10 Police Investigations Aided By Psychics And Their Aftermaths

People have claimed to possess clairvoyant powers allowing them to predict the future and solve mysteries for thousands of years. Today, many are scornful of the idea that psychics help the police with criminal cases, yet law enforcement personnel, trained to be skeptical and discerning, admit to using psychics as investigative tools.

While serious publications may resist the idea that there are psychics who aided the police, there is one medium that allows police, psychics, and victim's family members to tell their stories to the public: reality television. Shows like Psychic Investigators and Psychic Detectives present viewers with firsthand accounts of citizens who use their paranormal abilities to uncover clues in criminal cases. In going public with these stories, law enforcement personnel are willing to put their professional integrity on the line. 

The stigma surrounding psychic ability is apparent in the dated cliches some reporters use to describe psychics, painting them as carny types staring into crystal balls. The New York Times manages to sniff at the idea of cops working with psychics while simultaneously citing a survey that acknowledges 35% of the 50 largest US police stations admit to doing just that. That percentage could be even higher. As Captain Bob Ingalls notes in the "Blood Money" episode of Psychic Detectives, "using psychics is employed by many police agencies. Some agencies don’t talk about it, and some do.”

It's clear that many psychic claims are bogus and may even hinder investigations, but the testimony of detectives and police officers who've worked successfully with psychics is difficult to summarily dismiss. In the following police investigations that used psychics, the psychic was credited by law enforcement as providing helpful information.

In 2009, Psychic Investigators aired the episode "Till Death Do Us Part" about the 1996 murder of Jenifer McCrady. Ohio state trooper Jack McCrady reported his wife Jenifer missing to the Belpre Police Department, claiming she “cleaned out everything she owns. Wedding rings were lying on the kitchen counter.” Jenifer’s mother immediately dismissed the idea that her daughter ran off with another man and abandoned her children. 

Georgia Rudolph was a local psychic said to have worked with the police for two decades. Rudolph told Belpre Police that “she was connecting with Jenifer’s spirit, and that Jenifer was dead.” Rudolph went on to tell Detective Dave Garvey that Jenifer was “shot in the back of her head” and that the man who murdered Jenifer was “like a cop.”

Rudolph also reportedly told Garvey that he could find Jenifer’s body south of town, near a road with the numbers “298." A day later, Detective Garvey checked out a local woman’s report of seeing a State Highway Patrol car in an out-of-town area "off Highway 298" around the time of Jenifer's disappearance. Garvey called a local detective to the scene, and together they found the fresh grave of Jenifer McCrady. A jury later found Jack McCrady guilty of the murder.

In the episode, former Belpre Police Dispatcher Moni Tanner states, “Georgia’s information made a world of difference. It solved the case.”

Kevin Rings, Assistant Prosecuting Attorney, also says, “Without that information and the resultant discovery of Jen’s body, I don’t think there would have even been a charge filed in the case against Mr. McCrady. It would have been simply an unsolved missing person’s case. Not only did she (Rudolph) say where the body would be discovered. She said she (Jenifer) was dead before anyone else had reached the conclusion. And then she said, you might not want to hear this, but the person who killed her is a cop.”

Now-retired Detective Sergeant Garvey added, "Following Georgia’s guidelines, or thoughts, whatever you want to say, led us to finding Jennifer. We found Jennifer. We found the bad guy.”

In August 2010, Aboriginal elder Cheryl Carroll-Lagerwey claimed to see the location of a missing child in a dream. Carroll-Lagerwey went to that location, Nurragingy Reserve (a suburb of Sydney, Australia), and reportedly succeeded in finding human remains. Police were called to the scene and later identified the body as Kristi McDougall, a 31-year-old woman reported missing in June.

At the time, Chief Homicide Inspector Pam Young said that she had “certain strong feelings about people who claim they are psychic.”

No word on whether Young thanked Carroll-Lagerwey for finding the body of Kristi McDougall. The inspector was only quoted as saying that it was ''interesting that a woman had a sense or a feeling that it was worth her while to come to this particular part of the park."

On a stormy night in 1975, psychic Phil Jordan was contacted by the father of a boy who went missing after picnicking with his family at Empire Lake in Tioga County, New York. Earlier that day, five-year-old Tommy Kennedy, wearing nothing but a swimsuit, reportedly had a temper tantrum and ran into the national forest surrounding the lake.

