Deep Dive
Shownotes Transcript
Who asked you to go out of town, the stupid young one or the married one? The married one. That's what me thought. Don't go, you hear me? And you know what? You're not listening to me because I see you going. I see you going. I'm just telling you, I'm trying to help you to avoid the heartache. Don't go blindly through life. Let me use the power of the tarot to show you the way. Call me now for your free reading. Call 1-800-355-3765.
In the late 90s and early 2000s, a mystical psychic named Miss Cleo permeated the late-night television airwaves of the United States of America. She starred in dozens of commercials and infomercials advertising a telephone hotline called the Psychic Readers Network, which featured highlight reels of supposed actual phone calls between herself and the public. Miss Cleo would answer questions of life, love, and death in a stern manner, but with a comforting Jamaican accent and a charming sense of humor.
Advice from the tarot about the past, present, and future would be revealed to the curious caller. Don't let sex be the thing that wants to take you back to a familiar place. The ex is much better than the present one. You know, your face gets hot. She got embarrassed. You had to go get something to drink. If you want him to believe that it's over, then you gotta stop accepting the booty calls at 2 a.m. in the morning. You understand? Yeah. I also see another individual who is older than you.
Ms. Cleo claimed to have a connection with the spirit world that would provide her with the answers to the caller's questions. She claimed to be a vessel of communication between the physical and the spiritual realms. According to her biography on the Psychic Readers Network website,
Cleo learned the ways of the tarot under the tutelage of an elder shaman in Trelawny, Jamaica, where she had been born and raised. I am a shaman. I have a shaman of my own, and she has been the one that has trained me over the years. And so I go to her. She's a 93-year-old woman who I absolutely adore. I don't move unless I talk to her. Everything that has gone on in my life for the past 25 years, she's been a huge part of.
Other than that fact, not much else was known about the charismatic woman with the funny catchphrases and the colorful wardrobe. But the mystery surrounding Ms. Cleo only helped her become more of a pop culture icon. She released instructional VHS tapes and spoken word albums. Her commercials inspired comedy sketches by the likes of Mad TV and Dave Chappelle. Ms. Cleo had become a household name.
And many of those households, nearly 6 million of them in a five-year span, had picked up the telephone and dialed the toll-free number. He's lying all the time. So I lurked to find out the truth. So, I mean, does he hate me that much, Ms. Cleo? He hates himself, honey. Your husband...
The first three minutes of a call to Ms. Cleo were free, as advertised. But any conversation that took place thereafter was billed at a rate of $4.99 per minute.
And the conversations almost always lasted longer than three minutes. Because those first three minutes were used to gather personal information about the caller, like names and birthdates and phone numbers. Sometimes the operator on the other end would even stall and place the caller on hold long enough for that grace period to expire. Sometimes the meter was already running before the caller was even connected to a psychic. And when the psychic finally picked up on the other end, there was no guarantee that it would be the Ms. Cleo.
Sometimes the sidekick on the other end was a 19-year-old college freshman like Rebecca Barthel, who wrote an article in 2012 for the website XOJane about her experience taking calls. In the article, Barthel described how she would use the telephone in her dorm room to read back answers to the caller's questions from a provided script. She was instructed by the company that hired her to keep the callers on the line for as long as possible by telling them exactly what they wanted to hear.
On average, customers were charged $60 for a single call to Ms. Cleo in the Psychic Readers Network. Entry-level psychics like Rebecca were compensated at about 20 cents per minute. Expert shamans like Ms. Cleo were paid a little more, but not much. In fact, Cleo has admitted in interviews that she was only paid $1,500 for the first 30-minute infomercial that she had recorded for the company.
In total, Cleo estimates that over a five year period, she had earned almost half a million dollars from all of her commercial appearances. Not bad, but not great considering that in that same time period, the Psychic Readers Network as a company had billed its customers for an estimated one billion dollars. Most of that money went to these guys. The preceding has been a paid presentation of Access Resource Services.
Access Resource Services, the parent company of the Psychic Readers Network, was owned and operated by two South Florida businessmen and cousins named Stephen Fetter and Peter Stolls. The two men were making a fortune from the gullible masses, and the two men knew that this gravy train wouldn't last forever, so they pushed it into overdrive until the entire operation came off the rails. The company started sending spam emails to thousands of recipients, advertising a free tarot reading from Ms. Cleo.
