Articles of General Interest

Hypnosis

The year was 1970.  I was in my final year of Grant Medical College in Mumbai, India.  I was to appear for my final MBBS degree exam in December 1971.  In 1970, I dreamed of becoming a doctor and earning some money to get rid of this poverty that my elderly parents and I were living in.  I had among the best marks in my class, so I could have picked one of the coveted fields of medicine or surgery – any of the lucrative fields; certainly not psychiatry.  Yet, I chose to be a psychiatrist.  The reason for that was 2-fold – I read Sigmund Freud’s “Interpretation of Dreams” during an extremely hot 24-hour train ride and was absolutely fascinated by the capabilities of the mind, and the second reason was the Max Collie hypnosis show.

Max Collie:  Max Collie was a hypnotist from Scotland who was visiting Mumbai and performing shows daily to rave reviews and packed audiences.  My four friends and I stood outside the huge auditorium where Max’s shows were held and hoped we would catch a glimpse of our favorite actors and actresses from Bollywood as they went inside.

We did not.  We would have to content ourselves by looking at the large photographs enclosed in the glass cases facing the sidewalk.   India’s most glamorous actresses and actors were shown sitting in the front row of the auditorium and looking up at Max Collie on the stage hypnotizing a few volunteers.  “That’s it!” we thought.  We could become volunteers for the show and we would be face to face with these gods of show business.  We were 21 then and nothing seemed impossible.  The cheapest tickets were up in the stratosphere of the large theater.  One probably needed binoculars to see the stage from up there, but those were the only tickets we could afford, so we bought five tickets for some future date.

On the day of the show, the five of us showed our tickets and walked in.  We hung around on the ground floor pretending we had lost some jewelry on the ground in order not to go up five flights of stairs to where our seats were.  Through the curtained doorway walked the wealthy older folk. We were sure they would not volunteer to be Max Collie’s hypnotic subjects.  While the ushers and the five of us were stooped over, searching intently for the lost ring or whatever it was that we were supposed to be looking for, we heard Max Collie’s booming voice introducing himself in his Scottish accent and promising a marvelous show.  He said he needed some volunteers and promised that those volunteers would be given front row tickets for a future show since they would not remember today’s show.  Upon hearing Max’s request for volunteers, the five of us medical students sprang into action.  There was very little security in those days.  We strode quickly past the ushers, and through the velvet curtains and ran down the aisle towards the stage.

I still remember Max Collie pointing at us and laughing, “Oh look what we have here!” he said.  “Five strapping young lads eager to be volunteers.”  He invited us up onto the stage.  Little did I know that that show was going to change my life and that of many others whom I would help as a hypnotist in the years to come.

We bounded up onto the stage, excited and a little scared but eager to look out and see the actresses and actors in the first row (the blinding lights in our eyes prevented us from seeing anything).

Max Collie started the induction process – “close your eyes; hold your arms out and feel them becoming like steel rods,” he said.  I obeyed, and did as I was told.  He went on with his orders and I kept standing there with my eyes closed, hoping desperately to be hypnotized.  But I wasn’t - and I felt Max smack me on my forehead, and I opened my eyes.  Max motioned me off the stage.  I saw that my friend, Onali was hypnotized.  Another friend walked off with me but Onali and Girish looked like they were in another world!  They were literally in a trance.

My friend and I walked off the stage and found two seats on the ground level that were empty and hurriedly sat in those seats for the remainder of the show, transfixed on what was happening to our three friends.  Max made them believe they were chickens, clucking and hopping around, to the absolute delight of the audience.  He made them jump off the stage in abject terror to get away from the imaginary fierce dogs that were after them.  Max made one of the three subjects – Onali – put his head on one chair and his heels on another chair four feet away and think that he was a rigid wooden board.  My other two friends stood on his body which was suspended like a board between the two chairs! (the next day he had no pains or stiffness either).  I thought to myself while this was going on, with amazement, how the body responds to the commands of the mind so completely.  But even more amazing things were to happen!

Max made my friends do more things which brought out superhuman strength in them and they did things which nobody would have believed them capable of, physically.  He then told them that he was going to touch them with a feather; instead he inserted needles into my friend’s body – sterilized – and then asked if there were any doctors in the audience.

There were many, of course, and a few of them went up on stage.  Max asked the doctors to examine the very long needles which were sticking out of the bodies of my three friends.  They looked like stainless steel knitting needles to us from where we were.  After the doctors were satisfied that the needles were in fact sticking into the bodies, and had perforated the skin, Max told the hypnotized subjects that in fact they were being touched by soft feathers and that he would remove the feathers.  He commanded that there would be no bleeding!  He removed the needles one by one, and asked the doctors to verify and report to the audience that the removal of the inserted needles had left no blood on the surface of the skin.

Max Collie then explained to the enthralled audience that the mind had complete control over the body; and that we just don’t know how to use the mind to get the body to do what is needed.

I will proceed in the pages to follow to relate how I was able in future years to use hypnosis to control patient’s asthma attacks, ulcerative colitis bleeding attacks, urticaria, migraines, etc.  Illnesses that are often difficult to control through medications and other treatments available to doctors but possible to treat using one’s own mind.  Since I have now retired from clinical practice, I want to stir in this generation of physicians an interest in the use of the mind to control the body and the various so called psychosomatic illnesses.

