Dorothy Allison - A Psychic Story

by A Psychic Story (lit)

  Dempsey was speechless. Their eyes held each other as Dorothy released her grip but still leaned against the table. Dempsey averted his gaze.

  "You're lucky I'm not a cop," Dorothy told him. "You don't have to say a thing, of course. But I know you killed her. My knowing won't do any good, I'm afraid. The police will have to find out for themselves."

  Dorothy thought of the investigation so far and felt furiously frustrated.

  "I didn't kill her. I didn't do it," Dempsey insisted, his voice holding back the rage and fear he was feeling.

  "I got all I wanted tonight." Dorothy moved away from the table and sighed. "Now, can I give you another piece of cake?" She smiled wryly at Dempsey and left the room.

  Dorothy was exhausted. It was after 1:00 A.M. Ellen had been resting on the couch for the duration of Dorothy's interrogation, while Lupo and Bill went over facts and possibilities on the case.

  Dorothy opened the kitchen door, entering the den like a doctor coming out of the delivery room into a waiting room full of expectant families. She slapped her hands together in a "job-well-done" fashion and announced that she was tired and ready to kick everyone out for the night.

  Bill went into the kitchen and told Dempsey they were ready to return to Staten Island. At this point Bill was still unsure of Dempsey. The Jacobsons were not aware of the depth of Dorothy's strong feelings about the youth. But Dempsey had lied, and the parents could not help but feel more suspicious.

  Dorothy abided by her cardinal rule of never telling a missing child's parents that she knew the child was dead. Therefore she could not reveal all her feelings about Dempsey to the Jacobsons. Dorothy knew, too, that for the Jacobsons to accuse Dempsey would get them nowhere, so she suggested to Bill and Ellen that Dempsey be given a polygraph. Polygraphs were not very reliable, but she hoped the fear of taking the polygraph would push him to talk.

  Gus Doyle, who was still helping the Jacobsons, agreed that the polygraph would be a good idea, and he volunteered to make the arrangements for the examination in Manhattan. Written permission was obtained from Dempsey's mother, who had had no contact at all with the Jacobsons before or since Susan's disappearance. Bill Jacobson paid the $200 for the examination. By now most of his home-improvement loan had been eaten away by the costs of the investigation.

  It was the first week in July that Dempsey went to Manhattan for the polygraph. When he was asked by the polygraph examiner if he had murdered Susan, he stated his innocence. The machine registered that he was telling the truth. Nevertheless he revealed facts to the interrogator that he had not disclosed to the Jacobsons.

  As soon as the test was completed, Dempsey called Gus Doyle. He admitted that he had seen Susan the Saturday she disappeared. In fact, he said, she had been at his apartment after lunch, where they had had an argument.

  "She left crying," Dempsey told Gus. "I never saw her again." And the teen-ager hung up.

  Gus knew that Dempsey had not been seen on the street that Saturday till 4:00 P.M. Between 1:30 and 4:00 he had no reliable alibi and claimed to have been alone.

  When Bill and Ellen heard from Gus that Dempsey had passed the polygraph, but not without divulging some interesting new facts, they could only think that Dorothy's intuition about the boy had been right. After six weeks Dempsey admitted not only to having gone home to change shirts but also to having been with Susan in his own apartment.

  Bill saw Dempsey on the street the next day and invited Mm upstairs for a talk. Bill had drawn a map of the area, detailing it with the places Susan was reported to have passed or possibly visited that Saturday afternoon. In light of Dempsey's recent admission, the map forced suspicion on him.

  "You kept telling us you hadn't seen Susan that day."

  Bill looked hard at the teen-ager. "Then you told Dorothy you did go home, but just to change your shirt. That was around lunchtime. That's about the time Susan was last seen."

  Bill was anxious, sitting there with Dempsey. He felt angrier than he had been in a long time. Dempsey was talk and more athletic than Bill, but the father wanted the truth, and he would use physical force if necessary.

  "If you look at this map, it's hard not to place the blame on you," Bill said.

  Dempsey looked directly into Bill's eyes, as if challenging him.

  "Well then, you'll have to prove it," Dempsey said sarcastically.

  Bill lunged forward and grabbed Dempsey's shirt. Flying back in fear, Dempsey landed against the kitchen counter. He took hold of the kitchen chair and threw it at Bill, shattering glasses in its path. Dempsey dived for the door and ran down the narrow steps. Out front he picked up a large rock and hurled it at the Jacobsons' front door, smashing it, then ran up the street and was gone.

  If ever guilt was evident, Bill felt, it was in Dempsey's behavior. How much more certain could he be that Dempsey was responsible for his daughter's disappearance?

  Bill went to Dempsey's mother's house that evening, looking for the boy. Dempsey had not been home since their encounter. The well-dressed, attractive mother sat and listened to Bill's story and his obvious concern with her son. After he had been there more than an hour, the phone rang. It was Dempsey.

  Bill listened as Mrs. Hawkins pleaded with her son to come home and discuss the matter. Dempsey argued that his mother did not love him, that no one really cared him, and that his problems were her fault.