They billed for calls made by minors whose ages were never verified. Even worse, the company started billing non-customers for calls that were never made. It even sent bills to people for calls that were made months, sometimes years, after that person had already died. Furthermore, there were reports of an automated version of Ms. Cleo calling up people at home up to 10 times a day, convincing the mark on the other end that she had a dream about them and that they should call her back immediately.
By 2002, over 2,000 consumer complaints about deceptive advertising and billing practices had poured into the Federal Trade Commission. Access Resource Services was facing over a dozen lawsuits in over a dozen different states. When the legal troubles of the psychic readers network became public knowledge, its profits tanked, resulting in the company's quick and complete collapse.
In court, Stephen Fetter and Peter Stolz denied that their company had broken any laws, but they agreed to settle the cases by erasing over $500 million in debt owed to them by its victims. The Federal Trade Commission also levied a fine against the company of $5 million. Howard Bills, the director of the FTC at the time, who hopefully kept his day job, made the predictable joke, quote, I'm no psychic, but I can foresee this.
If you make deceptive claims, there is an FTC action in your future. Since Ms. Cleo was nothing more than a figurehead for the company, she had not been named in any of the lawsuits, except for the one in Florida. The state of Florida accused Ms. Cleo of quote, "crossing the line from being an ignorant spokesperson." State prosecutors pointed to the fact that Cleo's face was on every commercial, and that Cleo's name was on every company document.
The state alleged that Ms. Cleo embodied the psychic reader's network and therefore should be punished accordingly. Those charges against Ms. Cleo were eventually dropped, but the lawsuit did lead to the discovery of some interesting information about the mysterious clairvoyant. The state of Florida had subpoenaed Ms. Cleo's birth certificate and it revealed that she had not been born in Jamaica after all. Ms. Cleo had been born in Los Angeles and so had her parents. The accent, the name, the biography on the website,
It was all an act, performed by an actress and playwright named Uri Del Harris, an actress and playwright who had fled from Seattle in 1996 after pocketing grant proceeds from a theatrical production that she had written and directed. Harris had given every cast member a handwritten IOU and told them that she had bone cancer and needed the money for medical treatment. That wasn't true.
the Langston Hughes Cultural Arts Center that had funded the production, entertained the idea of pursuing legal action against Harris, but discovered it would pay more in legal fees than the amount it was seeking to recover. Charges were never filed, and Uri Del Harris skipped town and never looked back. I was just wondering, there's a lot of skeptics in the audience, and though we see and feel skeptics,
that you're real and you have this compassion for us. Like she was saying, I was wondering how you do explain to somebody, even after they're red, they're still skeptic about it. How do you tell them that you're really telling them the truth? I mean, how do you make them feel? - You know what's funny? I never have to. 'Cause you know what? They come back day later, two days later, two weeks later, tell me everything!
So skeptics now worry me because me I know what I know, me I know what I believe, you understand me? They're the ones that get nervous after me I pull everything out of their closet and that me enjoy. That's probably not a good thing but I enjoy that. Even after the psychic readers network was dismantled, one aspect of the Miss Cleo persona that she maintained was not an act, was her gift to communicate with the spirits. She no longer claimed to be a psychic.
In fact, she claimed that she had never called herself a psychic. Those were the company's words. Ms. Cleo considered herself more of a Caribbean voodoo shaman, a title that Access Resource Services considered unmarketable for some reason. Yuri Harris still had the gift. She still had clients all over the world who would call her for regular consultations. She still had the Jamaican accent, even in private, though it had been established that she was very much an American.
Yuri Harris still had Ms. Cleo, and she planned to milk that identity for all it was worth. Harris appeared as the psychic in advertisements for used car dealerships and the French Toast Crunch cereal. She appeared in a Grand Theft Auto video game, voicing the character Auntie Poulet. She wrote a book. She started a podcast. She even started a web-based dating service at some point, although that might have been mostly intended for herself.
One of the last times Cleo made the news was in 2006 when she came out of the closet publicly in an interview with the Advocate magazine. With the same warmth and charm she used so effectively in those commercials of the past, Ms. Cleo told the world that she was gay and jokingly thanked her mother for sending her to an all-girls boarding school when she was a child. Cleo also announced that she was back on the market after remaining single for most of her adult life.
She said she had been physically abused by her second wife and made a promise to one of her daughters that she would take a break from dating. I don't know if Uri Del Harris ever found love, but I do know that she made a living as Miss Cleo in some form or fashion for the rest of her life. She died on July 26, 2016, after a long battle with colon cancer, leaving behind a community that believed in her and a crowd of skeptics who know a con artist when they see one.