Max Collie taught the audience that there are voluntary muscles and involuntary muscles; that they are physiologically reactive responses that we erroneously think are not under the control of our mind.  Such as developing a weal when one touches a hot iron, or bleeding when stuck with a needle (in later years, I was fascinated to read of China’s acupuncturists helping patients undergo surgery without anesthesia and using acupuncture to control bleeding!).

Max said that the mind is a powerful tool to use not just for tricks to entertain people as he was doing, but also to use the mind to cure and control diseases that afflict the body.  By the time I left the show, actors and actresses were the furthest thing from my mind.  I was eager instead to learn hypnosis, and to learn to control my mind, and to use the minds of patients to help them heal.

I move to USA: 

 In December of 1971, I passed my final MBBS exam.  For years, we were practicing saying “DR.” in front of our names while standing in front of a mirror, much the way a bride-to-be may sound out what her name would sound like with her husband’s surname “doctor such and such!” “Hello doctor!” “Good morning doctor!”  Our chests filled with pride as young 22-year-old doctors, we held our hard earned degrees in our hands.

I was determined, for more reasons than one, to become a psychiatrist, something that my friends found surprising.  “Why not a higher paying specialty?” - I was asked.

At the same time, in December 1971, just as we were taking our final exams, war broke out between India and Pakistan.  My friend Girish and I joined the armed forces; we rushed to the recruitment offices as soon as we heard the news of war and asked to be sent to the war zone.  The war with Pakistan lasted only 13 days.  When it was over, the war office told us it would be a long time before we were needed – so we could go on a long vacation if we wished.

I moved to the USA in April 1972 to be close to my brother, and my parents, who lived in New York.  I joined a hospital close to my brother’s house in 1972 and started as a first year psychiatry resident.  Having newly moved from India and being only 22, life was just so much fun.  As a psychiatry resident I had occasion to use hypnosis extensively.  I used it to treat a young girl in her early 20s who suffered from a case of multiple personalities – one of the most fascinating cases ever.  To hide her identity, I will call her Connie .  One of Connie’s personalities would get Connie to do strange things that she would have no memory of doing, similar to hypnosis.  Under hypnosis I gave Connie a post-hypnotic suggestion. I would often get calls from Connie from airports in the west or the Midwest saying “Doctor, this is Jana” one of her other personalities “I am at the airport in Seattle, Washington.”  “Connie wanted me to call and let you know.”  I would tell Jana to look down at her hands, and stare at the fingers – a post hypnotic suggestion that would cause her to revert back to Connie.  Connie would then, in typical hesitant, shy fashion, then asked “Hello who is this?  Where am I?, how did I get here?”  She would then take the next flight back to the east coast.  Ultimately Connie  was able to rid herself of all her other personalities with the use of self-hypnosis.

1972 was a great year for me.  I became well-known in the hospital as a practitioner of hypnosis.  I was 22, going on 23, friendly, easy to approach, and always eager for subjects on whom to practice hypnosis.  So the employees of the hospital came to me in droves, asking me to hypnotize them.  Things were different in 1972 than they are now – everybody smoked cigarettes (or at least I thought so), even in the hospital; many smoked “pot” openly.  TVs were only black and white.  After 9 p.m. (or 10 p.m. at the latest) there were no more shows on the four channels on the TVs with rabbit ear antennae (there was no cable TV then), only ABC, NBC, CBS, and PBS, if I remember correctly.  Everybody was asleep by 9.30 or 10.30 p.m.

As a consequence, I rarely heard people complain of being tired in the morning.  At one point in the 70s, the TV stations decided to add particularly flavorful programs starting at 8 p.m. and ending at 10.  Many people stayed up to watch.  I remember the whole nation being fixed to the TV watching Roots or Mohammed Ali’s boxing matches.  Gradually late night new shows were introduced – Ted Koppel after 11 p.m. even.  Soon, people wouldn’t go to sleep until midnight – and came into work bleary eyed, yawning and tired the next morning.  Before my eyes, I saw our nation go from a bright eyed energetic group to one that dragged its feet and yawned and was constantly tired.  But, I digress.

I was constantly asked to hypnotize the nurses in the hospital to stop smoking or to lose weight or something else.  Those were the most common.  Sometimes, it would be to recollect where jewelry had been hidden.  Those kinds of things.

Once the nurses on the psychiatric floor asked me to hypnotize one of them to show them what can be done.  “Carol” volunteered.  I had never hypnotized Carol before.  I found out that she was extremely hypnotizable – perhaps the most hypnotizable person I have ever met.  After the initial part where I got her to do a few silly Max Collie kind of things, I thought I could try age regression because she was so hypnotizable.  Something I had only heard of or read about.  Informed consent and lawsuits were not uppermost in my mind in 1972, things were different then and Carol told me later she did not mind.

