Lost at Sea (26 page)

“I was bitten by a brown recluse spider in 1993,” she says. “It was so painful I wanted to die.”

She says she called the official right-to-die groups, “but they wouldn’t help me.”

“Because you weren’t terminally ill?”

“Yeah, they rejected me. But then somebody said, ‘You might want to call George.’ Kind of like under the counter.”

Cassandra says she would have killed herself with George’s help—he was perfectly willing—but she couldn’t find anyone to look after her pet snake. Eventually, they got to talking. If she wasn’t going to be his client, perhaps she should be his assistant.

•   •   •

GEORGE ARRIVES.
He has a second job now, buying up houses that have been seized by the banks, and then selling them on for a quick profit, although he hasn’t managed to sell any yet.

“You could provide the full service,” I say. “You could sell them a house, and when the banks foreclose, you could help them kill themselves.”

We laugh. I say to him, “In the Arizona tape, Shirley said, ‘It’s bitter,’ and you snapped, ‘Drink it!’”

“Absolutely,” he replies. “Because I’d been through that argument with her before.”

“She’d tasted it before?” I ask.

“Yeah,” he says. He’s getting annoyed with me. “I’d been with her twice before in person. What kind of bull twaddle is that? If you’re serious, you’re going to drink it and not whine about it!”

“But this is somebody who doesn’t know whether to kill themselves,” I say.

“Just drink it,” he says, exasperated. “Three or four swallows and you’re going to go to sleep. Permanently. In ten minutes you’ll be off this planet. Yes, I was probably pressing her to some extent. But I was pressing her to make up her mind one way or another because I can’t go flying across the country week after week and have nothing come of it. I want her to either go on and live her life, or check out. But it’s her choice. It’s not mine.”

We go for lunch. Cassandra has told me that her multiple chemical sensitivities (triggered by the 1993 spider bite) were so severe, there is only one local restaurant she can eat in where the atmosphere does not set off her symptoms. But we eat in another restaurant—an all-you-can-eat buffet—and she is fine. She eats all she can. I begin to see Cassandra as living proof that George really shouldn’t help people like Cassandra kill themselves.

After lunch I tell him some people think he’s on a slippery slope.

“What slippery slope?” he asks sharply.

“Not being able to stop helping people because you see it as your calling and you like to be there at the moment of death because you get something out of it. And you may consequently be encouraging them toward suicide.”

“Bullshit,” he says. “It just hasn’t happened. Otherwise these people wouldn’t be hanging on for years and years and years.”

And that part seems to be true: He’s always said he has clients who have been vacillating for years.

George drives off to do some real estate business and I’m left alone with Cassandra. We sit on her porch. “I see this as a business,” she says. “George sees it as a calling. There’s a big difference there. For me it’s ‘No cash, no help.’”

“What’s your price?” I ask.

“Seven thousand dollars,” she says.

“You’re bound to get it wrong, aren’t you?” I say. “And help someone who shouldn’t be helped?”

Cassandra shrugs. “Probably, at some point, yes,” she says.

She says George’s worst crime is his financial imprudence: that he’ll help people who can’t afford to pay.

“George will get to a point where he’ll run out of money,” she says. “He won’t scale down the expensive cuts of meats. He would rather kill himself than economize.”

“He seems quite keen on killing himself,” I say.

“I think he’ll do it soon,” says Cassandra. “And that’s why I’ve been pressing him to give me a list of his current clients.”

A few weeks pass. Then I get an early-morning call from Cassandra. She says the FBI has just arrested George. His partner, Thomas, woke up to find George and two men standing there. They said, ‘We’re putting George in prison until we can take him to Ireland.’” George didn’t have the opportunity to run into the kitchen and drink his poison.

A few weeks after that (I later learn) Cassandra flew to New Zealand to help a depressed, nonterminally ill woman she had met on the Internet commit suicide. The woman had previously asked a mainstream right-to-die group called Dignity NZ to help her, but they refused. “I was of the impression that she needed assistance in living rather than advice on how to end her life,” Dignity NZ’s founder, Lesley Martin, later e-mails me. “I imagine you are developing a good understanding of what an absolute mess the euthanasia underground is. Unfortunately, there are ‘gung-ho’ individuals involved who, in my opinion, treat the matter of assisting someone to die as an exciting relief from the boredom of their own lives and do so completely ill-equipped and dismissive of the responsibility we have of ensuring that people who need mental-health assistance receive it, while still working toward humane legislation that addresses the real issues.”

I visit Cassandra and ask her what was wrong with the New Zealand woman. “She had some sort of breathing disorder,” she says, “and the doctors there wouldn’t give her the medication that she needed. I happened to take the same medication. I gave her a little bit of mine and she was fine.”

