""childadvocate""
Have you adopted any of this woman's tactics?
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/crime/article5088734.ece
From The Sunday Times November 9, 2008
The evil career of Vanessa Campbell, the bad Samaritan
This woman made millions by convincing rich, even famous, people that
they would become ill or die if they didn=92t give her money. Why did
they believe her?
Tim Rayment
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 =97 a strange, silver-and-blue =93evil eye=94 =97
coul=
d
apparently see and hear everything they did. Now, after months of
speaking in terrified whispers inside the flat, they=92d had enough.
We=92ve 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 =A34.3m 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 ****pped 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. =93I used to walk out of there elated,=94 says Ruthie of Vanessa
Campbell, =93because I=92d been able to talk about anything.=94 Women
canno=
t
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 ***, men are prone to do anything she asks just to be
somewhere near her. Like Mr Ripley, she=92s talented. You=92d 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=92s
when she means St Hilda=92s, and her business cards use a term from the
wrong side of the Irish Sea, =93barrister-at-law=94. But her emotional
skills are without parallel. She perfected the undermining of people=92s
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 brainwa****ng, 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.
=93So this girl bounced in, her hair back and glossy and ****ny, and with
a lovely complexion then. Dressed very smartly, but casually. I
thought Whoa! This is a nice, bright, sunny human =97 gosh. I was very
happy to talk with her.=94
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=92s 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 =97 when she and her husband divorced =97
and it would be a while before he realised that she changes her name:
to Marianne Moore, Juliette D=92Souza, Vanessa Wallace, Jacqueline
McSherry, Juliette Campbell and Juliette McSherry, among others. By
then, it was too late.
She became his most im****tant source of sup****t. 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 re****ted 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 =A335 for an hour=92s 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=92s 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 air****t
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 =A33m, and maybe as much as =A37m,
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. =93They often fall for a scam
that starts with a request to help the less fortunate,=94 he says. =93You
need the victims to trust their own capabilities and experience.=94
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 =A3150,000 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. =93I feel a chump,=94 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
=A3700,000 in a desperate attempt to save his wife.
=93You end up doing things you would never have done in a normal state
of mind,=94 says Chantelle, a poised woman in her thirties who
surrendered =A3170,000 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=92s emotional insight =97 put with information supplied by Bender
=97 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=92 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=92s life for
=A315,000? And then another =A330,000? And if you don=92t 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=92s fault: one lovely, elderly Hampstead resident whose sister
died, despite the provision of padded envelopes containing =A3226,000,
was told it was her responsibility for allowing the sister a few
gl***** of wine.
Bender, the osteopath who became Campbell=92s unwitting helper, was not
immune. =93One day she turned to me and said, =91Look, Keith, I=92ve seen
i=
n
the distance that you=92re going to have a serious problem with your
gut. You=92re going to have colon cancer.=92 I was devastated,=94 he
recalls. =93I didn=92t even question it. Why didn=92t I go to a frigging
doctor? It makes no sense to me now. But I felt so indebted to her.=94
So the pressing problem was not to confirm the spirits=92 diagnosis with
a doctor=92s 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 =A3730,000
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. =93When I was on the couch,=94 says Ruthie, =93he did my back and
said, =91There=92s somebody I think you need to see.=92 I said, Oh? And he
said, =91Well, she sees things.=92=94
Ruthie is a gentle woman, brought up not to ask questions. She made an
appointment with =93Jacqueline McSherry=94 =97 Vanessa Campbell =97 for
February 12, 1998, and recalls the healer, her long dark hair in a
ponytail, sitting behind a low table. =93What 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, =91Oh, don=92t worry, you leave all your problems here with Pa.
We=92ll look after everything. Make an appointment to come back next
week.=92=94
The shaman asked for a =93sacrifice=94 of =A36,000 to heal a facial
blemish
without leaving a scar, and the spot healed. Another blemish, also
=A36,000, 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 =A318,000 this time and not =A345,000.
They sold one of their two homes and remortgaged the other to save
themselves from blindness (Ruthie) and death (Geoff). Another =A37,000
was demanded after Ruthie=92s brother died, to prevent his spirit coming
to break her neck in the night. Meanwhile, each partner was sworn to
secrecy. =93We were forbidden to speak to anybody,=94 Ruthie says. =93If
yo=
u
talk about this, Pa will be very angry and something terrible will
happen. And if Pa discards you, you have no hope.=94 Those who defied Pa
were killed, Campbell said.
