Paint, Blood, and Prophecy: When Fortune Turns Fatal
by M.P. Pellicer | Noir Notebook
In 2005, someone hunted down Ha “Jade” Smith and her daughter Anita, and slaughtered them inside their own home. Investigators would later ask the same question that lingered over the blood-soaked scene: did greed drive the killer—or something far more irrational?
Tanya Nelson, 52, built her life on belief. A Vietnamese immigrant who arrived in the United States in 1979, she carved out success within the Orange County Vietnamese community. Then, in 2005, her business collapsed.
Desperate, she turned again to Ha “Jade” Smith—“Miss Ha”—a sought-after fortune teller who charged as much as $15,000 per reading and drew clients from across the country. Nelson had trusted her for years.
Jade gave her a simple directive: leave California. Start over in North Carolina.
Nelson obeyed. She moved to Roanoke Rapids, hoping distance might break whatever curse shadowed her life. It didn’t. Her business failed again. She lost her home. The spiral tightened—and in her mind, the blame sharpened into a single point: Jade.
On April 22, 2005, a friend of Jade and her daughter, Anita Nhi Hung Vo, came to their home, a small stucco house on Bird Ave in Little Saigon. The silence felt wrong. The family’s Pomeranian waited outside, alone.
Inside, police uncovered a scene that felt staged by something darker than robbery. Both women lay dead, stabbed repeatedly. White paint covered the walls, the floors—splashed across the bodies themselves.
The killer had taken jewelry and credit cards, but nothing about the scene felt ordinary. No forced entry. No hurried escape. Only violence—and ritual.
In Vietnamese tradition, white wards off evil.
More than a month later, detectives caught a break. Tanya Nelson booked a flight from North Carolina to Orange County using Jade’s credit card. She had already used cards belonging to both victims in a spending spree.
Police moved quickly. They arrested Nelson and recovered the stolen cards. A search of her home led them to Phillipe Zamora.
He confessed.
Zamora told investigators that Nelson had recruited him for murder. She promised him access to men he desired in exchange for helping her kill Jade. Both had once sat across from the same fortune teller, listening, believing.
On the day of the killings, they met Jade for breakfast. Later, from their hotel, they called her—lured her back home.
There, everything unraveled.
Zamora claimed Nelson stabbed Anita first. Anita screamed. Then Nelson turned and demanded he kill Jade. He smashed a wine bottle over the fortune teller’s head and drove a kitchen knife into her again and again.
Afterward, they looted the house. Then they returned with white paint—and poured it over the dead.
By 2009, Zamora pleaded guilty and agreed to testify. The court sentenced him to 27 years to life. Prosecutors argued that Nelson’s rage grew from a belief that Jade—and Anita—had misled her, ruined her, cursed her life.
But Nelson’s world had already begun to fracture long before the murders. She had carried on an affair with her brother-in-law. When it ended, she sought guidance from Jade, hoping for reconciliation. Instead, her life continued to unravel. At one point, authorities even accused her of urging her son to kill her former lover’s wife.
In 2010, a jury found Tanya Jaime Nelson guilty of two counts of first-degree murder and sentenced her to death. She never confessed. She insisted she had followed her estranged husband in Orange County that day, not committed murder.
She remains incarcerated at the Central California Women’s Facility, having become only the second woman to receive the death penalty in Orange County history.
The truth, like the paint on the walls, refused to wash away cleanly.
More than a decade earlier, another fortune teller met a far more grotesque end.
In November 1994, Mary Debrah Stevens—known as Sister Myra—built her reputation as a psychic adviser from her brick home on Pulaski Highway in Baltimore. For 25 years, clients came seeking answers.
Someone repaid her with decapitation.
Police found her body near the front door. Her head lay ten feet away.
Despite her birth in Chicago, Sister Myra spoke with an Eastern European accent, a remnant of her Romanian heritage.
Stevens was the daughter-in-law of King Dick Stevens, a national gysy leader who lived in Baltimore until he died in 1959.
The Stevens family had immigrated from Romania at the turn of the century. King Dick operated a Cherry Hill coppersmith shop from the 1920s until his death. He led about 10,000 gypsies from across the United States and was considered the most powerful in the country.
In death, Sister Myra’s family dressed her in white sequins and buried her among hundreds of other gypsies in Western Cemetery. Mourners traveled across the country to say goodbye.
Her killer unraveled almost immediately.
Two hours after the discovery, Douglas Thomas Clark, 28, tried to throw himself in front of an Amtrak train. He failed. Police caught him as he made repeated attempts to end his life in traffic.
Clark had visited Sister Myra often. He believed someone had placed a hex on him—Jamaicans, he claimed. Then his paranoia shifted. He decided the psychic herself had become the devil.
That belief sealed her fate.
Investigators later recovered the murder weapon—a culinary saw—from a trash bin across the street. Clark confessed repeatedly, babbling to paramedics and doctors about “roots” and curses.
“I had a root on me,” he said. “She wouldn’t take it off… that’s why I had to cut off her head.”
Psychiatrists diagnosed him with schizophrenia. The court still deemed him competent to stand trial. In 1995, he pleaded guilty but not criminally responsible and entered a state mental health facility.
Six years later, authorities released him into his mother’s care.
Then he vanished.
Sometime after 2016, workers demolished the house where Sister Myra died. Today, nothing stands there—just an empty lot where belief once thrived, and something terrible answered.
The pattern didn’t end there.
In May 2022, Anna Torres, a tarot reader in Queens, opened her door to a man who believed she had cursed him.
Giuseppe Canzani, 41, fired three shots. Two struck her—one in the head.
Then he walked into a police station and surrendered.
“They tried to kill me,” he said.
Torres, the mother of an NYPD officer, had argued earlier with a client known as “Joey.” Police later confirmed that Canzani knew her, at least casually. Not intimately—but enough.
He had no criminal record. He battled gambling addiction. When his luck failed, he blamed her.
His attorney pointed to anxiety and depression.
Canzani pleaded guilty to manslaughter in the first degree. In December, 2025, he was sentenced to 23-years behind bars.
Across decades and cities, the details shift—but the pattern remains.
People seek answers from those who claim to see beyond the veil. Sometimes they find comfort.
Sometimes they find someone to blame.
And sometimes, when belief curdles into obsession, prophecy doesn’t predict the future—
It creates it.
