Has a psychic ever helped a criminal indestigation.

[NorthernSoul]

In the Amanda Hart thread Nasib claims so.

[FarSideOfTheMoon]

Depends on the definition of 'help'.

Plenty send in (or claim to have sent) information to the police that the police have not asked for. See the old Psychic Sarah threads on here for some of that action.

Plenty take credit - see Joe Power on BadPSychics who claims to have helped locate Shannon Matthews after giving her mother a reading - but he never noticed the mother was responsible.

There are television programmes built around the fact that psychics are investigators but if you watch these programmes, nothing is ever uncovered that isn't in the public domain.

Personally, I'm still waiting for some evidence that a rational person would decide meets the recognised use of the verb 'help'.

[Matt]

She provides this link.

http://www.tonyyouens.com/ruislip_murder.htm

Scroll down and we get the answer

http://www.tonyyouens.com/ruislip_murder.htm#alttheory

The tip off that put "Pokie" Ruark in the frame was made in the Windmill pub two days before a person claiming psychic powers and living just 1.3 miles away repeated the accusation alongside a display apaprently consistent with cold reading.

Whether or not Holohan is truly psychic or not it appears that Ruark would have been caught and convicted without Holohan's dubious testimony. She appeared to confirm things the polcie already knew (as would be the case with classic cold reading) but added no new information, opened up no new channels of investigation and therefore cannot be said to have actually helped the police.

http://www.newsmonster.co.uk/paranor...ve-crimes.html

The fact that Guy Lyon Playfair and Montague Keen are convinced is pretty much a given.

Papers use unamed "sources" when they don't want their facts to be checked. Sadly today's "churnalists" don't have much time for fact checking so the true source of this claim may never be found and verified. It is certainly at odds with named sources explicitly denying that any psychic has ever produced any useful information.

http://www.skeptics.org.uk/article.p...d_psychics.php

[NorthernSoul]

I can't believe I titled this thread "Indestigation"

[Nasib]

She provides this link.

http://www.tonyyouens.com/ruislip_murder.htm

Scroll down and we get the answer

http://www.tonyyouens.com/ruislip_murder.htm#alttheory

The tip off that put "Pokie" Ruark in the frame was made in the Windmill pub two days before a person claiming psychic powers and living just 1.3 miles away repeated the accusation alongside a display apaprently consistent with cold reading.

Whether or not Holohan is truly psychic or not it appears that Ruark would have been caught and convicted without Holohan's dubious testimony. She appeared to confirm things the polcie already knew (as would be the case with classic cold reading) but added no new information, opened up no new channels of investigation and therefore cannot be said to have actually helped the police.

http://www.newsmonster.co.uk/paranor...ve-crimes.html

The fact that Guy Lyon Playfair and Montague Keen are convinced is pretty much a given.

Papers use unamed "sources" when they don't want their facts to be checked. Sadly today's "churnalists" don't have much time for fact checking so the true source of this claim may never be found and verified. It is certainly at odds with named sources explicitly denying that any psychic has ever produced any useful information.

http://www.skeptics.org.uk/article.p...d_psychics.php

Extracted from 'Spirit Communication' by Roy Stemman (one-time assistant editor of Psychic News, and involved with the recently broadcast 'Tony Robinson and the Blitz Witch' tv documentary)

The first account of the extraordinary case, written by one of the investigating police officers, was published not in a tabloid newspaper or a psychic publication but in Police, the journal of the Police Federation (December 2001).

A detailed paper was published in the January 2004 Journal of the Society for Psychical Research under the title 'A possibly Unique Case of Psychic Detection', it contains declarations from both Batters and Smith (the pc's involved) that the paper is an accurate account of the events that they reported. Tony Batters revealed his initial feelings when asked to interview the medium:
I was at that time completely sceptical and did not wish to pursue the interview, but as a courtesy we sat down in her lounge and she started saying things that immediately shook me. I was writing them down; at a very early stage she went into what I would describe as a trance, although I'm not familiar with a trance, but her eyelids fluttered and closed and she spoke, in a normal voice, a series of very short sentences, and I produced a verbatim transcript from the original notes of that meeting which I still hold.

We were probing - 'Where did you get this information? Surely you have been speaking to relatives? Do you know somebody in the murder squad?' And she said, 'Well look, from the questions I think you don't believe me. I'd like to do something, and Jacque is telling me to do this, and that is if one of you will give me something that's personal to you, I will try to demonstrate something.'

