Dorothy Allison - A Psychic Story

by A Psychic Story (lit)

  Seeing how emotionally overwrought Nancy was, Dorothy told her that she would not, could not work with anyone so volatile. Dorothy's emotions and her psychic power were too closely connected, she explained, and would be blurred by a mother's emotions. It was partly for that reason that Dorothy never told parents if she saw their child dead, or took them to the victim's grave. Dorothy also knew the law about tampering with a corpse, possibly contaminating it and ruining the evidence.

  Meeting Dorothy and sensing her confidence and sympathy infused Nancy with new hope: hope in which she wanted desperately to believe. For six months she had listened to detectives and psychics theorize or shrug their shoulders, and for six months hardly a night had passed that she had not shed tears. The police had even suggested that her own son, Joey, was not beyond suspicion. But when the angry family insisted on his taking a polygraph, the police had refused to administer it.

  That night Nancy felt stronger and more positive than she had felt in months. That night Nancy did not cry.

  ***

  The following day Dorothy drove to the Lodi police station and met the two dectectives. They sat for a few minutes discussing aspects of the case that Dorothy had sensed during the night. Meeting Nancy had sent her into a whirlwind of feelings and visions. Dorothy's instant warmth and sympathy for the woman and her suffering made her want to resolve the case quickly. She knew she could.

  Tortora had taken some time after work the previous day to search around Teterboro Airport. He admitted it was difficult trying to pick one spot in which to search in such a large area. But he had found one interesting item: the skirt from a blue car, which was a recent model.

  Dorothy was pleased, sensing immediately that they were on the right track.

  "Let's start driving around. I don't want to get in the car with Nancy on Sunday and take her to her son's body. She doesn't need that."

  They drove for almost two hours, but they stayed within Lodi, rather than driving to the airport. Dorothy first asked to be taken to a street or place that would have some connection to the telephone company. She had no feelings about the actual telephone company building when they passed it, so Tortora suggested "Bell Avenue."

  "That's it," Dorothy said. "Someone who lives on Bell Avenue gives me very strong feelings."

  They drove down the tree-lined street of older homes. Dorothy indicated that one of the perpetrators, "one of the animals," lived on that street.

  Tortora and Serwin did not tell Dorothy that Dave Menicola lived on the block she pinpointed; they simply too note of the fact and continued driving.

  Next they drove to DeVries Park. They walked around the area where Ronnie had been left by his sister, and Dorothy felt Ms presence as she had seen it in her mind. She could picture his getting out of the yellow and black car and meeting his "buddy."

  "I think these kids were up to something," she told the detectives. "They didn't just kill him. One of them thought they had good reason to do nun in. Poor Nancy, she should know."

  ***

  It wasn't until Palm Sunday that Dorothy finally got to Teterboro Airport. Nancy and her son-in-law, Johnny, drove Dorothy around DeVries Park first. Dorothy was trying to follow the path the boys had taken the night of September 22.

  Nancy and Dorothy walked around the yellow building. Walking through the small dirt playground alongside the building, where mothers and their children were playing, Dorothy noted that part of the original name of the building was still in evidence. What remained of "Water Works Building" was only the first word.

  Next they drove to Teterboro. Dorothy remembered the two businessmen who had been heading for Teterboro four years before and whose plane had crashed in southern New Jersey. She was finally seeing their destination, a busy, small private airport.

  In a vast, swampy area behind the airport Dorothy walked with her companions. As soon as she had spent some time walking around on the cool, sunny day, she felt certain that Ronnie was in the area. Tortora had told her where to find the blue skirt, but she didn't want Nancy to accidentally trip over her son's leg.

  Nancy walked alone, her head down, her eyes fixed on anything that might have been a grave. She picked up a broken white vase. She thought it was a beautiful piece of ceramic, and an odd item to find in such a desolate area.

  While she stood musing, Dorothy quietly told Johnny that they should leave the area. She told him that Ronnie's body was definitely there and that Nancy should be taken away. She said she would feign illness, so as not to arouse Nancy's suspicions.

  "Are you sure it's Ronnie you're feeling?" the boy asked.

  "Of course I'm sure," Dorothy said.

  "Well, they did find a black boy's body here about a month ago. Maybe you're sensing him," Johnny offered.

  "Not on your life," Dorothy exclaimed. She moved toward Nancy.

  Nancy was confused and angry when Dorothy said she wanted to leave. After so much enthusiasm and confidence, Nancy had expected to spend the whole day out looking.

  But Nancy could not dissuade the psychic. She was aware that she wasn't paying Dorothy anything, so Dorothy was free to do as she pleased. Nancy placed the vase on the ground and the two women walked slowly back to the car.

  Before Dorothy drove to Nutley, she told Nancy that someone in a blue car would have important information for her. "Whatever he says is crucial," she told the sad mother.

