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The Binge. The Bench.

When I first started looking online for information about Maria Duval, I found a story on her now deleted website Maria Duval.com.

It starts in Santropay, the beach town in the French Riviera that really comes alive in the summer. It's a super fancy

place fueled by expensive bottles of champagne and caviar. In the summer, San Tropea fills up with the

rich and famous. In the winter it becomes a ghost town.

So during the off-season the local police don't have very much to do. It's mostly

noise complaints between locals, that kind of thing.

But not today.

Today is different.

It's a crisp winter's day in 1977 and the police station is humming with frantic conversation.

A woman who lives nearby has gone missing. She's the wife of a local dentist. She drove off a few days ago and no one

has any idea where she went. The police are running out of options. Helicopters race up and down the coastline and return empty-handed.

Leeds about where the dentist's wife could have gone have dried up. The police are trying to figure out how to tell him

there's not much more they can do. That's when a mysterious woman walks in

...