Approved For Release 2003/09/09! C6MSRDP$600788R002000240037-5 *sychic’s Powers istound Police s PAUL BANNISTER Dutch psychic Warner Tholen has amazed and _iounded police and civilians alike with his uncanny _jlides to find missing bodies and lost articles -- ad ever predict the future. Among his successes, Tholen has: pinpointed for police »exact spots at which bodies of missing people would be ind, He has also: found the vehicle (and the miss- * Located urgently necded)ing man’s body) in the water. ter at an African mission — “Tholon really has incredible oman aerial photo. power. He’s been called in by @ Documented the precise} police many times.” jury of an astronaut at| {n another case, police found lashdown. the body of a missing 20-year-' Tholen has found many) gld man in water near Lelystad sing people and has helped)in the Netherlands — where -2 police Im a great miiy|Tholen told them it would be. ses,” revealed Prof. W.ILC.| At his home near Utrecht, the mnhaeff, 84, a : psychic produced a letter from ycholopy pro- the local police acknowledging, sor at Uni- “Without Tholen’s help we wolly of Ut- would never have solved this cht, who has case, We would not have found served Thol- * the body.” os Work, One of the most astonishing One uv 'Thol- successes of the 66-ycar-old Vg recent suc- se # psychic came when a mis- asses occurred 9 sionary priest, Rev. Nicholas hen the Dutch weenie, , Borst, appealed to him for help rte Police at “° ©" in finding desperately necded aethoorn usked him to help {water near his Catholic mission Sind a missing man, “Tholenjin Tanzania, Africa. . ee een ae at ee dd us to look in a particular| ‘“‘TIle sent me an aerial pho- water was found at 75 feet and pot at the Beukesgracht Ca-|tograph of the mission and the |at 112 fect — the exact depths ial,” recaiied Police Inspector |land around it,” Tholen said. ‘I the psychie had predicted, ‘endrick Schut. concentrated on the photograph In 1969, Prof, John Beloff of “There were the tracks of aland pinpointed the exact spot.” |the department of psychology, ear leading into the water. We| A letter of thanks that Father at the University of Edinburgh _ent for the river pulice and the t te to Tholen tells how | in Scotland, recorded Tholen’s ; oe ; prediction that the youngest of ihe Apollo astronauts would be slightly wounded on the right side of his head when landing, aad that they would not land in heir target region. On splashduwn, Nov. 24, 1969, Al Bean, youngest of the astro- bauts, received a blow over his} the one Tholen had described,’ right eye when he bumped into] said Dr. Janssen : a loose movie camera, and the eeainees ——~ ‘ capsule landed two miles off ‘ target — just as Tholen had pre- : dicted. In Tholen’s favorite case, he lucated plans for 800-year-old < Coevorden Castle, after a futile SSE ; four-nation search. WHERE BODY WAS FOUND: Inspector Hendrick Schut Tholen advised Dr. Corncille shows where } Chic directed _police. Janssen, architect and director 88R002000240037-5 UNCLASS LFIED of the Provenci: Museum 01 Drenthe in the Necherlands. “Look for a fair-sized b.usidl- ing to the southeast. There you will find a large carved, wooden chest painted red, green and white. In it you wil find a draw, ing of the tower.” Wher Dr Janssen went to a farm ‘us three milcs southeust of his ow! home, the farmer handed hi. . drawing of the tower. “The farmer told me that un. til two years before, they bi: been kept in a chest exactly lk
GaTHFISSVIONA Approved For Release 2003/09/09 : CIA-RDP96-00788R002000240037-5 a ryt L.A. Police By Mark Jones Los Angeles Times 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? >. How was it, thought a deputy dis- * triet 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 ET nn vor Foe fF Pe ee Cn a ease 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 eases. 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 searching Psychics’ psychies 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- Gividually 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 Approved For Release 2003/09/09 : CIA-RDP96-00788R002000240037-5 G#THISSVTIONA
Pay Approved For Release 2003/09/99 GlegRRE 98500788R002000240037-5 ” Vas L.A. Police Researching | Psychic’ ‘Crim ma - ee 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 ‘2° murder. In nearby Downey and Torrance a  Duteh-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- ne Solving disclosed: secret information about at recently Gross recalled the first time che met the psychic, chic, who has since returned to -Hol- land, is said by police officers to have 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 “Tt 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 q . nee TE an Approved For Release 2003/09/09;nCMARRP24-09,788R002000240037-5
Ga I4TSSvIONo Approved For Release 2003/09/09 : CIA-RDP96-00788R002000240037-5 / THURSDAY, COVEMRER 23, 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 ef 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 14-page research paper entitled “An Evaluation of the Use of Psychies in the Investigation of .. Major Crimes,” to be published in March by the Journal of Police Science and Administration. In it Reiser concluded, “. . . Over- all, little, if any, information was eli- cited from the 12 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- 1978 A a f ‘ Gl chology is the subject of clinical Te- search at recognized universities, and there is a growing public belief that ‘some individuals may be fnvested 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 ereecra Times he is still “spooked” at the way. , the psychic had been able—without a sitigle clue or revealing item of See PSYCHIC, G3, Col. 1 Approved For Release 2003/09/09 : CIA-RDP96-00788R002000240037-5 Ga T4ISSVIONA
h *. Approved For Release 2003/09/09 : CIA-RDP96-00788R002000240037-5 UNCLASSIFIED “Phirsday, 1 November 23,1978 THE WASHINGTON POST Psychics Crime Solving PSYCHIC, From G3. | ‘prints on the right door jamb, exactly | 4% inches up from the floor. - “Well,” said the detective, “my ’ gergeant and I figured what the heck. The guy was pretty insistent and, any- way, by that time we hadn’t any really - .solid leads in the case.” So the next day the detective re- turned to the theater, where he found a set of prints overlooked in the ori- ginal investigation and where the psyhcic said they'd be, Well, almost. They weren't 4%, ~ Tintches up from the floor, Gross said, "-"They were 4% inches.” The finger- — '. sprints Jater matched those of a sus- _*+SWhen the psychie volunteered to. _formation, time I figured that when the guy ar-. ~pect. comé to the station to share his in- Gross thought, “By this ‘yiyed I was going to throw him in the clink because he knew as much about .the murder as I did.” As it happened, however, the psychic had an unshak- able alibi. And more. ‘“When Steers began to tell the sergeant and myself about how the . Victims were laid out the night of the . murder-—and helieve me, he was cor- rect ‘all the way down the line—I got ‘white as a sheet,” the officer said. “I mean, there was just no way this man could have known what we found at the murder scene unless he was truly psychic.” The officer, who through his associ- . ation with Steers came to be humor- ously known by his fellow investiga- tors as “detective of the kook squad” (someone even put a miniature crystal ball on his desk one day), said also that the psychie’s predictions about the killer all checked out down to the 32-cal pistol hidden in his blood- stained boots the day of his eventual arrest, } The case never went to trial, _ though because the suspect hanged himself in the Torrance jail. “I don’t think you can say that psychics are a panacea in solving crimes,” the Torrance detective says. “But they can be an invaluable inves- tigating tool. I mean, you get the right investigator working in tune with the right psychic and a department could settle a lot more of their unsolved cases,” ' UNCLASSIFIED Approved For Release 2003/09/09 : CIA-RDP96-00788R002000240037-5