An elderly man with Alzheimer`s disease wanders away from his North Side home. As days pass and police fail to solve the disappearance, distraught family members consult a psychic, who ”sees” the man near water. The next day, the man is found alive near the Chicago River.
A resident of a south suburban nursing home vanishes without a trace. Police search the densely wooded area around the nursing home several times over the next week with no luck. At the request of the family, a psychic is brought in. After visiting the missing woman`s room, the psychic gets an impression of a nearby crooked road, an old shack and burned wood and predicts that the woman`s body will be found within a half-mile of the site in her psychic vision. Acting on the tip, police search the area one more time and discover the body of the nursing home resident within a half-mile of the remains of an abandoned refreshment stand partially destroyed by fire.
Lucky hunches? Or are these persuasive examples of psychic sleuthing?
Either way, both cases are typical of police and psychics joining forces in a sometimes uneasy alliance, working on the same case whether they like it or not. And, while psychic sleuthing dates back hundreds of years, these days it is being taken more seriously-at least in some quarters.
”There has been more formal acceptance of psychics in solving crimes in recent years,” says Marcello Truzzi, an Eastern Michigan University sociology professor and the co-author of ”The Blue Sense” (Mysterious Press), an in-depth look at psychic detectives based on more than 10 years of research.
”The serious examination of this issue, involving credible experts from the academic community, is a relatively new development.
”More articles are appearing about the use of psychics in police journals, for example, which suggests increased legitimacy or at least interest in looking at this stuff, and cops are more willing to use them,”
notes Truzzi. ”The hokey old image of a psychic as a flamboyant tea-room fortune teller is pretty much gone; the best ones work quietly with the cops and don`t seek publicity.”
But are psychic sleuths getting more respect from cops? Yes and no. In the two Chicago-area missing person investigations, both of which took place last month, police say they would have cracked the cases sooner or later on their own. A spokesman for the Chicago Police Department, who declined to have his name used, asserts that police had planned to search the river area anyway for the missing man.
A certain skepticism
”We have our own `psychics,` ” the spokesman says. ”They`re called detectives. But if, in the course of an investigation, a family wants to call in a psychic and they come up with a substantial lead, we`ll follow up on it.”
William Burke, chief of the Cook County Sheriff`s Police Department, which handled the nursing home disappearance in south suburban Lemont Township, readily acknowledges that the psychic`s suggestions about location may have helped to ”speed up” the discovery. Still, he thinks that his investigators would have found the woman`s body by ”normal means”
eventually.
”You have to have a certain amount of skepticism, but there`s nothing wrong with gathering as much information as you can and evaluating it,” says Burke, ”especially if the psychic has proved credible in the past.”
Psychic sleuths are in the spotlight these days thanks to increased media attention and appearances on television shows such as ”Unsolved Mysteries,” where segments involving crime-fighting psychics are among the program`s most popular-not surprising, given that a 1990 Gallup poll found that 49 percent of Americans believe in ESP and another 22 percent are undecided. But some psychic sleuths complain that official recognition can be slow in coming.
”By and large the Chicago police are very good with me and the suburban police are wonderful, but sometimes they expect too much, or you get an ignorant or hostile (detective),” says Evergreen Park psychic Jacki Mari, whose vision of a crooked road and old shack prompted police to scour the woods a final time for nursing home resident Vivian Budlane.
”People get the idea from TV shows that you should know everything at once and say, `Dig here.` It doesn`t work that way. Sometimes the information comes in bits and pieces, like putting together a puzzle.”
Though they`ve gotten more attention in recent years, psychic sleuths are nothing new.
During the 15th and 16th Centuries, for example, theft victims often consulted village ”wizards” as to the guilty party.
Brandeis was no psychic
In more modern times, reports of psychics assisting the police appeared occasionally in newspapers in the 1920s and 1930s; in 1928, U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Louis Brandeis predicted that ”advances in the psychic and related sciences may bring means of exploring unexpressed beliefs, thoughts and emotions” that would render more conventional sleuthing methods obsolete. Closer to home, Chicago-based psychic Irene Hughes says she began working with police in the Chicago area and throughout the country in the 1960s;
Hughes estimates that over the years she has worked on more than 2,000 murder cases.
”People are more aware of the dangers of crime, and they`re more anxious,” says Truzzi. ”The more anxiety that is present, the more people will turn to magical or other alternatives.
”The main problem is getting people to come out of the closet and talk about failures and successes,” adds Truzzi, who also is director of the Center for Scientific Anomalies Research in Ann Arbor, Mich., an organization of academics and scientific researchers who consider themselves a ”reasonable third force” between proponents and debunkers of psychic phenomena.
”Cops are willing to use psychics, but they have been very reticent to speak about them.”
Indeed, though they may be more open now to working with psychics, police often are likely to deny that calling in a psychic was their idea.
