Voodoo dolls, ritualistic baths... and a chilling rotting meat stench: The exotic 'witch doctor' who duped her wealthy neighbours out of £1m by promising cures for everything from cancer to failed marriages | Retrui News | Retrui
Voodoo dolls, ritualistic baths... and a chilling rotting meat stench: The exotic 'witch doctor' who duped her wealthy neighbours out of £1m by promising cures for everything from cancer to failed marriages
SOURCE:Daily Mail
Juliette D'Souza did not look like a master criminal. Or a witch doctor, for that matter. She did not dress for attention or cultivate an air of mystery.
Juliette D'Souza did not look like a master criminal. Or a witch doctor, for that matter. She did not dress for attention or cultivate an air of mystery. She didn't wear cloaks, bang drums or make a spectacle of herself with ritualistic flamboyance.
Quite the opposite, in fact. She appeared neat, composed and unremarkable, the sort of woman who blends easily into cafes, offices, polite company.
The sort of woman who might carry a Louis Vuitton handbag, yes, but who lived quietly and unobtrusively in one of London's richest neighbourhoods, with famous neighbours and impeccable society connections.
Don't be fooled, though – as her victims were. D'Souza remains one of the most audacious con-artists this country has ever seen, and certainly one of the biggest female fraudsters.
In May 2014, a jury at Blackfriars Crown Court took just an hour to find D'Souza, who was then 59, guilty of 23 counts of obtaining property by deception and fraud.
The judge who sentenced her to ten years inside called it 'the worst case of confidence fraud I have ever had to deal with or indeed that I have ever heard of'.
So why, when she was jailed amid such publicity and notoriety, has the case of Juliette D'Souza come back into the public eye?
The fact is that D'Souza became eligible for parole in 2019 and while her exact whereabouts are a mystery, at least one former neighbour has spotted her back in her former stomping ground in Hampstead, north London.
Juliette D'Souza preyed on vulnerable clients and duped them into giving her £1million
D'Souza – also known as Vanessa Campbell – became a client of osteopath Keith Bender
Now, they are asking: is she back and looking for new prey? And will we ever know the full extent of her scams?
Tomorrow, a BBC documentary – presented by Tim Rayment, the journalist who first tracked D'Souza down to her other home in Suriname in South America after she fled the UK in 2007 – will revisit the story.
The film promises to tackle 'unfinished business'. It's not clear what this means, but those who have followed this story hope that questions will be answered about what became of D'Souza.
Those who live in this upmarket celebrity enclave have good cause to be wary, because over the course of 12 years D'Souza posed as a shaman or faith healer, targeting vulnerable – and rich – neighbours. At least 11 people fell foul of D'Souza's elaborate scheme – and were fleeced out of an incredible £1million.
Somehow, she managed to convince them that she could provide a service, driving out their demons and curing them or loved ones of cancer, healing broken marriages and helping them rebuild failing businesses.
How? If they gave her money – a financial 'sacrifice' – she would arrange for it to be hung from a sacred tree in the Amazonian rainforest, and in return... well, the gods would deliver.
In fact, the cash was being used to fund her extravagant lifestyle, which included designer clothes, antique furniture and first-class travel.
On paper, and with the benefit of hindsight, it sounds laughable – but, actually, it was stunningly effective. One retired opera singer handed over £250,000 to D'Souza, convinced she was saving her sister's life.
Ricky Gervais is one of those who stepped in to fund a monkey sanctuary for her final victim
Those who fell under D'Souza's spell were mostly professionals. Her victims included a solicitor, an actor, a photographer and an osteopath.
She was brought to justice only because they banded together to take their stories to the Press. When they first approached the police they were dismissed, told that because they had handed the money over willingly, there was nothing that could be done.
The story of Juliette D'Souza is one of those real-life stories that is stranger than fiction. Not only does it have a faraway magic tree at its heart and a macabre backdrop of ritualistic, satanic artefacts, and rotting meat in freezers, but its cast-list includes the famous and infamous.
