The Body Finder

That's what the press dubbed my mom in the late 70s, when she helped police discover the body of a missing 78-year-old man named Russell Drummond. He and his wife were camping in Calaveras County, California, when he left their campsite to use the latrine; he never returned. Frantic, his wife reported him missing to the local county sheriff's office and they organized a search party of some 300 persons. But after an intensive two-week exploration of the gold country foothills, the search was called off. The sheriff concluded that Drummond must have been taken from the county or left of his own accord.

Unfortunately, without proof of his death, Mrs. Drummond could not collect his pension or his life insurance. Six months after his disappearance, she decided to consult my mom.

I don't know how my mom got the clinical detachment to work police cases. This was one of her first, and the one that hit the papers big-time. But at this point, she'd been honing her intuitive abilities for over ten years, often on a daily basis with clients, and she'd developed a methodology, including charts, photographs from the client, and a tape recorder. Personal counseling sessions typically ran an hour, but cases might run an hour and a half or more per session. She'd look at photos, hold a personal object belonging to the victim, scribble on special charts, and dictate her impressions into the tape recorder. She usually made two copies of the taping, one for the client and one for herself.

Some critics said my mom shouldn't charge for these cases. I can tell you that, over the years, hundreds of hours of her work went without pay, especially if a police department had no budget or belief in her abilities. If a family member came to her as a client, she charged them her normal fee. I mean, lawyers deal with pitiful cases all the time, and so do doctors. Is it wrong that they are paid? Why should my mother's time and skill cost nothing? She made a living this way, she had bills to pay, kids to raise, and a roof to keep over her head. This reproach from self-appointed critics was annoying and unrealistic, but it cropped up quite often as she became more well-known.

She also did not seek out cases to work on, ever; she always had to be approached by a relative, friend, or detective connected to the case. More on that in another blog.

Mom told Mrs. Drummond that Russell was dead. He'd suffered a stroke prior to their camping trip, and she felt a similar disorientation as he wandered from the site in an easterly direction. She described a gravel path near a small cottage-like building amid trees and brush. She felt him suffering another stroke and falling beneath a madrone, a stubby, brush-like tree with reddish bark that is common to the Sierra foothills.

Surprisingly, she felt that his body was still intact—an anomaly for any flesh in an environment that included opportunistic carnivores like coyotes.

Mrs. Drummond took her tape to the (new) Calaveras county sheriff, Claude Ballard. Ballard listened to my mom's descriptions of the area and decided to have a look. If he could pin down enough of her details, then he'd consider organizing a new search party. He took his skeptical undersheriff, Fred Kern, with him. As it turned out, the description fell into place so well that Ballard was able to walk immediately to Drummond's body and find it without a search party. Fred Kern said the taped details were 99% accurate.

This story hit the news like a lit match to an oil drum, and Mom was splashed all over the newspapers as "The Body Finder." Her career went to a new level. She was romanced by various PR agencies. The phone rang off the hook, and from then on, her work included a large dose of police investigations.

It was a long way from "psyching out" greyhounds on the Florida dog track when I was a teen. Like any celebrity, her success was viewed as overnight and somewhat miraculous but she was quick to point out that she'd been sharpening her intuition for a number of years. Many called it a "gift," a term she dismissed out of hand.

"We all possess this ability, it's not a gift," she'd say. "It's like playing the piano: anyone can pick out a tune but not everyone is going to be a concert pianist. Still, if you played piano every day for years, I bet you'd get pretty good at it! That's what I've done. Practiced on my 'instrument'—my intuition—for more than a decade."

Mom tried hard to be called a parapsychologist instead of a psychic. Sometimes, this seemed to be an unnecessary distinction, and a bit snooty, but I understood her motivation. Psychics were stereotyped as crystal ball readers, palmists along the beach roads, spooky hoo-doo charlatans; my mother prided herself on being down-to-earth, conscious, and detail-oriented. She was as far from hoo-doo as she possibly could make herself and if semantics helped market that difference, she would use them.