Although out of the 2,000 complaints to the FTC about the Psychic Readers Network, there wasn't a single one related to Ms. Cleo's psychic abilities. Perhaps every caller had been satisfied with their readings, but it's more likely that no one wanted to admit that they had been duped by an actress disguised as a shaman. So Ms. Cleo's psychic abilities were never a focal point of the investigation, further shielded by the fact that all of the commercials featuring Ms. Cleo had a fine print that read, quote, "...for entertainment only."
Not to mention that disproving mysticism of any kind in court is practically impossible. Those two key features of the American rule of law allow psychics and televangelists and self-help gurus to peddle their bullshit without consequence, and no psychic has been more effective at that than a woman named Sylvia Brown. A self-proclaimed psychic builds a multi-million dollar empire by preying on the emotionally vulnerable and making one preposterous claim after another on this episode of Swindled.
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When man leaves his lifetime...
there is a definite tunnel that appears and that tunnel magnificently begins to connect to your own etheric substance. When those two connect, you begin to lift out of your body and you go straight across dimensionally. And when you go straight across dimensionally, all of a sudden, the most magnificent thing happens. You have such a sense of peace.
Sylvia Celeste Shoemaker discovered that she had psychic abilities in 1941 when she was just five years old. She recalls one night lying in bed at her childhood home in Kansas City, Missouri and receiving a premonition about the impending deaths of both of her great-grandmothers. A premonition that proved to be true less than two weeks later. Little Sylvia was understandably upset and confused by her visions.
She confided in her grandmother Ada Coyle about how she had predicted the future. Sylvia's grandmother Ada, who was a professional psychic counselor, had been waiting for that day to arrive. She sat Sylvia down and assured her that there was no reason to be afraid. Ada explained to her granddaughter that the psychic powers she had just discovered were genetic. Sylvia was just the latest member of the family with a psychic gift from God.
Ada confessed to Sylvia that she too had the gift, and that it could be traced all the way back to her great-great-great-grandmother, who was born in the year 1700. Two years later, when she was seven years old, Sylvia claims that she felt a presence as if someone was standing directly behind her while she was combing her hair in the bathroom mirror. There was nothing out of the ordinary in the reflection, but Sylvia took a peek over her shoulder just in case. There was nothing there. Sylvia had resumed combing her hair when she felt the presence once again.
but this time it spoke directly to her. The voice told Sylvia that it had been sent from God and that it was there to guide and protect her. After another consultation with Grandma Ada, it was concluded that the voice Sylvia was hearing was her spiritual guide introducing itself, a spiritual guide named Francine. Ever since that day, Sylvia claims that Francine has been by her side, offering advice and warnings and a connection to what Sylvia calls the "other side."
Through Francine, Sylvia could interact with heaven and the angels. She could perceive all sorts of vibrational frequencies that a normal human being could not even comprehend. Sylvia could even speak with the dead. However, throughout her childhood and teenage years, Sylvia found little use for her psychic powers and imaginary friends. Well, most of them anyway. After college, Sylvia spent the next 18 years indoctrinating children as a Catholic school teacher.
It wasn't until a dinner party in the early 1970s hosted by Sylvia and her first husband Gary Dufresne that she even considered turning her gifts and passions into a career. For fun, Sylvia started giving tarot readings to a handful of people inside of her home. That handful of people told another handful of people, and before long, Sylvia Dufresne was holding gatherings of up to 300 people at local churches and town halls in the California town where the couple had relocated.
The Dufraines divorced in 1972, but not before Sylvia gave birth to two sons and a new career. The following year she married a man named Kinzel Brown and adopted his surname. With the help of her new husband, Sylvia Brown would continue her pursuit of transforming the supernatural into dollars, ultimately resulting in the incorporation of a professional, legally sanctioned, non-profit organization called the Nirvana Foundation for Psychic Research in 1974.
Sylvia Brown claimed that through this organization and a Gnostic church she founded later called the Society of the Novus Spiritus, she would help thousands of people with their spiritual and religious quest. She claimed to help people quote "gain control of their lives, live more happily, understand the meaning of life, and to find God in their own unique way." And apparently one of the ways Sylvia tried to help was by offering investment tips to those seeking spiritual direction.
