The day Ruthie and her husband cracked, they looked at each other, glanced at
the cheap object hanging on their door, and decided to go into the street to
talk. Fearful of saying anything in their own home in case the spirits heard
them, they knew their lives had been taken over and that something was very
wrong.
Ruthie and Geoff are a wry, gentle couple. But they have been subject to a
campaign of mind control more powerful than if they had joined an extremist
cult. The object they had been instructed to hang on their door in north
London — a strange, silver-and-blue “evil eye” — could apparently see and
hear everything they did. Now, after months of speaking in terrified
whispers inside the flat, they’d had enough.
We’ve got to get out of this, said Ruthie, who had been stripped of everything
from a lifetime of careful saving and well-paid employment. This is
horrendous, said Geoff, whose debts will take until 2025 to repay. But at
least they are alive. They are among the victims in a story, revealed here
for the first time, that will enter the annuls of crime. The police do not
take it seriously, yet it is one of the biggest and strangest frauds ever
perpetrated in the English-speaking world.
Together with other trusting people, including some famous names, they have
been conned by perhaps the greatest female fraudster in history. Her haul,
at the expense of lonely and often desperate people, probably exceeds the
£4.3m stolen by a secretary at Goldman Sachs who was jailed in 2004. She
obtained the money by the most manipulative betrayals possible. Four people
whose lives she infiltrated are dead.
In a nine-month investigation that should have been the task of the police, we
traced her to a comfortably appointed home in South America, to which she
has shipped antique furniture worth many thousands of pounds. But this is
not about money. After 26 years as a journalist, I know the darkness in
human nature. This is the first time I have encountered a person I think of
as evil.
She can make you laugh; she can make it seem that you are the only person in
the room. Best of all, she can make you feel you are not alone. “I used to
walk out of there elated,” says Ruthie of Vanessa Campbell, “because I’d
been able to talk about anything.” Women cannot get enough of the vivacious
Campbell, a stimulating friend with light Indian skin and impeccable
clothes. Although she makes it clear there will be no sex, men are prone to
do anything she asks just to be somewhere near her. Like Mr Ripley, she’s
talented. You’d never imagine that under a sunny surface lie the seeds of
your own destruction.
In her fantasies, she is an orphan born on a plane, an Oxford-educated
barrister and a shaman. Even in real life, featuring a mother who is
terrified of her in a council flat in Acton, she is a pretty unusual piece
of work. Her clients would later speculate that, as the descendant of
Indians in South America who were one step above being slaves, she enjoys
hurting the white middle class. Certainly, she has spoken warmly of the ease
with which crime can be carried out in Britain, and the low chance of being
caught.
The enigma at the centre of this story was born Maryan Lesley Persaud in
Georgetown, Guyana. She emerged with the amniotic sac over her face, a lucky
omen. But the sac was stolen, and with it went the luck. Dumped for a year
in a convent when her parents moved to London, she was seven when she came
to join them. She went to school in Ladbroke Grove, leaving at 15 to live
with the older electrician she married three years later.
As a former cleaner, receptionist and temp, some of her fantasies are not very
convincing. She claims her Oxford college is St Hilliard’s when she means St
Hilda’s, and her business cards use a term from the wrong side of the Irish
Sea, “barrister-at-law”. But her emotional skills are without parallel. She
perfected the undermining of people’s lives in the monied streets of
Hampstead, which offer a supply of liberals with two qualities in common:
they care about others, and many are anxious or lonely.
Campbell worked on them one-to-one in a home-grown programme that satisfies
the official definition of brainwashing, breaking down their identities
through isolation, dependency and the threat of physical harm. She created
the dependency with attentive listening and apparent good works, isolated
her prey from family and friends, got honest people into the habit of lying,
frightened them with threats of violence, and stripped them of everything.
“So this girl bounced in, her hair back and glossy and shiny, and with a
lovely complexion then. Dressed very smartly, but casually. I thought Whoa!
This is a nice, bright, sunny human — gosh. I was very happy to talk with
her.”
