A Deal with the Devil Read online

  We also had a puzzling exchange with a different attorney from a firm that represented Maria on a Canadian trademark just a few years after the US one. “It does not appear that we have had any additional contact with Maria Duval since 1997,” the attorney wrote.

  Not satisfied with this one-line response, we quickly responded. “Does this mean that your agency did have direct contact with Maria Duval in 1997? We’re trying to figure out if she was actually involved in the trademark application or if it was someone else. If so, do you know if anyone met her in person?”

  But again, all we got back was a cryptic reply. “I’m sorry, I don’t have any additional information that I can pass along to you on this matter.” This left us wondering whether this attorney too had communicated only with this Andrea Egger character and not Maria.

  It was an attorney from Finland, whose firm had represented Maria on a 1996 trademark, who was the most candid of the bunch:

  Normally our firm cannot give any information about our clients, but given the rather historical aspect of your investigation I take the liberty of telling you that we did not have any contact with Maria Duval after filing a trademark for her in 1996. A quick investigation on Google reveals that she has visited Finland in year 2000 and there were some media reports about her visit. These things were probably connected.

  Unfortunately there is not much more I can tell you, I wish you good luck in tracking her down!

  Again, we asked if this meant he had been in direct contact with Maria while filing the trademark. And again the answer was no.

  Despite their dry legalese, we were convinced that these attorneys held the key to figuring out whether the woman in Callas was behind the letters. The trademark documents themselves, on which her name was clearly listed as the applicant, suggested she was. Since none of these attorneys seemed to have ever met or spoken to her, it seemed entirely possible that someone else pretending to be Maria could have easily orchestrated all these filings.

  But then we found a 2006 trademark document that featured a signature that was allegedly from Maria—and it looked a lot like the signature on all the scam letters. In this document, filed with the US Patent and Trademark Office, Maria pledged that she was a “living individual” and consented to the registration of a trademark for her name. Of course, someone could have been brazen enough to forge this signature despite the grave legal consequences for doing so. Otherwise, it appeared that Maria Duval really had been involved with filing these trademarks. As far as we could tell, Maria or someone pretending to be her was filing for trademarks so that her name could be used to solicit money, just as the letters had done for decades.

  There was also a detail in the email from the Finnish attorney that made Maria’s involvement seem more possible. He wrote that a real woman claiming to be Maria Duval made a public appearance in Finland not long after the trademark was filed. Could this appearance have been used to lure in potential victims?

  • • •

  Tabloids and other news reports about Maria showed her traveling the world making in-person media appearances.

  An online video appeared to document her visit to Finland. The woman in the video looked middle aged and had the same short blond hair as the younger woman pictured in the letters. At one point, she swung around some sort of pendulum, and another shot showed her looking at tarot cards. We couldn’t understand what was being said in the video, but it was pretty clear that she was being touted in Finland as a true psychic.

  Right around the time she allegedly visited Finland, she had also traveled to Australia. Maria, or whoever it was claiming to be her, had been interviewed by a radio host named Maria Zijlstra at the government-funded Australian Broadcasting Corporation. In her head shot online, Maria Zijlstra is pictured as a middle-aged woman in narrow, red-rimmed glasses with a long braid going from her forehead down past her shoulders. And her bio didn’t read like that of a typical journalist: “As a preschooler, Maria Zijlstra smashed the family radio by inadvertently pulling it off the top of a slopey-shouldered refrigerator, for which she is still trying to make amends.”

  After weeks emailing back and forth with officials at the Australian radio station, we received the audio file of the entire fifteen-minute interview, which was taped in 1999 but not aired until January 2000 (right after the fears of a Y2K apocalypse had subsided). Eager to hear how the interview unfolded, we plugged in our headphones and listened from our computers, pausing every few seconds in order to transcribe each sentence.

  From the interview, you would never know the controversy that was already swirling around Maria and the letters bearing her name. In fact, the letters were raging in Australia and New Zealand at the very same time the interview was conducted. The interview was also, suspiciously enough, conducted remotely—meaning that the host was not in the same room as Maria or her interpreter. The woman claiming to be Maria was given the opportunity to spend the entire time boasting about her extrasensory abilities.

  The host began the interview by lavishing her with a fawning introduction.

  Her curriculum vitae presents her as having twenty-three years of accurate and verifiable political and economic predictions under her belt, including that Jacques Chirac would become the president of France. . . . Cooperating with doctors and police, she has located nineteen missing persons so far, and she has had thousands of appearances in the media, mainly providing horoscopes and mainly in Europe, but her territory of influence is growing to include Australia, since last year anyway. I met Maria Duval then on her visit here to Australia, catching her actually just before she left the country and then only by studio hookup while she was in Sydney. . . .

  Now she used an interpreter, I hasten to tell you, since she claims her English isn’t good enough, but despite that I found her powers of communication extremely impressive—or maybe I’m a sucker. By the way, she began our conversation by asking me when I was born, complimenting me on my star sign.

