Dorothy Allison - A Psychic Story

by A Psychic Story (lit)

  News spread quickly in the quiet communities that the psychic's predictions had come to pass. Dorothy was in Florida working on the other case she had taken on when she heard that Debbie had been found. She had several other cases demanding her help, so the success of the Kline case gave her a new boost of energy.

  A confession to kidnapping and rape came from Richard Dodson the following day. At the same time he named Ronald Henninger as Debbie's murderer. As Dorothy had foreseen, plenty of doubles were involved, including double rapist-murderers.

  After Debbie's burial, the community continued its tug-of-war over the use of the psychic. Different religious groups had their own reasons for either not wanting her to be credited or wanting her to receive proper reward for her work. In an interview in the Public Opinion, Sergeant Hussack said he was not one to join the bandwagon of accolades.

  "To the best of my knowledge," he told reporter Marie Lanser, "she hasn't helped us. We weren't pursuing her predictions - we weren't relying on Mrs. Allison."

  The following Wednesday's edition ran two letters from irate citizens, shaking an angry finger at Hussack, under the headline of "State Police Said Unfair to Mrs. Allison." Both letters were from Chambersburg residents who did not know the Klines personally. One said "Give credit where it is due - to Mrs. Allison. May God bless Mrs. Allison as she continues the fine work she does of helping police find missing children."

  In pointing out that Sergeant Hussack was "downplaying Mrs. Allison's role," the same writer enumerated all the details given by the psychic and the consequent discoveries. Dorothy had a strong support base.

  But was God on her side? In this religious community it was a controversial question.

  As far as the Klines were concerned, God was a topic better left alone. Jane Kline declined to discuss the subject. For months she had placed Debbie's picture on her white Bible, always left open on the mantel. Everyday the desperate mother took hold of the Book and prayed. She read till she could feel no more.

  Richard Kline said, "This kind of thing makes us wonder. Something like this happens and you don't know which way to turn. Feels like a fence walker: either side looks wrong."

  Both of the Klines credited Dorothy with being the strongest influence in locating their daughter. One of the local Methodist ministers, however, took exception. In an article entitled "Psychics Forbidden in Biblical Times," Reverend Glen A. Miller of Greencastle saw the psychic's involvement as an omen of universal bad times.

  After thanking the Lord for returning Debbie's body, he went on to say "that it is recorded in I Samuel 28" where "Saul wanted to hear from God. He sought answers in the appointed ways and God refused to give answers. His refusal came because of wickedness and disobedience in the government." So Saul sought a medium.

  The minister emphasized that psychics are forbidden in other parts of the scriptures, as well. "It is a sad commentary on the spiritual level of our nation when psychics are called upon to give answers."

  And yet another prominently placed argument was run by a concerned pastor from State Line, Pennsylvania. Pastor Fisler of Trinity United Brethren Church wrote that the Record Herald had given "extensive coverage to Dorothy Allison and her role," overlooking the "community prayer service held at the Antrim Faith Baptist Church on January 6, 1977."

  Reminding the readers that "God can still perform miracles" and that "if you want an amazing turn of events, consider the stated purpose of that January 6 prayer service and what actually happened last week when the suspect from the Franklin County Detention Center stepped forth to show authorities where Debbie's body was buried.

  "It seems to me that prayer was answered explicitly. It would be good to see headlines that say 'God Answered Prayer' instead of continual headlines telling about a psychic's predictions."

  Dorothy was irritated by all the religious hooplah. It was her being called a devil woman that had triggered fear in the incarcerated suspect, however. She felt that perhaps, in this case, being partnered with the "devil" was a godsend.

  The Washington Township Police made Dorothy an honorary member of the department and presented her with a badge.

