Renie, Adam Walsh, and Christie Luna

On August 8,  our book, Secrets of Spirit Communication, is released. Here’s one of our personal favorite stories from the book, one in which we were involved with an old friend, Renie Wiley, who passed some years ago. The major players in this story are Adam Walsh and Christie Luna and the contact spans nearly 25 years.

Renie was a South Florida artist and psychic who often volunteered her services with the Cooper City police. She was a tall, large-boned woman, a redhead with a kick your ass attitude who dominated any room she entered, any gathering she joined. She was opinionated, funny, stubborn, smart and sassy. She was an ace astrologer who mentored Trish and a psychic with such raw talent that one Cooper City cop began to use her in his investigations.

In the summer of 1981, Renie and the cop were driving near a mall in Hollywood, Florida, where five-year-old Adam Walsh was last seen in Sears on July 27, 1981, shopping with his mother. The cop hoped that Renie might be able to pick up something psychically about the missing boy—where he was, what had happened to him, if he’d been abducted.

At that point, the police believed he’d been abducted, but didn’t have any leads. Renie didn’t have an object that had belonged to Adam, but posters of the boy wearing his baseball uniform and cap were found everywhere around South Florida and they wrenched at your heart. His huge, innocent eyes whispered, I am your son, your brother, your cousin, your neighbor. His face had been burned into the collective consciousness and that seemed to be all that Renie needed.

When she and the cop were within a few miles of the mall, Renie’s hands suddenly flew to her throat. She started choking, gasping for air. The cop had worked with her often enough to realize she was picking up something related to Adam and quickly sped away. Several miles later, he swerved to the side of the road.

“What is it, Renie?”

She sobbed. “Adam was decapitated.”

It was as if Adam’s spirit had reached out to Renie her empathic ability, so that she physically felt what he had felt as he was dying.

Not long afterward, the head of the six-year-old boy was discovered in a canal in Vero Beach, Florida, more than a hundred miles north of the Hollywood mall. Ottis Toole, a serial killer, was serving five life sentences for murder when he confessed to killing Adam Walsh. He died of liver cancer in 1996 at the age of 49. However, it wasn’t until 2008 when police announced that they had verified Toole’s confession that he had killed John Walsh’s son.

We observed Renie in action several years later, on a dismal, rainy night in late 1984. We drove with her to the police department in Greenacres, Florida to see what she could pick up on a missing girl. Eight-year-old Christie Luna had vanished near her home in Greenacres on May 24, 1984. Around three p.m., she had walked to a store to buy cat food and never returned. Police suspected foul play.

Renie had requested toys that Christie played with, her way of connecting with the girl’s spirit. She sat on the floor of the police station clutching an old teddy bear, running her hands over it. Her eyes were shut as she rocked back and forth, humming softly. Everything about Renie at that moment suggested a small, childlike person. She started to whimper, then cry, then sob, her body hunched over the teddy bear.

“The mother’s boyfriend used to beat up on her,” Renie murmured. “She’s deaf in one ear because of it.” The deafness was later confirmed by Christie’s mother.

We left the station with the officer and drove around Greenacres, through the wet darkness. Christie’s teddy bear was on Renie’s lap as we passed the house where the girl had lived and the store where she was headed when she vanished. Renie directed us through streets until we came to a wooded area surrounded by a high wire-mesh fence. Renie disliked what she was feeling and turned to the officer. “You should search in there.”

Renie felt the girl had been killed by the mother’s boyfriend, but Christie Luna’s body was never found and the case remained open.

Renie passed away in the mid 1990s. But in 2008, twenty-four years after she had clutched Christie Luna’s teddy bear, both she and the case entered our lives again, through a strange and startling synchronicity and spirit contact.

Dennie Gooding, a psychic in Los Angeles, called to say she was going to be in South Florida, and hoped we could get together. Nancy McMoneagle, who today is director of the Monroe Institute, also called and said she was going to be in South Florida the same weekend. As it turned out, they had both been invited by the wife of a detective, who was investigating a cold case. They would be staying with her in Greenacres, which is less than ten miles from our home in Wellington. Their visit synchronistically coincided with that of author and past life researcher Carol Bowman, and screenwriter Julie Scully. So we decided to throw a party on the weekend when everyone would be in town.

The morning of the party, we found an uncashed check for $50 from Renie, dated 1987, the repayment of a loan. We wondered where the check had been all these years. After all, we had moved twice since the check had been written and why had it suddenly turned up now? We didn’t think anymore about it until later that evening, when the party was in full swing, and we were catching up on things with Dennie.

“So what kind of case are you working on with this detective?” Trish asked.

She then proceeded to describe the unsolved mystery of a girl from Greenacres who’d gone missing in 1984 and was presumed dead. “But her body has never been found.”

Goosebumps crawled up Trish’s arms. “The Christie Luna case?”

Dennie looked shocked. “How’d you know that?”

Trish told her about Renie and that night twenty-four years earlier, then went over to a drawer and brought out the check from Renie.

“Synchronicity!” Dennie exclaimed.

Dennie wasn’t able to locate Christie’s body. But interestingly, when she and the cop in charge of the cold case were driving around, she pinpointed the same area that Renie had—several acres of yet undeveloped, government-owned land, bordered by a metal fence. “I feel she’s buried in there.”

The synchronicities and instances of spirit contact in this confluence of events are startling. Something that began in 1984 came full circle on that night in 2008, twenty-four years later. Not only did Dennie pinpoint the same area that Renie had, but on the day we learned of Dennie’s involvement in the case, we found the check Renie had written us decades ago. It was as if the spirits of both Renie and Christie Luna were urging us to pay attention, to acknowledge this contact between the living and the dead. C’mon, they seemed to be whispering. You can solve this thing.

Now and then, something appears in our local newspaper about the Christie Luna case. But as of today 2018, the case is still open.