  Dorothy told the police by telephone that they should search the fields around Teterboro. If someone had been buried there in September, the changes of season would have washed away any indications. The police said they didn't have the manpower to search such a large area.

  ~~~~~~~

  Chapter 8

  March was a strong month for Dorothy, a period in which her success rate always soared high. For reasons best explained astrologically, Dorothy's life seemed to take its most dramatic turns during March.

  Ten years before, Dorothy had only been able to handle one case at a time; now she was working on as many as twenty at once. Many of the early frustrations had been shed over the years as she learned to believe in herself. She still had to deal with chance at every turn, never knowing if her vision would ever connect with reality. So many tunes she wished she had been able to resolve cases such as the Delardo-Carlucci murders, but she had long ago learned to take things as they were. Still, she would never give up hoping that one day she would find the murderers in unresolved cases.

  Requests for Dorothy's help and guidance now numbered well over a thousand. From early morning to late at night her two phones rang with pleas from all over the United States and with latest information on cases. Both police and parents made a haven of her home.

  Dorothy had strong feelings about Ronnie Stica; she was certain that Nancy would have her son back, albeit a corpse, within days. She told Nancy about the Jacobsons and how they had suffered for the past twenty-two months, not certain if their daughter was alive or dead.

  Nancy phoned Dorothy on Easter Sunday wondering if Dorothy had any feelings about an article Nancy had seen in a newspaper. The skeleton of a boy had been found in an oil drum at the bottom of a twelve-foot shaft in Staten Island. He was decomposed, Nancy said, except for a pair of sneakers. Ronnie had worn tennis shoes, and the body had apparently been there a long time. Did Dorothy have any feelings about it?

  "It's not Ronnie, Nancy. I feel certain it isn't Ronnie. Your boy is not on Staten Island, he's closer to home. But maybe it's Susan Jacobson."

  "Can't be," Nancy said. "The article says it's a boy."

  "That doesn't matter," Dorothy informed her. "Sometimes it takes days of lab work to figure out whether a skeleton is male or female. Something tells me the shaft you're reading about is one I've seen."

  Bill Jacobson had been reading the evening newspaper at his office in Wall Street, when he noticed a piece about three kids muscrat-hunting in Mariner's Harbor, and finding the decomposed body of a youngster. He phoned Ellen, who in turn called the police to see if the
body was Susan's.

  After several conversations and no answers, she figured out for herself that the corpse had to be Susan. One of the detectives reported that the tennis shoes found bore some writing, although all that was legible was "forever" and two blurred names. At one time, Ellen knew, those two names had been "Susan-Dempsey."

  Ellen called Dorothy to tell her that Susan had been found. The body had been spotted by a thirteen-year-old boy who was playing with friends in the area. He had seen the skeleton sticking out of a fifty-five-gallon oil drum at the bottom of a twelve-foot concrete shaft.

  The fact that would wrench the heart of Bill Jacobson ever afterward was that he had been in the very shaft where Susan was found when Dorothy had pointed it out to him. It had then been partially full of water, and the oil drum, which Dorothy had smelled so acutely, prevented anyone from seeing or smelling the decomposing body.

  It was also the very place to which Dempsey had taken Patricia Jacobson in search of her sister. Dempsey, never descending into the shaft, only pointed out places he felt the others might look.

  News of the discovery and Dorothy's involvement spread quickly through New York's media. On Monday the New York Post ran a major story with Susan's picture on the front page. The following day the Post ran a large story about Dorothy with the headline, "Psychic Sees a New Job: Finding S.I. Girl's Killer."

  Everyone's eyes turned to Illinois where Dempsey Hawkins was living with his father and grandmother. Within days, the process of extradition began, to bring the boy back for arraignment.

  Dorothy was even more excited when, the next Tuesday, Nancy Locascio phoned to report that Ronnie's body had been found in the area behind Teterboro Airport.

  She told Dorothy that one of Joey's friends had come to their house on the weekend. When Nancy opened the door, she saw the anxious boy was driving a blue car. Remembering Dorothy's words about the car, Nancy felt instinctively the teen-ager was there for more than just a friendly visit.

  He said he wanted to talk with Joey. The two boys left the house immediately, and Nancy waited anxiously for her son to return. Joey came home two hours later saying that the friend had told him the three boys responsible for killing Ronnie had heard that the police had been led by the psychic to the Teterboro Airport area, and that the search was centered there. The friend reported that Ronnie was, indeed, there, and had been killed by Dave Menicola with a knife. The wound that had taken Menicola to the hospital was a knife wound, not a glass cut. What grieved Nancy most was the fact that three boys had been involved in the murder, and that Ronnie's murder was well known to the teen-agers who frequented the wall.

  At Susan's funeral, Bill Jacobson realized that the "John and Mary tombstone" of Dorothy's last hypnosis session had at last been found. The "silver" she had seen was "Silva Funeral Parlor." Susan's burial was at St. Peter's cemetery, the grave located not two hundred feet behind what had once been stables owned by John and Mary Moore. The tract of ground now used for burial had once been a bridle path. Dorothy had seen horses from the past taking her to a burying place in the future.

  Bail for Dempsey was set initially at $100,000, but at the request of Hawkins's attorney, the judge ordered the eighteen-year-old youth held without bail until a formal application for bail could be made. But the prosecution already had a strong case against Dempsey. The district attorney's office said it intended to produce witnesses - not necessarily eyewitnesses - who had identified Dempsey as the murderer. Dempsey entered a plea of innocent.