Keith Bender, a society osteopath, was her gateway to Hampstead. His patients
rightly trust him: he has the most healing hands in London. But his private
life had long been in turmoil, and this, coupled with a lifelong quest to
comprehend how human beings function, would prove the undoing of his
clients. At first Campbell told her new osteopath she was in the legal
business. Then, as she got to know him better, she adapted. There are many
complementary systems of therapy, and Bender wanted to understand them all.
Campbell let slip that she had psychic powers, and invited Bender to the
South American country of Surinam to see traditional shamans at work. Over
time he became her poodle.
Usually, practitioners of shamanism are seen as a force for good. In ancient
cultures they treat sickness by confronting evil spirits and prescribing
herbs. The shaman’s spirit is said to leave the body to search for
answers in the supernatural world. But not in this case.
Bender, a gangly man with mobile, nervous arms who endears himself to everyone
he meets, was the first person to be isolated. He was ripe for it. His
marriage to a Shakespearean actress was about to end. He was in financial
difficulties. Soon he was a broken human.
He was not to know that Campbell had been in Holloway prison as Marianne
Nicholls in the 1980s — when she and her husband divorced —and it would be a
while before he realised that she changes her name: to Marianne Moore,
Juliette D’Souza, Vanessa Wallace, Jacqueline McSherry, Juliette Campbell
and Juliette McSherry, among others. By then, it was too late.
She became his most important source of support. She paid the mortgage and was
a tireless friend to a couple in crisis. Then the tone of her advice
changed. She told him to stay away from his wife, falsely claiming she had
been sectioned. She reported that one of his sons, who is mildly autistic,
was now a vegetable and that the other was not his anyway. When the shaman
and the osteopath met, her habit had been to court old people, often
establishment figures such as judges who did not have long to live. But with
Bender as a depressed and unwitting ally, a new possibility emerged. His
diary is full of patients who think the world of him. If he referred them to
her for shamanic therapy, she could help.
She charged £35 for an hour’s consultation, and asked for full-length
photographs of family members, friends and colleagues, apparently to get an
idea of their bank balances. She then judged to perfection what to find
wrong in a person’s life, and how much to charge for Pa, an all-seeing
shaman 4,400 miles away, to fix it. The money was to be delivered in cash,
in a padded envelope sealed like a piece of airport luggage, bearing the
names and birth dates of the people concerned.
The package was sent to Surinam to be tied to a tree in the rainforest, where
it was left untouched while Pa started work on the case. Eventually there
would be £3m, and maybe as much as £7m, flapping in waterproof envelopes
from the tree.
Before you laugh, consider this. Research shows that high-achieving
professionals are the most likely to be defrauded, while the poor are harder
to trick as they do not trust their own judgment. Frank Engelsman, a fraud
specialist, says doctors are especially vulnerable to scams that encourage
them to do good. “They often fall for a scam that starts with a request to
help the less fortunate,” he says. “You need the victims to trust their own
capabilities and experience.”
The research, carried out by Ultrascan, an IT fraud agency based in the
Netherlands, also shows a strong correlation between being conned and a
family trauma. Among people who lose more than £150,000 to e-mail
fraudsters, there is an 85% chance of a recent, parent-related event such as
death or acrimonious separation impairing their judgment.
And this is exactly what Campbell constructed: the perfect crime to trap
intelligent people at a vulnerable time. Getting the victims to co-operate
with this investigation has taken gentle persuasion and patience, because
they now feel embarrassment, guilt and disbelief at their own actions. “I
feel a chump,” says Richard, a solicitor with cancer who lost thousands.
It would be wrong to give even the first name of another casualty, the
director of a company that identifies financial fraud. He gave £700,000 in a
desperate attempt to save his wife.
“You end up doing things you would never have done in a normal state of mind,”
says Chantelle, a poised woman in her thirties who surrendered £170,000 she
did not have.
This is how it works. The referral is either by Bender or a friend who is
already dependent. Chantelle, for example, was urged to go by a close
friend. He could not function without his shaman, and was telephoning her up
to 10 times a day. This is despite being so successful in his field that a
Google search for his unusual name yields 8,270 pages. Chantelle was
sceptical, but went. She found a sympathetic listener.