  Maria (the psychic) started by talking about how intrigued she had always been with Australia, and went on to discuss her work with the supposed Callas Institute for Parapsychological Research and whether particular nationalities were more open to psychics than others. Then we got to the good part, where Maria mentioned some sort of “commercial structure” and seemed to at least hint that she could be involved with the letters or the company sending them out.

  The gifts that I received at birth which I’ve developed give me a much more human dimension. What does that mean to have that human dimension if it isn’t to be able to help large numbers of people, people who meet us or who write to us? We have a service established so we respond to these people and we give them help. Not only psychic but also material help. Naturally through my work we’ve established a commercial structure, that’s normal. But through my skills, our aim is to help as many people as possible. Because at the moment, people, at least those who live in very sophisticated civilizations, have no point of grounding. Religions are disappearing. The family structure is no longer what it was. So most people need to refer to and to tell their troubles to somebody, and I hope that I am fulfilling that role.

  What we considered to be a scam Maria made sound like a noble venture. Instead of pressing her on this, the host only fed her ego:

  It sounds to some degree the way you’ve described it as if you are kind of a social worker, but then on a mass scale. Is that a fair kind of way of summing it up?

  Yes, Maria responded.

  It was the host’s complete lack of skepticism that caught our attention. Hearing her glorify Maria Duval as a social worker made our blood boil. The interview got even more outrageous from there, with Maria talking about how she predicted the new prime minister of Sweden after being shown only a photo and how “the greatest scientists” placed electrodes on her brain in a failed attempt to find the source of her powers. The segment ended with her making outlandish predictions about the end of civilization as we know it.

  We’re goin
g to be living in space. For the moment, there are actually no references in our civilization for that. So the planet Mars will soon be explored. If there’s evidence of water there—and where there’s water there is the possibility of life. And if humans manage planet earth so badly, the future history will be written in space. With stations in space of three thousand, five hundred people. There will be more and more of those. And earth in about one hundred years’ time will explode because of poor management of the humans.

  Apparently Maria Duval was a doomsayer. We didn’t know how this story could possibly get any stranger.

  • • •

  It was 2007 when Belgian journalist Jan Vanlangendonck and his colleagues arranged a sit-down interview with Maria at a Paris hotel. After suffering through the glowing Australian interview, we were happy to find another journalist who shared many of the same questions about Maria that we had.

  In a series of radio reports that aired before the meeting, Jan took a much more skeptical approach than the Australian radio host, documenting the Maria Duval letters as a heartless scam. He said that Maria’s “secretary,” Jacques Mailland, had told him that Maria had agreed to meet him in order to defend herself against the negative way he had portrayed her in his reports.

  We watched the interview on YouTube. It was originally shown on a Belgian television program called Koppen. We immediately recognized the elderly French-speaking woman with dyed blond hair and unnaturally plump lips. She wore a silky royal blue blouse and flashy black leather pants. Her voice sounded a lot like the one from the Australian radio interview from nearly a decade earlier. We both decided that the woman from the video and the woman in the grainy photo on the letters that showed a much younger glamorous blond could indeed be the same woman, especially if in recent years she had gotten some major plastic surgery.

  In the interview Maria likened herself to an angel and berated journalists for attacking her with negative articles. When asked about the letters in her name, she admitted that she didn’t sign each letter but still defended the operation, saying in French that the majority of her clients were happy, while those who were unsatisfied were offered refunds.

  I have people that I’ve trained. I cannot write day and night. . . . I take the responsibility. I’m certain that my people are well trained. They may sign for me. I don’t understand why you would make it into a controversy when people are free to reply, when they receive a prepaid stamped envelope on which they can indicate if they do not want to receive mail from Maria Duval, when if they are not satisfied after six months, they can be reimbursed. What more could you want? . . . In conclusion, I’m very pleased with myself. I’ve been working for fifty years, and for fifty years, the majority of the testimonials we get are satisfied. So poor Maria Duval works so hard on something she loves, helping other people. I don’t see why all the negative articles [have been written]. . . . I’ve dedicated my life to helping others.

  If the letters were really someone else’s creation, this interview would have been Maria’s chance to distance herself from the scam. Instead she did the opposite. She vehemently defended the letters sent in her name, seeming oblivious to the pain she had caused.

  We later spoke with Jan, who still remembered Maria vividly. He described her in an email as “mad(!), but a cunning lady, sly as a fox.

  “She never stepped out of her character,” he wrote.

  At this point, we were becoming human Ping-Pong balls. In only a matter of weeks, our theories had bounced all over the place. We went from thinking Maria was a psychic villain to thinking she was nothing more than a stock image. Then we started to believe that Maria might be a real person, a real person who claimed to be a psychic. What we needed to confirm was her involvement with the letters.

  The Psychic Sidekick

  WE WERE NOW convinced that Maria Duval was real and that there had to be someone out there who could help us find her.

  Her sidekick Patrick Guerin, the man whose letters and corny DVD initially sparked our interest in this investigation, might be the right person to start with, we figured. Maria’s letters often introduced Patrick as her friend and esteemed colleague. It was likely that whoever had turned Patrick into a mail-order psychic may have been behind Maria’s fame too.

