Bonus: How to Become a Police Psychic w. Josie Duffy Rice

This week, a late night viewing of Unsolved Mysteries leads to a conversation about Ouija boards, pumas, reading auras to determine guilt, and what police psychics can reveal about the legal system itself. 

Content note: this episode contains brief descriptions of murder and sexual assault. 

The Unsolved Mysteries episode 

Nancy Myer's book 

Nancy Myer's website  

Transcript:

Silent Witness YWA

“For nearly 20 years, Nancy Myer has proven an invaluable tool for law enforcement, but Nancy is no ordinary investigator. She apparently employs psychic abilities to find clues that might otherwise go unnoticed. Tonight you’ll see Nancy in action, as he searches for answers in the tragic murder of a young girl in Florida. Join us for this intriguing legend, and much more, on Unsolved Mysteries.”

Welcome to You're Wrong About, where increasingly we talk about paperbacks that I can't stop thinking about. And I am talking about them today with Josie Duffy Rice. Hello.

Josie: Hi, I'm very excited to talk about paperbacks with you.

Sarah: Thank you so much for coming back. I do feel like paperbacks are where our cultural knowledge is hidden a lot of the time.

Josie: It's true. You know what I just thought about? They don't really sell paperbacks at the grocery stores anymore, do they?

Sarah: I don’t think like they used to. It's really rare now to see a circular, like a rack of paperbacks, like a wire rack.

Josie: Yeah. Let's bring those back. Yeah.

Sarah: And the paperback we're talking about today, and let me actually tell you how I got to this book, because this is a fun story. Like a lot of the good things in my life, the story came to me because one night I was laying on my character, trying to summon the energy to get up and brush my teeth and go to bed. And I was watching Unsolved Mysteries. And they had an episode, which I'm going to show you some of in a minute, about the Mary Celeste, something else, and Nancy Myer a police detective.

I was most interested in the Nancy Myer part. Although I also love the Mary Celeste. But apparently this was the piece that brought this woman, Nancy Myer to some of the national attention that she had around this time. But she had sort of been gradually making her name since the seventies, when she started working as a police psychic in various capacities. She authored with her husband at the time, Steve shortly, I want to say, a book called, Silent Witness. Okay. I’m showing it to you now. And if you were in like fourth grade, wouldn't you just be like, there can be no lies contained here.

Josie: Absolutely not. I would be sold. That would be my new bible.

Sarah: And it's got an opening blurb by Lois Duncan. I’ll just read you the back copy. “She was an ordinary suburban mother and homemaker, until her extraordinary power launched her into the dark world of crime solving…”

Josie: What could go wrong?

Sarah: They talked about a couple of her cases. There was one that we're going to talk about that was in this book that happened in Wilmington, Delaware. And then in this episode, they brought her to a location that had to do with a crime that was being investigated at the time. What I found interesting about what she did and that made me want to seek out her memoir, was that she does this thing which I recognizes what the FBI does. Where she goes to a crime scene, she looks at pictures, she gets a picture of the victim if she can. You know, not too much information, but like picture of the crime scene, picture of the victim. And then tries to sort of, I mean, I would describe this as trying to empathetically think her way through and profile the assailant.

Josie: So she profiles them without meeting them? Just seeing a picture.

Sarah: Yeah. Well, and so here's where I feel like this gets muddy. This whole concept of FBI profiling, it's like you do it with different amounts of information. And ideally, you're doing a Mindhunter type thing where you're talking to all the available serial killers so you can figure out what they're about. But like, the way that we conceive of it now, and the way that I think people who work in criminal profiling have, at times, promoted their accountability is yeah, maybe you need to talk to a criminal. Or maybe the idea is that in an unsolved murder, you can sort of look at who the victim is, look at the scene, take in the available information, and sort of using the magic of your brain be like, the assailant was between 20 and 30 and had trouble staying employed, and lived in a basement.

Josie: And that is such a cycle because how we understand who commits crimes and who has done what, is so informed. What we already know about who does things, right? I should start this by saying, we solve so few serious violent crimes in this country that our portrait of who does things is so limited. It's limited to the whatever, 30% of rapes that we on a great year solve, or the 50% of murders. And so it's just such a self-reinforcing cycle. The kind of people they describe are the kind of people they seek out. Which are the kind of people they find who do things, which then make it the kind of people they describe when you don't have all the information. What you think is your really great instinct is actually just confirmation bias, basically.

Sarah: Yeah. And I think something that I have reflected on as someone who really grew up reading and consuming a lot of true crime, is that the payoff of a lot of these stories is like, and then they caught the guy, and how do we know he was the guy, because the police and the trial said so. And it's well, right, right.

Josie: Yeah. Right. Can be back up a little. Exactly.

Sarah: There's more to say about police psychics, way more than just this one book. But I want to focus on Nancy, I think partly because I read this book last fall and I remember ending it with this feeling of, this is ridiculous. I don't think that this is a thing. And yet at the same time, this feels like she wasn't providing entirely useless information. I feel like she weirdly actually did something here. And that's what's most interesting to me. And I'm curious what you're going to think about that.

Josie: I'm ready to believe.

Sarah: Wouldn't it be nice. Okay. The first one is called, Witness on the Water. Nancy, at this point, is a mother of two young boys living in Delaware. Honestly, to me, the most mystical thing about Nancy that she lives in Delaware. Which like, who does that?

Josie: It is one of those places that's like nearby, but so few people you ever talk to live there.

Sarah: I've never met someone from Delaware. I mean, I've driven through it. It's lovely. You can get the Old Bay chips there. But, what is it? We don't know.

Josie: No offense to Delawareans, Delaweaves?

Sarah: Yeah, it's great. I mean, good for you. Nobody knows what you're like, you could be anything.

“Frank Abel who owns a 34-foot houseboat called Funhouse is moving it down to Florida with two teenagers he's hired, named Lee Sullenberg and Bill Bonds, when a storm hits. And they are lost at sea since 15 miles, north and inland in a residential development called Scottfield, a subdivision of neat, saltbox-style starter houses near Newark, Delaware.

A young housewife by the name of Nancy Anderson stood at her kitchen sink, rinsing dishes and placing them in the dishwasher. Her kids are playing outside. She sees a storm coming, she rushes them down into the cellar, and she notices her son Blake's Fisher-Price happy houseboat. She's smelling the sea. She's thinking about this houseboat. And then when her kids come back up from the cellar after the storm passed, the first toy that her son picks up is the happy houseboat, which lay turned on its top, its belly exposed to the July sun.”

