No Regrets

with her as she described what she had done in a flat, emotionless voice. “I had to do it,” she said. “I dropped my babies into the water. I heard two ‘kerplunks’ a long way down.”
    “Why?” Pittman asked in a strangled voice. “Why did you do this?”
    She looked at him as if he could not understand, even though it was so clear in her mind. “You can’t know why I did it unless you look at my whole life. He [her estranged husband] is partner to this...This is how evil we are. Each of us have used people in our lives. We’re not pure at heart. Not loving people, but using them.
    “I was lazy and rebellious and I fought against everything that’s good and I had degenerated, rather than grown. The only change was that I lied about it. I would always lie to myself.”
    To the detective, the soft-faced woman before him looked like anything but a degenerate sinner. She looked as if life itself had risen up and crushed her. Pittman said a silent prayer that what she was telling him was not the truth, only the ramblings of a broken mind.
    It might be impossible to prove what she was telling him. If the children were in the river, there was a good chance they would never be found. The Columbia was so deep as it passed through the city and its current so powerful that two tiny bodies would quickly disappear.
    Pasco police detectives, all of them hoping this was only a nightmare from a psychotic mind, found the little trailer cold and empty. There were children’s clothes and toys there, teddy bears left behind—but no sign of Christopher and Ryan. They looked in the cupboards and found little food. There were only stacks of unpaid bills, and an almost palpable air of despair in the small mobile home.
    Christine Jonsen was arrested, and she seemed relieved. She had asked to be taken into custody, saying that she was fully prepared to be hanged for what she had done. Long months of psychiatric evaluation lay ahead. Now there were so many “if onlys” spoken by her neighbors and the members of her church. If only they had known. But hindsight could not save either the little boys or Christine herself.
    If Christine’s sons were to be found so that there could be a funeral or a memorial service, it would take some kind of a miracle.
    •  •  •
    Since the majority of detectives think in terms of hard evidence and things that can be seen, touched, smelled, and proven to a jury absolutely, they are rarely impressed by psychics. Three thousand miles away from the Tri-Cities area, a detective in Nutley, New Jersey, had overcome his own doubts about the positive results that could come from clairvoyance. Salvatore Luberpazzi, of the Nutley Police Department, was highly resistant when he first met a fifty-four-year-old grandmother named Dorothy Allison. Dorothy was a typical middle-aged woman in the Italian community, but there were many people who had turned to her in desperation when all other methods to find their missing loved one had failed. She was neither highly educated nor extremely brilliant, but Dorothy Allison had a remarkable gift, one that sometimes haunted her so much that she wished it would just go away. She could see where the bodies of lost people rested. She was especially psychic when she was asked to find children, particularly children who were under water.
    Luberpazzi had very reluctantly agreed to let her work on some of his cold cases. “It’s a very strange feeling to go up to this woman and tell her what I’m looking for and she describes an area that’s miles and miles away.” He shook his head in wonderment as he said: “In the past eleven years, she has found twenty missing or deceased persons for us.”
    Dorothy Allison had no axe to grind. Unlike many well-known psychics, she certainly wasn’t into clairvoyance for the money; she asked only for reimbursement for the cost of transportation and lodging when she had to travel far from her home. She had a family and would have preferred to be with them, but she accepted that she had been blessed—or cursed—with her ability to “see” whatwas hidden to everyone else. By the time Christine’s boys vanished beneath the river’s surface, Dorothy had long since overcome police skepticism about her ability to locate those she called “my babies...my angels.” Although the earthly remains of missing children might be only decomposed skeletons, they were smiling, innocent children to her, and she was compelled by the