A psychic detective is a person who purports to investigate crimes using paranormal psychic abilities. Claimed techniques and abilities have included postcognition, psychometry, telepathy, dowsing, clairvoyance, and remote viewing. In murder cases, psychic detectives may purport to be in communication with the spirits of the murder victims.
Jane Nartare Beaumont, Arnna Kathleen Beaumont and Grant Ellis Beaumont, collectively referred to as the Beaumont children, were three Australian siblings who disappeared from Glenelg Beach near Adelaide, South Australia, on 26 January 1966 in a suspected abduction and murder.
The Wanda Beach Murders, also known simply as "Wanda", were the unsolved murders of Marianne Schmidt and Christine Sharrock at Wanda Beach near Cronulla in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia, on 11 January 1965. The victims, both aged 15, were best friends and neighbours from the suburb of West Ryde, and their partially buried bodies were discovered the next day. The brutal nature of the slayings and the fact that they occurred on a deserted, windswept beach brought massive publicity to the case. By April 1966, police had interviewed some 7,000 people, making it the largest investigation in Australian history. It remains one of the most infamous unsolved Australian murder cases of the 1960s, and New South Wales' oldest unsolved homicide case.
Mr Cruel is the moniker for an unidentified Australian serial child rapist who attacked three girls in the northern and eastern suburbs of Melbourne in the late 1980s and early 1990s. He is also the prime suspect in the 1991 abduction and murder of a fourth girl, Karmein Chan. His moniker came from a headline in the Melbourne newspaper The Sun.
Morphett Vale is a southern suburb of Adelaide, South Australia in the City of Onkaparinga. It is the largest suburb in the state, with a population of more than 23,000 and an area of 12.76 km2, followed by Paralowie with nearly 10,000 fewer residents. There are approximately 1,000 businesses in Morphett Vale. The suburb is bordered by Sheriffs/Pimpala Road, Panalatinga Road, Doctors/Beach Road, and the Southern Expressway.
The Family Murders is the name given to a series of five murders in Australia, speculated to have been committed by a loosely connected group of individuals who came to be known as "The Family". This group was believed to be involved in the kidnapping and sexual abuse of a number of teenage boys and young men, as well as the torture and murder of five young men aged between 14 and 25, in Adelaide, South Australia, in the 1970s and 1980s.
Hannah Foster was a 17-year-old British student who was abducted after a night out in Southampton in mid-March 2003. Murdered by Indian immigrant Maninder Pal Singh Kohli, who had come to the UK in 1993, her body was found in nearby West End, Hampshire, two days after she disappeared. A few days later, Kohli fled to his family's home in Chandigarh, India, later assuming a new identity in Darjeeling, but was finally extradited in 2007. He was found guilty of the crime in 2008, and was sentenced to life imprisonment with a 24-year non-parole period.
Christopher Bernard Wilder, also known as the Beauty Queen Killer and the Snapshot Killer, was an Australian-American serial killer who abducted at least twelve young women and girls, killing eight of them during a six-week, cross-country crime spree in the United States in early 1984. Wilder's series of murders began in Florida on February 26, 1984, and continued across the country through Texas, Oklahoma, Colorado, Nevada and California, with attempted abductions in Washington and New York. Wilder victimized attractive young women, most of whom he would entice by promising to take their pictures. After subduing them, he would torture and rape them before shooting, stabbing with a knife, or strangling them to death. Two or more of his victims were electrocuted using a makeshift electrical cord.
Maura Murray is an American woman who disappeared on the evening of February 9, 2004, after a car crash on Route 112 near Woodsville, New Hampshire, a village in the town of Haverhill. Her whereabouts remain unknown. Murray was a 21-year-old nursing student completing her junior year at the University of Massachusetts Amherst at the time of her disappearance.
Arthur Stanley Brown was an Australian man charged for the 26 August 1970 rape and murders of Judith and Susan Mackay in Townsville, Queensland. In his 2000 trial, the jury failed to reach a verdict, and a new trial was blocked on the grounds that Brown was too senile to be tried again. Brown's arrest attracted wide publicity, leading to a witness to the 1973 Adelaide Oval abductions identifying Brown as the suspect she had seen. Brown is thus considered a prime suspect for both these abductions and the Beaumont children disappearance in 1966 as well as for several other murders.
