IT WAS AS if Shilie Turner had just evaporated.
For more than a month in the winter of 1993, the 17-year-old star athlete's whereabouts were a mystery murkier than the dust she left behind breaking track records at William Penn High School.
Detectives went door-to-door interviewing the girl's acquaintances and retraced her last known path. Search dogs sniffed fruitlessly through abandoned houses hunting for her. Tearful relatives and friends held vigils and went on television to plead for her safe return.
Stymied, police Det. Frank Martin turned to an unusual source for help.
Valerie Morrison was a psychic whose typical clients were love-torn romantics, regular Joes with legal or money troubles and grief-stricken relatives of the recently deceased.
At Shilie's rowhouse in West Philadelphia, Vivian King took Morrison to her daughter's bedroom for a private chat, while Martin waited downstairs.
Within minutes, a blood-curdling scream interrupted Martin's bored vigil. King stampeded down the staircase, shoving Morrison in front of her and commanding them to leave the house.
A few weeks later, police found Turner's frozen corpse beneath brush in Fairmount Park, and King confessed to murdering her daughter. Sentenced to 10 to 20 years in prison, she was released from prison in June 2004.
Morrison takes credit for cracking the case, saying Shilie's spirit spoke through her to implicate King. But Martin - a skeptic before he took Morrison to see King - remains doubtful, saying a dog-walker found the body and detectives already suspected King killed Shilie.
Still, he admits the psychic had some effect on King, whose demeanor changed from friendly to frightened after meeting Morrison.
In many police squad rooms, the mere mention of psychics draws belly laughs from seasoned detectives who see clairvoyance as new-age nonsense and an unacceptable substitute for hard evidence.
But some victims' families, anxious for answers, are turning increasingly to psychics, whose business and believability have been boosted by a flurry of psychic-friendly TV shows like "Psychic Detectives," "Medium" and "Crossing Over with John Edward." Morrison's involvement in the Turner case will be featured on Court TV's "Psychic Detectives" on July 26.
Some crime victims' advocacy groups warn that psychics are predatory scam artists who offer hope - with a price tag - when relatives are vulnerable and desperate for good news, or at least closure.
But two local seers say law-enforcement authorities regularly call on them to assist pro bono on cold cases and tough ongoing investigations.
"A predator would take money - I don't charge [in criminal cases] except for my expenses," said Elizabeth Joyce, a Chalfont psychic who has worked with authorities in Montgomery and Bucks counties.
"I am born with a gift, a natural gift like what Barbra Streisand and Frank Sinatra have. If I can help, why not?"
SHOCKED INTO PSYCHIC VISIONS
Valerie Morrison says she was 5 years old, playing in water, when she had her first psychic experience.
Her mother, who had just finished ironing clothes nearby, pulled the iron's cord out of the wall sharply enough that the cord's prongs detached, protruding from the outlet.
With wet hands, Morrison scurried to retrieve the prongs, a well-meaning but dangerous decision that sent her flying.
"The fireman who resuscitated me had a black halo around him that no one else could see - I was frightened and repelled back from him," Morrison recalled. "He said, 'Don't be afraid,' and I said, 'No, you be afraid.' "
A week later, the firefighter died in a fire, she said.
The incident hardly surprised Morrison and her family. Her grandfather, a miner, was "the biggest psychic I ever knew," Morrison said.
As an adult, Morrison became a nurse whose uncanny psychic abilities were well-known among friends and colleagues, she said.
She turned her readings into a business more than 30 years ago, greeting clients in the first floor of her Roxborough home packed with a dizzying blend of angels, medieval swords and shields, and religious bric-a-brac.
Her first foray into psychic sleuthing came after her daughter was raped while walking to work. Sensing the attack, Morrison said, she begged her daughter to stay home. But the woman went and was so savagely attacked that doctors weren't sure she'd survive.
As her daughter recovered in the hospital, Morrison felt the rapist would attack again, and she alerted police, who found the thug when and where the psychic directed them, she said.
Likewise, Elizabeth Joyce had a personal tie to the first crime she foresaw.
Her father worked for Exxon for almost 50 years, so when she heard that Exxon executive Sidney J. Reso had gone missing in 1992, she got a "psychic headache" and a vision "in my third eye," she said.
She saw Reso's abduction unfold in that third eye and sensed that he was wounded in the shoulder and held in a storage unit, she said. She felt when he died and where he was buried, she said, adding that she alerted FBI investigators about her visions.
Reso's body was found buried in the New Jersey Pinelands, and his abductors were jailed. Joyce declined to identify the FBI agents she contacted; the FBI doesn't comment on specific cases.
Both Morrison and Joyce can ramble off a list of prophecies they claim came true.
Morrison claims she predicted President Reagan's attempted assassination, gave the FBI an accurate profile of serial killer David "Son of Sam" Berkowitz and correctly predicted in 1975 that then-Mayor Frank Rizzo would suffer injuries fleeing a blast.
Joyce predicted in 1997 that "a dark-haired woman named Monica will upset the Clinton administration in early 1998.
"I know what happened to JonBenet, Natalee Holloway, Chandra Levy, Elizabeth Smart, O.J. Simpson, Robert Blake," Joyce added. "I didn't concentrate or ask for these visions; they come to me like a tidal wave, like a tsunami."
(For the record, Joyce says: JonBenet Ramsey's mother's spurned lover killed the baby beauty queen as retribution for his rejection; Holloway was killed and thrown from a boat when she fought back against men who abducted her to sell her into sex slavery; Chandra Levy was kidnapped and killed by a random thug, not Rep. Gary Condit; she knew Smart was abducted and alive long before the girl was found; and Simpson and Blake are guilty in their spouses' slayings.)
