Photograph courtesy of the Jaegers Family
The world’s first psychic detective squad was founded by a St. Louis housewife—but you probably knew that.
It was September 4, 1971, and Bevy Jaegers was sitting in the driver’s seat of a dead woman’s car.
Sally Lucas’ green ’69 Pontiac had been discovered in Panama Beach, Fla. Sleeping inside it was an ex-con named Anthony Damico who had nothing on him but18 cents—and two credit cards belonging to Lucas, a 36-year-old Town & Country housewife who had disappeared several weeks earlier. Damico claimed that he’d met Mrs. Lucas in the company of three hippies and that the five of them had embarked on a druggy road trip, destination Miami. The itinerary was moving too slowly for Damico’s taste, he said, so he dropped his fellow passengers off under a bridge in West Memphis, Tenn., and continued to Florida.
But the only thing Sally Lucas ever smoked was an occasional cigarette. She had a husband and two daughters, whom she doted on. The day she disappeared, she was shopping at Famous-Barr, clad in culottes and $1,200 in diamond jewelry; local newspapers identified her as a “socialite.” The idea that Lucas would’ve suddenly turned light-footed after meeting some hippies at a department store sounded too hokey even for a dime-store crime novel.
The police knew it, too. They held Damico on charges of fraudulently using Sally Lucas’ credit cards as they searched frantically for Lucas—or her body. In an earlier attempt to get Damico to break, they brought in Sally’s husband, Lawrence. He showed Damico photos of the couple’s children to play on his sympathy, then suggested that Sally had been confused or suffering from amnesia when she got out of the car.
“No,” Damico mumbled, suddenly hanging his head. “She wasn’t sick.”
That slip was all the police had to go on. They knew their chances of finding Lucas, or charging Damico, were becoming slimmer by the day. That’s when they brought in Jaegers.
In August 1971, Bevy Jaegers(“Beverly sounds like a mouth full of oatmeal,” she once said) was teaching a class at University City adult night school. Though she’d taught business classes—she typed upwards of 100 words a minute—she wasn’t teaching shorthand. She was teaching ESP. When Jaegers called the police about the Sally Lucas case, it was only to request a few items for her students to practice on so that they could check their results against the newspapers. The cops sent a nightgown and a powder puff. Jaegers had been researching psychometry, or psychically reading the history of an object, for almost 10 years but wasn’t ready for what happened when she picked up that nightgown.
“I felt like I was dying,” she later told the Chicago Tribune, “like I had been hit on the right side of the head.” Pain radiated from her skull and spread down her neck. Holding the nightgown in her left hand, she began scribbling down her impressions with her right. She gave a copy of her notes to a reporter at the St. Louis Globe-Democrat. Later that night, the crime desk called back. How the hell did she get access to confidential police information? ESP, she said. The crime-desk reporter encouraged her to contact the police. “He said they’d try anything,” she recalled later. “That meant ‘Even a weirdo like you.’”
The police were so jarred by the accuracy of her information, they briefly wondered whether she’d had something to do with the crime.
Now Jaegers sat in the Pontiac at the invitation of the Missouri State Highway Patrol. Earlier that day, she, husband Ray and a student named Jim Mueller had pinpointed an area where they were certain the body lay; Jaegers had crisscrossed the area, feeling so oppressed by the sense that she was near a dead body, she felt she had “a hod of bricks” on her shoulders. But the weeds were almost 6 feet high and impenetrable. The party planned to come back the next day with the family dog to continue the search.
Sitting in the police garage, Jaegers began narrating what she saw: horses’ heads. A small bridge. The letters C and CC. The numbers 3 and 4. A creek bed. An airport. A poker. An abandoned, decaying church. Pillar mailboxes.
Though she never named Damico, she described the murderer as prone to bragging about things he had never done and said that his mind was “infantile.”
“This was not a robbery,” she told police. “The motive was sexual but twisted. He plans things at night. He walks in alleys at night. He loves the night.”
And then the blinding head pain, the feeling that she was dying, swept over her again, even stronger this time. Nauseated, she placed a hand on her head and broke into a sweat. Hastily exiting the car, she was unable to hold back her tears.
