How were so many top people duped by Britain’s most preposterous con woman? Handed millions after she promised an Amazonian witch doctor could offer cures

• Fraudster Juliette D'Souza stole at least £1million from her victims
• She told them the cash would be hung from a tree in the rainforest
• The 'tributes' would supposedly help to cure a range of ailments
  

By Barbara Davies for the Daily Mail

Published: 17:37 EST, 13 June 2014 | Updated: 18:32 EST, 13 June 2014

Con: Juliette D'Souza, who was jailed for ten years last week, is thought by police to be the most successful female fraudster in British legal history

Every day, the narrow staircase leading up to Sylvia Eaves’s small attic flat echoes to the sound of the singing lessons she gives her pupils.

By rights, the 83-year-old opera singer, a star of both Glyndebourne and the Hollywood Bowl, should have retired years ago.

But dreams of spending her twilight years in financial comfort were shattered the day she met confidence trickster Juliette D’Souza, who slowly and surely whittled away Sylvia’s life savings.

Silver-tongued D’Souza, who was jailed for ten years at Blackfriars Crown  Court last week, is thought by police to be the most successful female fraudster in British legal history.

On paper, the 59-year-old is known to have stolen at least £1 million from her victims — £380,000 from Sylvia alone — after posing as an intermediary to a ‘shaman’ (a mystic with supposed contact with the spirit world) in the Amazon rainforest.

Incredibly, she managed to persuade them to hand over huge sums in ‘cash sacrifices’, telling them the money would be flown to South America and hung from a sacred tree, according to ancient healing rites. Apart from Sylvia, who gave everything she had to D’Souza, the 11 victims who came forward included a solicitor with leukaemia, the mother of child with Down’s syndrome and, perhaps most shockingly of all, a wealthy businesswoman who gave D’Souza £170,000 while trying to become pregnant, then agreed to abort her unborn child when D’Souza told her it was ‘deformed’.

And, as a Mail investigation now reveals, D’Souza even ensnared a phlebotomist working in the blood analysis lab of London’s Royal Free Hospital, who referred a patient awaiting a liver transplant to her for ‘alternative therapy’.

So how did D’Souza, whose web of deceit stretches from leafy Hampstead to the South American Republic of Suriname, manage to pull the wool over the eyes of so many bright, middle-class professionals — not just once, but time and time again?

Incredibly, detectives acknowledge the victims who gave evidence are just the tip of the iceberg. Dozens of others, humiliated by having fallen for D’Souza’s sophisticated charade, could not bear to face her in court.

One is said to be an actress who gave £730,000 and lost her home after being told she would get pancreatic cancer, a brain tumour and heart disease if she failed to pay.

Their embarrassment is entirely understandable. Anyone reading about D’Souza’s crimes will struggle to grasp how the victims could have fallen for her fantastical yarn. Yet those caught up in her world describe her as ‘plausible’, and speak of her gift for making them feel safe.

Significantly, all of D’Souza’s victims had personal problems at the time she entered their lives. She reduced them to such a state of emotional dependence that they felt only she could help them.

‘I was stupid, wasn’t I?’ says singer Sylvia when she recalls how she first gave D’Souza £3,000 in return for herbs to help cure a stomach ailment. But the con woman’s victims are too numerous and intelligent to be dismissed as merely ‘stupid’.

Sylvia, a gentle, softly spoken widow of a BBC executive, met the fraudster in 1998 after her osteopath, Keith Bender, suggested D’Souza might be able to treat her stomach problems.

D’Souza’s modus operandi was to form a strong relationship with one key figure —  then exploit that person to find further victims.

By Keith’s own admission, he was the unwitting cornerstone of D’Souza’s operations in North London. A self-confessed ‘old hippy’ with a lifelong interest in natural therapies, he was intrigued when D’Souza — a smartly dressed woman claiming to be an Oxford-educated barrister — came to him with a bad neck in the early Nineties.

Keith, who was close to bankruptcy and going through a painful divorce, recalls how vulnerable he was then.

‘I had terrible problems in my personal life. I was very depressed,’ he says. ‘Juliette, as a lawyer, stepped in to save me. She even represented me in my divorce proceedings. I was hugely grateful for that.

‘I had no reason to doubt her or not to introduce her to friends. She was completely plausible — very charming, spirited and well turned-out.’

But, in addition to her ‘legal’ assistance, D’Souza started telling Keith, now 57, of her interest in shamanism and plans to give up her career to focus on faith healing.