“But you helped her commit suicide, even though you helped her breathe better?” I say.

“Yeah,” says Cassandra. “Isn’t that ironic?”

“You shouldn’t do it,” I say.

“Somebody’s got to pay the bills so you can have some water in that glass you’re drinking,” she says.

On October 25, 2007, a federal judge in Charleston, West Virginia, decrees that because assisted suicide is not a crime in twenty-five of the fifty states, he can’t allow the Irish prosecutor to try George in Dublin. The extradition has failed. George is free.

I visit George one last time. I thought there wouldn’t be any more twists and turns in this story. But there’s a final one. “You know I provided you with a tape?” he says. He means the Shirley/Arizona telephone tape. “That was not a real deathing. I was talking to a dial tone.”

“You’re a very good actor,” I say.

“I wanted to give you an example of how I would work with somebody,” he says, shrugging. “And she was the only possibility.”

He explains that Shirley was a real person, and he really had visited her on many occasions, and that she really had vacillated. All that was true.

“And guess what?” he adds. “She’s killed herself now. While I was in jail.” He pauses and says, sounding quite triumphant: “She really is dead now.”

Is She for Real?

DAY 1: AT SEA

It is Tuesday evening and I am on a luxury Mediterranean cruise ship called the
Westerdam
. I’m in the audience in the Vista lounge. A grouchy woman is sitting on a beige and golden throne on the stage. She’s complaining about builders and dispensing dietary advice. Her name is Sylvia Browne and for years I’ve wanted to interview her. She’s America’s most divisive psychic. She’s become famous for telling the parents of missing children what happened to their kids. Distraught parents go to her during her weekly appearance on
The Montel Williams Show
on CBS television. Montel is like Oprah. Sylvia tells them, “Your child is dead,” or “Your child was sold into slavery in Japan.”

She really did once say that, in 1999. A six-year-old, Opal Jo Jennings, had a month earlier been snatched from her grandparents’ front yard in Texas while playing with her cousin. A man pulled up, grabbed her, threw her into his truck, hit her when she screamed, and drove off. Her grandmother went on Montel’s show and said, “This is too much for my family and me to handle. We want her back. I need to know where Opal is. I can’t stand this. . . . I need your help, Sylvia. Where is Opal? Where is she?”

Sylvia said, “She’s not dead. But what bothers me—now I’ve never heard of this before—but for some reason she was taken and put into some kind of a slavery thing and taken into Japan. The place is Kukouro.”

“Kukouro?” Montel Williams asked, after a moment’s stunned silence.

“So she was taken and put on some kind of a boat or a plane and taken into white slavery,” Sylvia said.

Opal’s grandmother looked drained and confused. Opal’s body was eventually found buried in Fort Worth, Texas. She had, the pathologist concluded, been murdered the night she went missing. A local man, Richard Lee Franks, was convicted.

Montel Williams was once asked in a radio interview why he has Sylvia Browne on his show. He said, “She’s great! She’s a funny character! She’s hysterical!” Thanks to Montel her books, such as
Adventures of a Psychic
, are frequently on the best-seller lists. She is the queen of psychics, but there are many others working in her field. “It happens every time a child goes missing,” Marc Klaas told me in a telephone conversation shortly before the cruise began. “I call them the second wave of predators. First you lose your child and then these people descend. Every time.” It happened to Marc. In October 1993 his twelve-year-old daughter, Polly, had two friends round for a sleepover at their California home. At 10:30 p.m. she opened her bedroom door to find a man standing there with a knife. He tied up the girls, told them to count to a thousand, and took Polly away. For the next two months, before Polly’s body was eventually found (she’d been raped and strangled), Marc was inundated with offers from psychics. “I was insulated from most of them by family and police,” he said, “but there had to be at least a dozen I personally dealt with. They hope you’ll pay them and they hope they’ll get really, really lucky and make a guess so close to the truth, they can say they solved it.”

Marc did consult a psychic. He says she got it wrong but nonetheless later took credit (on a tabloid TV show) for psychically locating Polly’s body. “You become increasingly desperate and afraid,” he said. “Every day the police don’t find your child, you think they’re not doing their job. So you go elsewhere, and psychics put themselves out there as a very viable solution.”

This is why, Marc said, he’s not surprised by reports that Madeleine McCann’s parents are considering consulting a psychic called Gordon Smith. Friends of the family have already contacted Smith, a host on Living TV’s
Most Haunted
. According to a
Daily Mail
article on October 2, the McCanns have received a thousand psychic tip-offs since May.

Sylvia Browne doesn’t solicit. Such is her fame, distraught parents go to her. Most famously, Shawn Hornbeck’s parents went to her. On October 6, 2002, eleven-year-old Shawn disappeared while riding his bike to a friend’s house in Missouri. Four months of frantic searching later, his parents went on
Montel
.