A wild rainstorm rolled in on Sunday, making it impossible for Jaegers to return to the area she’d been combing. Late in the day, after the storm cleared, a couple pulled their car over on Wild Horse Creek Road to walk their dog. They noticed “a peculiar smell” hanging in the humid September air. Though they did not recognize it, the dog did, eventually leading them to some badly decayed human remains. The police arrived to find the body of Sally Lucas, the right side of her skull smashed in. She lay in a dry creek bed 15 yards from a small bridge, near the junction of Routes C and CC. Nearby were the Spirit of St. Louis Airport, a horse ranch called Poker Flats, an abandoned Assembly of God church, a row of pillar mailboxes.
By dating a purchase Damico had made on one of the credit cards, police determined that Lucas had been abducted between 3 and 4 p.m. The final verdict was that Damico had tried to sexually assault her. When she resisted, he tried to subdue her with a blow to the head, killing her instead.
“That was the first and last time I ever cried over a case,” Jaegers said grimly. “It felt so real. I could even feel myself being flung into that creek and left to die.”
When the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the Globe-Democrat ran their coverage of the murder on September 7, 1971, both papers devoted substantial column inches to Jaegers and her students. “Psychic had remarkable impressions on the location of Mrs. Lucas’ body,” read the Globe’s headline. Eventually, the story would be featured as a reenactment on Leonard Nimoy’s In Search Of … . Jaegers began receiving calls asking for help on other unsolved murder cases—and so the U.S. Psychic Rescue Squad, the world’s first psychic detective unit, was born. Though Jaegers died in December 2001 (one of her last cases involved feeling into the sunken Kursk submarine to seek out survivors), the squad is still in operation. Its work has been covered by the Discovery Channel, Omni and A&E’s The Unexplained. Its members are now scattered from California to England, though a good number are still in St. Louis. There has been talk of doing a Psi Squad reality show, but the St. Louis members, most of them in law enforcement, must keep their work a secret; if anyone knew, they fear they would lose their jobs, even though all work is pro bono and provided as a public service.
“There’s no one here in St. Louis who wants to be on TV,” says Russ Hartford*, a squad member and former detective who’s been with the group since the beginning. “Here, you’re not very well-accepted if you go into that ... The more religious they are, the more freaked out people get. They don’t see that it’s a scientific thing—they think you’re in league with the devil.”
Throughout the ’70s and ’80s, Jaegers was so famous for her predictions that the National Enquirer, the Star and every other trash tabloid in the supermarket checkout aisle illegitimately used her name to push their year-end predictions. Yet she was the unlikeliest of psychics. A little over 5 feet tall and heavyset, Jaegers wisecracked, chain-smoked and refused to tolerate the ridiculous, even in her own hair. She dyed hers blue-black to hide its natural coppery red color, which she thought looked absurd with her olive complexion and black eyes. She grew up in St. Louis Hills, the daughter of a cop (her grandfather, brother and uncles were all cops, too), and inherited her dad’s hard-boiled skepticism. “As far as I know, I’d never heard the word ‘psychic’ in my life,” she said of her upbringing. “The only contact that comes close was that my dad often made jokes about running the gypsies out of town, [the] storefront fortunetellers.”
She hated séances and Ouija boards as much as she adored the Cardinals. When daughter Mary got married during the ’82 playoffs, Jaegers donned a red dress—in contrast with the wedding party’s muted colors—pairing it with her usual comfortable moccasins and a portable radio tuned to KMOX.
What really set Jaegers apart, though, was her belief that ESP is a skill that can be taught, not a mysterious power granted to a handful of people born with the thumbprint of God on their foreheads. Jaegers—who, for the record, wasn’t overly fond of the word “psychic”—thought of herself as a mind researcher, not a mystic. When she taught her classes, there was no incense, no chanting, no visualization of chakras. There were only sealed envelopes and closed boxes, passed around the room. Each student would hold the object in his or her left hand, connected to the highly intuitive right brain (though southpaws are often the opposite), and write down what rose to mind. Jaegers’ theory was that all objects absorb information from their surroundings that can then be accessed through the use of the subconscious.
