by John Edward
No surprise, though, that after the HBO special aired late in 1999, Gary found himself being cut in half by James (The Amazing) Randi, a magician by trade who likes to pull barbs out of his hat and hurl them at the nearest medium. Since he first surfaced years ago, Randi’s refrain has been that psychics and mediums are just clumsy pretenders, at best magicians adept at sleight-of-mind tricks. As America’s debunker laureate, he’s written two fire-breathing exposés, one title as pointed as his eyebrows—Flim-Flam!—and the other as long as his white beard: An Encyclopedia of Claims, Frauds, and Hoaxes of the Occult and Supernatural: James Randi’s Decidedly Skeptical Definitions of Alternate Realities. His most famous stunt is a standing offer of a million dollars to anyone who can prove after-death communication.
The Amazing Randi’s assault on the Merely Unusual Schwartz started on Randi’s website and continued in an article in the Times of London before ending up in letters back and forth. Randi trotted out his usual assertions about mediums, then launched into his newest target. “Schwartz’s method of edging up on doing real science has one big advantage for him,” Randi wrote. “It allows others to get excited and to assume conclusions that are not supported by the half-research he conducts. And can attract funding and attention.” Gary, loving a good fight, answered back that Randi was “a living example of someone who seems incapable of learning,” and thanked him for instigating the creation of the first scientifically documented evidence of mediumship. “You are the prime inspiration for creating the Mediumship Science Aptitude Test.”
“So this is science, Dr. Schwartz?” Randi responded. “You really need more experience of the world, sir.”
Like any scientist, Gary was always eager for more experience of the world, and was already at work designing his next big test: an elaborate experiment involving five research sites in the United States and Europe, in which neither the mediums nor the sitters would speak to each other, and only a third person would hear the reading.
When Gary first started his research a few years ago, people would ask him whose side he was on—the mediums or the skeptics. “Well, I’m not on either side,” he would say. “I’m on the side of the data. If the data takes me to the mediums, I go to the mediums. If the data takes me to the skeptics, I go to the skeptics. Now, if you ask me whose world view I prefer, there’s no question that the mediums’ is much more beautiful and special. But my job is not to test my beliefs. It’s to follow the data. Are we trying to prove the survival of consciousness? No. What we’re trying to do is allow survival of consciousness to prove itself. If mediums are willing to stand up and be counted, scientists should be willing to stand up and count them.”
— CHAPTER 5 —
Six Lies
and
Videotape
Hits and Misses
If we were 83 percent accurate in the Arizona experiment, what about the other 17 percent? Among skeptics and believers alike, there’s a catchphrase to describe what’s become a popular way to evaluate a medium: hits and misses.
I hate those three words.
To think spirit communication is about hits and misses is a miss itself. That implies that the misses are just wrong. But they’re not—even the 17 percent that Gary Schwartz counted as inaccurate. I believe that all the information I’m given is accurate. It’s what happens next that counts. Any number of factors—the skill of the medium is a big one, but not the only one—will determine whether the information will be considered a hit or a miss. We may not always understand how spirits choose their messages, or why they convey them with this symbol and not that one, but spirits don’t play games or misstate. If I pass on twenty-five pieces of information and nineteen are validated, it doesn’t mean I’ve gotten six “wrong,” any more than it means that they’ve told six lies. What makes a piece of information a perceived “miss” is either a simple short-out somewhere in the medium-spirit-recipient circuit, or a delay in the validation. This may sound like a cop-out, but this really is a three-way partnership that requires positive, open, and strong energy from everyone involved—on both sides of the great divide.
If I bring through information that someone being read does not acknowledge, one of five things is happening. I have control over just one of them.
1. I’m misinterpreting the symbols I’m being shown. That’s a biggie.
2. The information is meant for someone else in the room, and we’re not connecting strongly enough to get me to go there.
3. The sitter doesn’t know whether the information is true or not because of an unfamiliarity with the family tree, or because this is simply something that he or she is not aware of—yet.
4. The person does not want to acknowledge something for personal reasons.
5. The person is suffering from “psychic amnesia,” a temporary affliction that has been known to render people incapable of remembering their spouse’s name or their child’s birthday.
Take it from me: There are a thousand ways for a medium to misinterpret a message from the other side. The most common problem I have is receiving a symbol, often a fleeting one that fades as soon as the next one appears, and describing it incorrectly. The spirits will use my references, things I will recognize and relate to, to get me to say something. But as in a game of charades, I might see the symbol from the wrong angle and pass on the wrong information. Or be too literal—or not literal enough. During one reading at a lecture, I was shown the image of a woman I recognized as Jennifer Valope, a TV news anchor in Miami. I threw out everything I could: News reporter, TV, Miami. Nothing. Finally, I just said what I saw: Jennifer Valope. The person in front of me said her name was Jennifer. That could have gone another way and been considered a “miss” with a lot of fishing around—a cold reading. Wouldn’t it have been easier for the spirit to just give me the name audibly? Why use such a roundabout symbol? The answer: Who knows? Sometimes spirits can be very clever. Other times, obscure. Ultimately, though, it’s hopeless to ask why they give one symbol and not another. Does everyone who plays charades use the same clues? They give me what they give me. I pass it on the best I can.
