It was a tense day in February 2016 for Tim Ballard and operatives working for Operation Underground Railroad, the anti-human trafficking group he founded. They were on what would prove to be a bumbling and ineffective mission to save a trafficked child Ballard believed was being held in a village on the border of Haiti and the Dominican Republic.
This wasn’t just any mission, however. The child they were searching for was Gardy Mardy, a missing Haitian boy whose abduction Ballard has portrayed as “the case that led us to found OUR.” Joining him and his team of elite operatives was Janet Russon—a psychic medium from Utah whose supposed visions were guiding the mission.
According to documents from a now-closed criminal investigation into Ballard and OUR obtained by VICE News through a public-records request, video shot by a crew hired by OUR captured Russon talking with Gardy’s father, Guesno Mardy. In the conversation, Russon seemed to credit herself with locating Gardy. She assured him that his son was nearby, and that without her visions, he never would have been found.
“No way you would have found this place, no way,” she proclaimed, according to a transcript of the conversation written by a criminal investigator working on a joint investigation between the FBI and the Davis County Attorney’s Office.
“Guesno, buddy,” Ballard said during the conversation. “He’s here. We’re gonna get him.”
In fact, Gardy was not found that day, or any day since. There is no evidence to suggest that he was ever in the village where Russon’s visions led OUR and his hopeful father. Dave Lopez, a former head of OUR’s “ops team” who oversaw the organization’s work in Haiti, told an FBI special agent and a Davis County investigator in October 2020 that Russon’s visions were “the only form of intelligence they were using to locate Gardy.” As far as he knew, he said, OUR had no intelligence even suggesting Gardy was alive apart from what was provided by Russon. This was Ballard’s “most guarded secret,” Lopez told the FBI.


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