Do Psychics Solve Criminal Cases?

Don't believe what you've read

Yesterday, the New York Post’s website flashed a bold headline: Psychic correctly predicted location of missing college student’s remains finally found in 52-year-old cold case: ‘Nothing short of a miracle’. It certainly made me stop and read. Having spent 20 years investigating the whereabouts of paintings stolen 35 years ago, I’m interested in any novel approaches to finding missing things.

Full disclosure: I’ve been contacted by hundreds of psychics in that time. None of them have offered anything even remotely useful. I’ve always found it interesting that no two psychics offer the same findings. Surely, if psychic ability was real, at least two of the aforementioned hundreds would have hit on the same thing. Instead, they typically present what can best be described as lame contortions of common guesses. They come in many forms, too: dowsers; seers; speak-to-the-dead sorts; and so on. Sometimes, I’ll be given an address and when I ask where it came from I’ll be led down a 20-minute explanation that ends with something like “My chimera told me.” I wish I was joking. I am not.

So when I saw the Post headline, I was skeptical. After I read the story, I was annoyed. What one learns is that the psychic had not led the authorities to the remains of the ill-fated student. Instead, she had given her best guess.

From the Post:

[The victim’s mother, who died in 2010] kept a journal tracking her thoughts and developments in her son’s case. An entry she wrote in 1990 describes an uncanny encounter that left a lasting impression on one of the detectives.

The heartbroken mom wrote that while shopping at a department store in Salt Lake City, she happened to meet a store clerk who said she was a psychic.

“Maybe you can tell me what happened to my son,” [she] had asked.

“He really wants you to find him,” the psychic told her, according to the entry.

The psychic revealed details no one would have known at the time about Brick’s disappearance. She told [her] that her son had gone to the foothills above campus, where he contemplated ending his life. But he became afraid, and because it was dark, he slipped and fell, she said, according to the release.

The student’s skull was found 33 years later at the top of Black Mountain. Now, that might sound like something, right? It’s not. Black Mountain is located right above the University of Utah, which the student attended at the time. In a case where there is no sign of criminal behavior, it’s not a stretch to think that maybe a missing student lost their life on a hike in the mountain.

This hardly equates to Nostradamus. It’s a logical, if not obvious, hypothesis.

What’s the harm, one might ask. Well, one need only give a closer read of the so-called psychic’s words: First, the statement “He really wants you to find him,” is borderline cruel. The student’s mother, tormented by her son’s disappearance, of course wanted to find her son. It’s easy to imagine the sense of failure this might have caused her, as if she wasn’t trying her best.

Second, the irresponsible conjecture that her son “contemplated ending his life,” implanted in his mother’s mind a thought based on nothing but a misguided belief in a fictitious sixth-sense. The already heartbroken mother might have gone to her grave thinking her son died a tortured soul when, in fact, there’s no reason to believe so. The prospect of having missed her son’s signs of severe depression couldn’t have been easy. Sadly, there’s actually no reason to think they even existed.

To this latter point, the Post incredibly adds that this was “a detail no one would have known at the time.” Indeed, that is true, but it’s not a detail at all. It remains baseless conjecture.

The fact about psychics solving crime is this: there are no credible cases in which clairvoyance held the answer for police. Many controlled experiments have shown that psychics fail to outperform mere chance. And there’s the grotesque case of the famous, if not ghoulish, psychic Sylvia Brown telling the parents of Shawn Hornbeck that their child was dead. Shawn was later found alive.

When I wrote the book The Woman Who Stole Vermeer, I found that Vermeer’s The Guitar Player, which had recently been stolen from the Kenwood House, was found left in a cemetery. It was commonly held that police had been led there by Nella Jones, a homemaker with what she believed to be psychic powers. A retired officer even seemingly confirmed this to me. But after further investigation, I learned that the police were likely led to the painting by an informant and that Nella provided them with a very convenient cover.

So, if you are nagged by loss or seeking answers for problems in your life, stick to professionals and avoid the psychics.