  In February stories about Dorothy began to appear over the AP wires across America, in police journals, and in the Star and National Enquirer. Each month she would receive hundreds of letters begging for her help. All the letters were handled by Lubertazzi and his wife. Many of the letters would be from spouses whose "better halves" had absconded with their children. "I know they've got to be in the Pittsburgh area," the plea would say, "couldn't you help me find them? Look at these faces, wouldn't you miss them too?"

  ~~~~~~~

  Chapter 6

  When Kathy Hennessy woke up on March 5, 1977, the Saturday morning before her birthday, she was full of expectation and excitement. The next day she would have her party. The brown-eyed child with long brown hair decided, as she sat atop her bed, that she would make a list on her typewriter of presents she wanted, and she would include a present for her brother.

  The house was quiet. Her five year old brother, Spanky, was still sleeping. Carol, her mother, was at the Deborah Heart and Lung Center in Brown Mills, where she worked as a nurse's aide. Kathy's tall, lean father, Sergeant John Hennessy, was sound asleep after working the night shift at McGuire Air Force Base. Kathy knew better than to make too much noise, averting the ire of her sleeping father, who wouldn't awaken till sometime late in the afternoon.

  Kathy was a precocious, lively seven-year-old, who had a reputation for being intelligent and brave. One neighbor recalled the summer before when she was bitten on the leg by a dog.

  "Blood gushed out, but Kathy was very calm," the friend said. "I drove her to the hospital because her mother Was at work, and doctors had to stitch the wound.

  "But Kathy was able to tell us her daddy's telephone number where he worked at McGuire AFB, as well as her mother's number. Even the nurse said how brave she was. The only question asked was if she was going to lose her leg," the neighbor reported.

  Quietly the slender girl slipped into the den with her child-sized typewriter. She put the machine on a small table in front of the television and proceeded to write a story about a girl friend who had angered her the day before. At the same time she watched cartoons and waited for her brother to awaken so they could go to the park and play.

  That Saturday was special for many residents of Pemberton Township. The weather gave people reason to believe that winter was on the wane. The skies cleared, and clouds gave way to a radiating sun. Some thirty miles south of Trenton, New Jersey's capital, Pemberton Township can be a bleak spot in winter, located as it is on the perimeter of New Jersey's rural pine barrens, an area dotted with lakes and streams and mostly sandy soil.

  Locals welcomed the warm day that allowed them to escape the monotony and bleakness of the military-base architecture that dominates the pre-Revolutionary town. McGuire Air Force Base and adjoining Fort Dix are the largest employers in the area, seconded only by berry farming and picking, which accounts for a sizeable migrant-worker influx each year.

  But by the end of that sunny afternoon grim newspaper headlines in the Burlington County Times all but banished the day's pleasures: "Br. Mills girl killed, dumped in lake."

  Two women, a nursing student and her fiance's teen-age sister, had been out walking that afternoon around the lake known as Lake-in-the-Woods and frequently referred to as Hidden Lake. In a wooded area sometimes used as a picnic site, the lake was located just below a hill known by winter sledders as Suicide Hill. While enjoying the day, the two women discovered the body of a little girl floating facedown in the shallow waters of a trickling rill.

  The pair ran to their nearby home in the Brown Mills section of Pemberton and phoned the police. The two women and the fiance's mother ran back to the site to see if any aid could help the child and to wait for the arrival of the police.

  Because the body was found six hundred feet out of the township and on Fort Dix property, the i
nvestigation was spearheaded by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and assisted by nonfederal forces. The federal agents in charge of the investigation came from the Fort Dix military police, the Criminal Investigation Division (CID) of Fort Dix, and the office of Security Investigation at McGuire Air Force Base. The nonfederal forces were headed by the Pemberton Township Police Department with support from the Burlington County prosecutor's office, and the New Jersey State Police.

  The unidentified body was a grim sight. When Dr. Arthur Webber arrived from his post at Walson Army Hospital, he found "the body had no heartbeat or pulsebeats ... it was cold and pale." He pronounced the child dead.

  The little girl was naked from the waist down, and her red-and-blue checked sweater was pushed up beneath her arms. Blue shorts were found ten feet away from the body, turned inside out, the zipper down and broken. A pair of underpants, also inside out, were caught on a twig in the water. Bruises and cuts covered the child's face and body.

  The corpse was removed and taken to the army hospital where an autopsy would be performed that night by Dr. Joseph DiLorenzo, the Burlington County Medical examiner.

  The Fort Dix team heading the investigation at the site of the child's demise had no forensic pathological experience; hence, when Lieutenant Detective Richard Serafin, the Pemberton policeman heading the casework, arrived on the scene, he had no chance to look for clues as the body had been removed and the evidence improperly marked. The crime scene was contaminated.

  News of the murder spread and consumed the community with instant terror and fear. Word of a slain child channeled through the massive military post and throughout the town. For several hours the local radio blared news of the death, trying to identify the lost child.

  Helicopters buzzed like hungry vultures over the wooded area, looking for any clues that would lead to the girl's murderer. Federal agents scoured the vicinity while bloodhounds clawed their way through the underbrush. Both on and oft the post, agents and police began the long, arduous task of interviewing anyone and everyone who might have been in the area that bright sunny day when Kathy Hennessy was raped and murdered less than half a mile from her home.

  When Carol Hennessy returned home from work around 6:30 P.M., she saw Spanky playing listlessly in the yard. When she inquired as to his sister's whereabouts, the little boy shrugged his shoulders.

  A next-door neighbor came running over to see if Kathy was home. She told Carol that she had heard news reports that a little girl's body had been found nearby that afternoon.

