Gilroy – Kathlyn Rhea moves gingerly these days, and with
considerable pain, as she recovers from a broken pelvis she
suffered over the summer. She still can’t get around very well on
her own.
Her body is getting old, but it’s Rhea’s mind that matters. Rhea
is a psychic detective, a pioneer of sorts for a suddenly hot
industry gaining ever more credibility.
Gilroy – Kathlyn Rhea moves gingerly these days, and with considerable pain, as she recovers from a broken pelvis she suffered over the summer. She still can’t get around very well on her own.
Her body is getting old, but it’s Rhea’s mind that matters. Rhea is a psychic detective, a pioneer of sorts for a suddenly hot industry gaining ever more credibility. “Medium,” a new show on NBC, depicts the fictionalized adventures of psychic Allison Dubois, but Rhea has quietly helped California law enforcement agencies solve crimes and find missing persons for 30 years. In that time, she’s worked thousands of cases, been deputized twice and stepped into the occasional controversy. But the first thing anyone needs to know about psychic crime-solving, she said, is that it’s nothing like you see on TV.
“They do tend to exaggerate,” Rhea said. “They have to meditate and all that. It’s a bunch of baloney, only half-real. My work is all intuitive.”
And Rhea says that she’s no different from anyone else, just more practiced.
“Everybody’s intuitive,” she said. “If people have five senses then they have six. It’s just that I’ve been developing mine for 30 years.”
Rhea teaches what she calls the Three I’s: Intuition, Intellect and Interpretation. The third “I” is key. It’s not until a person is able to accurately interpret her thoughts and feelings that she’s able to make sense of them. It’s a philosophy that made Rhea a lot of enemies among other psychics.
“I say that everyone is psychic and other psychics hated me because I blew their cover,” Rhea said. “Now everybody says it.”
Rhea’s approach to crime-solving is simple. She looks at pictures of the victim and crime scene, and when possible, visits the scene.
“I’ll pick up the dirt where the body is and feel it,” she said. “I see colors. It’s all according to what people want me to see. I tell them, ‘you tell me what you know, and I’ll tell you what I know.'”
And, often to the great surprise of law enforcement, Rhea has known a lot about cases that had officers scratching their heads. She’s worked with countless agencies up and down the state, and two counties, Calaveras and Sonoma, have deputized her.
“I heard about her early in my career, and had an open mind, but we’ve had a lot of people who claim to be psychic who give us information that hasn’t panned out,” said John Crawford, an investigator in the Calaveras County District Attorney’s Office, who first worked with Rhea as a detective in the late 1970’s. “She’s been instrumental in composing suspect’s pictures that have turned out to be amazingly accurate.”
Intuition is better than eyewitness accounts, Rhea said, because witnesses and police officers tend to personalize descriptions. Tell a 5’7″ detective that a suspect is tall, and he’ll picture a man standing 5’10”. Give the same description to a 6-foot detective, and suddenly the suspect is 6’6″.
Crawford’s first contact with Rhea came in the case of an elderly Alzheimer’s patient who had wandered away from his family’s campsite. Rhea correctly predicted which deputy would find the body and that the man would be slumped dead against a tree.
In the case of a woman who was abducted in San Joaquin County, Rhea divined the importance of the number 4, and said the woman would be found near water, just out of reach of the San Joaquin sheriff. It turned out that the woman had been taken just over the county line into Calaveras County and left by the Stanislaus River, just off Highway 4.
And in an episode fitting a carnival midway, Rhea predicted the exact number of people who would be arrested over the course of the Calaveras County Fair in 1983. It was 58.
“There’s a link between intuition and the skills that a good cop gets with experience,” Crawford said. “I don’t know why she’s so much better at it than most people. I’m certainly not at her level.”
But for all her fans, Rhea has passionate critics, and none more so than Marc Klaas, whose young daughter Polly was kidnapped and murdered in 1993. Rhea consulted with Polly’s grandfather, but she clashed with Klaas. Neither one has forgiven or forgotten.
“I have very strong feelings about psychics,” Klaas said Tuesday. “They’re part of a second wave of predators. The first wave is the person who takes the child. The second is the ambulance-chasing lawyers, the exploitation journalists and psychics. She came up with the same crap that we heard from every other psychic we talked to. She said she saw rolling hills and green trees and a babbling brook. She described nearly every spot in northern California.”
In one instance, Klaas said, Rhea led a search party onto private land in a late-night expedition that ended with an angry property owner waving a shotgun. In the end, Polly’s abductor, Richard Allen Davis, led police to her body, two months after her abduction.
Rhea maintains that had Klaas not interfered with her work, Polly would have been found much sooner.
“He thinks that because he lost a daughter that he’s an expert and so now he gets his nose involved in everything,” she said. “He wouldn’t listen to me. I could have solved it two months earlier, but he kept insisting that she was alive.”
Klaas thinks Rhea got involved with his daughter’s case for the exposure, a charge she vehemently denies.
“I don’t do what I do for any other reason than to give people closure with their cases,” she said. “I don’t ever go to the papers with anything I’m working on. I don’t waste my time if families act like they know everything.”
Despite the growing respect afforded Rhea and her colleagues, there is still resistance to psychics in law enforcement and victim advocacy circles. The FBI prohibits its agents from employing psychics, and spokeswoman Tina Schwartz from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children in Washington D.C., indicated that psychics might hinder police work.
“We get questions about psychics from time to time,” Schwartz said. “We leave that decision up to the parents, but we have no record of a psychic ever leading to the (live) recovery of a missing child. Law enforcement obviously needs to be able to do their job. That needs to be the focus of any investigation, and we wouldn’t want anything to hinder that.”
Rhea said that she has found live children and that she’s still very busy with police work, but can’t discuss any of her current cases. She moved to Gilroy about two years ago to be near two of her sons (she has two other grown children and four grandchildren, the products of two marriages). Much of her time is devoted to less glamorous business, trying to help people develop their own intuition to make better choices in life.
Rhea also works with couples who are unsure about whether they belong together. She sees people in colors. Physical people give off red hues. Mentally-driven people have blue and purple auras.
“I’ve worked with some couples and I tell them that they’ll have to wake up every day and remind themselves that the other person sees the world very differently,” Rhea said.
Busy as she is, Rhea might still have time for some of Gilroy’s most notorious cold cases, including the mysterious shooting of Gregorio Ramirez, who six years ago was gunned down at the corner of Ninth and Eigleberry streets, and the even more mysterious case of two decomposed and still unidentified corpses discovered near the Gilroy Sewage Treatment Plant in 1996.
But until three days ago, Gilroy police didn’t know they had another crime-solver in their midst.
“We’re at some dead ends,” said Gilroy Police Capt. Jack Robinson. “A lot of police work is testing hunches based on past experiences. But sometimes hunches don’t pan out. We just like to remember the ones that do because we like to think that we’re that good. So we’re not opposed. If she has something to give we’d be willing to talk to her, but we didn’t know she was here. We’re not the psychic ones.”
