Angry? Sad? Both? Poor Vera Pratt.

Vera Pratt wasn't super-wealthy. Not by the current standards that decree that if you've got anything less than a billion or two you're just one step above pauper. But she was the great-granddaughter of a Standard Oil partner of John D. Rockefeller, and was in possession of a hefty trust fund.

She was also in possession of plenty of hopes and dreams that she was hoping to realize when, at age 70, she left her home in Washington, DC for a newly purchased $2M home on Martha’s Vineyard.

This was in 2005, and the hopes and dreams she took with her to the Vineyard including a lot of time for gardening and canning, singing in the local choir, painting Impressionist-style works, taking up dancing again, and – hope against hope – finding a nice guy to enjoy what remained of her life with.

While my hopes and dreams are nothing like those of Vera Pratt, I actually know that, at 70, there’s still room in your life for plenty of hopes and dreams. So I have a lot of sympathy for Vera.

At some point after the big move, Vera started to experience what this layperson can only categorize as mental health issues. She:

…began to believe that demons had entered her body and lodged near her right shoulder blade. (Source: Boston Globe)

And these demons were wrecking her hopes, stomping all over her dreams.

Vera Pratt was a highly intelligent and well-educated woman. She had an undergraduate degree in landscape architecture from Radcliffe, a graduate degree from Harvard’s School of Design. She was repeatedly unlucky in love, but Vera was able to travel extensively and enjoy plenty of adventures.

…She learned about Jungian psychology in Vienna. She studied with Timothy Leary, the Harvard psychologist experimenting with psychedelic drugs. She befriended Yule Kilcher, a key figure in admitting Alaska as the 50th state and an advocate for nature conservation.

Just the sort of adventures that someone who didn’t have to worry about paying the rent tends to have. But good for her. Despite the travel and adventuring, she wasn’t a spendthrift when it came to herself. Mostly, she used a lot of her wealth to pay for the education of her nieces, nephews, and godchildren, and to support causes she believed in: civil liberties, refugees, holistic healing.

And there she found herself, alone on Martha’s Vineyard, hoping that there'd be more adventures. But thinking that those demons entering her through her shoulder were ruining her life.

Then she saw a magazine ad for Psychic Angela.

Pratt believed in alternative spirituality and healing. She was interested in Eastern medicine and philosophies. She even believed herself to be mildly psychic, but found the prospect too frightening to pursue.

Maybe not pursuing it for herself. But believing of it in others. Like Psychic Angela – in real life, Sarah Ann Johnson – down there in Florida and ready and willing to "help." Or at least to help herself to some of Vera Pratt’s wealth. Over the next

nearly seven years, Psychic Angela may not have been able to exorcise Vera Pratt’s demons, but she was able to syphon at least $3.5M out of her trust fund.

Psychic Angela may not have been Vera Pratt’s equal education wise – her formal schooling had ended after second grade – but she was able to make a pretty good living for herself with her psychic and spiritual powers.

Psychics don’t come cheap. They sell all sorts of junk: candles, bath salts, jewelry with healing powers. If you need a curse removed, it might set you back $2,500. A love spell? That might go for a cool $12K. Full psychic/spiritual makeovers can cost $50K.

After their [initial] phone call, Johnson set in motion a course of treatment that would shape Pratt’s life for years. The psychic would dedicate her mind, body, and soul to praying the demons away for hours, sometimes late into the night, and, as she would tell Pratt, at the expense of time spent with her own family. Pratt received instructions to place crystals around her home to ward off negative energy, and to clean them regularly. She should pray and meditate, as well as light incense and ring a gong daily.

The pair spoke and e-mailed frequently, and soon enough, Psychic Angela was making pricey house calls to Martha’s Vineyard.

Pratt’s investment in Johnson also went beyond her services and into companionship. Pratt was a reserved person who kept her inner life private — even from family — but here was someone who knew her hopes and despair, her strengths and vulnerabilities, the way a life partner would. Pratt had spent a lifetime longing to share her life with someone and, though a spiritual healer wasn’t what she had imagined, now she did… Most of all, she shared with Johnson her optimism that her demons would be expelled, and her life would be hers once more.

