Psychic Detectives

Movies and TV shows featuring psychics who solve baffling mysteries and crimes have become increasingly popular in recent years. Some might dismiss it as mere fiction, but there’s actually a strong factual foundation to many of these psychic detective story-lines.

Psychics using their paranormal abilities to find missing persons and solve crimes goes back to ancient times, when oracles in Greece or Rome would be consulted to unravel mysteries. Today, law enforcement agencies, from the local police to the FBI, have been known to call upon the input of a psychic when all other leads have been exhausted.

Sometimes people ask why psychics aren’t always consulted from the beginning. The simple answer is: skepticism and public opinion. Psychic work is not an exact science and therefore typically seen to be a ‘last resort’ when all else fails.

One documented case of a psychic’s vision helping catch a killer was the murder of Penny Serra in 1973. Psychic Pascarella Downey informed police that the murderer, a man whose name began with an E, would be apprehended later. It so happened that Edward Grant was eventually caught… 26 years after the murder took place!

Another murder, that of 16-year-old Patricia List by her father, John, was a cold case. No one knew whether the suspect was alive or dead. Psychic Elizabeth Lerner helped the police track him down many years later, and he was convicted.

Some psychics have been so successful at helping police crack cases over the years that they’ve made entire careers out of it. Anyone who thinks psychics aren’t real may find themselves questioning everything they believe after learning about these real crime cases where the FBI and psychics worked together ~ Jane H Kyle

So, knowing that cases have been documented as solved with the help of psychics, maybe they should be used more often to help law enforcement. It doesn’t help that we live in an era of cynicism, where skeptics are often quick to try and debunk all manner of unexplained phenomena. “It can’t possibly be real,” they lament.

It is an ‘open secret’ in the psychic field that many unknown cold cases, including those that don’t make the nightly newscasts, have been cracked because of a single tip. If that tip comes from someone with no connection to the case, who couldn’t possibly know a specific detail, who’s to say the tipster isn’t using his or her psychic ability? The psychic characters frequently depicted in media, including the faux-psychic in the series Psych, are often in pursuit of money and fame. A true psychic will always use his or her gifts in the pursuit of truth and the greater good, which sometimes includes helping to catch murderers or kidnappers.

Many psychics have no desire to be in the public eye. If law enforcement chooses to consult a psychic, the best connections can be made via recommendations or referrals, or by using a psychic with some link to the victims of the crime. Also, a case without any leads might be solved by a well-meaning psychic who calls a tip line, after seeing a story on the news. Insight can come from any and all directions in the spiritual realm. Unfortunately it is too often disregarded.