Psychic Sleuths and The Examination of Psychic Detectives' Claimed Abilities
To assess the then-growing claims of psychic crime-solving, the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (now Committee for Skeptical Inquiry) created a "task force" of investigators headed by Joe Nickell, PhD, a former magician, mentalist, and investigator for the world famous Pinkerton Detective Agency. The result was a book, introduced and edited by Nickell, titled Psychic Sleuths: ESP and Sensational Cases (1994), and containing a final analysis of claims by psychologist James Alcock.
Psychic Sleuths—still perhaps the only truly skeptical, book-length treatment of the subject—demonstrated that claims of psychic crime-solving repeatedly failed scrutiny. A major ploy the claimants used was a technique called "retrofitting" (or after-the-fact matching). For example, the psychic offers several vague "clues"—such as "I see water; I'm getting the number 7; and so on"—which are invariably of little use to police. However, after the facts become known, the psychic attempts to fit them to the earlier offerings. (For instance, a corpse may have been near a stream, pond, lake, or other body of water, and the number 7 might be made to seem a fit by pointing out that the location was 7 miles out of town, or off Highway 7, or 27, or the like.) Retrofitting has duped even seasoned homicide detectives.
Most of the cases investigated for Psychic Sleuths depended on retrofitting, the apparent use of cold reading (a psychic's artful technique of fishing for information while appearing to gain it paranormally), and other ploys such as exaggeration.
In light of erstwhile "best-cases" that are sometimes touted (see below), Psychic Sleuths offers a remarkable example:
After a nurse went missing in Los Angeles in 1980, an ordinary woman claimed to have a "vision" of the nurse's murdered body. Not only did the unlikely psychic pinpoint the area on a map, but she actually arrived at the location of the body ahead of police! Nickell observes, however, that Smith failed a lie detector test, gave conflicting accounts of her "vision" and could have learned the location indirectly: as it happened, the killers were eventually caught because one of them had boasted about the crime in his neighborhood
Read more about this topic: Psychic Detective
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