Misinterpretation of a fleeting symbol or sound is only one of the two most common obstacles to the mythical perfect reading. Just as common is the delayed validation. Most often it’s a piece of information that a person doesn’t know about and has to check out—anything from a detail about an event from the past to the name of a neighbor’s grandmother. So many times I’ve been directed to deliver information to someone who seems to have no connection to the spirit, so of course can’t validate the information. In many cases, it’s because they actually do have some connection, but it’s not obvious and they may not even know it. I might be reading someone who’s a distant or even unknown relative of a spirit that’s trying to get a message through to another relative. Or the person being read is a friend or acquaintance of the intended recipient. Trying to connect mutual acquaintances like this can lead to a lot of blank expressions and denials, which can be frustrating for all three of us.
People often wonder why spirits use these indirect, unlikely connections. The answer is simple: It’s their best chance to get a message through. I have an analogy for this: If you were stuck in some remote, foreign land without a phone and ran into someone from your hometown who was on his way home, wouldn’t you want that person to get a message to your family that you were all right?
A Murder in Michigan
THERE’S ONE OTHER KIND OF MESSAGE that comes through and either seems like information that’s ten miles off the mark, or makes people stretch in every direction to try to make it fit. And that’s a message about something that hasn’t happened yet. I don’t know if I was foreshadowing Pat Price’s husband’s death when I interpreted him as being already crossed over. But it’s not unusual for me to receive and pass on information that seems wrong at the time it’s delivered but later turns out to have meaning. It doesn’t have to be earth-shattering. Often it’s a forgettable, mundane event.
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The first time I met Carol Maywood, I told her in the course of a reading that someone was putting up new wallpaper. It didn’t mean anything to her, but a few months later, somebody in her family, maybe it was her sister-in-law, changed the wallpaper in the bathroom, or maybe just the top part, I think they call that the border. It might have been the bedroom. See what I mean about mundane and forgettable? Which makes what happened later in that reading all the more extraordinary.
Carol is a radiologist and medical administrator from Phoenix. In May of 1998, she lost her sister Louise, who died as suddenly as it is possible to die of cancer. It came out of nowhere, and her devastated family, a close-knit group, was left reeling and terribly wounded, each trying to help the others cope. Flipping channels one day later that year, Carol saw me on one of the afternoon shows and was curious enough to go out and buy the first book she had ever read on spirit communication. Carol had always believed that when we die, our energies merge with a universal force and we cease to exist as individuals. Our personalities go on only in the memories of those we leave behind. What I and others were saying was very different. She liked the way it sounded.
One day in the spring of 1999, Carol’s brother, Dan, called from his home in Michigan to say he had seen me on The Crier Report. They had discussed the subject, and Carol had thought about what it might be like to connect with her sister. Was it possible?
“John Edward is going to be in Phoenix,” Dan told her on the phone. “You’ve got to call and get tickets. I’ll give you the number. You have to go.” Carol was taken aback by the force of Dan’s demand. She didn’t mind—they were extremely close and it was hard for them to offend each other, but still, it was not at all like Dan to tell her what to do about anything.
Carol made the call and went with her mother to the event I was having in downtown Phoenix. Carol was like most people in that room or any other room I’ve ever appeared in. She hoped she would be read, and if she was lucky enough, to hear from someone in particular. But it didn’t look like it was going to happen. Two hours in, and nothing for Carol and her mother. But then—and I’m telling this from her perspective, of course, based on what she told me later—I asked if anyone had “a Holland connection.” I was feeling an older male figure and being shown wooden shoes. Nobody acknowledged it. But when she saw that I was slowly walking in their direction, Carol whispered in her mother’s ear and then raised her hand, tentatively, as people usually do when they’re not sure if it’s for them but since nobody else is claiming it. . . . Carol’s Uncle Steven, her mother’s brother, had married a wartime bride from Holland. Both of them had passed.
The next sequence of information confirmed that I was in the right place—Uncle Steven’s jovial, ladies’-man personality, and the presence of a “D-N” name with him, which Carol’s mother immediately connected to her cousin Don, who was very much like Steven in personality. The feeling they gave me was that although they were not close on earth—they were far apart in age—they were close now that they were together on the other side. “Who had the stage background?” I asked, seeing a theater stage. Carol’s mother said her mother was a stage actress.
It was the typical family gathering, except that, to her disappointment, Carol’s sister was not among them. Then, toward the end of the reading, they were telling me that the family would be getting together soon. “My sister’s birthday is in July,” Carol said, almost desperate to make her sister a part of this.
“Nope,” I said. “Sooner than that. It’s in about a week. They’re telling me they’re all going to be there.” It was nothing that they knew of, Carol said. I wondered if I was blowing someone’s surprise party. This was one of those times when the people I saw in front of me were saying no and the ones I couldn’t see were saying, oh yes. In cases like this, my money is always on the ones who got in for free.
