Ghosts & Gallows (19 page)

As the 1950s progressed, Croiset became nationally acclaimed throughout Holland for his abilities to help with the tracking down of missing persons. The case that firmly established this reputation took place in 1954. On 18 April, Easter Sunday, a four-year-old boy named Jacob Klerk was found to be missing, believed kidnapped, from his home in the town of Haarlem. Police stations throughout Holland were informed of the disappearance and a countrywide search for the child was soon underway. The Haarlam Police Commissioner, William Gorter, was interested in the fledgling subject of psychic detection and, off his own back, made a decision to telephone Croiset personally. The clairvoyant told the policeman over the line that he had an overwhelming impression that the missing Klerk boy was dead; he had drowned in the River Spaarne near a bridge and the body would be recovered within the week. Croiset described the setting: there was a caravan and some lorry trailers with bails of compressed peat, while beyond the river was a shipyard with a crane. The river was dragged but nothing was recovered and as the days began to pass the truth of Croiset’s vision began to fade. However, on 4 May 1954, the Dutchman was vindicated as, tragically, Jacob Klerk’s body was found floating in the Spaarne; the surroundings were as Croiset had described and it seemed likely the corpse had become fouled on a submerged root or other obstruction which had kept it submerged for nearly two weeks.

Gerard Croiset’s reputation as one of the world’s leading clairvoyant detectives or ‘paragnosts’ was firmly established in his native country by the work of Wilhelm Tenhaeff, but the person who played the most part in establishing the Dutchman’s international reputation was American magazine journalist, Jack Harrison Pollack. In February 1961, Pollack wrote an article entitled ‘Crime Busting With ESP’ on the use of psychics in police work for
This Week
magazine, which was syndicated to over forty big-circulation American Sunday newspapers including the New York
Herald Tribune
. The publication of the article, which included accounts of some of Croiset’s work with the Dutch police, coincided with the disappearance of a four-year-old girl, Edith Kiecorius, nicknamed ‘Google’, who was last seen playing outside her uncle’s Manhattan home at 170 Eighth Avenue on the afternoon of 22 February. An official of the KLM airline, who had read Pollack’s article, offered to fly both Croiset and Professor Tenhaeff out to New York but the psychic settled on working from his own home using a street map of the city plus articles belonging to Edith which were flown out by courier to Utrecht where, by this time, Croiset had been living for five years. The American police were following several lines of enquiry, one of which was that Edith Kiecorius had been seen with a woman at Chicago airport, but Croiset was adamant that she was still in New York; like the case of Jacob Klerk, the Dutchman also warned that the child was dead and had been taken away by a small man with sharp features in his mid fifties, who had taken her to a room on the second floor of a grey stone building in a neighbourhood that Croiset was able to describe in some detail.

Four days after she was reported missing, two New York policemen kicked down the door of a second floor room in a boarding house at 307 West Twentieth Street and found the body of Edith Kiecorius; she had been raped and bludgeoned to death. Three days later, a New Jersey farm worker, Fred J. Thompson, who detectives had found had rented the room the previous week, was picked up by police; he admitted the crime and was committed to the Mattewean Hospital for the Criminally Insane. Pollack subsequently checked details of the case and visited the area where the abduction had taken place. He found that Croiset had been highly accurate on a number of points including the description of the murderer, the boarding house where the body had been discovered and details of the surrounding area, while other points which were incorrect seemed to be more in the nature of near misses rather than total inaccuracies. Pollack later included the Kiecorius case among nearly a hundred other accounts of Croiset’s work reported by Tenhaeff and preserved by him in the archives of the Parapsychology Department at Utrecht in his book
Croiset the Clairvoyant
, which was published by W.H. Allen in 1965. For many in the English-speaking world, this was their first introduction to the psychic adventures of ‘The Miracle Man of Holland’.

