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Missing boy: psychics get it spectacularly wrong
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 UNITED STATES. Two of America’s best known psychics have some explaining to do. Four months after 11-year-old Shawn Hornbeck (right) went missing in 2002, while riding his bicycle to a friend’s house in Richwood, Missouri, Sylvia Browne and James Van Praagh – regarded by many as the top US psychics – told his parents during television appearances that their son was dead.
Browne and Van Praagh differed, however, on the location of the boy’s body.
Thankfully, Shawn, now 15, and another kidnapped boy, William Ben Ownby, 13, have been found alive and well.
The case raises many questions, not only about the paranormal abilities of these two well-known psychics, but also about the advisability of giving unsolved on-going cases such high profile exposure on television.
Shawn Hornbeck went missing on October 6, 2002, after leaving home on his bicycle to visit a friend. He never arrived there. Despite appeals for information from his family and police investigations, he was not found.
His parents, Pam and Craig Akers, agreed to appear on TV’s Montel Williams Show with Sylvia Browne (below, left) on 12 February 2003. Browne makes regular appearances on the show, sometimes giving readings to telephone callers and at other times to studio guests.
 She told the Akers their son “is no longer with us” – news they were hoping not to hear. Browne had the impression that his body was in a wooded area, some 12 miles southwest of Richwoods, where they lived. It was near two large, jagged boulders that looked out of place in the area. Browne added that Shawn’s bicycle as in a dump “in another state”.
Among other impressions given by the medium was that Shawn had been taken by a “dark-skinned man, he wasn’t black – more like Hispanic” who had long, black hair which he wore in dreadlocks and was really tall.
Two weeks after the televised psychic reading, the Akers revealed to their local newspaper that they had consulted other psychics, too. “I don’t know what to think any more,” Craig Akers commented. “The information from different psychics doesn’t match up.”
When the Akers also appeared on James Van Praagh’s Beyond TV show, he also indicated that Shawn was dead, but indicated that his body would be found in a different direction. Van Praagh (right) suggested that the person who had taken Shawn worked in a railroad car plant and that the boy’s body might be concealed in a railway car.
 The “psychic” clues given by both mediums led to extensive but futile searches in the areas they described. Meanwhile, the Akers established the Shawn Hornbeck Search Team to make their own enquiries, and also the Shawn Hornbeck Foundation to assist with the disappearance of other children.
They said they would not give up their search for Shawn.
He was found along with another missing boy, William Ben Ownby, on 12 January 2007 by police who went to an apartment in Kirkwood, Missouri, to serve an unrelated warrant. They noticed a rusty white Nissan pickup truck that matched the description of a vehicle near to where William had disappeared five days earlier. Their enquiries led them to the apartment of Michael J. Devlin, 41, a pizza parlour manager, where the boys were found.
According to the Daily News (18 January 2007) Browne tried to cash in on her original televised claim by contacting Pam and Craig Akers, a month later, offering her services at $700 per half hour to help locate Shawn’s body.
Wayne Evans, a spokesman for the Shawn Hornbeck Foundation, told the newspaper: “Pam was that desperate that if she had had $700 in her bank account she would have put it on the table. We are talking about a mother who would have sold her soul to have her boy back. Everybody was angry. Sylvia Browne’s name was never brought up again until Shawn was found. He’s home now, and that’s all that matters.”
But Sylvia Browne, while admitting she’d got it wrong about Shawn being dead, denied the claim that she had tried to cash in on his disappearance.
“I'm terribly sorry that this happened,” she told the Daily News. “But I think my body of work stands by itself. I’ve broken case after case. I think it’s just cruel to jump on this one case in which I was wrong. I’ve said thousands of times I’m not God.”
And in rersponse to the claim that she tried to make money out of the case, she added:
“There's never been a case that I’ve ever charged for a missing child. I would never do that. Never, never.”
COMMENT: See Roy’s Blog (Rights and wrongs of psychic detection), 15 January 2007.
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Posted on Monday, January 15, 2007
Category: Mediumship
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