In 1988, Sylvia Brown convinced Greg and Robin Cross to invest $20,000 into a gold mining venture that her husband was managing. Sylvia and Kinzel explained to the couple that the mine was on the verge of operation and that their $20,000 investment would allow them to get started right away. In order to close the deal, Sylvia shared with the Crosses that she had, quote, "...strong psychic feelings that the mine would be extremely lucrative for everyone involved."
One month later, the mining venture declared bankruptcy. Greg and Robin Cross had lost $20,000, but they weren't going to take it lying down. After multiple attempts at recovering their money from the Browns, the Crosses filed a complaint with the Department of Corporations. On May 26, 1992, both Sylvia and Kinzel Brown were indicted on criminal charges of investment fraud and grand theft.
The investigation uncovered that the Browns had sold the securities in the gold mine without a permit and that instead of going towards operating costs, the money invested by the Crosses had been immediately transferred to a bank account controlled by Sylvia's Nirvana Foundation for psychic research. Sylvia and Kinzel Brown pleaded no contest to the investment fraud charges.
The couple was forced to pay restitution and given one year probation on top of a four-month jail sentence for Kinzel and 200 hours of community service for Sylvia. The couple divorced soon after. Sylvia commented on the fraud case in a book she wrote in 1998 titled Adventures of a Psychic. She blamed the bankruptcy entirely on Kinzel, writing that her ex-husband had attempted to cover up the illegal activities in which he was involved and which she had been completely unaware of at the time.
and she addressed the elephant in the room that she wasn't able to see any of it coming because quote, "I am not psychic about myself." But Sylvia Brown, who kept the last name after the divorce but added an "e" to the end of it, claimed to be psychic about practically everything else. She began making the rounds on daytime talk shows and made quite the name for herself. People were taking her seriously.
In fact, people were taking her so seriously that the FBI even interviewed her after the 1993 World Trade Center bombing to see if she could provide any insight on potential suspects. Short build, wiry, black hair, black eyebrows. There's an M on there and I'm not exactly, but it's S-A-L-Z-E-M something. Salzeman. Salzeman. M-O-N. Okay, Salzeman.
Mohamed Salameh was the first suspected bomber arrested on March 4th, 1993. Salameh. Salzaman. Tomato. Tomato, I guess. Sylvia's prediction was pretty damn close. Very impressive, until you realize that the FBI's interview with Sylvia was conducted on March 16th, 1993, almost two weeks after Salameh was arrested. Okay, well, Sylvia might have been a little disingenuous,
In retrospect, it's obvious that she had seen the reports of the arrest, but that prediction, or lack thereof, was mostly harmless in the grand scheme of things, and there's no reason to spend any more time on it when there are far worse predictions yet to come. Support for Swindled comes from Audible, who proudly present Evil Has a Name, the untold story of the Golden State Killer investigation.
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Evil has a name only on audible listen now audible.com/evilswindled or text evil swindled to 500 500 About a year ago During the first conversation that I had with Sylvia. I had said to her Sylvia, please help me I had lost a thousand dollars in my home Where did I hide this thousand dollars? She said to me it's in a red book. I
Sylvia Brown's popularity exploded in the mid-90s thanks to a few New York Times bestselling books, infomercials, appearances on radio shows like Larry King Live, and appearances on television shows like Montel Williams.
Sylvia would go on these shows and perform psychic readings for members of the audience. She would make predictions about the economy, the love lives of celebrities, and the end of days. She would even offer health advice to people, some of whom were chronically ill. But what Sylvia Brown became best known for was her self-professed ability to break open unsolved cases, especially those involving missing persons. Do you ever work with, like, police? Oh yeah, I have 250 cases, in fact, right on my...
There's a lot of cases I've solved right on Montel's show. I also cracked the ski mask rapist case. Many of the cases Sylvia has claimed to have solved, like the ski mask rapist case, are unverifiable. Either the information she provided was too vague to give her sole credit, or there are no records available to corroborate her story. However, there are many examples of cases where Sylvia Brown did far more harm than good.
In 1999, a six-year-old girl named Opal Jo Jennings was kidnapped from her grandparents' house near Fort Worth, Texas, while playing with a cousin in the front yard. The cousin told police that a man pulled up to the curb in front of the house, grabbed Opal, and threw her into the passenger seat of his truck. She said the man hit Opal when she fought back, and she could hear Opal screaming as the truck pulled away. Opal Jo Jennings was never seen again, and the investigation was going nowhere.
