Priscilla Kelly Delmaro mugshot
A psychic named Priscilla Kelly Delmaro, 26, has been charged with grand larceny and is looking at spending up to a year in jail after conning a lovesick man out of nearly $1 million dollars.
The Daily Mail is reporting on the story of Niall Rice, 33, who had made hundreds of thousands of dollars working in search engine optimization. Originally from the UK, Rice spent time in a rehab clinic in Arizona to help him kick a drug and alcohol problem. While there, he met a woman named Michelle, who was also in rehab, and they fell in love; however, the relationship eventually fizzled out.
Rice claims he was still in love with Michelle when he moved to New York and began seeing a psychic named Brandy Mitchell to help him get Michelle back. Mitchell conned him out of $718,000 to pay for services such as warding off evil spirits to help him reclaim his lost love. A visit to Michelle in California ended disastrously and caused Rice to lose faith in Mitchell.
This is when he turned to Delmaro, who was going by the name of Christina and had a shop near Times Square. Delmaro also began conning Rice, starting with her first visit which cost $2,500. The second visit jumped to $9,000. She then bilked him out of $40,064 worth of diamonds to “protect his energy” and another $56,000 to rid him of an evil spirit who she claimed was stalking him. Even more preposterous, Delmaro then charged him $40,000 to stage a fake funeral ritual to convince the spirits that he was dead. Another $30,000 was used for a time machine to cleanse his past.
“She somehow said all the right things,” Rice said. “It sounds mad now that I’m saying it…She wouldn’t leave me alone. She was like family. I needed my mum, really.”
In February of last year, Rice logged onto Facebook to see how Michelle was doing and found out that she had died of a drug overdose.
He confronted Delmaro who told him that Michelle was killed by his own evil spirits. She told him not to believe Michelle was dead because if he did, it would be true. She then offered to reincarnate Michelle and place her spirit into the body of a 31 year-old woman.
She also charged him $80,000 for an 80-mile “bridge” to lure spirits into another realm, and $90,000 to lure Michelle’s spirit across a 90-mile bridge.
All told, Delmaro conned Rice out of nearly $1 million dollars before he lodged a criminal complaint with the New York City police department in May of this year.
By then, Rice was broke, had sold his car, lost his apartment and was borrowing money from friends to survive. Although he plans to return to England to start over, he is staying in New York to “see this through”, he said.
“I just got sucked in. That’s what people don’t understand. It’s embarrassing now. I just want justice. I just don’t want her [Delmaro] to do to anyone else what happened to me.”
The Manhattan District Attorney’s office has decided not to order Delmaro to return the money she conned out of Rice. She is expected to be offered a plea deal under which she’ll get a year in jail could be out in six months with time served.
As is the case much too often, Delmaro will probably show up under another name in another city, still conning millions out of desperate people who don’t understand that there’s more than one demon that lurks behind these charlatans – the demons they are consorting with in their dark craft, and the demons of their own greed which are causing them to continue their heartless crusade of preying upon the vulnerable.
