Dorothy Allison - A Psychic Story

by A Psychic Story (lit)

  Hours passed before Dorothy regained consciousness. Her body ached; her head rang with the pressure of her clamped jaws. The sheets were tossed about her, damp with perspiration. They were also stained. She had her period.

  She managed to get up and bathe, and the warm water soothed her body.

  Over and beyond her physical discomfort Dorothy was depressed and frightened. The drugs gave her a shrouded feeling, as if a pall were over her. She had no strength to fight.

  The next day Vicaro suggested they might make another stab at driving around.

  "If he's free, then maybe we'll find him." "Vicaro," Dorothy explained, "I am what is known as tired. My body feels like a used car that was hit by a crane. And," she added, "I look like one, too.

  "Please, I said Michael would not be found until February seventh. There is no sense in trying to outguess what is destined. Nine times out of ten, fate wins."

  "Okay, Dorothy. Have it your way. If I get a chance, I'll look myself. How's Lydia?" "She needs a job." "I'll ask around," Vicaro offered. Dorothy did not regret having taken in Lydia. Growing up without money or resources, she had known many down-and-out people. Moreover she felt that women had it hardest in society, and Lydia impressed her as a woman who had suffered in a man's world. It was almost time, she felt, that Michael was found and his mother sent on her way.

  Thinking about February 7, Dorothy could not explain why she felt so strongly about the date. Astrologically the day was a good one not only in her chart, but in the victim's as well. But that didn't fully explain the feeling she had about that day. She, like everyone else, would have to wait and see.

  She reflected over the past month and the changes that had occurred in her life. Powers and abilities she had never known in herself had somehow chosen this time in her life to come out, giving her a sense of rebirth.

  As she grew more accustomed to living and dealing with her psyche, Dorothy would develop abilities that allowed her to gain more and more control and focus. Now she knew that believing in herself was the most important thing.

  The biggest news in the New York area on February 5 was the weather; for on that day the temperature inexplicably began to rise. For three days the sun radiated springlike heat in the dead of winter. The temperature reached a high of sixty degrees.

  At noon on February 7 Bill Werner left work to return home in Clifton, New Jersey, to eat his lunch. His wife, Sylvia, had called him at work that morning to tell him that Mamie, their cat, was dead. "What am I supposed to do with a dead cat?" his wife cried.

  Bill agreed to return at lunch and take care of the dead animal. He decided that after two days of warm weather the soil would be in good enough condition for digging a small hole. He would take the cat over to the nearby water hole, Bleachery Pond, and bury it there.

  When he arrived at home, his wife told him the trying saga she had suffered, discovering Mamie in the clothes hamper, dead.

  "How could I lift her up?" she said. "It's so awful."

  As he walked to the bathroom and contemplated the sight he would probably encounter, his stomach turned. Nausea would overcome him if he allowed it to.

  Bill placed the stiff black cat into a burlap bag and placed it in his trunk. He drove to the side of the elementary school, just above Bleachery Pond. He looked out and saw the ITT tower standing tall in Nutley and the Shell station on the highway, above the pond.

  With sack in hand he began the steep descent to the water's edge. The ground was still moist from the snows. Barren branches caught in his coat. Several times he had to retrace his steps where the underbrush was impassable.

  His eyes searched the water's edge for a possible resting-place for Mamie. Suddenly Bill Werner stopped short and put Mamie down. His eyes, he hoped, deceived him.

  He edged closer to the water, careful not to trip. There, approximately seven feet in front of him, floated the remains of Michael Kurscics.

  It was 1:30 when Bill Werner called the Clifton Police Department to inform them of his discovery. Twenty minutes later a call was placed to the neighboring Nutley Police Department for a missing-person's check.

  Vicaro had been sent out to check on an accident in the Shop Rite parking lot just prior to the Clifton call. When he got back to the department around three, the sergeant told him that the Kurscics kid had been found. Vicaro bounded up the steps to Buel's office. "I hear they found the kid," he said to the chief. Buel told him that the boy's body was found floating along the edge of the Bleachery Pond in Clifton, across the highway.

  Vic called Dorothy and told her to prepare Lydia; he was coming to pick them up and take them to the funeral home for identification. He told her not to tell Lydia that the boy had been found, because he wanted to hypnotize her first, helping her to prepare psychologically for what she was going to see.

  Vicaro did hypnotize the mother and prepare her. As it turned out, however, she never identified her son. Vicaro did, and later the father.

  The funeral director asked Dorothy, "Are these the clothes you saw in your vision?" He showed her a plastic bag containing the child's snowsuit. She blanched; her insides quivered as she identified the clothing as that seen in her vision.

