I had a couple of weird clients when I was fortune telling – but fortunately nobody who was prepared to kill me for giving them a bad reading. So I was better off than poor Ha Jade Smith who, along with her daughter, was stabbed to death by a client.
Tanya Nelson and her accomplice Phillipe Zamora stand accused of the murders and Ms Nelson – who was apparently enraged after Ms Smith’s love spell failed to work – may face the death penalty. The murders were particularly gruesome – if you want to read about it, click here. After the stabbings, the victims’ bodies were splashed with white paint, possibly to hide the wounds.
Ha Jade Smith was, according to one report, a respected figure in her Vietnamese community in California. Not only was she a popular fortune teller, but she also charged up to $15,000 a time for ‘spell casting’. In this case, she had written to Tanya Nelson telling her that her spells couldn’t “change reality”.
She seemed to have made quite a bit of money from her supernatural skills, as she had large amounts of cash kept at home, which her murderers ran off with, along with her credit cards.
The whole story is unpleasant, but I don’t think it says anything in particular about fortune telling – it says a lot more about nut cases. The New Age attracts more than its fair share, both as practitioners and as clients. This time, it was the fortune teller got done, but I have read stories out of the US recently about psychics who have scammed big amounts of money out of clients.
To be honest, I have no idea how anybody gets this kind of control over other people, unless they’re deliberately setting themselves up like a cult group. In all my New Age days – and there were plenty of them – I never met anybody who could compel other people in this way, or who could trick money out of them. The closest I came to it were dealing with some ethnic groups, particularly those from post-Cold War Eastern Europe, who were occasionally said they were under a curse that they wanted removed. But they were also tough people, who I can’t imagine would hand over large wads of cash just because someone was a fortune teller.
The moral of this story is to stay well away from spooky people – the tattooed, lank-haired criminal types, rather than ladies with Tarot cards.
Terrible news.
I’ll bet she didn’t see that one coming.