Without anywhere else to turn, Opal's grandmother appeared on the Montel Williams show and pleaded for help from Sylvia, the world-renowned psychic. "This is too much for my family and me to handle. We want her back. I need to know where Opal is. I can't stand this. I need your help, Sylvia. Where is Opal? Where is she?" She's not dead, but what bothers me, and I've never heard of this before,
But for some reason she was taken and put into some kind of slavery thing and taken into Japan. According to Sylvia, Opal was alive but she was suffering a fate worse than death. Sylvia said that Opal had been put on a boat and forced into sex slavery in Japan where she was being brutally and repeatedly raped. Opal's grandmother felt completely helpless.
Later that year, a registered child molester in Fort Worth named Richard Lee Franks was arrested for the kidnapping and the murder of Opal Jo Jennings. He had killed Opal with blunt force trauma to the head within hours of her abduction. Detectives found Opal's skeletal remains 13 miles away from her grandparents' house. She was still wearing her pink Barbie tennis shoes. Sylvia Brown never acknowledged how wrong she was about the Opal Jo Jennings case.
She never acknowledged the psychological and emotional torture she inflicted on Opal's grandparents. Instead, Sylvia returned to the Montel Williams show, where she continued to make inaccurate and irresponsible predictions. Because he was picked up in a blue-colored sedan by... Was it anybody that Sean knew? No.
On October 6, 2002, at 1:30 in the afternoon,
Eleven-year-old Sean Hornbeck disappeared while riding his bike to a friend's house in Richwoods, Missouri. After four months of unsuccessful search parties, the investigation had reached a dead end. Sean's mother, Pam, and his stepfather, Craig Akers, reached out to Montel Williams and Sylvia Brown for help. Sylvia informed Sean's parents that he was abducted by a tall Hispanic man with dreadlocks. When Pam Akers asked if her son was still alive, Sylvia shook her head and said no.
Sylvia said Sean's body could be found between two large boulders in a wooded area about 20 miles southwest of their home. Hearing that was one of the hardest things we ever had to hear. About a month after their appearance on the Montel Williams show, the Akers received a call at their home in Missouri. It was Sylvia Brown. She told Sean's parents that she had new information to share and that they could continue their conversation about their son's disappearance for a one-time fee of $700.
Pam was desperate and willing to do anything to find her son, but she didn't even have $700 in her bank account. Sylvia held firm on her price and hung up the phone without offering any further assistance to the devastated family, but luckily they wouldn't need it.
The search for a kidnapped 13-year-old boy in Missouri has led police to a shocking discovery. Not only did they find Ben Ownby, who was snatched from his neighborhood on Monday, they've also recovered a boy who was kidnapped from another Missouri neighborhood four years ago. Sean Hornbeck disappeared in October 2002 when he was 11. He went for a bike ride and wasn't heard from again, until now, when he was found in the same home where Ben was being held.
On January 16th, 2007, while serving an unrelated arrest warrant at an apartment complex in Kirkwood, Missouri, police spotted a white truck in the parking lot to match the description of the vehicle used in the kidnapping of a 13-year-old boy earlier that week. Not only was 13-year-old Ben Ownby in the apartment, so was 15-year-old Sean Hornbeck, who had been missing for over four years.
The kidnapper, Michael J. Devlin, was not a tall Hispanic man with dreadlocks, as Sylvia Brown had described. He was a short, stocky white guy with thinning hair. Sylvia Brown had been absolutely wrong on every detail, again. Even more concerning is that the local police had actually rerouted their search based on the information Sylvia had provided, wasting valuable time and resources.
maybe even prolonging the sexual abuse that Sean Hornbeck suffered while in captivity for those four years. Sylvia Brown was widely criticized for her participation in the Hornbeck case. She publicly denied offering information to Sean's parents in exchange for a fee. She claimed that she worked strictly with law enforcement agencies on missing person cases and that she would never contact the families directly. Sylvia's business manager, Linda Rossi, further defended her boss's lousy predictions in a statement that read, quote,
As Sylvia states on her appearances on the Montel Show, in her books, and in each of her lectures, she cannot possibly be 100% correct in each and every one of her predictions. She has, during a career of over 50 years, helped literally tens of thousands of people. It is so sad that many in the public will afford any other professional, such as doctors, lawyers, and even law enforcement, the right to be human and to be wrong, but not Sylvia.
That's right, the woman who paraded herself around on multiple media outlets claiming to have the supernatural ability to talk to the dead and to predict the future was complaining about not getting leeway for human error from a public that she had continuously misled. Sylvia Brown was a fraud and almost everybody knew it. Even Montel Williams, the guy who provided Sylvia a regular platform to spout her nonsense.