  Not only was Dorothy correct about the date of Michael's recovery, but everything he wore was exactly as she had seen. It was the funeral director who mentioned the boy's overshoes were on the wrong feet. And his hands, which Dorothy had seen as charred, were dark with mud. Dorothy prayed to St. Anthony, thanking him for Ms assistance in helping her. The burial of the little boy was paid for by Dorothy, as the parents could not afford it.

  ~~~~~~~

  Chapter 4

  Finding Michael Kurscics changed Dorothy's life forever. Never again could she deny the import of her visions, nor the fear she was experiencing. At the age of forty-three Dorothy had spent most of her life raising her family. But the little drowning victim had become a part of her soul, as would dozens of other children in the coming years. Little Michael's face would never leave Dorothy's mind, sometimes bringing her comfort, sometimes sadness.

  Dorothy now began to see more and more, but she still understood very little. Images of death or unknown faces would creep into her consciousness without warning or emotional preparation. For the next several years the usually buoyant woman would often teeter between emotions, many times forcing her to retreat into solitude. Concerned for her welfare, her husband and children imposed a moratorium on her work.

  Word eventually got around to neighboring police departments of her success with Michael Kurscics. They would call on Dorothy to help them on dead-end cases. From Newark to the northern reaches of New Jersey, police came to her with robberies, assault and batteries, missing persons, and arson cases.

  Though she sometimes would try and help the police, her abilities were mostly in the abstract. She had not yet learned to focus and interpret images that came to her, though she was willing to try. Nor did she have anyone, except Vicaro and Justine, who would sit down and listen to her visions. Often Dorothy and Justine would talk about the people she saw, the mother hoping to find in her daughter both an identifier and a sympathetic ear: Justine was both.

  Justine and Paul loved to hear of their mother's involvements with the police, often coming home to find a patrol car sitting in front of their house. But they were also frightened when they saw their ebullient mother plunged into depression by an inexplicable vision. Dorothy would try not to reveal the horrors she saw to her family, but they could see how she was affected. Bob and Justine would take over the cooking and shopping when they felt she needed total rest.

  The summer after Dorothy found Michael Kurscics she received a call from an acquaintance who reported the son of her closest friend missing. Eighteen-year-old Barney Berke had gone to Asbury Park on a date with his girl friend, Molly. Barney and Molly had been spending the day on the beach when Barney said he wanted to fetch something from his car, and he left, supposedly to return momentarily. But he never came back. Barney had
disappeared, wearing only a bathing suit, and with his car still parked where he had left it.

  The Berkes were frantic. The area was scoured by police and detectives for days, but Barney was not found. Daily the parents went to the shore and watched over the ocean for any sign of their son. Helicopters and boats provided no more clues.

  Dorothy listened to the voice of the mother on the phone, which helped her form a picture of the son. She immediately felt that the boy was not dead, though she saw that he was trapped in some entanglement.

  "I don't see him drowned or dead at all," Dorothy told the parents. "I know he will return. He's caught in some kind of Houdini act. You will just have to be patient. He will return."

  Two months passed and the Berkes lost patience. The mother told Dorothy she didn't want to hear her predictions anymore because they only gave her and her husband false hopes. She informed Dorothy that they were planning a funeral for their son.

  The night before the funeral Dorothy called the parents to say that she felt they were wrong in losing faith, but that she had done everything she could to help.

  Two weeks after the funeral Barney Berke reappeared at his home, bedraggled and wearing ill-fitting clothes. He told his parents he had been a victim of amnesia, and had no recollection of his whereabouts for the past months, nor could he remember who had given him his attire.

  The "Houdini act" Dorothy had seen was later explained by the apologetic parents. Barney was studying to be a professional magician, and the psychic had obviously picked up this aspect of his life.

  Regardless of occasional successes, Dorothy was still too emotionally involved with her visions to be able to objectify and interpret. Sleepless nights of agonizing dreams rendered her vulnerable and without resistance.

  As the years went on, she would take on occasional cases. In 1973, she was asked by New York's Midday Live television show to appear with writer William Blatty, whose new book, The Exorcist, had just been published.

  One of the program's viewers was a detective from the New Brunswick Police Department Phyllis Thompson, a twenty-eight-year-old schoolmaster, had been brutally murdered on September 2,1973, in East Brunswick, New Jersey. In one of Dorothy's finest psychic sleuthings since the Michael Kurscics case, she was able to describe with alarming detail the victim's last hour, giving not only the birth dates of the last two people to see her, but the murderer's name and background, as well.

  A detective from the East Brunswick police called the Nutley Police Department in search of Dorothy. On Dorothy's first visit to East Brunswick with the detective, she led them directly to the bar where Phyllis had been having a nightcap with friends.

  The mother later detailed the events in the following manner:

  Mrs. Allison told me she saw Phyllis being forced into a car, raped, struck three times with a heavy object, and drowned. All of these things were indeed found to be true. She further described a cemetery where the man took the body. It was the very cemetery the body was actually taken to.

  Mrs. Allison said the murderer's name was Krug. She gave his birthday and said he was short with powerful arms. He was an ex-convict. He had even hurt his leg the last time lie was in jail. The police found all of this was indeed the case when Krug was arraigned.