This is obviously a sign. And so one of the teenagers, Bill, does survive we learn. And the other young guy who Frank Abel hired, Lee, we don't know what happened to him. So essentially in this chapter, Nancy is called on to use her psychic powers. And she talks to Lee's dad and she basically very gently is, I don't feel like he made it. I don't think that your son made it. And she I think is the first person, at least as this narrative tells, who uses her psychic powers to be like, you're not going to get your son back. And that's the story, that she was right. She also, when she's talking to Lee's father, she says she sees that he fought hard. Even after he got tangled, he was a very strong boy who didn't give up. He was very brave. And his father says, “I just can't accept that he's dead”. And she says, “I understand that, this is just what my powers are saying to me”.

Next case the police bring her back. She needs to now try and figure out who assailed a person who's currently in a coma. She comes up with a sketch of the assailant. And then several chapters later we find out that she was right, except about the race of the assailant. Which is, I don't know. And then the book is like, “But aren't you wondering how Nancy became psychic?” And you're like, “Yes, I am”.

Josie: 100%.

Sarah: So it is because they lived in Chile. And in 1956, there was a man-eating puma. So she went out on the hunt for the puma. And she sensed from the puma’s energy that its paw was hurt and it can't hunt, and that's why it's attacking the villages. Which people who remember the episode that I did with Jamie Loftus on Adam, Lorraine Warren member, that Lorraine Warren had a similar revelation about Bigfoot. That his foot isn't naturally big, it's big because it's infected. And he's just sad because he's lonely and he needs a wife.

Josie: Ah ha. Well, I do feel like the puma one is interesting. Because, did she see the puma?

Sarah: Yes. And she looks into its eyes.

Josie: And so it was his energy telling her that his paw was hurt, or maybe the fact that she saw him and saw that his paw was hurt?

Sarah: Yeah. And this is the thing too, is that according to the story, she first has the paw hurt vision. And then she sees the puma and she's like, yes, your paw is hurt. I was right. And then the lion fleas and Nancy is like, “It's okay. He won't be back. He's going to the mountains to heal.” And then one of the villagers they’re with says. “Esta niña es una bruja”, which means, “this girl is a witch”. And, you know, I believe that something happened with a puma at some point, but yeah,

Josie: Sure. I mean, I would love to do a whole episode on the man-eating puma, and I think everybody does this. Maybe she took it a little far. Right. But here's my personal example of this. I remember when Elizabeth Edwards died, John’s wife. And the day before she died, I was talking to someone, and I randomly said I was just thinking about Elizabeth Edwards Like, she was really sick. Like I wonder how she is. And then the next day she died. And it was like a running joke.

However, the joke is that there are a lot of people who die, who I was never thinking about the day before. Like 20 things will pass through your mind, and if one of those things comes through, you're like, “I knew it.” Right. But you discount the 19 things that, you know, pass through your mind or the ones that you didn't get right. I guess the promise of being psychic isn't that you're psychic about everything all the time, but it does feel like consistency has to be a key part of it.

Sarah: Or just, what separates a psychic from just someone who has decent intuition but doesn't find a profession out of it? To me what's at the center of the thing of like why detectives are so irresistible as like a kind of person who exists in the world, and why the kind of faith we put in them is so dangerous, because I think we just all are seeking order all the time. And we all are looking for ways to be like, yeah, ‘I knew that was happening. I knew that was going to happen. I saw that coming.’

Josie: Right. But I also would question like, what exactly is intuition as we understand it. And is that even real. Like you hear all the time about women's intuition, which to me is just like…

Sarah: Compensation for lack of childcare.

Josie: Right. Exactly. You need it because you have to be able to do 20 things at once. No, but also just communal experience and trauma. You know, like women's intuition, I knew that guy was going to be shitty or be creepy or whatever it is. It's, yeah. I mean, that's because you've seen enough. This is experience-based right. The idea that someone, certain people, are like gifted with more intuition as its own quality than other people feels worth interrogating.

Sarah: Well, yeah. Like people who believe in it tend to be the ones who feel that they have it, right. No one's psychic powers are real, and I don't have any of them. I guess people do say that, but I don't know. I don't go around talking about the reality and importance of things I can't do. I'm not like, you know what's great, home organization. Can't live without it. I do admire it, but I can't do it yet.

So Nancy grows up with puma sensitivity and so forth. And then she grows up, she gets married. There's like this thread running through that actually reminds me of Michelle Remembers, because she she's writing about, or at least telling the story of, her former marriage. And co-writing it like with the person she's married to after her first husband. So there's this thread of, Nancy wasn't fully satisfied with life as a wife and mother.

Josie: Ah, got it.

Sarah: I also feel, I mean, if I'm like a housewife in 1975 and I'm interested in trying to help solve crimes, what am I going to do? Like, a) get a job outside the home and start working as a cop and b) just have the joyful experience of being the only woman in my workplace, probably? No. I'm going to be a psychic.

Josie: Right. Totally.

Sarah: So things really open up for her though. And she starts using a Ouija board .

Josie: Ahh, I was worried, Sarah, that Ouija boards would not be part of the story. And I am glad that I was wrong.

Sarah: Yep. Page 54, Ouija boards.

Josie: How do we get there?

Sarah: This is a nice flashback. She's out to dinner with her family after some crime solving and we learn, “Watching her boys devouring their steaks, she was once again pulled back to the roots of her psychic opening. She allowed herself to go still, searching for some guidance on how best to use her gifts. She thought back to when the doors to her psychic gifts flew open in a frighteningly dramatic way. And it started in the spring of 1973 with a friend's game. Despite her world travels, Nancy had never seen a Ouija board before. She was introduced to it by her friend, Marianne Bogart, who brought it over for fun one afternoon while the children were napping. Nancy was quite surprised to feel their fingers pulled over the board, by what seemed like a life-like willfulness. As the pointer spelled out answers to their questions. ‘Just touch it lightly’. Maryann said. ‘Don't push it around the board.’ ‘I thought you were pushing it,’ Nancy said.”

And then the two of them get really interested in Ouija. They started asking a lot of questions, “Will Nancy be able to adopt a child? What color will the child's hair be like? And the Ouija is very responsive. And then it starts swearing at them. It spells out, “fuck you”. And though the quality of information coming from the board itself was deteriorating, Nancy's direct psychic activities seemed to be growing in volume, detail, and clarity. Although she had always used her psychic ability to keep track of Blake, she was now so tuned into his mischief that he actually noticed and complained about it.” Blake is her son.