Do you believe in that stuff, Montel? Be honest. Oh, come on. I've said it clearly on my show a million times. I don't believe in psychics. You know, I happen to believe that for whatever reason, this woman has a little bit more intuition than most people I know. But the thing that's funny about her, she's great. She's a funny character. She's funny. She's hysterical. You look at her. You listen to her. She gives some of the funniest answers. People love her and hate her. But you have a right to do either one. She happens to be on the day if you want to love her or hate her.
What Montel Williams was trying to say was that Sylvia Brown was a ratings darling and that he had no problem turning a blind eye to blatant quackery if it equated to an extra zero on the end of his paycheck. When asked about the inaccurate predictions made on a show by Sylvia Brown, Montel would always respond with quote, "no comment," an answer that Sylvia Brown should have used herself when approached by grieving parents about their missing kids.
Instead, she would offer half-hearted shots in the dark and then write a book about it patting herself on the back. Sylvia would shrug off any criticism and Montel would invite her back on the show to throw more shit at the wall. And sometimes you could smell it as soon as it left her hand. Like the time one woman asked her what happened to her deceased boyfriend. I lost my boyfriend tragically a few years ago. They never found him. And I've had such a hard time since. Every day.
The reason why you didn't find him is because he's in water. It was September 11th. There was no, he was a fireman, but... A New York City firefighter drowned inside of the World Trade Center on 9/11. Good one, Sylvia. There was also the time two parents were searching for answers about the mysterious death of their daughter. My daughter, Michelle, was 17 years old. She'll be gone five years, the 21st of this year. Sylvia,
Michelle had randomly collapsed in her bedroom. An autopsy revealed that there had been no foul play. There was no possible way that she died from a gunshot. When presented with these facts, Sylvia stuck to her guns and responded curtly with quote, I don't care. In another heartbreaking example of Sylvia Brown's complete ineptitude,
Gwen Crewson appeared on the Montel Williams show looking for answers seven years after her daughter Holly went missing. Sylvia told Gwen that Holly had run away to Hollywood where she was now addicted to drugs and working as an exotic dancer. After the show, Gwen Crewson immediately flew to Los Angeles. She scoured every strip club in Hollywood, handing out flyers and interviewing club owners, but there was no trace of Holly. Gwen Crewson died of an aneurysm less than a year later.
She died worried sick, convinced by a TV psychic that her daughter was a junkie strung out on the streets of LA. Holly Crewson was eventually found in 2006. Her body had been sitting in a medical examiner's office for over 10 years. She had been murdered and was eventually identified through dental records. Sylvia's list of greatest misses is seemingly endless.
She told the parents of Ryan Ketcher that his body had been stuffed into a metal shaft by two panicked friends after he quote, aspirated on alcohol. Ryan's body was later found at the bottom of a pond inside of his truck. Sylvia told the family of Linda McClelland that she had been kidnapped by a man with the initials MJ and that she was still alive and well in Orlando. One of the family members present for Sylvia's reading, Linda's son-in-law David, was later convicted of murdering the missing woman.
Linda's remains were found near her home in Pennsylvania. Sylvia Brown also missed the mark on Terry Webb, Wayman Robbins, Lori Pleasence, Richard Torres, John Slayton, Richard Kneebone, Robert Hayes, Erica Frazier, and the list goes on. There was also that time Sylvia Brown appeared on the Coast to Coast AM radio show on January 3rd, 2006, the day after the Sago Mine disaster in West Virginia.
In which a coal mine exploded and collapsed, trapping 13 miners underground. Many of the details about the situation were still unknown at the time of Sylvia's on-air appearance. And there was breaking news in the middle of her conversation with host George Norrie. A report emerged that the trapped miners had been found. Of course, Sylvia Brown knew that that was going to happen.
because she's a psychic, remember? No, I knew they were going to be found. You know, I hate people that say something after the fact. Minutes later, that original report was recanted. There had been a miscommunication between the rescue crews and the command center. The revised report announced that at least 12 of the 13 coal miners were dead.
What was that you were saying, Sylvia? That's frustrating. Yeah, that is frustrating. Sylvia Brown had completely flip-flopped on a prediction that she made less than an hour earlier.
Also, didn't she say that she hates... Yeah, I thought so. Anyway, as bad as it was, Sylvia's Sago Mind Disaster disaster hardly made a blip on the public's consciousness. But there was another case that did.
