When Ghosts Speak - Mary Ann Winkowski [59]
I understood that arranging this kind of a meeting could be a very hard thing for a cop to do. To go to a victim’s family and say, Well, we’ve got this lady who can talk to ghosts . . . I don’t know what the police said to the woman, but eventually she agreed to meet with me. From our conversation on the phone, I knew that the spirit of the girl was there. So the girl was dead.
When I visited the house, the mother became very upset, and I left without really talking to her. But the girl was there, too, and I was able to get some information from her before I left. I gave the officer who had initially contacted me five or six pieces of information about the girl’s death. The cop had already known two of them, but the others were fresh leads.
Shortly after this, the girl’s body was found, and the FBI was called in to work with the local officers. I didn’t think much about the case; unless the mother called me again and asked me to come and talk more with her daughter, I’d done all that I could do.
It was about a week later that I first saw the strange car parked in the cemetery across the street from our house. I don’t know what made me take notice of it, but I soon realized that the car arrived each morning and stayed all day. This went on for several days. After a day or two, I noticed that the driver would get out and stand next to the car. When I realized that he had binoculars, I was totally freaked out. Give me a ghost any day over some Peeping Tom with binoculars!
I locked all the doors and picked up the phone to call my husband at work. I heard a series of clicks and figured the phone was out of order—not unusual with the phone service in our small rural town. When I finally got hold of my husband, he told me I was being paranoid.
That whole week I watched the guy, and he watched me. Early the next week, with the car still parked in the cemetery, I got a call from the suburban cop. She wanted to talk with with me privately. When we met, she immediately asked me where I had gotten my information about the missing girl.
“Everybody’s really ticked off over at the police station,” she told me.
“At me?” I asked.
“No, not at you,” she told me. “Not exactly.”
She continued: Her superiors had turned over the information I’d given them to the FBI official in charge. It turned out that the FBI had already possessed this information, but had withheld it from the local cops.
“So why are you buying me lunch?” I asked.
The woman lowered her voice. “I’ve got to tell you, Mary Ann—you’re a suspect. You know too much. Don’t be surprised if you’re being trailed or watched, or if your phone has a tap on it.”
Suddenly the clicks on the phone and the man in the cemetery made sense, and I confirmed my suspicions with the officer. When all was said and done, I was under suspicion for about six months because I “knew too much.”
I learned then and there that any relationship I had with a law enforcement agency would be a delicate one. These days, if an agency calls me and asks for my help, I do everything I can to assist. But I don’t call them to volunteer information about every ghost of a murder victim I encounter. If I did, I’d be at risk of being lumped in with what many law enforcement officials consider “all those nuts.” Or worse, I could again become a suspect.
It would certainly be easy if whenever a suspicious death came across a detective’s desk, he or she could just call me up, drive me over to visit with the deceased’s family, assume that the victim’s spirit would be there, and wait until I could tell them everything they needed to put together an airtight case.
Unfortunately, it just doesn’t happen like that. First of all, it can be awkward to suggest to a grieving family that I visit along with the officer assigned to their case—assuming that the victim even has a grieving family. There are plenty of John Doe or Jane Doe homicides that need to be solved, and I don’t have the faintest idea