Episode Eleven: Psychic Detectives

 Episode summary: Can the finest psychics in St Louis help the police solve a murder? No, not really. 

Bike summary: 2.6 miles, 133.2 calories

This episode has a great opening, especially in light of the awareness (and over-glamorization) of forensic and scientific criminal investigation techniques popularized by the CSI franchise. A psychic detective called Peter Hurkos plays with some evidence with his bare hands while Leonard Nimoy asks in voiceover, "Can ESP be used to fight crime and find missing persons?"

We'll see more of this later with episodes about ghosts and some other things, but I think that the most entertaining episodes of this show are when it embraces the extremes of the TV documentary -- the highly fact based ones and the ones like this, where they put the cart before the horse and go with it. At no time do they ask "Does ESP exist?" anymore than they asked if Atlantis existed. It's like a window into a parallel 1970s where the paranormal is as ordinary and its uses as ubiqtuous as the internet is today.

From Hurkos the scene moves to Saint Louis, where some people regularly get together as the Psychic Rescue Squad. Most of the episode follows Bevy Jeagers, founder of the Rescue Squad. After a woman was murdered, police were unable to findf the body and the family asked the police to bring in Jeagers . . . who didn't find the body, either. In the episode they recreate how the police brought her to a range, where they let her get in the victim's car. She claimed she went into a kind of psychic trance and experienced the woman's last moments, a blow across the head and impressions of horses and streams. Then she drove around the suburbs known for horses until they gave up -- but they said that where they gave up driving was a bridge over a stream, while the body was discovered a few days later in a creek downstream of that bridge. 

It really isn't a lot to build an episode on, especially since it's clear that the psychics aren't allowed anywhere near the actual case. "Evidence" obtained by psychic means would be inadmissable in court, possibly causing a mistrial, nor could it be used as probable cause to obtain a warrant. The other problem with it is that they kind of fail to really explore how psychic abilities could be used to fight crime. 

Finding bodies and missing persons is all well and good, but it's kind of a niche application. Many times, we see psychics have to be able to touch things that belong to victims -- but crimes like embezzlement or money laundering don't even need the money to pass through the hands of the criminal. Similarly, they never show how the psychics would use their abilities to establish any facts that would be used to convict someone. 

Say you're trying to prove that X murdered Y on the night of July 10. You need a victim, a cause of death, a time of death, a weapon and an indication that X handled the weapon. Even that doesn't establish that X even killed Y. To prove a murder, you also need to prove that X and Y had a history of some sort, that X, even in a state of passion, was capable of making rational decisions (or at least of understanding the consequences of their actions). You also need to prove that Y wasn't the aggressor, that some freak accident didn't happen. There are a lot of things that go into a murder investigation just to establish a plausible or likely sequence of events -- and that doesn't begin to go into actually convincing a jury (well, some juries mighty be more easily convinced than others).

Podcast Summary

Blake sums up the episode nicely by describing the Psychic Rescue Squad as "If the Babysitters' Club had psychic powers" (I'm sure this a Scholastic YA series, by the way). 

They also describe it as looking like an adult extension course. I didn't live through it myself, but I feel like some community college probably did offer courses in ESP. 

They talk a lot about psychics and others don't charge for their services, but accept donations and how this is because of consumer protection laws -- if a psychic can't prove they have psychic powers despite advertising that they do, they can be sued or arrested for fraud. I did not know that, I know a lot of times they say they can't charge for using their putative powers for various mystical reasons (this isn't neccesarrily obfusication -- the clergy of many religions don't technically charge for performing the rites, which is simony in Christianity). 

They mentioned they found a treasure trove of information about the Sally Lucas case, but no mention of psychics involved in it. As I pointed out in my episode summary, psychic "evidence" is inadmissible in court, so that's not unexpected.  

Blake and Jeb also pointed out that Peter Hurkos was a fraud.        

As we all found it in the 90s, no one could have foreseen the closure of the Psychic Friends' Network. 

Take it away, Miss Cleo!