I asked Carol to go back in time, and she did.  With each successive year that I regressed her, her voice and manner of speaking seemed to change.  Dramatically, when I asked her to imagine that she was in school with her kindergarten class on her first day, she curled up in the chair like a little girl, and started speaking like a child in a child’s voice!  Excited at first, and happy but then she started crying – as a child would – because somebody had taken her pencil.  “The one with the rubber on top,” she said.  We were all fascinated by Carol’s transformation in front of our very own eyes.  Nobody was laughing now.  There was pin drop silence in the room which contained about seven of us altogether.

I decided to try something else I had only read about.  I asked her to imagine that she was still in her mother’s womb.  Then I asked her to go back even further and imagine she was in her previous life!  I had no idea what to expect – I had only read of such things, never expecting to find a subject this hypnotizable!

Carol suddenly transformed again – looked different and sounded different.  Her voice was mature, strong and confident.  She spoke in a different language, a language that none of us recognized.  But it was not gibberish – it was a definite language!  And this “new” person was trying to tell us something important!  I was fascinated!  But also worried because I had never done this before, and did not know if there would be consequences.  I brought her back gradually to the present life, and quickly through the years to the present year of 1972.  I asked her to speak to me and answer questions about the current year, month and date.  I asked her to get up, stretch, move around, while still under hypnosis.  I made sure that we all felt that our regular Carol, RN, was back to normal.  Then I asked her to open her eyes.

Carol had no memory or awareness of anything that happened.  Perhaps that was fortunate.  But I was fascinated!  None of my psychiatrist supervisors knew anything about hypnosis.

They were intoxicated with the stories I told them about Connie, or how I treated anxiety attacks or migraines or other conditions with hypnosis – but they drew the line when I told them about age regression and Carol.  They forbade me to do that again.  And so I lost the opportunity to see what else hypnosis could tell us about worlds and states that we know nothing about.  In the pages to follow, we will explore stories of others in history – in Europe and USA – who used self-hypnosis to cure diseases that the best doctors were unable to do, with novel cures, predict the future, tell about past lives, etc.  One of them was called the miracle man of USA.  The New York Times called Edgar Cayce “the most fascinating man in America.”  American presidents paid for stenographers to write down everything he said.  Having only an eighth grade education, he could, under self-hypnosis, give cures to diseases that were years ahead of his time and answered questions for brilliant people like Thomas Edison.  He made, for other people, millions of dollars who asked him about winning horses in a race, or for stock tips or where to dig for oil.  Max Collie, how is this possible?

Hypnosis saves a life:

Getting back to 1972, I was provided with a cute, neat apartment across the street from the hospital so that I was always readily available.  There were no cell phones then, and I believed beepers came later.  So one had to let the hospital know constantly a landline phone number where one would be.

One evening, the phone rang.  It was the medical ICU.  A nurse who  had used hypnosis to stop smoking was calling.  She asked if I would come to the ICU right away.  She said they had a sad case of a man in his late twenties dying of status asthmatics (status asthmatics is a condition where a patient has one severe asthma attack after another – nonstop – an acute exacerbation that is often unresponsive to bronchodilators.  They are unable to speak more than one word or two words as they are very short of breath).  I asked her why she was calling me as a psychiatrist since this was an extreme medical emergency.  She explained that the doctor had tried every medication possible – IVs, bronchodilators – everything – and the patient was only getting worse.  The treatment team was now convinced he was going to die; the family was all outside the room, and the priest had just finished with the last rites.  But the patient was desperately trying to communicate something before he died, but could neither speak (because he was so short of breath) nor could he write or sign.  Perhaps a psychiatrist could figure out what message he was trying to get across to his family before he died? she asked.

I had never seen a patient with status asthmatics before this, and never again since that day have I seen such a patient.  I was not prepared for what I was going to see.  When I got to the ICU, there were a handful of his family members outside the ICU.  They were crying, holding each other.  A priest was standing with them, comforting them.  The patient was in a glass enclosed room right next to the nurses’ station.  He was a young man who was extremely agitated, wheezing loudly, moving his head side to side with air hunger – opening his mouth.  His breathing was extremely rapid.  Parts of his body were blue.  His eyes were wide open, and abject terror showed through his eyes as well as a clearly evident plea for help through his eyes.  Because of his air hunger he could not speak a word and he was too weak and oxygen depleted to write anything.  His eyes darted from me to the door and around the room.  I sat down next to him, not knowing what to do.  I was a 22-year-old with no experience in this.  How was I going to handle this?  To help him, and his family figure out what he wanted to say before he died?

That was the only thing in my mind, leave alone trying to even conceive that I could help his medical condition in any way.  After trying to ask a few questions I realized the futility of trying to speak with him.  Others had tried – he could not answer.  What do you say to such a person – cannot say “how are you?” or “how are you feeling?” or “what’s going on?”  I decided to put on a very confident air and said to him “I am here to help you.”  I said “I am trying to understand what you want to say to us but I know you cannot speak.  If you understand what I am saying to you, blink your eyes.”  Wild-eyed and scared, he blinked twice, eager to try this new means of communication.  I went on, more confident now that I had at least a little bit of communication with him.  “We have to get you to relax a bit – slow your breathing down.  Okay?”  He blinked.  “I know you want to tell us something but you cannot do that like this.  So I am going to try and relax you so that you can write down what it is you want to say.  Okay?”  Blink.

