Ellis Blake - A deal with the devil: the dark and twisted true story of one of the biggest cons in history

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For Lex Haris, who let two reporters spend months chasing down a French psychic

The first thing I noticed when I met Maria Duval were her eyes. Cats eyes. Not the blue eyes of a Siamese cat, with the shade of delft-blue porcelain china. Not the eyes of a Persian cat, with the shade of molten gold. The eyes of a street cat. Mysterious green, with the sea-blue shades of a swamp. Lights with the sparkle of golden coins, glowworms, and star particles. We stood opposite each other. Maria looked straight into my eyes. People say that a cheetah hypnotizes its prey before he strikes. That is what I had in front of me. A cheetah. A captivating catlike woman who held me in the grip of her emerald-green eyes.

UNKNOWN

Alain: An archivist at the French newspaper Nice-Matin

Astroforce: A company long connected to the Maria Duval letters that was used on business filings around the world and of which Maria Duval was once a shareholder

Franoise Barre: Former mayor of Callas and close friend of Maria Duval

Willem Bosma: A Dutch journalist who spoke with Jacques Mailland when reporting on the Maria Duval scam in the Netherlands

Anne Chamfort: Another purported French psychic whose face and name have been used for letters very similar to Marias

Data Marketing Group Ltd.: A Long Islandbased company that tracked payments from victims and fulfilled orders for talismans

Destiny Research Center: An apparent shell company used to mask where the most recent US Maria Duval letters were coming from

Joseph Patrick Davitt: An Australian businessman listed as director of Listano Limited, the owner of Maria Duval trademarks

Martin Dettling: The mysterious Swiss man who opened the mailboxes in Sparks, Nevada

Maria Duval: A purported French psychic whose name, image, and signature have appeared on millions of psychic letters sent around the world

Andrea Egger: The Swiss attorney who helped file a number of Maria Duval trademarks around the world and whom we attempted to confront in Monaco

gd2use: Online handle of a mysterious person who uploaded numerous videos of Maria Duval interviews to YouTube

Clayton Gerber: The US postal inspector whom we first interviewed about the Maria Duval scam, who said it was one of the largest consumer frauds in history

Patrick Guerin: Maria Duvals psychic sidekick, who appears in some of her letters and advertises in-person consultations in Paris

Infogest: A Swiss company founded by Jean-Claude Reuille that once managed the worldwide distribution of the Maria Duval letters

Infogest Direct Marketing: A Canadian company connected to the Swiss Infogest, which managed the mailing of the Maria Duval letters in the United States and Canada

Julia Jones: A French-speaking CNN reporter

Jacques Mailland: A French copywriter and alleged mastermind of the Maria Duval letters

Jordan Malter: A CNN producer who filmed our journey

Lukas Mattle: A former Infogest employee

Barney McGettigan: A British accountant in Stratford-upon-Avon whose firm provided the mailing address for Listano Limited

Thomas Ninan: A US postal inspector and key investigator for the US governments Maria Duval case

PacNet Services: A Canadian payment processor that cashed many of the checks mailed to the Maria Duval scam over the years

Antoine Palfroy: The son of Maria Duval and former owner of an eccentric bookshop

Gerard du Passage: A man now living in Thailand who had previously served as a contact for Maria Duval

Patric: A man claiming to be Jean-Claude Reuilles childhood friend who contacted us after our Maria Duval series ran

Luis Alberto Ramos: A man who sued Maria Duval after she purchased a field from him in Argentina but allegedly never paid for it

Jean-Claude Reuille: A Swiss businessman and alleged ringleader of the Maria Duval letters

Doreen Robinson: An elderly woman and mother of Chrissie, who became obsessed with Maria Duval while battling dementia

Chrissie Stevens: A woman who tried for years to save her mother, Doreen, from the grip of the Maria Duval scam

Jan Vanlangendonck: A Belgian journalist who interviewed Maria Duval in a Parisian caf

Vronique: A psychic in Callas who was the first person we found who actually claimed to have met Maria Duval

T HE MYSTERIOUS FRENCH psychic enters the lives of her victims through the mail. For decades, she has seized on the desperation of millions. The lonely. The weak. The elderly. They give her everything. Their trust. Their devotion. And their money.

For many, she became an obsession. It was Maria Duval, they were convinced, who would cure their illnesses. It was Maria Duval, they were convinced, who would bring them much-needed money. And it was Maria Duval, they were convinced, who truly loved and cared about themoften, even more than their own families did. They were captivated by the elusive woman with the piercing gaze, convinced she was the only one left who could help them.

It didnt take us long before we too were captivated by this woman. At the time, we were two twenty-eight-year-old journalists looking for our next story. Instead, we ended up falling down a rabbit hole so deep that we were still trying to get out of it years later.

We were a relatively new investigative duo at CNN. A tall, blond Idaho native who spent years studying Arabic and worked at a newspaper in the Middle East before joining CNN and traveling to North Dakota in an RV to cover the emerging oil boom. And a short brunette from California who studied journalism in the freezing cold of Syracuse, New York, before becoming a local newspaper reporter back in Los Angeles, covering a corrupt city councilman who was later indicted for embezzling thousands of dollars from a local farmers market. Even though we worked for one of the worlds largest television news operations, we both considered ourselves more like old-school newspaper reporters than aspiring correspondents.

When Maria came to our attention, it was the fall of 2015. The first Democratic presidential debate had just aired, Hillary Clinton was facing harsh public questioning about her controversial response to the Benghazi attack, and the real estate mogul Donald Trump was just starting to make waves by unexpectedly dominating Republican polls.