Perhaps Sylvia's most well-known botched prediction involved a young woman named Amanda Berry, who had disappeared in 2003, the day before her 17th birthday. On the Montel Williams show, Sylvia told Amanda's mother, Luana Miller, that her daughter was dead and that her body could be found in water.
Luana was heartbroken upon hearing the news. She returned to Ohio and began removing missing posters from telephone poles and giving away Amanda's belongings. Amanda Berry's body was never found and her mother died of heart failure two years later without ever knowing the truth, which would be revealed almost ten years later.
- Who's the guy who went out?
Um, his name is Ariel Castro. How old is he? Uh, he's like 52. And is he white, black, or Hispanic? He's Hispanic. And what's he wearing? I don't know because he's not here right now. When he left, what was he wearing? I don't know. It's a pretty. What? The police are on the way. Talk to them when they get there. Okay? I need, okay. I told you they're on the way. Talk to them when they get there, okay? All right, okay. Thank you. Bye.
In May 2013, police in Cleveland, Ohio arrested Ariel Castro for the kidnappings of Michelle Knight, Gina DeJesus, and Amanda Berry. The same Amanda Berry, who's now a deceased mother, had given up looking for her based on completely fabricated information that she had obtained from Sylvia Brown. Fortunately, Sylvia's failures had not gone unnoticed. Support for Swindled comes from Rocket Money.
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Once again, after a slew of bad press, Sylvia Brown had to face her critics. She released a statement that read, quote,
Notable skeptic James Randi, the same man that exposed Reverend Peter Popoff, issued a challenge to Sylvia to prove her psychic powers in exchange for $1 million. Sylvia accepted the challenge initially, but eventually stopped returning his calls. She claimed that her track record of finding missing persons was all the proof that she needed. Although, unlike Sylvia's predictions, there was actual data to prove her claim incorrect.
In 2010, Skeptical Inquirer magazine published a three-year study of Sylvia Brown's claim that she had a psychic success rate between 87 to 90 percent. They compared Sylvia's predictions of 115 different cases to newspaper reports of those same events. After analyzing cases where there was a known outcome, about 25 of them in total, the Skeptical Inquirer concluded that quote, "Brown has not even been mostly correct in a single case."
In other words, Sylvia had been wrong every single time. She had a success rate of 0%. And remember, that study only covered a period of three years. Sylvia Brown's career as a psychic had lasted more than three decades. A career that featured a four-year waiting list for a 30-minute telephone session, for which she charged $750. Sylvia charged police departments $400 for her, quote, "...help with missing persons cases."
Not a great use of taxpayer dollars, if you ask me. Even in the mid to late 2000s, Sylvia's business manager claimed that from all of her different ventures, the psychic was generating over $3 million a year in revenue. Even her reclusive first husband, Gary Dufresne, broke his silence after the Sean Hornbeck debacle. In an interview with Robert Lancaster, the creator of StopSylvia.com, Gary said he could no longer sit back and let his ex-wife get away with what she had been doing.
Quote, I tried to get her out of my mind as much as possible, but the damage she does to unsuspecting people in crisis situations is just atrocious. Gary continued, sharing a conversation he had with Sylvia back in the early 70s when she had first started holding tarot parties at the home they shared. Quote, I said to her as we were washing dishes and she was wiping, I said, Sylvia, how can you tell people this kind of stuff? You know it's not true, and some of these people actually are probably going to believe it.
And Sylvia said, screw him. Anybody who believes this stuff ought to be taken. Sylvia Brown was asked to respond to her ex-husband's comments after the interview was published. She said Gary Dufresne was a liar. She said he was a dark soul entity and followed up with, quote, but at least the asshole gave me children.
Two children, to be exact, Paul and Chris, the latter of whom has found his way into the family business. When you book a reading with me, we'll cover a wide range of topics, including but not limited to health, career, finances, family, social, spiritual, and personal relationships, and certainly all your questions. Thank you.
In 2003, Sylvia Brown, after publicly stating that she was not psychic about herself, made one final prediction about herself. She told Larry King that she would die in 2024 at the age of 88. Wrong again. Sylvia Brown died in 2013 at the age of 77. After learning of her death, a spokesperson for the James Randi Educational Foundation released a statement by email. It read, quote,
No one celebrates her death, but skeptics do criticize how she lived. Her dismal track record at predictions would only be laughable if they did not hurt so many people. The number of people she hurt with her pretend supernatural abilities is nearly as high as the number of her failed predictions.
