Dorothy Allison - A Psychic Story

by A Psychic Story (lit)

  "You son of a bitch," she said, poking the man in the stomach, "that was your old police station." Nine years before, the Pemberton Police Department had still been in its Revolutionary-period edifice, on land that was now vacant.

  In the next hour Dorothy's clues and descriptions led the two cars out of the Pemberton area and north toward where Serafin and the FBI knew their possible suspect lived. Soon she had directed them within a block of the man's home, where the search had to be stopped as they were beyond the boundaries of their own official jurisdiction.

  Serafin led the psychic caravan to the local police department, where the police chief escorted them into an empty courtroom. The first thing that hit them was the pungent odor of fresh paint.

  "There's my painter." Dorothy pointed to a man standing on a ladder in the courtroom, repairing the ceiling.

  The group sat around a large meeting table, Fitzwilliam at its head. Everyone looked worn from the fatigue of driving around for hours.

  "Mrs. Allison," the agent began, "an this driving around is very interesting, but is it getting us anywhere?"

  "It's impossible for me to tell what it is I'm after," Dorothy explained. "I have to follow feelings and visions as they come, as they lead from one to another. I'm not even convinced that this man I'm describing is the murderer. But it can't be denied that I have pinpointed this man out of the blue. For what reason, I don't really know."

  "Who do you feel killed Kathy Hennessy?" Fitzwilliam looked Dorothy in the eyes.

  Dorothy did not answer for a moment. The five men present sat dragging on their cigarettes and waiting to hear her response.

  "His first name is David," she said, slicing the air with her decisiveness.

  Suddenly, with easy abandon, Dorothy had left her vision of the man whose middle name was Harry, and had taken the investigation back to the name of a man who, unbeknown to the psychic, had been a prime suspect from the second day of the investigation.

  "Can you describe this man at all?" Serafin pursued.

  "Yes. I feel this man was someone who knew Kathy's father. I feel that Kathy knew him, too, that he had played with her before and she trusted him. That's why she went with him," Dorothy said.

  "What does he do?" Serafin asked.

  "I don't know ..." Dorothy hesitated. "I mean, I see him working, but I can't get a clear picture of what he's doing."

  "What do you mean?" one of the agents asked.

  "I see him working," Dorothy tried to explain, "but I can't figure out what he's doing. He keeps walking into a dark room, like a closet."

  "What's he doing in there?" Serafin asked, pushing her into her vision.

  "Well," Dorothy thought for a moment, "he's got on gloves. I don't know what he does with them. Thin gloves, not like boxing gloves. The kind you'd wear if you worked with chemicals or washed a lot of dishes."

  "Maybe he's working with photography?" one agent suggested.

  "No, I got it." Dorothy said. "He's a janitor. That's it. He works as a janitor."

  The men looked around at one another, both skeptical and astonished at the woman's pronouncement. If indeed she had David Geary in mind, then one clue seemed wrong. David Geary was not employed. He had been out of work for a while. Nevertheless Fitzwilliam felt she was on the right track.

  "This guy is a drug user, too," Dorothy added. "In fact, with his personality, the only way he made friends was by selling drugs."

  Indeed David Geary had been involved with the sale of drugs, especially grass. Knowing all the facts, Fitzwilliam was willing to bet on Dorothy's vision of David Geary.

  But Serafin had a potentially explosive situation on his hands. In his opinion there were two prime suspects, barring the man from the naval base. Careful not to talk about the men who were most suspected of the rape-murder, especially with the Hennessy family, Serafin had not been sure how to pursue his inclination. The man Dorothy described fit the bill of David Geary. The other person Serafin suspected was an old school friend of Carol Hennessy named Phil, who lived in Pennsylvania and whom John had gotten to know well.

  Phil had been expected on that fatal Saturday, but had never appeared or called to say he wasn't coming. An intelligent, handsome young man, Phil had a reputation for being volatile. Little Spanky had even mentioned that Phil had beaten Kathy for being bad, although no one else had ever seen him beat the children. Serafin knew that a "beating," in the eyes of a child, could cover anything from a slap on the rear to a punching.

  It was impossible, Carol Hennessy insisted, that one of her oldest friends would hit her children in a drastic manner, much less be capable of the murder. She would hear nothing of the matter.

  But the police could not discount the possibilities. In any investigation the family or friends of those involved are open to suspicion. These could include people so completely trusted that they were often underfoot in the victim's home. In fact, many a criminal investigation has been contaminated by allowing too much traffic in such a home.

  At the end of Dorothy's day in Pemberton, the investigation had seemingly moved nowhere. The man she had psychically pursued probably had nothing to do with the Hennessy case, but all admitted that she had found a man the police believed to be a child molester from her home a hundred miles north.

  The chief of police in the suspect's area refused to have the man in the brown house confronted merely on the suspicions of a psychic. The man was eventually interviewed, however, by Serafin and Forte. His alibi for March 6 was solid and beyond suspicion. They would no longer look at him as a suspect.

