One Breath Away: The Hiccup Girl - From Media Darling to Convicted Killer

by M. William Phelps

  Lane warned: not everyone will benefit from hypnotherapy.

  Right away, she realized, “Jennifer was a malleable young lady.” In Lane’s opinion, she felt, just by speaking to Jennifer briefly that Jennifer was being manipulated, maybe even used in some way. Or perhaps Jennifer was herself using the hiccups as a means to an end of some kind?

  Debbie Lane was the 2007 “Hypnotist of the Year” internationally (with hypnotists from as many as twenty other countries in the running); she is a certified member of the National Guild of Hypnotists, along with several other certifications. Hypnosis isn’t some Houdini-like, spiritual, Long Island Medium-type of psychic, junk science. To the contrary, Lane said: “Hypnosis is a method of achieving a relaxed state of heightened focus and concentration—intensified attention and receptiveness to an idea or set of ideas. Hypnosis produces the ability to experience thoughts and images as real, bypassing the ‘critical factor’ to establish selective thinking. When the conscious mind is bypassed, the subconscious mind is open to suggestion. This hypnotic trance state makes it possible to increase motivation or change behavior patterns.”

  Hypnotherapy also allows the hypnotist to understand why the condition, problem, or personal issue in the client’s life is occurring in the first place, which can, in turn, lead to that change that the person is seeking to take place.

  The type of treatment Lane began with Jennifer, “hypnotherapy,” is what she referred to as a “complementary treatment of a health problem, using hypnosis following a diagnosis. Hypnotherapy is performed by a hypnotherapist. By law, hypnotherapy must be performed by a trained professional who is a medical practitioner, or under the supervision or direction of a licensed practitioner. Some issues require a script from a medical doctor for a referral.”

  Lane sat Rachel down in her office and explained how the session was going to work, once she and Jennifer were alone. “You cannot be here. You’ll have to wait outside the room. I’m going to tape-record the session. . . .”

  Rachel said she was okay with all of that. She then signed the waiver forms the hypnotist required because Jennifer was a minor.

  “Rachel came across antsy after I explained things,” Lane recalled. “She agreed to it all . . . but I saw distance.”

  Even though she sensed something going on with Rachel, Lane said, her main concern was Jennifer.

  Debbie Lane is an articulate, well-dressed professional woman from head to toe. She was there, as a practicing hypnotist, to help a child overcome what she viewed as a horrible condition that had saddled Jennifer’s life and put her teenage years on hold. She had explained to Jennifer and Rachel before the session began that hypnosis required the client to have the desire and commitment to achieve the goals of the therapy. More than that, the client must have an unencumbered belief in one’s self that it can work, alongside a positive expectation for an outcome they all seek to achieve.

  Lane wondered: Is this the “next thing” in a long list of remedies Rachel and Jennifer have lined up? Are they going about the business of checking things off a so-called list only to turn around and say, “We tried everything! She still has the hiccups.”

  After speaking with Rachel, Lane got the feeling it was all of the above.

  Meeting and speaking to Jennifer alone, Lane felt the properties a hypnotist needed for a positive and rewarding outcome were there, even if she had to pull them out of the girl.

  “What are your goals?” she asked Jennifer. By this point, they were alone in a relaxed setting inside an office Lane had maintained exclusively for therapy sessions. Lane had asked that Rachel and Allison Baldwin wait down the hall. She told Rachel not to expect her and Jennifer anytime soon and not to interrupt the session at any time, under any circumstance.

  Rachel took off outside and had a cigarette as the hypnotist and Jennifer got started.

  “Intense,” Lane said of Jennifer. “Right from the start.”

  Immediately after Jennifer was “under”—a term that probably doesn’t best describe the state of consciousness the client is placed in by the hypnotist—Jennifer went back to those days before she had the hiccups. This was an important space Lane needed to explore without prodding. Getting Jennifer to realize and feel what life had been like without the hiccups was important to Jen’s stopping.

  “She talked about the secondary gain and fear before she even came down with the hiccups,” Lane recalled later, speaking about the session.

  Within every action a human being takes part in, there is a secondary gain—a positive outcome he or she is chasing, so to speak.

  “Or he/she wouldn’t have it to begin with,” Lane explained.

  “For her to continue those hiccups,” the hypnotist said, “at a subconscious level, there had to be a gain—something in it for Jennifer’s benefit.”

  A payoff, in other words.

  In Lane’s opinion, Jennifer had been hiccupping all this time for a reason. Jennifer was herself continuing to allow the hiccups to control their lives because she was receiving gratification of some sort for doing it. Through the hiccups, she was getting something she had wanted and craved for a long time, Lane claimed.

  “Attention,” the hypnotist said (a few others agreed with this overall observation). “When you’re living in a house with that many people and you’re not being heard, your body’s responding to it. Jennifer Mee wanted attention.”

  The hiccups were certainly getting her plenty of it.

  At one point, Lane asked Jennifer: “Your mom said you were her oldest?”

  “Yes.”

  “How many siblings do you have?”

  “Four.”

  “How old [are they] and what are their names?”

  “Um, the youngest one is five and her name is McKenzie. Destiny is seven. Kayla is twelve, and Ashley is fourteen.”

