Joiner admired Dorothy's confidence, even if he didn't particularly like her tongue.
Dorothy repeated to Weachter and Joiner her older statement to Jane Kline, that she saw an outside oven somewhere, and something "burnt."
"Burnt?" Joiner asked.
"No, I see the word "burnt," not necessarily something burned."
The men were confounded. "What kind of oven?" Weachter asked.
"I don't think it's still used. What's more important," Dorothy went on, "is the yellow I keep seeing. We have to find all that yellow. I saw it the first time I spoke with Jane Kline. We'll find her just beyond that yellow. Her body is near a blue swimming pool. That's what we should be looking for."
Joiner looked at the state trooper and shrugged.
When they arrived at another field surrounded by dense trees on the outskirts of the town, Dorothy began to get a picture of the man she felt had murdered Debbie Kline. Paul Weachter was walking next to her. She told him that the man she saw had straight, thinning hair worn combed to one side. He was about five feet eight, but she reminded Weachter that height was not her best dimension.
"He's thin, maybe no more than a hundred forty pounds. I see him with someone who looks to me like an animal." And she made a face of disgust.
"Wait, I feel you should know something about one of these men," Dorothy suddenly said. "Yes, one is known by the police now. I think he recently tried to rape someone, but she managed to stop him. Something went wrong. The police somewhere in the area know him," she said confidently.
Dorothy kept walking slowly, her short legs kicking up puffs of snow as she tried to focus on the man she saw in a prison cell. Once again she stopped. "I'm beginning to see this beast. This man doesn't deserve to be alive."
Weachter immediately showed Dorothy pictures of suspects that he was carrying in his car. Dorothy flipped through the stack quickly, stopping once and handing the selected photograph to the officer.
"This is him. If his name is Robert, Richard, or Ronald, you've got number one."
"You're sure there were two ...," he started.
"I see what I see. I know there were two men," she insisted, "and neither of them had ever seen Debbie Kline before that day. It's the other animal that has the double letters in his last name. God protect us from people like this. This guy" - pointing to the picture Weachter held - "will lead us to the other bastard. You're not going to want to see what these guys did to that girl."
Weachter felt chilled and excited by what he sensed Dorothy was seeing. The photo he held was of a man he knew was sitting in jail. His name was Richard Lee Dodson, a thirty-year-old from nearby Greencastle. He wondered if Dorothy knew this man was being held in the Franklin County Prison on a charge of attempted rape of a twenty-six-year-old housewife in Fort McCord.
Richard Lee Dodson, as Dorothy had sensed, was not a neophyte criminal. His dealings with the Franklin County juvenile authorities had begun at the age of thirteen in 1959, and his dalliance with the authorities had continued through a series of altercations, until 1972, when twenty-six-year-old Dodson, then married with four children, was picked up for raping a fourteen-year-old girl. The rape charge was dismissed in plea bargaining, leaving him guilty of indecent-liberties charges.
Then, two days before his sentencing, Dodson's house had mysteriously burned to the ground, killing his wife and three of his children. His still-breathing four-year-old son was severely burned and permanently institutionalized in a burn clinic. People thought it odd that Dodson had been home at the time but had escaped unscathed.
He was, in any case, sentenced to four to six years in the Illinois Correctional Institute. Later he was transferred to Vienna Prison, where his cellmate was Ronald Henninger.
Henninger's record made the justice system look like a hunk of Swiss cheese. Henninger had eight AWOL counts against him before his dismissal from the navy; later he accrued up to eighteen years of prison tenancy, though paroles were twice awarded him.
After his second parole in February, 1973, he was charged with fleeing police, aggravated assault, several motor-vehicle violations, and murder. The violations were part of an attempted escape from a rifle-shooting incident, in which Henninger killed Francis "Frank" Fenton, a murder which he had been hired to commit. After two trials Henninger pleaded guilty to involuntary manslaughter and was sentenced to three to ten years in Joliet Prison. In 1975, he was transferred to Vienna Prison, and paroled on April Fool's Day, 1976.
Henninger's daughter, Lome, who at the age of five had been shipped off to a foster home with her two other siblings, found her father in Vienna Prison after years of not knowing anything about him. Lome, then eighteen and beautiful, was introduced by her father to his cellmate, Richard Dodson, with whom she fell in love. Dodson's parole, on May 26, 1976, was partly arranged by Henninger's claiming him as a relative. Lome and Richard were married shortly after his parole, when he was full of promises and new horizons.
In December, Dodson took a job with a local oil delivery company. It was while making the rounds through a Fort McCord neighborhood that he stopped at a house under the pretense of delivering oil on a cold winter day and attacked the attractive woman who answered the door. The rape was thwarted, however, by the woman's resistance. Dodson left, warning her he would be back to finish the job.
It was Trooper Paul Weachter who had been summoned to the Fort McCord woman's home. She identified Dodson, and Weachter persuaded her to testify against him in court. Leaving the quiet residential home, Weachter noticed an oil truck passing through the street, slowing down in front of the house he had just left.
