Was it her psychic abilities, or just dumb luck?
Last week, an 11 year-old boy went missing in the semi-rural southern California town of Menifee. The authorities led a massive search for four days before finally calling it off. Then an Orange County psychic stepped in, claiming to have had visions of the missing boy's location. Based on her vision, she searched the family's back yard and discovered the body, which had been partially buried just feet from the family's home.
How legit is this story, really? Cops will tell you, any time someone goes missing, the psychics crawl out of the woodwork with thousands of unhelpful clues that waste departmental time and resources. These psychics are never right… until this time, it seems.
Pam Ragland describes herself as "an intuitive," in addition to experiencing visions. She runs a business helping clients grapple with addiction and other problems, using a technique that she calls "Quantum Thought Shifting." On the third day of the search for Terry Smith, as Ragland watched a news report about the fruitless search, she had a vision of Terry lying beneath a tree. A dirt road and a distinctive building were also in her vision.
Ragland drove out to the Smith home, where she found the distinctive building in the back lot next door: a storage shed behind a neighboring convenience store. With the help of a firefighter, she convinced the Smith family to give her access to their back yard. There, she and her children (who had come along to help) found the body of Terry Smith, who had been killed and partially buried beneath a tree in their back yard.
Despite how accurate it sounds like Ragland's visions were, apparently it was not actually that difficult to find Smith's body. Once she gained access to the family's back yard, Ragland smelled "something dead." Then her children spotted the top of Smith's head, which was poking up out of the ground. By the sounds of it, Smith's body had barely been buried at all.
The real surprise in this story is that no one else found him first. How could you coordinate a multi-day search effort and never notice the bad smell or the exposed head in the family's back yard? Did no one think to check back there? No one noticed that the soil had been disturbed?
Smith's 16 year-old half-brother has been arrested on suspicion of the murder. The half-brother has apparently acted violently in the past, and had an argument with the 11 year-old Smith on the night he went missing. This is one sad story all around.