After an initial search by the family and park rangers failed to find the boy, the Tioga County Sheriff’s Department were called to the scene as “hundreds of volunteers searched in vain.” By the time Detective David Redsicker and Phil Jordan arrived at the lake, the search was about to be halted until the next morning due to thunderstorms. 

Jordan brought a map with him that he reportedly drew at home to prevent the chaos at the scene from clouding his psychic impressions. Jordan’s map is said to have led searchers through dense forest to an area that had yet to be searched. And in that area, cold and exhausted, was little Tommy Kennedy. 

Now-retired Detective Redsicker said on Larry King Live, “We had spent well over 12 hours with a couple hundred searchers without success, and it was actually less than an hour before Phil led us right to the boy.” 

A few miles south of San Francisco lies the town of Pacifica. Known for its rugged coastline intersected by California’s famously scenic Highway 1, the town is flanked by plenty of hiking trails and a national park. When local resident and former paratrooper 71-year-old Dennis Prado was reported missing in May of 1997, cops discovered Prado liked to go for walks and knew they had a tough job in front of them. 

“Finally, about nine to ten weeks into his disappearance,” Detective Fernando Realyvasquez of the Pacifica Police told Nancy Grace in 2005, “His family had come to me and asked me if I would go see a psychic on their behalf.”

Despite razzing from his colleagues, Detective Realyvasquez contacted psychic Annette Martin.  Martin reportedly pinpointed a small area on a map that covered over 2,000 acres, a small area that Nancy Grace measured out to be “the size of two city blocks." Searchers went to the location Martin chose and discovered Prado’s body, just as she predicted. “Based on the final conclusion,” Realyvasquez told Grace, “she was very, very accurate.”

According to the Mercury News, “Prado’s appreciative family invited Realyvasquez to join them spreading the the man’s ashes at sea under the Golden Gate."

In 1979, a Central New York town was rocked by a quadruple murder inside a local nursery. In the "Blood Money" episode of Psychic Detectives, Sheriff Bill Hasenauer says the killings were “probably the most hideous crime during my term of office.” Shot execution-style, the victims were the owner of the nursery, who also ran a coin shop out of the building, his employee, and two bystanders.

After an extensive investigation that led nowhere, Sheriff Hasenauer called psychic Phil Jordan to ask for help in the case. Jordan was reportedly able to describe the murders from the point of view of the perpetrators. He led detectives to a location outside of the nursery where stolen coins dropped by the killers were then discovered - an area the police had previously searched, finding nothing. 

Jordan also said the getaway car was “a small vehicle, with a custom design.” He reportedly stressed that the “front end was funny, and it looked like a Rolls Royce, with that kind of front grill.” His vision corroborated a report left on a police tip line that a Volkswagen was seen near the crime scene. 

When detectives tracked down a suspect in Florida, the suspect was driving a Volkswagen.  Authorities canvassed local body shops and confirmed that the suspect had altered the car so it no longer had the customized “Rolls Royce” front end. Detectives now had probable cause to search the Volkswagen, where they found some of the stolen coins.

That suspect and two other men stood trial for the murders. All were found guilty.
Kurt Hameline, Assistant D.A. of Oneida County, concluded that, “We were able to use a psychic who gave us certain information that helped us in the investigation.”

On June 1st of 1996, 22-year-old single mother Nicole Arochas left her daughter with her parents to go out for the evening. As told in an episode of Psychic Investigators, when Nicole didn’t return that night, her father reported her missing to Detective Jim Novak of the Sayreville, New Jersey Police Department.

Detectives interviewed Nicole’s boyfriend Michael Reid, who reportedly claimed that he last saw Nicole before she "went out drinking" the night she disappeared. According to Detective Novak, he knew that Nicole was dead when Reid referred to her in the past tense, telling Novak, "I didn’t love Nicole. We were only friends.” But the detective had no evidence to back up his suspicions.

Two days passed with no sign of Nicole or her black Chevy Malibu. With no leads in the case, Nicole’s mother Pat Arochas says in the episode, “My uncle, Walt Werner, worked for the Hackensack Police dept. and he suggested a psychic that the police force sometimes used.” That psychic was New Jersey resident Frank St. James, said to be known for finding missing persons. 

After seeing Nicole’s picture, St. James delivers the bad news on the third day of Nicole’s disappearance. Nicole was no longer alive. The Arochas family invited the psychic to their home to see if he could get more information. In their kitchen, St. James claimed to connect with Nicole’s spirit who showed him her car in a marshy area "close to home" that could only be seen from the air.