“It was practice and practice and practice,” Hartford says. “It was actually boring, down to the point where you’d go to sleep if you didn’t have someone to wake you up ... Visualization, going down through energy levels—Bevy just kicked that aside and said, ‘Here’s an envelope. Tell me what you get.’ And you did it over and over, and sure enough, it worked.”
Her students were housewives, salesmen, lawyers, pilots, engineers, teachers and policemen, and she selected the best of them for the Psi Squad.
Lance Daniel, a Sacramento attorney who’s now the director of the squad, was also trained by Jaegers, though he never took one of her classes. Jaegers, a friend of his mother’s, used to visit them in Creve Coeur.
“One day she came over to the house,” Daniel says. “I was probably 7 or 9 at the time. She supposedly could do this psychic stuff. Being a precocious little brat, I thought, ‘Yeah, right!’—so I decided to test her.”
He ran down the hall, far from her sight, sealing a photo inside a manila envelope and holding it up to the light to make sure she couldn’t see through it. He marched back into the living room and thrust it across the coffee table at her.
“If you’re so good, you can see what’s in here,” he told her.
Daniel says she laid the envelope down on the table, never touching it again. She closed her eyes for a few seconds, then opened them.
“It’s a photograph; it’s not in color,” she told him. “It’s an outdoor scene, black and white, with a vertical metal pole, and a white ball ... It’s two kids playing tetherball.”
“Which it was,” Daniel says. “I still have the photo in one of my albums.”
Being a logical kid as well as a precocious one, Daniel considered the possibilities: Either it was a trick, or she could actually do this stuff. The most logical conclusion, he decided, was that she could do it.
“Do you want to know how?” sheasked him.
“Yeah, I want to know how!” he shot back.
She began by telling him that she’d started out as a skeptic, too. In 1962, as a freelance writer looking for interesting things to write about, she’d stumbled over a translation of some Russian ESP studies of people who had been trained to see color with their hands.
She remarked that she “was amazed that reputable publications would print things about people like that, because I thought they were all a bunch of wild-eyed, ring-tailed kooks.”
But then the thought occurred to her: If ordinary Russians could be trained to see color with their hands, what about ordinary Americans? Around the same time there was what Jaegers called “a big foo-fah” about Jeanne Dixon’s Kennedy assassination prediction, and she thought ESP might be an interesting subject to write about.
She went to the hardware store and picked up some paint chips, cutting them out and taping them to index cards. Then she began practicing by placing cards face down in her palm, trying to guess the color by feel.
She couldn’t do it with her right hand, but on her left palm, red felt warmer than blue. Yellow was smooth. Orange was rough. Pretty soon she was batting .300 with the cards; then she began sealing them up in envelopes.
She moved on to objects, borrowing jewelry, books, even rocks from friends and setting out to tap into their histories using her mind.
Though she developed ways of tracking her experiments down to the minutiae, eventually certain sensations—like the cold feeling she got when she picked up a dead person’s belongings, even a photo of the person—became so familiar, she didn’t second-guess them. “You ask yourself a question,” she explained to the Chicago Tribune. “‘Tell me about this object.’ The brain is programmed to do that ... It is a conditioned response, and there’s nothing more mysterious than that. Doesn’t it make sense to you that there’s more to the world than beer and pretzels?”
Her cop father, at least at first, didn’t think so. He thought she was nuts, though later he’d work with her on squad cases.
One person who never thought that Bevy Jaegers was nuts was her husband. Ray Jaegers was a farm boy from the Missouri Bootheel who’d moved to St. Louis with two little kids in tow after surviving a bad divorce. When Ray met Bevy at a dance at the Casa Loma Ballroom, she was divorced, too, with three kids of her own. Back then she was ridding herself of her red hair by bleaching it blond. The two found themselves glued to each other all night. They would marry and merge their little families in a big, rambling house in Richmond Heights, and soon they had a child together.
“Ray was her biggest supporter,” Hartford remarks. “He helped her with everythingshe did.”
When Bevy stumbled on the Russian study and began her living-room psi experiments, she enlisted Ray’s assistance. He good-naturedly agreed.
“My husband became the victim,” she told the Chicago Tribune. “One night, I just said, ‘Shut up, we’re going to do something, no matter how flaky you think it is.’” They experimented with sending thoughts back and forth, eventually becoming so adept at it that Ray developed a habit of speaking his wife’s thoughts out loud, which would cause her to turn away from whatever she was stirring on the stove to scold, “Will you get out of my head?”