  "What do you mean, I don't love you?" Bill heard the anxious mother say as she paced back and forth in the small, dark hallway.

  "You're not talking sense. Commit suicide? Dempsey, come home and talk to me. You'll be safe here, I promise you. No one is going to do anything to you."

  The tall, dark-haired woman put the phone down and shook her head. She turned to Bill and sighed, looking confused and without real direction. Bill soon departed, leaving the mother to await the arrival of her son.

  The next day Dempsey was hanging out on the corner as usual. This time, however, he paid no attention to the Jacobson house. Nor did the Jacobsons attempt communication. Bill and Ellen were too angry and hurt to talk with Dempsey again.

  But the boy's presence was always felt. He and some friends took to showing up on the corner with radios blaring at night, often as late as 2:00 A.M. The angry parents decided to ignore, as much as possible, his juvenile behavior.

  Dorothy and Lupo felt something had to be done about getting Dempsey interrogated again by the police. The polygraph had proven both positive and negative; though he had passed it, it had brought out new evidence that could only bring him closer to being incriminated.

  Lupo called the Missing Persons Bureau and informed them that he and Dorothy both felt Dempsey was guilty. The detective he spoke with said that he had already interrogated the boy and felt he was not only innocent, but a help in getting information about the girl's whereabouts. That a psychic felt Susan had not run away proved nothing to the officials involved.

  By August Bill was usually searching alone after work, although he was sometimes aided by friends or Dorothy. Dempsey's face was seen less and less as he involved himself with other neighborhood friends and stayed away from the Jacobson house. Dorothy's feelings never wavered, nor did her vision of where Susan's body would be found.

  It wasn't until November that Dorothy underwent hypnosis with Dr. Ribner. Bill had asked that someone from the Missing Persons Bureau be present, and had been told the Bureau would cooperate. The group waited for someone from the Bureau to arrive, and then, after forty-five minutes, went on without him. Bill had brought along his own cassette recorder.

  Dr. Ribner asked Bill to wait outside during the first session. He explained that a family member's emotions could prevent Dorothy from seeing clearly. Bill consented.

  Gus Doyle and Dr. Ribner proceeded to interrogate the psychic. In that first of two sessions, Dorothy told the that she saw Susan, and that the girl had been strangled death. The murderer was black, she said, and everyone in the family knew him. Once again she described the area sh
e had originally seen around Mariner's Harbor. "Susan is in water, but she didn't drown," Dorothy said. "I smell oil Very strong oil odor, as if I could suffocate from it."

  She also told them she saw another body that was not Susan Jacobson's, but that would be found in the Richmond Town area within the next two days. The body was that of a woman who had been dead several days.

  When Gus played the tape that night for Bill and Ellen it was the first verbal confirmation they had from Dorothy that their daughter was dead. In the six months they had worked with her, not once had she openly stated to them that Susan had been murdered. They found themselves crying, even though they had felt all along that Susan could not be alive.

  The next day a woman's corpse was found in Richmond Town in the manner Dorothy had foreseen. Bill and Ellen were excited, hoping to provide substantiation to the police of Dorothy's abilities.

  The couple was even more determined to prove her abilities publicly after Dorothy's second session with Ribner, during which she described in detail a scene in which another body would be found on Staten Island within days. This time she mentioned a cemetery and something she saw on a hill.

  "Isn't it funny," she said, "that I see a lighthouse on land? Can that be? It's not close to the water."

  She went on to describe a nearby golf course and an area known as Toad Hill. She said the woman's body, which had already been buried once and dug up again, would be found near the lighthouse.

  "It's not Susan, though," Dorothy cautioned.

  "Dorothy, try and get back to Susan," Dr. Ribner guided her. "See what's around Susan."

  Dorothy was quiet for a moment while she focused again. This time, however, she did not get the scene in Mariner's Harbor.

  "I see horses. Several horses running along a trail. I'm getting something like silver, too. I'm not sure it's the metal I feel or just the word. Or a word close to it. Now, somewhere near those horses I see a gravestone. One of those large, family-type stones. Wait, I'm getting a name on it." She hesitated for a moment while Bill Jacobson, sitting next to the tape recorder, watched her work through inexplicable mental channels.

  "The name I see on the gravestone is John and Mary Moore," Dorothy reported. She also gave the dates inscribed on the stone, and described a long plank of wood over which people would cross.

  Bill was excited by the details. This time he and Ellen wanted to prove to the police that Dorothy was on target. For the next several days they searched through cemeteries for the names John and Mary Moore. Since it was a common name, plenty of Moores were found, but none with the right first names. Every Staten Island cemetery was searched, but they came up with nothing.

  At the same time they searched for the "lighthouse" Dorothy had seen. The Jacobsons wanted to find the body of the woman Dorothy had seen and lead the police to it. But they were beaten to the finish by two little boys who discovered the woman's body behind a round, turn-of-the-century home that resembled a turreted old English home. In Dorothy's eyes the tall, round structure resembled a lighthouse.

