Jail for 'spiritual healer' who promised to hang cash from magical tree in Amazonian rainforest

A woman described as “pure evil” has been has been jailed for 10 years after swindling £1 million from vulnerable people by claiming to be spiritual healer who could cure cancer or help them to get pregnant by sending money to the Amazon jungle. Juliette D’Souza, 59, extracted huge sums of cash from 11 people across Hampstead and north London – including opera singers, photographers and solicitors – by claiming to be a shamanic healer with links to the rainforest in Suriname.

D’Souza was such a persuasive con-artist that she managed to convince her victims she could cure terminal illnesses, help disabled children or enable them to conceive by sending cash to the South American jungle – to be hung from a sacred tree. Her victims believed she was working with two other shamans in Suriname, known as Pa and Oma, who would hang their cash “sacrifices” on the tree in the heart of the jungle. Instead, D’Souza spent the money on a lavish lifestyle, renting three or four luxury flats at a time in Hampstead and splashing a fortune on Louis Vuitton bags, jewellery, antique furniture and holidays. She boasted of celebrity clients including Princess Diana and Simon Cowell.

Her victims described her as confident, well-spoken and attractive, and said she was incredibly manipulative and persuasive, convincing them that terrible things would happen if they did not hand over cash sacrifices. The victims were so under her spell during the 12-year scam that one woman, who cannot be named, had an abortion at her say so, while another, Ruth Fillingham, sold her home because D’Souza said it was “spooked”. The woman who had the abortion had previously given D’Souza more than £170,000 in the belief it would help her to conceive. Ms Fillingham, had paid £169,000 from 1998 to 2004 to ward off the evil spirit of her deceased brother, save her partner from a nonexistent tumour and ensure her eye surgery would be a success – which it was not.
Her boyfriend, Geoff Wheeler, handed over £195,000 in the same period. Much of the money was supposed to secure his job, but he was still made redundant. Retired opera singer Sylvia Eaves, 83, was conned out of a total of £353,000. D’Souza had multiple identities and a litany of addresses across Hampstead, as well as in West Hampstead, Belsize Park, Kensington and St John’s Wood. She would pay up to a year’s rent in advance – in cash – and occupy several flats at once. It emerged during the trial that she was previously convicted of 28 counts of fraud and four of theft, spending time in Holloway prison in the 1980s. Sentencing her to 10 years in prison for each of 23 counts to run concurrently - the maximum sentence allowed by Parliament, Judge Ian Karsten QC said: “It is the worst confidence fraud I have ever had to deal with or indeed that I have heard of”.