Dorothy Allison - A Psychic Story

by A Psychic Story (lit)

  Jane, his short, stout, graying wife, moved in the world at a rocking-chair gait, the pace sometimes broken by moments of nervousness and fear. Jane cared and tended for her family with an eye out for the unexpected, even though it seldom visited them.

  Eighteen-year-old Debbie Kline, the third of the Kline children, graduated from Waynesboro High School in May of 1976. Debbie, an average student, had matured quietly; she was not one to exhibit sudden enthusiasms or emotional changes. She had her senior ring, which she treasured so much that it was safely sequestered in her jewelry box, and she had her diploma.

  The reticent brown-haired beauty had had one boyfriend, with whom she had broken up just prior to graduation. Most of her free time was spent to her family, and her strongest attachment was with her mother. Debbie would spend hours sitting beside her mother, leafing through magazines, quietly passing tune.

  Debbie summed up her life in a letter to a close friend by saying that "things are really starting to shape up. I got a job which I start in the beginning of July ... I got a beautiful burgundy Vega with only thirteen miles on it ... things are really looking good for me and I am enjoying every bit of it. I'm so happy ..."

  On Thursday, July 22, Debbie and her mother spent the morning thumbing through the Montgomery Ward catalog, looking for clothes that Debbie might wear at her sister's wedding in October. Like a winsome kitten, she played that rainy, warm morning with her mother and her two-year-old niece, who romped around the house in Debbie's white work shoes.

  Later Debbie went off to work at Waynesboro Hospital, only five minutes from her home. She called her mother around 4:30 P.M. to say that she had been paid and that she wanted to take her father out for pizza when she got home - a surprise she knew he would like.

  It had rained most of that day. The sky remained overcast during the afternoon and early evening. The trees and ferns were a deep, glistening green, while the dirt road in front of the Kline's house was a muddy stream. Late in the day Dick labored on their well-manicured lawn, tending flower beds and snipping weeds.

  Debbie usually got home around 6:30. When she hadn't arrived by that time, Jane stuck her head out the screen door and asked Dick if he'd seen or heard from her. He hadn't.

  "You can set time by her," Dick said. "Debbie's never late. Maybe she's having trouble with that new car."

  At 6:45, Dick and Jane got in their car and drove down the quiet rural road alongside the golf course. Then, forking to the right, they rode through a shady Revolutionary-period neighborhood to the hospital.

  Debbie's new Vega was not in the parking lot. Jane looked at her husband. Neither said a word. They drove the route Debbie usually took home, Jane's eyes darting in all directions, but they found nothing. Jane suggested the gas station, but no burgundy Vega was visible.

  Next, back through the small town and on to a girl friend's home, where Debbie sometimes stopped to visit. She had not been there that afternoon. Jane Kline was showing signs of fear.

  The couple headed back to their home via the same route. They passed a vacant lot where ten days before a minister's home, in the last days of construction, had burned to the ground. It was at the bottom of the hill below the Kline house. Jane noticed a township police car parked alongside the road. A lot of policemen had been in and around the razed site, so the Klines didn't think their presence odd.

  As they passed the site, however, Jane turned around to look into the lot through a break in the high hedge of bushes, and she glimpsed a burgundy car.

  Dick backed up instantly and they discovered that the car behind the bushes was Debbie's. Jane, now panic-stricken, took hold of her husband's arm for support. The policeman had been running a license check on the car, they learned, but it had proved futile, since the car was too new for the registration to have been processed.

  Nowhere could they see their daughter. Frantic, Jane and Dick began searching the area. The sun, still penetrating the cumulus cloud cover, allowed plenty of light for seeing into the bushes and trees. No trace of their daughter was found. They checked the two-story shaft of the still-standing fireplace and chimney, a last, lonely appendage of the destroyed house, but found nothing.

  How could Debbie have disappeared in daylight at the side of an often traveled residential road? The policeman, in words that would be repeated by uniformed men for the next several days, suggested that their daughter might have run away. Her parents knew she had not run away. It wasn't even a possibility.

  For several grueling weeks the Kline family hunted everywhere a possibility sprouted. The vaguest clue, like a hiker's report that he had smelled rotting flesh at a spot high in the mountains, was pursued by Dick Kline. State and local police gathered what little they had to go on and interviewed anyone who had seen or known Debbie Kline.

  A special phone installed by the Klines for information regarding Debbie's whereabouts proved both aggravating and fruitless. There were several crank calls, and others giving information that led only to disappointments and more sadness. One call came through that Jane believed was truthful. The whispering caller said nothing more than, "Debbie's dead," and hung up.

  Prayer sessions and public search parties were organized as the small town's own speculative fears were increased by circulating rumors. Headlines during the first period of the investigation reveal the agonizing pace the investigation took: "Bloodhound Search Futile"; "Third Search Launched for Missing Girl"; "Quarry Search Proves Fruitless"; "Search for Debbie Enters Sixth Week." State police, headed by Sergeant Hussack, had tried everything within possibility.

