TV medium Lisa Williams puts Australian psychic detectives to test
“You need to come back now. You need to let the murder go,” urges TV psychic Lisa Williams. The woman is in a “full trance” and looks distressed, as if she’s having trouble breathing, as she and other Australians mediums investigate a death.
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GROUPS of women are walking around the conference room in pairs and trios, some are holding hands, others have their eyes half closed in deep concentration. They’re moving as if they’re being pulled by a great, unseen force.
The group of roughly 60 adults — mostly women and a handful of men — are all students at a three-day forensic mediumship convention hosted by international celebrity psychic Lisa Williams in Wollongong, NSW … and this is serious business.
They’ve each paid hundreds of dollars to be taught by Williams, who has cult-like status in the mediumship world after hosting US TV show Lisa Williams: Life Among the Dead, and by the end of the weekend, the mediums — or aspiring mediums — will have well-honed skills as psychic detectives.
They’ll work on real life cases such as the mysterious 2011 death of 20-year-old Morgan Jennifer Ingram from Colorado, US.
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Participants will also investigate the recent murder of 32-year-old Nicole Cartwright, whose body was found near a children’s playground on Sydney’s North Shore in October, and they will channel Australian serial killer Archibald ‘Mad Dog’ McCafferty, who murdered four people in 1973.
But right now, they’ve been told to use their intuition to find objects Williams’ has hidden around the room.
“Remember to feel where you need to go,” she says in an English accent, shaped by a Birmingham upbringing but softened by years working abroad.
“Feel where you’re being pulled to. Imagine that you’re trying to find a body.”
There’s a sense of urgency as students peep under tables and chairs and run their hands around door frames in a race to beat the clock.
When time is called five-minutes later, the empty-handed students look genuinely devastated.
“You lot are crap at finding dead bodies,” Williams quips.
However, the exercise is child’s play compared with what happens next.
Grouped into tables, the mediums work to investigate the case of Morgan Ingram.
Ingram was found dead in her bed with purple marks on her neck and lethal levels of amitriptyline, a drug usually used for abdominal pain and headaches, in her system. Authorities claim it was suicide but her family argue she was murdered by her stalker.
While her students work in groups, Williams casually chats away before she is abruptly interrupted by her assistant medium, Linda Usope.
“We’ve got someone over there in full trance!” Usope says.
“S---!” mutters Williams, dashing across the room.
The woman in question is sitting with her eyes semi-closed at the table. She looks distressed, as if she’s having trouble breathing.
“You need to come back now,” Williams tells her, firmly.
“You need to let the murder go.”
Suddenly, the woman shakes her head from side to side, and clicks her hands several times over her head, before opening her eyes.
She seems wiped out, spacey and somewhat shell-shocked, as if she doesn’t know where she is for a few moments.
Concerned conference attendants rush over with lollies and water.
Later, the woman identifies herself as Jacinta Feeley, 43. She’s travelled for seven hours by car from rural Victoria to attend the conference, along with her best friend Tonya Reeves, 49, known colloquially as ‘the cowgirl psychic’.
Feeley tells True Crime Australia she allowed Ingram’s spirit to take over by moving her own “energy” out of the way.
The result is temporary possession, during which she can feel and see the sensations felt by the young woman.
“I felt like I couldn’t see, it’s like I was drugged. It wasn’t nice. I started to not be able to breathe properly, like there was pressure,” she says.
Throughout the course of the weekend it becomes clear forensic mediumship has its safety hazards.
At the lower end of the spectrum it’s the risk of disturbing visions.
“I don’t want to see someone’s head hanging off somewhere,” says Williams, explaining she makes a point of asking the spirit world to avoid showing her the gory details when possible.
At the more extreme end of the spectrum, it’s meant very real attempts on her life.
Once when she was followed for 45-minutes after picking up a hire car from Kentucky Airport — she stopped at McDonalds and turned into a dead-end street to test the commitment of her pursuer but couldn’t shake them — only escaping when she got onto a secure army base where her boyfriend was working.
In another instance, she was shot at while visiting the location of a crime scene in San Bernardino, California, while investigating a drug-related murder.
“We were walking to my car and I could see a gang member and he looked at me, I looked at him. And I don’t understand gang language or slang but he turned around and said, ‘I’m going to drop you’.
“And the victim’s mum said, ‘You need to get in the car and drive. He’s got a gun.’ I got in the car and just as the guy’s pulling out his gun, I started the car, and he’s pulling out his gun across the car park, he’s aiming at me and as I swerved out of the car park, he fired a bullet but he missed me, thankfully,” says Williams.
For someone revered as a celebrity psychic, Williams comes across as remarkably normal. There’s plenty of flowing lace dresses and women heavily adorned in crystals at the conference but Williams wears a simple pair of jeans and fitted top.
She’s direct and matter-of-fact in her manner and doesn’t smell of incense.
She’s made a prosperous living from connecting with ‘the other side’ and runs training courses for wannabe psychics to try and combat the charlatanism often associated with her industry.
She also accepts being mocked for her psychic insights is part of the profession.
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Williams recalls a policeman asking her to look into the case of missing three-year-old Madeleine McCann, who disappeared from her bed while holidaying with her English family in Portugal in 2007.
Despite investigations by Portuguese and British authorities and various theories, the case remains unsolved.
“A police officer asked me to look at the case and then when I gave him information and he passed it onto his boss, his boss basically turned around and ripped up the piece of paper and went, ‘that’s all bullshit’,” says Williams.
“I felt as though there was child trafficking and I do think things could have been prevented, at some point,” she says.
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When the local case of murdered 32-year-old Nicole Cartwright is raised for investigation, medium Feeley reveals her insights about what may have happened before Cartwright’s body was found bound and beaten in a Hunters Hill park.
“I see rubbish bins,” she says.
“I feel like someone’s grabbed her by the neck because suddenly my neck started hurting and my chest, it’s like it hurts.
“I keep feeling as if there are men, different men. She felt like she was befriending someone, like she was meeting someone she was friendly with.
“I keep getting a car, the back seat of a car, a blue BMW,” she adds.
With police still investigating, it can’t yet be verified if Feeley’s insights have any weight.
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However, there were some seemingly on-point premonitions to come from the weekend.
When participants are shown an unidentifiable photo of Australian serial killer Archibald ‘Mad Dog’ McCafferty and are asked to glean what they can about him by staring into his eyes, surprising remarks emerge.
“I see a house, the car, the wife, and then everything went down the drain,” yells out one woman.
“I keep getting the year 1974,” chimes in a man.
“He had it all and he lost it.”
When the room is asked to predict how many victims the mysterious offender had, approximately 15 people raise their hand for the number seven.
Researching the crime after the fact, True Crime Australia found McCafferty’s murderous rampage took place in March, 1973 — five days after his six-week-old son died when his wife feel asleep while breastfeeding, and rolled on top of him.
During his trial in 1974, the serial killer explained he heard the voice of his dead son telling him he would be born again if seven people were killed.
Although he only racked up four victims before he was caught, McCafferty remained fixated on the number seven and penned an autobiography titled, Seven Shall Die, while incarcerated.
Of course, the sceptic would argue the “insights” were just wild guesses which conveniently turned out to be correct.
Others might be blown away by the detailed accuracy of their utterances, and perhaps, just perhaps entertain the possibility, they could really be psychic.
Originally published as TV medium Lisa Williams puts Australian psychic detectives to test
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