Psychic Sleuths (Including Gerard Croiset]

Andrew Boot's book revealed that he relied on some rather dubious sources for information on which to build.

In the bibliography he lists some well known tabloids not exactly renowned for 'getting it right' such as People, the News of the World, Psychic News, The Unexplained, and the American National Enquirer.

Among the fifteen authors listed (all pro paranormal) were Peter Hurkos (a psychic detective), T. C. Lethbridge (a diviner), Guy Lyon Playfair and Uri Geller ('psychic' spoon bender and co-authors of a Geller biography), Jenny Randles, and Colin Wilson!

The confident introduction starts with, 'Psychic phenomena do exist. There is more than enough evidence to prove that they do, and the sixteen cases in this book provide good examples of how those powers can help to solve baffling crimes.' Relying on the information sources he did, I was not surprised to read Mr Boot's questionable conclusions. Interspersed between the 'facts' of the cases were conversations and scenarios to which neither the author nor any other person were witness.

According to the author, one of Croiset's successes was providing the NYPD with information enabling them to find and arrest Fred Thompson the killer of Edith Kiecorius, a four-year-old who went missing in Manhattan in February 1961. The child had been playing with friends near her home when she wandered away never to be seen alive again.

False trail

Briefly, Boot's version claims, inter alia, that

(1) after abandoning a false trail leading to Chicago, the New York police department (not an individual officer) decided to officially call in a psychic-Gerald Croiset.
(2) Croiset, (living in Utrecht, Holland), asked for and was sent maps of the areas where Edith lived and where she disappeared.
(3) After studying the maps of New York, Croiset had visions of a small thin-faced man between forty and fifty years of age, assaulting a child and returning to the scene of the crime time and time again.

Certain that he could trace the route the man had taken, Croiset phoned the NYPD and described the area where Edith had been playing, even down to the street signs (one of which was bent) and the names of the shops along the route that he had seen in his vision.

Having been told by Croiset that Edith would be found in a rooming house near the street where she had disappeared, within hours, the police had found the decomposing body of a child later confirmed to be that of the missing girl. Fifty- three-year-old Fred Thompson was later picked up and charged with the murder. He stood trial and was found guilty but insane, spending the rest of his life in an institution.

Psychic detection or just guesswork?

Let's have a closer look at some of the above statements.

1. Croiset did not speak English, so the request for maps must have been made through an interpreter. A minor point perhaps, but of significant value to Croiset, as it gave him an excuse when shown to be wrong, by claiming that he had been misinterpreted.

2. What other information not mentioned was passed on to Croiset with the maps? Surely if you are seeking someone's help, you would give them every scrap of information you had on the case.

3. One of the maps was large scale enough to show exactly where Edith was playing shortly before her disappearance.

The positions and names on the signposts should be obvious to anyone who looked at the map, and an occasional bent signpost is a common feature of any streetscape. Did he pinpoint the bent sign post?

To explain the naming of the shops however, poses a problem because of the lack of detail. Was this journalistic licence? Did Croiset identify them all using the owners' names? Did he refer to them by the products they sold—meat, vegetables and fruit, clothes, hardware, pizzas, fish, hamburgers and so on? Every row of shops in every suburb has a similar selection. If he was not too specific how could he go wrong? In any case, only the murderer could confirm whether or not Croiset was right — this was not stated.

Telling the detectives that Edith would be found in a rooming house in a street near where she had disappeared, sounds at first like an incredible hit. However, according to the story, '...within hours of beginning their (the detectives) investigation in the area, they came across a locked room in a run-down rooming house and hotel.' Odd? The search was confined to a relatively small area of back streets and a rooming house evidently not subject to a previous house to house search—why did it take hours if the location of the rooming house had been pin-pointed? Further, if Croiset could identify details such as the names on shops, sign posts and even a bent sign post, why couldn't he put a name to the rooming house?

Finally, let's pretend for a moment that you are the clairvoyant studying a large scale map of the area where it is known that the child was playing prior to disappearing. Your imagination would be working overtime theorising possible abduction scenarios. First we know from Edith's playmates the rough direction she took when she left them. The abductor, in an effort to lessen the possibility of detection would, one would suspect, avoid the main or more frequented streets and stick to the side streets. No one witnessed an adult and a four year old girl walking together, which suggests that the pair would not have travelled far from the pick-up point.

Croiset took this logical deduction a little further and made a guess which, it is claimed, turned out to be correct. I say claimed, for two reasons.

One, only the NYPD and Thompson, the girl's abductor, are in a position to confirm whether or not Croiset was correct, and they haven't.

