This article originally appeared in The Skeptic, Volume 6, Issue 2, from 1992.
Not long ago a television mini-series called ‘The Hillside Stranglers’ was screened. It was based on a true story of two men working together as ‘serial killers’ in Los Angeles during the 1970s. Between them they murdered twelve young women for no apparent reason. The very arbitrariness of the crimes made them difficult to solve, and the television film concentrated on the mounting pressure being exerted on the policeman at the head of the investigation. His failure to make any progress in tracking down the murderers was underlined when, in one scene, an old man appeared at the door of his office. “It’s the medium who wrote to you from Germany,” says the detective’s assistant, “you remember, the one who wanted you to pay his fare over here because he had vital information on the case.” “Bring him in here”, says the cop, ready to try anything.
In comes the old man, who is visiting relatives, and has been obliged to pay his own fare. He tells the policeman that he should be looking for two Italian brothers who are driving a red car. The detective loses his patience and tells the assistant: “Get this creep outa here”.
Needless to say, when the murderers are eventually apprehended they are Italian in origin, but they are cousins, not brothers. The red car is, in fact, a red van. “Isn’t this what that old man said?” asks the incredulous detective. I don’t know whether the incident has any truth in it, or whether it was added to the dramatisation in order to perk it up a bit, but claims by psychics that they have given valuable information to the police in difficult cases are quite common.
Take the dear departed Doris Stokes, who was a seasoned operator of the celestial switchboard (‘just one moment please, I’m putting you through’). She made all kinds of extravagant claims about kidnap victims she had located, and hidden bodies she had led the police to. None of these were ever verified by the authorities and, indeed, the only time I ever saw them checked up on was when a Sunday newspaper asked Scotland Yard for details of Doris’s miraculous sleuthing. They denied ever having heard of her.
Now Scotland Yard has issued the findings of a report it undertook in 1990 monitoring London’s eight major investigation pools, which deal with the most serious crime. As a result Detective Chief Superintendent Eddie Ellison was able to say: “There were no cases of psychics either offering effective help or being invited to assist investigations”.
Are you really surprised? Even Tony Ortzen, editor of Psychic News, has to admit: “Anyone can call themselves a medium, and often, if you get a child murdered in a brutal fashion, one of these people will write to the police or family and say, ‘I was just washing up last night, and this name came to me as that of the murderer’. There are a lot of tea-cup mediums around who will take advantage of any situation.”
Mr Ortzen, though, as you’d expect, doesn’t hold with the view that all mediums are misguided. He feels that if the police were to find ‘the right ones’ they might discover that spiritualism has a lot to offer.
Of course, if we could only find the ‘right ones’ we wouldn’t need the police at all – except perhaps for crowd control and helping old ladies across the street. There only need be a few arresting officers to go around mopping up the miscreants that the mystics had pinpointed. Who needs all this forensic balderdash when a quick trance could save so much time and effort? Strange that this economically appealing idea never seems to get much further. Think what could be saved in public spending (and public unease) if we could reduce the police to the role of traffic wardens.
Given that those on the other side know the answer to every cosmic question that has ever flummoxed a philosopher, it’s amazing that they never get around to giving any information. Why don’t mediums ever ask Christian wraiths whether they have met God, and if so whether he accepts Muslims and Hindus at his place. Why don’t they ask whether they still have sex in heaven. (I’d particularly like an answer to that one because if they don’t, I’m not going.) Wouldn’t Bertrand Russell want to give us the answers now that he has them? Wouldn’t Dickens want to let us know how The Mystery of Edwin Drood worked out? Wouldn’t Mahler like to tell us what he thought about other people completing the symphony he left unfinished at his death – and what kind of job they made of it?
The sinister side of this, of course, is the exploitation of the recently bereaved. Doris Stokes was a devil for that. Those who are in the vulnerable state of having to let go of their loved ones are easy prey for those who promise one last glimpse.
Spiritualism is appealing, of course, but I think we ought to accept that it doesn’t pose much of a threat to the criminal fraternity.
