The Binge Cases: Denise Didn't Come Home - The Greatest Scam Ever Written | 2. Psychic to the Stars

Episode Date: August 8, 2024

Who was Maria Duval? Her son says she had a gift, an ability to see people’s futures. She helped locate missing people and worked with the French elite, befriending Jacques Chirac and Brigitte Bardot. In the late 80s, when two businessmen approached Maria Duval with a life-changing deal, her name becomes synonymous with one of the greatest scams ever written.  Unlock all episodes of The Greatest Scam Ever Written, ad-free, right now by subscribing to The Binge. Plus, get binge access to brand new stories dropping on the first of every month thats all episodes, all at once, all ad-free. Just click Subscribe on the top of the Smoke Screen show page on Apple Podcasts or visit GetTheBinge.com to get access wherever you get your podcasts. An ITN Productions & Sony Music Entertainment production. Find out more about The Binge and other podcasts from Sony Music Entertainment at sonymusic.com/podcasts and follow us @sonypodcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

You're listening to Smokescreen, the greatest scam ever written. Before you dive in, if you want to listen to the whole story uninterrupted, you can. Unlock the entire season, ad-free, right now with a subscription to The Binge. That's all episodes, all at once. Unlock your listening now by clicking subscribe at the top of the Smokescreen show page on Apple Podcasts, or visit getthebinge.com to get access wherever you get your podcasts. When I first started looking online for information about Maria Duvall, I found a story on her now-deleted website, mariaduval.com. It starts

in Saint-Tropez, the beach town in the French Riviera that really comes alive in the summer. It's a super fancy place fueled by expensive bottles of champagne and caviar. In the summer, Saint-Tropez fills up with the rich and famous. In the winter, it becomes a ghost town. So during the off-season, the local police don't have very much to do. It's mostly noise complaints between locals, that kind of thing. But not today. Today is different. It's a crisp winter's day in 1977, and the police station is humming with frantic conversation.

A woman who lives nearby has gone missing. She's the wife of a local dentist. She drove off a few days ago, and no one has any idea where she went. The police are running out of options. Helicopters race up and down the coastline and return empty-handed. Leads about where the dentist's wife could have gone have dried up. The police are trying to figure out how to tell him there's not much more they can do. That's when a mysterious woman walks in through the station doors. She's attractive in her 30s with intense green eyes and short brown hair.

She tells the police she's a clairvoyant. She read about the missing woman in the newspaper and claims she can find her. The police officers are skeptical at first, but they decide to take her up on her offer anyway. What harm could it do? The clairvoyant asks for a photo of the dentist's wife, her birth date, and a map of the area. She sits at a table, places the photo on top of the map, and closes her eyes. She swings a pendulum in wide circles above the map. At first, there's muffled laughter from the police. Maybe this woman is just plain nutty. But slowly, the room goes silent.

The pendulum slows down and hovers above the mountains on the map. The police chief goes to the phone and makes a call. An hour later, the phone rings. The search party has just found the dentist's wife in the exact same spot this clairvoyant predicted. She's injured, dehydrated, and mere hours away from death. The police can't believe it. The dentist, shocked and grateful, falls to his knees and asks the woman's name. Maria Duval. Yes, the very same Maria Duval who, decades later, would write thousands of letters to strangers offering her psychic services for cash. I have to admit that when I first read this story, I was a bit taken in by Maria and her powers.

She saved a woman's life here. The image of the beautiful, unknown psychic wandering into the police station and solving the puzzle that no one else could. It's compelling, right? But when I looked into this story a little deeper, the details were a bit blurry. I can't really find anything online about this so-called dentist or his missing wife or anything about the case at all. It's as if it's a myth. How are we meant to find out the truth about Maria Duval when all there is online is a collection of weird, unverifiable stories

and complaints from people thousands of miles away? I want to cut through all of that, forget the mythology and drama, and reveal the real Maria and her true role in the scam. They took advantage of her notoriety. They used my mother's reputation. They promised her TV, flash bulbs, fame, and that was that. Who are they? I'm Rachel Brown, and this is The Greatest Scam Ever Written, from Sony Music Entertainment and ITM Productions.