I racked my brains to see what I was going to do.  It is called the ‘Law of the Instrument’ - - “the natural human tendency to be over-dependent on their narrow skill-sets and resources” which also means that if the only tool a carpenter has is a hammer, then to him everything looks like a nail.  So logically, the only thing I could think of was to hypnotize this young man, perhaps make his last moments a little less scary.  Could he even concentrate on what I was going to say?  Could he do it?  Could I do it?  I asked him if I may hypnotize him and he blinked.  I asked him to close his eyes.  I went on speaking, asking him to relax his body, think of himself on a beach, look out at the waves, etc., etc.  Much to my astonishment, his breathing slowed a little.  I told him when I touched his left hand it would feel light and buoyant and float upward.  I touched him and his left hand – joy of joys! – floated up.  His breathing started slowing down some more, almost to normal.  I said he should breathe in the salt air of the ocean, slow deep breaths, feel the warm sun on him, look at the clouds, look at the waves, and he breathed deeply.  His color returned to normal, his body was still.  I could not believe my eyes!  While still speaking to him, I twisted in my chair to look backwards.  Through the glass of his room, the entire staff was staring spellbound.  I kept this up for quite a while until I was convinced that he was not going to revert back to the state of rapid breathing again.  I told him to stay there – on the beach and relax, not to open his eyes until I told him to – and left him in a state of hypnosis – while I stepped outside.

The nurses were almost jumping up and down with excitement.  They asked if they should bring the family in.  I said not to, until he spoke, until we spoke to the attending doctor – Dr. Larry Denson.  Now I forgot to mention that Dr. Denson was his attending – a doctor feared by the lowly residents at that time.

Dr. Denson is Impressed:

Dr. Larry Denson was politically a very powerful man in the community.  He was flamboyant and aggressive in his manner.  A single man who drove a gold Rolls Royce. He dressed as if he were wearing a tuxedo all the time, and a black dracula-like cape.  He hated psychiatrists and psychiatry (until after this case).He began to rely on me for many of his cases after this.  I told the nurses we should call Dr. Denson before we did anything else.

The nurses dialed Dr. Denson and told him what they had seen.  He asked to speak to me.  Feeling he would congratulate me and thank me, I took the receiver from the nurse.  Instead, Dr. Denson began screaming at me!  “What did you do to my patient?  What did you give him?”  I said I only hypnotized him, did not give him any medications.  “I don’t believe it,” he screamed.  “I gave him every drug possible.  What did you give him?  You wait right there – don’t do anything, don’t go anywhere.  I will be right there.  Don’t move,” he screamed.  I was afraid.  This was the great Dr. Denson, medical examiner for the entire county, head of the medical staff of this hospital and he was furious at me.  What did I do wrong?  Was I going to be fired?  I was confused.  There was no such thing back then as job security or “rights.”  You could be fired on a whim, no reason given.  What was I going to say to my bride-to-be waiting eagerly for me in India to come back once I got my permanent visa.  I couldn’t do this if I didn’t have a job!

Shortly thereafter, Dr. Denson strode down the long hallway from the elevator to the ICU – long Dracula cape flowing behind him (he probably slept in his tuxedo and cape).

He looked angry.  He told the family he would be right with them and brushed past them into the patient’s room.  He looked at the patient lying quietly and then came to the ICU nurses’ station.  He faced me.  The nurses stood around.  He asked me to tell him exactly what had happened.  I did.  He said he could not believe that hypnosis could do this.  He said he had been practicing for 40 years and had never ever heard of such a thing “it’s not possible.  I gave him every medication I could!”  But he was calmer by now and looked at me with interest (and perhaps a little respect?)  He went over “next steps.”  What to do?  Should we tell the family he is out of the woods?  Should we bring him out of the hypnosis?  Would the status come back?  Would it be as responsive the next time?  Questions to which I had no answers, I told him.  I had never done this before, I said I don’t know what would happen.  He said for me to come with him and I should speak to the family.  I did.  The family was overjoyed, and cried.  They expressed their gratitude.  They asked if they could see the patient.  I was worried because emotions are triggers for asthma but I agreed.

I brought the patient out of his hypnotic state.  Dr. Denson examined him, spoke to him and was satisfied. Dr. Denson stood tall, proud and erect, as if he had done a great job.  But he looked at me and smiled!  He asked me to see him the following day and walked off cape trailing behind him.

I told the nurses to limit the family’s visit, and I left.  Bewildered but relieved.  I had saved a man’s life!  This was probably the first of a few others in my lifetime.

Dr. Denson met with me the next day.  He was soft spoken now and genuinely interested in what had happened and wanted to learn more.  He told me he was going to keep the patient in the hospital for a few more days and that I should follow the patient’s care while in the hospital.

That day, the patient was comfortable in bed, having eaten a nice breakfast.  He seemed healthy, jovial and comfortable.  We discussed everything that had happened the previous evening.  I then asked him what he was so desperate to communicate.  He said he wanted to tell his wife that he would always love her (that’s it? I thought).  Then he explained.  The asthma attack, he explained, started when his wife came to him and told him that she loved another man and she wanted a divorce.  He had reached out for her, clutching her arm tightly and she had tried to pull away.  The resulting physical and emotional exertion caused him to develop an asthma attack which escalated to status asthmatics (I explained this later to Dr. Denson who suggested that I see the two of them for marital counseling).

