Lost At Sea Part 40

I've been worried about bringing this up with him. Bandler may be quite brilliant and charismatic but he also seems overbearing and frightening. And although Paul McKenna himself strikes me as likable, his team of overzealous (literally overzealous) a.s.sistants scattered around the hotel are forever eyeing me with suspicion if I appear anything less than completely thrilled. Plus, earlier Jaime the PR rep cornered me in the corridor and said, "A few people have reported to me that you've been asking about banking and finance. You aren't going to be writing about how NLP can be misused, are you?"

Then she looked me in the eye and added, "Some people are concerned."

And that's just because I was asking about banking! What'll happen if I ask about murder-not the pretend murders Bandler jokes about onstage, but a real one?

Still, they aren't in the room now.

"Tell me about the murder trial," I say.

He doesn't pause at all. He tells me what he told the jury-that James Marino did it. There were two men in the house when Corine was murdered-the famous Richard Bandler and the lowlife James Marino. Yes, he was there. He lifted her head, which is how her blood ended up on his s.h.i.+rt. Why do I think the police went after him?

"With me, the DA gets to make a big reputation," he says. "But if it's some thug drug dealer, you're not going to make any mileage."

The trial lasted three months. The jury acquitted Bandler after five hours of deliberation. On the stand, Bandler blamed Marino and Marino blamed Bandler. There was no way for the jury to know which of the two was telling the truth. Furthermore, James Marino was at times an unbelievable witness, frequently changing his story. Sometimes he was upstairs when Bandler shot her, sometimes he was downstairs. Plus, as the Mother Jones profile pointed out, who had the greater motive: the man who had been beaten up, or the man who was righteously indignant on behalf of a friend who had been beaten up?

"It took the jury longer to pick a foreman than to decide if I was guilty or innocent," Bandler says. "The guy was a convicted felon! We caught him lying, falsifying evidence... ."

It is at this exact moment that Paul McKenna and the entire upper echelons of his company troop cheerfully into the room.

"The other guy was their stool pigeon they used to bust dope dealers!" Bandler is now hollering at me. "I mean, excuse me! A lot of very dirty things went on through that trial."

Earlier today Paul McKenna got a compulsive blusher onstage and cured her of her blush. I am like the blush lady now, sitting on the chesterfield sofa, Bandler towering over me, yelling about the murder rap, while Paul McKenna and his managing director look anxiously on.

I change the subject. I say, half joking, that being an NLP genius must be awful: "To know in an instant what everyone's thinking by their winks and tics and barely perceptible sideways glances and eye movements," I say, "you must sometimes feel like one of those superheroes, ground down by their own superpowers."

"Yeah," Bandler replies, suddenly looking really quite upset. "It's called the supermarket."

He pauses.

"You walk into a supermarket and you hear someone say to their kid, 'You're never going to be as smart as other kids.' And I see the kid's eyes, pupils dilating, and I see the trance going on in that moment... . It became a burden to know as much as I did. I went through a lot of things to distract myself. I used to just sit and draw all the time. Just draw. Focus on drawing to keep my mind from thinking about this kind of stuff." And then he goes quiet, as if he is falling into himself.

I SUPPOSE PEOPLE shouldn't judge gurus until they need one. Luckily, I do, a bit. And so on Wednesday I use my ninety minutes with Paul McKenna to get him to cure me of my somewhat obsessive, debilitating conviction that something bad has happened to my wife and son when I can't get ahold of them on the phone. I've always suffered from this. If I am in America and I can't reach them on the phone, I become convinced that Elaine has fallen down the stairs and is lying at the bottom with a broken neck, and Joel is reaching up to grab the electrical cord of a newly boiled kettle. I have panicked unnecessarily about this all over the world.

Paul McKenna does Richard Bandler's Swish technique on me. He gets me to picture one of my horrific imaginary scenes. I choose my son stepping out in front of a car.

He spots, from my eye and hand movements, that the mental image is situated in the top right hand of my vision, big, close to my eyes.

"Part of the neural coding where we get our feelings from, and ultimately our behavior, comes from the position of these pictures," he explains. "Pictures that are close and big and bright and bold have a greater emotional intensity than those that are dull and dim and farther away."

"And Richard Bandler was the first person to identify this?" I ask.

"Yes," he says.

He chats away to me, in his hypnotic baritone voice, about this and that: his own worries in life, etc. Suddenly, when I'm not expecting it, he grabs the s.p.a.ce in the air where my vision was and mimes chucking it away.

"Let's shoot it off into the distance," he says. "Shrink the picture down, drain the color out of it, make it black-and-white. Make it transparent... ."