Episode 2, Psychic to the Stars. Last time, we heard the story of Doreen Robinson, who struck up a destructive relationship with Maria Duvall in her final years of life. Despite years of writing to Maria and sending thousands of dollars in exchange for her psychic guidance, Doreen had never met her in person. Neither had her daughter Chrissy, who refused to stop searching for clues about Maria after her mother's death in 2012. I didn't even know where I could start to look, but I knew that some of the information, some of the paperwork that I had from my mother's estate, some of these little bits need to be hung on to for a little bit longer just in case something is discovered. And then there's part-time scam buster Dr. Terry Polivoy

who also tried everything he could to get to the bottom of the letters and yet still came up empty-handed. My first attempt to research Maria Duvall was back in 2020. There were a handful of videos of her on YouTube and a Wikipedia page that was very thin on details about her life. CNN had done an investigation into her a few years before, and a couple of European journalists had interviewed her as well. But it was unclear whether she was still alive or not. I don't speak French, so maybe I was missing something, but it felt like Maria was popular at a time when news wasn't online and social media didn't exist.

So let's go back to the source, the letters. What can we learn about Maria from the words she uses? When was the last time you received a letter in the mail? Think about it. I'm not talking about flyers for local takeout restaurants or your bank statements. I mean a real, handwritten letter from someone who knows you, really cares about you. It's easy to forget that before the internet took over, letters and mail were one of the only ways we got news and stayed in touch with loved ones. Just listen to the opening few lines of the 1973 film Letters from Three Lovers. There's probably nothing more important in your life than what you get in your daily mail.

Letters about births and deaths. Letters filled with happiness and despair. All my cause of my life for the price of a postage stamp. Today, this might feel like an old-timey or even luxurious thing. I feel the same way. I might write the occasional thank you card, but I only really write letters to get people to talk to me as part of my job. Whenever I do put pen to paper, I'm reminded that the act itself is surprisingly satisfying. But what I enjoy even more is decoding a letter.

The deepening of a scrawl the further down the page you get, the smear of ink betraying a left-hander, a crossed-out word here and there on an otherwise pristine page. Sometimes more than the words themselves, the physical letter can actually reveal a lot about its sender, maybe more than they even realize. All of this is why I think Maria Duvall's letters had such extraordinary power for those who received them. They cut through to something primal, nostalgic even, a desire to connect. This connection is there from the moment you pick up the envelope. Like Doreen's initial letter, Maria immediately catches the recipient's attention with a personal and very urgent call to action.

Doreen, you have to read this. When you open the letter, you're instantly greeted by the grainy headshot of an attractive blonde woman in the top right-hand corner. She's backlit, giving her an almost celestial appearance, like some sort of goddess. It's Maria Duvall, who the letter describes as a world-renowned psychic with over 40 years of, quote, accurate and verifiable predictions. And almost immediately, she tells you why she's written directly to you. If you've got a special bottle of bubbly you've been saving for celebrating great news, then now is the time to open it. And on it goes, pages and pages of excited,

optimistic words promising a better life at a cheap price. The first thing I want to do for you is to do everything I can to have you win the sum of $25,000 immediately. Tell me the exact sum of money you need. She's speaking directly to you, and she somehow knows your deepest desires. And it's not just her words that are so powerful. It's the fact that she's left traces of herself across the pages. Some letters even have a coffee stain ring on the page, showing where she left her cup while writing, handwritten notes hastily scrawled in the margins, like an excited afterthought,

as if Maria just couldn't wait to draw your attention to a particularly special paragraph. I could not believe my ears. Go to the next page quickly to find out more. Maria asks for personal details, a lock of hair, anything that might help her connect with her reader. And there's always this sense that the clock is ticking in everything she writes. You must accept these changes as they happen to you, because an opportunity that you ignore is an opportunity that usually never shows up again. Enclosed is a special green envelope to send these personal treasures directly to Maria. In return, she promises personalized psychic services