And then just the other day, I watched Practical Magic again for the first time since I was like 11.

Josie: It is a really great movie. I love it.

Sarah: It is a great movie. There's a scene at the end where they have to call all the women in town to come over and form a coven and save Nicole Kidman from being possessed by her ex-boyfriend. And one of the women is like, “One time, I don't know, something happened to my daughter, and I was on the other side of town, and I just knew.” Which is the kind of thing that moms say a lot.

I remember my mom always talking about one time when she was like 10, she was riding a horse. And according to her mother, her mother was folding clothes at home and thought, “I hope Carol knows to duck if there's a branch” or something. And she like got hit by a branch and fell and broke her arm.

Josie: That's so funny. I mean, not funny, but wild. Can we just back up real fast to the Ouija board?

Sarah: Yes. Sorry to drag you away from that.

Josie: I really feel like I want to talk about this. Okay. So first of all, we should just generally note how interesting it is Ouija boards were a thing. Even when I was a kid pre-internet, we would play with the Ouija boards. The whole point is that for anything to happen, someone has to cheat the system. Even if we are to believe that sometimes we do boards get possessed, I think it's fair to say that a bit like millions of people that bought a Ouija board, probably all of their loved ones were not like talking to them through it.

Sarah: Just some of them.

Josie: Just Nancy. But it is just like a fascinating concept as a form of entertainment. So that's one. Two, Nancy's friend hates her, is clear.

Sarah: It had to be a demon, right? No person could have spelled that word.

Josie: I know. I really love the fact that Nancy was like, obviously it couldn't have actually been my friend.

Sarah: You can get away with a lot of passive aggression. I have never played with a Ouija board, which seems like a real oversight for me.

Josie: It’s not. You don't want to get possessed by something you can buy at Target. Like, it's just not cool. It's not cool. If you're gonna get possessed, you want it to be like in your own unique way?

Sarah: I want it to be like my own special ghost. It's really funny to me that we're living - I mean, we never haven't been - but we're living in a time when a significant faction of the United States believes that Satan is in charge of the Democratic party. He's like a seeable, knowable, communicable presence in our lives, and that he can reach you through Ouija boards. And yet no one seems to be trying to regulate Ouija keyboards. Like, why should we be able to buy them this easily if they're so evil?

Josie: On the other hand, would Ouija boards even succumb to regular regulation? You know, when the demon wants you, the demon wants you.

Sarah: Ouija boards don't possess people, demons possess people.

Josie: Well, there was that. But to your point about like how there are lots of people who believe the Democratic party has been invaded by Satanists. I understand that's different than people claiming to be psychic, but I would put it all in sort of the same category of like, here's a conclusion. Any evidence against it, I'm going to discount. And any remote evidence that proves it, I'm going to absorb. And there's no possible way that I can be wrong, because if you say that I'm wrong, I just don't trust you anymore. But if you're like, I'm psychic, if anybody tells you you're not, you just have decided they don't understand you.

Sarah: Right. I mean, it feels like we're very much living in the consequences of a culture that tells you if it feels true to you, then it is. And if they're working for Satan, then you just got to discount everything they say. It's a perfect built-in excuse for not hearing information.

Josie: Totally.

Sarah: Well, and then I feel like the benign side of it is the ‘mother’s intuition’ thing. If you have more information in your brain than you're conscious of, some of it is bubbling up in helpful ways that you could intellectualize. But why bother? Cause it's true then yeah, that's a real thing. That's useful.

Josie: I worry about something happening to my kids so much that if something happened to my kid today, I would be like, “Oh my God, I was so worried about something happening to him and it happened.” When like, your job is to be vigilant about something. I'm more impressed if you say something great happened to my kid and I had intuition.

Sarah: Yeah, you never hear those stories.

Josie: I don't doubt that the range of possibility on this is broad, but I also think people chalk things up to mother's intuition when it's just, no, it's actually your job to constantly think about everything that could happen about… well, actually that's probably not your job. You probably should be more reasonable. But like it's natural to think about every possible thing that could go wrong in this little person's life, given that they have no sense and are mobile. Like how can you not be in like permanent… what if someone drops them? What if it’s SIDS? What if they're in pain and they can't talk to me? Like, it's haunting. Right? So that resonates.

Sarah: Yeah. It makes sense to me that. Nancy's psychic powers arrived, essentially, like simultaneous with her becoming a parent. Like she needed them.

Josie: She's like, “I sense that…” What's your son's name, Blake?

Sarah: Yeah. Blake and Travis are her two kids.

Josie: We should look them up. We should see how it would, how they're doing these days.

Sarah: We got an update at the end, which is, you know, only relevant to the early nineties. But last we heard Travis worked for Keebler, and Blake got culinary training.

Josie: Great for them. They didn't go into the family biz of being a psychic.

Sarah: Oh boy, a family psychic detective firm. That would be a good show. Somebody make that.

Josie: That would be a great show.

Sarah: I guess like, Psych and The Mentalist are like, we do have some nice TV. Of course, psychics aren't real. But what if there is an Australian guy who paid close attention to everything, right.

Josie: Right. Having good judgment is such a key part of how we think about law enforcement. And people associate intuition with judgment. So it's not surprising, but it is pervasive.

Sarah: What we talked about regarding CSI and junk science, I feel like connects with this and connects with our dream of the detective. Because like my favorite detective is Lenny Briscoe. And what is his skill set, really? It's gravitas and one-liners, and also that he's been doing this job for a really long time. So like he'll interview everyone and he'll be like, well, it seems to me like she's cheating on the hubby, or whatever. I'm an unapologetic, Jerry Orbach stan.

But like, why do I trust him? Why do I trust Lenny? And it's well, because he knows what he's doing, and he can look at the situation and he'll have a hunch. And probably I’ll agree with his hunch because it's being presented to me as a credible thing. If I'm a viewer and just I trust him, I feel like it just comes down to, I trust him. And if you're watching CSI and they're like, the computer said that these bite marks come from this guy, well, I trust this computer. Any process where the results come from out of a black box that you just have to trust that it's working well, that seems very dangerous.

Josie: I think also it's just the medium question, right? When someone has invested a ton of money into a TV show that is only gonna work if you trust Lenny Briscoe, they're going to make sure you trust Lenny Briscoe. When the person making it has an investment in how you feel about the main character, chances are you're going to feel that way about that person. Lenny Briscoe is never going to be like a real detective, a more complicated self. He's never going to be like controversial.