  The months seemed to pass in a cloud of sadness for the Jacobson family. Whiter had set in, and the searching came to a standstill. The only important development was that Dempsey had left school that January. Fellow students reported to the Jacobsons that their daughter's former boyfriend had left Staten Island. Rumor had it he was somewhere in the Midwest.

  The rumors were correct. Dempsey had gone to live with his father, a farmer, in a little rural town in Illinois, called Joppa, population 500. As far as the Jacobsons knew, Dempsey had never even met his father; now he was living with him.

  With Dempsey out of reach and the police investigation at a standstill, there seemed no hope of ever finding Susan.

  Dorothy, wherever she traveled, kept Susan's picture with her. While in Baltimore in March, 1977, Dorothy checked the police department to see if Susan was listed on the national missing-persons printout. She discovered that her name had never appeared on the national list, only on the New York State file which was located in Albany.

  On Tuesday, March 14, 1978, Dorothy sat in her den with three detectives from the Missing Persons Bureau of the Bergen County Police Department. On March 1, Detective Rufino had called Dorothy concerning a missing youth the police were having trouble locating. Rufino felt the nineteen-year-old boy had run into problems but was stumped as far as clues were concerned. Rufino brought two fellow detectives with him, Charlie Serwin and Tony Tortora.

  While they were discussing the case, Rufino was called away by his department on an emergency. As the men had traveled in two cars, Tortora and Serwin wondered if Dorothy might be willing to help them on three other cases whose files they had brought with them. The three separate cases all involved teen-agers, and none had been resolved by conventional means. Virtually no clues existed. Two cases dated back a year, one was only sixty days old.

  Dorothy agreed to see if one of the cases might strike a chord in her which would help them. She sat on her couch, legs crossed, cigarette in hand, trying to focus on a vision she had of someone who might be one of the teen-agers involved. She had a feeling that the boy she had in mind was known to the detectives, although possibly his was not one of the cases on hand. She was having trouble getting details, though.

  As Dorothy and the men discussed the missing teenagers, a drama began to open in her vision.

  Three boys were moving about together in a vast, empty area, as if scrambling for something. Swamplike, the area was bordered by a highway on one side. She could also see a car. Then she saw another boy, but he was on the ground and still. Finally she saw a knife.

  "I'm getting something with a stabbing," she interrupted them. "But I don't think it's one of the kids you're looking for today."

  "We're not here for a stabbing," Tortora said. "We're not homicide. As far as we're concerned, these kids are just missing. We have no real grounds for suspecting foul play."

  "You don't call 'missing' foul play?" Dorothy asked. "If my kid was missing, the first thing I'd smell would be foul play."

  "These kids may have split on their own," Serwin offered. "We were hoping you'd be able to help us with that."

  "I don't care," Dorothy said. "I see what I see, and I think one of you knows about this stabbing."

  The men looked at one another, perplexed and wondering how to gain control of the situation. Dorothy went on with her vision.

  She told them she saw three boys around the age of nineteen or twenty, in a large field, and that she had the feeling the field was located behind an airport, or some place to do with airplanes.

  Next she described a wall. She said the area was known as the "wall," and that kids came to that area to gather and drink at night. She felt the "wall" was part of an old building that had been destroyed by fire and was near water.

  Dorothy got up and pulled a clean piece of paper out of a drawer in the bookcase. She began to draw what she was seeing. Tortora watched the rustic map evolve of a place Dorothy had never visited. After a few minutes the two detectives decided the map resembled the area around the Passaic Avenue bridge across the Saddle River in Lodi.

  "It isn't near the airport," she said, handing the map to Tortora. "There's an empty lot adjacent to it that'll soon have a building built on it. Something official, like a courthouse." She stopped for a moment, focusing on the area around the "wall." "There's a building nearby that has the word 'water' written on it. Water is part of the name of the building, I think."

  Tortora and Serwin sat in amazement. They had no idea what to do with the facts; only Tortora was beginning to recognize landmarks.

  "Did this guy drown?" Tortora asked.

  "No, I'd know that for sure. This boy was stabbed to death and buried in dirt. I know one of you is aware of this case," she told them.

  "Can you describe the kid at all?"

  "I get a boy in bis late teens. Good looking, with glasses. Very strong. A fighter in strength, but not necessarily in temperament. I see him very a
ctive in sports."

  Tortora thought about Dorothy's description for a few minutes before saying anything. He did have a case, he told her, dating back to late September, concerning a seventeen-year-old Lodi boy who had never been found. As soon as he began telling Dorothy about the boy, she felt they were on the same track.

  "The kid's mother has been trying to get in touch with you for six months now," he informed her. "She called and wrote the Nutley Police Department, and they told her they would forward her name to you when you weren't busy on other cases. That was last October."

  Dorothy flinched, thinking of the hundreds of letters and phone calls Lupo and Phyllis had to field. The thought of the desperate mothers turning to her for help depressed her.

  "Call her now," Dorothy said. "Tell her to come over."

  Nancy Locascio was thrilled to hear that Dorothy Allison would work on her son's disappearance. The call from the Bergen detective lifted her out of her despondency. The short, dark-haired woman had been to the threshold of insanity in her desperate six-month search for her son, Ronnie, the third of her four children.