Because Etta knew facts that only the police had access to, they threw her in jail. When three men were later convicted of the crime, Etta sued the city of Los Angeles for false arrest. A jury awarded her $24, 184.

Police attitudes have changed a lot in the 12 years since Etta's arrest. Instead of arresting psychics for knowing "too much" about a crime, many law enforcement agencies are hiring them to help with investigations of difficult kidnapping, missing-person, and murder cases.

"A lot of people are still skeptical about psychics," says Marcello Truzzi, Ph.D., co-author of The Blue Sense: Psychic Detectives and Crime and director of the Center for Scientific Anomalies Research. "But they've become a lot more accepted in the last decade. There are certainly cases when psychics are inaccurate or even fraudulent, but some have extremely impressive track records."

"I try to enter the mind of the killer."  Noreen Renier of Maitland, Florida, has worked as a consultant to law-enforcement agencies throughout the United States and as far away as Japan.

Here are the stories of two women who consider themselves "ordinary," but are among the most respected psychic detectives in the nation:

I had no idea I had any psychic powers until I was 30. I was a divorced mother of two working as public relations director for a hotel. I was asked to do promotions for a lecturing psychic. Either she was very powerful or I was very sensitive because my whole body felt like it was vibrating after being with her. That is when I starting reading about parapsychology.

Two close women friends were also interested, so we'd get together occasionally to meditate. One afternoon we were meditating with our eyes close when my body suddenly felt as if it had been plugged into a wall socket, then I heard my voice blurting out strange things. When I opened my eyes, one friend was sipping my coffee to see if it was spiked. The other was crying - I'd just given her a message from her deceased mother.

After that, I was hooked! I wanted to experiment all the time. I became obsessed, I couldn't concentrate on my work. Eventually I was fired - and undoubtedly deserved it.

I had to support two teenagers, so I went to a rival hotel and gave a psychic demonstration. They gave me permission to do such demonstrations in their lounge for $5 a session. But I didn't just want to perform, I wanted to find out how this worked.

At first I thought I might be reading minds. Then a lady came in very upset about a nephew who'd been in an accident in another of the country. I told her I saw a man in a coma; he had curly brown hair and two scars on his head. I also gave the woman the number 14 twice. She said, "You're a fake. My nephew has long blond hair and no scars." The next day she came back to apologize. She'd learned her nephew had cut his bleached hair, which had grown in brown and curly, and the scars were from surgery. He recovered from the coma exactly 14 days and 14 hours after my reading. That convinced me I was not reading minds, but what was it?

I contacted Dr. William Roll at the Psychical Research Foundation (PRF). I subjected myself to five years of laboratory testing at PRF and at Duke University. They tested me for psychometry by sealing personal objects like combs and watches in envelopes; I touched them and described their owners. They tested for telepathy by having me identify symbols on cards in another room. In the test for psychokinesis (the ability to influence physical matter) I was put in front of a computerized light system and asked to alter the light pattern by using my mind.

I scored quite high in everything.

At one point they hooked me up to an EEG machine and monitored my brain waves. When they asked me to psychometrize an object, the machine showed that I switched to the opposite side of my brain, Evidently, the psychic comes from the emotional side of my brain, which may be why you find more women psychics.

My first police case came accidentally. I was lecturing at Blue Ridge Community College when somebody in the audience asked me to help find a rapist who'd been terrorizing the nearby town of Staunton, Virginia. Half the people in the room knew one of his victims.
The town had a small police force. The man wore a mask so all they knew about him was his race. I tuned into the rapist and started describing him. A rape victim in the audience told the police what I'd said and they were open-minded enough to want to hear more.
We visited the homes of two victims and I immediately knew the rapist had a scar on his right knee, wore a green uniform with his name on it, had been in prison and drove something that went round and round. They arrested him a few days before Christmas. Everything I'd said turned out to be right; the thing "that went round and round" was a cement truck. The man was convicted of five rapes and 16 other felonies.

When I work a case, I try to get into the heads of the victims. With the 1986 murder of Jake and Dora Cohn, for instance, I went into Jake's mind as he was reading in his living room. I stayed with him as he heard a noise and walked down the hallway to the room where he was killed. Then, I became his wife, Dora, and told police that the killer had been doing work for her husband. My reading confirmed police suspicions and led to the arrest of three men, including one who'd been fixing the floor for Jake.

When I started this stuff, my daughters were in high school and thought I'd flipped. When I began doing police work, though, they developed more tolerance. When one daughter was 17, she was with me during a reading. I was holding the cross of a woman who was obviously a skeptic. When people are hostile and doubt my authenticity, I pick up on those feelings and can't concentrate.

My daughter realized what was happening and got so irritated she grabbed the cross and described the scene of a young boy drowning.

"Yes," the woman whispered, "that was my son."

My daughter handed back the cross and said, "Now, leave my mother alone." Later, I told her that proves she's psychic. She said, "Absolutely not," and refused to talk about it.

Although I do private readings about personal matters, I prefer to work with the police on crimes because they're in a position to follow up on clues. I charge by the case, which usually involves two sessions. In the first one, I describe the criminal to a police artist, who makes a sketch of the face. At times I've come up blank, but I don't know of any cases when I've been dead wrong.

I'm the first to admit that there are plenty of charlatans out there who pretend to psychic abilities and prey on vulnerable people.

Those of us who are legitimate don't mind being challenged. In 1986 I actually took a man named John Merrell to court for labeling me a fraud. FBI Agent Mark Babyak testified that I helped locate a crashed airplane. And Robert Ressler, a 17-year veteran with the FBI, confirmed that I had worked successfully on a number of cases. He also corroborated my prediction of the assassination attempt on President Reagan during a lecture at the FBI Academy several months before the shooting. The jury found Merrell guilty of libel and awarded me $25,000. I really appreciated that because a career as a psychic does not make you rich.