Unknown to Ruthie, Geoff was having doubts, and for him the threats of
violence became serious. =93I was scared for my life, because she would
say quite categorically that people would come and get me.=94 And he
couldn=92t talk about it, even to his wife. It wasn=92t only thugs he
feared: the shaman told him that Ruthie =97 who was paying secret
sacrifices to keep him alive =97 was planning his death. Each grew more
isolated. Ruthie was instructed not to go to her brother=92s funeral.
Geoff was forbidden to attend his sister=92s wedding, even though he was
giving away the bride.
By the end they had handed over =A3359,000, including money borrowed
from friends under false pretences when no bank would lend to them.
Everything they owned had gone. Ruthie said: =93Jacqueline, there=92s no
point in finding anything wrong with me, because I have no money
left.=94 They walked out to freedom the day Campbell tried to draw
=A320,000 on Geoff=92s credit card. The card issuer contacted Geoff, and
they decided to save themselves. =93I only have a roof over my head out
of the kindness of somebody=92s heart, because I have nothing in this
life,=94 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=92s wedding. When her parents tried to visit, she crawled across
the floor so they wouldn=92t see her. =93I was behaving in the strangest
ways,=94 she says. =93My parents =97 my mother who gave birth to me! =97
it
really was insane. I never thought I would end up in a sect. And there
I was in one.=94
The isolation served its purpose, ensuring Chantelle lied her way to
borrowing the =A3170,000. The cash included her parents=92 life savings
and =A350,000 from the uncle she was trying to save from a heart attack.
=93Everything I did was out of character. I hated myself and the
situation I=92d got myself into. And I didn=92t know how to get out of
it.=94
The shaman also ostracised Keith Bender from his parents at the time
when he needed them most, by =93warning=94 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=92s isolation was complete.
=93It=92s
unforgivable,=94 says Bender, who was under Campbell=92s influence for a
decade. =93Unforgivable. 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.
=93When 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=92re right. These are
sane, wise human beings who have been married next year for 60
years.=94
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 (=93Granny=94), Campbell=92s 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. =93She was quite happy to destroy whatever
happiness people had,=94 Rachel says.
Campbell moves address as often as she changes name, and it is rarely
her name =97 any of them =97 on the tenancy agreement. Geoff took
responsibility for at least three tenancies. Incredibly, in a part of
London where a flat can cost =A32.5m, 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=92 mansions
bordering the heath. The rent was =A38,000 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. =93He
was so starved of contact,=94 says Bender of Joey the monkey. =93He used
to come onto my knee and curl up like a little cat.=94 It was the only
companion****p 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
=A3100 a pot. Only the Cartier boxes were opened.
Do***ents in the house reveal a long relation****p with Armand Tjin A
Ton, a senior police officer in Surinam. He is named on papers going
back years, including receipts for =A324,100 of furniture ****pped 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 =A324,000 behind with the rent.
Unable to reach Campbell, he contacted one of her oldest friends =97 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 =A33m in scammed or extorted
money, but the total could reach =A37m or higher. =93I got the feeling
that she had groups of people around the country,=94 says Geoff. He
glimpsed diary entries for =93Group A=94 and =93Group C=94; the scam might
=
be
national. Which makes this a matter for the police =97 except that the
police are not interested. An officer in the financial investigations
unit at Scotland Yard told Chantelle they didn=92t look at frauds
involving less than =A35m. She and Keith Bender tried to re****t the =A33m
fraud to their local police station in Hampstead, but were told it was
a civil matter.
They thought it would be so straightforward =97 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=92s not a f***ing film, man.=94 Jon Lowenstein, the photographer
working on this assignment in Surinam, was nervous. A story such as
this is not supposed to be dangerous. It=92s 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 =97 Surinam=92s
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=92Souza, 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=92s the relation****p.
You don=92t 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=92s 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 =97 who recently won a libel action over an attempt to link him
to drug traffickers and a gangster =97 is said to be serious about
removing corrupt officers.
There is no evidence that Tjin A Ton is aware of his lover=92s 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 flu****ng away do***ents. 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=92s office (where he doesn=92t 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 do***ents. 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.
=93They know everything about the monkey; they=92re doing everything for
the monkey,=94 says Rachel, who aborted her child. =93Lovely monkey =97 we
adored him. But a monkey=92s a monkey, right?=94 For the humans in this
story, justice is taking a little longer.
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