  Jennifer was in a comfortable space for Lane right now.

  “Okay, okay,” she asked Jennifer, “do you get along with all of them?”

  “There have been times when I have, and times when I don’t,” Jennifer answered. “It’s like every normal family, but yeah, I get along with them, for the most part.”

  “Do you share a room with any of them?”

  “Yes. We live in a two-bedroom house and, unfortunately, we are all crammed into one room.”

  Compelling in and of itself, especially to Lane as she got to know Jennifer more personally during the session and learned what she perceived as the root cause of her hiccupping, was a moment while Jennifer had filled out the paperwork for the hypnotist before the session started. Jennifer had to be told to go into a room down at the end of a long hallway and close the door because she was hiccupping so loudly and disruptively. It was so bad that some of the other tenants in the building stuck their heads out of their doors to see and ask what in the world was going on. For Lane, it was as if Jennifer had arrived wanting to make sure everyone in that building knew she was the Hiccup Girl.

  As the session continued, Lane noticed that Jennifer’s hiccupping, which at the start of the hypnosis therapy was loud and rapid and obnoxious, had slowed down as she talked her way through what was bothering her at a fundamental, emotional core level. Jennifer’s deep feelings were spilling out of her and the hiccups were beginning to subside.

  “What I discovered during the session was that the more I asked questions and just listened to her, the quieter the hiccups became,” Lane recalled. “And it was in that silence, if you will, that I heard an answer.”

  CHAPTER 34

  AS JENNIFER BECAME more relaxed, slipping deeper under hypnosis, Debbie Lane heard what she believed was the answer to the hiccups, which then pointed toward a direction to take Jennifer with the session.

  “We’re going to work together as a team until we can get the solution that we want,” Lane told Jennifer. She paused.

  “Okay . . . ,” Jennifer responded.

  “And what is it you want?” Lane asked.

  “I want them to go away a
nd to be a normal fifteen-year-old again,” Jennifer said.

  This hardly sounded like a child faking the hiccups for attention.

  “And what is a normal fifteen-year-old?” Lane asked, trying to get a clear indication from Jennifer how she saw herself in the world.

  “Um, being able to go out to the movies every Friday. Hanging out with your girlfriends and doing stuff that I would like to do, like talking on the phone and stuff like that.”

  Sounded pretty average.

  “Okay. And what else?”

  Jennifer took a breath. Without hiccupping, she said: “Um, just, I would like to be able to go to the movies every Friday, which I can’t do anymore because I would be a distraction. Going back to school. That may sound a little silly for saying that ’cause most teenagers don’t like school, but I’d like to go back to school and see all my friends and be able to be with all my classmates again.”

  As Jennifer continued, she talked about wanting privacy and more attention from her parents. She then listed her goals in life, one of which included having her own bedroom. Jennifer talked about how tired she was of living in a two-bedroom house with four sisters, her uncle (who had been living with them since 2005), and her mother and father. There was nowhere for her to go and be alone.

  Another part of this for Jennifer, which Debbie Lane said Jennifer never mentioned (but Rachel had mentioned a few times), was that Jennifer had been kept on such a short leash by Rachel all her life. Rachel had been scared to allow Jennifer or any of her children the freedom to go out on their own, she claimed, especially due to living in downtown St. Pete. Jennifer certainly wanted to break free from that and be her own person.

  The situation in the house had been like this for as long as Jennifer could recall, she told Lane, and she just wanted to be noticed and heard in what was a chaotic existence inside a home that was far too small for eight people.

  The hiccups, Lane thought while listening, were Jennifer’s way of getting that attention she had sought all her life.

  “To be noticed,” the hypnotist said. “Jennifer told me she just wanted to be heard.”

  One of the reasons she held on to the hiccups, Lane considered while listening to Jennifer talk about what bothered her, was because “she was afraid of letting go and what might happen to her if she stopped hiccupping.”

  “Death,” Jennifer said.

  Death? Lane asked herself. This was shocking. What was Jennifer talking about?

  “She said she was afraid of dying,” Lane explained.

  The hypnotist was interested in this thread of Jennifer’s life. She tried to get Jennifer to explain herself more fully, but Jennifer backed off the subject. The one thing about hypnosis that Lane was quick to point out was how careful the hypnotist had to be not to lead the client into any answers by carefully chosen (and leading) questions. Lane had to allow Jennifer to talk her way through whatever she wanted and needed to say, without coaching or holding her hand and pointing her down a particular path. In doing that, Jennifer could effectively cure herself, or at least get to the heart of what was troubling her most.

  Jennifer explained that she would stop hiccupping if and when she felt “safe.”

  “Is it now safe to stop?” Lane asked Jennifer softly, almost in a whisper.

  * * *

  Debbie Lane’s perspective after sitting and counseling Jennifer with hypnotherapy, hearing Jennifer speak under hypnosis about her life both before the hiccups and after, changed as she realized what she felt were Jennifer’s biggest fears.

  “When I first heard about Jennifer, it was this tiny, little paragraph in the newspaper,” Lane explained. “But the story leapt out at me as if the entire paper was a blur except that little paragraph.”