He stopped the truck and found that the driver fit the description the woman had given. It was Dodson, coming back for more. That afternoon he was charged, without bail, with attempted rape. That was on January 13 - the day Dorothy had predicted to Jane Kline as a significant date.
Weachter led Dorothy and the psychic posse back to his car, telling her that he was planning to go to the jail later. After hours of searching, Joiner and his friends also decided to return to their warm houses. Dorothy was glad to see the skeptics leave her in peace. However, after years of working with police, she preferred honest skeptics like Eldon Joiner to people who pretended to trust her. She knew she would have him convinced by the end of that week.
All the hours that Dorothy trudged through the snow, following her psychic instincts, the townspeople were listening to radio reports of her arrival, each station promising to be the first to get news of Debbie Kline's discovery. Believers and skeptics alike listened from their homes, from the hospital, the jail, and businesses. A small contingent of nonbelievers had voiced their opinion that the psychic was a "devil woman," and soon their views developed into a small controversy carried over into the local newspapers.
As Appolonia had told her, it was God who gave Dorothy the gift of vision, and she had never doubted that. God worked in odd ways, allowing so many children to see so much tragedy. But Dorothy knew it wasn't God who took those children; it was human ignorance and perversity that destroyed lives, and she only wanted to help the victims safely on their way to God's protection.
As Dorothy had matured, with the help of believers, practice, and hypnosis, she had begun to see that her life had taken on a special meaning. She felt she was a messenger of St. Anthony, whose image never left her. She would spend her time helping the totally helpless and innocent, especially children. No one, Dorothy felt, spent enough time worrying and caring for children.
In fact she believed that those people claiming she was a "devil woman" could spend their tune better by communicating with their children and families. She was deeply saddened by this undercurrent of bigotry, realizing its potential power.
But at the moment Dorothy was more concerned with a new mental picture she was getting - a vision of trouble at the jail.
"Someone is going to try and break. Warn the guards," she told Weachter. "Today is very dangerous for a policeman. Someone at the ja
il had better be careful. I get the feeling of being unable to breathe. It's funny, it's not like being buried or underground or something like that ... just unable to breathe. It's like being smothered."
Cox and Peiffer took down the words verbatim. Weachter absorbed the information, not knowing what to do with it.
As it happened, a jailbreak was attempted at the Franklin County Detention Center at 4:50 P.M., just three hours and twenty minutes later. A sixteen-year-old inmate grabbed a matron and tried to choke her to death in order to secure her keys. As it was reported on the front page of the next day's paper, another guard, overhearing the scuffle, rescued her, breaking the grip of the boy's hands on her neck, thus thwarting the escape attempt.
Weachter, in the meantime, made certain that all the inmates of Franklin County Prison heard the news of the visiting psychic on the radio. And the next day the young state officer, having heard of the predicted escape attempt coming to pass, would go beyond the call of duty. He went to visit Richard Lee Dodson.
Weachter met with Dodson in a small, windowless room while a guard stood at the door. Dodson was nervous, his cocksure attitude having diminished in the past week. The Kline case, after so many months of dormancy, seemed to be boiling again. On the table Weachter had placed various newspaper articles Dorothy had given him which covered some of her previous cases. Weachter asked Dodson to leaf through the material. The officer was not going to use any other force than logic.
"I've spent the last two days working with this woman," he said to the prisoner, pointing to a picture of Dorothy and her dog Jason. "Do you believe in psychics, Dodson?" he asked.
"Guess so," he shrugged. "They say she's a devil woman."
"Maybe so," Weachter said. "She's got me convinced, though. She told us there was going to be a break yesterday in the jail. Did you hear that?"
Dodson nodded. "Yeah, they've been buzzing it up all morning."
Weachter was glad everyone had heard about Dorothy's prediction coming true. Next he took a stack of photos from his briefcase and held them before the accused rapist.
"I handed these to Mrs. Allison yesterday. She looked through them and picked out one picture." He let the photo of Dodson drop to the table. "She handed me this picture and said, 'If his name is Richard, Robert, or Ronald, you've got your man!' " Weachter stared directly into Dodson's eyes. "Do you have anything to say?"
Dodson looked away.
"She also said that Debbie Kline's body was next to a blue swimming pool. Does that mean anything to you?"
Dodson said nothing.
"She also said there were two of you and that both of you had been involved in rape before, and that now you hated each other. Well, what do you have to say?" Weachter pursued.
"Nothing, damn it. I never met the woman before." His voice sounded angry. "She's no cop. She can't accuse me of a thing."
"Right. She can't, but we can. You just think about it for a while and anytime you want to talk, just let the guard know. I'll listen anytime."
Weachter got up, picked up the scattered papers, and left the prisoner staring at the blank wall.
Dodson sat in his prison cell, the world slipping away from him. Anger permeated his thoughts as his chances for freedom grew dimmer.
Henninger, his mentor, was in prison in Illinois, but Dodson had learned from his wife that Henninger intended to return to Pennsylvania and finish him off.
