Psychic helps police pursue killers

On his day off from driving a taxi in Hirosaki, Japan, Mitsuhiro Kobayashi allegedly held up people in an office building and set it on fire.

Five perished and four others were injured in that tragedy on May 8, 2001.

The suspect remained unidentified until this spring, when Nancy Myer, of Derry Township, "saw" him spreading gasoline in the building's stairwell.

Myer, an internationally known psychic consultant and author, picked up images when a Japanese television crew took her to the scene of the crime.

A composite drawing of his description aired March 2 on Nippon TV's "Super Special Psychics."

Kobayashi, 43, was arrested the next day. According to an account in the Tooku Nippo newspaper, he had purchased a can of gasoline just days before the crime.

"The composite that you worked on looked so much like the arsonist," wrote Yukiko Iwadate, the television station's production coordinator and researcher who booked Myer through Idea Network LA Inc. in Los Angeles. "You are officially a famous psychic detective in Japan."

That distinction is nothing new for Myer, 57, who in the past 32 years has assisted detectives in nearly all 50 states and abroad.

In more than 500 cases, she has provided information that augments criminal investigations and often leads to arrests and convictions.

She considers her extrasensory perception a "talent," although one that she didn't initially understand.

"I thought that everyone saw things like I did," she said. "I just assumed that people knew what I knew."

Myer eventually realized she was "different" but didn't comprehend how extensive it was until she was 28 and a friend talked her into trying a Ouija board. The experience was dramatic and "terrible."

"Ouija boards are dangerous and people should not mess with them," she said. "Had I not been a strong person, it would have really messed me up."

Myer describes herself as a spiritual person who "prays a lot."

"God made me this way for a reason," she said, "and I see it as a tremendous responsibility in how I use it."

For that reason, she volunteers her services to police departments.

"I have a bone to pick with murderers," she said.

She started pursuing them in the mid-1970s after several members of the Delaware State Police attended her seminar at the Delaware Technical and Community College in Wilmington.

"When are you going to work for me?" Col. Irvin B. Smith asked.

Myer wasn't interested. Later in the day when she was demonstrating psychometry — the reading of objects — she picked up so many personal images from his ring that he asked her to stop disclosing the information.

He called her every morning for weeks and said, "I won't go away until you show me that it doesn't work."

It worked.

She provided information for three cases, one of them the brutal murder of Leonetta Schilling. Myer went through 42 mug shots to pick out the suspect, who was later convicted. Her accuracy convinced one of the skeptical cops assigned to work with her on "The Sherlock Squad" that she was authentic.

Myer found those first cases "scary."

Hundreds of investigations later, she said, "I'm still disturbed to see the mayhem that people wreak on each other."

Images of the violent crimes often come from the victim's point of the view. At the scene of the fatal arson in Japan, which is now an empty lot, she envisioned the perpetrator in what she described as "a series of broken movie clips in my head."

"He set the fires in such a way as to trap the people," she said. "It made me mad. I was livid. As a human being, it bothered me that he could kill like that and that he could do it again."

Through an interpreter, she described the suspect to artist Hiroyuki Watanabe, who made a composite drawing.

Myer estimates that about 90 percent of the time she's able to provide new and relevant information, but that doesn't always lead to an arrest.

"Very often, they will end up knowing who did it, but there's a world of difference between knowing it and proving it," she said.

Since moving to this area in the 1980s, Myer has given seminars to local and state law enforcement agencies.

In the case of the disappearance of Michael Rosenbloom, of Allegheny County, she worked with the victim's father and Capt. Therese Rocco, who then headed the Pittsburgh police's missing persons bureau.

Myer drew a map of where she thought the body was on a steep hillside near Baldwin. There, she said, searchers found pieces of clothing and boots that could have been Rosenbloom's. Myer rappelled down the cliff and picked up images of a skull hidden in inaccessible rocks. Bone fragments later surfaced after a rock slide, but the case remains unsolved.

Myer wrote about her work in the autobiography, "Silent Witness." She also has chapters in "More Hot Chocolate For the Mystical Soul," "Chicken Soup for the Sports Fan" and "Magical Souvenirs," and collaborated on a video that soon will be released.

She is seeking a publisher for "Murder Nightmares," a fictional account of a psychic pursuing a serial killer.