Psychic detective
A psychic detective is a person who purports to investigate crimes using paranormal psychic abilities. Claimed techniques and abilities have included postcognition, psychometry, telepathy, dowsing, clairvoyance, and remote viewing. In murder cases, psychic detectives may purport to be in communication with the spirits of the murder victims.
Individuals claiming psychic abilities have stated they have helped police departments to solve crimes, however, there is a lack of police corroboration of their claims. Many police departments around the world have released official statements saying that they do not regard psychics as credible or useful on cases.
Prominent cases
Many prominent police cases, often involving missing persons, have received the attention of alleged psychics. In November 2004, purported psychic Sylvia Browne told the mother of kidnapping victim Amanda Berry, who had disappeared 19 months earlier: "She's not alive, honey." Browne also claimed to have had a vision of Berry's jacket in the garbage with "DNA on it". Berry's mother died two years later believing that her daughter had been killed; Berry was found alive in May 2013 having been a kidnapping victim of Ariel Castro along with Michelle Knight and Gina DeJesus. After Berry was found alive, Browne received criticism for the false declaration that Berry was dead. Browne also became involved in the case of Shawn Hornbeck, which received the attention of psychics after the eleven-year-old went missing on 6 October 2002. Browne appeared on The Montel Williams Show and provided the parents of Shawn Hornbeck a detailed description of the abductor and where Hornbeck could be found. Browne responded "No" when asked if he was still alive. When Hornbeck was found alive more than four years later, few of the details given by Browne were correct. Shawn Hornbeck's father, Craig Akers, has stated that Browne's declaration was "one of the hardest things that we've ever had to hear", and that her misinformation diverted investigators wasting precious police time.When Washington, D.C. intern Chandra Levy went missing on 1 May 2001, psychics from around the world provided tips suggesting that her body would be found in places such as the basement of a Smithsonian storage building, in the Potomac River, and buried in the Nevada desert among many other possible locations. Each tip led nowhere. A little more than a year after her disappearance, Levy's body was accidentally discovered by a man walking his dog in a remote section of Rock Creek Park.
Following the disappearance of Elizabeth Smart on 5 June 2002, the police received as many as 9,000 tips from psychics. Responding to these tips took "many police hours", according to Salt Lake City Police Chief Lieutenant Chris Burbank. Yet, Elizabeth Smart's father, Ed Smart, concluded that: "the family didn't get any valuable information from psychics". Smart was located by observant witnesses who recognized her abductor from a police photograph. No psychic was ever credited with finding Elizabeth Smart.
In the case of the Long Island serial killer, the psychic said the body would be found in a shallow grave, near water and a sign with a G in it would be nearby. Despite the vagueness of this claim the New York Post stated that the "Psychic Nailed it!". Describing the case, skeptic and author Benjamin Radford wrote: "more surprising than the psychic's failure is the fact that this information was described as an amazing success on over 70,000 websites without anyone realizing that she was completely wrong".
A body was located in the US by psychic Annette Martin. Dennis Prado, a retired US paratrooper, had gone missing from his apartment and police had been unable to locate his whereabouts. With no further leads, the chief investigating officer, Fernando Realyvasquez, a sergeant with the Pacifica Police, contacted psychic detective Annette Martin. Prado had lived near a large forest, some 2000 square miles. Martin was given a map, she circled a small spot on the map, about the size of two city blocks. She said that Prado had struggled for breath, had died, and his body would be there within the indicated area. She described the path he took, and where the body would be found. Although the area had been searched before and Prado had not been found, a search and rescue officer initiated a new search with the help of a search dog, as Martin suggested "A search dog is going to find him." They found the body covered with dirt at the location, as Martin had indicated. While the body had deteriorated, there was no evidence that he had been attacked and it is thought that he had likely died of natural causes, as she also indicated. However, when Joe Nickell, a columnist for Skeptical Inquirer magazine, was shown tapes of Martin at work, he stated he was "underwhelmed". Regarding the Prado case, he noted that "What she did was very shrewdly ask all kinds of questions of that police officer, who helped her even further and told her all kinds of things. It's probably perfectly sincere, not an act. But it's just the facility of a highly imaginative and emotional person and doesn't mean anything scientifically".
In August 2010, Aboriginal elder Cheryl Carroll-Lagerwey claimed to have seen the location of a missing child, Kiesha Abrahams, in her dream. The missing child's disappearance was being investigated by police. She took them to a location where a dead body was found, however it was of an adult woman and not the body of the child.