She claimed to have been born on an aeroplane, still wrapped in the caul — or membrane — from her mother’s womb, a lucky omen she said gave her special gifts as a ‘seer’.

'I was stupid, wasn't I?' Widow Sylvia Eaves, a former Glyndebourne opera singer, handed S'Souza £380,000. But the cynical con woman¿s victims are too numerous and intelligent to be dismissed as merely 'stupid'

As well as lending Keith money when he was close to bankruptcy, she took him on an all-expenses-paid trip to Suriname in February 1996, where he witnessed shamans at work and underwent a ‘cleansing’ ritual in an iron-rich red jungle lake.

‘I thought it was all to the good,’ he says. ‘I truly believe in the power of the mind. I don’t know how shamanism works, but it was here long before conventional medicine. We don’t have all the answers. I would promote anything that offers a lifeline to someone in dire distress.’

But over the next few years, D’Souza cut Keith off from friends and family — controlling every aspect of his life and even telling him what to eat.

As well as giving her what was left of his money, he recommended her to several of his patients — including Sylvia. This has left him feeling ‘wrung out and spun dry’ and struggling to go on with his life.

‘Do I feel bad about it now? Of course I do,’ he says. ‘But there was no bad intent at the time. I didn’t know any better. I work in the caring profession and I want to do whatever I can to help people.’

His faith in D’Souza undoubtedly persuaded his patients to trust her, too. ‘I thought she might be able to help me with my tummy troubles,’ says Sylvia.

At first D’Souza just gave her herbs with which to make tea. Soon they became friends, watching episodes of Strictly Come Dancing together.

When D’Souza discovered that Sylvia’s younger sister Margaret was seriously ill with Crohn’s disease, she said her life could only be saved with the help of shamanism — and that such miracles required huge sums.

Sylvia gave £226,000 — money left to her by her late husband — to be sent to Suriname. Tragically, Margaret did die, but Sylvia continued to give cash to D’Souza — even paying to rent her a flat near her own home so she could have her close by.

While Sylvia struggles to remember dates and exact amounts, the diaries she kept at the time show an astonishing number of transactions. She was told to present the money  to D’Souza as bundles of cash in a sealed envelope. On four consecutive days in 2008, she withdrew £3,000 from her bank to give to D’Souza — £12,000 in just half a week.

In August 2009, while D’Souza was away in Suriname supposedly hanging her tributes on the tree, Sylvia wired £3,000 to pay for a helicopter supposedly needed to take D’Souza to hospital from the jungle.

Then, in a final twist of the knife, D’Souza claimed in 2010 that Sylvia’s money was being returned by ‘Pa’ — the name she gave to the Suriname shaman — but was being held by customs officials at Heathrow.

Sylvia was persuaded to pay out £57,000 in ‘tax’ — a sum she had to borrow from a friend — before her money would be released, after receiving bogus phone calls from D’Souza posing as a customs officer.

Sylvia, who is now struggling to get by on a state pension and the little money she earns from teaching, says: ‘I can’t really believe now that I did it. I was gullible, but I’m not a materialistic person. I believe in spiritual things and I would have done anything to make my sister better. I must have been out of my mind.’

Victims: Hampstead osteopath Keith Bender, left, referred clients to D'Souza in the belief she could help. Sylvia, right, was conned time and time again by D'Souza who said her cash was being sent to Surinamese shamans

Another of D’Souza’s victims, a photographer who has asked not to be named, also met her after receiving treatment from Keith Bender for a bad back in 1997.

He admits he was ‘intrigued’ by shamanism and impressed by D’Souza’s seemingly uncanny ability to know what he was thinking.

Over the next nine years, he handed over £40,000 in ‘cash sacrifices’ in a bid to save his sick mother, who died last year, and to stop his girlfriend from being killed in a car crash.

‘Looking back, D’Souza conducted her fraud like a military campaign,’ he says. ‘She set up Keith from day one, and it all stemmed from there.

‘I was going through a tough time. I knew Keith had been out to Suriname and seen the shaman for himself. I thought, “What have I got to lose?”’

D’Souza charged him just £35 for an initial consultation, and took time to get to know her new ‘patient’. But when the photographer’s mother became seriously ill, she demanded larger cash sacrifices. ‘She told me, “I’ll save your mum’s life.” When you love someone, you’ll do anything, however unlikely it seems.’