  After a barbeque at the Serafins' home, Dorothy and her husband drove north to Nutley, exhausted from the tensions and apprehensions of the day. Dorothy would make one more trip to the town, since she wanted to meet Kathy's parents, to see if she could derive any other feelings from them. Most particularly Dorothy was anxious to meet Spanky, whom everyone insisted knew nothing, but whom Dorothy had seen in one of her visions as "the boy in the bushes."

  Dorothy felt depressed working on the Hennessy case. Her personal philosophy, however, was to keep her worries and sadness hidden. She had learned from being in numerous traumatized environments that her own personal emotions were best left for herself to handle, for better or worse. She would never let Serafin or the Hennessys see anything but the compassion she had for the family and the murdered victim, who had become part of the fabric of her soul.

  Serafin felt sad, too, working on the case. Each time he would look at his own little girl, a silent prayer would cross his lips. He had grown fond of Dorothy, welcoming her humor and candor. In her brief stay she had managed to amaze a bevy of skeptics.

  While Dorothy was working on the Hennessy case, one of the many calls she received for help was from a Greek family in Baltimore. On March 15, thirteen-year-old Gus Karavasalis disappeared. His parents, who had moved to the United States three years earlier, were frantic in a strange land and without sufficient resources.

  The state police, who had handled the case originally, had turned it over to the Youth Division of the Baltimore County Police, where Detective Al Darden, a lively, warm twenty-five-year-old patrolman now had charge of the case with fellow detective Bill Bendetto.

  Dorothy had worked with the Baltimore County Police Department the year before in trying to discover the identity of a girl's corpse that had been found along a road. When she received their call asking for help on the Karavasalis case, she was glad to oblige, having been treated kindly and with respect by the department. Also, as soon as she heard Darden discuss the missing teen-ager, she began to get strong positive feelings.

  "Wait, don't tell me too much," she stopped him. "I'm already getting vibes. That kid is alive and well. Don't give up," she said. "I'll have to come to Baltimore. I'm working on a case down in Pemberton Township next weekend, and I'll come to Baltimore after that. Tell the parents the kid is alive," she commanded Darden.

  The Youth Division had a lot of work on its hands, with 1,944 runaways in
Maryland that year alone. After ten days of looking for Gus, absolutely no information seemed to lead anywhere. But Darden took hope in Dorothy's promise that Gus was still alive.

  Dark, hirsute, and mature looking, Gus could easily pass for a teen-ager of eighteen or nineteen. The shy, diffident boy had run into some problems in school, having been caught smoking cigarettes earlier that fall. His family was brought before the assistant principal where Gus's aunt acted as interpreter for the non-English-speaking parents.

  Gus Karavasalis's parents were given to understand that their son would be sent to reform school if he were caught smoking again. Gus was humiliated that he had embarrassed his parents and caused them discomfort. Then, in March, he disappeared after getting caught again with a cigarette on school grounds.

  The despairing parents, who sat every night before their window silently hoping a miracle would return their son, had to rely on the help of the police and their detectives. They had seen the Nutley psychic on a television interview and begged the police to call her. The Youth Division was responsive to their needs, Darden and Bendetto working closely with the family. Alex, Gus's eighteen-year-old brother, searched almost daily with the police.

  The Greek community of Baltimore rallied to help the family. Everything was tried: newspapers, fliers, television, police, even the Cherry Pickers of Essex tried to help, but to no avail. Thousands of leads were received, but nothing came of them.

  Dorothy was excited to work on a case in which she felt certain the missing person was alive. It was seldom that a case came her way involving a missing person who had left of his own volition, or a kidnap victim who was still alive. In the next six months she would travel to Baltimore more than a dozen times. Bob, her husband, also of Greek background, helped to assuage the fears of the Karavasalis family. Dorothy's assurance that their son was still alive infused them with enough strength to continue the search day after day, month after month.

  Before Dorothy returned to Pemberton Township, she spent some time trying to discern more about the man she felt was the murderer. She reported to Serafin on the phone that she felt the young man lived in a trailer park, that he had been in jail before, that he was adopted or had a foster mother. Moreover he had never graduated from high school, had a hot temper, and someone near to him was either on crutches or in a wheelchair.

  Dorothy's descriptions at the moment seemed to lead directly to David Geary. When questioned by the FBI, Geary had played it cool and aloof, stating that he had been visiting his family the day of the murder. But Geary did live in a trailer, with a couple who drank heavily and refused to answer questions.

  Two things especially piqued Serafin's interest regarding Geary: first, the fact that the woman who lived in the trailer with him was in a wheelchair, and second, that Geary had visited John Hennessy on several occasions, selling him medicinal herbs like Tai Sticks.

  Serafin told the young parents that Dorothy felt Spanky knew something. John Hennessy had tried several times to place his son's location at the time of the murder. Everyone knew the two children were practically inseparable. Why had Spanky left his sister on that day?

  John Hennessy did feel that Spanky must have been to the crime scene because he knew exactly where to lead his father when the pair had walked in the woods the day after Kathy's murder.

