A Deal with the Devil: The Dark and Twisted True Story of One of the Biggest Cons in History
By Blake Ellis and Melanie Hicken

The crime:

Maria Duval was the name and face behind one of the biggest mail frauds in history. People (usually the elderly and vulnerable) sent money to her hoping that her psychic powers would bring them good fortune. But when a pair of CNN reporters tried to track down Ms. Duval they found that she was just a front for a much deeper scam being operated by a variety of mysterious and shady characters.

The book:

I don’t say this very often, but this is one of those books I couldn’t put down. It sucked me in and I kept reading it all in a rush.

I think it helped that it was a mystery, and no less satisfying for being a mystery without a full solution. Ellis and Hicken are intrepid reporters, and seem to have been having a lot of fun along the way while trying to track Duval (or “Duval”) down, but as with any great conspiracy story we only get past one wall (or e-mail address, or shell company) to find another standing behind it.

This is what I found so fascinating about A Deal with the Devil. I think everyone agrees that we live in a time that’s rich with magical thinking and dense with conspiracy theories. What doesn’t get enough attention are the background cultural factors that contribute to this.

In some ways it all goes back to the way the world itself has become more complicated through science and technology, making us feel increasingly alienated from and powerless in the grip of tools that we use and depend on every day but don’t understand a thing about. But there is a political and economic side to this as well, as we feel both left behind and in the dark by governments and big corporations that operate so much in the shadows that there’s often no way even investigative reporters working for major news outlets can figure out what it is they do.

This leaves A Deal with the Devil reading a bit like a Pynchon novel for the Google Street View age. All the indeterminacy and mystery in our everyday lives naturally leads to unexpected lapses into credulity and conspiracy mindsets. Near the end of their investigations the authors are even entertaining one tip from Romania suggesting that a cult of Satanists might be behind the whole thing. Shades of QAnon! But the truth, though less sensational, is even more unnerving: a cabal of international money people and crime bosses running a global scam taking in hundreds of millions of dollars. If this is so, might there not also be some truth to ESP and the power of magic crystals? Given the existence of such real conspiracies, wouldn’t it be a kind of survival technique to just believe everything?

The one part of the book I felt resistance to came at the end where the authors finally get to meet Maria Duval and find the perfect image for the wall of unknowingness they’ve come up against in the blank eyes of an old woman afflicted with dementia. There is a suggestion made of this being a final irony, in that Duval herself might be seen as a victim of the fraudsters who bought her name and monetized it by attaching it to their scam. That may be, but I had zero sympathy for Duval. She cashed out and was in no way a victim in all of this.

Noted in passing:

Is it the case that native speakers can’t hear themselves speaking with any kind of accent? That they just see their own accent as “normal”? I think this might happen, which is why I was surprised when the authors (both born and bred in the United States) described the Canadian characters they meet as having “a charming Canadian accent” or “a distinctly Canadian accent.”

According to Wikipedia, most North Americans “cannot distinguish the typical accents of the two countries [that would be Canada and the U.S., though Mexico is also in North America] by sound alone.” Of course there are regional differences. People from Texas, Boston, or Newfoundland have easily recognizable accents. But I don’t think there’s any difference between the speech of someone from Toronto and a native of Cincinnati. The old joke from South Park where Canadians are heard pronouncing “out and about” as “oot and aboot” always baffled me. We don’t sound like Scots.

When I went and watched some videos about Canadian accents I was just as confused. The way words were being pronounced in a “Canadian accent” didn’t sound like anything I’d ever heard. I don’t think I’ve ever heard “sorry” pronounced as “sore-ee.” There are some Canadianisms, like the particle “eh?” that I guess are a tag, but to be honest I don’t even hear “eh?” very much anymore. Certainly not as much as it was used thirty or so years ago, when you did hear it all the time. Place names are a specialty in any language, so I don’t know how many people from elsewhere pronounce Toronto as Trahn-toe (which is how we do it). Probably as many as pronounce New Orleans as New Orleens or New Orlee-ans, when I think it’s supposed to be New Orlins or New Awlins (but not Nawlins, which I’ve heard is a myth).

In any event, Ellis and Hicken don’t give any examples of what makes the Canadians they talk to sound so charmingly or distinctly Canadian, so I don’t know what it was they were responding to.

