Dorothy Allison - A Psychic Story

by A Psychic Story (lit)

  "Damn right I would. One of these days I have a feeling you and I are going to have just that opportunity. I have a feeling you and I are going to work together on another case, more important than this one."

  Lupo wasn't sure whether he was pleased or nervous about Dorothy's prediction. For the time being he wanted to get out of her house and be alone. He thanked Dorothy for her help and sandwiches and told her that if anything came of the clues, he would let her know.

  "Listen, paesan. Between us, I don't think you believe a word I'm saying." Her large brown eyes challenged him. "That's fine with me. Just don't waste my time coming back if you're not going to check into those clues. You tell Mrs. DeMars to leave me alone if you're not going to take me seriously. Okay?" Dorothy challenged him.

  Lupo blushed. He managed to stammer a farewell and a promise to be in touch. With that, he was out the door and hurrying to his car.

  Back at his desk Lupo quietly went over the clues given to him by the psychic. A row of tires. That could be any dumping ground. What two guys and what park?

  Maybe the two guys are archers. Or underwater divers with spears. Lupo's mind reeled with possibilities.

  In the meantime dozens of calls and reports from around the metropolitan New York area came in from people claiming to have seen DeMars. Cabdrivers, postal workers, commuters, convenience store managers called in reporting that someone looking exactly like DeMars had just been seen.

  The most important call of the day came from a Lynd-hurst resident. The caller, who wouldn't give his name, was a bond broker in Manhattan. He reported that he was a regular commuter on the Erie Lackawanna, and that he got off each evening in Lyndhurst, the stop just before Nutley. He had seen the articles in the papers about the Chemical Bank officer and recognized him as one of the nightly commuters.

  On the night in question the anonymous broker reported that he had absentmindedly missed his own stop in Lyndhurst. He said that he had asked the conductor to stop the train because he had missed his stop. The train had only moved forward a hundred feet or less and was brought to a quick stop.

  "It was very dark outside," the man told Lupo, "and there was no light when I looked out the doors when the train stopped again. We were probably a hundred feet away from the Lyndhurst station, on the tram bridge over the Passaic," the broker reported. "I decided it was too dark and too far to walk back to the station, so I went back to my seat and waited for Nutley." When he got back to his seat, the man next to him offered to drive him to Lyndhurst.

  "In any case, anyone could have gotten off that train mistakenly," the voice conjectured. "You ought to check with the train officials," he suggested and then hung up.

  Lupo could not evade the fact that Dorothy's words of the morning might have come true. If the man's call was legitimate, then someone on that train was not telling the truth, because someone had to have stopped it.

  At the railway office Lupo tracked down the conductor and one of the engineers from the train DeMars had usually taken out of Hoboken. This tune, with the bond broker's report in hand, plus Dorothy's warnings in the back of his mind, he interrogated the two men for the third time in three weeks.

  As the engineer recaptured the scene, he recalled that a businessman in the third car had run to him just after they left the Lyndhurst station and asked him to stop the train. The commuter had missed his stop.

  "Isn't that unusual, to make an extra stop?" Lupo asked.

  The engineer, a man in his thirties, nodded in agreement.

  "Why didn't you tell me about this man before?" Lupo asked.

  "Your picture of DeMars and the man who asked me to stop the train aren't the same person," the engineer defended himself. "I never saw DeMars that night."

  "That's the problem," Lupo said. "No one can place him on the train that night. At least, not yet I can see we'll have to jar a few more memories." Lupo gave each man a final stare and left.

  Lupo called Dorothy and told her that he had found the missing part of the story.

  "The train made an extra stop over the Passaic," he told her. "What do you think?"

  "I think you should pick me up tomorrow and we should start looking for his body along the river," she suggested. "If that's okay with you, I'll cancel my hair appointment."

  "I'll pick you up around ten o'clock," Lupo said.

  "What's the matter, you busy at nine?" Dorothy asked.

  "No, I just thought ...," Lupo stammered.

  "Pick me up at nine. The earlier the better. See you tomorrow," and she disconnected.

  Based on the suspicion that DeMars was on the tram, although that fact had not been proved, and on the fact that the train had made an extra stop on the bridge, Lupo suggested to Dimichino that the Passaic be thoroughly checked.

  "It's mighty cold out there." Dimichino rolled his eyes. "I'll tell the chief and he can call the Essex County divers for help. I'll tell him you're going too, floating on your psychic," Dimichino laughed and walked away.

  Lupo was not willing to believe so readily in Dorothy's powers. That the men "in uniforms" had been found might have been coincidence. He was going to check out everything that came over the transom, hoping to counter her predictions.

  For three days, eight hours a day, Lupo joined the Essex County divers under the train trestle in the cold Passaic. Dorothy walked along the swampy, rubbish-ridden banks, trying to ascertain which way DeMars's body had gone. She was certain that he had been on the train and had suffered some sort of amnesia which caused him to leap unwittingly to his death.