”I think it`s the difference between official and unofficial use,” says Truzzi. ”Lots of police will give a psychic a try, but there`s a big difference between that and the force actually funding a psychic.”
Mari is annoyed
Typically, law enforcement`s official position is that if the family wants to call in a psychic, they will take the information into account-but they would have cracked the case eventually themselves. That attitude annoys Jacki Mari.
”They always like to say they would have solved the case `eventually,`
” says Mari. ”That`s what they said in the Budlane case, but they had swept that area 19 times and they hadn`t found her.
”It`s getting to a point where you don`t want to do anything,” adds Mari, a psychic consultant and medical hypnotherapist who says she has assisted in hundreds of police investigations throughout the United States and abroad during the last 15 years.
”I don`t need publicity, and I don`t make a nickel from these cases,”
says Mari, who, like many psychic sleuths, does not charge for her work in police investigations. ”But until recently, a lot of police talked pretty openly about their use of psychics. Now they`re denying that (it is their idea to) use them. Maybe they`re afraid their investigations are going to be hampered by all the attention psychics-I`m talking about professional ones, not carnival types-are getting now.”
Police make the call
According to Mari and Hughes, the police, rather than the families, usually contact them.
”Sure, Chicago police come to me,” says Hughes, who believes that police ”absolutely” have become more open to psychics in the last few years. ”They never say they do, but they call me. Sometimes the families ask them to call. I won`t work with the families themselves; it`s too emotional.”
”What usually happens is that a person is missing, the family gets upset because they feel the police aren`t doing their job, and they ask the police to call in a psychic,” says Mari, who says she is working on 30 police cases at the moment. ”If a family member calls me, I tell them to have the detective they are working with to contact me. If you go off on your own with the family, you`ve got a bunch of excited people, and you could screw up an investigation.
”The way I work is that I first decide whether the missing person wants to be found,” explains Mari, who says her psychic abilities date from childhood. ”If it`s a murder, I decide whether I want to be the murderer or the victim. Then I walk it back (mentally) to when the person was alive and work from there. Sometimes I start sketching the victim or the murderer.”
Veteran private investigator Henry Farag, founder of Factual Research Agency, a detective agency in Merrillville, Ind., believes that credible psychics sometimes can be a helpful tool in an investigation when more conventional methods have proved unsuccessful.
”If people believe that by using a psychic they`ll uncover the smoking gun and crack the case, that`s probably not going to happen,” says Farag, who has consulted psychics four times in his 20-year career. ”But they can be very helpful in determining the lay of the land-character definitions, who might be lying, oblique things like that.
”My personal feeling is that a lot of police who haven`t been on the job a long time tend to be judgmental and conservative and would be more likely to think using a psychic was wacky,” adds Farag. ”But I think that the increased publicity has led to increased acceptance, and if you talk to some of the detectives who have been involved in homicides a long time, you`ll invariably find that they have gone to psychics at one time or another.”
`They`re a tool`
Farag most recently consulted a psychic two years ago after hitting nothing but dead ends in his search for a client`s grown daughter. The client had put the child up for adoption at birth but decided, 30 years later, that she wanted to establish contact.
”We went through all the traditional means of searching for her,” says Farag. ”Finally I decided to give a psychic a shot, and consulted a woman in the Merrillville area. I didn`t tell the client. I figured she might think I was nuts.”
After being given the basic facts in the case and the daughter`s birth date, the psychic told Farag the daughter had left Indiana.
”She named two places to look and described some health problems the woman had,” Farag says. ”She also told me the woman worked in the health field. Based on that information, I placed newspaper ads and eventually located the daughter.
”When I found her, she wasn`t exactly where the psychic said she would be,” says Farag. ”But she had left Indiana, and the information about her health problems and her profession turned out to be true. I feel the psychic helped by steering me away from looking constantly in this area.
”I look at a psychic like I would look at a handwriting expert or a polygraph expert,” adds Farag, who also found psychics helpful in cases involving embezzlement and a suspicious death. ”They`re a tool. It`s the regular, tried-and-true, knocking on doors kind of investigations that usually get results, but on those long-term, wide-open cases, what do you have to lose by consulting a psychic? I believe there are such things as vibes-or hunches or whatever you want to call them-and psychics may have a more refined hunch capability.”
What does the future hold for psychic sleuths? Truzzi, who continues to research the phenomenon, speculates that the media-generated interest in psychics may be peaking, barring any scientific breakthroughs that would offer conclusive proof of psychic sleuths` effectiveness.
”Still, with any increase in crime, you naturally will get more unsolved cases, and as you have more unsolved crimes, people will continue to turn to unorthodox measures,” he adds. ”Even if psychics aren`t successful in solving the case, a lot of people are happy they tried a psychic. There is a strong psychological need to leave no stone unturned.”