Some followers are reverential in their respect for psychics.
"I believe that they have the power to literally talk with the dead," said Sophia Fleming of Germantown, who has consulted several psychics about her son Adam Hammer's 2004 murder.
Although Adam's homicide remains unsolved, Fleming is adamant that psychics provided critical clues that have helped move authorities closer to collaring his killer. For example, Morrison told her that "J.J." killed her 17-year-old son and "David knows." Fleming has identified people in the community who could be J.J. and David, but police have made no arrests.
Morrison attributes her lack of psychic specifics to the nature of visions and spirit-channeling: "It's like tuning into a radio station - sometimes it comes in loud and clear, other times you just catch bits and pieces."
Despite the lack of details, Fleming's devotion doesn't waver.
"There are some phonies out there - you can tell when they don't make sense to you," said Fleming, who believes she saw her son's ghost in a storefront window and an angel in the sky when Adam reached heaven. "When psychics don't talk about my kids, then I know they're phony, because my kids are the most important thing to me."
One Montgomery County police chief credited Morrison with helping him crack one homicide and several other crimes in the 1980s.
"As a direct result of her input, we were able to expand our investigation," said Carmine Pettine, Plymouth Township Police chief, who declined to discuss specifics. "The data obtained from her proved to be accurate and brought successful conclusions to those investigations."
ALL TALK, NO ACTION
When Danielle Imbo vanished with her sometime-beau Richard Petrone in February 2005, police and the press weren't the only ones tying up John Ottobre's phone line.
"In the very beginning, we had maybe 10 or 20 psychics calling us, unsolicited," said Ottobre, Imbo's brother. "We listened to them at first, because you want to believe the good stuff and not the bad stuff, and there was a little of both."
It didn't take long for skepticism to set in.
"We had the same psychic tell us one thing, and then six months later tell us something totally different," said Ottobre, of Cherry Hill.
The couple - both dedicated, single parents who relatives said would never willingly disappear - vanished after meeting friends at a South Street nightclub.
Some psychic scenarios: The couple crashed their pickup into the river and died; Imbo was left for dead in a crate in a shipyard by shady thugs avenging some undefined misdeeds by Petrone; Imbo is alive and oblivious as a Jane Doe in a hospital somewhere; and Petrone has returned secretly to his hometown and is working unnoticed in a Camden shipyard.
A psychic who claimed she knew the couple's whereabouts prompted a massive search by the Mount Laurel police, which deployed dogs, divers, helicopters and officers on foot, Ottobre said. "They gave up after she changed the location like six times," Ottobre said.
With such conflicting predictions, "it's hard to put any weight into what they say," Ottobre said. "If you know where they are, take me by the hand and take me there, but anything less than that, don't bother me."
Scientific evidence of psychic success in cracking criminal cases is scant.
In a 1993 study, almost two-thirds of the nation's 50 largest police departments said they didn't use psychics. None said the information provided by psychics was more useful than that from other sources, and some complained that psychics' predictions even hindered investigations, according to the study by Mark Durm, a psychology professor at Athens State University in Alabama.
Marc Klaas has firsthand experience with Durm's findings.
The Californian became a nationally known victims' advocate after a convicted sex offender kidnapped, molested and killed his daughter Polly in 1993. Before her body was found, authorities acting on a psychic's tip spent hours fruitlessly searching an innocent man's property, Klaas said. After Polly was found, another psychic wrongly boasted on a national TV show that she had solved Polly's case, he added.
Psychics' successes are rare and result from nothing more than good luck and intuition, Klaas contended.
"Psychic detectives do not possess supernatural insight, they do not converse with the missing or the dead, they never bring children home," Klaas writes on his KlaasKids Foundation Web site, which is dedicated to fighting crimes against children. "However, their rambling predictions may have filled in enough gaps to pad their resumes and claim the reward."
Many psychics make predictions that aren't unlikely, Klaas added. For example, declaring that a missing person from California can be found "in the hills" is hardly prophetic because much of that region's geography is hilly, he said.
Predictions often interfere with police probes, distracting and diverting police to chase phantom leads, he added.
Even psychics can offer little proof of their prophetic prowess.
"Nobody wants to admit they worked with a psychic," Joyce said.
SEEING SHILIE DEAD
Finding Shilie was as easy as lying on her bed, Morrison said.
Within seconds, Morrison recalled, she got the tingly, trancelike feeling that overcomes her when a spirit arrives.
" 'Tell them what you did to me, Mommy!' " Morrison said she told King that frigid day in January 1993. During that vision, Morrison added, she saw Shilie lying dead near trees and water in Fairmount Park, the victim of a violent fight with her mother.
King paled and panicked, Morrison recalled, prompting her to boot the psychic and the surprised detective out of her row house.
The incident didn't change Martin's mind about psychics supernaturally solving crimes.
"We were at a point in the investigation where we had reached a dead end," he said. "I was a skeptic, but I was hoping Miss King would believe in psychics more than I did. I was hoping for a spontaneous admission."
A former top-ranking city police official agreed: "Morrison was used to rattle the suspect. Martin was probably very shrewd to bring her in on a case that had stalled."
Martin's doubts intensified when Morrison billed the police department $650 for two hours of work on the case, he said. Morrison vehemently denies that she charged anything for the case.
Still, Morrison said she can still remember the clammy desperation and profound sadness that overcame her when Shilie's spirit entered her.
And she plans to continue helping to fight crime when she can.
"They have every right to be skeptical, just as much as people have a right to believe in me," she said. "But my grandfather used to say, 'If the fruit is good on the tree, it will last. If it is not, it will rot.' I've been around for 30 years, and I think that's pretty good."
http://www.philly.com/mld/dailynews/15003846.htm
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