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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