tailor-made to your needs. All you have to do is grasp the hand of friendship. We are holding out to you. Your devoted friend, Maria Duval. Your devoted friend. At the end of 12 pages that are full of compelling writing, it's easy to believe that Maria Duval actually knows you, cares about you, and wants you to succeed. Especially if you happen to be going through some dark times when the letter hits your mailbox. These letters might help me understand a bit about how persuasive a writer she is. But Maria's true intentions and the motivation behind

her impulse to change lives remains a mystery to me. I want to know who the real Maria Duvall is and how she got involved in this whole thing. But the problem is, I'll never be able to ask any of these questions to Maria directly. In the process of trying to get in touch with anyone who knew her, I discover that she recently passed away.

But there is a way I can still get some answers. I need to talk to someone who knew her intimately. And there's really only one person in the world left who can do that. Her son, Antoine Palfroy. It took some convincing to get him to speak to me. But eventually, after a lot of wrangling, the word comes through. Antoine is willing to talk. There is no other word other than criminal. Criminal. As a kid growing up in Chicago, there was one horror movie I was too scared to watch. It was called Candyman.

It was about this supernatural killer who would attack his victims if they said his name five times into a bathroom mirror. But did you know that the movie Candyman was partly inspired by an actual murder? I was struck by both how spooky it was but also how outrageous

it was. Listen to Candyman, the true story behind the bathroom mirror murder wherever you get your podcasts. I am Maria's son, her only son, Antoine. And with me is my daughter, Solène. Well, hello, I'm Solène, the granddaughter of Maria Duval, the youngest of three granddaughters, and the daughter of Antoine Palfroy. I've spent so many hours imagining what Maria was like.

I'd pictured a reclusive woman reading tarot cards and astrology charts by candlelight. And now it feels surreal to be sitting down with Antoine and Céline Palfroy, Maria Duval's son and granddaughter. We're in Maria's house, two years after she died, about an hour north of Saint-Tropez. It's a large villa nestled in a hilly region in France, famed for its vineyards and stunning views. The house is like stepping back in time. It's truly a relic of Maria's heyday. I can just imagine her starting her day with laps in the indoor pool or admiring the sculptures in the garden.

Having spent a bit too much time wondering, obsessing about Maria Duval, it's finally time for me to get a sense of who she really was. She had discovered her gift at a very young age, but she didn't use them because they scared her a bit. She was a little worried about having these visions, having things like that happen with people. It just came to her unintentionally, without wishing it and without forcing it. Antoine remembers his mother as someone who could always predict the future, and someone who couldn't help but share those predictions, for better or worse. I would say, I've met a girlfriend. What's good about her? What's bad about her?

And she always answered me, and unfortunately, sometimes for me, it was always very accurate. Afraid of how other people might react to her supernatural insight, Maria kept it a secret and instead focused on building a life for her and her family. So my parents divorced when I was young. After that, my mother did a whole range of jobs. She had owned industrial cleaning companies. In fact, she was very entrepreneurial. As soon as the business worked well, she would sell it.

And she never stopped. She was always in the process of calculating her next move, planning what was next, talking about what we can and can't do as a business. From cleaning companies to clothing stores, Maria was a savvy businesswoman. And in her spare time, for fun, she would do readings for family and close friends.

But eventually, word started to get around. Often people would come and see her in store and they would say, listen, Maria, can you help me? I have a question. My mother used to say, okay, come next door to a small room. I'll do the cards, you can look at the astrology. And so it was like this.