“Is he still with us?” asked Pam, Shawn’s mother.

“No,” said Sylvia.

Pam broke down. Sylvia said Shawn was buried beneath two jagged boulders.

Four years later, in January of this year, Shawn was found alive and well and living with his alleged abductor, Michael Devlin, in Kirkwood, Missouri. This miraculous happy ending became headline news across the U.S. Shawn’s parents told journalists that one of their lowest points was when Sylvia Browne told them their boy was dead. “Hearing that,” his father, Craig Akers, told CNN, “was one of the hardest things we ever had to hear.”

Sylvia Browne doesn’t give interviews, especially not since the Shawn Hornbeck incident. She’s turned down CNN’s Anderson Cooper, Larry King, ABC, and so on. A few months ago I logged on to her website and watched some of her videos. She looks and sounds like a worldly dame you’d meet in a bar in a Dashiell Hammett novel. Then I noticed an announcement on her news page: Sylvia was to be a guest lecturer on a cruise around the Mediterranean in late September. Fans could sign up for four lectures and a cocktail party.

“She can’t avoid talking to me if we’re trapped on a ship together,” I thought. And so, impulsively, I booked myself on to the cruise.

•   •   •

IT’S OUR FIRST EVENING
aboard and there she is. She’s sitting on the throne on the stage, unexpectedly giving a rambling, grumpy lecture. “I don’t like tofu,” she growls. “I’d sooner eat a sponge.” And: “Try to get a workman! I’ve always wanted to put a little solarium on the back of my house. You know. Glass. They put it on backward. People don’t care anymore.”

The audience listens politely. For all the times Sylvia gets things psychically wrong (which she does a lot: I sometimes think if she tells you your kid is dead, you should probably presume the child’s alive, and vice versa), she still has an enormous following. Hundreds of people have paid thousands of dollars each to be cruising with her this week. This is in part because if you want to pay $750 to have a thirty-minute telephone reading with her, there’s a waiting list of four years. Her critics believe her career can’t possibly survive the Shawn Hornbeck debacle, but there’s no sign of it diminishing on this cruise.

I don’t know anything about my fellow travelers. They mainly look like retired Americans. But then Sylvia draws names out of a hat. If we hear our name called, we are allowed to ask her a single question. Only one.

“Julie Harrison . . . Joan Smith . . . Pamela Smith . . .” says Sylvia. And, one by one, they walk to the microphone in front of the stage.

“Why did my husband decide to take his own life?” asks the first woman.

“What?” Sylvia says. The woman is crying so hard, Sylvia can’t understand her.

“Why did my husband decide to take his own life?” the woman repeats.

“He was bipolar,” Sylvia says.

The next woman walks to the microphone.

“I have a strained relationship with my daughter,” she begins. “And I want to know—”

“Your daughter is strange,” interrupts Sylvia.

Sylvia doesn’t pause. Other psychics will often reach around for some inner voice, but Sylvia answers each question instantly, in a low, smoky growl, sometimes before the person has even finished asking it.

“Your daughter is stubborn,” she says. “She’s selfish, narcissistic. Leave her alone.” The woman reluctantly nods. Tears roll down her cheeks.

“Don’t get too involved with her,” Sylvia says. “She’ll hurt you. Leave her alone. I don’t like her.”

“Thank you, Sylvia,” the woman says.

“Am I ever going to have a better relationship with my father?” another woman asks.

“No,” Sylvia replies. “He’s narcissistic. He has sociopathic tendencies. Forget it. There’s a darkness there.”

“Thank you, Sylvia,” she says.

Sylvia seems to be psychically diagnosing a lot of people with narcissism today.

“Will you tell me exactly the time and place my father died?” the next woman asks.

“Ten years ago in Iowa,” Sylvia says.

“Iowa?” says the woman, surprised.

“I’m the psychic,” Sylvia snaps. “I’m telling you. Iowa.”

“Thank you, Sylvia,” the woman says, cowed.

The next woman asks, “What happened to my dog? Is she still alive?”

“No, honey,” Sylvia says.

The woman bursts into tears. There are no parents of missing children on this cruise, but every other human tragedy is well represented.

“My son . . .” the next woman says. She stops, choking on her words. “My son met a violent death,” she says.

“I’m sorry, honey,” Sylvia says.

“Is he around me?” she asks.

“Yes, he does come around you,” Sylvia says. “In fact, he rings the phone. He also drops coins around you. When the phone rings and no one’s there, that’s him. People have said to me, ‘That’s telemarketers.’ Have you ever heard of a telemarketer that didn’t talk? No.” (Actually, telemarketing companies use an auto-dialing machine called the Amcat. When your phone rings and there’s nobody there, it’s because the Amcat has inadvertently dialed your number on behalf of a cold caller who is still pitching to someone else. I feel bad mentioning it here, but it’s the truth.)