  Hypnosis has come a long way since the days of a magician waving a pocket watch in front of a preselected audience member, uttering those abracadabra words of “you’re getting very sleepy.” Debbie Lane, a board-certified hypnotherapist, had helped many people “make those changes they’ve been promising themselves for a long time.”

  Part of Jennifer’s therapy included her looking into the future and seeing herself not hiccupping. She needed to feel the calm she was experiencing under hypnosis and believe that all of the fear she felt being lifted as the safety she desired was put in its place so she could live her life without hiccupping. This was important to the long-term outcome of the session.

  One of the main issues Jennifer returned to was that while she felt cramped inside her small home, Rachel and Chris had gone and allowed Chris’s brother to move in with them. It bothered Jennifer that as she stated her opinion to her parents about there not being enough room inside the house, they wouldn’t listen.

  “She felt as though she was the one everyone in that house was picking on,” Lane said. “Now, that is typical teenager stuff, and they may have all felt that way in the house.”

  * * *

  As Jennifer talked for hours about her life before and after having the hiccups, not once, Lane confirmed, did she mention being raped. One might expect that such a traumatizing moment of Jennifer’s life would be front and center within a session such as hypnotherapy, a barrier she needed to overcome in order to heal. But it never came up. Neither did the later revelation by Jennifer of dealing crack cocaine at thirteen and having been beaten by Tyrone O’Donnell.

  Perhaps Jennifer had blocked all of it out for some reason?

  When later pressed for details about being raped, Jennifer explained to me that she was “very young.” She “felt as if what they were doing” to her “was okay.” She talked about being by some water one time where the two males liked to hang out. “We played house and it started with [one of them] playing with my hair and led to other things.” She recalled being “raped in [a building by water].” She didn’t remember how long it lasted, but she was certain the males “did it every chance they got.” Moreover, Jennifer’s sister Ashley was a witness to it all. “You will never talk about this,” the males allegedly said to Ashley and Jennifer on more than one occasion, “or you will die.” There was once, Jennifer said, when she tried to scream as she was being raped and one of them shoved an “object in my mouth.”

  Was this that fear of dying Jennifer referred to in her hypnosis testimony? Experts who study rape and how the mind deals with the trauma afterward feel this type of trauma, left untreated, could manifest in various ways throughout a lifetime, including post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and rape trauma syndrome (RTS). One of the most persistent symptoms of both includes “avoidance of stimuli that remind of the trauma. . . .” Within this, the victim “avoids thoughts and feelings associated with the trauma. . . .”

  Jennifer’s not recalling many details about the rape, nor sharing it under hypnosis, falls in line with the mind’s normal way of dealing with such a painful, disturbing event.

  When Lane later heard about that “thug life” Jennifer spoke of being involved in from the age of thirteen, she couldn’t help but think that as Jennifer looked back on her life years later, she “fantasized” about aspects of it to draw even more attention to herself, especially after all of her hiccup fame diminished.

  “Look, if, in fact, that is true,” Lane said later in her quiet, soothing voice, clearly thinking through her answers before speaking (referring here specifically to Jennifer’s crack dealing at thirteen, not the rape), “I’m stunned, because Jennifer was fifteen when she saw me and there was no evidence of any of that type of behavior. She came across as a tough little girl, but at the same time, a little girl. She won my heart. . . .”

  * * *

  After a long period of silence during their session, Lane said, “You may slowly begin to bring your awareness back to the room.”

  “Oh, you don’t know how much I love you [right] now,” Jennifer said. “They’re gone! I can’t believe it.”

  CHAPTER 35

  JENNIFER WAS COMING out from under hypnosis as she and Lane realized the hiccups were comple
tely gone. Not partially, or for a few moments—but Jennifer Mee was not hiccupping anymore.

  “I love you, too, sweetheart,” Lane said.

  “They’re gone. I’m in tears.”

  “May I hug you?” Lane asked, being certain not to invade Jennifer’s space.

  Crying, Jennifer said, “Yes! I love you. Oh, my God.”

  “You now know they are gone,” Lane stated, wanting to be clear.

  “Yeah, I do.”

  “And you’re safe?”

  “Yes, I am. Oh, my God!”

  Again, this did not sound like a young woman who had been faking the hiccups and was suddenly now “cured.” Jennifer came across as a young girl suffering from social isolation, which was now going to be lifted because the ball had finally been cut from the chain.

  As Jennifer acclimated herself to the room and opened her eyes, she was weeping profound tears of joy and adulation. It was as if she had dumped all of her emotional baggage and was starting from a fresh outlook—one that did not include her hiccupping anymore.

  “I love you. . . . I love you. . . . I love you,” she said to Debbie Lane, jumping up and hugging her. “I cannot believe this. . . .”

  The hiccups were completely gone.

  “Mom? Mom?” Jennifer called out. Jennifer was still “heavy from the trance . . . and remained relaxed in a recliner,” still coming out of it.

  Rachel was outside smoking, according to Lane, who went to fetch her while Jennifer waited.

  “What’s going on?” Rachel asked, walking into the lobby area and sitting down.

  “I have a surprise for you,” Lane said.