  "I don't think Debbie is going to come home alive," the frenzied mother told Marie Lanser of the Public Opinion, one of the two local newspapers. "In my mind I want Debbie home. I've got to see her, you know how you've got to see someone. But in my heart I don't think I'm going to see her."

  The distraught mother recalled her daughter's perilous entry into the world. Debbie had been born two months prematurely at 5:13 A.M. on Thanksgiving morning, after Jane had begun to hemorrhage internally. For two months the helpless infant had hung precariously between life and death. That battle she had won.

  "I sit in this room with my hand on the Bible and I pray," Jane said, rocking back and forth in her chair, bringing her hand to her tearing eyes.

  "It's like a nightmare," the saddened father said. "You want to wake up, but you can't wake up. You watch things like this on television, but it doesn't happen to you."

  "The nighttime's the worst," Debbie's twenty-four-year-old sister said. "You don't sleep."

  "It's a small world when you're trying to hide," Dick said. "But it's a big world when a person's lost."

  As the leaves on the trees began to color, and cooler weather eased in after the heat of August, the torment and anguish of the Kline family began to take its toll. Jane Kline became a recluse and spoke only through tears. Their children talked little, one sister often closing her door and crying herself into oblivion.

  For the Kline family holidays took on a different meaning, as would the notion of giving thanks. By late October Jane and Dick had decided that Thanksgiving would go unheeded.

  "We've got nothing to be thankful for," Jane said.

  It was the desperation that fermented over months of waiting that led the quiet, small-town family to examine the idea of using a source never before considered: a psychic. In November the Klines contacted several people claiming to have psychic powers. One psychic from Chicago mailed them a price sheet, demanding money before arrival. All the psychics they approached had a price. The Klines were willing to pay for further investigation, but money was not easy for them to find.

  Eldon Joiner, a close friend and golf pro, offered to help the family out. The son of a highly regarded Southern criminal lawyer, the white-haired, lively Georgian had moved to the quiet area around Waynesboro in 1945. He had been a successful lawyer, made some money, and after changing jobs a few times, finally opted for the gentlemanly profession of golf. Though a staunch di
sbeliever in psychics, the family friend was willing to help them try anything.

  The same day Lubertazzi received the letter from Jane Kline, he received a similar letter from a desperate mother in Florida whose daughter was reported missing on July 22, the same day Debbie Kline had vanished. All Dorothy's mail went to the Nutley Police Department. This method was used for her protection. Finding dead bodies was not particularly unsafe, but hunting murderers and rapists could jeopardize her life and the safety of her family. Consequently Dorothy's address and phone number were given out to few people. Lupo and his wife, Phyllis, would present Dorothy with the cases and requests, and according to her own schedule and the feelings she might get when looking over a case, she would choose which cases to work on.

  Dorothy immediately grabbed both the Kline case and the one in Florida, feeling that "doubles" would play an important role in them. She believed that information she might give to the Klines would be pertinent to the Florida case.

  When Dorothy phoned Jane Kline, she told the desperate mother that she would not be able to get to Waynesboro until some time after the New Year. With occasional visits made in connection with a Staten Island case, plus two other cases with which she was occupied, and a promised flight to Flordia to search for the missing twelve-year-old, her time was seldom her own. Over the past two years Dorothy's time had been consumed more and more by her work, which had long since taken on the fervency of a life's mission. Instead of three or four cases, she was handling up to ten cases at a time, some within the region, other via phone communication. Her dining room was stacked high with newspaper clippings and police photographs and data. Her phones, sitting side by side on the bookcase, would ring at all hours of the day or night, with calls giving her last minute details on cases or feedback from clues she had gotten psychically sitting at home in her den.

  In addition to her pressing schedule, with the holidays and her own birthday imminent, Dorothy felt she must focus on her family for the next several weeks, trying to keep travel at a minimum.

  Jane Kline offered to fly the psychic to nearby Harrisburg, but Dorothy refused, saying she would drive and save them the expense.

  "I feel something very important is going to happen around the thirteenth of January," Dorothy told Jane. "I'm not sure what it is, but in the end it will make sense. Do you know any Richards?" Dorothy inquired.

  "My whole family is Richards," Jane said nervously.

  "How about a Robert or a Ronald? I'm looking for a man whose middle name is either Lee or Leroy. There will be double letters in the last name of one of the men," Dorothy predicted,

  "One of the men?" Jane Kline queried.

  "Yes, there are two men involved. Your daughter was with two men," Dorothy told her.

  Dorothy proceeded to describe a car in the scene and an area where a building had burned recently. A building which she felt had belonged to a priest. A building with an outdoor oven standing.

  Yellow. Dorothy said she saw a great burst of yellow. Not flowers, but something that was expansive and brightly painted.

  "We need to find that yellow. It's important to where Debbie is right now," Dorothy said. "Also, have the police locate double bridges," Dorothy instructed, "because that's the route they took.