Detective Novak was able secure a helicopter to search local marshy areas on June 6, five days after Nicole's disappearance. Novak says he remembers thinking, “Please God let us find something. If we don’t, I am never going to be able to live this down.”

The helicopter pilot spotted a car that looked like Nicole’s in a secluded, marshy area. Police did a ground search and found Nicole’s body inside her Chevy Malibu. Reid was reportedly charged in her drug-induced death and sentenced to ten years in prison.

“We had nothing,” now-retired Detective Novak says about the case. “We found Nicole based on the information supplied to us by the psychic Frank St. James. And that’s it. I don’t see how anyone could dispute it.”

Rosemarie Kerr is a psychic featured in Psychic Detectives's 2007 "Midnight Strangers" episode on the murder of Andre Daigle.

Daigle went missing in 1987, after leaving a Louisiana bar with an unknown woman. Police and Andre’s family immediately began an exhaustive search of the New Orleans area. After three frustrating days, Daigle’s sister reached out to California psychic Rosemarie Kerr, sending her a photo of Andre and a map of Louisiana.

After touching the photograph, Kerr says she “knew something terrible had happened, and felt an urgency stronger than any other urgency she’d felt in a reading.” After opening the map, Kerr was drawn to the New Orleans suburb of Slidell. Kerr called the Daigle family and told them to go to Slidell immediately. “Do it now. Do it quick.” Andre’s family members reportedly raced toward Slidell, and when they got off at the Slidell exit, they spotted Andre’s truck on the road next to them.

According to Captain James Gallagher of the Kenner police department, “They pull up to the truck and they see two strangers.” Andre’s brother reportedly flagged down a cop car, and the truck was pulled over. The two suspects in the car were arrested for being in possession of a stolen vehicle, but there was no evidence of foul play. 

Captain James Gallagher took psychic Kerr to the bar where Daigle was last seen. Andre Daigle was no longer alive, Kerr said. He'd been murdered by two men. Kerr was able to reportedly connect with Andre's spirit and was shown images of a body of water and railroad tracks. Captain Gallagher said, “She described the location in great detail” and stressed that the number 7 was also “very, very important.”

Detective Gallagher searched a previous apartment of the two suspects (apartment number 7) and found a “huge bloodstain” later confirmed as Daigle's blood. The suspects, already in jail thanks to Kerr, confessed to using a female accomplice to lure Daigle from the bar, then killing him in a convoluted plot to “get into the mafia.”

When the suspects led police to Daigle's body (next to Interstate 7), Detective Gallagher confirmed that the location had “everything she (Kerr) described. I was stunned and amazed.”

Kerr later testified in the trial of one of the suspects. She was reportedly “the first psychic to ever testify in a criminal trial” because, as Detective Gallagher states, “she led directly to the killer. You can’t dispute that. That is fact.”

Both suspects were eventually convicted and are reportedly serving life sentences.

Etta Louise Smith lived in north Los Angeles and worked at a Lockheed aerospace plant. It was 1980, and Smith was listening to a news update on the radio about nurse Melanie Uribe, missing for two days. Smith didn’t consider herself a psychic, yet when she heard police were doing a house-to-house search, she felt certain the search was heading in the wrong direction.

“She’s not in the house,” Smith thought. In her mind’s eye, Smith reportedly "saw" where Uribe was: in brush, less than two miles away in Lopez Canyon. In 2004, Smith described her psychic vision on Larry King Live, “I could visually see where she was. I didn't know the name of the street, but I knew how to get there. And I couldn't shake this.” 

After work, Smith went straight to the Foothill station of the LAPD and showed Detective Lee Ryan on a wall map where she "saw" Uribe’s body. On Larry King Live, Detective Ryan said that Smith "had top security clearances. She lived in the community. She was obviously a professional businesswoman." 

Smith left the station with plans to meet up with Detective Ryan the next morning, but instead, feeling an intense sense of urgency, she went to Lopez Canyon where she discovered the body of Melanie Uribe.

After Smith alerted the cops of her discovery, she quickly became a suspect in Uribe’s death. According to the LA Times, “Detectives questioned Smith for about 10 hours before arresting her on suspicion of having murdered the nurse. Smith was released four days later and never charged. Three men with no known connection to Smith eventually were convicted of the murder and are serving sentences of up to life in state prison.”

Smith ended up suing the LAPD for wrongful arrest, and was awarded $26,184 in damages.