Sarah: The characters we love in fiction will never betray us by saying something stupid on Twitter. The actors the play them will, but not Jerry because he's dead. Thank God. Not really, I wish he were alive, but…

Josie: Now this is a closed universe, and the ways in which they have to earn your trust are straightforward.

Sarah: Yeah. Thank you, Lenny. Yes. Okay. So Nancy develops her skills and then they fuck with the Ouija board too much and they get a Poltergeist. Poltergeist breaks a whole bottle of Welch's grape juice, so they know they need to get rid of the Ouija board. So she decides that she's going to defeat the Poltergeist. The kids are napping, she wakes them up. She takes them to the neighbors so they can finish napping. Which I love that she did that because you have to explain to your neighbor, “Please watch my children sleep. I have to destroy a board game.”

And then she gets the Ouija board, gets a hammer, and then goes into the backyard and just like hammers it to smithereens. They are released from the Poltergeist, but she's still psychic. So it all worked out great for everybody.

So the stories that happen in the course of this book, she's a mother of two young kids and she's increasingly being called on to help the police. Because as we've seen, she's like somewhat useful from a gathering information standpoint, but also I think she has a good bedside manner. I think she talks well with people who are bereaved or potentially bereaved.

Josie: How does she start helping the police?

Sarah: What's so funny is that we don't start with her first case. We start with right after that. So after the storm and the houseboat sinking, she reads about the houseboat in the paper. So she's inspired to think that she has insight into this because she saw her son with a Fisher-Price houseboat, and then she learns that there's this houseboat, that sank. There's someone who's missing. So she's like, okay, I'm connected to this. And then she has a vision about it. And we read, “She was learning more about how her mind worked each day. But even now, two years after she had opened herself to her psychic abilities, her capability exceeded her confidence.”

Josie: I would have to disagree, but, continue.

Sarah: “During the search for a missing girl in New Jersey earlier that year, Nancy had accurately described the location of the girl's body, working from a map she had pointed to the section of railroad track. The body was later found beside that spur, lying in water, just as Nancy had described.” So actually, how does she start working with the police? I don't know if we actually got that.

Josie: Probably, Nancy was deciding to write this book and the cops were like, don't tell them how it went down.

Sarah: Right. Because did they reach out to her first? Throughout this book she starts getting like some regional attention and being known by local cops. And that's why she's working in investigations and various jurisdictions. But we end with her becoming known because she has, again, like one of the things I like about this book is that she isn't really successful at anything until the final chapter. And then she actually does, apparently, identify or correctly profile an assailant. And that's when she gets however famous a police psychic can be.

Josie: So at that point, how long had she been working with the police when she finally got it right?

Sarah: If the houseboat was in 1975, and she's been psychically opened for two years now, then that's been since 1973. So she's a psychic for six years. And she's working with the police for four or five years before she has a win.

Josie: Nevertheless, she persisted.

Sarah: This is why making the workplace accessible for women is important, because if you don't, then we'll just invent random, made-up things to do. Okay. Her successes are increasing, she and her husband adopted their two sons, but she becomes pregnant with their third child who's a daughter, who they're eventually going to name Heidi. And then Heidi herself – snap - turns out to be psychic. Like, moves a crocheted ball with her mind. She has telekinesis, which Nancy doesn't have. It's very exciting. Motherhood makes her psychic, and then pregnancy makes her more psychic. She's having more successes, more kind of qualified successes throughout this time.

Josie: Fucked up to your adopted kids to have a biological kid and then be like, this one is psychic.

Sarah: Yes. Also, she's becoming friendly with the local police, and she's socializing with them and their wives. There's trust there. She's becoming a colleague rather than sort of a random person who they call. She's also, like she's able to work with them, partly because the detectives who she's contacted by and who are apparently initially skeptical, like according to this book are very impressed by the readings that she does on them. And eventually they take her to conferences, and they ask her, you know, here's this guy, tell us what he's about, what's his deal.

And she’s like, you’re going to receive a gift soon. And then he does. People are amazed. How does someone embed themself within a police department? And it's well, if the police are credulous, then she can. So that's how that worked.

Josie: I mean, if it were me and I wanted to convince someone that I was psychic, I would definitely say something, generic things about them that they could then, you know, you're never going to be like, “I bet you hit your wife”. You know, you are going to pick the things that are, you're going to be like, I bet you're really quiet, but sturdy, but reliable type. And he’d be like, oh my God, I totally am quiet, sturdy, and reliable.

Sarah: You have a long lifeline. You're a kind, man. You're on the verge of something big. Okay. Chapter six, Just Stay Out of the House. “So in 1976, there is in Wilmington, the murder of an elderly lady, Mary Amelia Allen. She lives alone. The police bring Nancy in to investigate. She walks in, according to this book, “A blinding white light engulfs her, and she hears a woman's screaming, ‘Get out!’ and a voice filled with rage. She gets told to ‘Get out” again and again, scary, screaming ghost. And then she leaves the premises, like you do. So she's debriefing with the police. She tells him that Mary told her to get out. Here's the response. “Carl was beginning to be impressed. He wasn't sure he believed in emotional residue, and he sure didn't believe in ghosts. But at whatever source had provided Nancy with that name might provide other information. He wanted more. ‘Get back in there,’ he said. ‘Tell Mary, I want to know who killed her. I want to know what they said. I want to know what they did. If Mary is going to talk to you, let's get something good out of Mary’.” Which is my favorite moment in the book. Probably because it, as a detective demanding that someone give the ghost the third degree.

Josie: And that the ghost is going to listen when the ghost has told you to do something, and you say, “No”. She has really no leverage here. She is a regular human and the ghost is a ghost.

Sarah: He cannot be detained without counsel. I mean, exactly. Yes. Nancy says, “Mary wants you out of the house. I wouldn't go back in there. She said to get out.” “Nancy, we're the police. We don't go out, we go in.”

Josie: That is actually the most reasonable thing that they've said so far, which is actually, we're going to go and do our job regardless of what the ghost told you.

Sarah: As long as we agree we're not going to try and strong arm this ghost. That's what I'm here for. And then she tells them she's picked up on the idea that, okay, the victim knew the assailant, the whole murder was hateful. It was overkill. He just kept stabbing and stabbing to degrade her. She says he's brilliant and angry and very disturbed. She blinked and shook her head as if she were trying to tune in a radio broadcast. He's a shoplifter.

