress who had appeared in more than twenty movies throughout the 1940s. The mentions of these other Maria Duvals were merely sprinkled among the large volume of search results that pertained to the Maria Duval we were looking for.

  At the top of the list of websites, blogs, and scam alerts was a jumbled Wikipedia entry that contained a smattering of supposed personal details. It stated that Maria’s real name was Carolina Maria Gambia and that she had been born in Milan, Italy, before moving to France. She had a son named Antoine Palfroy, and she was the president of the Institute for Parapsychological Research in the small French town of Callas. The page also provided a potential theory about the letters. It said that Maria had once owned a company called Astroforce, which continued to use her name for the well-known scam “with her consent and knowledge.” It stated that she worked in conjunction with Destiny Research Center, the name from the Sparks mailing address and the name Chrissie was so puzzled by.

  We would later turn back to this Wikipedia entry, surprised at the glimmers of truth hiding in it. But at the time, we suspected that much of it was nonsense. The Institute for Parapsychological Research? It doesn’t exist. And we couldn’t find anyone in Italy—or anywhere else, for that matter—with the name Carol
ina Maria Gambia.

  After some more digging, we found a four-person private investigation firm from Calgary, Alberta, called Rainbow Investigations, which appeared to have done some research on Maria. The owner, Ron Reinhold, spent much of his time chasing down cheating spouses and helping businesses screen potential employees. In his spare time, he wrote warnings to the public about insidious consumer frauds. We emailed him to set up an interview once we’d read through his lengthy write-up on the Maria Duval letters. He quickly replied, telling us he’d be happy to talk but would first have to dig up the dossier on the scam he had created and tucked away years ago.

  We got on the phone with him the next day. With a distinctly Canadian accent, Ron told us how his fascination with Maria had begun after being contacted by the family of one of her victims. He faxed us all the documents in his file, which included one of the more ominous letters we had seen to date. Featuring graphic photos of a car that had been totaled in a crash, Maria explained in the letter that only her special talismans could protect people from imminent dangers like this.

  I was involved in a horrible car accident. I got out unharmed while the car was completely destroyed (as you can see on the photograph that I’ve enclosed with this letter). I am certain I would no longer be in this world if it weren’t for the Ring of Re. I felt as though it was protecting me.

  Ron was also one of the first people we discovered who was convinced that Maria was indeed a real person, though he suspected that she could have died many years ago. “She’s not gonna be a young woman if she’s still around,” he told us.

  After our conversation with him, we realized that he wasn’t the only one confident in her existence. In archived news articles, journalists had reported that Maria was a real psychic, holed away in the south of France. “The elusive clairvoyant refused requests for an interview, but we can reveal she lives near glamorous St Tropez in a luxury chateau in the village of Callas,” one Scottish newspaper wrote in 1997.