Scam the bereaved, defraud the dead: the shocking crimes of America’s greatest psychic conman

He was the fake medium from Florida whose scandalous cons almost got him shot. So why did M Lamar Keene then blow the whistle on psychic swindlers? A new podcast finds out

The Guardian/Febuary 1, 2022

By Hollie Richardson

What does it take for someone to impersonate a dead teenager to the grieving mother of the deceased? For M Lamar Keene, a prominent Tampa-based medium in the 1960s and 70s, it was a cinch – all it required was a cocktail of cunning, charisma and sheer audacity. In front of the congregation of his spiritualist church, Keene would enter a trance state and appear to speak as the deceased 17-year-old, Jack, and ask Jack’s mother, Lona, to donate thousands of dollars to the church. One day, Lona asked Jack about the secret name he used for her, to prove it was really him, and Keene was stumped – until he attended a gathering at her house and feigned a headache. While pretending to rest in her bedroom, he searched her belongings and found the name scribbled in a family Bible: “Appleonia”. He pulled it off.

Keene confessed to being a conman in his 1976 book, The Psychic Mafia. Jack and Lona’s was just one of many audacious cases he revealed in the exposé, which shook the world of spiritualism so much that it led to an attempt on his life. Someone took a shot at him on his lawn but missed, leaving a bullet in the side of his house. In the book, Keene described how mediums shared client information so that they could conduct “hot readings” based on solid facts. He recounted how they would steal jewellery from clients for a few months, only to pretend a dead family member’s spirit had made it reappear (which usually resulted in generous tips). Ultimately, he confirmed that mediums formed a vast network to fraudulently monetise people’s grief. So why did Keene – the so-called Prince of the Spiritualists – choose to blow the whistle on everyone?

Vicky Baker, a journalist with a nose for juicy scandals, knew she had hit the jackpot when she discovered a photograph of Keene dressed in his famous all-white suit and boots. She had Googled “psychic crime rings” to feed a new curiosity about psychic scams while sitting across the road from a medium’s office. Eager to follow up her 2019 podcast series, Fake Heiress (the story of con artist Anna Sorokin, who passed herself off as a wealthy heiress, Anna Delvey), Baker was excited to make Keene its subject. “Now that I think about it, there is a parallel between him and Delvey,” says Baker. “Some people were wowed by her and found her really impressive, others found her quite dull. Some people barely remembered Keene, others he left a massive mark on … an unforgettable showman.”

Charisma played a huge part in Keene’s story (“He had this unusual way of speaking that was very theatrical, like he was always putting on a show,” Baker says) and it is illustrated in the podcast by means of dramatisations that verge on cheesy, but fit nicely with the tone of astonishment. Over six episodes, Baker also meets fraud experts, psychologists and sceptics to unpick this absurd world, as well as people who knew Keene – though it was near impossible to get to the roots of his story.

Baker knew that Keene’s mother died when he was young. “There was only a certain amount of information I could get my hands on – mostly from the book, and 75 hours of recordings he made for his ghostwriters. Everything else involved a lot of digging,” she says. Not being able to speak to Keene, who died in 1996, further fuelled the intrigue. “The book starts when he is in his 20s, and the guys who interviewed him were more interested in pressing him on other people in the industry, whereas I would have asked more about … well, him.”

Baker sent a lot of unanswered emails, before her best lead connected her with Keene’s half-sister, who filled in the wild details about why he had severed ties with his family: “There’s a weird subplot where he convinced an elderly woman that he was her son … it’s a whole new twist that comes up in episode five.” Keene left home to train as a medium with his friend Raoul (a pseudonym). He quickly realised Raoul was an “open-eye” medium, fully aware that he couldn’t contact the dead. After becoming certified as a reverend and opening his own church, Keene attended the popular spiritualism centre Camp Chesterfield, in Indiana. Researching this camp many years later, Baker made an exciting discovery.

Baker found out about Mable Riffle, who ran Camp Chesterfield, where desperate guests paid to mingle with mediums and attend seances to try to contact their lost loved ones. Baker describes Riffle, who died in 1961, as the matriarch of mediums: “The fact there was a holiday camp for spiritualists made me so curious to explore more. And her cousin Ethel even set up a rival camp. You could do a whole other podcast on that.”

In 1960, another exposé used infrared cameras that revealed the figures who materialised in Riffle’s seances to be humans, entering the room through a side door. For Keene, the camp was an inspiration to go big with his scams, using tips and tricks he picked up there. After many years of success, and a lot of money rolling in, what was it that finally made Keene crack?

“It was never quite explained in the book,” says Baker. “But he had a massive run-in with Raoul and felt like he was being pushed out. There was jealousy and accusations on both sides. He described it as the ‘biggest showdown in all of my medium career’. So that’s the argument that caused him to sever ties.”

It’s unlikely that Keene revealed the slippery secrets of his trade for moral reasons. Yet Baker was deeply shocked by how his life turned out: after the assassination attempt, he changed his identity and devoted his life to good deeds. Without giving away the revelation brought to light in the final episode of the podcast, Baker says: “I could never have predicted it; I found myself in a completely different world. People who knew him then didn’t even know he was previously a psychic.”

Keene’s world might sound utterly absurd, but it still has strong resonance with people’s behaviours and beliefs today. The industry analyst Ibis World reports that the psychic services market in the US is worth $2.2bn, and grew 0.5% a year on average between 2017 and 2022. At a time of collective mass grief, it’s perhaps understandable that spiritualism is having a resurgence.

“People wanting to communicate with the dead is timeless,” says Baker. “Today, some psychics refer to themselves as ‘intuitive healers’, which is much more compatible with the wellness industry. Even Goop, Gwyneth Paltrow’s wellness brand, looks at them. Kim Kardashian promotes psychics. Drew Barrymore has them on her chatshow. Nowadays, it’s a wellness treat – rather than a dark secret in a dodgy alleyway shop.”