Mary Cahn was one of the two kids who moved to St. Louis with the young, divorced Ray Jaegers, and she soon began calling Bevy “Mom.” Cahn says Bevy did regular “mom stuff”: went to PTA meetings, volunteered as a Girl Scout leader, cooked dinner. Though their Richmond Heights neighborhood was devoutly Catholic, she says, no one ever thought of her family as weird or spooky.
“The squad didn’t operate all the time,” Cahn explains. “It was case by case, and she’d call them together. But sometimes they didn’t have time—and that’s when the family became guinea pigs. We didn’t know what we were working on, but she’d use us all the time.”
That included test-driving new ESP decks, too. “She would work with the cards that people sold, but it was driving her crazy,” Cahn says. “She kept running into a brick wall, because the shapes on the cards were too similar ... She wasn’t getting them, and other people weren’t getting them. So she developed her own deck.”
Cahn says that her mother’s work included far more than just the Psi Squad. Bevy and Ray, who collected fountain pens and inkwells, co-wrote a book on the subject, and Bevy and some students did some ghostbusting for a spell, but one of Bevy’s largest projects was assembling thousands of handprints to study. “If she knew a teacher that worked with autistic children, she’d get permission from their parents, and she’d get all their handprints and look for similar characteristics,” Cahn recalls.
Cahn remembers her mother sending the kids off to the library. They’d walk home, each carrying a large stack of books that, they knew, their mother would read within the week. The reason her mother assembled files and files of handprints and analyzed them, Cahn says, was that she couldn’t find any books on hand analysis. So Jaegers wrote her own: You and Your Hand, one of the 14 she’d eventually write. Her book The Psychic Paradigm (1998) hit the Amazon bestseller list twice, and even used copies still sell there for more than $20. (Ray Jaegers learned to carve plates and eventually installed a printing press in the family’s basement so he could republish runs of her books under an imprint they called Aries Press.)
“I asked her, ‘Mom, how do you do it?’” Cahn recalls. “She said, ‘Why do you think I’m such a night owl? I couldn’t write books when you kids were running around, so I’d wait until you were asleep.’ She’d stay up all night and then sleep until 11 in the morning. A lot of people called my mom lazy. She wasn’t lazy. She stayed up all night, until 4 in the morning ... until the Internet—and then she started staying up until 6 or 7.”
By 1974, Jaegers had obtained her private investigator’s license, and the squad had 20 members. What had started as the U.S. Psychic Rescue Squad soon became the U.S. Psi Squad after the group was overwhelmed with telephone calls from little old ladies who had lost their eyeglasses or their cats. The squad laid down ground rules: to only accept cases from law enforcement, and only when approached; to never accept money for their work; to never contact a victim’s family; to keep all cases confidential; and to avoid publicity at any cost. These are the same rules that the squad operates under today.
Phyllis and Dave Dee* were core members of the squad back in the ’70s but knew Jaegers before that. A few years before the Sally Lucas case, KMOX invited Jaegers on the air to talk about her work with handprints. That day, Phyllis Dee had her radio on while doing housework.
“She was on Bob Hardy’s show,” she says of Jaegers. “She really sounded intelligent and down-to-earth, very matter-of-fact.” Hardy asked listeners to send handprints for Jaegers to analyze on the next week’s show. Dee tuned in again and learned that Jaegers would be teaching a class in U. City.
“And of course I was front and center,” Dee says. “That was, I think, 1967—and I never left her after that.”
Dee eventually became Bevy’s assistant in gathering handprints, developing such a knack for interpreting them that when Bevy and Ray opened a Psychic Center, they hired her to teach a class on it. The storefront was in Maplewood, at 2719 Sutton, now the site of a mortgage company. Though it was only open for a few years, it had a splashy opening day: Channel 5 showed up to cover it.
