A psychic detective is a person who investigates crimes by using purported paranormal psychic abilities. Examples 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.
Lori Kay Soares Hacking was a Salt Lake City, Utah woman who was murdered by her husband Mark Douglas Hacking in 2004. She was reported missing by her husband, and the search gained national attention before her husband confessed to the crime.
Janelle Patton was a 29-year-old Sydney woman who was murdered on Norfolk Island on 31 March 2002. The case made national headlines in Australia and New Zealand, as she was the first person to be murdered on Norfolk Island since 1893.
Sarah MacDiarmid was a 23-year-old Scottish-Australian woman who disappeared from Kananook railway station in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia on 11 July 1990. She is presumed murdered, although no trace of her body has ever been found.
Marcus Delon Wesson is an American mass murderer and child rapist, convicted of nine counts of first-degree murder and 14 sex crimes, including the rape and molestation of his underage daughters. His victims were his children, fathered through incestuous sexual abuse of his daughters and nieces, as well as his wife's children. He has been described as the worst mass murderer of Fresno, California.
The Snowtown murders were a series of murders committed by John Justin Bunting, Robert Joe Wagner and James Spyridon Vlassakis between August 1992 and May 1999, in and around Adelaide, South Australia. A fourth person, Mark Haydon, was convicted of helping to dispose of the bodies. The trial was one of the longest and most publicised in Australian legal history.
Peter Falconio was a British tourist who disappeared in a remote part of the Stuart Highway near Barrow Creek in the Northern Territory of Australia on the evening of 14 July 2001, while travelling with his girlfriend Joanne Lees.
This is a timeline of major crimes in Australia.
Johnny Allen is a fictional character from the BBC soap opera EastEnders, played by Billy Murray. He first appeared on 4 January 2005 and became the show's primary antagonist until the character was killed off on 20 October 2006.
Murder Investigation Team was a British police procedural drama/cop thriller series produced by the ITV network as a spin-off from the long-running series, The Bill. The series recounts the activities of the Metropolitan Police's Murder Investigation Team, who are led by D.I. Vivien Friend and D.S. Rosie MacManus. The series, also starring Diane Parish, Steven Pacey and Michael McKell, produced 12 episodes between 3 May 2003 and 1 August 2005. In September 2005, The Sun reported that ITV would not be commissioning a third series.
Terrance John Clark, also known by the aliases Terry Sinclair, Alexander James Sinclair, Tony Bennetti, the Australian Jackal and Mr Big, was the head of the Mr Asia drug syndicate, which imported heroin into New Zealand, Australia and the United Kingdom in the 1970s. In fact, Clark was the 'second' head man of the syndicate and became the lead having successfully plotted the murder of Marty Johnstone, the man who became known as Mr Asia.
David John Birnie and Catherine Margaret Birnie were an Australian couple from Perth who murdered four women at their home in 1986, also attempting to murder a fifth. These crimes were referred to in the press as the Moorhouse murders, after the Birnies' address at 3 Moorhouse Street in Willagee, a suburb of Perth.
It is possible to convict someone of murder without the purported victim's body in evidence. However, cases of this type have historically been hard to prove, often forcing the prosecution to rely on circumstantial evidence, and in England there was for centuries a mistaken view that in the absence of a body a killer could not be tried for murder. Developments in forensic science in recent decades have made it more likely that a murder conviction can be obtained even if a body has not been found.
The Xue family murder and abandonment case involves the murder by New Zealand man Nai Yin Xue of his wife Anan (Annie) Liu (劉安安), in Mt Roskill, Auckland, on 11 September 2007, and his subsequent abandonment of their three-year-old daughter, Qian Xun Xue also known as Clare Xue and nicknamed "Pumpkin" by the police and media, at Southern Cross station in Melbourne, Australia. Nai Yin then fled to the United States, settling undercover across the southern states, before being captured by members of the ethnic Chinese community of Chamblee, Georgia and handed over to police. He was deported to New Zealand, and convicted of the murder of his wife in June 2009. He refused to confess to the murder until a parole hearing in 2020, when he finally expressed remorse.
Judith Maryanne Moran is the matriarch of the Moran criminal family of Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, involved in the Melbourne gangland killings.
Celia Natasha "Tasha" Douty was a British-born Australian resort worker who was murdered on Brampton Island in Queensland, Australia. The crime remained unsolved until 2001, when Sydney motor industry finance Business Manager, Wayne Butler, was found guilty. It was the first murder in Australia to be solved using DNA profiling. The prosecution relied heavily on DNA evidence and it became a case study for the use of the technique in court.
Huang Na was an eight-year-old Chinese national residing in Pasir Panjang, Singapore, who disappeared on 10 October 2004. Her mother, the police and the community conducted a three-week-long nationwide search for her. After her body was found, many Singaporeans attended her wake and funeral, giving bai jin and gifts. In a high-profile 14-day trial, Malaysian-born Took Leng How, a vegetable packer at the wholesale centre, was found guilty of murdering her and hanged after an appeal and a request for presidential clemency failed.
Ivan Robert Marko Milat, commonly referred to in media as the Backpacker Murderer, was an Australian serial killer who abducted, assaulted, robbed and murdered two men and five women in New South Wales between 1989 and 1992. His modus operandi was to approach backpackers along the Hume Highway under the guise of providing them transport to areas of southern New South Wales, then take his victims into the Belanglo State Forest where he would incapacitate and murder them. Milat is also suspected of having committed many other similar offences and murders around Australia.
In the early hours of August 13, 2018, in Frederick, Colorado, American oil field operator Christopher Lee Watts murdered his pregnant wife Shanann (34) by strangulation, and their two children Bella (4) and Celeste (3) by smothering them. He buried Shanann in a shallow grave near an oil-storage facility, and dumped his children's bodies into crude oil tanks. Watts initially maintained his innocence in his family’s disappearance, but was arrested on August 15 after confessing in an interview with detectives to murdering Shanann. He later admitted to murdering his children.
The Mount Isa Murders, also known as the Spear Creek Killings, took place 12 km (7.5 mi) from the small North Queensland town of Mount Isa at Spear Creek. While there have been a number of other murders, the term "Mount Isa Murders" here refers to the Spear Creek Killings. This triple murder took place in October 1978 and remained unsolved until an arrest was made in April 2019.
