When Ghosts Speak - Mary Ann Winkowski [60]
The next problem is that the only way earthbound spirits can tell me who killed them is if they know their murderers. If ghosts have seen their killers, I can get descriptions, of course, but it’s not like I can ask the ghost to come on down to central booking and go through the mug shots.
Finally, any information that I pass along has to be carefully considered by those who receive it. If there is a chance of solving a crime, the law enforcement agents on the case need to be sure that they follow all procedures for obtaining evidence for the best chances of an airtight conviction. I realize that all I can do is tell them what I have been told. How they use that information within the scope of the law is up to them.
Staying to Seek Justice
In some cases, the ghosts of murdered people will remain earthbound as they search for a way to bring their killers to justice. In these cases, the connection between victim and killer is often personal. In one case I worked on, the victim—Jenny—had called her sister only weeks before her death to say that if anything ever happened to her, the sister should let the police know that her live-in boyfriend, Connor, was responsible.
“I know Jenny didn’t die of natural causes,” the woman who called me said. “She was going to leave Connor and take their son with her. I know he killed her.”
“What do the police say?” I asked.
The doctors at the hospital were saying that her sister died of a heart attack; pending completion of the autopsy results, the police were suggesting that perhaps drugs or alcohol were involved as well. But the woman assured me that, although Jenny had been a bartender, she did not take drugs and rarely drank.
When she told me that Connor’s former wife had died of a heart attack, I thought the circumstances sounded suspicious. But I could also tell that the ghost of the dead woman was not with her sister. I suspected that she might be staying close to home, watching over her child, as the ghosts of mothers frequently do.
“I could come to her wake,” I offered. But the woman told me that Jenny’s body was still with the coroner in Denver, where she had lived, and that Connor was pushing to have her cremated and the ashes shipped back east to her sister.
“Don’t you think that’s odd?” I asked. “What about the police? If it’s an ongoing investigation, they’ll probably want the body intact.”
The woman made it clear that the police weren’t going to do anything further until they had the autopsy report. She didn’t know if she could keep Connor from making final arrangements for Jenny’s body.
I could hear in her voice that she didn’t have the energy to keep fighting this much longer. I told her to get in touch with a detective, not a regular police officer, and to tell him or her everything she’d told me. And I advised her to do whatever she could to bring Jenny’s body back home before it was cremated.
When the woman called me back a week later, she told me that her sister’s body was at a local funeral home and asked me if I could go over and see if her spirit was with it. I knew the funeral director at this home, and it was easy for me to arrange a private time to meet with the woman there.
When we arrived, I wasn’t surprised to see a ghost in the room with the body. But when I described the ghost to the woman, I was surprised to learn that it wasn’t Jenny. I told the woman that the ghost was named Laura and that she had died about ten years earlier in a car crash.
“Laura was Jenny’s best friend,” the woman gasped.
The ghost explained that Jenny had stayed in Denver to be near her child. She didn’t trust Connor with the boy. Laura’s ghost had been with Jenny since her death ten years ago, and had come with the body as a sort of messenger.
Laura went on with her story: She had watched Connor use a medicine dropper to put something in Jenny’s juice each morning for weeks. A glance at the label told her it was a slow-acting poison that could cause heart failure. “I tried to warn her . . . ,” the ghost said helplessly.
Jenny’s sister