  "Mrs. Kline, I'm going to give you some dates," Dorothy told her. "Please write them down and see if they have any meaning to your family. This will help me know if I'm on the right track." Dorothy gave Jane four dates: October 2, October 11, December 3, and April 4.

  Dorothy received a call the next day from a Chambersburg reporter saying that he and another reporter would be available to her when she arrived in the area. The two veteran reporters, Bob Cox and photographer Ken Peiffer, saw the beginning of an exciting newspaper story, which two years later they would also publish as a book.

  It was not until January 22 that Dorothy traveled with Bob and their son Paul to Waynesboro. It was on a cold, bitter Saturday that the trio drove the five and a half hours across Pennsylvania. They went first to Chambersburg, where they were met by the two Record Herald reporters. They, in turn, drove the Allisons to the Kline house, where the entire family sat waiting in suspense.

  Dorothy's phone conversation had floored the grieving parents as they had instantly recognized some of Dorothy's clues. The burned house had to be the remains of the Moser house, where Debbie's car had been found. Moser, the Klines knew, was a minister, hence Dorothy's "priest" was nearly correct.

  The dates Dorothy had offered had surprised the family, as well. Three of the dates were family wedding days, one of which Debbie had been planning to attend in October. The fourth date was important only to Debbie: in her journal it was the day highlighted for her first date with her boy-friend.

  Dorothy arrived with a composite she had worked on with a Clifton, New Jersey, police artist. She had tried to see through the victim's eyes at the time of her struggle, hoping to have a picture of at least one of the perpetrators of the crime she knew to have taken place. When she met Dick Kline, however, she was startled. The composite she held in her hand looked like him.

  It's logical, she thought, that Debbie was reaching out for her father, whom she loved, in her last desperate moments.

  Jane Kline took Dorothy into Debbie's bedroom, letting the psychic feel articles of Debbie's clothing. Dorothy saw the shiny high-school ring and put it on her finger.

  "Let me wear this for a while," she asked the mother. "I feel it will bring me luck."

  Handling beloved possessions of victims often triggered strong impressions for the psychic. As with Doreen Carlucci's bracelet, Dorothy often found that these articles helped her feel sure she was on the right track. If an object did not seem to fit her feelings about a person, then she would question the veracity of those feelings or the genuineness of the article. She felt many tunes, too, that the auras of personal articles brought her luck, as she had said to Jane Kline. In this instance luck meant being certain that Debbie Kline was the person she had in focus.

  As soon as Dorothy had the ring, she felt that its owner no longer lived. She knew that Debbie Kline was dead.

  Paul Weachter, a young, dark, curly haired state trooper in his late thirties, waited with the family as Dorothy prepared herself psychically and physically for the day's hunt. Weachter had not worked on the Kline case before but had been assigned to work with the psychic over the weekend, since the trooper who had been working on the case was on vacation. Bright and energetic, Weachter was willing to try anything Dorothy requested. Along with the two newspaper reporters and Dorothy's family, he helped her interpret clues.

  Others, however, were not as willing to acquiesce to her visions. Sergeant Hussack, Weachter's superior, let it be known that he was not in accord with the psychic's investigatory procedures. What Dorothy did not yet know was that her presence, in less than one week, was to stir a wide wave of public skepticism.

  While everyone stood in the Kline's living room, where pictures of children and grandchildren were placed all around, Dorothy pulled out a set of long underwear and went into Debbie and her sister's room for a quick change. She was not going to take any chance of getting frostbite on this bleak January day.

  The Kline children stood silently as Dorothy reappeared, her short, solid body wrapped in a bright ski parka and black knitted pants, and a colorfully woven ski cap pulled over her forehead. She smiled and motioned her arm as if leading troops forward. Trooper Weachter followed Dorothy to his car, where Bob, Paul Allison, and the two reporters joined them. A second car, containing friends of Dick Kline, followed close behind. This group was openly skeptical, questioning Dorothy's moves and vision at every turn. It seemed as though a sports event were about to begin.

  Dorothy's first instinct was to head for a dumping ground in the area. She tried to describe to Paul Weachter how she envisioned the dump, but any site would be difficult to recognize under two or more feet of snow. Following her instructions, the officer drove to a hill where a small dumpi
ng area was located. Rather than point to the ground, though, Dorothy indicated a house at the bottom of the hill, which she felt was important to Debbie. It was the home of Debbie's former boyfriend.

  One of the group who had come in the second car was Eldon Joiner. He asked Dorothy why she couldn't just tell the police where to go and find the girl. Dorothy explained that her psychic sense did not work that way.

  "I have to proceed at a pace that takes me closer and closer to feelings I can identify within me. When something is right, I know it," she told the Southerner. "I know this girl is dead." Eldon blanched at the psychic's brutal pronouncement.

  "Surely you don't just see that?" he wondered in amazement.

  "I do just see that. If she was in water, I could tell you where she is and what time we'd find her. But she didn't drown. So, if you want to follow us around, you better keep quiet and quit complaining."