Part of D'Souza's modus operandi was to share details of how she had tried to help celebrities. She claimed to have helped cure the actor John Cleese's sister from cancer. She claimed – falsely – that the former Duke of York had been a client, as had Simon Cowell and Robert Redford, and confided that she had once warned the late Princess of Wales not to travel to Paris on that fateful trip.
After she disappeared, a horribly neglected pet monkey was found in a tiny cage in her flat. Some still regard Joey the capuchin as her final victim.
Her neighbours Ricky Gervais and Stephen Fry stepped in to fund the monkey sanctuary where poor Joey – his spine deformed because of how he had been caged – lived out the last of his days.
Little wonder it took a six-part podcast to tell the full, horrifying-yet-gripping story. In 2023, the podcast Filthy Ritual offered what seemed to be the definitive account of Juliette D'Souza's crimes.
There was the suggestion she was involved in an alleged visa scam around the same time as she was fleecing neighbours – a ruse that may have netted her another £1million.
When D'Souza appeared at Blackfriars Crown Court, Filipino protesters gathered outside – the alleged victims of another high-value fraud scheme, involving immigrants paying for help getting UK visas that never arrived.
A detective involved in the case at the time said: 'I believe the victims in the trial were just a fraction. That's £1million from a handful of people, but she's been doing it for decades. I can easily believe it's more than £5million.'
And perhaps the BBC documentary will clear up another thing her former neighbours in leafy Hampstead would like to know. Is she back in their midst?
According to the podcast, at least one neighbour has reported seeing her back in her old stomping ground, which is intriguing, and worrying, to say the least.
So who is Juliette D'Souza? It's always hard to separate the fact from the fiction with an enigma like her, but we know that she was born in Georgetown in Guyana, but had family in Suriname, a neighbouring country.
She was seven when she moved to London to join her parents, who had relocated to the UK.
This story really begins in 1993, when D'Souza – who has also been known as Vanessa Campbell – became a client of an osteopath called Keith Bender who would become a friend and unwitting collaborator. The Filthy Ritual podcast identifies him as 'patient zero' in her complex web.
An affable man, who has been likened in appearance to the actor Richard E Grant, Bender was ultimately the one who blew the whistle on D'Souza – but not before she had almost ruined his life.
Although outwardly successful, Bender was in a difficult place when D'Souza appeared in his life. His marriage was in trouble, and he would soon be diagnosed with depression.
'I was actually in a pretty, I would say, downward spiral state of mind,' he told the podcast hosts. Her arrival 'was like a sort of ray of bright sunlight shining in on my rather sad, grey world'.
D'Souza's back issues brought her to Bender every couple of months, and he reports being struck by her 'intuition'.
Initially, he'd been shocked when D'Souza announced, out of the blue, one day: 'You know your marriage is going to end?' But later, when indeed it had ended, he'd clung to D'Souza's words as evidence of her powers of premonition.
Over the course of a couple of years, D'Souza became more of a friend than a client. He confided in her about financial issues – how his house was going to be repossessed, about how he had been summoned to court over missing mortgage payments. D'Souza whipped out a business card and revealed that she was actually a lawyer. She offered to go to court in his place, to sort this all out. She seemed 'heaven sent', he said.
Alarm bells perhaps might have rung when, later, D'Souza asked Bender to lend her £3,000, but this money was repaid. The mutual trust grew.
Now, Bender had always had an interest in alternative therapies and once had his chakra energy measured. He has since spoken of how he'd 'be prattling on about things like natural medicine' to D'Souza during their sessions.
In one, she revealed that she'd been born with the amniotic sac covering her face (known as 'en caul'). In shamanic circles this is seen as evidence of spiritual powers or a second sight. 'I said, 'What are you trying to tell me? Are you telling me that you have a certain ability, a sort of shamanic quality?' And fundamentally she said yes.'
Bender wanted to know more, so D'Souza told him that she was due to travel to the rainforests of Suriname. Maybe he would like to join her? 'I just thought, 'Yeah, great, gosh'. I'm going to meet a shaman. You know, I'm really living natural medicine here.'
