Messages help widow persevere

[Carol]

Messages help widow persevere
Posted By BILL HENRY
Posted 1 day ago
A love poem brought Mary Ellen McDougall a message from her dead husband, Neil, just as rumours that he had left Durham for a new life were at their height.

The framed souvenir from their honeymoon less than five months earlier was shaking mysteriously and rattling noisily on her bedroom wall.

Even after death, the poem read, we'll still be together.

"It was just vibrating on the wall. I went up and I put my hand on it and it stopped. But it was him coming through," Mary Ellen said recently. "That was Neil just trying to tell me 'don't listen to those rumours.'"

Mary Ellen and her psychic friends often get such messages from beyond the grave.

That's why she believes she knows who killed him.

That's why she thinks his body was in a shallow rock grave near an Ayton hunt camp the night he was killed, more than 22 years ago.

That's why she's also convinced his remains are now in deep water behind the smallest of two dams at the Orchard picnic area, south of Durham.

The psychics all get "bad vibes" from a shed near Ayton where she suspects Neil may have been killed, either deliberately or by mishap.

The messages began soon after his mysterious disappearance on Oct. 12, 1985, Mary Ellen says.

A dream four months after Neil's death directed her to the glove compartment of his Cadillac. She found a Valentine's card he never got to send.

"You're that special someone I'm so much in love with," it read.

Mary Ellen still keeps that card with a bundle of wedding and family memories, pictures of the red brick house they bought together, newspaper clippings about his disappearance and correspondence about the case with several psychics. She still keeps a pile of similar cards Neil sent, often with roses.

Born in New Brunswick to a military family, Mary Ellen moved in the 1980s with her four children following a divorce, to Meaford, where her parents had settled. She eventually took a job in Durham, where she met Neil. They lived together for a year, with her two youngest children, aged 10 and 13. The oldest were grown and gone.

The couple married in May 1985. Her children enjoyed Neil's friendly company enough to head out with the self-employed part-time garbage contractor on his 5 a.m. rural collection runs.

"He was a great one for bringing me roses and hiding these I love you cards everywhere in the house," she said. "Neil and I were soulmates. We never even had a disagreement in that year and a half we were together."

He vanished on the Friday night of Thanksgiving weekend in 1985.

After weeks of searching in vain for her missing husband, knowing in her heart he was dead, despair overcame Mary Ellen early in 1986.

With no body, there could be insurance - that took 11 years - and banks were demanding payments she couldn't make. Then an OPP officer investigating the case dismissed her desperation with a suggestion she file for bankruptcy, she says.

It was all finally too much.

"I went home immediately and I cried. I had a breakdown. I overdosed, tried to commit suicide. From what I'm told I shouldn't be here today," Mary Ellen said recently.

"I wasn't eating. I wasn't sleeping. I was searching with my friends every night. We were walking the country roads with flashlights, searching abandoned barns. We were driving to Hamilton searching the streets. I was just worn out. I had a breakdown. I'd had enough."

Ambulance workers kicked in her bedroom door to find Mary Ellen unconscious from the pills she took. After two months recovering at the Homewood Health Centre in Guelph, she tried to get on with her life.

Police stopped coming around. She stopped calling them. Her husband stayed on the missing person list, and Mary Ellen continued working until retirement a year ago at Durham's Rockwood Terrace seniors residence.

About 10 years ago Mary Ellen began a serious study of spiritualism, attending numerous psychic workshops, practising meditation and consulting psychics, clairvoyants and mediums. That includes several workshop sessions at Lily Dale, N.Y., known as the town that talks to the dead.

That's where the Fox sisters started a North American spiritualist movement, and where, 18 months ago, Mary Ellen met Mary Ellen Rodriguez, the "psychic detective" she credits with helping reopen the investigation into her husband's death.

"The first time she sat down at this table, Neil came through with a message," she said.

Sometimes the messages are in dreams, sometimes images, impressions or signs. Sometimes they seem to come directly from Neil, or relate directly to what happened to him, she said.

Recently, he communicated reassurance the case will soon be solved through Rodriguez with a process called automatic writing. The medium holds the pen and writes the message from "a person who has crossed over," Mary Ellen said.

Rodriguez and other psychics have followed signs to the Orchard picnic area, where they believe his remains were taken in a truck and dumped. They also believe the shed near Ayton is somehow connected to whatever happened to Neil McDougall.

"Everybody hits big time on that shed," Mary Ellen said.

West Grey Police Sgt. Jeff Beselaere said he welcomes any information about the case and doesn't discount information coming from psychics.

"I'm certainly open to whatever information they might be able to provide," he said. "I've had no personal experience in that regard but I don't say it's not possible."

Asked if any information from psychics has paid off as direct evidence, Beselaere said "not yet."

Mary Ellen doesn't worry that her beliefs in paranormal communication may be a bit much for many people. They're helping her deal with the long years without her husband, and taking her closer to resolution, she said.

She also knows it's going to take more than psychic messages to convict her husband's killers.

"Somebody's going to talk. That's what it's going to take to solve this case."

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