Sylvia Browne, 1936–2013

Sylvia Browne was one of America’s most famous psychics, with a four-year waiting list of true believers seeking her divine insight in $750 private consultations. She brushed aside skeptics who accused her of exploiting people’s grief. “The people that are gonna love you will love you,” she said, “and the people that won’t, won’t.”

Browne was born and raised in Kansas City, Mo., and claimed to have become aware of her psychic powers at age 3, said CNN.com. After moving to California in 1964, she began hosting psychic readings and soon switched “from helping people privately to doing so publicly.” She wrote several self-help books and founded the Nirvana Foundation for Psychic Research in 1974 to help people, she said, “find God in their unique way.”

Browne’s reputation took a hit in 1992, when she and her husband were convicted of investment fraud and grand larceny in a gold mine scheme, said the San Diego CityBeat. But being a convicted fraudster didn’t prevent her from becoming a regular guest psychic on The Montel Williams Show. Although she made “countless mistakes”—divining, for example, that Bill Clinton did not have an affair with Monica Lewinsky—she built up a fervent fan base.

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Browne’s best-known readings on television told “distraught parents where their children were,” said The Guardian (U.K.). But she frequently got those wrong, too. In 1999, she told the grandparents of Opal Jo Jennings that the kidnapped 6-year-old had been sold into slavery in Japan, only for the missing girl to turn up dead in Fort Worth weeks later. She informed the mother of kidnapped teenager Amanda Berry that her daughter was “in heaven, on the other side” in 2004; Berry was rescued from the Cleveland home of Ariel Castro last May.

Browne responded to her critics by saying that she’d never claimed to be perfect. “I have been more right than wrong,” she said. “Only God is right all the time.”