  Susan had been with Dempsey at his apartment that Saturday afternoon. They had quarreled about breaking up the relationship and had walked along the railroad tracks toward Mariner's Harbor. After Dempsey strangled Susan to death and hid her body in the oil drum, he had gone home and changed shirts and then gone directly to the nearby playground where he informed his cousin Punky of his deed. Later he had taken his cousin to Mariner's Harbor and pointed out the shaft. Not only Punky but several other teen-agers knew of the murder, but no one had said a thing. At Dempsey's trial Punky was the chief witness against him.

  Mrs. Hawkins refused to discuss the case when questioned by reporters. "Please don't ask me any questions," she said.

  Dempsey's sentencing was held on April 6, 1979. That week Dorothy had been in Johnstown, New York, working on a case concerning a teen-ager who had been abducted from a local bar. She returned early on that Friday to attend the sentencing with the Jacobsons. She had not attended any of the long trial, careful, as always, not to jeopardize the prosecution's case with publicity about psychics. But Dorothy had spent twenty-two months with the Jacobsons and had held out for Dempsey's reckoning.

  In the courtroom Mrs. Hawkins sat alone and erect during the proceedings, across the aisle from Dorothy and the Jacobsons. When Dempsey was brought into the courtroom, his head was held high and his expression was impassive, even while his attorney pleaded with the judge to impose the minimum prison term of fifteen years.

  The middle-aged lawyer stood before the judge and stated that the murder had not been premeditated or carried out for financial gain. He said it had been the "emotional explosion" of a teen-ager confused by love and society. He argued that Dempsey could not have been "totally bad" if the Jacobson family had "condoned and accepted him" until the time of the abortion. He claimed that Dempsey had been raised in an unjust society, one in which his place had never been comfortable.

  Dempsey Hawkins was sentenced to a mandatory life term. He would serve a minimum prison term of twenty-two years before parole consideration. The maximum the judge could have set was twenty-five years.

  Dempsey's mother quietly sobbed into her hands as her son passed by. Dorothy felt sorry for her, but as for the son, she felt justice had been served.

  For the Jacobsons the long ordeal - and all the unanswered questions - were finally over. What remained for Ellen and Bill Jacobson was the heartbreak of having lost a beautiful daughter in the springtime of her life. The memory of that loss would always haunt them, but Dorothy knew that for the Jacobsons life was still worth living: they were blessed with six other children, and their home abounded with love. And out of the terrible sorrow of the Jacobson case, a deep, abiding relationship had grown between Dorothy and the Jacobsons. Ellen and Bill considered her a member of their family.

  The long, arduous trial of Ronnie Stica's murderer extended even longer the agony that his mother had suffered. Looking around the courtroom, she saw other teen-agers who might have known, since September, that her son had been murdered, but who had chosen to say nothing.

  Preliminary medical examinations had revealed that Ronnie had been stabbed once in the throat and three times in the upper back. Three boys had downed her son. During the trial it was brought out that the Teterboro site had not been a totally arbitrary choice. Several feet from Ronnie's body was a patch of cultivating cannabis plants, which one of the group had harvested without anyone else knowing about it. Menicola suspected Ronnie.

  The two friends who accompanied Menicola to the murder site claimed to have no idea that a murder was about to transpire. They were given two and three years with probations. Dave Menicola, twenty years old, was given twenty-six years, without parole.

  The discovery site of Ronnie's body couldn't have been closer to Dorothy's description. Nancy could not bear to think he had been murdered not more than ten feet away from the white ceramic vase she had held. She cried, knowing how close to her own son she had been without being able to feel his presence. When Dorothy went to the site herself, she looked around the area and saw, across the highway, a billboard with the word "Eclipse" standing out. Ronnie's body was hidden directly behind the Eclipse Bowling Alley.

  Dorothy's life was now totally consumed by her work. She had helped resolve over thirty cases, and aided and searched in more than a hundred. As her successes increased and her name spread across the country, more and more requests for her help appeared. In the next year the number of letters handled by Lupo and Phyllis would
reach as high as nine thousand.

  The resolution of the Jacobson and Stica cases within days of one another triggered even greater publicity for Dorothy, who suddenly had not only mothers chasing her for help, but news reporters from Newsweek, McCall's, and Readers Digest, approaching her as well. Calls came from television talk shows across America, requesting Dorothy as a guest.

  She was proud of her work and the respect she was suddenly accorded. She would gladly go on television with her own special message: a child is never safe enough. Dorothy would campaign against lazy, negligent parenthood. Words of caution directed at children and teen-agers would be: avoid dealing with total strangers; open up communication within families. She wanted parents to understand how different their children's lives might be from their own childhoods.

  In her fifties Dorothy was younger and more energetic than ever. Her family was proud of her success and so were the many detectives and police who had watched her evolve into a famous sleuth. Her big moment would come that summer when she addressed the International Association for Identification in Baltimore, speaking before federal investigators and agents from all over the Northeast.