My Life Across the Table (12 page)

Within a couple of hours, the long drawn out drama over the house was finished. Not only did the truth about the fault show up rather mysteriously, but the soils reports, complete with all the information they needed to cost out the necessary repairs, magically appeared along with it. The owners came forward pretty quickly, suddenly flexible, and willing to negotiate the price. The escrow was a short one, and before we all knew it, the hysteria had faded and they were moved into their two hundred and seventy eight thousand dollar home on Tareco Canyon. The repairs on the fault running under the kitchen began almost immediately, with the final bill totaling seventy thousand dollars.
My heart was at peace for my friends. I had tried very hard, over the crazy weeks and dozens of hysterical phone calls, to share with her what I saw. I kept hoping that my certainty would somehow be contagious, and that she would know in her heart, what I knew as fact. No matter how hard I tried to help her see her life through my eyes, I came to the realization that it was never going to happen. It was simply impossible.
In thousands of readings over the years I have wished, if only for a moment that people could see what I see, and feel what I feel. Not just by giving a reading, but literally letting them see their lives through my eyes.
I realized that what I see with such clarity and detail, and the peace-of-mind I experience for a client in a reading are, and will forever be, non-transferable.

It was a strange place, Texas, Houston had a life all its own. In September of 1979 the people were wild, the air humid and hot, sticking to you like steam on a mirror.

There was a peculiar undercurrent throughout Houston. I could feel the impatience in the air. When I arrived at Houston Airport, I should have known this was the beginning of an experience to remember.

The journalists’ husband was there to greet me, but had no idea who I was when I said “Hello” to him.
He ignored me for about fifteen minutes, until I walked right up to this short, straight, bespectacled attorney and introduced myself.

He was shocked, and more than a little embarrassed, he told me I looked too normal to be a Psychic, and thought that I had been trying to pick him up!

When I told him I was Karen Page, he looked me up and down, and with a straight face, said he expected me to have a turban on, and to come sweeping into the airport on a broom! Of course, since I looked like a “normal” person, he felt pretty foolish.

Anyway, we went to Brennan’s Restaurant and had a very pleasant dinner, with his also completely-takenaback-wife, Mary. She was warm, genuine and lovely. She was about five foot five, painfully thin, and dressed in perfect polyester, with shoulder length, brown hair.

She did the interview for the Houston Chronicle over dinner, telling me she didn’t usually do these kinds of stories but, I was a psychic, and probably already knew that. She was a home story reporter that did stories on all the beautiful homes around Houston.

She said this just seemed so, well so, you know “ different.” She just had to give it a try, and besides, Gee Whiz! She had never met a real live psychic before.

The interview went surprisingly well. She was really amazed by the fact that I led a pretty normal life. You know, I have to wash my dishes, clean out the kitty litter box, have my car serviced, and brush my teeth every day.

There was an air of “Wow!” to the entire interview, but I loved it. They were genuinely nice people, right out of “Father Knows Best.” I tried to help them stop thinking I was going to levitate the table during, or after dinner, but to this day, I think they were more surprised that I didn’t.

The newspaper article came out the following Sunday, unleashing the most unbelievable response. The paper had to put on extra switchboard operators to handle the calls and give out my phone number. My phone rang incessantly, from the crack of dawn, into the wee hours of the night, I booked appointments.