  Through mud and sludge, along the banks of the Passaic, Dorothy trampled in knee-high boots and a pink ski parka with a fluffy white hood. Their hope was to catch the body before it traveled to Newark Bay. The pair ceaselessly worked together tracking down clues and interpreting Dorothy's feelings. Three days of diving and swimming in the river proved fruitless, but left Lupo with a case of influenza.

  Four days later, after Lupo regained his strength, he and another cop chased down reports that DeMars had been jogging in Newark. It took two days to track down the jogger, who resembled the missing man only from the rear. Another report came from a taxi driver who swore he had picked up DeMars at the Lyndhurst station on the day in question and left him at Newark Airport. Two days of questioning dozens of people at Newark Airport proved fruitless.

  Lupo was still unwilling to believe totally in Dorothy. He chased a caller's clues from Long Branch, New Jersey, a city forty miles south of Nutley on the Jersey shore, with dogged tenacity. So positive was he that DeMars would be found in Long Branch that he dragged Dorothy down to the Seven Eleven store where the pair stood for two days talking to customers and passing out pictures of DeMars. The caller insisted that he had seen him; none of the convenience store shoppers recognized the six-foot-three man with wire-rim glasses. So far Dorothy had been more right than wrong.

  Everyday Lupo stopped at the DeMars home and reported the findings of the detectives working on the case. Dimichino was frustrated, the chief was angry, and the detectives felt their angst. From day one, DeMars's deacon brother-in-law had called out the Knights of Columbus to assist in the investigation. More and more they got on the police department's nerves, raveling and unraveling details that had been gone over time and again.

  To add to Dimichino's frustration, the New York Daily News ran an article on January 13 entitled, "Nutley Cops Draw a Blank on Missing Banker." Chief Buel was angered and embarrassed by the article, and he let his men know his feelings.

  By late January, Lupo and Dorothy had traveled back and forth along the riverbanks in the vicinity of the Lyndhurst stop dozens of times. Dorothy began to feel that searching any more was futile. Then the numbers "222" came to her again and she told Lupo that he should hold onto those numbers. They would be important.

  That night Dorothy called Lupo at home and told him that DeMars would not be found until February 22. She had decided that was the meaning of the numbers.

  "I don't think w
e should search anymore. Don't be like that crazy Vicaro who wouldn't believe me when I gave him a date and he told me I should keep searching anyway," Dorothy warned. "I've got other cases I'm working on, too, so I better give them a little more attention. They're kids, and I think they need my help more than this banker."

  "You mean we just sit around till the twenty-second? What am I going to tell the DeMars family?" Lupo wondered.

  "Tell them you're following leads and trailing down clues like always. You police know how to lie better than anyone. You won't have any problems." Dorothy laughed. "The only thing that will bring him up sooner than that date will be those Knights of Columbus. Maybe they'll bless him so much the river will choke and spit him up."

  Lupo was surprised at Dorothy's humor, but before he could respond, she had disconnected.

  Two days later Dorothy received a call from the Woodbridge police. They wanted to visit her for a little while that afternoon. Dorothy made herself available to them.

  Two police detectives arrived around 3:00 P.M. They reported to Dorothy that they still had no leads in the Carlucci-Delardo murders. The only suspect was in jail for the murder of a teen-ager in a community not far from Colonia. Nothing, however, would link him to the two girls.

  Dorothy asked the two men if they had any suspects who had anything to do with shoes or shoemaking, who might have raped or murdered a woman. Probably a nurse.

  The older man asked Dorothy if she had read any of the recent reports about Joseph Kallanger. Dorothy seldom read the newspapers or listened to television. She relied on her family to point her toward pertinent news. Dorothy had not heard of Kallanger.

  A shoemaker from Philadelphia, Joseph Kallanger, with the aid of his teen-age son, had raped and brutally murdered a nurse in Leonia, New Jersey, on January 8. In a case that would stun and frighten people everywhere, the story of Joseph Kallanger took months to unravel, while a growing number of female victims in Pennsylvania, Delaware, and New Jersey were attributed to him, many only on speculation.

  Dorothy was sickened to discover the source of the shoes and the nurse that had haunted her. She felt, however, that the man the detective spoke of had nothing to do with the murdered girls.

  Dorothy sensed an unfriendly air about the two cops. It took her only a moment to realize what they had on their mind.

  "Mrs. Allison, would you answer a few questions for us? You seem to know an awful lot about this case and we thought you might be able to help," the stern-looking detective said.

  Dorothy asked if the Carluccis knew they were questioning her. The blond-haired, younger man said they had not been notified of the visit. That confirmed Dorothy's suspicions.

  "Mrs. Allison, where were you the night of December thirteenth?"

  "Listen, you guys, you can ask all the questions you want. I just want you to know that I think you're cheap, half-baked cops, and your handling of this entire investigation has been rotten." Her eyes glared with anger. "Now you're questioning someone who had never seen these people till the day after Christmas, two weeks after the disappearance."

  She stopped short for a moment and looked at the older man, "I can't tell you why I know you have a mentally retarded daughter," Dorothy said to him. "I just see it. Have you ever met me before?" she challenged him.