“He’s around you,” Sylvia says. “He has beautiful eyes, an oval face. Why is he holding his head?”

“He was shot in the head,” the woman says.

“That’s why he’s holding his head,” Sylvia says.

Sylvia says this to the mother but also to us, as if to say, “See, everyone! That’s my psychic gift!” It is an impressive moment.

It’s dinnertime in the Vista restaurant. I sit with others from the group. Sylvia is nowhere to be seen.

“Those stories were really sad,” I say.

“That’s nothing,” says a woman in her seventies whom I’ll call Evelyn. “Three years ago I saw Sylvia give a talk in Tampa. A girl in her thirties stood up, really young. She said, ‘I haven’t been feeling well. What do you think is wrong with me?’ And Sylvia replied, ‘Do you want the truth, honey? You’ll be dead in two years.’”

Everyone around the table gasps.

“The girl had to be helped from the room in tears,” Evelyn says.

“I wonder if I should try to track the girl down,” I think out loud.

Evelyn looks at me as if I’m an idiot. “She’ll probably be dead,” she says.

DAY 2: DUBROVNIK

Sylvia is having the day off and so her co-psychic, Colette Baron-Reid, entertains us in the Vista lounge. She’s not grouchy and monosyllabic like Sylvia. She’s bouncy and eager to please. She makes us do a “get to know the group” exercise. We have to turn to our neighbor and tell them a lie about ourselves. My neighbor is Evelyn. I really like her: She’s a funny and kind old lady from New York who does amateur dramatics. She’s looking forward to directing a big musical next year.

I say, “My lie is that I don’t have any children.”

Evelyn replies, “My lie is that I don’t have really bad stomach cramps and I’m not scheduled for a colonoscopy when I get home from this cruise.” Evelyn looks scared. “If Sylvia calls my name out tomorrow,” she says, “I’m going to ask her about the stomach cramps. They’re really bad. They shouldn’t be this painful.”

Later, in the Jacuzzi near the dolphin sculpture on the lido deck, I bump into the woman whose husband committed suicide.

“Did Sylvia help you last night?” I ask.

She smiles sadly and shakes her head. “No,” she says. “He wasn’t bipolar. He had excruciating physical pain in his legs.” She falls silent. “Sylvia didn’t help,” she says.

She’d been too polite to say anything at the time. I think Sylvia survives in part because her audiences are often too polite to say anything.

I feel the need to escape the group. I sneak off to the ship’s casino and pump money into a slot machine. From the corner of my eye I see a flash of red and gold approach in a wheelchair. It is Sylvia. Her golden hair cascades down her red dress. She starts pushing money into the machine next to me. I momentarily overhear her conversation.

“Do you think they liked it?” she asks one of the four large and quite frightening-looking men who are always around her. They look like the Sopranos.

“What?” he replies.

“The thing,” Sylvia says.

“You mean the lecture?” he says. He sounds surprised, as if this isn’t a conversation they have very often.

“Yeah,” Sylvia says. She sounds quite sweet and anxious. “Do you think they enjoyed it?”

“They loved it,” he says.

“Good,” Sylvia says. She catches my eye and smiles warmly. In this moment, she seems likable, though a suspicious part of me wonders whether she knew I was overhearing and said something sweet for my benefit.

There’s a website called stopsylvia.com. A computer programmer called Robert Lancaster created it as a hobby. He does it because, he writes, “I found her work with missing children to be incredibly offensive.” The site assiduously details many of the notable occasions she’s got it wrong. In the FAQ section, Lancaster asks:

Q: Do you think Sylvia believes she is psychic?

A: No, I do not.

Famous skeptics such as James Randi say Sylvia is not a silly, deluded person who believes herself to be psychic. They say she’s a callous fraud. She’s just a good cold reader.

Cold reading is the stage art of convincing a stranger you know more about them than you actually do. Good cold readers are brilliant observers. They make high-probability guesses about their subject based on their clothes, race, age, etc. They quickly pick up on signals as to whether or not their guesses are in the right direction, and alter their spiel accordingly. Of course, cold reading is easiest to spot when the psychic does it badly. This morning, Colette, Sylvia’s co-psychic, seemed to be cold reading badly. She said to a man in the audience, “Why do I see a hospital around you?”

“I’m a doctor,” he replied.

“That’s why I see a hospital!” Colette exclaimed to the crowd.

“I’m a chiropractor,” he added. “I work out of an office. I stay away from hospitals.”

“I meant medical . . . uh . . . lab,” Colette said. “You know the expression, to ‘lab’ something? To research something? That’s what I meant. Are you researching anything at the moment?”