I love my work, so I was happy as a lark, and thrilled to be that openly accepted in the Bible belt of America.
One day a rather large, six-foot tall, dark haired lady came for a reading. During the course of her session, I discovered she was a police officer with the Houston Police Department, homicide division. She asked me rather pointedly, if I ever worked with the police, and I told her yes. Without much detail, she enlisted my talents to help Houston Police Department with a rather perplexing murder case they were trying to solve.
I was staying in a condo complex, owned by a client of mine. The project was brand new. There were three buildings, in a U-shape with a total of seventy six units. I was in the front building in the lower center unit, right off Buffalo Speedway. I found out the building wasn’t quite finished, and that only three units were occupied, one in each building.
There was a caretaker on the premises, whom I never saw, and a very lovely lesbian couple, Carol and Lori, who worked for my client. They were quite helpful to me during my adjustment to the new building. I had been staying in another apartment complex, also owned by my client, until this unit was completed for me.
It took about three weeks to get the apartment finished, and have me moved in and settled. I was booked solid, working sixteen to eighteen hour days, without any breaks.
The girls had become my little guardian angels. They helped me move in, and would bring me lunch and dinner, whenever I finished working every day.
One day they took me for Chinese food to meet their friend, Mr. Lee. He was quite a character. I had the great joy of watching him dissect a chicken, in ten seconds flat, skin and all. After giving me the once over, he decided he liked me. I was the genuine article, and not some gypsy from outer space.
We went there often, and after Mr. Lee got to know me, he started having very vivid dreams about me that really disturbed him. He decided not to say anything about them for quite a while, until things really got weird, and by then he felt that he had no other choice.
The police detective and her captain called for an appointment one day, not too long after I had moved to the new unit.
I was booked up from morning until night, and had to make time to spend with my clients that brought me to Texas. Having those famous Sunday afternoon barbecues with the governor of Texas, and the owner of the Houston Oilers football team, were also part of my job.
I had to juggle things around a bit not to sound too weird to these Texas detectives, so the appointment was set for about a week later, in the evening. I had planned to be finished with my readings by eight or nine that particular evening, and figured I could give them a couple of hours then.
I didn’t think too much about the appointment with the detectives, until I finished working one evening about midnight, and decided to walk down the street to Denny’s, and get a bite to eat. The waitress asked if I was planning to eat by myself, and when I told her yes, she looked very surprised. Then asked me if I had parked my car in the lot, and I told her I had walked. This time she almost fainted.
I didn’t understand her concern, or her reaction, so I asked why she was so shocked. She told me she thought I was very brave to go out by myself, particularly at night with this guy running around cutting up women on the loose.
Well, of course I thought she must be referring to some other part of Texas, and Texas, as we all know, is a very big place, so I never felt threatened or scared. I just thought she was overreacting to newspaper headlines, exploiting some phantom in the night.
If I knew at that moment that grisly dissections of women, were going on not five or six blocks from where I sat comfortably munching my cheeseburger, and that in a few short days, I would know up close and personal, more than I ever wanted to know about human lunacy, I probably would never have stepped foot out of that apartment again, even if I starved from that day forward.
What I found out shortly after that last little outing in Houston, would chill the stoutest of hearts, and make every young woman, from twenty to forty, never leave her home, or answer her door to anyone, for any reason, ever again. Had I known, I would have thought twice about this innocent request to help the police. But ignorance is bliss, and what did I know from someone cutting up people like frogs?
Without another thought, I went right back to my eighteen hour a day schedule of readings, and when the day came to see the police about this case, I was no more well informed, than I had been that evening at Denny’s.
I was even less prepared when the detectives arrived for their appointment. They were accompanied by other detectives, lugging several banker boxes, and stacks of files being carried like schoolbooks, from hip to shoulder. I asked them what all of this was, telling them it wasn’t necessary to bring me everything they had ever done on this case. They said that they hoped it would help me give them a clue, as to what the hell was going on with this monster.
I had been talking to the female detective, when I asked the captain if he had brought a picture of the victim. What he did after that, I don’t know if I will ever understand. From across the room I watched him take a stack of photos out of one of the boxes. He meticulously lined them up, side-by-side, until they covered the top of my coffee table. I walked over to find that the pictures he had so carefully laid out were the actual crime scene photos of a decapitated woman’s torso splayed out on a bed. There was no blood, and no head in sight.
I backed away from them, horrified, asking him what he thought he was doing. From the moment he walked in, the few words he had spoken to me had been rather short and dismissive, and I realized that he resented coming to see a psychic for help on his murder case. He had been a detective for many years, and didn’t want, or need my help. As far as he was concerned, I was just some kook from California. Since he didn’t know me, or what to expect, he was going to shock me with grisly crime scene pictures. Sarcastically, he said, “Well, you told me to bring you a picture of the victim. Isn’t this what you wanted?”
I was visibly shaken, but tried to restrain myself, “No, this isn’t what I wanted, don’t you have any pictures of the victim when she was alive? or maybe one of her smiling with her dog? His answer was another sarcastic, “No.”
So this was what I had to work with, a table top covered with murder scene pictures. Even without the help of their captain, they hoped I could come up with something, as they were at their wit’s end with this senseless, horrifying set of circumstances. Not only were they frustrated, with no idea where to start, but they were embarrassed in the eyes of the Houston community in their apparent inability, to come up with even the slightest direction in which to begin.
To add insult to injury, they had two identical murders, two weeks apart, both on a Thursday night. They had occurred in the same building, one floor apart. The victims not only lived in the same apartment on different floors, but they also knew each other. The HPD was looking pretty inept, so in spite of their captain, they were quite desperate for some help by the time they rang my doorbell that evening.
I tried to get to the core of this case from the moment they walked in. Trying not to clutter my mind, or theirs, with some of the useless information their officers had gathered going on wild goose chases all over Texas.