Antoine tells me she was a very good clairvoyant, making many accurate predictions. And people began offering her money for the service. She had so many people come to see her that she said to me once, I have to decide whether I'm going to continue with the clothing business or whether to set up as a clairvoyant. And so with all these people who came to see her, she said, well, I'm helping these people, so I'm going to carry on doing that. And help she did. He tells me she was asked to assist the national police in Saint-Tropez

to help find missing people. She then started hosting a radio show that broadcast across the region offering daily horoscopes and even featured regularly in local newspapers. As her fame rose steadily, she moved to Paris to set up a practice where she was embraced by the city's elite. She began advising, directing and answering questions from politicians, artists, men and women alike, as well as businessmen, advising them on their affairs, their love affairs and their business affairs.

But for sure, it was always legal. There was never anything illegal because she was also very afraid of everything that was fiscal, everything to do with treasury, taxes, the police. So it was always important that everything was kept properly organized. Antoine seems keen to point this out to me. He knows why I'm here, and he wants to make his position clear. It seems even he is trying to square up his mother's name with what her legacy has become synonymous with.

Antoine and Maria were close. He was never too far from her side. She often took me with her on days out to operatives, to events. There were sculptors, there were artists. And for me, afterwards, it became something quite natural. Brigitte Bardot being there. Hello, madame. Brigitte Bardot, as in the actress, model and icon of the 50s and 60s. She's like a French Marilyn Monroe. So she'd worked with various artists.

She'd worked with Chirac, Jacques Chirac. We can talk about him now that he's dead. There were other politicians too, who are not yet dead, so we won't talk about them. Antoine's name-dropping Jacques Chirac here, who was president of France for over a decade. Maria's website also claims that she's one of the only psychics to have had an audience with the Pope. It's a pretty impressive client list for sure, and Maria's stories about these famous clients have become an important part of her mythology. For instance, I'd heard Maria tell journalists a story in the past in which she used her powers to locate Bridget Bardot's

missing dog. But Antoine says the missing dog story never actually happened, and Bridget Bardot has also come out recently and said it's not true. This all speaks to the swirling mass of intriguing and contradictory stories surrounding Maria. What we can say for sure is that by the late 80s, Maria is a successful clairvoyant with some fame in France. For many people, that would be enough. But then, an opportunity comes knocking. She was approached by some businessmen in Switzerland who were looking for a new hatch.

So things went very well at first, but then they said, yes, but you understand, we want to buy your name. And what happened next would change the course of Maria's life and bring us to her door decades later. They took advantage of her notoriety. They used my mother's reputation. They promised her TV, flashbulbs, fame, and that was that.

At the point Maria meets the Swiss businessman, she's in her 40s and doing pretty well for herself. According to Antoine, these businessmen were offering a huge sum of money for Maria to be the face and name of a new mailing campaign, what would come to be known as the Maria Duval letters. So she never actually wrote all the letters. They were a product in a mailing campaign, duplicated letters posing as personalized readings. But the letters looked so real, like each one of them came fresh from the hands of Maria Duval.

They contained so much detail, and she was exchanging so much personal information with the recipients. None of the people who wrote to Maria could have known it was a mass mail-out. The personal touch is what hooked people in. But that's all to come. Back to this crucial meeting in the late 80s. The businessmen want to buy Maria's name, expand her reputation around the world. And in return, they'll give her a percentage of the sales they make on the letters. She'll be rich. They said, we want to buy your name.

We buy a name, we make you dream. I know my mother liked that, being famous, journalists, interviews, TV. She liked it. She really liked it. She liked to shine. And the time was right to expand her business. Appetite for psychic services during the 80s and 90s couldn't have been bigger. Maria would likely have seen the extraordinary success of psychics like Sylvia Brown, one of the most notorious mediums in America. Sylvia had become

famous for telling the parents of missing children what happened to their kids on TV programs like The Montel Williams Show and Larry King Live. I grew up in the 90s and remember seeing these psychics on TV all the time asking customers to call into their 1-800 numbers. Psychics like Ms. Cleo urged viewers to phone in for a unique reading that was just for them. The cards can reveal things that you will never see by yourself. Call me now for your free tarot reading. Call 1-800-980-8000. And with the rise of the internet, psychics realized they could sell their services in an even bigger way than ever before. They could, in theory, reach millions of people. This was a great opportunity. Maria would sell her name and likeness for letters in exchange for money.