Two, Croiset's past failures and false claims. These include the missing inhabitant of Rossum, in 1956, said by Croiset to be alive in Germany, and who was found drowned at Ootmarsum, Holland (Hoebens, 1981, Skeptical Inquirer); The Sandelius case in 1959, which was a complete fabrication (Rowe 1993, Skeptical Inquirer); The Pat McAdam disappearance in England in 1967—Croiset was proved wrong but still claimed success (Boot, 1994, p234). In Viareggio, Italy, in 1969, the clairvoyant “saw” the body of a missing boy in water—the body was found in sand dunes. (Hoebens. 1981). In Wierdon, Holland in 1977, Croiset is supposed to have identified a young girl's assailant using psychometry—he was wrong (Hansel 1978, ESP: A Critical Re-Evaluation. Hoebens 1981-82). In the Yorkshire Ripper case (1975/8) Croiset proved useless and was dismissed (Boot, 1994, p283, 286). And then there was the failure to find the missing Beaumont children at Adelaide in 1966.

Croiset in Adelaide

In a feature article in the Adelaide Advertiser, (July 31, 1993), Tom Prior, alleges that 'Croiset, now dead, was exposed as a charlatan before he died...' Although Prior gave no reference in the article whereby the accusation of charlatanism could be verified, there are many claims attributed to Croiset that have been examined by investigators such as Piet Hein Hoebens, and which suggest no credence can be had in any of the claims made by Croiset or his admirers.

In the 1970s and 1980s, Adelaide, the City of Churches, was rapidly gaining the unsavoury reputation of being the graveyard of murdered children and teenagers. Between 1979 and 1983, four teenage boys were kidnapped, held captive in appalling circumstances, sexually tortured and murdered. Spencer von Einem, a homosexual, was arrested and charged with the murder of one of the boys, convicted and sentenced to a minimum of thirty-six years. At the time it was alleged by the police that von Einem was only one of a 'family' of sadistic deviates, an extremely influential group of about eight or nine of both sexes, with strong links to powerful figures in South Australia's establishment.

Joanne Radcliffe, 11, and Kirsty Gordon, 4, of Hackham, were abducted during a football match in August 1973, the abductor never found. The bodies of seven young South Australian women abducted, sexually assaulted and murdered in 1976 and 1977 were found buried near Truro. Christopher Worrell and his lover James Miller were charged with the crimes, Worrell dying in a car accident prior to the trial, Miller sentenced to life imprisonment.

Prior to this, on a hot January 26, 1966, the three Beaumont children, Jane, 9, Arna, 7, and Grant, 4, disappeared from the foreshore at Glenelg, an Adelaide beachside suburb, sparking off the most intensive manhunt in South Australian police history. The mystery remains unsolved to this day.

Croiset's involvement began in August 1966, when a group of Adelaide businessmen and a property developer, Mr Con Polites, donated money to fly the Dutch clairvoyant to Australia after he 'visualised' where the missing Beaumont children were. He flew from Holland in November and was met at Adelaide airport in an atmosphere of near-hysteria. Before coming to Australia and after studying video tapes of the Glenelg area, Croiset said that he had 'seen' where the children were—accidentally smothered in a sandfall in a tunnel.

However, after three days of walking around the beachside suburbs of Glenelg and Brighton, the clairvoyant changed his mind and announced that the bodies of the three children would be found buried in a brick-kiln at the former Paringa Brickworks in Wilton Ave., Somerton Park, now known as Woolcocks' Discount House. However, acting Premier Frank Walsh, on police advice, refused to give the go-ahead for the warehouse to be excavated.

In February 1967, an independent public fund raised six thousand dollars for the job, but despite an eight day dig to a depth of four metres, no trace of the children was found.

Three years later, the Amsterdam paper Het Vrije Volk, quoting an AP Telex, only reported that the Australian authorities had 'refused permission to search on the spot.' This type of half-truth simply served to boost Croiset's reputation. In the minds of some, perhaps he had located the spot where the children's bodies were buried, but because the authorities refused to allow the area to be excavated the truth will never be known.

Like father like son

In 1974, Gerald [Gerard] Croiset's son, Gerard Croiset Jnr., a self-noted clairvoyant, artist and touch-healer, was contacted by investigative journalist Dick Wordley, and asked to help in finding the body of Joanne Radcliffe, who disappeared in 1973.

In a taped interview, Croiset Jr. said that he believed Joanne Radcliffe was buried under a house at Bowmans, thirteen kilometres east of Pt. Wakefield. This turned out to be a false lead. Another false lead given to the police by the clairvoyant came shortly after the posting of a reward of two hundred thousand dollars for information regarding missing Italian tourist, Anna Rosa Liva, and another girl Karen Williams, both from Coober Pedy.