  She mentioned that Phyllis's wristwatch would show the time 3:25 A.M. When the body was found, the watch had stopped at that very time.

  One of her most important clues, which she mentioned on the very first visit, concerned an article of Phyllis's clothing. She said Krug tried to burn the clothes, but that a fingerprint of Krug's would remain on Phyllis's panty hose. This was found and used later as a major piece of evidence in the trial. She said Krug would be picked up while committing another crime. Her description exactly fit that of Frederick Krug, twenty-seven, of South River, New Jersey. He had just been picked up on alleged charges of rape and had a long record of violent attacks on young women.

  Thanks to Mrs. Allison, Krug was indicted for the murder of Phyllis Thompson on January 16, 1974. He was sentenced to life imprisonment for the kidnap-murder.

  Although saddened and often sickened by the sight of the victims, whether child or adult, Dorothy believed that finding a body and therefore being able to have a funeral were as comforting as anything else that might be done. She came to feel that a funeral at least put an end to the torture, and as a concluding rite, helped some faltering families begin to reestablish a more normal pattern, and sometimes brought them closer to God again. In the period between the Michael Kurscics case and her work on the Phyllis Thompson murder, she gradually learned to render her own sadness into positive energy and focus on her objectives: finding the victim and then, if possible, the culprit.

  Waiting, in Dorothy's mind, was torture. Part of her mission in her new life, she hoped, would be to end the interminable period of waiting, speculation, and false hope for the parents of missing children. She saw firsthand how parents were destroyed by the lack of resolve, never knowing if their child ran away for emotional reasons, or was abducted. As long as there remained a chance that word would come of the missing child, parents always kept the fire of hope alive. Dorothy felt, particularly if she saw the victim dead, that hope was another ingredient in the torture.

  One of Dorothy's greatest gifts, which would help endear her to the staunchest police skeptic, was her comic aspect. The child in Dorothy was an important source of life. From that irrepressible side of herself she would summon the spirit of adventure and faith, of humor and unadulterated compassion for others. Laughter, she felt, was the antidote to tragedy and her greatest defense against overwhelming depression. The child in her loved to play pranks, often using her psychic powers as the source of humor. The fact that most of the police she would deal with towered over her in height and bulk made her antics seem all the more childlike.

  The blossoming of her psychic abilities opened up channels of her intellect she had never before realized she possessed. Her ability to objectify herself and call to account her various personal aspects would allow her to question the prejudices with which she bad grown up. Through the years Dorothy would become a campaigner on issues she learned about from her new encounters with people from all backgrounds. And while a firm believer in God, she could be both iconoclastic and irreverent.

  ***

  On February 8, 1974, Dorothy was asked by Randolph Hearst to assist him in finding his daughter, Patty, who had been kidnapped on February 4. Dorothy, before that weekend, had never heard of either Randolph or Patty Hearst.

  "Would you help us? We're desperate," Hearst pleaded with Dorothy. He would fly her out and pay whatever price she requested for her services.

  "I don't take money, Mr. Hearst. There's no price for a child."

  During that weekend Dorothy had watched coverage of the kidnapping on television. All she knew was that a teenage girl had been taken and the girl's parents had money. Dorothy agreed to fly to San Francisco and work under hypnosis for two days. She would bring two people with her, she told Hearst, so she would need fare and rooms for three: Dorothy, Vicaro, and Dr. Ribner, her psychic guide and interrogator. Carmen A. Orechio, Director of Public Safety for the town of Nutley, cooperated by allowing Detective Vicaro to accompany Dorothy.

  Hearst agreed, and the trio flew to California. For two days Ribner and Vicaro worked with Dorothy and the FBI, going over clues and details of Patty's life that might trigger something in Dorothy's psyche. Dorothy spent hours under hypnotic trance, being interrogated about places and people she had never heard of or seen.

  They worked while hundreds of agents, detectives, and police across the country built a network of communication in the most publicized kidnapping the world had witnessed since the Lindbergh child had been reported missing.

  In her hotel room perched over the bay, Dorothy searched for Patty. She could do little more than say the girl was still alive, frightened, and hidden in a place that was dark, like a prison cell. "There is a small light in the room," sh
e explained. "It's dark like a closet."

  Time and again she saw the girl alive in a dark cell. She could describe the room with some accuracy of detail, but she could not determine its whereabouts.

  Dorothy left San Francisco to work on other cases, telling Hearst and the FBI that she would work on his daughter's case from her home. But it was not until five months later that she had a psychic run-in with Patty Hearst while searching for the bodies of two men in central Pennsylvania.

  On July 20, Dorothy had been in Hollidaysburg, Pennsylvania, looking for the bodies of Richard Wyler and Alfred Sutley, New Jersey and Long Island businessmen whose single-engine Beechcraft had plunged into the night somewhere between Cincinnati and Teterboro, New Jersey, on July 10.

  Ruth Wyler, wife of forty-nine-year-old victim, had contacted Dorothy from her Westwood, New Jersey, home. She explained to Dorothy that the last time the men had been heard from was from the Flight Service Station at Johnstown, Pennsylvania, not far from Altoona, at 8:00 P.M. on July 10.

  Despite the combined efforts of the Federal Aviation Administration and local and state police, as well as a five-state search by the Civil Air Patrol, the plane had not been found, Mrs. Wyler reported.