During the 1950s and ’60s, as well as Gerard Croiset, other noted ‘paragnosts’ were gradually being brought to the attention of the public at large. In Sweden, a contemporary of Croiset was Olof Jonsson, an engineer by profession, who became known as a highly accurate clairvoyant and sensitive. Jonsson’s finest hour was to come in February 1971, when
Life Magazine
published an article about ESP experiments that had taken place through space between the psychic engineer (who at that time was living and working in Chicago) and the American astronaut Edgar Mitchell, then in orbit around the Earth in the Apollo 14 spacecraft. Much earlier, in 1952, Jonsson had assisted a Swedish journalist, Leif Sunde, who was writing an article about a series of violent murders that had taken place in and around the southern village of Tjörnarp. Thirteen people, all unconnected, had been attacked in their homes – stabbed or shot – and then robbed, after which the houses had been set on fire in an attempt to destroy any incriminating evidence. By the beginning of March 1952, when Jonsson accompanied Sunde to Tjörnarp, the police investigation had stalled, but when the psychic engineer was handed the charred remains of a rifle that had been recovered from one of the crime scenes, he instantly knew that the killer was one of the actual policemen assigned to work on the case and who had been acting as a guide to the visiting journalists. The following day, Officer Hedin, the man named by Jonsson, was found drowned in a local river; a suicide note contained a full confession to the crimes.

Another Dutchman who became something of a psychic celebrity, particularly in America, during the 1960s was Peter Hurkos (real name Pieter Van der Hurk), a former house painter and Dutch resistance fighter, who developed a vaudeville stage routine in the years following the Second World War psychometrizing photographs while blindfolded. Hurkos’ act impressed Dr Henry (known as Andrija) Pulharich, an American medical inventor and radical psychical researcher, who, in 1948, invited the Dutchman to the States to take part in laboratory experiments. While in America, Hurkos became involved in several high-profile murder cases including that of Melvin David Rees, a twenty-eight-year-old professional jazz musician known as the ‘Sex Beast’, who was executed in 1961 for killing nine people in Maryland and Virginia, including a family of four; and the case of the Boston Strangler, a notorious series of sex crimes carried out between June 1962 and January 1964 for which Albert DeSalvo (who was stabbed to death in prison in 1973) was regarded as the perpetrator. Hurkos in fact considered a Boston shoe salesman, subsequently detained permanently in a mental institution and known by the pseudonym Thomas P. O’Brien, to be the real killer. Hurkos, who died in 1988, often performed on television and described himself in his own autobiography as ‘the greatest psychic in the world’.

As the 1970s began to gather momentum, super-psychics like Hurkos, Croiset and Jonsson found themselves effortlessly eclipsed by the headline-grabbing activities of one man, an ex-Israeli soldier, fashion model and nightclub entertainer who became an instant media sensation as newspapers, radio and television, first in Germany and later Britain and America, quickly succumbed to the phenomenon of the ‘Geller Effect’. The alleged paranormal abilities of Uri Geller (born in Tel Aviv in 1946), whose powers famously include metal-bending, mind-reading and the ability to stop and start clocks and watches at will, are so well known that it is hardly surprising that middle-aged ‘paragnosts’ like Croiset and Hurkos, despite their impressive back catalogues of psychic crime busting, were unable to compete with such a young, dynamic and instantly controversial psychic star. With no exaggeration was the late John Beloff able to state, in his
Parapsychology: A Concise History
(1993), that ‘as with no other psychic of modern times is it harder to separate fact from fiction or to decide whether to treat him [Geller] as an ingenious entertainer or as a genuine purveyor of the paranormal’; particularly as under hypnosis, the spoon-bending Geller revealed (to Andrija Pulharich, who brought him to America in 1972) that his supernormal abilities came from a cosmic super-computer called ‘Spectra’ built by aliens from the planet Hoova.