Unfortunately, this has a sad ending.  I started seeing the two of them for counseling both together and individually.  The wife explained to me that she did not want to remain married and was eager to start a new life with her new boyfriend.  I told her to please give me some time while I work with her husband to teach him to use hypnosis to control his asthma.  She agreed, but was not sure how long she and her boyfriend could wait.  The husband was quite complacent, unfortunately, and did not seem aware that his wife still wanted to leave him.  I am not sure whether he practiced the self-hypnosis diligently.  They stopped coming to me about nine months later.  A few months after that the wife called me tearfully.  She told me that he had died.

He had been served with divorce papers.  He had clutched her wrist and she said he had had a severe asthma attack and died.

Hypnosis to Solve a Murder:

In the interim, Dr. Denson had sent me many other cases to treat and to hypnotize.  He was a pulmonologist, so he saw many cases of asthma.  But he also saw other patients as an internist.  So he sent me, as outpatients, anybody who he thought had a psychosomatic illness.  And to the surprise of all the doctors in the hospital and all the nurses, he started calling me in to consult on many of his patients in the hospital.

I will  describe later some of my experience with other psychosomatic illnesses (a term which is often misunderstood).  People think that this means it’s “all in the mind.”  No.  It is a physical illness.  It has real symptoms and signs.  Just as described with the status asthmatics patient.  A person with ulcerative colitis can be bleeding real blood per rectum – it is not “in the mind” but this condition maybe “caused or aggravated by a mental factor such as internal conflict or stress.”

But Dr. Denson, in addition to getting me started as a very, very busy practitioner by being my biggest fan, promoted me to other physicians, and got me started in the forensic use of hypnosis to solve murders and other criminal cases.  He was the medical examiner / coroner in those days.

In 1976, I was still a resident in psychiatry.  Dr. Denson was still the medical examiner.  I had no office.  In those days, there were few kidnappings, rapes, or murders in the news, compared to today.  But on August 31, 1976, a 20-year-old named Kim Montelaro disappeared after last being seen in a New Jersey shopping mall.

As I mentioned earlier – to the best of my recollection – there were only four TV stations at that time.  All four TV stations constantly showed photos of a pretty, young 20-year-old.  The TV news reported that Kim had gone to the shopping mall and had not been seen since then.  Her car was found in the parking lot, still locked.  Where had she gone, her family wondered?  If her car was still there, how had she left?  Had she been kidnapped?  Was she still somewhere on the grounds of the mall?  The photograph was flashed on TV for weeks after the disappearance and police has absolutely no leads to go on.  The case looked like it was going to go cold, and Kim would not be found.

One day in the fall of 1976, the lobby receptionist of the hospital where I worked said there were some police officers in the reception desk asking to see me.

Wondering what I had done wrong this time, I went down to the lobby to see two large, smartly dressed, uniformed police officers with guns.  They were respectful to me and asked if we could speak privately.  We went into a small room.  They explained that they were referred to me by the medical examiner Dr. Larry Denson (once a nonbeliever in psychiatry and the powers of the mind, Dr. Denson now used me for anything that hit a wall).

The policemen said they were investigating the disappearance of a young 20-year-old Kim Montelaro and asked if I had seen this in the news.  I told them I was only aware of a disappearance but nothing else.  The police said they too only knew that much at this point and had no leads at all until a day or so before they came to see me.  They said a young man had come forward and said that after seeing Kim’s face on TV for many weeks, he now had a vague recollection that he may have seen her in the mall that day but could not remember anything else.  Since this was a high profile case, and since they had no other leads to go on, the police had decided to put as much effort into this as they could but had hit a dead end because the young man could not remember anything.  “Dr. Denson the medical examiner suggested we speak to you to see if you had any suggestions.”  I said I had never used hypnosis for memory enhancement before, to my recollection, but I would be willing to give it a try (this started me on many cases where I successfully worked with law enforcement, prosecutor’s offices, FBI, secret service, etc., to solve various cases which had some witnesses with poor memories of events, faces, or had seen license plate numbers but could not recollect.  More on that soon).

We arranged for a room in the hospital where I would hypnotize the young man to refresh his memory of August 31, 1976.

When I saw the witness, he was quite anxious.  He seemed shy and withdrawn.  The young man was escorted by quite a few tall, burly uniformed officers, enough to make anybody nervous.  Before I hypnotized him, he said that he could not remember anything at all other than that the girl’s face looked vaguely familiar.  He consented to being hypnotized.  He turned out to be a fairly hypnotizable subject.  Fortunately.  Under hypnosis I placed him back in the Paramus Park parking lot of the day in question.

He said that he had purchased a used Volkswagen Beetle – his pride and joy.  He had waxed it and polished it.  It sat in the parking lot of the mall under the sun – gleaming.  He felt nervous leaving it there because it looked so beautiful that he was sure somebody would steal his car.  He looked around the lot to see if any suspicious looking car thieves were looking at his car.  Seeing nobody in the lot he proceeded towards the mall entrance.