In 2006, Psychic Investigators aired an episode about the murder of Jacquie Poole. Jacquie’s body was found in her West London apartment in February of 1983. She’d been sexually assaulted and strangled with a cord. 

The night after Jacquie’s body was found, local psychic Christine Holohan claimed that the spirit of the murdered woman appeared to her, identifying herself as Jacquie Hunt. Jacquie was recently divorced, and Hunt was her maiden name. 

Constable Tony Batters was sent to interview Holohan, and she shared details about her visions of the crime, which included a sweater that she felt was important to the case. The psychic reportedly "amazed" Constable Batters by giving him detailed information about Jacquie’s life.

Holohan is said to have described the appearance of Jacquie’s killer, including his tattoos, also revealing the killer's name as “Pokie” through a process known as "automatic writing." “It was like someone had taken my hand and very, very slowly written out the name,” Holohan says of the experience.

“Pokie” was discovered to be the nickname of a friend of Jacquie’s boyfriend, a man named Anthony Ruark, already one of the suspects in the crime. His physical appearance was also said to match Holohan’s description.

Police found a a sweater which “forensically linked Ruark with Jacquie," but it was not enough to stop the 15-month investigation from being disbanded.

Eighteen years later, skin from under Jacquie’s fingernails was examined along with a “bodily swab” from the crime scene. The DNA was positively identified as Ruark’s, whose DNA was on record because of a crime he had committed in 2000. Ruark was reportedly “linked to Jacquie’s murder by a one-in-one-billion match.” 

Retired Constable Tony Batters attended Ruark’s trial. According to Psychic Investigators, “The retired police officer had listed 130 specific points that Christine (Holohan) claims she received from Jacquie’s spirit. Now he wanted to see just how many were correct. An amazing 120 facts matched information brought out during the trial.”

Ann Batters, the Constable's widow, confirms in the episode that her husband believed that "the information must have come directly from Jacquie.”

The jury found Ruark guilty and sentenced him to life in prison.

Known as the Boca Raton "high school sweethearts,” Cynthia Rediger and John Futch were reported missing in January of 1978.  

As detailed in an episode of Psychic Detectives, Palm Beach County police contacted psychic Phil Jordan for help after John Futch’s car was found submerged in a canal. Jordan was brought to a picnic site that the cops believed the teen couple had visited on the day of their disappearance.

At the scene, Jordan reportedly told investigators that “they (the couple) were approached by two men. One had a shotgun, and one had a rifle. I'm pretty sure they’re dead.The cause of death was gunshot wounds to the head.”

Among the psychic images Jordan said he received, one was a dilapidated white house with dark trim. “We had already looked at an old white house," says Detective Rendell of the Palm Beach County sheriff’s office. "But now that Phil mentioned this, I wanted to go back again. So I went back. Now, the house is empty. We find shell casings for a .22 rifle.”

The investigation stalled until two months later, when a bicyclist reportedly found the bodies of Rediger and Futch in a rural area east of the picnic site. The cause of death for both teens was gunshots to the head. A bullet fragment pulled from John’s skull reportedly came from a .22 rifle.

Detective Rendell contacted Phil Jordan again, asking him to try and get a description of the two suspects. Jordan gave Rendell a composite drawing of what he envisioned the shooter looked like. He reportedly also stressed that the initial "A" was tied to the suspects, and that one or both of them were “Latino or Mexican.” Finally, Jordan told Rendell that "a dog" would be important to the case.

Another crime rocked the area: a young woman was reportedly kidnapped and sexually battered, but she was able to escape. Palm Beach County's Detective Sessa tells Psychic Detectives that the victim identified a man named Adam Herrera as the man who kidnapped and assaulted her. "I subsequently placed him in hand cuffs and arrested him,” says Sessa.

Then a tipster contacted police claiming that he'd sold his dog to a man who said, "I know who killed the Boca Raton high school sweethearts. He’s in the Palm Beach County jail. He just got arrested for sexual battery.”

Detective Rendell compared Herrara’s photo with Phil Jordan’s composite sketch. “It was a strong match,” said Rendell. Palm beach County detectives also determined that Herrera had once lived in the same white house where Rendell found the shell casings.

Herrera and an accomplice were found guilty in the killings of Rediger and Futch, with Herrera eventually receiving two life sentences with no chance of parole.

“Every cop in this investigation did their best,” Detective Rendell says about the convictions. “Phil (Jordan) had that investigative ability too, he just had it in a different way.”