No Regrets

visions that came to her.
    Dorothy Allison’s involvement in the search for missing children began in 1968 when she woke from a nightmare. She had seen the image of a little boy stuck in a pipe. For a month, she tried to put it out of her mind, and then she went to the Nutley police. When she told the desk sergeant what she had dreamed, she described his reaction: “The officer jumped off his chair like a maniac and told me a little boy with that description was missing and believed drowned.”
    The police followed Dorothy’s instructions, and she led them to that small boy. Michael Kurcsics, five years old, was found caught in a drainage pipe, and became the first picture in Mrs. Allison’s “book of angels.”
    She had seen that Michael’s rubber boots were on the wrong feet, and down to that small detail, she was correct.
    Soon, Dorothy pictured the body of fourteen-year-old Susan Jacobson and led Staten Island police to an oil drum where her killer had secreted her body. He was caught and convicted. She “saw” the grave of eighteen-year-old Debbie Kline of Waynesboro, Pennsylvania, and gave police a composite sketch of the man who had killed her. It was uncannily accurate, almost as if the prime suspect had posed for it.
    Asked if she might be able to receive images from the other side of the country, Dorothy agreed to try. When shewas alone and in a meditative mood, images rushed into her mind. Although Dorothy Allison had never been in Washington State, the pictures in her head sounded familiar to the Pasco police investigators. She told them that she could see Ryan and Christopher Jonsen in a wide river. For some reason, she kept getting a sense of “doubles—everything is double.” Even she didn’t know what that meant.
    Dorothy said she saw the bodies near a bridge, and she could make out the numbers seven and eight. She also saw the number four and thought that that might mean the bodies would be found in the fourth month. “And there are cars,” she added. “Many cars parked nearby.”
    Dorothy’s visions were published in an article in a local paper on March 21, and John Waibel, a retired man who lived in Wallulah Junction, some twenty miles south of the Tri-Cities, decided to see if he could locate an area similar to what she had described. He drove to a spot near Sacajawea Park, which was three miles downstream from the Pasco-Kennewick Bridge where Christine Jonsen said she’d thrown her children into the icy Columbia.
    He stepped out of his truck, and his breath caught in his throat as he looked around. Right in front of him, he saw two huge electrical towers, two railroad bridges, two looming holding tanks. Two Rivers Park was just across the river. The park had a large parking lot filled with cars. And on one of the electrical transmission towers he read the number “78.” A nearby buoy bobbing in the river had “44” painted on it. Doubles. Doubles.
Doubles.
    Waibel began his eerie search, hoping that he wouldn’t find what he was looking for. But he did. The body of two-year-old Ryan Jonsen, clad only in a diaper, rested face up where his body was caught on the rocks. Well preserved in the freezing water, he appeared to be only asleep.
    Dorothy Allison had been tragically accurate.
    And then, eleven days later, it was again doubles. It was now the first day of the fourth month, April 1, when a pair of seventeen-year-old twins from Hermiston, Oregon, were fishing in the Columbia River. The twins found Christopher’s body. It, too, was lodged among the rocks of the river.
    There were two more “angels” whose pictures would be placed in Mrs. Allison’s pathetic scrapbook.
    There was probably no one in the Tri-Cities area who could read who did not know the details of Christine Jonsen’s “crime,” so a change of venue was granted at the defense’s request. Her trial began on October 3, in Seattle, with Benton-Franklin County Superior Court Judge Albert Yencopal presiding. Franklin County Deputy Prosecutors Stan Moore and Michael Kinnie would argue that, although they agreed that Christine was emotionally disturbed, she was not legally insane under M’Naughton, the guideline in the State of Washington. Moore would insist in his opening statements that the young mother had prepared for her crime, and sought to avoid detection until she confessed, and that she had a purpose in what she was doing. These elements, he stressed, would block the defense claim that she did not