He looked around the lot to see if any suspicious looking car thieves were looking at his car.  Seeing nobody in the lot, he proceeded towards the mall entrance.  As he was entering the mall, a pretty young woman passed him and headed toward the parking lot.  That was Kim.  He turned to look at his car once more for a final glance, and to look for anybody suspicious looking to steal his car.  Lo and behold, this time he saw a very suspicious man looking at the young woman, and then at him.  He was sure this man was going to steal his car.  He looked suspicious.  He thought that,  to be sure, he would make a mental note of this man’s license plate just in case his prized Beetle was stolen when he left the mall  (one cannot make these things up – Fate has a way!).  Then he went inside the mall.

As it turns out, we later found out, that when Kim approached her car and opened her car door, she deposited in the car a few things she had bought.  The perpetrator approached her from behind with a hunting knife and forced her into his car.

The witness then gave us, under hypnosis, the perpetrator’s license plate number!!  It was accurate except for a letter that he had reversed – a J or an L.  But the DMV and the police tracked the plate down immediately to the perpetrator.  That evening the police arrived at his door, and he confessed to the murder.  Apparently, he had just been released from jail for a previous rape conviction.  He had had the urge to rape again, and had been waiting in the mall parking lot for a victim.  He had taken the young woman to the woods in Washington Township, and after sexually assaulting her had stabbed her to death so as to avoid being prosecuted again.  He has remained in jail since then and five efforts by him since that time for parole have been met by serious opposition by the public.  In 2016, the killer was denied parole again, having been in prison for almost 50 years, and this was all over the news again.

That case resulted in the County Prosecutor’s office and various other police departments calling me on many occasions to assist with similar cases.  Many times witnesses were not hypnotizable and I was unable to help.  Other times, the witnesses were quite hypnotizable and the success brought great satisfaction to the law enforcement officers, to myself and the victims’ families.  I will describe only a few of them here.

Another Murder :

In 1978, I started my own private practice.  One day after I had been in practice for a while, my secretary, Eileen, who remained with me for 20+ years, and who was the wife of a local police officer, intercomed me and said there were two state policemen in the waiting room to see me.  I had learned that there is a hierarchy – local town police, county police, and then state police.  The state police had jurisdiction anywhere in the state, I believed.  In any case they were there to speak to me about a homicide case.  I told them when I would be free.  They agreed to wait.  When we subsequently sat together, they told me that one of the state highways of New Jersey, a dead body had been found on the grassy slopes a few hundred feet off the highway.  The individual had been shot in the head.  The body was so decomposed that it could not even be identified as male or female, black, white, or other.  And they had no clues.  It looked like this murderer was going to get away scot free.

However, they said, one of the young state police officers was to be married in the near future.  His fiancée lived with her father, who was a retired postal worker, who now delivered flowers from town to town to pass his time.  This was his only daughter and he was a widower, so he doted on his daughter and her future husband, the State Police Officer.  Every chance he got, while driving on state highways, he would keep his eyes peeled for his future son-in-law so that he could tell his daughter over dinner that he saw her fiancé.

One evening, the police officer was over for dinner with his fiancée and her father.  He mentioned casually that the chief had told them of this body and the murder, and that it had absolutely no leads and therefore could not be solved.

The future father-in-law muttered under his breath that he thought the body belonged to an Asian male.  The future son-in-law questioned why he would make that statement, and the old man said he didn’t know, just a hunch.

( …to be continued) Hypnosis – Chinese Murder

A few days later, the chief addressed his entire team and he announced that an autopsy had revealed that the victim was an Asian male.  The police officer raised his hand and related what his future father-in-law had predicted.  Since there were absolutely no other leads in this case, the chief asked that the retired postal worker be brought to his office.

When the elderly man was brought in to the chief’s office and asked what made him say that this was the body of an Asian male, he replied truthfully that he had no idea why he had said that.  “It was just a hunch.”  The chief reassured him, told him he had done nothing wrong, but that if he would undergo hypnosis to see if there was anything else in his memory, this would perhaps help the investigation of the case.  Being eager to help in any way he could, especially since his future son-in-law was involved, the doting father agreed to subject himself to hypnosis.

I have found over the years that motivation is a very large factor in determining hypnotizability.  Some people are very hypnotizable all the time; some cannot be hypnotized at all.  Others are hypnotizable when they are very motivated and not hypnotizable when they are resistant.  I had mentioned that my medical school friends had been hypnotized by Max Collie.  One of my friends, Onali, spent a few days with me recently.  We were reminiscing of days from 50 years ago.  He told me something I did not know.  The first time when all of us had gone to Max Collie’s show together, I had seen Onali being hypnotized and onstage.  He had been very motivated at that time.  Onali  told me that Max had then given him a free pass to come to a future show and to sit in the front.   Onali did not want to miss the show yet again – he wanted to see what happened.  Max called out to him at the very beginning and told the audience that Onali had been a great subject at a previous show.  Onali went onto the stage but could not be hypnotized, even by the great Max Collie.  Interesting, isn’t it?