My mother remained discreet about her work, very discreet about what she did. Antoine claims not to know the ins and outs of the agreement, and it's frustrating that we'll never truly know exactly why she signed it. Maybe she was blinded by the lucrative offer. The promise of more fame and more wealth. Once the deal goes into effect, according to Antoine, the businessmen don't bother Maria with the day-to-day runnings of the enterprise. But as part of the agreement, Maria travels around the world to promote her work. She went to Russia, Japan. She went to India, she went to South America.

So many countries. Although she may have already been famous in France, the letters have given her a new international audience who all want to see her in real life. Because people wanted to see Maria Duval. Who is Maria Duval? Is it a commercial name or is it really a person? Hearing Antoine talk about this, it reminds me of a couple of videos I came across online, all from the same weird YouTube channel. Most of the videos on the account are of interviews with Maria, with subtitles in several different languages. But there are also clips of these international conferences and appearances.

One is a Russian news report from the early 2000s that claims Maria visited Moscow to make predictions about the country's future. And there are many others like this. Maria Duval. Maria on an Austrian talk show. Maria being interviewed by a Greek news outlet. And all these trips were organized and paid for by these two businessmen. They organized the trips, the hairdressers, the hotels, everything. In other words, my mother had no say in the matter. If the company told her she had to do a three-week conference in Japan,

she would do a three-week conference in Japan, she would do a three-week conference in Japan. Antoine and Solène believe Maria saw the sale of her name as a positive thing at the start. But as the years went on, she started to have misgivings about the letters. I know that she told me that they were going too far with these letters. They went too far. I know that in the letters, they promised the world, which she never, never promised.

The people who came to see her, she never said, tomorrow I'm going to cure you of your cancer. I'm going to cure you of your calluses, your hair loss. No, no, no, no, no. So she became unhappy with the copy of the letters, but was she still receiving money? She received money from the sale of her name.

I think they must have signed a contract for X number of years because at some point they stopped paying her for her name. He claims she was helpless to stop the letters, even if she wanted to. She told me, there's nothing I can do. The name is sold, it no longer belongs to you. It's business, but they're going too far. Antoine is adamant that Maria wasn't properly informed about what the deal really meant and what the implications are when you lose control over your name.

Individually speaking, she no longer had the right to have a consulting practice. She was still seeing friends, she was seeing people she knew well, but these companies had forbidden her to work as a clairvoyant as she had done before. I don't entirely buy Antoine's line here. After all, Maria was a grown woman with a string of businesses under her belt. What does Antoine have to say about the thousands of victims that suffered as a consequence of Maria's deal. If I told you to eat this cake for a thousand dollars, then you won't have any corns on your foot anymore. What do you think this is, in your opinion? It's a scam, of course. But on the other hand, if you're the one who pays a,000 to eat this cake, telling yourself you won't have any more corn on your feet,

you'd have to be just as naive. Do you see what I'm getting at? What Antoine's saying is that this scam was a two-way street. Yes, scammers wanted to take advantage of people, but willing participants chose to believe they'd get luck and fortune in exchange for their money. To me, it sounds like victim-blaming. It's true that sending letters like that is not normal.

It's not ethical at all. It's taking advantage of people's weakness. But then you can't defend people against themselves. Earlier, Antoine painted his mom as never participating in illegal schemes and always on the up and up. But now he's saying the Maria Duval letters were unethical. But whether it was illegal was something it would take me a lot longer to unravel. Antoine, for his part, is empathetic to the victims of the scam, even as he defends his mother.

I understand that there are people in the United States who have been cheated, who have been robbed. There's no other word for it. They've been robbed. They're either unhappy or angry, and that I understand. But I don't think my mother can fully assume that guilt. I do accept that there's a kernel of truth in what Antoine is saying. And the irony here is striking. Because the promises made to Maria weren't so different from those made in her name to the victims of the scam. The promises of money, fame, and success that each and every one of us is vulnerable to.