“The main thing I remember was, I waslate,” says reporter John Auble, who was assigned to the story. “I’d met Bev before, and we walked in. I was all set to apologize.” Jaegers handed him a piece of paper. “Why don’t you look at that,” she told him, the cameras rolling. “I unfolded it,” Auble recounts, “and it had the exact time that I would arrive. She’d either already forgiven me or was hoping I’d follow her recommendations for being late.” The piece closed with a bit of slapstick. “There was a good-looking blond psychic,” Auble says, “and I said something about wondering if they could really read your mind. She sashayed by, turned around and slapped me.”
Though the TV spot poked gentle fun at what they were doing, Jaegers was just as serious about her teaching as she would be later working with police on the Atlanta child murders and the Ted Bundy serial killings. And rarely does ESP look like what you see on TV; squad members say that their impressions don’t always relate to each other or make sense at first. It’s a smaller part of the picture, like a fingerprint or a hair sample.
But David Dee says that sometimes, very rarely, you get the whole thing in one rush. It happened to him when the squad was trying to help locate a real-estate agent who had gone missing in Mexico. “The [Mexican] police had murdered this woman,” Dee says, “and that’s why they were not getting anything done. In their haste to get rid of the evidence, I had a [mental] picture of them just tossing this stuff up on the police-station roof. Sure enough, when this information was turned in, they investigated, found the evidence and arrested these guys.”
The Dees, both retired from the Psi Squad, are working as ministers. Though it was a jarring run-in with an entity in a basement during a ghostbusting trip that caused her to quit, Phyllis Dee says that she was ready to give up the work anyway.
“I stopped doing it,” she says, “because I got tired of looking at pictures of dead eyes.”
Jaegers fought her whole life to prove that the paranormal is actually normal, a natural occurrence that can be tested under the right circumstances. (Her nickname was “the psychic mechanic.”) Much as Phyllis Dee grew tired of death, Jaegers lost patience with being unable to check the accuracy of the squad’s work, because they rarely received feedback from crime cases. She applied her skills to archaeology, which was better, but found her favorite litmus test in the stock market. She made news around the country in 1974 after consulting with Pete Dixon, a commodities broker who’d come to her with a sealed envelope containing a prediction that coffee prices would go up, asking her to tell him about its contents. According to a Post-Dispatch article from 1975, she saw heavy rain and people carrying baskets with a few shriveled red berries in the bottom of each.
Dixon danced around her study, promising that he’d buy her a new house if what she said was true. He bought voluminous shares in coffee, just in time to watch the price shoot up after a freeze in Brazil decimated the crop. He made millions and made good on his promise, giving Jaegers a check for $57,500, which she used to buy a new house in Creve Coeur.
“I never had the first clue as to what was going on,” Jaegers told Times West. “I’d never seen a coffee bush. I saw those red cherries and found out later that they contained coffee beans ... I didn’t even know Dixon was a commodities broker.”
That inspired her to start a side business in stocks, in which she could measure her results—and charge a modest fee. Her predictions were accurate enough to attract media coverage: In 1982, the St. Louis Business Journal pitted her against 20 stockbrokers. Her portfolio rose by 29.1 percent, but the brokers’ fell. A similar scenario had played out three years earlier when the National Enquirer tried the same experiment. “We didn’t do too well at all,” said Chris Morton of Merrill Lynch, Fenner & Smith. “The psychics beat us fair and square.”
At the time of her death of a heart attack in December 2001, three months after 9/11, Jaegers was envisioning a whole new application for psi in counterterrorism work. She never had a chance to articulate it.
Mary Cahn agrees with her father, who’s now 82 and living down the block from her, that her mother “died too soon.”
“She did a huge [remote-viewing] convention two years in a row, in Las Vegas, right before she died, and they’d arrange the whole convention around the fact that she was going to be there,” Cahn says. She says she’s just now beginning to appreciate her mother’s work. “I was just a dumb kid,” she says, “and it was just what she did!”
Since Jaegers’ death, things have quieted down a bit. Daniel stepped in to manage the case flow, which he says has been pretty low for the last year, though case demand tends to be cyclical. Requests for help still come through the website that Jaegers set up in the late ’90s, uspsisquad.com, where you can read her notes on the Kursk submarine accident; not surprisingly, each viewing session is dated between11 p.m. and 3 a.m.