Getting back, however, to the murder of the “Asian male,” the retired postal worker was escorted to my office by 2 state police officers.  As was my usual style, I told him that the entire procedure would be videotaped and the police would have the tape.  He had no problem with that.  I then asked him to tell me whatever he remembered consciously about the reason why he thought the body was that of an Asian male.

He said he had absolutely no idea but was willing to be hypnotized to see what he could remember.

I hypnotized him.  Under hypnosis, I asked him to visualize himself on the state highway where the body had been found, and tell me what he saw.

He started speaking.  He said he was driving on the highway towards a certain town in New Jersey to deliver flowers.  This was his part-time job now that he had retired from the post office.  He saw a car on the shoulder with its hazard lights on.  Perhaps a flat tire, he thought.  He pulled over 100 yards or so behind the car and waited for a state police car to pull in behind the other car.  He hoped it would be his future son-in-law so that he could tell his daughter that night over dinner that he saw him.  However, the police officer who did come by was somebody else, so he pulled back into the highway and drove off.  Some distance further, he saw a mini school bus pulled over.  It was yellow and black but small, holding about 20 passengers.  He pulled in behind the bus, hoping that this time perhaps his daughter’s fiancé would show up.

He said he saw two Asian men alight from the bus and walk towards the grassy embankment on the side.  It seemed to him they were marching, rather than walking.  It struck him as strange that they were walking in formation even to relieve themselves.  One man in front and one man behind him, looking straight ahead with not a glance on either side.  He watched until they disappeared, wondering why they were going so far just to urinate.  He kept looking in his rearview mirror to see if a police car was approaching.  There was none.  Then a few minutes later, he drove off.  He did not see the men come back.  I asked him to tell me the license plate number of the bus.  He said he had not seen it.  I asked him to look at it now and tell me when he could see it.  He said he could but that it was blurry.  I said he could focus and that the license plate number would show itself clearly.  I was anxious myself – hoping against hope that I would get something.  To my surprise, amazement and happiness, he gave me a license plate number.  I wrote it down.  It was videotaped as he was saying it.

I then went through the rest of the process and brought him out of the hypnotic state, and brought the two state police officers in.  They telephoned their headquarters with the license plate information, told me they would keep me informed of their progress, thanked me for my assistance and left.

For a few months, I did not hear any news regarding this case.  I called a couple of times to see if the license plate number was really accurate, whether it did belong to a bus and if anything had come of this information I had obtained for them.  All I was told was that they were still investigating.

What I found out later was that the license plate number was indeed correct, and that the police had tracked it down to a Chinatown gang.  This gang used to bring in illegal workers and then transport them from Chinatown, New York to New Jersey, Pennsylvania and other places.  There was a strict code of payment.  Apparently, this man had not paid, and the punishment was death.  He had been executed on that Garden State Highway for nonpayment.  He had been marched out of the bus, down the embankment, and then shot in the head.  His body had been left there.  Had it not been for this chance encounter with the retired postal worker, this murder would not have been solved.

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Another shocking murder…

At 3:22 PM on January 2, 1986, but Chatham Township police received a call from a Mr. John Dreher. Chatham is a township with multi-million dollar homes where the extremely affluent live. Mr. John Dreher owned a leather factory in Newark and was a prominent member of society. At 3:22 PM, he called the police stating that he had just returned home from work and found that his house had been ransacked and he believed that his home had been burglarized. Five minutes later the Chatham Township police received another call from Mr. Dreher. This time, he told them that he had made his way into the basement and found his wife tied to a post and beaten badly about the head and body. “Hurry – I think my wife is dead,“ he said. She was dead, it was later determined.

Almost 3 weeks after this call -I received a call from the Chatham police and they came to my office to see me. They explained that their Township saw no murders or major crimes. Their initial assumptions were that a burglar had broken into the Dreher home after Mr. Dreher left home with their two young sons early in the morning. Dreher had explained that he left his wife at home alone, and dropped their two sons to school and then went on to his place of work. He further claimed that he returned home from work at 3:30 PM and that during his absence, an intruder had broken into their home and upon unexpectedly finding Mrs. Dreher at home, had tied her up in the basement to a vertical pillar and then beaten her badly with a fireplace poker until she died. The police had no leads or evidence to the contrary, and, although certain elements of Mr. Dreher‘s story did not fit, there was nothing pointing to the actual perpetrator.

While the police were continuing their investigation, a neighbor of the Drehers– a Mr. Austin Lett -read in the newspaper the account that Mr. Dreher had left home at an early hour and return home only at 3:30 PM. Mr. Lett had called the police and said that, although he was not sure, there was a part of him that felt that Mr. Dreher had returned to his home sometime later that morning.

This information was crucial to the police and they needed to be sure of what Mr. Lett was saying because there were absolutely no other leads. But why would Mr. Dreher - an extremely wealthy businessman and a prominent member of society – be lying? The police said they had asked Mr. Lett if he would be willing to subject himself to hypnosis in an attempt to refresh his memory. Mr. Lett said that while in the U.S. Navy he had been hypnotized and had been told that he was a good hypnotic subject. He would be willing to be hypnotized.