We started with stacks of forensic lab photos of body parts. Stacks and stacks of Polaroid’s taken at the scene. All I needed was one from each crime, but they were intent on filling the top of my coffee table with multiple shots, from every angle, figuring lots of these photos would help.
I finally got them to understand that what I really needed to help them was, one plain, not fancy, picture of each victim. Excuse the morbid pun, but since they did not have a head shot available to give me, I would just work with one of the torso shots they brought, and there were definitely plenty to choose from.
I started telling them the reason, and makeup of the crime. That this was a sex-related crime, and that the murderer knew his victims, but would not know the next one.
I proceeded to tell them what the next victim would be like. That she would have red hair, be quite petite, would have been in Texas for a very short time, about six weeks, and would be from Florida. That she had a boyfriend already, and that this one would be different. It would occur outside, not in the girls’ apartment. I also knew what day they could expect it. Six days from that very evening.
I told them what motivated the killings, how he selected, and approached his victims, gained their trust, and gained entry to their apartments.
I told them he was not from the Houston area originally. That they would find the first victims’ head buried beneath the rear steps of his mother’s home. His mother lived in a yellow house with a large back yard area, and a front and rear porch, with a church nearby. I also told them that I saw the killer in a white coat. That he worked in a medical facility in Houston, with access to medical tools and equipment.
I knew he had a total, and complete split personality. He would commit one of these murders, and go have breakfast at the same diner he always went to, sit at the counter reading about it in the paper, and comment on what kind of terrible person would do something like this. This was all before I gave them his physical description. I told them he was over six foot tall, with short blond hair, wore glasses, and was sort of preppie looking, in a nerdy sort of way. They would find that he had a history of mental illness, and had started cutting up animals as a small child. I also knew that his current obsession with dissecting human beings appeared to be a point of graduating to a higher form for him. We are talking really sick. I knew that he had a criminal record, and if they had pictures of the convicted sex offenders in the Houston area, I would like to see them. Well, of course they had pictures, about forty or so, and they just happened to have them with them.
As they dug around searching for this stack of photographs, they informed me that they had already spoken to most of these guys, still had nothing to go on, and were completely and totally at a loss.
They clearly didn’t know what they were dealing with, and didn’t even know if these guys were in the area at the times of the murders, since they were
just
convicted sex offenders, and
not
murderers. That little differentiation makes a big difference when dealing with something like this. They stated they had pictures of forty or so guys who were
only
convicted sex offenders, and in the eyes of the law they were
not
, I repeat
not
, heinous sex murderers.
We went back and forth on this point for several minutes while they fumbled around with their files. When they finally produced the requested stack of pictures I flipped through them relatively quickly, and much to their surprise, about a half way through I tossed a picture across the table at them and said, “This is your guy.”
They looked stunned, and muttered something along the lines of “Just like that?”
I trudged forward urging them to check into his background, certain they would find a rather detailed history of mental disturbance, from his childhood onward. I warned them that they would find him to be the only one of the lot that would pass a lie detector test, hands down. From my vantage point he gave the word schizophrenic, a whole new meaning. The detective told me he was afraid to go to this guy’s house and open the refrigerator afraid of what he might find.
After my clear and certain identification of their elusive murderer, they just sat there, continuing to ask me if I was sure, because to them, he was
only
a sex offender, with no prior history of murder. I looked at them, practically begging them to check out the information I had given them. If I was wrong, they could call me pisher, but if the information I had given them was correct, then go get him. I also knew something else. Unfortunately, it would take one more brutal murder, before they could nail him. If they worked quickly, it would only be one more. Not a dozen more.
Thinking I had done my job, I told them to feel free to call me if there was anything else I could assist them with. They assured me they would let me know what was going on. We said our goodbyes, and I went into the kitchen to make myself a cup of very strong, black coffee.
Every time I work on a murder case like this, it makes me think about the twisted illness of human nature. What could possibly cause such a snap in someone’s mind?
I didn’t hear from them for about a week, and then I read the newspaper. The redheaded girl from Florida was front-page news. As predicted.
My phone rang with a request from the police captain, to come by and talk to me again. I stood by my word, shuddered and said yes. We set a date and they showed up as scheduled. Again, I was not prepared for their proposition. They had indeed checked out the facts, against my feelings, and clearly began to see there just might be something to this “spooky psychic stuff.”
The murder of the Florida girl really gave them a spin. They realized they had better act quickly, or who would be next?
Indeed, the man I had picked from the photographs was from outside Houston. He was from a small town called Wharton. His mother lived in a yellow house, with a large back yard, and a front and rear porch, as I had described. The most important parts were yet to come. They found out that he did work in a medical facility, and there absolutely was a history of mental disturbance. He had been treated as a child at a mental facility, for cutting up small animals.
What they requested of me during this second meeting was so shocking and ridiculous, I was certain they were joking.
I am that same psychic from Los Angeles that they had treated like a carnival side show attraction. Their captain had been rude to me, they argued with me about everything I said, and now they wanted me, who they didn’t believe to begin with, to go talk to this guy!
They reasoned that obviously, because of my strange gift to see and know things, I could get through to him, and get him to talk.
I didn’t have the slightest desire to find out what they might have been thinking, trying to put me in the sights of this lunatic. I suggested they get a veterinarian to see him, since he had such an obvious interest in animals. However, they failed to see the humor in my train of thought, as they found themselves once again at a loss, and could not get me to cooperate by becoming their sacrificial lamb. I tried to reason with them. I explained to them that his knowing I was the one that pinpointed him, as the bladewielding fruit loop of Texas, was of no benefit to their case. But it did place me in considerable danger.