In Sydney, Australia, in 1996, a Belgian-born Sydney psychic, Phillipe Durant was approached by the fiancé of missing Paula Brown to help locate her. Durante told police the location of the body of Brown. She was found less than two kilometres from the spot he had indicated in Port Botany, New South Wales, by a lorry driver who came across the body. "Even though the body was discovered purely by chance, the speculation by a clairvoyant appears to have been uncannily accurate", a police spokeswoman conceded. Durant had used a plumb bob and a grid map, combined with some hair from the victim.
In 2001, the body of Thomas Braun was located by Perth-based Aboriginal clairvoyant Leanna Adams in Western Australia. Police had initially been unable to find the body. The family of Braun had been told to contact Adams, an Aboriginal psychic who lived in Perth. The Braun family had requested police to do a search based on Adams's directions but they had not assisted. Adams went to Alice Springs, in the Northern Territory, which was 3600 kilometres away from her home in Perth. She took the family members directly to Braun's remains, a spot high on a ridge west of the town, some 20 kilometres out. The remains were not immediately identifiable. Police later confirmed the remains to be his using DNA testing.
Noreen Renier claimed to have solved the murder of Kimberly McAndrew, who disappeared on August 12, 1989. Six years after McAndrew went missing, in October 1995 the Halifax Regional Police hired Renier to help. Renier gave the police three interviews which were recorded and years later obtained for review by Tampa Bay Skeptics founder Gary P. Posner. Using psychometry, Renier claimed to channel the murder victim. After a long analysis of the tapes, Posner states that Renier took the detectives on a "wild goose chase". Renier's clues were misleading, vague or incoherent, leading to nothing solid that could be verified. Renier assured the police that the body would be found soon, before Christmas of that year, saying it would be "a nice Christmas present for everybody". But decades later it has yet to be located, and as of 2024 the Government of the Province of Nova Scotia is still offering rewards of up to $150,000 for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the person responsible for Kimberly's disappearance.
In 2023, Charlotte Sena was reported missing from a campground in Moreau Lake State Park in Saratoga County, New York resulting in a huge search effort involving over 400 people, including teams from the New York State Police, New York State Park Police, Forest Rangers, the FBI, and other agencies. Suspecting a possible abduction case, the State Police put the family's home under surveillance, and after a suspicious vehicle drew attention of the police, a ransom note was found in the family's mailbox. Forensic evidence was soon matched to Ballston Spa resident Craig Nelson Ross Jr., who had a previous criminal history and was living about eighteen miles away from the campground where Sena was found safe and Ross was arrested. A segment from WNYT NewsChannel 13 called "Psychic helps police, family of a kidnapped girl" featured Christine Seebold-Walrath, a self-styled psychic medium. In the segment, journalist Dan Levy claimed that Seebold-Walrath was in touch with the New York State Police and the victim's family during the ordeal, implying she helped with the investigation. However, skeptic Kenny Biddle, chief investigator at the Center For Inquiry, contacted the Saratoga office of the New York State Police and spoke to Officer Stephanie O'Neil who explained whenever information pertaining to a kidnapping, missing person, or homicide is released, they always receive many calls from alleged psychics and that police must follow up on every tip. When asked directly by Biddle, O'Neil said that Seebold-Walrath did not provide any information that helped with the case. Ross was later sentenced to 47 years in prison the following year, and was currently confining his sentence at the Attica Correctional Facility in Attica.
Official police responses
Many police departments around the world have released official statements saying that they do not regard psychics as credible or useful on cases.In Australia
Australian police, officially, in general have said that they do not accept assistance from psychics. This was in response to an Australian TV show Sensing Murder in which psychics attempt to crack unsolved murders.Western Australian Police have a policy that they do not contact psychics for assistance with investigations, however they will accept information contributed by psychics.
An unnamed Australian federal police officer was suspended following his seeking the aid of a clairvoyant in regard to death threats made against Prime Minister John Howard. A federal police spokesman said they do "not condone the use of psychics in security matters".
There are still cases of psychics professing to have trained with the Australian police and failing to provide credible evidence to support qualifications or evidence of being a psychic profiler or intuitive profiler with the Australian police.
While official policy for police forces in Australia does not advocate the use of psychics for investigations, one former Detective Senior Constable, Jeffrey Little, has said police do use them "even though they officially say they don't". Additionally, police in NSW have used psychic Debbie Malone on a number of cases. While no evidence she has supplied has solved murders or missing investigations on their own, her evidence had been used to corroborate theories, and in one case, included in a coroner's brief on a case. Little, in reference to one case she assisted on, felt her description of what happened was "exceptional", other officers also had been impressed by her assistance, while yet other NSW officers felt she had not helped solve any cases. Sergeant Gae Crea and Detective Sergeant Damian Loone, state that she did not give them anything the police and the public didn't already know. Crea recounts "I've dealt with a lot of psychics, but no one has ever said, 'I can see where the body is buried and I'll take you there.