Examining The 'Best Case' For Psychic Detectives
In 2008 while being interviewed for the Skeptiko podcast, managing editor of Skeptical Inquirer Magazine, Ben Radford challenged the host Alex Tsakiris to give him the best case for evidence of a psychic solving a crime. Tsakiris had "repeatedly accused skeptical investigators of purposely choosing the weakest cases". Radford agreed to investigate in depth a case from any period in history, around the world, "that presented the gold standard for evidence". Tsakiris chose psychic Nancy Weber who in 2006 appeared on an episode of the Biography Channel Psychic Investigators. Weber claimed to have helped the New Jersey police solve the serial murders of Amie Hoffman and Dierdre O'Brien from 1982. The police arrested James Koedatich in 1983 who was later found guilty of serial murder. Psychic Investigators interviewed Weber as well as the two police detectives she worked with, Hughes and Moore, who verified Weber had given them information she could not have known.
Radford spent the next 9 months reviewing the case, he and Tsakiris re-interviewed the detectives as well as the psychic on the Skeptiko podcast. Radford discovered that the detectives had not kept their notes from the case and their story had changed since the TV show aired, in fact he found that their stories now contradicted the psychic's story. A further discovery by Radford using a New Jersey phone book from 1982 found that if the psychic had indeed given the detectives all the evidence she claimed she had, the police could have discovered the killer with a 15 minute search through the phone book. Radford concludes that the police and the psychic "simply fell prey to... confirmation bias".
Read more about this topic: Psychic Detective
Famous quotes containing the word psychic:
“It seems to me that all of the evil in life comes from idleness, boredom, and psychic emptiness, but all of that is inevitable when you become accustomed to living at others’ expense.”
—Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (1860–1904)