Medium lösa mord

The Australian Institute of Criminology, Australia's official crime research agency, advises parents of missing children not to resort to using psychics who approach them.[57] Former FBI analyst and profiler Clint Van Zandt has criticized the use of psychic detectives and has stated that "What happens many times is that professed psychics allow themselves the benefit of 20/20 hindsight. After the case is solved, they make their previously vague predictions somehow fit the crime and the criminal."[58] A detailed 2010 study of Sylvia Browne predictions about 115 missing persons and murder cases has found that despite her repeated claims to be more than 85% correct, "Browne has not even been mostly correct in a single case.

Many prominent police cases, often involving missing persons, have received the attention of alleged psychics. In November 2004, purported psychic Sylvia Browne told the mother of kidnapping victim Amanda Berry, who had disappeared 19 months earlier: "She's not alive, honey." Browne also claimed to have had a vision of Berry's jacket in the garbage with "DNA on it". Berry's mother died two years later believing that her daughter had been killed; Berry was found alive in May 2013 having been a kidnapping victim of Ariel Castro along with Michelle Knight and Gina DeJesus. After Berry was found alive, Browne received criticism for the false declaration that Berry was dead. Browne also became involved in the case of Shawn Hornbeck, which received the attention of psychics after the eleven-year-old went missing on 6 October 2002. Browne appeared on The Montel Williams Show and provided the parents of Shawn Hornbeck a detailed description of the abductor and where Hornbeck could be found.[3] Browne responded "No" when asked if he was still alive. When Hornbeck was found alive more than four years later, few of the details given by Browne were correct. Shawn Hornbeck's father, Craig Akers, has stated that Browne's declaration was "one of the hardest things that we've ever had to hear", and that her misinformation diverted investigators wasting precious police time.[4][5]

When Washington, D.C. intern Chandra Levy went missing on 1 May 2001, psychics from around the world provided tips suggesting that her body would be found in places such as the basement of a Smithsonian storage building, in the Potomac River, and buried in the Nevada desert among many other possible locations.[6] Each tip led nowhere. A little more than a year after her disappearance, Levy's body was accidentally discovered by a man walking his dog in a remote section of Rock Creek Park.[7]

Following the disappearance of Elizabeth Smart on 5 June 2002, the police received as many as 9,000 tips from psychics (and others crediting visions and dreams as their source).[8] Responding to these tips took "many police hours", according to Salt Lake City Police Chief Lieutenant Chris Burbank. Yet, Elizabeth Smart's father, Ed Smart, concluded that: "the family didn't get any valuable information from psychics".[9] Smart was located by observant witnesses who recognized her abductor from a police photograph. No psychic was ever credited with finding Elizabeth Smart.

A 1993 survey of police departments in the 50 largest cities in the United States revealed that a third of them had accepted predictions from psychic detectives in the past, although only seven departments treated such information any differently from information from an ordinary source. No police department reported any instances of a psychic investigator providing information that was more helpful than other information received during the course of a case, since any information has to be proved, only information matching other evidence could be used.[36][37] A follow-up study looking at small and medium-sized cities in the United States, found that psychics were called upon by the police departments of those cities even less frequently than large cities.[38] A former senior investigator for the FBI has stated that psychics may be used "as a last resort [and] as an investigative tool with caution"[39] for providing clues not directly admissible in the court of law such as a criminal's character, or the location of dead bodies.

No psychic detective has ever been praised or given official recognition by the FBI or US national news for solving a crime, preventing a crime, or finding a kidnap victim or corpse.