When a case comes in, Daniel uses the same method Bevy Jaegers always did: He requests a personal item belonging to the victim—say, a hairbrush or a locket—then asks the sender to seal evidence in an envelope so he can’t see it and FedEx it to him. Daniel writes down his impressions and airmails everything to the next squad member. They do this in a chain, with the last person sending the package back to the police.
“We just give that to the cops, let them figure out how it fits, let them solve it,” he says. “One of the things that really P.O.s cops is some psychic coming in and saying, ‘You cops are bumblers—me and my huge ego are going to solve the case for you Keystone Kops.’ Well, no, you’re just a resource, another tool in the bag for them to use.
“But if you call up a police department and say, ‘So, do you guys use remote viewers? Do you use psychics?’ they will laugh their ass off. ‘Ho-ho-ho! No way, no way!’ Yeah—except, I’m telling you, I’ve worked with so many departments that do. They don’t want the public to lose confidence in them. I’m talking the FBI. I’m talking other intelligence agencies. They absolutely do.”
Though the Psi Squad has worked with Interpol and the FBI (the squad assisted with the Chandra Levy case), the group usually doesn’t have to worry about raising negative publicity for law enforcement. Most of their work is still under the radar, dealing with state and local police departments, especially sheriff’s departments in small Southern towns, offering clues to help find missing people and murder victims who will never make the front page of a newspaper as Sally Lucas did. The Psi Squad is there for them anyway—and that’s just how Bevy Jaegers would have wanted it..
*Not their real names. Read on for our writer’s own ESP experiment.
It’s All in the Hands
Our writer tries her hand at psychometry
It was almost irresistible to us to ask for a demonstration of the Psi Squad’s abilities. “We don’t do dog-and-pony shows,” squad director Lance Daniel informed us. The squad had done one for the BBC a few years ago, and it had turned out badly. Though Daniel correctly identified several details about the chosen target—among other things, that it was a large building containing World War I memorabilia, with large oil torches in front of it and a parade ground nearby, they e-mailed him back: “A total miss. Thanks for giving it a go.” The target was Ataturk’s museum in Turkey, which does indeed possess all of those characteristics. “I wrote back,” he says. “I was mad—they’d wasted my time—I said, ‘Well, how are any of these things wrong?’ They said, ‘Well, you didn’t say, ‘Ataturk’s museum,’—and I laughed. I’m not God. In a police context, would you want me to tell you they’re sitting at Denny’s right now, at the corner of 33rd and J, and here’s their cell number?
Plus, I think it would be more interesting if you tried it yourself.”
He FedExed an envelope, containing six sealed envelopes and a tiny zipper-lock bag of dirt, to our offices. Over the phone he took notes as I held each envelope and tried to peer inside it with my mind. The hand I used definitely made a difference: One photo of a redheaded friend of Daniel’s—not, by the way, Bevy Jaegers before she took to dyeing her hair—came up, in the left hand, as the color orange and the word “Halloween” (the woman was wearing black pointy shoes); in the right, it registered as a black-and-white image of a family standing next to a car and a tree in the snow. Another impression was of an old man surrounded by whiteness. “Hospital” was the word that came to mind. It was a wedding. There were plenty of other odd—and definitely incorrect—images, including a bear hanging out at the edge of a lake.
But the dirt was interesting (apparently dirt or any other physical object is easier to read than a photograph in an envelope).
With the packet of dirt in my left hand, I concentrated. All I could see was a Jeep, stuck in a video-game–like landscape, stuck in the mud, its wheels churning. What kind of Jeep? Daniel asked. Totally plain, I say, the kind with the metal bars. What color is it? A bland, blah color, was all I could tell him. What do the people do there? They’re farmers. What kind of place? I wasn’t sure. What popped out of my mouth was, “It’s hard to get to. It’s been trampled on, but it shouldn’t have been.”
I was sure I was bombing. “You’re doing better than you think,” he chuckled.
It turned out that the dirt was from a Vietnam War memorial in Sacramento. Unlike Bevy Jaegers, I didn’t see people dying, or soldiers, or dog tags. There were no dramatic Hollywood effects, just a slide show of weird little impressions that I figured didn’t add up to much. But, as Bevy once said, she started out as “totally untalented” and got better only after lots of practice. For a first run, I’ll totally take it.
