Sleuthing a psychic sleuth

On February 7, 1996, I appeared on the Mark Walberg Show, a television program produced in the Big Apple.

Among other guests - who included an alien abductee and her hypnotherapist, a UFO conspiracy theorist, and a pair of ghost hunters - there were two "psychics," one of whom claimed to assist police departments. He was Ron Bard from southern New York state.

Walberg asked, "Ron, how did you discover this ability?"

Bard replied, "Well, it's been in my family for quite a few generations. I've solved over 110 murder cases and returned 150 missing children in my career so far," he boasted.

"And how did you help them . . . ?"

"The one that stands in my mind most," Bard replied, "was two girls found in plastic bags in Harrison, New York. Anybody can call the Chief of Harrison Police Department and find this out for fact," he challenged.

I resolved to do just that.

Bard continued: "They found two girls in plastic bags. We went to the scene. The gifts weren't identifiable. We identified the girls, found an unmarked key in the pocket, went to the south Bronx, unlocked the door - there is a lot of putting the evidence together inevitably - the key worked in the lock and that's how we found the murderer" (Bard 1996).

This certainly sounded like an amazing case of psychic power. Unfortunately, an examination of news stories relating to the case (Gannett 1984) and the testimony of the Harrison police chief (Dorio 1996a, 1996b) paint quite a different picture.

The first newspaper account was March 9, 1984. It reported that "the bound, frozen bodies of two unidentified women, possibly teenagers" - each in a green trash bag tied at the top with rope - had been discovered near Harrison High School. "One of the women was white, the other black," the newspaper reported. "Both had their hands tied behind their backs with twine, and were curled up, almost in a fetal position." A detective was quoted as saying that the young women appeared to have been dumped at the site after being killed - the cause of death not yet having been determined.

Subsequent reports told of the difficulty police were having in learning the identities of the two victims, neither of whom was carrying identification. The victims had been fully clothed, and there was no evidence of sexual abuse. They had died from suffocation. An item found in one of the plastic bags - which police would not identify at the time led them to a particular area of the Bronx. The item was a key that had been made in a store on Southern Boulevard, so the police search was focused on that vicinity.

In just over a month, police circulars bearing descriptions and morgue photos of the victims, together with articles in a Spanish-language newspaper, had brought forth the parents of one young woman and the mother of another - each looking for a missing child. They identified their respective daughters as Daisy Rivera, 20, and Iris Comacho, 15, both of the Bronx and both Hispanic. The key in Miss Rivera's possession fit the door to her apartment. Before that, according to an April 15 newspaper account, police thought the key might have belonged to the murderer.

Eventually, after a five-month investigation of the case, in the aftermath of a drug raid in Yonkers, police were able to arrest three men for the murders. Eyewitnesses named those responsible and told how one man had ordered the older of the two females killed because he thought she was an undercover agent, and the teenage girl because she had said something that offended him. Each of the three killers was convicted and sentenced to two consecutive sentences of twenty-five years to life the maximum under New York law (Gannett 1984).

Only a couple of news reports relating to the case referred to a psychic. And, although no name was given, it was not Ron Bard but his mother (Dorio 1996a). "She" was described in the news reports as a "volunteer psychic." Her involvement had been permitted by the lieutenant in charge of the case, who spoke of what he considered her accuracy in the case. One account attributes to him the statement that she helped both to identify the bodies and hone in on the murderer, while another account quotes him as saying, "She helped primarily for identification." In fact, she helped in neither way.

If the psychic had indeed helped in the identification, the lieutenant would have to have withheld that information from his own detectives. We know this because a major detective on the case was the current Harrison police chief, Louis Dorio, who insists that "the identification was done by sheer police work, not a psychic" (Dorio 1996b).

Indeed, the lieutenant himself admitted that "what she told us didn't really lead to things, but after we discovered answers, we could confirm what she told us." This, in fact, is the major technique used by so-called "police psychics" and it is called retrofitting. The alleged clairvoyant tosses out several "clues," like "water" and "the number 7." Typically, these are merely puzzling to the police, but after they solve the crime by ordinary if often dogged detective work, the psychic retroactively fits the "clues" to the now-known facts. Credulous police officers may even assist in this. "Water" can be a creek, lake, pond, ocean, etc., or Riverview Drive, a water tower overlooking the site, a rainy day, or - well, you get the idea. "The number 7" could be Highway 7 or 70, even 27; or it could refer to the number of miles the murder site is from town, the number of people in the search party, a number in a license plate, a period of time, or some other interpretation.