Campbell’s emotional insight — put with information supplied by Bender — lent
accuracy to her observations. Several former clients say she told them
things she could not possibly have known. Some were encouraged to go further
by early lucky successes: a patient improving against doctors’ expectations,
or a disfiguring facial spot healed. Guilt, and the threat of violence,
persuaded the rest.
How does it feel to turn down an offer to save your father’s life for £15,000?
And then another £30,000? And if you don’t come up with the latest demand
for cash in 24 or 36 hours, the spirits will see to it that something truly
frightening happens to you or your loved one. If you do pay up and the
shamanic intervention fails, it is always the client’s fault: one lovely,
elderly Hampstead resident whose sister died, despite the provision of
padded envelopes containing £226,000, was told it was her responsibility for
allowing the sister a few glasses of wine.
Bender, the osteopath who became Campbell’s unwitting helper, was not immune.
“One day she turned to me and said, ‘Look, Keith, I’ve seen in the distance
that you’re going to have a serious problem with your gut. You’re going to
have colon cancer.’ I was devastated,” he recalls. “I didn’t even question
it. Why didn’t I go to a frigging doctor? It makes no sense to me now. But I
felt so indebted to her.”
So the pressing problem was not to confirm the spirits’ diagnosis with a
doctor’s appointment, but to find the money. She suggested he borrow from
his patients, a breach of boundaries that gave a floundering man the worst
day of his life. Bender introduced a Hampstead actress, who not only paid
for him but received a supernatural warning of pancreatic cancer, a brain
tumour and heart disease. She gave £730,000 and lost her home.
or Ruthie and Geoff, it started with a car crash. Geoff suffered whiplash and
Ruthie had shoulder pains, so they consulted Keith Bender. “When I was on
the couch,” says Ruthie, “he did my back and said, ‘There’s somebody I think
you need to see.’ I said, Oh? And he said, ‘Well, she sees things.’”
Ruthie is a gentle woman, brought up not to ask questions. She made an
appointment with “Jacqueline McSherry” — Vanessa Campbell — for February 12,
1998, and recalls the healer, her long dark hair in a ponytail, sitting
behind a low table. “What was strange was, she did tell me certain things
about my family; both my parents had died recently, things like that. I
walked out thinking, well that was all right, because it was quite uplifting
to unburden yourself. And she said, ‘Oh, don’t worry, you leave all your
problems here with Pa. We’ll look after everything. Make an appointment to
come back next week.’”
The shaman asked for a “sacrifice” of £6,000 to heal a facial blemish without
leaving a scar, and the spot healed. Another blemish, also £6,000, did not
change, however. Geoff also consulted her. The alluring healer treated him
like an older brother. Over the next six years, step by step, this husband
and wife yielded up their lives. Campbell stopped Geoff taking up a new job,
keeping him free to do errands for her, and the demands for cash grew more
intense, so that it was a relief to be asked for £18,000 this time and not
£45,000.
They sold one of their two homes and remortgaged the other to save themselves
from blindness (Ruthie) and death (Geoff). Another £7,000 was demanded after
Ruthie’s brother died, to prevent his spirit coming to break her neck in the
night. Meanwhile, each partner was sworn to secrecy. “We were forbidden to
speak to anybody,” Ruthie says. “If you talk about this, Pa will be very
angry and something terrible will happen. And if Pa discards you, you have
no hope.” Those who defied Pa were killed, Campbell said.
Unknown to Ruthie, Geoff was having doubts, and for him the threats of
violence became serious. “I was scared for my life, because she would say
quite categorically that people would come and get me.” And he couldn’t talk
about it, even to his wife. It wasn’t only thugs he feared: the shaman told
him that Ruthie — who was paying secret sacrifices to keep him alive — was
planning his death. Each grew more isolated. Ruthie was instructed not to go
to her brother’s funeral. Geoff was forbidden to attend his sister’s
wedding, even though he was giving away the bride.