Vera Pratt's social life would flourish. She’d travel. Find new friends. Get even closer to family. 

None of that happened. Instead, she got in tighter with Psychic Angela.

Friends and family began to fear that Pratt was developing dementia. And that she was vulnerable to being exploited by her psychic bestie. (Pratt had, in the past, fallen in with psychics who took her for a ride, but nothing to the extent that Psychic Angela was doing.) They voiced their concerns to Pratt, who pooh-poohed them, even if she saw her fortune starting to dwindle.

Vera Pratt appeared to brush the concern aside. “This gal is wonderful, and I don’t mind giving her money,” she responded. If she had any concern about the length of the treatment without anything to show for it, she ascribed it to the difficulty of the demons, not an ineffective treatment.

Meanwhile, Psychic Angela was starting to police Vera Pratt’s social life. Family and friends, Pratt was told, “were full of negative energy and couldn’t be trusted.” Hmmm. Psychic Angela also put the kibosh on Pratt’s spending on others “— especially family — because giving it to others would return bad energy.”

Pratt wasn’t quite running on empty, but her wealth was dwindling – while Psychic Angela was living it up.

Her lifestyle filled with Celine and Chanel handbags, Christian Louboutin and Yves Saint Laurent shoes, and a Porsche Cayenne. In Aventura, Florida, she lived in a 3,270-square-foot, half-a-million-dollar condo. She had a sizeable New York City Flatiron District home with a kitchen that a visiting Washington Post journalist, asking psychics to predict the 2016 election, described as being as big as the reporter’s entire apartment. When Johnson visited Pratt on the Vineyard, she sometimes stayed at the $500-a-night Harbor View Hotel.

Not surprisingly, psychic fraudsters target older people, “due to common feelings of trust, vulnerability, and isolation." Add in what was likely some form of dementia and Vera Pratt was a prime target.

In 2013, when Pratt was seven years into her screwy relationship with Psychic Angela, her goddaughter – Pratt had enlisted her to help with some bill-paying – saw the drained accounts and called the police. A detective – Sean Slavin - started poking around, and there was Psychic Angela on the scene, barring Vera from meeting or speaking with him. She got Pratt to write a letter stating that whatever money Pratt had given to Psychic Angela was a gift, and tried to assign her power of attorney privileges.

Slavin got Pratt’s family involved. Her brothers had been reluctant to step in because they didn’t want to trample on her rights, stifle her independence. But enough was enough. A bit of investigation of bank records showed the amount of money that had gone Psychic Angela’s way. That would be $3.5M.

The family stepped in and got Vera Pratt a trusted caretaker. Psychic Angela was gradually moved – with plenty of resistance on Psychic Angela’s part - out of the picture.

Vera Pratt’s mental condition went down hill and she was moved by her family to an assisted living facility on the mainland.

Eventually, the FBI got involved and began investigating Sarah Ann Johnson/Psychic Angela’s financial history. No surprise, they found tax evasion. She was sentenced to 26 months in prison. And had to pay Vera Pratt back the $3.5M she owed her.

(As of last summer, Johnson, now out of prison, had repaid under $38,000 toward her restitution. Because she had been unable to find full-time work, she has been allowed to pay $25 per month.)

Not that it matters to Vera Pratt. She died in February, 2018, a few days before what would have been her 83rd birthday. February 14th. Valentine’s Day. 

I don't know whether this story makes me more angry than sad, or more sad than angry. Both, I guess. Sure, if Vera Pratt was eccentric enough to want to fritter away her fortune on psychic flim-flammery, her choice. But it's pretty clear that she was experiencing dementia - I omitted a number of details here - and that Sarah Ann "Psychic Angela" Johnson was exploiting her big time. If there's a hell, there has to be a place for Psychic Angela and her ilk there.