And, sure enough, as the image shoots away, far into the distance, the neurotic feelings a.s.sociated with it fade too. This is Paul McKenna "repatterning" my brain. He says this isn't self-help. I don't have to do anything. This is reprogramming, he says, and I am fixed.

"Oh yeah," he says. "You don't have to do anything now. It's worked."

A year pa.s.ses. I don't have a single paranoid fantasy about something bad happening to my wife and son. I really am cured.

And so I have to say, for all the weirdness, I become very grateful that Richard Bandler invented NLP and taught it to Paul McKenna.

Death at the Chateau

The Chateau de Fretay is a hundred-acre estate in the Brittany countryside, with chapels and cottages and a lake and forests. From a distance, the place looks like a dream. Some teenagers from the village tell me that until a few weeks ago they'd go up to hang out with the children of the English couple who lived there. The mother, Joanne, always had an open fire and English breakfasts on the go. The place was so big and overgrown that one time they found a chapel on the grounds that n.o.body, not even the English kids, knew existed.

I park my car. There are hundreds of seedlings in little plastic cups in rows on tables, ready to plant but all dead now; abandoned plastic garden furniture is strewn everywhere, as if a tornado had come through; a statue of the Madonna and Child stands in some builder's rubble; and a swimming pool is filled with rotten green water-two unopened bottles of Heineken sit there poolside.

I peer in through the window of the main house. It isn't, actually, a chateau. There's nothing castle-like about it. It's a big farmhouse. It is dark. The doors and windows are police-taped up, as they have been for the past seven weeks, since September 4, so the place is a time capsule of that weekend. There's a pack of playing cards on the living room table, a beer on the arm of a comfy-looking leather chair, next to a folder filled with complicated-looking business plans. In the kitchen, the dishwasher is still turned on. You get the eerie sensation that Mr. and Mrs. Hall have just gone into another room and will probably return any second and have a fright to see a journalist peering in through their window.

The village mayor, Pierre Sourdain, a farmer, says he liked Robert and Joanne Hall very much. All the villagers say the same: They were impressive, charming, self-possessed. (Saying that, the people in the village speak no English, and Robert Hall-despite living here for ten years-never learned French.) For years the Halls had been trying to get an ambitious golf project off the ground. They wanted to turn the chateau into an eighteen-hole golf resort with holiday cottages. That's presumably what the file resting on the chair was all about, Mayor Sourdain says.

"It would have happened too," he says. "They would have made it happen. That's the kind of man Robert Hall was. It would have been so good for the region." There's a short silence. Then he says, less confidently, "I'm sure it would have happened."

On the evening of September 4, Sourdain got a call from the gendarmes: Something had happened at the chateau. It is a French custom for the gendarmes to call the mayor, as the representative of the people, to the scene of a crime or a terrible accident. He arrived to see the oldest son, Christopher, twenty-two, with the gendarmes as they stood in protective suits, breaking up a big block of concrete. Robert Hall was inside the house, crying.

"After twenty-four hours, concrete is like biscuit," Sourdain explains. We're sitting in his office in the village of Le Chatellier, two miles from the chateau. "So the gendarmes were crumbling it with their hands. And after a while they discovered a ring. They asked Christopher, 'Is this your mother's ring?' He said, 'Oui.'"

Robert Hall had told the gendarmes that twenty-four hours earlier he'd had a drunken argument with Joanne during which she accidentally fell, hit her head, and died. Then, during the hours that followed, he set her body on fire, put her remains into a builder's bag, poured in concrete, and hauled it onto the back of a lorry. All this happened behind the house, near the back gate, next to a row of half-built holiday cottages.

Then he stopped. He telephoned Christopher. He said he was going to commit suicide. Christopher called the ambulance, who called the gendarmes, who called the mayor.

Catherine Denis, from the prosecutor's office in Rennes, told a press conference later that week that when the gendarmes asked Robert why he burned Joanne's body and encased her remains in concrete, he explained that she'd always said she wanted to be cremated and laid to rest in a mausoleum and he was simply respecting her wishes, albeit in a somewhat informal way.

"What did the Halls do for money?" I ask Mayor Sourdain. "How were they living? How were they funding the golfing project?"

"He told me he was a big success in England," he replies. "He had lots of businesses there. And sometimes British tourists would rent the chateau for their holidays."

"Do you know if the tourists enjoyed staying there?" I ask.

"I wouldn't know anything about that," he replies. "It would have been between English people. You see?"

FABRICE FOUREL works in a bright office in the nearby village of Saint-etienne-en-Cogles. Posters advertising successful Brittany tourist endeavors line the walls. I am sitting, he says, exactly where Robert and Joanne Hall sat when they came to him in a flap regarding their golf project, in September 2008.

"They were lost," he says.

Fabrice's job is to be the middleman between prospective tourist businesses and the labyrinthine French bureaucracy.