By the end they had handed over £359,000, including money borrowed from
friends under false pretences when no bank would lend to them. Everything
they owned had gone. Ruthie said: “Jacqueline, there’s no point in finding
anything wrong with me, because I have no money left.” They walked out to
freedom the day Campbell tried to draw £20,000 on Geoff’s credit card. The
card issuer contacted Geoff, and they decided to save themselves. “I only
have a roof over my head out of the kindness of somebody’s heart, because I
have nothing in this life,” says Ruthie in their rented flat. Today she
feels safe, but Geoff is still afraid of retribution.
The damage Campbell wreaked in this marriage is part of a pattern. Chantelle
was forbidden to speak to her parents or to go to her brother’s wedding.
When her parents tried to visit, she crawled across the floor so they
wouldn’t see her. “I was behaving in the strangest ways,” she says. “My
parents — my mother who gave birth to me! — it really was insane. I never
thought I would end up in a sect. And there I was in one.”
The isolation served its purpose, ensuring Chantelle lied her way to borrowing
the £170,000. The cash included her parents’ life savings and £50,000 from
the uncle she was trying to save from a heart attack. “Everything I
did was out of character. I hated myself and the situation I’d got
myself into. And I didn’t know how to get out of it.”
The shaman also ostracised Keith Bender from his parents at the time when he
needed them most, by “warning” them that their son intended to kill them.
Then she installed him in a flat where only she knew the address. She told
him never to accept anything from anyone, even if he was parched and wanted
a glass of water. She influenced his patients, by now her clients, to be
wary of him by saying he had killed one of his children by throwing the boy
down the stairs.
It sounds too mad to believe. But insanity is a creeping process, and with
these fabrications the osteopath’s isolation was complete. “It’s
unforgivable,” says Bender, who was under Campbell’s influence for a decade.
“Unforgivable. When I finally met up with my folks it broke my heart. Broke
their hearts. They were both frightened. She said I was going to kill them
in their beds. And they believed it, to the point where they locked their
bedroom door at night.
“When we first got going again they said, how could you let this happen? And I
said, okay, how could you believe this woman, that you locked yourselves in
the room? And they went: you’re right. These are sane, wise human beings who
have been married next year for 60 years.”
Worst of all is Rachel, who consulted Campbell because she and her partner
wanted to conceive a child. To her joy, the pregnancy happened. Then Oma
(“Granny”), Campbell’s accomplice in Surinam, contacted Rachel to say the
foetus was deformed and should be aborted. With no evidence this was true,
Rachel murdered the unborn infant she desperately desired, and later decided
to kill herself. Only a chance phone call saved her. “She was quite happy to
destroy whatever happiness people had,” Rachel says.
Campbell moves address as often as she changes name, and it is rarely her name
— any of them — on the tenancy agreement. Geoff took responsibility for at
least three tenancies. Incredibly, in a part of London where a flat can cost
£2.5m, the shaman insisted that Keith Bender rent a stack of four flats so
that she could occupy an entire house in Willoughby Road, Hampstead, near
the rock stars’ mansions bordering the heath. The rent was £8,000 per month.
She lived there alone with multiple locks on the front door, the blinds down
and a capuchin monkey as a guard dog. But then, at the end of 2006, the
shaman made her first mistake. She took a trip to Surinam, and for a while
she was out of contact. The monkey was left in the company of a 54in
television, with daily feeding visits by Bender, and Campbell did not come
back to Britain until this year. “He was so starved of contact,” says Bender
of Joey the monkey. “He used to come onto my knee and curl up like a little
cat.” It was the only companionship for either of them.
This shaman is a compulsive shopper. Inside the house were hundreds of items,
brought home from Bond Street and never unwrapped. Louis Vuitton handbags;
jewellery from Cartier; La Prairie creams costing £100 a pot. Only the
Cartier boxes were opened.
Documents in the house reveal a long relationship with Armand Tjin A Ton, a
senior police officer in Surinam. He is named on papers going back years,
including receipts for £24,100 of furniture shipped from London to South
America in 2000. They had an affair until last year, when he is said to have
left his wife for her. Nobody knows if he is an accomplice or not.