When Carol got home, she called Dan in Michigan. She was glad her brother had told her to go—although Louise didn’t come through, Carol and her mother got to be one of the chosen. She recounted the reading, and then they tried to figure out what that family gathering thing was all about. What could be happening in just a week? Dan took out his palm calendar, which had all kinds of offbeat occasions on it. “Hey, what about Bugs Bunny’s birthday?” he said kiddingly as he scrolled. “Louise loved Bugs.” They couldn’t figure it out, but Carol and Dan talked twice more that week, about the reading, about Louise, and about Dan’s upcoming visit to Carol in Arizona. Could that be the “gathering”?
Early on Saturday morning, the phone rang in Carol’s house and she heard these words in her sister-in-law’s voice: “Dan is dead.”
He had been found in his car, in the parking lot of the factory plant where he worked the overnight shift. He had been shot in the head with his own gun. In a year’s time, Carol had lost both her sister and brother without warning—at least none that she had been able to perceive.
When she regained a semblance of equilibrium, Carol thought about the imminent “family gathering” her relatives had talked about. She didn’t think they meant Dan’s funeral. He was cremated, and there wouldn’t be a memorial service until his birthday, months later. Then Carol realized what it was. She calculated that Dan had died exactly seven days and four hours after our spirit contact. The family gathering they were talking about was on the other side. They were the ones who would be getting together. Helping Dan cross over.
Now the question became, What happened to Dan? Remember the unsolved mystery of the murder of Nicole’s boyfriend Roger in Tampa Bay? Here’s another one. It happened less than four months after Roger interrupted our infomercial to get a vital message to his girlfriend, apparently to allay her fears about his murder. But this one took a slightly different turn.
The police in Michigan immediately ruled Dan’s death a suicide and closed their “investigation” without conducting standard crime-scene tests or questioning people connected to him. Carol, her sister-in-law, and others close to Dan could not believe he had killed himself. But for the first few days, they couldn’t focus on anything but breathing. Dan had been divorced, and had remarried just three years before. His wife was devastated, totally out of it. And Carol had all she could do to stand up herself. Besides her own grief, she had to deal with telling her parents that now two of their children were dead.
It was a week before Carol was able to begin thinking about the investigation of her brother’s death. She was sure he had been murdered, and so was everyone else in Dan’s circle of family and friends. He had not been depressed, and he been making all kinds of plans. He had bought train tickets for a trip to the Grand Canyon he and his wife were going to take during a visit to Carol in Arizona a month later. They were planning to move to Texas after his retirement in two years, and he was trying to convince Carol to move there, too. He had arranged to leave work in time to go to his friend’s wedding reception on Saturday, and he had taken chicken and ribs out of the freezer to defrost and marinate for the weekend.
Once she was sure he had not committed suicide, Carol began to think about who might have killed him. Dan had no enemies, she thought. But then, she realized that he did. Dan had been in a legal dispute with someone he had hired to restore a 1965 Thunderbird. The man did a terrible job and cheated him, leading to an angry confrontation in the parking lot outside Dan’s apartment. Dan had recently won a $30,000 court judgment against him. Carol learned that the man thought he wouldn’t have to pay because he was declaring bankruptcy, but believed that Dan informed him that bankruptcy rules didn’t apply to frauds. He would still have to pay him the money. Not long after the judgment, Dan was dead.
When Dan’s family tried to bring this and other information to the police, they were rebuffed. “They told us, not very nicely, ‘You just let us do the detecting,’ ” Carol said. But apparently they detected nothing. They returned the gun, still covered with blood, to Dan’s wife. She cleaned it, assuming the police had gotten fingerprints off it. They hadn’t
bothered. They said the case was closed. Carol hired an independent coroner, and his opinion was that based on his wounds and the positioning of his body, Dan could have been killed, most likely during a losing struggle for the gun.
Carol thought the obvious suspect had to be the man Dan was having problems with, a young guy named Baxter. She theorized that Baxter wanted to meet with Dan, maybe telling him that he wanted to pay him some of the money he owed. But Dan would not have wanted Baxter to come to his apartment again. Maybe he told him to come to his work, where there would be people around. He brought his gun because he was afraid. Carol believed the case wasn’t investigated because the town where it happened was virtually owned by Dan’s employer. There had been three previous murders on the property in the past five years. They didn’t want this in the papers.
One night soon after Dan’s death, Carol decided to sit down at her computer and put down everything she knew and everyone she had talked to—an organized chronology of the events leading up to that night in the parking lot. And while she was doing that, she became aware that she was seeing the events playing out in her head in great detail: Dan driving his heavy equipment “Hi-Lo” from the factory to his car hoping to attract the attention of plant security. Positioning his car so that he could see Baxter coming. Loading his gun and taking a spare magazine clip from his fanny pack and placing it upright in the console between the bucket seats, leaving the console lid flipped open. Holding his gun and rehearsing the actions he might have to take to defend himself.