  Carol ran into the house, searching and yelling for her child. John Hennessy asked her what the urgency was about, and Carol told him about the radio reports.

  Within minutes Carol and John were on their way to the hospital to see if their child was the victim being reported.

  The post mortem results from Dr. DiLorenzo painted a gruesome, frightening picture of Kathy's last living moments. The time of death was placed between 1:00 and 2:00 P.M. Suffocation was given as the cause of death, possibly by a hand held over her mouth and nostrils.

  Dr. DiLorenzo told authorities, "There is no doubt there was a physical attack and that it was violent." The fact 'hat the child had been sodomized was not publicly reported, nor was the fact that seminal fluid was found in her mouth.

  More details magnified the horror. She had twenty-one lacerations of her face and body, fourteen black and blue marks beneath the skin - "probably from punches," Dr. DiLorenzo hypothesized - plus four abrasions or scrape marks.

  "Her skull," the doctor added, "had five separate bruises inflicted by punches."

  He went on to conjecture that "considerable force was used by either a punch or a good shot from the knee," as most of the contusions were on the child's belly and pelvic area.

  In trying to remove the child's shorts, the rapist-murderer left several deep trenches in her inner thighs.

  As Kathy's school picture ran on the front page of all the local papers, and as the hunt for the person who could murder a seven-year-old ensued, the town tightened its hatches. An aura of tension and fear pervaded the vicinity. Each media report stoked the flames of fear. This was especially true since reports from the autopsy were leaked; most details had been kept from the media.

  Lieutenant Serafin had his hands full. The fact that the murder was a rape, and a brutal one, acted like a powerful fuel, igniting paronoia in mothers, fathers, and teachers, all of whom suddenly took hysterical precautions with their children. Every reason anyone could find to be suspicious of his fellow man, whether neighbor or stranger, was apparent in the atmosphere. Wild reports of child molestations began to filter in at an increasing rate. The very air of the town seemed an incubator for fabricated stories.

  Several days into the investigation, Detective Bud Fifield was investigating an attempted abduction report. He approached a ten-year-old girl and asked if her mother was home.

  "The kid went bananas," Fifield reported. "She started screaming, 'Don't hurt me, please don't hurt me.'"

  Lieutenant Serafin cited the case of a Fort Dix six-year-old who had returned home from school and told her adult baby-sitter that she had seen a man pulling a little girl into the woods.

  "She described the man and his victim right down to the color of their clothes," the stout, blond lieutenant said.

  Nearly seventy-five agents, military police, and local and state police officers moved with lightning speed to the described area. Helicopters and hounds were brought in, as well.

  "We became suspicious when she told us the victim was wearing a coat," Serafin said. "The weather was hot that day. Too hot for the heavy coat this kid described."

  After two hours of searching, the child admitted to having made up the whole story, "to see what would happen."

  ***

  In an attempt to piece together Kathy's last hours, an appeal was made to any children or adults who might possess information about Kathy's actions between noon Saturday and 2:00 P.M. to call a special telephone number at Fort Dix.

  One report came in from a fourteen-year-old ninth grader from Pemberton Township High School. He and his father had been motorbike-riding that day in the area where the second grader's body was found. The father, a master sergeant at McGuire, confirmed that they had seen a girl "standing with a man with gray hair next to a light brown pickup truck." Since the pair looked like a father and daughter loading firewood into the truck, neither sensed anything odd about the sight.

  "A half hour later the truck drove off," the father said. "I don't know if anyone was in the vehicle with the driver."

  Upward of eighty men, mostly federal agents, made every effort to track down the man and the truck. Other calls led to a search for another man said to have been seen near the crime scene. Described as white, between forty and fifty years of age, the man was seen driving an old white car, probably a Ford.

  The FBI stressed the point that these people were not necessarily suspects, they were merely being sought for information.

  One unanswerable question was why Kathy had not been with her brother, Spanky. An FBI agent had interrogated the five-year-old twice and was unable to ascertain whether or not the boy had been with his sister. Spanky said he had been playing in the nearby park, but when the agent asked more specific questions, the boy answered in non sequiturs.

  Rumors abounded throughout the area that an AWOL recruit was being sought as chief suspect. Another widely accepted notion was that the murderer was a teen-aged boy.

  "There's so much pot smoking and narcotics around here," one woman neighbor railed.

  In the meantime Detective Serafin worked with the FBI in accumulating from their files every known sex offender within a fifty-mile radius.

  "This is a crude area," the detective said. "It's a melting pot of problems. Incest is prevalent here. Parent problems lead to juvenile delinquency problems."

  In 1975, the Pemberton Police Department had instituted a Juvenile Bureau, with two men working full time with children and t
een-agers. Since the beginning of the project, over two hundred fifty cases of child abuse had been reported. For a small area with a population of fifty thousand, the figure was high.

  Five days after the battered body of Kathy Hennessy was found, she was buried in an out-of-state military cemetery, following funeral services in a Brown Mills mortuary. John Hennessy, wanting to avoid any carnival atmosphere, insisted upon private services.

  The young parents, both in their late twenties, had been preparing to leave New Jersey, as the sergeant's time with the Air Force would terminate in May. Kathy was buried in North Carolina where her parents were from and where they would follow her some time that summer.

  John and Carol Hennessy had declined to talk with reporters while they endured the shock and horror of their daughter's death. A reward was posted for $5,000 to anyone offering information which would lead to the arrest and conviction of the murderer. The reward came from the hospital foundation of the famed Deborah Heart and Lung Center where Carol was employed.