By the end of February 2007, Bender was £24,000 behind with the rent. Unable
to reach Campbell, he contacted one of her oldest friends — and learnt for
the first time that he was at the centre of a vast web of lies. The blood
drained from his face. Then, slowly and tentatively, he started to talk to
Chantelle. She was wary of him at first. She had been told he was a
child-killer.
But they decided to tell the landlord the truth, and dared to go into the
other floors of the Hampstead house. There they found evidence not of
shamanism but black magic: voodoo dolls everywhere, an effigy floating in a
bottle, cut-up pictures of clients and their friends, colleagues and loved
ones in a bowl filled with salt and earth. There were also hints of the life
Campbell would have liked: a ball gown and dozens of empty envelopes
addressed to casting directors.
This investigation has identified more than £3m in scammed or extorted money,
but the total could reach £7m or higher. “I got the feeling that she had
groups of people around the country,” says Geoff. He glimpsed diary entries
for “Group A” and “Group C”; the scam might be national. Which makes this a
matter for the police — except that the police are not interested. An
officer in the financial investigations unit at Scotland Yard told Chantelle
they didn’t look at frauds involving less than £5m. She and Keith Bender
tried to report the £3m fraud to their local police station in Hampstead,
but were told it was a civil matter.
They thought it would be so straightforward — after all, there was a trail of
money, a spell in Holloway prison and an old appearance on Crimewatch.
Finally they assembled a group to go to Holborn police station, where they
secured a crime reference number. But still the police did nothing. So they
contacted The Sunday Times.
"It’s not a f***ing film, man.” Jon Lowenstein, the photographer working on
this assignment in Surinam, was nervous. A story such as this is not
supposed to be dangerous. It’s a confrontation with a female con artist, not
a war. But this was getting more threatening by the hour. Campbell lives
with Tjin A Ton in a nice area of Paramaribo, the capital. By local
standards, these are big houses — Surinam’s equivalent of The Bishops Avenue
in Hampstead.
We rented an apartment down the street and watched the house. It was five days
before Campbell, who is known in Surinam as Juliette D’Souza, turned up. We
knew she would be well protected, and not because of the metal railings that
go from floor to ceiling under the green-and-white striped canopy of their
house. It’s the relationship. You don’t put serious allegations to the lover
of a senior police officer in this part of the world without thought.
And Tjin A Ton is not just a police officer: he is Surinam’s head of
immigration, with absolute power to decide who enters and who leaves.
The police in Surinam have a better reputation than those elsewhere in the
region, and Chandrikapersad Santokhi, the minister of justice and police —
who recently won a libel action over an attempt to link him to drug
traffickers and a gangster — is said to be serious about removing corrupt
officers.
There is no evidence that Tjin A Ton is aware of his lover’s scam. Yet he
behaves like a person who is nervous about something. Lowenstein takes
photographs of me outside the house. Then Tjin A Ton appears at the wheel of
an anonymous white car, and we decide to head back to the hotel. I look in
the mirror: the head of immigration is tailing us. We have broken no law. He
does not know who we are. Yet the head of immigration is tailing two
foreigners, in person, across the capital. That evening, the hotel fills up
with plain-clothes police. I spend the night flushing away documents. Sure
enough, the next day I am questioned and searched.
There are other signs of anxiety. Soon, all telephone calls to the house are
being routed to Tjin A Ton’s office (where he doesn’t answer them, or
terminates the call as soon as he hears my voice). And Campbell, I learn,
has contacted someone in England, whom she has asked in the past to provide
her with false identity documents. Is she getting ready to flee? Surinam is
not the most comfortable country for her: last year she was given a
suspended sentence for extortion.
There is good news for Joey the monkey. He is enjoying life at a sanctuary in
Cornwall. When he first ventured outside, the sanctuary workers wept to see
him taste things he should have taken for granted, such as feeling the sun
on his face while being groomed by a close monkey companion.
“They know everything about the monkey; they’re doing everything for the
monkey,” says Rachel, who aborted her child. “Lovely monkey — we adored him.
But a monkey’s a monkey, right?” For the humans in this story, justice is
taking a little longer.