  The man looked at his partner and told Dorothy he was amazed that she knew his daughter was retarded.

  "Well, be amazed that I knew those two poor girls were murdered and would be found quickly, while you men insisted they'd run away. You cops certainly did nothing to make life easier for those two suffering families." Dorothy stood tall as she confronted the two men.

  After fifteen minutes the two men left like puppies leaving an obedience school. Dorothy was angered at their reasoning, suspecting her of having any connection to the murder of two beautiful children. The saddest fact would be that the murderer of Doreen and Joanne was never to be found.

  It was on February 22 that the Kearny Police Department phoned Lubertazzi in Nutley. The Kearny assistant detective reported that a body had been found in the Passaic River. A wallet had been found on the body, with Nutley identification inside.

  "What's the name in the wallet?" Lupo asked.

  "DeMars. I think we've found your man," the detective said in a congratulatory tone.

  Lupo hopped into his car and drove the several miles to the site of the body as described by the Kearny cop.

  Lupo parked his car in the dirt near the muddy shoreline of the Passaic River, five miles downstream from Nutley. He walked alongside the park and discovered that the body had been found some fifty feet behind a Two Guys department store. As he walked and mentally crosschecked the scene with Dorothy's vision, he was amazed by her accuracy. Here was the Two Guys department store, there the playground, and as he stood on the chalk-lined grave, he saw the charred ruins of what had been a paint factory across the river.

  It was not until a few days later, when the railway bridge next to the Lyndhurst station was investigated, that he saw the number "166" emblazoned on a tugboat that was permanently stationed under the bridge.

  Lupo could see the tracks made by the coroner and all the policemen in the mud. He followed the tracks through to the park where a teen-aged boy watched him approach,

  "Did they find anything else with the body?" the sixteen-year-old inquired.

  Lupo explained that he was not part of the Kearny investigation, that he had only come down to see the place.

  "Do you know how they found the guy?" Lupo inquired.

  The boy's face lit up.

  "Yeah, me and my Dad found him," he said proudly. "We were shooting arrows at a target, and one got away. I ran to chase it way down by the river's edge, and I saw that man's leg in the mud and plants. I ran back and my dad went over to Two Guys and called the police."

  Lupo was stunned at the sight of the archer. "You've done terrific, kid. Keep it up."

  Lupo walked to his car and drove to Dorothy's to share the news with her.

  ~~~~~~~

  Chapter 5

  December 3, 1976

  Dear Detective Lubertazzi,

  I read in the Enquirer about Mrs. Allison helping you with a case in 1975 in helping you to find two children.

  I was wondering could you please help me get in touch with her to help me find my daughter. She has been gone since July 22, 1976. Our Police and State Police can't find a thing. It will soon be five months and I and my whole family are nearly out of our minds. Her name is: Debbie Kline, she was 19 November 28. She disappeared coming home from work. We found her new 76 Vega parked in the mud and thick bushes. Her pocket book and all her I. D. cards was in her billfold along with her money $30.00. Please help me if you can. I don't know what else we can do. Please call me at this no. collect anytime.

  Please do not think this a prank or anything like that.

  Please please help me. I have no place else to turn and it is terrible when you try everything and found nothing.

  Please call as soon as possible.

  Thank you very much

  Mrs. Richard A. Kline, Sr.

  Waynesboro, Pennsylvania

  Waynesboro is a small, conservative, and Fundamentalist community forty miles southwest of the state capital, Harrisburg, and on the western perimeter of the Quaker Dutch country. Surrounded by green orchards and rolling farmlands, Waynesboro has one main street, one high school, and one hospital. The people of the town are television watchers and churchgoers: if churches were as easy to install as televisions, there might be many more houses of worship.

  Waynesboro, and its close neighbor to the north, Chambersburg, exist in a pocket-size world all their own. It is said that during the Depression, people in the two communities hardly knew what all the fuss was about. Even tourists seldom find the bucolic area; Gettysburg and the Amish areas draw most of the traffic east of the towns.

  Violent crimes seldom seem to occur in the two communities; most "crimes" there are deviations from
accepted religious doctrine. Religious and community leaders work together to keep the towns on an event keel. Disturbing ideas and modern changes were kept at bay as much as possible by the strong Evangelical leaders throughout the area. The local newspapers, which are published in Chambersburg, became sounding boards for public battles against invading ideas or factions not welcomed by the resident faiths.

  The Richard Kline family fit into the fabric of the area. Dick and Jane Kline had known the mountains and hills around then" small comfortable home all their lives. As local folks, they had quietly tended to their own business, been respectful of God and country, and mindful of the needs of their six children.

  The tall, blond-haired father had worked for the Waynesboro golf club since the age of twelve, and after twenty-eight years, still worked as the superintendent of the course. An easygoing, affable man, he and his wife had raised a Protestant family by making family concerns their priority, rather than religion. Nevertheless Dick Kline gave his children full opportunity to grow up with the church as moral backdrop.