So they ID a suspect the police bring him in. They interrogate him. He doesn't crack. They hook Nancy up to a radio so she can listen in on the interrogation and try and tune into the suspect's brainwaves.

Josie: Very ethical thing to do when it doesn't even seem to actually work for you, but like volunteers sometimes.

Sarah: Right. I mean, this is the thing it's like, this is the existence of police psychics in America is like really bizarre. But I think the real thing is every profession has randos trying to help out. But the question is like, how do you let them in so deeply?

Josie: At some point you gotta say, this isn't gonna work.

Sarah: Right. Oh. And actually, excuse me, they used very high-tech technology and they actually let her watch on video. Because she needs to watch for lies, because lies cause a person's aura to go from layers of color to gray, apparently. Which again is like cuckoo bananas. However, the idea that I think a lot of non-police psychic, just like normal police, normal prosecutors, normal jurors, YouTbers certainly have, they can tell when someone is lying. That you can tell by body language, you just know. I think it's also equally ridiculous.

Josie: I could not agree more. Again, confirmation by association so often happens on the backend. I feel like most people think they have a special insight into being able to tell when people are lying. And it’s absurd.

Sarah: Yeah. And it makes sense that we want to believe that. I mean, if I'm being honest, I think I'm overly credulous and a sucker, but I don't go around thinking that about myself. I'm like, I have a pretty good sense of people. That guy seemed legit. Right?

Josie: You could imagine a scenario where you're like, oh, I know this person. I can tell when they're uncomfortable. But it's this sort of thinking, you can tell that about anybody. Right. That just seems misleading.

Sarah: Yeah. So I don't really hold Nancy to that high of a standard. She hasn't been to police school or whatever, but these guys have her watching and listening, and the guy is not cracking. But she's like, no, like I can tell, like I can tell he's angry. I can see flashes of vivid color in his aura when you bring up his mother. He's like acting normal, but she says psychically, the picture was quite different. And the disparity was charring, never had she seen someone whose behavior was so detached from his inner life and whose inner life was so shielded. And it's like Nancy, you were the only one who can see his inner life.

Josie: Right. That's the only time you've seen this interrogation room with police, have someone accused of murder. Isn't it funny how somehow that same guy seems to have no inner life to you?

Sarah: It's a paradox. And so “The interview went on for several hours after that”, which like, I think maybe there is a cutoff for this, but like when does an interview become an interrogation? I think after one hour, probably.

Josie: I think the minute you are in that room and the cops suspect, you're being interrogated, right?

Sarah: Is ‘interview’ just like a word that we use as a euphemism for ‘interrogation’ that means nothing?

Josie: I think that you can definitely be interviewing people who you don't suspect of doing it, but maybe that was something. Or maybe the conversation goes from, can you help me learn something too? I think you did it. But yes, I think that any time law enforcement is talking to someone they suspect of a crime, it's an interrogation and should be called as such.

Sarah: I don't know if anyone wanted to interview me for several hours. I would say no to that because that's. Bad sounds psychically damaging. Right? So this goes on until 2:30 in the morning. They cannot get him to crack, which is their explicit goal. And they conclude by basically they have to let them go and say, “The Delaware state police have a long memory and we're always going to be here. There's no statute of limitations on murder.”

They let him go and then Carl the detective comes in and shakes his hat and he says, “Son of a bitch enjoyed it.” And it's like, really, why? Why a great, a sicko who's I guess, love to mayhem. Isn't going to enjoy being interrogated by the cops for untold hours, I don't think.

Josie: We talked about this last time, but like most of what law enforcement does is not exciting or like the big stuff that they imagined when they were going to be a cop. And so I love this idea of them like interrogating this random guy who was like, “I didn't do anything, I don’t know what you’re talking about.” And then when they leave, they're like, “Total sociopath”. And it's no, I think he just actually seems like a pretty normal guy. I don't think he enjoyed it.

Sarah: Might've been a guy who was tired. Yeah. And so this case concludes with, they have to let the guy go. The Mary-Ellen murder remains an open case as of the book being published, no one has ever been charged.

Speaking of, by the way, if you like to lie on the couch late at night and watch Unsolved Mysteries, you should just do a quick Google to see how many people have since been exonerated, because that number is not zero.

Josie: This is my thing about news. They cover the story so heavily. I was recently reading a story about a guy who's been convicted of many murders in New Orleans, like gang related murders is what they accused him of. When I was reading the scripts in maybe the 2010 era, I was noticing related to that story was another murder that had happened. Where the guy who was accused of doing that murder had tried to blame the first guy.

So in the article, it’s like, also in courthouse news, this guy is on trial for murder. He claims that this other guy did it, the first guy in the article. But police say he's just trying to blame whoever he can, and he actually did it. Fast forward like seven years. I'm reading updated articles about this same guy and the guy who claimed the other guy did it, was telling the truth. Seven years later, they discovered that he actually wasn't lying. The other guy did do it, but it's like, it gets one line in like a brief, versus actually having people be like, turns out our intuition about this guy was completely wrong.

Sarah: Yeah. I know a ton of people say this all the time, but I was really struck by a story a friend told me who was, I think, majoring in criminology or something. And was taking a crim class where the professor was like, “When does a sociopath lie? Whenever he opens his mouth.” And it's like, okay, but can he see how by this metric if I decide you’re a sociopath right now, you can never change my opinion of you ever. It's just over.

Josie: Yeah. I mean, you know, there are articles written in the New York Times Magazine from not that long ago about like, how do you tell the child's a sociopath? And look, it's not to say that like again, 7 billion people in the world, all kinds of people are different. It's not to say that there aren't situations in which you can tell stuff early about someone that later manifests in other ways. But it is just sort of bizarre how we try to quantify and intuit everything. Including the things that simply we don't have enough information for or cannot be predicted.

Sarah: Yeah. All right. So that case was a wash. Then she is brought in to look for a missing child named Zandie. And once again, she does her thing of going in feeling the location and thinking, you know, I sense that this kid didn't make it and gently breaking the news. And she is again, correct about that.

She's also talking to the police around this time. And one of the many cops who she's trying to win over says, “Do you think it could be the devil?’, the source of her psychic powers? And she says, “No. What makes you think that?” It was a question she herself had raised during her opening.

I love that we call this her opening. I think that makes it sound very sexy. “The answer that she had arrived at had come from considerable soul-searching because Nancy began, ‘I think if it were the devil, the information wouldn't be accurate, it would be misleading. And it would waste a lot of time’.”