Perhaps not surprisingly, given the complexity of D’Souza’s crimes, it has taken years to bring her to justice.

In 2006, she ‘disappeared’ from the UK for two years, when in fact she was imprisoned in Suriname after being convicted of pretending to be a lawyer. Keith Bender, who’d been asked to feed Joey, her pet Capuchin monkey she kept at home, was told not to go further than the one room in which Joey lived, or Keith’s neck would be broken by evil spirits.

When D’Souza failed to return from Suriname, his suspicions grew. Eventually, he looked around the rest of the house.

He found Louis Vuitton handbags, Cartier jewellery and hundreds of other luxury items from Bond Street, as well as evidence of black magic, including voodoo dolls, several freezers of rotting meat, and bowls of salt and earth containing torn-up photos of her victims.

There were also diaries suggesting that her Hampstead victims were just one of several groups she was scamming.

Pet: Mr Bender had been visiting one room to feed D'Souza's pet monkey, Joey, but did not dare enter the rest of her property for fear it was cursed. She had told him evil spirits would break his neck if he did

But when Keith and others went to the police, they were told it was a civil matter. It wasn’t until 2010, when a concerned friend of Sylvia’s went to the police, that a fraud investigation was finally opened. While many of D’Souza’s lies have been uncovered, the truth about this woman, described by detectives ‘as dangerous as a violent criminal’, is still only partially known.

I have discovered her real name is Maryan Lesley Persaud and she was born on September 11, 1954 — not on an aeroplane wrapped in a caul but in a hospital in Georgetown, the capital of what was then British Guyana in South America.

She was then left in a convent in the former British colony while her parents, factory worker Ivan and his wife Betty, ventured to the UK in search of work. Aged seven, their daughter joined them.

In 1970, when D’Souza was 15, she left school in West London. Three years later she married  28-year-old electrical engineer George Nicholls. The marriage lasted only a couple of years and Mr Nicholls has since died, but a relative told me this week the relationship was not a happy one and that D’Souza — or Marian as she was known to them — had tried to extract money from a family member at the time.

‘I can’t say I’m surprised to hear that she did something like this,’ says the relative. ‘She was very beautiful, fun and confident, and at parties everyone wanted to talk to her, but it quickly became apparent that there was something not quite right about her. She was not what she seemed to be.

‘George’s mother used to say, “She’s not all there.” There was something quite disturbed about her. We almost wondered if she was mentally ill.’

In the years that followed, D’Souza worked variously as a punch-card operator on early computer programmes, a receptionist and a temp, but then her criminal life began.

She was featured on Crimewatch after committing fraud and deception in the Eighties, and spent a short period in Holloway women’s prison. Upon her release, she began to perfect the art of preying on the anxious and lonely to steal their savings.

D'Souza as a younger woman: Her real name is Maryan Lesley Persaud and she was born on September 11, 1954 in a hospital in Georgetown, the capital of what was then British Guyana in South America

It is impossible to know the exact amount she has stolen, but it is believed to be at least £7 million.  Most of it has been spirited 4,400 miles away to South America, where she owns a home in the Suriname capital, Paramaribo, furnished with £25,000 worth of antiques shipped from the UK.

Everything is in place for the self-styled ‘witch doctor’, who has countless aliases, to pick up where she left off the moment she is released from Holloway, which could be as early as five years’ time.

One of D’Souza’s most recent scams — posing as an immigration officer and taking money from Filipinos living in London — was conducted while she was awaiting trial.

According to a Filipino newspaper, phlebotomist Darwin Sanidad, who works at the Royal Free Hospital in Hampstead, not only recommended D’Souza to a British transplant patient in 2012 but also referred fellow Filipino colleagues, many of whom were desperate for work visas, for ‘immigration services’. Bulgarian authorities are also investigating a new ‘passports for sale’ scam with links to D’Souza.

Certainly, it seems unlikely that we have heard the last of Juliette D’Souza, or Marian Persaud, or whatever name she chooses for herself when she gets out of prison.

Last week, even as Sylvia was giving evidence in court, D’Souza’s hold on her was still so strong that Sylvia couldn’t bring herself to look the swindler in the eye.

‘I certainly wasn’t going to tell her I was sorry for landing her in court,’ she says, before pausing.

‘Isn’t it awful?’ she adds, ‘Even now, after everything she has done, she can still make me feel sorry for her. That’s the kind of power she has over you. You feel that you owe her everything.’

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