So from this perspective, the woman fronting the scam was, in some ways, a victim herself. Maria's involvement with this business spanned over 30 years. Going into this interview, I assumed that Maria had been making a lot of money from it, regardless of her doubts about how they were using her name. But Antoine tells a very different story. Compared to the mountain of money they had, my mother got nothing. Nothing at all. I don't even know if she knew how much money was at stake.

My mother was still alive when they stopped paying. I don't remember if it was 2014 or 2016 when they stopped paying her. But it was hardly anything. It was nothing. And then the irony deepens. In around 2013, Maria is diagnosed with Alzheimer's, just like Doreen. When she becomes unable to live alone and pay her bills, Antoine and his family are left to pick up the pieces of her life and care for her.

The day that my mother became ill, we were the ones who paid for everything because she didn't have a single euro left. She had nothing left. We paid for the food, the gas, the electricity, everything. If she had earned just 1% of all the money that was earned, there wouldn't be a house like this one. The walls are covered in deep cracks.

Metal rods prop the house up around outside. As Maria's mind weakened, the building quite literally crumbled around the family. She could be very, very susceptible to influence. She wasn't sure what was happening around her. For us, it was a difficult period because there were a lot of people who wanted her money, who thought she still had a lot of money,

and who tried to split me and my mother up. So things got complicated. Antoine's grief about people coming after Maria's money as she becomes more and more vulnerable, it's exactly what Doreen went through. All of this feels almost like a parable. There is no other word other than criminal. Criminal.

So he does think it's a crime. A crime that should result in a punishment. And above all else, what was also criminal was buying my mother's name and trying to pin it on her. Because she's been swindled too. For Antoine, the family's loss is much more than just the money. It's Maria's name and reputation. People think it's Maria Duval when in fact it's the trade name. It was the trade name of Maria Duval that scammed those people.

Before we go, Antoine and Solène show us folders upon folders of newspaper clippings and magazine features. It's a testament to all the work that Maria did throughout her life. Maria passed away in 2022. Antoine still struggles to reconcile his memories of his mother with what's become of her reputation. My mother's name today is reviled. The name Maria Duval is to blame for all of this. I'm still wary about Antoine's take on all of this. Arguing that Maria was a victim herself and had little responsibility for the scam despite it being conducted in her name for decades, I just can't quite swallow it.

But at the same time, I believe him when he says that Maria was not in the driver's seat. So who is the real puppet master pulling the strings? In the next episode of The Greatest Scam Ever Written, help is on the way in the form of one investigator who will stop at nothing to bring down the perpetrators. The mantra is that we are referred to as the silent service. You know, when I go to the door to knock on the door to interview someone, I say, hey, I'm with the Postal Service. And they're like, I'll talk to you. And I get people to say the darndest things. Unlock all episodes of Smokescreen, the greatest scam ever written.

Ad-free right now by subscribing to the Binge Podcast channel. Not only will you immediately unlock all episodes of this show, but you'll get binge access to an entire network of other great true crime and investigative podcasts, all ad-free. Plus, on the first of every month, subscribers get a binge drop of a brand new series. That's all episodes, all at once. Just click subscribe at the top of the Smokescreen show page on Apple Podcasts or visit GetTheBinge.com to get access wherever you get your podcasts. This episode of The Greatest Scam Ever Written was hosted by me, Rachel Brown.

Our sound designers are Luca Evans and Sam Cassetta. Our mixer is Jay Rothman. Our assistant producers are Luca Evans and Leo Schick. Our producer is Millie Chu. Our story editor is Dave Anderson. Voices by Jean-Luc Fontaine, Julie Pabillon, and Nevada Red.

For ITN Productions, our production manager is Emily Jarvis. Our executive producer is Rubina Pabani. For Sony Music Entertainment, our executive producer is Catherine St. Louis.