Sylvia Browne

Sylvia Browne, born Sylvia Celeste Shoemaker, died on November 20, 2013 at the age of 77. Most widely known for her fame as a self-proclaimed psychic, Browne saw 22 of her more than 50 books ascend the best-seller lists throughout her lengthy career. She started giving psychic readings in 1974, and was a frequent guest on television and radio programs, where she typically discussed her abilities with the host and performed readings for audience members or callers. Some of her most high-profile appearances occurred on CNN’s Larry King Live, where she appeared multiple times. She was also a weekly guest on “The Montel Williams Show” for 17 years.
 

Browne’s psychic abilities were criticized after a series of high-profile false predictions during the mid-2000s. In 2002, she predicted that the missing 11-year-old Shawn Hornbeck had died and was kidnapped by a dark-skinned man. The child was found alive five years later, and he had been taken by a Caucasian. In November 2004, she gave another prediction that kidnapping victim Amanda Berry had been killed, but Berry was also found alive in May 2013. In 2010, a three-year study was published that reviewed 115 of the cases where Browne claimed to have helped law enforcement agents, and the study concluded that she had been completely wrong in every case, or that the outcome was unknown so her predictions could not be substantiated.
 

In her personal life, Sylvia faced her own challenges. She grew up in Kansas City, where she said that her psychic powers manifested themselves when she was 3 years old. Her biography on the Society of Novus Spiritus website, a Gnostic Christian organization that she founded in 1986, claimed that she had earned a graduate degree in English and had worked for 18 years as a teacher in a Catholic school. In 1992, she was convicted of securities fraud for selling securities in a gold-mining venture under false pretenses. She married four times, and had two sons by her first husband. Browne is survived by her husband, Michael Ulery, and her sons, Paul and Christopher Dufresne.