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*sychic's Powers
tstound Police
- PAUL BANNISTER
Dutch psychic Warner Tholen has amazed and
founded police and civilians alike with his uncanny
ilities to find missing bodies and lost articles
ad even predict the future.
,
e
,.
Among his successes, Tholen has: pinpointed foi police
.. exact spots at which bodies of missing people would be
He has also:
and, — —
Located
urgently
needed
ter at an African mission —
fin an aerial photo.
• Documented
the
precise
jury
of
an
astronaut
at
lashdown.
“Tholen
has
found
many
•ssing people and has helped
;
.3
police
in
a
great
many
ses,” revealed
Prof.
W.II.C.
mhaeff,
84,
a
ychology pro-
sor
at
Uni-
* uty
of
Ut-
eht, who
has
served
Thol-
i’k work.
One
Thol-
es recent suc-
cesses occurred
lien the Dutch
ate
Police
at
«iethoorn
asked him
dud
a
missing man.
PSYCHIC
Warner Tholen
to
help
‘Tholen
ild us
to
look
in
a
particular
pot
at
the Beukesgracht Ga-
ud,
’ recalled Police Inspector
lendrick Schut.
“There were the tracks of a
car leading into the water We
Dnt for the river ponce and they
found the vehicle (and the miss-
ing man’s body)
in the water.
“Tholen really has incredible
power. He’s been called
in by
police many times."
|n another case, police found]
the body
of a missing 20-year-
old man in water near Lelystad
in
the
Netherlands —
where
Tholen told them
it would be.
At his home near Utrecht, the
psychic produced a letter from
the local police acknowledging,
“Without
Tholen’s
help
we
would never have
solved
this
case. We would not have found
the body.”
One of
the most astonishing
successes
of
the
66-year-old
psychic
came
when
a
mis-
sionary
priest,
Rev,
Nicholas
Borst, appealed to him for help
in
finding
desperately
needed
water near his Catholic mission
in Tanzania, Africa.
“lie sent me an
aerial pho-
tograph of the mission and the
land around it,” Tholen said. “I
concentrated on the photograph
and pinpointed the exact spot.”
A letter of thanks that Father
Borst wrote to Tholen tells how
WHERE BODY WAS FOUND: Inspector Hendrick Schut
water was found at 75 feet and
at 112 feet — the exact depths
the psychic had predicted.
In
1969, Prof, John Beloif of
the department
of psychology,
at the University of Edinburgh
in Scotland, recorded Tholen’s
prediction that the youngest of
m the Apollo astronauts would be
| slightly wounded
on
the
right
® side
of his head when landing,
and that they would not land in
choir target region.
On splashdown, Nov. 24, 1969,
A1 Bean, youngest of the astro-
nauts, received a blow over his
right eye when he bumped into
a loose movie camera, and the
capsule
landed
two
miles
off
target — just as Tholen had pre-
dicted.
In Tholen’s favorite case, he
located
plans
for
800-year-old
Coevorden Castle, after a futile
1 four-nation search.
Tholen advised Dr. Corneille
of
the Provencii
Museum
oi
Drenthe in the Netherlands.
“Look for a fair-sized band-
ing to the southeast. There you
will find a large carved, wooden
chest
painted
red,
green
and
white. In it you wi.l find a draw-
ing
of
the
tower.’’ When
Pi
Janssen went
to
a farm
nis
three miles southeast of his ov\
i
home, the farmer handed hi.n
.
drawing of the tower.
“The farmer told me that un-
til two years before, they
ha-
been kept in a chest exactly uki
the one Tholen had described,’
said Dr. Janssen.
shows where psychic directedjooiice.
Janssen, architect and director
Wnere
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i*'
•b
ese&rcnm
ics
By Mark Jones
I
Los Angeles Times
l
LOS ANGELES — How could
it be,
a
police
detective wondered,
that a
housewife
apparently
with
psychic
capabilities
could
help
put
together
the
drawing
of
a man who
a week
later would be the prime suspect in
a
triple murder?
r
How was
it, thought a deputy
dis-
' trict attorney recently, that a second
local psychic could reenact a two-year-
old murder after touching the killer’s
fingerprint card?
And how was
it possible, the FBI
wondered last month, that yet a third
Los Angeles
psychic knew
so much
about
a
$500,000
kidnaping
in
Las
Vegas
‘ when,
in
fact,
the
crime was
still in progress?
Are any or all of these three cases
examples
of clairvoyance
or
coincid-
ence? Did
each
of the
psychics
“see”
through
time
and
distance
or were
they
just
lucky?
Answers
are
^ not
easy to come by when the topic is as
elusive
as parapsychology.
But while psychics have been
cas-
- ually involved for years
in criminal
investigations — the most recent local
case resulted in the arrest of a murd-
er suspect earlier this month by police
in South Gate near Los Angeles —
there have been few experiments
to
determine
their
reliability, in
crime
cases.
Until now.
Members of the Los Angeles Police
Department
admitted
recently
that
for the past eight months they’ve been
conducting serious research into psy-
chic
phenomena.
The
latest
study,
which began in October,' involves near-
ly
four dozen
specially selected Los
Angeles
psychics,
homicide
investi-
gators and “ordinary”
citizens.
The man leading what may be the
first announced
police-psychic
study
in the country is Dr. Martin Reiser,
director
of
the
LAPD’s
behavioral
sciences
department.