Takeaways:

It’s lucky the Duval mail fraud was shut down, though I doubt it has been shut down so much as it’s just been diverted into other channels. These operations know how to stay two or three steps ahead of the law. It’s exasperating reading about scams like this because they’re like junk mail, telemarketers, and spam: at any point the government could step in and put an end to all this but they won’t because there’s too much money involved.

What’s worse, in accepting, as I think we do, that so much of normal capitalist activity is a fraud or a scam, or something very like it, we tend to valorize the scammers as heroes and see their victims as clueless suckers who are, in the words of one of the people involved in the fraud here, “too dumb to live.” Taking the life savings of these people is a sort of cull. And this is old school mail fraud we’re still talking about. The Internet takes this heartlessness to a new level.

True Crime Files

Lust Killer
By Ann Rule

The crime:

In the late 1960s, Jerry Brudos killed four young women in Oregon. A closet transvestite with a particular obsession for high heels, his method involved strangling the women and then having sex with their dead bodies. He was apprehended and pled guilty to three counts of first-degree murder. In 2006 he died in prison.

The book:

I’ll start at the end. Lust Killer was one of Ann Rule’s earlier efforts, written under the pen name “Andy Stack” and first published in 1983 (The Stranger Beside Me, a work of memoir-true crime that drew on Rule’s acquaintanceship with Ted Bundy, came out in 1980). Later editions included an Afterword published in 1988, where Rule speculates on the possibility of Brudos getting early release. We now know that didn’t happen, and indeed Brudos was told by authorities that he was never getting out.

It’s also in the 1988 Afterword that Rule talks about how Brudos stands as “one of the classic examples” of a lust killer, but at the time even the label “serial killer” was something new (Rule herself has credited its first use to Pierce Brooks, the creator of the ViCAP system, in 1985, though others have found earlier instances). Today Brudos is a familiar type, with sexual fetish escalating into violence and necrophilia (in Rule’s account, a “constantly accelerating process – a juggernaut of perversion”). Apparently Ted Levine based his performance as Buffalo Bill in the film The Silence of the Lambs on Brudos, and it’s possible author Thomas Harris had him in mind as well when writing his 1988 novel.

What was different about Brudos? What first jumps out is that he was a married man, with two young children. This was seen as being so odd at the time it led to his wife Darcie being charged as an accessory, mainly on the suspect evidence of a busybody neighbour. She (Darcie) was found not guilty, and at least as Rule tells the story her complicity in the murders seems a stretch.

This isn’t unheard of with serial killers. Dennis Rader, the BTK Killer, was another lust killer who was married with two children (not to mention president of his local church council). Russell Williams, who also had a fetish for taking pictures of himself in women’s clothing, was married. So it does happen, even though I think it’s considered rare. Everyone compartmentalizes their life to some extent, but being a married serial killer, not to mention sexual deviant, is a hard act to maintain.

Noted in passing:

It was 1968, and Brudos had shag carpet (colour: blue) in his garage workshop. He said he needed it to keep his feet warm.

I’ve mentioned the process of escalation in Brudos’s criminal career, and it’s clear he was well on his way to becoming another Ed Gein at the end. When Rule mentions Gein, however, she says of him that “he hated his mother so much that he had killed her and other women and made vests of their dried flesh.”  This is actually a myth, reinforced by Hitchcock’s film Psycho. In fact, Gein seems to have doted on his mother, who died of a stroke and whose body he left intact and undisturbed in its grave.

Takeaways:

Rule emphasizes the key point: if you’re being abducted, even at gunpoint, you might as well take your chances and fight it out, because things aren’t going to get any better for you once you’re tied up in someone’s basement.

True Crime Files

You Could Do Something Amazing with Your Life [You are Raoul Moat]
By Andrew Hankinson

The crime:

A couple of days after being released from prison (on July 1, 2010) Raoul Moat shot his estranged girlfriend and shot and killed her new boyfriend. The next day he shot a police constable in the face, blinding him (the constable would later take his own life). A massive manhunt for Moat ensued, ending with his killing himself.

