Remembering Marcello Truzzi

Lois Duncan

 

    In 1989, our youngest daughter, Kaitlyn Arquette, 18, was murdered in Albuquerque, NM. Without telling her father and me, Kait’s oldest sister consulted a local psychic and learned a lot about the circumstances surrounding Kait’s death that we had not known before. Later, when it became apparent that there was a police cover-up, our family launched our personal investigation. I decided there was nothing to lose—and possibly something to gain—by consulting other psychics. I contacted the American Society for Psychical Research to find out the identities of the nation’s top psychic detectives. They suggested that I get in touch with a professor at the Department of Sociology at Eastern Michigan University, who was an “open-minded skeptic” and made it his business to debunk the frauds. They told me that anyone Dr. Marcello Truzzi recommended would be credible. I exclaimed, “Marcello Truzzi?!!! I went to high school with Marcello!”

    I interviewed the psychics Marcello recommended, and all gave us identical information, despite the fact that they were in various areas of the country, knew nothing about Kait’s case, and didn’t know we were consulting anyone but them. I, then, wrote a book, Who Killed My Daughter?, to motivate informants and prevent the facts of Kait’s case from becoming buried. That thrust me onto a national book tour, made difficult by the fact that just I’d suffered a minor, stress-related stroke. I didn’t tell that to my publishers, because I was afraid they would yank the tour, and the book would never be noticed.

    But I did tell Marcello. He kept in constant touch with me, giving me strength and encouragement throughout stressful appearances on Good Morning America, Larry King Live, Unsolved Mysteries, etc. (I was worried that I would suffer a second stroke and collapse in front of the camera.) When the tour took me to Michigan, Marcello turned up at a TV station and offered to appear with me on the show to add substance to my allegations. There sat the noted skeptic, crammed into a line-up of psychics, and not saying one damned thing that could possibly make me look bad for having consulted them!

    The little boy I knew in high school, (he was one year younger than I was), became a rock I leaned on during the most terrible experience of my life. He was a dear and wonderful man. Brilliant. Loving. Devoted to his family. A skeptic—yes, as we all should be—but open to all possibilities. He told me, “It’s my opinion that the first obligation of any investigator or scientist is to do nothing to block inquiry. A skeptic’s role should not be to close down research, but to challenge and investigate. I’m not opposed to the allegation of anomalies and the idea of keeping the door open to new phenomena. It’s been my experience that most of the people who are working in the field of parapsychology are honest and sincere and are trying to do the best job possible. There is certainly bunk out here that needs to be debunked, but I think we have to be very careful not to throw the baby out with the bath water.”

   
 

Lois Duncan is author of over 50 books, many of them 
young-adult novels. 

 
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