Claudia Elizabeth Lawrence is an English woman who was last seen and heard from on 18 March 2009. She was employed as a chef at the University of York's Goodricke College at the time of her disappearance. Although the police have treated Lawrence's case as that of murder, with various people arrested but later released, her fate is unclear.
Jaidyn Raymond Leskie was the Australian child of Bilynda Murphy and Brett Leskie, murdered in 1997. Leskie is believed to have died of head injuries. Despite intense public interest, several leads, and the arrest and trial of a prime suspect, Leskie's murder remains unsolved. Although the decision was made in 2002 not to hold an inquest into the toddler's death, the case remained in the news for several more years. An inquest was later held in 2006, implicating the mother's boyfriend, Greg Domaszewicz, who at the time of the kidnapping was babysitting the boy at his house at Newborough. The exact circumstances of Leskie's disappearance and death were never clear, and were complicated by vandalism at the house on the evening of the toddler's disappearance; several false tips and pranks about the boy's fate; and the body not being discovered until six months later.
Ireland's Vanishing Triangle is a term commonly used in the Irish media when referring to a number of high-profile disappearances of Irish women from the late 1980s to the late 1990s. Several other women were also murdered within the triangle and their cases remain unsolved as well. All of the cases appeared to share some common characteristics. The women's ages range from their late-teens to late-30s, they disappeared inexplicably and suddenly, and no substantial clues or evidence of their fate has ever been found despite large-scale searches and campaigns by the Gardaí to find them. Gardaí believe their remains are likely to be buried in remote fields, bogs and forests. The triangle is in the eastern part of the island, roughly the boundaries of Leinster, in an 80-mile area outside Dublin.
Joanne Ratcliffe and Kirste Jane Gordon were two Australian girls who went missing while attending an Australian rules football match at the Adelaide Oval on 25 August 1973. Their disappearance, and presumed abduction and murder, became one of South Australia's most infamous crimes. The presumed murders are thought by South Australia Police and the media to be related to the disappearance of the Beaumont children in 1966. The case is sometimes referred to as the Adelaide Oval abductions.
Derek Ernest Percy was an Australian serial killer and convicted child killer who was also a person of interest linked to the mysterious deaths and disappearances of multiple children in the 1960s, including the Beaumont disappearances and the Wanda Beach murders.
Madison "Maddy" Geraldine Scott was a Canadian woman who disappeared on 28 May 2011, after a party she attended at Hogsback Lake, 25 kilometers southeast of Vanderhoof, British Columbia.
Jonelle Matthews was a 12-year-old American girl who disappeared near Greeley, Colorado, on December 20, 1984. Her remains were discovered on July 24, 2019, by construction workers putting in a new pipeline 15 miles (24 km) from her home. Steven Pankey was sentenced to life imprisonment on October 31, 2022, after his arrest and trial for Matthews' murder.
On July 30, 1985, eight-year-old Nicole Louise Morin left her penthouse apartment on the 20th floor of an apartment building in the Etobicoke borough of Toronto, Ontario, Canada, to meet a friend in the lobby for a swim date. She never arrived and has not been seen or heard from since. The Toronto Police Service launched the biggest missing-person investigation in their history, forming a 20-member task force and investing more than 25,000 man-hours following up leads. No physical evidence has ever been found to solve the disappearance. While it is now considered a cold case, Toronto police and missing-child organizations continue to keep it in the public eye in an effort to garner fresh leads. They have produced several video re-enactments of Morin's last known movements and released age-enhanced photographs coinciding with anniversaries of her disappearance.
Darren Jason Shannon was an 11-month-old Australian baby who disappeared on 9 June 1973.
On July 13, 2023, nursing student Carlethia Nichole Russell allegedly disappeared for 49 hours from her home in Hoover, Alabama, falsely reporting to police afterwards that she had been abducted. The story of her disappearance went viral on TikTok and other social media platforms. On July 24, Russell admitted that she had fabricated the story, and had not been abducted. She was sentenced to a year's probation in March 2024.