Dodson might have wondered how it could be that he had managed to dance with the law for so many years, winning so much of the time, only to be hounded by a devil woman. He must have reflected on that drunken summer afternoon in July when he and Henninger had picked out Debbie Kline coming out of the hospital, and how Henninger had decided to show Dodson "how to really pick up a woman with ease." And how Henninger had slit her throat after they had both had sex with her, and how she had stood silent before them, as if defying them in death. Whatever his thoughts, Dorothy was zeroing in on him quickly, and so, too, were the police.
At the Kline house Jane and Dick wondered what kind of success this psychic would have. Would this woman find their daughter? Could she, in two days, do what dozens had been unable to do in six months? Was it worth being hopeful, only to be disappointed again?
Before Dorothy left for the hotel with her husband and son, Jane cornered her in Debbie's room.
"Mrs. Allison, I just want to know the truth," Jane said in her nasal, Southern accent. "Please, I beg you, tell me the truth. Is my daughter still alive? Do you see her living?" the poor mother struggled.
For the first time, Dorothy was going to break one of her cardinal rules.
"No," Dorothy said, taking the woman's hand into her own. "I'm afraid I don't. All I can tell you is that in my vision I feel she died quickly, not long after you missed her." The grieving mother sat on the bed and wept
Before Dorothy left on Sunday evening, she told Weachter and the two reporters that they should keep "doubles" in mind. The area in which Debbie would be found had double letters in it; the incidents she predicted might happen twice; and the murderers, of which there were two, had performed such crimes twice before.
She told Dick Kline that she sensed this was the second murder in Ms family, that he had had a close relative killed not too far from where Debbie was taken. Surprised, Dick corroborated the fact that his uncle had been mysteriously murdered only seven years before in the general area in which Debbie had disappeared.
Before she drove back to Nutley with Bob and Paul, the tired and cold psychic told Weachter that Debbie had not been buried. She would be found on a high spot from which great expanses could be seen and that she would be on some sort of "line." Again, she was bothered by a large plastic sheet that she was beginning to think might be the swimming pool.
"Look in two directions," she told him. "If we've been looking south, then head north tomorrow and see if any of the clues fit."
She also promised to undergo hypnosis with Dr. Ribner on the following Friday. At that tune she would "get in the car with Debbie" and drive the last miles with her.
"Hopefully, I'll never make it to Ribner's," she said, hugging everyone good-bye. "I think you're going to find Debbie this week. Before Friday."
Monday's Record Herald headlines were about Dorothy's prediction of the attempted break and her prophecy that Debbie Kline would be found within days. A photo was run of Dorothy holding a Princeton T-shirt, which had been given her by the Hearsts. It had belonged to their daughter, Patty. The article accompanying the photo described the psychic's more famous involvements.
Richard Dodson read the papers and thought about Weachter's words and Dorothy's visions. That afternoon he told the guard to have word sent to Weachter that he had something to say to the officer.
On Tuesday evening Dorothy spoke with reporter Bob Cox about further feelings she was getting from her home regarding the case. She told him that she felt something "drastic" would happen in the area within six hours. As the reporter told it in the paper, she said, "I see a brick building. Watch the corners. There could be a knifing. The building looks like the one I saw before."
As before, Dorothy's prediction was accurate.
"At 10:45 P.M. a second assault on a matron at Franklin County Detention Center was made by an inmate," Cox wrote. "It came less than four hours after the telephone call."
Again Dorothy had foreseen an event at the jail in which Richard Dodson was being held. She was focusing so acutely on the prisoner that she was picking up other prisoners' vibrations. Weachter was excited by the news.
It was on Wednesday morning that Paul Weachter and three other officials drove with Richard Dodson to the point where he claimed he could find Debbie Kline's body. Heading north over the double low bridges on Route 16, they drove fifty-one miles toward the Franklin-Huntington county lines. As they approached the mountainous area where the body was supposedly located, they passed a barrage of yellow warning signs and then, a large yellow billboard advertising rooms at "Burnt Cabins
," a small resort area.
Dodson pointed them to an area high on the mountainside that commanded a view of the valleys. This was where they had taken the quiet, frightened girl that summer day and shattered her life. Now, snow covered everything.
They parked the car and walked toward a pile of rubble. One of the policemen picked up a blue plastic swimming pool that was on top of a pile and saw a white shoe and part of a leg sticking out.
The body, essentially a skeleton now, was dressed in a white pants suit and white shoes. The remains could not be readily identified as male or female, and the autopsy would have to be delayed until the body had thawed. Cumberland County Coroner Dr. Robert J. McConanghie eventually attributed death to hemorrhaging from a neck wound.
"It's hard to pinpoint," he said. "When you don't have skin or tissue or a windpipe to work with. There was evidence of blood around the neck."
Using teeth, chest X-rays, hair, and clothing found on the corpse, the police were able to identify the body as Deborah Sue Kline's.
Dorothy Allison - A Psychic Story Page 14