There followed a ten-day trip where Bender seemed mostly preoccupied with not getting bitten by a tarantula. On their return, D'Souza delivered some grave news: she needed to tell Bender that he had cancer.
He didn't know it yet, but she could tell that there was a darkness in his abdomen.
There was a solution, however. If he gave her some money in a sealed envelope, she could arrange for it to be sent to Suriname and pinned on the tree of life in the jungle.
Obviously, he should have run a mile, but truly believing that his 'friend' was trying to save his life, Bender followed her orders. Since he did not have the funds available, though, he asked another client – retired opera singer Sylvia Eaves – if he could borrow some money from her.
They were all – the osteopath, the singer and the charlatan – now on a dangerous path. Those in the public gallery in court would sit open-mouthed at the detail of how D'Souza's web drew in more and more victims. She was, said one neighbour, 'a knife in a velvet glove'.
In effect, Bender recommended D'Souza's healing services to more and more of his osteopath clients. Over the course of the coming years, poor Sylvia Eaves, whose sister was terminally ill, would hand over £250,000 to D'Souza, at one point visiting various cashpoints to take vast sums from each one.
Others – educated, intelligent professionals – would seemingly lose all sense of logic. One solicitor, terminally ill with leukaemia, spent £7,000 on healing services.
A couple whose son had Down's syndrome and had been excluded from school parted company with £42,000. A photographer gave £45,000, hoping to save his mother and delay bankruptcy. An actress, battling pancreatic cancer and a brain tumour, would lose £730,000 and her home (although this woman did not testify at the trial). D'Souza's reign of horror – at least the parts we know of – went on for an astonishing 16 years. At one point she was renting – at a cost of £7,500 a month – four apartments in the same mansion block in Willoughby Road.
Keith Bender's name was on the lease, however, and he was acting as a sort of caretaker, permitted by her only to enter one room, to feed Joey the monkey.
But in 2007, D'Souza didn't return from a planned trip to Guyana as expected, and Bender was beside himself as the landlord kept asking for money.
The rent arrears reached £24,000 but when he eventually made contact with D'Souza, she seemed nonplussed and just asked him to use some 'sacrifice' money to pay the rent – the money she'd taken from people to supposedly hang on the magic tree, in order for the gods to sort out their problems. The scales fell from Bender's eyes: 'If you'd been a fly on the wall, you would have thought I was about to collapse.
'I went dizzy with fright. All those rental payments, they'd all been coming from the sacrifices.'
Bender and the landlord eventually entered the 'forbidden' rooms in those locked apartments – to be greeted by scenes of horror. Inside they found voodoo dolls, alongside unopened Chanel and Marc Jacobs bags, and dark, gloopy evidence of ritualistic baths. There was a barrister's wig in a box. D'Souza had installed freezers, 13 of which were full of meat. One was broken. Bender recalled the stench from within.
'At the time I thought, just for one horrible moment that this might be the smell of somebody. Fortunately, it wasn't human.' The emotional and financial cost of D'Souza's crimes are incalculable.
To this day only a few victims have recouped any money at all, and so many lives were shattered beyond repair; many of those (including the terminally ill solicitor) have since died.
Sylvia Eaves died in 2022. The podcast heard from Sylvia's friend Maria Feeney who witnessed the devastation as a destitute Sylvia reached the final chapter of her life.
'I had to sit with her so that she would eat because she'd already become like a little bird. I used to get calls and she'd be distressed. And I'd get there and she'd say, 'I think she's coming'.' By 'she', Sylvia meant D'Souza.
Sylvia only escaped the horrors associated with that name when dementia took hold. 'That woman took everything from her,' recalled Maria. 'She lived in the shadow of the pain and the degradation put upon her by Juliette D'Souza. Only when her memory wiped that out, did she escape it.'
The Million Pound Shaman Scam airs Sunday, January 4 at 9pm on BBC Two.