“So far
it hasn’t been demonstrat-
ed to my satisfaction that so-called re-
putable
psychics
can
solve
crimes”
he said, “and yet the homicide division
and
I do want to make a serious
re-
evaluation of paranormal phenomena.
“In other words,” he
said,
“I -want
to find out once and for
all whether
the hundreds
of
tips volunteered by
psychics
are
all
screwy
or
indeed
whether some of them have merit.”
Reiser
said
that
late
last
month
the
police
department,
with the
aid
of
clinical researchers
at UCLA and
Los
Angeles
City
College,
gathered
four separate teams of psychics, homi-
cide detectives and citizens.
He
said that during the next few
months
each
of them would be
in-
dividually tested for their abilities to
perceive—or to “see”—crimes describ-
ed inside 12 sealed envelopes contain-
ing items of evidence pertaining to a
different crime.
“We’re trying to be as unbiased as
possible,” Reiser said. “And if it looks
as
though
investigative
information
supplied by psychics not only
is
fea-
sible but has utility, then we’ll use
it.
That’s the nature of a police organiza-
tion, isn’t it?”
*
Despite the
psychologist’s guarded
optimism,
there was through
it
all a
bedrock
of pessimism
laid down by
the
results
of
Reiser’s
first
police-
psychic study last May.
In that smaller experiment a dozen
Los Angeles psychics were
tested
in
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!«;
L.A. Police Researching
Psychic’ Crime Solving
.
PSYCHIC, From G1
evidence—to “see” the killer together
with
his victims
in
a psychic
vision
one afternoon in October.
Sims
said
that
the
psychic and
a
police
artist
produced
the
drawing
of a man who later was identified by
the mother of one
of the victims
as
having been with her boy shortly be-
fore his death.
*
,,
Under
questioning, Sims
said,
the
man—a
family
acquaintance
with
a
record
of
sex
offenses—told
police
where they could find the body of one
of three victims. And with that, and
other evidence, the 33-year-old unem-
ployed truck driver, Harold Ray Mem-
ro, was
arrested
and
charged
with
murder.
„ m
In nearby Downey and Torrance a
Dutch-born psychic named Jan Steers
figured in some of the most curious
police-psychic cases in Southern Cali-
fornia in the early 1970s.
The
small,
quiet,
middle-aged
psy-
chic, who has
since returned to
Hol-
land, is said by police officers to have
disclosed secret information about at
least
two
unsolved
murders
and—
over the telephone—was able
to
pin-
point the location
of a dying
police-
man within minutes of his
near-fatal
injury.
One
of
the
officers
who
worked
with the psychic in 1973 was Torrance
police detective Ray
Gross. One day
recently Gross recalled the first time
he met the psychic.
“It
was
the
strangest
thing,”
he
said.
“I was
staying
late
at the
sta-
tion one night when this man
called
me and began rattling off some stuff
about the Rolling Hills Theater mur-
der (in which four persons were slain
in
1972).
“The guy
insisted
that
if
I would
return
to
the
scene
of
the
crime,
I
would find a set of the killer s finger-
See PSYCHIC, G6, Col. 1
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THURSDAY,
much the same fashion as those in the
current study.
One
psychic,
he
said,
astonished
everyone
by
managing
to
“see”
a
crime involving a church while hold-
ing one of the test envelopes (the con-
tents
,of which described the murder
of a church
official).
:
In another example,
five of the
in-
dividually tested psychics “visualized”
a crime in which a car was especially
important (the case described
in the
test
envelope
concerned
a
murder
associated with an
auto
theft).
In spite of the infrequent surprises,
though, Reiser spelled out his disap-
pointment in a 14rpage research paper
entitled “An
Evaluation
of
the Use
of
Psychics
in
the
Investigation
of
Major
Crimes,”
to
be
published
in
L _:
*
t '
i
/
'
t ’fit
’
“
*
*
*
*
i
*
*
r
*
'
*
¥
t
/
*
*
f
Crimes
NOVEMBER
23,
1978
NATIONAL NEWS
G1
March by the Journal of Police Science
and Administration.
In
it Reiser concluded,
.
. Over-
all,
little,
if any, information was
eli-
cited
from
the
psychic
partici-
pants
that
would
provide
material
helpful
in
the
investigation
of
the
major crimes
in
question,”
' For years the stereotype of psychics,
in the words
of Los Angeles psychic
Kebrina Kinkade,
on
the whole
has
been “a bunch of nuts and kooks who
came out of the woodwork when a big
case broke.”
And
it
followed,
she
said,
that
if
police had brought a psychic in on a
particularly baffling case they cringed
at the thought of admitting it in pub-
lic for fear of censure.
That
may
be
changing.
Parapsy-
chology is the
subject
of
clinical re-
search at recognized universities, and
there
is a growing public belief that
some
individuals
may
be
(invested
with the ability to “see” through time
and distance.
South
Gate
police
detective
Wil-
liam Sims said his department had ex-
hausted
what
was
felt
to
be
every
lead
in
the
sex
murders
of
three
young boys between 1976 and Septem-
;
ber
1978. Then, through
an interme-
diary, Sims and a second officer
soli-
cited the aid of a local (and unidenti-
fied) woman
psychic
in her
40s.
)
The detective told the Los Angeles
Times he is still “spooked” at the way
the
psychic had been
able—without
a
single
clue
or
revealing
item
of
See PSYCHIC, G3, Col. 1
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