Josie: That’s really smart, Nancy. Although I would agree, if the devil's going to be haunt you, it's probably not going to be in this way.

Sarah: It’s kind of a self-own, because it's like Nancy, sometimes your hunches really don't work out at all. So like, whatever, they buy it, it's fine.

Josie: No, that was my other thought. I was like, then we're all haunted by the devil, all of us. Because how many times do you think something that actually doesn't end up being exactly what you thought it was going to be? Okay. So then what happens to Nancy?

Sarah: So here's a case, this is the one where I feel most like she was doing something that I see as valuable. There's a 20-year-old junior at Westchester State College named Susan Spahn, who disappears from a popular discotheque one Saturday night in early November. And so the police were investigating, they're not coming up with very much. There's a detective named Chapman who reluctantly talks to Nancy. Which we got the line, “Chapman seemed anything but convinced that a psychic could help, especially one who looked about 10 months pregnant.” Love Chapman.

Josie: This is the only redeeming character in this book so far. So I'm a big Chapman fan, but yeah.

Sarah: So they bring her in, they show her a picture of Susan, and Nancy is looking at the picture. She's searching for a thought pattern. This is where she calls, and again, I don't know when I really like somebody, I think I'm most superstitious. Like when I hoping that somebody likes me back, I feel like I'm closest to like, what is their thought patterns? And are they liking me in their thought pattern?

But she doesn't get a thought pattern. But, there was no emotion to connect with beyond her own sadness. So from that, she's like, I don't think that Susie is alive either. The fact that I'm not getting any information means this person is dead. Which, I think giving people bad news as a psychic, I think is much better than giving imaginary good news as a psychic. So I'm very into that.

Josie: Agreed.

Sarah: She tells the police that Susan dreamed of her death in advance, and then she does get a vision. And basically, she says that after she was out dancing, she was sitting in a car with a young guy, white man, about six feet tall. And that he makes a physical advance, and she rejects him. And then he escalates violence and strangles her. And then she says two other things. She says, there's going to be two small pieces of evidence that are going to be found with the body that will tie the assailant to the murder, about the size of a matchbook, white or cream colored. And that she's going to be found after the first snow, and that she was strangled with wire. She gets the word ‘brandywine’. She thinks that's going to be important.

But aside from all that, I mean, I think… Here's the one thing that I feel like I don't trust the detective she's working with to think of, at this point. In the 1970s, this is where I feel like she's doing victim profiling or kind of profiling based on what does it mean to exist as a woman in the world?

Josie: You told me that someone went out dancing and didn't come home and is missing. And I'm going to guess that a guy came onto them, and they said, no, and then he hurt them. I mean, obviously that's not what happens every time, but that's a pretty sure bet. And especially in the 1970s, when violence against women was even more common. It's just to me, I'm like, yeah, Nancy. What I would take from this is that there should be more women in this police office at this point. We should just bring someone in to talk to them.

Sarah: Yeah. And I mean, I am long-term obsessed with the mythology surrounding Ted Bundy.

Josie: Same.

Sarah: Right? It's like our origin story for where we are as a country right now. Somehow, I think.

Josie: I started becoming obsessed with this because when I couldn't sleep, I would just start like pressing random on Wikipedia. And one time I happened to come across the Ted Bundy page. And I try to, because I advocate for like pretty drastic solutions in the criminal justice system, I find it my responsibility to read the worst stories to understand the spectrum of human tragedy. It feels like it's hard to say we can do this really differently if you are only thinking about the best possible people.

Sarah: Right. I mean, one of the points I've seen made that I find really thought provoking and that I want us all to talk about more, is that I think it's 50% of people incarcerated are there for non-violent offenses. So that's great. So they shouldn't be there. But then that opens the question of okay, what about people who are convicted of a violent offense? We need to talk about rehabilitation for people who did something.

Josie: Right. I have so many thoughts about this and I promise I won't get away from Nancy too much.

Sarah: That's okay. She'll be okay.

Josie: I mean, I actually think this is sort of related to Nancy in its own way. We draw a line between non-violent and violent, but it's very often meaningless. Because how we define those varies from system to system.

So a couple of examples. Until recently in California, if you robbed an empty house, it was burglary, which is a violent offense, right? It would qualify as burglary. I don't even know if this law changed, but last time I checked I should say, in DC, like yelling at a police officer or jerking your hand away was law enforcement assault, essentially.

Sarah: It's weird how law enforcement, how like they're supposed to be like way more fragile than everyone else based on laws like that. Like I think it should be illegal for people to yell at me, but apparently that doesn't matter because I'm not a cop.

Josie: Exactly. The other example of this. So let's say that both of us have a drug addiction and we're friends, and we like sometimes share drugs. And you got drugs and you share them with me, and they're laced with fentanyl and I overdose. I know a lot of states are now charging it as drug induced homicide. That is a non-violent drug offense that is also a murder, depending on who gets to charge you and why.

Sarah: Yeah. And it's, maybe we were just watching TV and doing drugs and having a very peaceful time. And then you got the bad dose, and I didn't participate.

But to speak to Ted Bundy for a minute. I find it just enduringly very sad and very funny that the mythos we have around him, that I'm doing my best every day to puncture, is that he was this genius who somehow was able to outfox the police for years and years and they never caught him. And then you look at the cases and literally the first murder that we know of him committing, Linda Ann Healy in Seattle, the cops come, they see that she's missing her roommates or like she disappeared in the night from her bed. This is very weird. She's very reliable. There's blood on her pillow. There's blood on the mattress. Please, help. And the police are basically like, she could have had a nosebleed and walked off in the middle of the night. And it's like, okay. So what kind of, how smart do you have to be to trick these people?

Josie: I mean, look again, we solve 50% of murders right now. You can flip a coin and that is the chance of you getting caught for murder, basically. Which by the way, presents it's sort of analogous to our conversation about lying presents this other quandary. Which is that we like to think that we know who's violent because we know who's been convicted of a violent felony. When, if that's the status, there's anywhere from 50% of murderers to 95% of rapists just walking among us at all times. And somehow the world is not, you know, falling apart. It's just two different kinds of realities in the criminal justice system. Which is, here's a group of people who tell you we catch the bad guy, and because of that, you don't have to worry about us. And it's, I mean, even by your own estimation, you're not catching all of the bad guys. Right?

