The Other Child Predators

“Your child was sold into slavery in Japan.”

She really did once say that, in 1999. A six-year-old, Opal Jo Jennings, had a month earlier been snatched from her grandparents’ front yard in Texas while playing with her cousin. A man pulled up, grabbed her, threw her into his truck, hit her when she screamed and drove off. Her distraught grandmother went on Montel’s show and said, “This is too much for my family and me to handle. We want her back. I need to know where Opal is. I can’t stand this. I need your help, Sylvia. Where is Opal? Where is she?”

Sylvia said, “She’s not dead. But what bothers me - now I’ve never heard of this before - but she was taken and put into some kind of a slavery thing and taken into Japan. The place is Kukouro.”

“Kukouro?” Montel Williams asked, after a moment’s stunned silence.

“So she was taken and put on some kind of a boat or a plane and taken into white slavery,” Sylvia said.

Opal’s grandmother looked drained and confused. Opal’s body was eventually found buried in Fort Worth, Texas. She had, the pathologist concluded, been murdered the night she went missing. A local man - Richard Lee Franks - was convicted.

I wonder if Sylvia Browne went to Koo Koo Roo for lunch that day. Professional psychics are leeches who thrive on people’s pain, loneliness and insecurities. What’s horrible is television and the internet keeps these frauds going even though they have been exposed as fakes many times.

Uri Geller has a new TV show on NBC even though he was exposed by James Randi on national TV in the 1970s. Of course, the public forgets things, especially after such a long time has passed.

In fact, Harry Houdini, one of the most famous magicians of all time, exposed psychics and frauds in his day. Yet here, in the 21st century, people still cling to the hope that real psychics. It’s the triumph of hope over experience.

Magical thinking is still with us in force. 

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