It is sad that it took death to stop Sylvia Brown. People come to her with their problems, they're desperate, and she preys on that. She takes advantage of that. She takes their money, she makes believe that she's psychic, and that's reprehensible. It's evil, is what it is. Swindled is written, researched, produced, and hosted by me, a concerned citizen, with music by Ethan Helfrich.
I'm very excited and honored to announce that Swindled has been named as a finalist for Best New Podcast and Best True Crime Podcast in the 2018 Discover Pods Awards. We are up against some pretty ridiculous competition, including shows from all of the major podcast networks, and one from the New York Times, and another from Dax Shepard, who is apparently still famous for some reason.
No big deal. We got this. Go to swindledpodcast.com slash vote and you will be redirected to a submission form where you can cast your vote. Voting ends on December 7th, so go now. We've all seen what happens when you don't vote, right? swindledpodcast.com slash vote I'm also excited to announce that a German translated version of Swindled launched earlier this month and it's been about a week as the number one podcast in all of Deutschland.
It's called Schmutziger Geschaffte and it's available everywhere you can find podcasts. So if you can speak German or just have a curiosity as to what the show would sound like narrated in German by a professional German actor, go check it out. I'll include the trailer at the very end of this episode so you can get a taste. For more information about the American version of the show, visit swindledpodcast.com and follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram at swindledpodcast.
If you want to support the show, you can do so by going to patreon.com slash swindled. For five bucks a month, you will get early access to advertisement-free new episodes and exclusive access to bonus episodes. If you haven't gotten your fix of Psychic Con Artists, the next Patreon bonus episode is about an entire family who manipulated a lonely man out of his fortune using psychic powers and immaculate conception. Yeah, it's pretty messed up.
Patreon supporters also receive free merch on a pretty regular basis. We have given away stickers, posters, art prints. Patrons that make it to six months of support receive little presidential lapel pins with the Swindled flag logo. Also, Swindled donates 5% of our Patreon proceeds to a different charity each month. So not only will you be supporting me, you will be supporting a good cause. Go check it out, patreon.com slash swindled. You can support the show another way by visiting swindledpodcast.com slash shop.
Christmas is right around the corner, so go consume your little heart out. Go check it out. Swindledpodcast.com slash shop. That's it. Make sure you stay tuned to hear promos for The Minds of Madness and to hear a trailer for the German version of this show. Thanks for listening. 911, what's your emergency? Every 60 seconds, a person is murdered somewhere in the world.
What causes ordinary people to do unthinkable things? And he says, look how easily I could kill you.
The Minds of Madness is a true crime podcast that examines the most disturbing criminal minds. We shed a light on the devastating impact these violent crimes have on the victims and their families. When you get calls in the night, you know they're not good or they're wrong numbers.
You'll hear about the incredible strength of the survivors and what they did to fight back. I was studying his face because I was thinking, if I get out of this, I'm going to get you someday. Subscribe to the Minds of Madness podcast today on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify, and Google Play. Es ist schockierend. At the end of this trial, I was called a jacked or ripped up.
At the end of this process, they called me Jack the Ripper. And I haven't slept in two years. Only two people know what happened that night. And one of them is no longer there.
It's unbelievable. It's like encouraging corporations to kill and mute simple people. After all, they only have to pay a small amount of money for that. It's breathtaking. Each and every one of you in this room are a murderer. You're nothing but a bunch of sick, sadistic people. Do you know what a government is?
But it's all true. These companies are going to go bankrupt. It's crazy. They're crazy. They have no idea.
Schmutzige Geschäfte. Die Podcast-Serie aus den USA. Jetzt neu und exklusiv in Deutschland. Wir gehen den cleversten Verbrechern und Betrügern aus der Wirtschaft auf den Grund. Jede Woche recherchieren wir einen wahren Fall mit echten Verbrechern, Original-Tonaufzeichnungen und unglaublichen Geschichten. Ist es das? Mein Kind ist nicht mehr da. Mein Kind ist nicht da. Er ist tot. Wegen ihm. Schmutzige Geschäfte. Jetzt in deiner Podcast-App oder auf schmutzige-geschäfte.de.
Thanks to SimpliSafe for sponsoring the show. Protect your home this summer with 20% off any new SimpliSafe system when you sign up for Fast Protect Monitoring. Just visit simplisafe.com slash swindled. That's simplisafe.com slash swindled. There's no safe like SimpliSafe.