  Dorothy suggested that the boy be brought to Dr. Ribner's office for hypnosis. John and Carol were willing, wanting to uncover any horrors that might be blocked by their son's emotions. But the FBI wouldn't allow it. They felt Ribner might be in cahoots with the psychic. If hypnosis was the next game plan, they would supply the doctor.

  Spanky was taken to a New York child psychologist who specialized in hypnotic therapy. The session, which lasted thirty minutes and cost the FBI $500, proved fruitless. The specialist announced that the boy was not susceptible to hypnosis. In a teletype to headquarters the agents reported to their superiors that policeman Serafin was responsible for the hypnosis idea, and that any further sessions would be on his shoulders.

  It was the following Saturday that Dorothy and her son, Paul, drove to Pemberton Township. Paul was in high school and had come to enjoy his mother's investigative jaunts. They drove directly to the Hennessys' home, where Carol and John awaited them with Serafin.

  Dorothy arrived with gifts for the little boy. She hugged the parents as if they had been longtime friends, careful not to be morose in Spanky's company.

  As they sat around the sunny den, Dorothy felt Spanky was on the verge of telling them something. He had been climbing on Paul's lap and then looking around at the adults, as if something was on his mind. Dorothy mentioned this to Serafin in confidence.

  Moments later the little boy, dressed in a T-shirt and shorts, climbed into Dorothy's lap. She smiled and gently bumped him up and down, laughing and talking with him. Suddenly Spanky stopped playing and threw his arms around Dorothy's neck.

  "I had a bad dream," he whispered in her ear. Dorothy felt her heart stop, anticipating what the little boy was about to say.

  She sat him up straight in her lap and gently coaxed him into telling her the dream.

  "What was the dream about?" she softly asked.

  "It was about my friend," he told her.

  "Oh. And who is your friend?" Dorothy asked.

  "My girl friend. Her name is Margaret," Spanky said.

  John and Carol, along with Serafin and Paul, stood breathlessly watching Dorothy gently assuage the fears and horrors that the little boy held within him. Tears began to form in his mother's eyes. Dorothy knew she would have to remain strong.

  Spanky told her that he had been playing in the woods with his friend. Playing with sticks and throwing rocks at a tree. But his friend left him to go off and play with someone else.

  "Who was the other person?" Dorothy asked.

  "A man. A mean man. He hit my friend." Spanky was suddenly on his feet, jumping up and down.

  "He hit her and jumped on her," the child screamed.

  Dorothy grabbed Spanky in her arms. "What did you do, Spanky? Don't worry, everything is okay."

  "I ran to my Daddy, but he was sleeping," Spanky said.

  "Why didn't you wake him up?" Dorothy pursued.

  "I couldn't," he said.

  "What did you do then?"

  "I ran back ..."

  "Back where?"

  "To the bushes. I went to the bushes. I didn't want anyone to hurt me," he told Dorothy, trembling with fear.

  Spanky sat wrapped in Dorothy's embrace, describing what he saw. He said that Margaret had mud on her knees, One moment she was on all fours, playing like a pig. Her eyes were closed, he said, and the man jumped on her behind.

  Carol Hennessy left the room. Tears streamed down Serafin's face as he leaned against the front door, averting his glance.

  Again Spanky jumped from Dorothy's reach and shouted as if he had a gun in his hand. "Bam bam," he shot. "Bambambambam," his imaginary gun shot into the air.

  "I shot the man! I shot him! I shot him!" the boy repeated, until Dorothy grabbed him and again he climbed in her lap. John Hennessy, his eyes unblinking, was in shock. Serafin had gone into the kitchen and was phoning the FBI, briefly telling them what had just transpired in the Hennessy den.

  Was Spanky talking from a dream? Had he seen the rape and murder of his own sister? When his father asked him to describe the man Margaret was with, Spanky said he couldn't remember. Later he began to change details of the story, embellishing it with fantastic details.

  It was decided, after Fitzwilliam had arrived and they had walked Spanky into the sylvan area where he led them directly over the log and to the spot where his sister was found, that another stab at hypnosis might be in order.

  Serafin, Dorothy, her son, John Hennessy, and Spanky drove to Manhattan to Ribner's Central Park office. The doctor greeted the entourage with a sucker for Spanky. He led Spanky into Ms inner sanctum and sat the boy down. With his father and Dorothy talking gently to Spanky, Ribner
was able to begin hypnotic suggestion. Spanky, as is often the case with children, could only reach a certain level of the process, a relaxed level between waking and sleeping.

  Ribner and Dorothy led the boy down the trail of his dream. At first much of the story was the same as he had reported to Dorothy. But after awhile he seemed to conjure happenings that were more and more improbable, mixing realities he had overheard from adult conversations with childlike perceptions. The doctor, however, was convinced the boy had witnessed the crime in the woods. No murderer would be locked up from Spanky's recollection or dream, however.

  Dorothy, too, was then hypnotized. John and Spanky went downstairs to sit in Central Park while Serafin and Ribner tried to determine if Dorothy could get closer to the criminal. She could not. She did, however, begin to describe another suspect.