If media coverage of psychic superstars like Uri Geller, together with sensational cases of haunting such as the ‘Amityville Horror’ (America’s very own Borley Rectory – see Chapter 14) and the Enfield Poltergeist, readily demonstrate an explosion of popular exploitation of the paranormal throughout the 1970s, for the world of parapsychology it was in reality a decade of crisis as academics struggling to make ghost hunting a respectable science faced some of their greatest challenges to date. In June 1974, Dr Joseph Banks Rhine, founder of the Institute for Parapsychology in Durham, North Carolina, one of the most respected and influential figures in twentieth-century paranormal investigation and often regarded as the ‘Father of Parapsychology’, discovered that one of his most trusted colleagues was faking the results of laboratory ESP experiments. Dr Walter Levy, whom Rhine had made Director of the Institute, and who was considered one of the rising stars of experimental psychical research, was caught falsifying data by two other staff members. Levy, who blamed his actions on the stress he had put himself under to produce successful results while carrying out his work, resigned; he claimed he had resulted to fraud ‘for the good of parapsychology’ but the damage was done. Four years later another bombshell exploded, this time on the other side of the Atlantic, when Betty Markwick, a member of the Society for Psychical Research, published conclusive evidence of similar data manipulation, this time by noted British mathematician and parapsychologist Samuel George Soal, during landmark ESP experiments he had carried out during the 1940s with South African photographer Basil Shackleton as the subject. Psychical researchers have since argued whether Soal’s actions (he died in 1975) were intentional, but it was enough to blot the posthumous copybook of not only Soal himself, but the respectability of organised paranormal investigation as a whole which, by the mid-1970s, had suddenly found itself under close and critical investigation. In 1976, Paul Kurtz, an American author and professor of philosophy at New York’s State University, had founded the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of the Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP), in effect an anti-paranormal thought police, whose concerted mission was (and still is) to expose as ‘flim flam’ and ‘pseudo-science’ what its sceptical members considered to be the threat posed by the public interest and acceptance of mediumship, astrology, ghosts and hauntings, on rational thought in both the United States and elsewhere. Scandals such as the Levy and Soal exposures were grist to the CSICOP mill, and there was to be more coming its way.

Piet Hein Hoebens, the chief editorial writer for Holland’s largest circulation newspaper
De Telegraaf
, was appointed as Chairman of the Netherlands branch of CSICOP, and in the late 1970s began looking closely at the University of Utrecht’s Parapsychology Department, and in particular the published work of the department’s head, Wilhem Tenhaeff, and his claims for the amazing psychic feats of his favourite ‘paragnost’, Gerard Croiset. After much consultation with police officials across Holland, the journalist discovered that practically all of Tenhaeff’s statements regarding Croiset’s successful solving of crimes and murder by psychic detection could not be substantiated. In 1983, by which time both Tenhaeff and Croiset were dead, Hoebens was able to state with supreme confidence that the Dutch psychical researcher ‘was not the cautious, dispassionate and honest scholar his many admirers believed him to be’ but was in fact ‘an extremely sloppy investigator who not infrequently indulged in outright manipulation of the data’; while his pet clairvoyant ‘was a master in the stockin-trade techniques of the “prophet”: collect information by normal means and feed it back as “telepathic impressions”.’ CSICOP had claimed two more impressive scalps: Tenhaeff died in isolation in 1981, ‘a disgrace to the field’, while the psychic sleuthing of the ‘miracle man of Holland’ was seemingly nothing more than plain old ‘double Dutch’.

Sadly, there is often little that can be done to rehabilitate the reputations of those persons who resort to fraud, be they mediums or researchers, as they are condemned by their own actions. A convenient ‘get out clause’ for psychics and clairvoyants is that of ‘mixed mediumship’, whereby a genuine sensitive, faced with failing powers or the pressure to perform successfully at every séance, will resort to trickery on occasions. Some psychical researchers have faced similar problems, a prime example being Harry Price over his reporting, in the latter part of his career, of the Borley Rectory haunting. Piet Hein Hoebens, however, was of the opinion (in following the ultra-sceptical party line of Paul Kurtz’s organisation) that all mediums and psychics are fakes and nothing they say can be trusted, a viewpoint which is totally unrealistic, as anyone who has looked in any detail at the evidence will come to realise. Wilhelm Tenhaeff may have been economical with the truth and some of his methods suspect, particularly as with other researchers such as Harry Price and Hans Holzer, he had a good relationship with the press and knew the value of popular publicity to his work, but to dismiss the case for genuineness in such a psychic as Gerard Croiset solely because of the reporting of one researcher is an unfair and illogical approach to establishing the truth. At Borley, the case for paranormality at ‘the most haunted house in England’ does not stand and fall with the work of Harry Price and, likewise, the posthumous reputation of ‘the wizard of Utrecht’ is not solely reliant on Wilhelm Tenhaeff. In both cases there exist testimonials independent of the principle investigators. This book is primarily concerned with British cases of murder and their association with paranormal, and in this respect we are fortunate in that what could be considered to be one of Gerard Croiset’s finest demonstrations of his power as a psychic detective is inextricably linked with one of Scotland’s noted unsolved cases of modern times.