  Patrick’s letters hadn’t garnered nearly the attention—or the complaints—that Maria’s had. Patrick, it seems, was used as a tool to suck even more money out of victims who were already obsessed with Maria.

  I wouldn’t normally take a telephone call while I’m doing this kind of meticulous work since it can be very distracting and I need to stay totally concentrated. But this time I had a strange feeling that this call was different. More importantly, I had a feeling that it was directly linked to the work I was doing for you. And I wasn’t wrong!

  When I picked up the handset, I recognized the warm, gentle voice of my friend, the renowned psychic, Patrick Guerin.

  This seer has a worldwide reputation. He also has the rare and special power to make people win, win and WIN AGAIN at the lottery and other games of “chance”, very often really large amounts of money!

  In this letter, Maria goes on to explain in great detail how she and Patrick had the same fantastic vision about the very person reading the letter. She writes how the two of them spent days locked in a room, working together “around the clock to perfect a brilliant, unique and very dynamic and personalized help plan.”

  Can you imagine the situation? Two acclaimed and respected psychics having the same visions about you at the same time! And in those visions, we both saw you winning a large sum of money on the lottery very soon and solving all those urgent problems that have been casting a shadow over your life until now! In such circumstances, how could everything we’ve seen for you not come true! Two psychics of international renown can’t be wrong!

  Among the psychic notes Maria claims she and Patrick took:

  Powerball!

  SEVERAL WINNINGS!!!

  Rebirth!

  Like Maria, Patrick also claimed to be French. He had a very active Facebook page, which featured a circle of colorful tarot cards as its cover photo, placed above a profile photo of the same serious-looking man with wavy brown hair from the letter in our pile of junk mail.

  His business website also popped up, which advertised more than a dozen books he had written, along with his consultations. On Google Street View the address for these consultations brought us to a nine-story apartment building with a bookstore on its ground floor and a crêperie next door. Maybe Patrick lived in the building or used the bookstore for consultations.

  Our best shot to speak with Patrick would be to secure a meeting with him, so we decided to pose as interested customers, planning to later identify ourselves as journalists if he agreed to a meeting. Patrick’s email address was right on his website, so we sent him this carefully crafted message:

  Dear Patrick,

  I am from the United States and saw one of your letters. I would like to come to Paris for a psychic reading. How do I schedule this?

  Two days later, he sent us a response in French: “Do you speak French? In that case I would welcome you.”

  Excited to hear back from him, we responded again to say that we could bring a French-speaking friend, asked him how to schedule a meeting, and where his office was located.

  To this, there was no response. We tried calling the phone number from his website, which resulted in a voice mail advertising his psychic services, and emailed him again. For a brief moment, we had a glimmer of hope that we would be jetting to Paris to meet this rosy-cheeked clairvoyant face-to-face, after which we imagined him spilling all of Maria’s dirty secrets. Such a trip, however, was clearly not in the cards. We never received more from him than that single email.

  The Sightings

  WITHOUT PATRICK, WE returned to the growing list of Maria’s media appearances.

  One of the last recorded sightings of her was a high-profile appearance in Russia in 2008, which h
ad been documented extensively in videos online and photos posted on Flickr by a user named “Maria Duval” (a user who, upon further research, appeared to have uploaded these photos and nothing else). Maria had even held a press conference at the Central House of Journalists in Moscow, complete with an official press release and fancy programs that announced her visit.

  Maria Duval, the famous French medium and clairvoyant, holds an open meeting in Moscow devoted to forecast the future of the Russian society. Among the announced topics of the meeting—the astrological forecast for the next few years, the results of the forthcoming elections in the United States, the resolution of the Russian-Georgian conflict, the development of nanotechnology.

  The press release, which was written in Russian, went on to detail an elaborate history of Maria in a manner very similar to the story told in so many of the letters and detailed in the Australian radio interview, including that she lived “in seclusion in her beloved Provence” and had written countless books. It also included some of her most repeated claims to fame: that she was the only psychic to have been granted a visit with the pope and that she had once found Brigitte Bardot’s dog. From its tone, you would think it was heralding the arrival of a queen.

  Maria was caught on camera as she entered the black wrought iron gates of the building wearing oversized sunglasses, a short black skirt and jacket, black heels, and a bright red scarf. The footage showed that the press conference was attended by a room full of people, including many holding video cameras and notepads, and close-up camera shots showed Maria’s chunky, braided metallic necklace, cleavage-revealing top, star-shaped earrings, and heavily applied icy eye shadow. Behind her hung a regal banner bearing a large “D,” presumably for “Duval.”

  It was during this visit that Maria predicted that “the next president of the United States will be black,” conveniently making the call just a few weeks before the election took place, at a time when Barack Obama was leading in the polls. And the Russian media, which broadcast the prediction, seemed to be far more impressed than we were. Some of her other predictions included that the US dollar would collapse and that the next generation would be more adept at using computers (imagine that!).