Bandwagon of rat-bags

The Croisets were by no means the only clairvoyants involved in these affairs: they crawled out of the woodwork like lice and proved just as useful—spiritualists, soothsayers, pendulum swingers, vision-seekers, hypnotists, religious fanatics, scatter-brain theorists and others who came up with weird and wonderful theories on the disappearances. They pestered the parents of the missing children, the police and the press. Mrs June Cox, of Kingston Park, said that the Beaumont children and Joanne Radcliffe and Kirste Gordon had been haunting her for 11 years and were buried between the 'trespassers prosecuted' sign and the trees in the distance near the Myponga Reservoir. Nothing was ever found. British spiritualist Doris Stokes said the girls were buried under a house at Alberton, but in January 1979, when police dug up a floor where it was suggested the bodies of the two girls may have been buried, nothing was found. One man walked into the Glenelg police station announcing that he was Jesus Christ and knew where the Beaumont children were buried. When asked by Police Sgt. Ron Blight 'Where's your beard?' He answered, 'It's invisible!' In August, 1980, the use of a well known American psychic Dorothy Allison also proved unsuccessful. (Ms Allison was the New Jersey psychic who provided police with information in the Atlanta child-murders case. She gave police forty-two different names, none of which remotely resembled Wayne Williams who was subsequently apprehended and charged with the murders).

Deluded and dangerous

In view of the complete lack of evidence to support the claim that some clairvoyants have in the past, or are presently able to assist the police in finding missing persons and solving homicides, the question remains, why do self-styled psychic detectives enjoy such an enviable reputation?

There are several reasons. First, there is a universal fascination with the unknown, the mysterious and the ostensibly unexplainable. There is a strong proclivity to believe that mysterious forces and energies exist and that a chosen few are able to utilise them in one form or another. Cognizant of this interest, the media and books generally tend to promote the 'gee-whiz' aspects of a mundane event rather than deal with it objectively. Hence, while half, or even a full tabloid page will be devoted to recounting the supposed sighting of a UFO landing in the hills and will be considered newsworthy, confirming that the lights seen were in fact car headlights, may or may not get a mention. Most media tend to encourage belief in all sorts of paranormal phenomena in an effort to generate copy: the facts are immaterial—don't bother to check it, and embellish it if need be. Doris Stokes was approached by the English newspaper Sunday People during the Jack the Ripper episode, and asked to do a psychometric reading on the 'I'm Jack' tape, (a tape subsequently believed to be from a hoaxer). Her impressions were published in the July 1, 1979, issue. (Incidentally, she was wrong). Not to be outdone, the Sun sent a journalist to Holland to interview Croiset. (He was also wrong). I suppose in all fairness it must be one heck of a job trying to fill a daily newspaper, but by the same token, equal space devoted to rational enquiry in an irrational world could only benefit society.

Second, the pronouncements by psychic detectives—like horoscopes, tarot cards, psychic readings and other forms of divination—are typically vague and ambiguous, lending themselves to post facto validation.

Third, they are self-promoting, using newspaper and magazine articles featuring them, as a 'proof' of their supposed clairvoyant abilities. Desperate victims, aware only of the clairvoyants 'fame' and 'successes', will turn to anyone whom they believe may be able to help—the parents of missing children are particularly vulnerable. In Croiset's case, his reputation and promotion to psychic stardom was virtually a creation of his mentor, Professor of Parapsychology at Utrecht, Wilhelm Tenhaeff. With Tenhaeff's skillful propaganda, deception and unreliable reports, Croiset become known as 'The Miracle Man of Holland'. All this despite unanimous studies (Brink, 1960, International Criminal Police Review, and Reiser et al, 1979, Journal of Police Science and Evaluation), whose conclusions were that the use of 'psychics' in police investigations is a complete waste of time.

The negative ramifications of psychic sleuthing far outweigh any potential benefits. False hopes are raised, valuable police investigation time and resources are wasted following false leads, innocents become involved, and in some instances, people have become suspects in crimes they did not commit. Psychic detectives are pretenders, pests and parasites.

It's worth mentioning that the NYPD was one of fifty American police departments surveyed in 1993, by Jane Ayers Sweat and Mark W. Durm, a skeptical investigator of paranormal claims and a professor of psychology respectively. The survey sought to ascertain to what extent, if any, police departments used psychics in their investigations. The survey took the form of a questionnaire and the responses were uniformly negative.

Question 1: for example asked, 'In the past has your Police department used psychics or does the department presently use them in solving investigations?' Of the forty-eight respondents, thirty-one answered no, and seventeen answered yes. However, a perusal of the comments from those who answered yes, indicated that it was not departmental policy but at the invitation of individual officers or at the request of a member of the victim's family. Information volunteered by psychics is listened to as a matter of courtesy and to show openness to explore any possibility when regular leads run dry. Question 4: (a) 'If your department has used psychics, was the information received more helpful in solving the case than other information.' Of the twenty-six who answered, all said no. Question 5: 'Do you personally consider information from a psychic more valuable than information received from a regular source?' All thirty-nine respondents said no. Not one of the forty-eight respondents said that clairvoyants had ever provided them with useful information. Sweat and Durm's full report can be read in the Winter 1993 issue of the Skeptical Inquirer.