Mr. Austin Lett was brought to my office by the Chatham police on January 23, 1986. This was exactly 3 weeks after the murder of Mrs. Dreher. Mr. Lett was a good looking, athletic man who carried himself in a manner suggesting that he was successful, self-sufficient and confident of himself. Prior to hypnotizing him, I questioned him as to what he knew or remembered about the morning of January 2, 1986. He told me that he did not remember any specifics but had a gnawing suspicion that he had seen Dreher later in the morning than the existing timeline that had been suggested. He explained that all the houses around him were owned by extremely wealthy individuals. The houses had large properties and trees around the periphery – evergreens “like large Christmas trees.“. “So his house is pretty far from mine even though he’s my neighbor. I cannot say I could see anything.“

Under hypnosis, let turned out to be a good subject. As I have mentioned before, emotions and memories are closely tied together. One of the keys to retrieving this memory from Mr. Lett’s mind was this emotion of embarrassment, shame or guilt associated with his sense of time on the morning of January 2, 1986. It was apparently a common theme among the male neighbors in the area, including Dreher and Lett, to tease each other about how late any of the guys left home for work. These wealthy, successful, self-employed man did not have to leave at a particular time in the morning for work. On the morning of January 2, 1986, Mr. Lett remembered that he was waiting for a crew from a tree removal company. They were to move one large tree and plant another in his front yard. “They would have to dig a large hole and they were already late. I was worried that if I left too late, I would be teased. I wanted to see if John had already left for work and whether he would notice that I was still at home“

Under hypnosis, he re-lived the moments of the morning of January 2. He said it was Thursday, the day after New Year’s day, a day that was almost like another holiday – as a number of people had taken off and taking a very long weekend. He wanted to leave for work but the tree guys were late!. He kept glancing at the clock on the mantelpiece over the fireplace and was acutely aware of the exact time. Alternate glances went down his driveway to look for the tree company as well as to look across at Dreher’s driveway to look for his car.

At 9:35 exactly, Mr. Lett said he looked at the driveway of Mr. Dreher‘s house – he saw Dreher‘s car in the driveway slow down as if looking into the mailbox. He was returning home rather than leaving home. To his surprise, Mr. Lett realized that Dreher was coming back home, not leaving home. He further saw that there was a woman in the front passenger seat and that Dreher was driving. “How do you know it’s Dreher?“, I asked. “Well, it’s his car. I’ve seen him in it 1000 times. I can see his salt and pepper hair.” He was very surprised at the fact that there was a woman in the car next to him – “it’s not his wife, I know that“

There were two crucial pieces of information that this gave the police that they could use to put the whole puzzle together. One was the time: Lett definitively put Dreher back at his home at 9:35 AM The other was that there was a woman involved in this matter.

Drewrey had initially covered his tracks well. He had proof that he was in his office earlier than 9:15 AM. He said he was in his office from that time until he went to the bank at 10 AM. The bank camera showed him in the bank. What Dreher had hidden was the fact that he had raced back to reach home at 9:35, killed his wife with the female accomplice, and then raced back to the bank near his place of work. This could not have been known without Lett’s testimony.

Lett’s revelation of “the woman in the car“ led to the police investigating this aspect of Dreher’s history. The prosecutor later told me that Mr. and Mrs.Dreher had been married for 15 years and had two sons. The marriage was a very stormy one. Dreher had met a woman, Nancy, who was a sales person selling timeshares. He met her at a bar in El Paso Texas in 1984 or 1985 and the two had established a close relationship, meeting each other frequently either in New Jersey or out West. They talked frequently about Dreher divorcing his wife. Dreher was extremely concerned about losing much of his wealth as a result of divorce proceedings. Nancy and Dreher discussed ways that they could get rid of Mrs. Dreher. One of them had purchased a gun.

Dreher and Nancy plotted to murder Dreher’s wife and to make it look like a burglary. They almost succeeded. Were it not for the testimony of Austin Lett, the police had no evidence.

Immediately after Lett gave the two crucial pieces of information, detailed police work allowed them to find the woman involved with Mr. Dreher. She had actually taken an active part in the murder after Dreher had handed her the assault weapon and insisted that she participate in the horrible act in order to bind her to the murder. However, the absence of any other binding evidence required the Morris County Prosecutor to grant her immunity in return for giving vital testimony against Dreher. She turned State’s evidence, and Dreher was arrested.

The case State v. Dreher went on for a long time in the Morris County Courthouse. It was front-page news in the Star ledger and other newspapers. Dreher used much of his wealth to hire the best attorneys to defend him. He retained the same law firm that defended Oliver North… Williams and Connolly. The attorneys did a very good job but Dreher was found guilty by a jury and was convicted of the murder. He was sentenced to life in prison.

However, the powerful law firm appealed – stating that the testimony obtained through hypnosis could have been “planted“ in Austin Lett’s mind by the hypnotist (even though there were three videotapes of the entire interaction between Lett and myself)

In New Jersey Superior Court appellate division in 1991, five years after the murder, John Dreher lost his case and was finally sent to prison for life for his role in the dastardly, horrible murder of his wife.