DC Smith gave the medium his bunch of keys. She then made three very clear and specific statements. One was that he had recently received a letter about some essential electrical work. This was correct. A building society had informed him that a property he planned to buy needed to be rewired before it would agree to a mortgage. She also informed him that he would soon be transferred to another police station. This he regarded as highly unlikely - until he was informed of his impending transfer a few days later. The third statement - actually the first she made - was clearly accurate, though Batters told the researchers 'to my dying day I could not disclose what she said. It was quite extraordinary with detail'. ...

There was not enough evidence to charge Ruark with murder and no court would accept statements from a murder victim made through a medium. He remaned a free man for 17 years until, in 2000 when the case was reopened, Ruark was arrested and sentenced to life at the Old Bailey in August 2001.

[Matt]

Why mention the parlour trick? It in no way assited the police in capturing Pokie.

[Nasib]

Why mention the parlour trick? It in no way assited the police in capturing Pokie.

It went some way in proving to the investigating officers that the info she was receiving was from the murdered girl, or at least from a source other than that which they already knew.

[Matt]

It went some way in proving to the investigating officers that the info she was receiving was from the murdered girl, or at least from a source other than that which they already knew.

It went some way to convincing them, for those who know how such tricks are done, or at least that they can be accomplished through non paranormal means it proves nothign of the sort.

What it doesn't do it provide new leads, channels of investigation or evidence. Neither for that matter did her telling the officers what they already knew about the case.

Lets take an example. An informant says something like "a saturday girl working at the newsagents saw them arguing" if the police found that they hadn't interviewed this girl but when they did so it revealed information valuable to the investigation then that informant has helped.

The trick with cold reading is to make the sitter think that the psychic is coming up with the information when in actual fact it's the sitter who's providing all the information. The limitation here is that such a cold reader can only provide information that the sitter already knows.

The police in question allready knew everything that Holohan had told them.

However in this instance the police officers weren't the only sources of information available to Holohan The trouble is that they'd already been askign questions and every suspicion that Holohan might have picked up in the community had already been hoovered up by the police who are often quite professional about such things.

As such she still added nothing to the investigation. however if she did get some infomraiton from the community and had revealed where she got it from rather than pretending to be psychic - in that scenario she might have directed police towards sufficient reliable corroboration to aid them in their interogation of Ruark.

[Nasib]

There doesn't seem to be any subsequent public mention of Christine Hoolahan since that case. I wonder if she is now on the 'official database of psychics' which the police regularly use, mentioned here:

http://www.newsmonster.co.uk/paranor...ve-crimes.html

Psychics and mediums are not something the police wish to talk about. It’s their guilty little secret.

The police take pride in solving crimes using rational detective work and forensic science. When quizzed, they prefer to talk about DNA fingerprinting and high-tech surveillance rather than the help they receive from beyond the grave.

But the Daily Mail has learned that the police are increasingly turning to psychics and mediums for help in their battle against crime. Sources in the National Criminal Intelligence Service say that officers turn to mediums to help them solve the more difficult cases. There is even a database containing the names of ‘official’ psychics that officers can tap into 24 hours a day.

These psychics have helped the authorities solve murders and trace missing persons. They have also helped the innocent walk free from jail.

[NorthernSoul]

You are yet to prove such a database exists.

[Nasib]

You are yet to prove such a database exists.

True, and I would anticipate coming up against a veritable wall of silence with any attempt at verifying that with the 'sources in the National Criminal Intelligence Services', if indeed those 'sources' could be tracked down in the first place.

[Julia]

We're heading into Gary Mannion country here. You know - the reason we don't hear about the miraculous cures brought about by New Age healers is that doctors and hospitals hush them up. It's paranoid nonsense.

[Matt]

There doesn't seem to be any subsequent public mention of Christine Hoolahan since that case. I wonder if she is now on the 'official database of psychics' which the police regularly use, mentioned here:

http://www.newsmonster.co.uk/paranor...ve-crimes.html

Here's a suggestion. The Mail journalists are lying. They don't have sources in the NCIS.

[niggle]

The Mail journalists are lying.

That's a big claim.

Presumably you have evidence that they are lying, and if so why have you not reported them to ofcom?

[Matt]

That's a big claim.

Presumably you have evidence that they are lying, and if so why have you not reported them to ofcom?

Not a claim a suggestion. A hypothesis with plausbiliity based upon the many libel payouts they make when they've been caught lying in the past. It's a hypothesis that helps explain why their sources are unamed and why their claim is in direct opposition to the many named sources who deny that the police use psychics.

If I had evidence I'd report them to the Press Complaints Commission. I have reported people to various regulators in the past. Threatening BT with a complaint to ofcom helped get my line reconnected. However since the Daily Mail aren't regulated by Ofcom I'd look pretty stupid complaining to them about a newspaper article.