Sarah: Yeah. And so she gives that profile. She tells them that they will find Susan's body after the first snow. And then she goes off to predict other stuff. She predicts Jonestown. According to this book, she says that one man is strangling hundreds of people, which happened, because that's what happens when you die by cyanide ingestion. Right. And so that's seen as one of her bona fides, which just, I don’t know.

Josie: I love that all of a sudden, she's actually correct. Because she didn't really mean strangling, she was just using poetic license.

Sarah: Yes. And then they do find Susan's body. And they find it not after the first snow of the season, but after the first snow of the year. So they bring her to the scene, and she reminds them about the two tiny pieces of evidence that they're going to find, which are somewhere in the woods. And they have a suspect in mind, this guy named Dutton. So once they find the body, they're like, okay, we're going to move in on him. They arrest him. And then something that I'm sure that you have never ever heard of in the annals of crime happens, which is that a fellow inmate who is in holding with him, if you want to complete the sentence for me.

Josie: He confessed to the fellow inmate who then became an informant.

Sarah: Why would he do that, Josie? How did this happen? It's shocking.

Josie: It is shocking. It is crazy how many people commit crimes and then just tell someone they happened to be randomly bunking with, that they committed a murder. It is really a true epidemic.

Sarah: Sarcasm aside, can you just describe this phenomenon briefly?

Josie: Yes. So the phenomenon is that informants, jailhouse informants as they are called, are often used in criminal cases to say that the defendant has confessed something to them. And in exchange for doing that, they tend to get time off of their sentence or a charge dropped here, charge dropped there. You know, it's a trade with law enforcement. This is unbelievably common and gets back to my complaints about Serial season one, by the way. Which I would love to discuss at any point,

Sarah: Oh, that'll be fun.

Josie: But it is this thing where everybody pretends to believe that this random guy that the alleged killer had known for days, was - and it's always this term – ‘bragging’ about what they did, right?

Sarah: Yes. This book says ‘bragged’. It says ‘bragging’.

Josie: Yeah, always. And when you actually think about this, Pam Colloff, again wrote a great story about an informant in Florida. Like when you actually interrogate this idea, you think, okay. But if I committed a murder and I did not admit it to the cops, I probably wouldn't just go admitting it to random people. Especially because said persons probably heard of jailhouse informants. But somehow, like what people on juries believe, I believe that most of law enforcement knows people are lying and they don't care.

But I think what people on juries believe very often. They don't even think, would I do that? Because they're like, well, this guy's a murderer, right? He doesn't do things the way that I do things, right. He would do it in this other way that makes no fucking sense.

Sarah: And he eats this toast with the buttered side down. And when he says goodbye, he really says, hello. Right, exactly.

Josie: It's just like this thing. And it's so common. I mean, the informant's issue, you know, you'll have the same informant who's testified in five different murder trials. Really weird how everybody keeps telling you that they had committed murders, even when they know that you've now told on all the other people who supposedly told it. It defies all of human reason. And yet they are still very commonly used in cases.

And what often happens now is that they say, I mean, they say this with a lot of different witnesses, but particularly with informants, were you offered anything in exchange for this testimony when they say something on stand and then they say, no, I was offered nothing. When actually what happened was like, it was a little bit more of a wink nod. You do this and we'll talk on the back end, but you know, I can't promise you anything right now. And it's just, God, if we had a way of, if only Nancy was here to tell us every single person who has been falsely convicted and their aura through informant testimony, then maybe we could really make some moves. But until Nancy returns, we're not going to be able to really even quantify how many people have been punished. We need Nancy.

Sarah: Yeah. And which is a more believable human motive, right? Say we're in lockup together. And I'm there for whatever charge and I'm fucked. And you're there, like on suspected murder and you're not caving. And I'm like, if one day I'm like, Hey, Jesse told me all about the murder she committed. She told me where she did, how she did it, where the weapon is. And if you're going to use my story to get a conviction that you want, especially if leaving this case open makes you look bad, maybe I can't afford a lawyer - because who can afford a lawyer in America - can get a lesser sentence. That's a reasonable human behavior. And an unreasonable human behavior is like bragging about a murder immediately after arrest, where you don't have an expectation of privacy. I'm not saying people don't do that, but the fact that we're like, yeah, people do that all the time. It's really weird.

Josie: And again, it's self-confirming, right? Because we hear so many stories about jailhouse informants. Many of them, I'm not necessarily saying the person's even innocent, but I think in many of these cases, that evidence is, I am going to venture to say a majority of jailhouse informant cases, that information is not reliable. There is evidence that supports that conclusion, because the evidence is made up. And because that evidence exists, it makes it less likely you're going to realize the evidence has made up.

People should look up the Orange County, California DA's office informant scandal, which is one of the most depraved and shocking, or I would say interesting, law enforcement scandals of the past few years. Where the DA office was using informants in like some of the most, I mean, I will let people look it up, but it's a very crazy story.

Sarah: When we talk about issues like no longer stigmatizing the criminal, or sort of separating the idea of the criminal away from the human, in any of these sort of soft on crime, prison abolition type ideas you know, there are many reasons to make this argument. But I think it's important to sell the idea that like we're not doing this entirely to be nice and altruistic, like it actually would be better to like, have a clear idea of who's guilty and who's innocent. That's the goal.

And if we have this scenario where, you know, it's just accepted that you're going to incentivize damning testimony against somebody who you want to put in prison, then if we're all going around with this idea of if someone is even suspected of murder, then none of their actions after that point have to make any sense to me because they're a murderer and there can't be any logic there because they're a murderer. Then it's like, you're going to be wrong a lot more because you're not thinking.

And so this guy Dutton goes to trial. The jury is deadlocked, they declare a mistrial. Thank God. And then again, we have an open-ended case. I don't know. I think Nancy got this right to the extent that she was able to. Which is you can't really identify a killer using the information you have, but you can maybe see farther than the police can in terms of what happened to the victim and why she disappeared.

Josie: Right, Though again, I don't think that's because Nancy's psychic, as much as I think that's because she's a woman, which, you know.

Sarah: Exactly. I mean, this actually connects to my not even a gripe, it's just an observation about the Silence of the Lambs versus Manhunter/Red Dragon, any Will Graham franchise, Hannibal. We're like, Will Graham's whole thing is that he has super empathy and he's different from everyone else. The FBI is like, he's retired because he's so traumatized. And we're like, we need you back. You're the only person in the entire FBI who can possibly investigate this murder and solve it because you have empathy, you have super empathy, you can do it.

