Popular TV clairvoyant, Sylvia Browne appeared on The Montel Williams Show in February 2003, four months after 11 year-old Shawn Hornbeck vanished. His parents, Pam and Craig Akers, were desperate to find clues to Shawn’s whereabouts. But Browne didn’t give them good news. She told them that she believed that Shawn was dead.

In her vision, she saw his body lying in the woods between two large jagged boulders, some 20 miles from his Richwoods, Missouri home. She even gave a description of the murderer: a dark skinned man that might be Hispanic, with long dread locks. Search teams redirected their efforts, only to find nothing.

According to Wayne Evans of the Shawn Hornbeck Foundation, Browne called Shawn’s parents about a month after the show to offer another sitting for a hefty fee of $700 per half hour. Browne adamantly denies this, stating that she never charges for missing child cases.

Four years later, Shawn was found alive and well. His abductor wasn’t a Hispanic man with long dreadlocks, but a 300-pound white man named Michael Devlin, who abducted another boy last week. Much to everyone’s relief and chagrin, Sylvia Browne was way off her mark and both boys are safe.

Despite the double happy ending, Browne’s blunders may damage the hard-won respect that other psychic detectives are trying to gain from law enforcement as well as the public.