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'Psychic Detective' Dorothy Allison Dies - Brief Article - Obituary
Skeptical Inquirer, March, 2000 by Joe Nickell
Dorothy Allison--who gained fame, or infamy, as a self-proclaimed psychic sleuth--died on December 1, 1999, at age 74.
Although she convinced many reporters and even police that she had a criminological sixth sense, skeptics observed that the Nutley, New Jersey, great-grandmother propelled herself into prominence by a tried-and-true formula: arrive on the scene of high-profile cases, make numerous vague pronouncements and, after the true facts become known, interpret the statements accordingly--a technique known as "retrofitting."
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For example, a 1997 episode of TV's Crackdown on Crime said of Allison: "Nutley police asked her to find a missing five-year-old boy. She did. He had drowned in a pipe during a storm." In fact, however, every one of those statements is untrue. It was Allison who approached police with a "vision." Not only did she fail to locate the child's body, but she caused police to waste considerable resources in digging up a drainage pipe she had identified. The boy's body was actually discovered later, floating in a pond, by a man seeking a spot to bury his dead cat. But through the technique of retrofitting, Allison converted her failure into a seeming success, mentioning details of the boy's clothing that she had supposedly "seen" accurately.
In her obituary, The New York Times observed that Allison was unsuccessful in solving the Patty Hearst kidnapping, the "Son of Sam" killings, the Atlanta child murders, or the death of JonBenet Ramsey--all cases in which Allison insinuated herself. "Skeptics," noted the Times, "many armed with volumes of research, insist that psychics never solved a single crime." That was certainly true of Allison who nevertheless made a name for herself by convincing people otherwise.
COPYRIGHT 2000 Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal
COPYRIGHT 2003 Gale Group
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