And then with the Silence of the Lambs we bring in Clarice, who's literally a student. We know she's very smart. We know she works hard. We know she jogs her tush off, but like she's never marketed as a genius or someone who has a mild superpower. And she does the same thing and they're just like, well, you're a woman.

Okay. We're rounding the homestretch. Nancy and her husband finally got divorced. And I feel like maybe this encourages her to greater psychic heights. So then she is called to investigate another murder, the Schilling murder. And she's also teaching adult courses on meditation, which I think is great. Her profile is raising generally, she's speaking to groups, she's making the rounds, she's known. This is 1979, by this point. And Dutton again goes to trial in connection for the murder of Susan Spahn. And he is convicted this time. And I'm not sure about that. So if anyone wants to look into it, I feel I have a lot of questions. I mean, I like Nancy as much as anyone.

But one day in June 1979, a man named Calvin Schilling comes home and he finds that his wife has been murdered. So the police bring in Nancy to help investigate. And she gets the read that the killer was someone who the victim knew, that she used to take care of him, that she greeted him happily. And then she senses that he's going to ask her for money. They argue, his thought pattern is disturbed, suggests he's under the influence. And she says it wasn't his mother, but it was a mother-like bond. And then she says he's badly hurt hearing how this woman truly sees him as intolerable. He can't face it. He kills her. And again, like what she's ideating here feels, whether or not it was authentic to this moment, authentic to how humans behave and that men do violence out of hurt feelings a lot of the time.

Josie: Exactly. I mean, like that's another rejection story. This one is a little bit different of the design, but I find the, ‘she took care of him’ part, reflective of so many women. Especially at the time there are so few environments where women, especially then in most relationships of women and men, women were taking care of men and in ways all the time that one isn't sex related. But you can imagine that if someone said to you, what do you think happened to this woman? And you might think, well, I don't know anything about this, but off the top of my head, maybe she rejected a guy, and he didn't like it. This wasn't obviously like Nancy's more specific. The like conceit is the same.

Sarah: Right. So they show her pictures of various suspects. She puts one aside and they're like, oh, that's the victim's nephew. And she's okay, well I think this is your guy. Right? And so they think that he has an alibi. It turns out when they interview his boss, when they do a little bit of follow-up, his boss is, oh yeah, he didn't actually work that day. The records say that he worked, but he didn't actually work. So he no longer has an alibi. They bring him in for questioning. He's I'm here. I'm game. I want to convince you guys that I'm innocent, in my opinion, is what a lot of innocent people say. But who cares?

Josie: That’s what I do.

Sarah: He was guilty. And so they don't get a confession, but they have quote, ‘one hell of a circumstantial case’, to the stage. To this day, Jim Morris says that he doubts the case would have been solved if they had not consulted Nancy. And it's gosh, wait, hold on…

Josie: The case wasn't solved, correct?

Sarah: Oh, no. It was solved. They had a hell of a circumstantial case, that's solving.

Josie: Oh, so they actually, okay, so they take… I just thought this was the beginning step, but what you're saying is that leads them to the actual conviction.

Sarah: Yeah, sorry. So yeah, so they do eventually convict him again. I'm like, well, he didn't confess, he didn't work that day, which could mean anything.

Josie: And you're a circumstantial case is that someone identified him who has never seen him and has just had visions. So I would actually call it the opposite of a hell of a circumstantial case. They don't think, you know what circumstantial means. So it feels like a not cool. They get just as such a setup, obviously of, if you want to be the kind of person who allows some evidence like that, to dictate your decisions as a law enforcement officer, you can create the right parameters that give you the result you want every time.

Sarah: Yes, I agree. And I feel like if you have a random, interested party who wanders into a system and is like, let me help, let me look at the criminal’s aura. And people are like, who do you blame? Okay. So they convict someone who like, we're not convinced based on all the information we've gotten is the killer. And they also say that they could never have solved the case. In quotes, if they had not consulted Nancy and yet they had this person in their suspect file. So it's well, gosh, you could have done some follow-up and probably managed it without her. But yeah, right.

Josie: Maybe it would have wrongfully convicted him a different way.

Sarah: But not the psychic way. Right. And then according to the book, this is when her profile really explodes. The guy is convicted. When he's charged there's a headline in the Baltimore sun that says, “Nephew charged in murder, psychic aids Schilling probe.” And that's the end of her story. We're watching Nancy poised on the cusp of a new world, and what will she use her powers for next? Who can say?

We close with, “Nancy allowed herself to be satisfied for a moment, even proud of herself. And with that confidence came a new clarity of thought. Maybe, she said to herself, the question was not whether she should continue her police work, but rather what more she should do as well with her special gift. She was just coming into herself. Growth was the thing, getting better and better, challenging herself, making the most of what God had given her in any way she could. The public now knew her as a police psychic, maybe the best there was. Schilling had made that clear. Now the question was, what would come next? The end.

Josie: I love that ending so much, particularly the part where Nancy implies that she actually doesn't have enough confidence in herself and needs more. Because let me tell you, if you are going around telling people that you can read minds with the necessary level of confidence that will put someone in prison for many years, you have plenty of confidence. Your confidence is not the problem. Believing in yourself is not Nancy's problem.

Sarah: This is a classic girl boss story, when you put it that way.

Josie: Nancy is what happens when you mix girl boss with Olivia Benson, and I hate it. But I also am glad that I am sorry that we are getting joy out of this story while surely this woman wrongfully convicted many people. But I have to admit that the story itself is amazing.

I really do think that inadvertently Nancy was indicting, not just herself, but also the limited perspective of men in a society that thrives off of misogyny. Particularly law enforcement in the 1970s, and also just the completely unreliable process of law enforcement. Which granted, I don't know if they'd be as quick to use a psychic today, but it's certainly not out of the question. Which feels like a problem.

Sarah: I think so. And let's talk about that more in a future episode. I'm very excited for that. Yeah. I think you're right. I feel like this book is like a massive act of folly, and yet I'm so happy that it exists. Because Nancy is inadvertently telling the truth about what's wrong with the entire system.

Josie: Yes. It's amazing.

“What if your mind worked like a television set? What if you could change channels that would tune into programs no one else could see? And one of you could never turn the set off? You're about to meet a remarkable woman named Nancy Myer, who apparently has the extraordinary mind of a psychic. She didn't ask for it. She doesn't always like it. Yet she has learned to put it to good use.”