The book:

You Could Do Something Amazing with Your Life [You are Raoul Moat] announces itself as literary non-fiction by being written in the highly unconventional second person. Despite all the rave reviews, I was on edge, thinking this a bit of a stunt.

It isn’t, and it works.

There’s a boldness to proceeding in this way. The stated “aim was to stay in Raoul Moat’s mind,” which presupposes an ability to inhabit that mind, to directly state what Moat was thinking at any given time. What allows Hankinson to go this route is the documentary evidence available. Moat left a record that speaks to us directly in his own voice:

The main source for this book was Raoul Moat, who left behind spoken and written material including audio recordings he made on the run, a 49-page confession he wrote on the run, recordings of this 999 calls before and after shooting PC David Rathband, recordings of phone calls he made while in prison, audio recordings he made during the final years of his life, training diaries, a psychological questionnaire, his correspondence, and six suicide notes he left in his house.

For all its literary qualities then, it’s also a very simple book, being a sort of Raoul Moat Reader or even oral history, with slight editorial asides inserted in square brackets instead of footnotes. But it makes for a great read and effectively delivers on the promise of taking us into Moat’s head by serving him up in his own words, even down to his employment of obscure local slang (“micey” being a word the exact meaning of which I’m still not sure of). The comparison most often made by reviewers was to the work of Gordon Burn, who did something similar in his immersive account of the Yorkshire Ripper, Somebody’s Husband, Somebody’s Son. That both authors are natives of Newcastle upon Tyne is only a coincidence, but one that probably carries some meaning. On some level our language, even if it’s just a dialect or regional voice, reflects a type of consciousness, and for an author wanting to get inside his subject’s head in particular, I think being steeped in that language and being a native of that place makes a difference. (As an aside, I’d mention Michael Winter’s attempt to do something similar in his “non-fiction novel” The Death of Donna Whalen, though the results there weren’t as successful.)

We shouldn’t be surprised, however, that nothing remarkable is revealed. Moat wasn’t so much a monster as just a dull brute. He was a big guy – 6’3” and around 240 pounds – and took various supplements as a bodybuilder to turn himself into a hulk. This came in handy when he worked for a while as a doorman or bouncer at local clubs, but the thing about big guys like this – or any athlete, or young beauty – is that you have to be able to manage the decline. Your physique is a diminishing asset. Moat was deeply depressed at no longer being as big or strong or tough as he was as a younger man – “I’m well aware that I’m past my prime” – and saw the best years of his life as over. At 37 he was “too old to start again.” “I’m not 21 and I can’t rebuild my life,” he remarked after coming out of jail. “I’ve got no life left,” he told the police operator after shooting PC Rathband. The suicide note or recording was his obsessive genre. He was paranoid too, to the point of delusion, and could be downright whiny when it came to how he was being “bullied” and “stitched up” (framed) by the police, but taking his own life was always where this was heading.

Hats off then to Hankinson’s largely editorial skill in making such a depressing and limited figure so interesting. I guess I could call it “revealing” too, but it’s a case where little is revealed that you probably wouldn’t have figured out after reading a quick news report on the case. Instead it’s exactly what it sets out to be, which is a trip into Raoul Moat’s mind. Not a place you may want to go, but one that it’s worth knowing about.

Noted in passing:

The level of self-pity even among the worst members of society has few limits. This was brought home to me years ago when reviewing Stevie Cameron’s On the Farm: Robert William Pickton and the Tragic Story of Vancouver’s Missing Women. Pickton was the B.C. pig farmer who confessed to killing 49 women. After being arrested he referred to himself as being “crucified” by the police (apparently he also found God behind bars). I can’t recall now if Moat ever referred to himself as being crucified, though I think he does at some point. He uses a more unconventional image in saying “I feel like King Kong when he’s at the top of that flaming building, you know.” Jesus, King Kong: both persecuted martyrs hounded to death by the authorities. It’s a weird way killers have of justifying themselves, while also plugging into the contemporary cultural imperative (that’s not too strong of word) of always casting yourself as a victim.

Takeaways:

Suicide can be a wrecking ball – just think of the prevalence of “murder-suicides” – and once someone’s course is set on self-destruction you should leave them to the professionals to deal with. Especially if guns and a history of violence are in the mix.

True Crime Files