Scotland Yard has deemed psychics no help in crime-solving. But British mediums say detectives just won't admit they seek - and find - useful tips from the spiritual world.
One psychic says a detective consulted him as often as every two months. Another says she's been tapped numerous times to help with murders and has come up with tips she calls significant.Scotland Yard's detective-chief superintendent, Eddie Ellison, brought the debate to light when he set out 18 months ago to discover whether police do indeed consult psychics and whether they help.
Officially, Scotland Yard says it never seeks their assistance, although should a psychic volunteer information . . .
"Whatever information we receive, from whatever source, is evaluated and followed up in the normal way," a Scotland Yard spokeswoman said this week.
Rather than review old cases, perhaps distorted by memory and colorful newspaper accounts, Ellison monitored all major current investigations in London. He asked senior officers to pass on details of all psychic help, sought or offered.
After a year, "There were no cases of psychics either offering effective help or being invited to assist investigations," The Daily Telegraph quoted him as saying.
But the spiritualists stick to their claims. Superior officers would be the last people detectives would tell of psychic aid, they add.
"I know how much help I have given Scotland Yard over the last year, whatever this survey says. When they say they never call on psychics for help, that's a lie," psychic Nella Jones says.
She says she helped police recover a valuable Vermeer painting stolen 14 years ago from a stately home in London and that she told police significant facts about serial murderer Peter Sutcliffe months before his arrest in 1981. No confirmation came from police.
Jones, a medium who claimed to have had an exclusive interview with publisher Robert Maxwell after he died, said police came to her twice in the past three months for help with two murders.
"Senior officers at Scotland Yard might not know about it. It's the chief inspectors and the superintendents actually involved in the investigations that come to me."
Robin Stevens, a minister of the Spritualists' National Union, also tells of calls from Scotland Yard.
In a telephone interview with The Associated Press, he spoke of one detective, now retired, who consulted him "with the utmost discretion" every eight or 10 weeks on a variety of cases.
"This particular man was in a fairly senior position and didn't want it known that he had consulted a spiritualist," said Stevens, whose organization regulates 400 spiritualist churches in Britain.