Michael Prescott's Blog

A little more on Jacqui Poole

To learn more about the Jacqui Poole vase, which I've discussed previously, I ordered a used copy of A Voice from the Grave, by Christine Holohan and Vera McHugh (2006; out of print). Holohan is the medium who features so prominently in the story. 

The book didn't provide a whole lot of new information, but it did clear up a few points. For me, the most interesting section was the appendix, which includes correspondence between SPR researcher Montague Keen and the police officer, Tony Batters, who took Holohan's testimony. Incidentally, throughout the book, Tony Batters is described as a detective, but according to other sources he was a uniformed patrol cop at the time of the initial investigation. Years later, Superintendent Tony Lundy, who dismisses Holohan's contribution to the case, wrote: 

Tony Batters was never a Detective. He was a beat constable and was the officer who attended the scene when the murder was discovered. Because of his local knowledge and keeness to help, I seconded him to the investigation team. He went to interview Christine Holohan with a Detective Constable and became somewhat obsessed with her views, and remains so!

However, Lundy neglects to mention that the detective constable (Andrew Smith) who accompanied Batters to his meeting with Holohan was equally imporessed with Holohan, and signed an affadivit vouching for the accuracy of the SPR report. 

In response to a question from Keen, Batters writes: 

Within minutes of my finding the body, I answered tel. 3 calls from:

Betty Hunt, JP's mother

Gloria Robbins, her close close friend/confidante

Sylvia Lee, wife of George Lee Senior

Nobody else rang in the entire five hours I was there ...

I thought it interesting that Christine appears to mention the three who rang me at the scene, viz. Betty, Sylvia, and 'someone who lives about a newsagents' (Gloria).

He's referring to the fact that Holohan gave five names in her testimony (not counting the murderer's nickname, "Pokie") and three of those five matched the three people who called Poole's apartment while Batters was investigating. The other two were Terry (Poole's brother) and Barbara Stone (a woman unknown to police at the time, who had been Poole's best friend until her death in a car accident about a year before Poole's murder). 

Then there is this exchange, prompted by the fact that Holohan indicated that a St Christopher's medal had been stolen: 

[Keen:] Is there any evidence that a St Christopher was among the stolen goods?

[Batters:] The fact was part of a sequential list compiled from info provided by friends and family after the initial list. These were documented evidence. The first list featured only items of major value, e.g. bracelets, rings, necklaces. I remember distinctly that the St Christopher (the only item with a picture thereon) was not mentioned until further inquiries were made during Week 2. 

Keen asks how it is possible to know that Poole changed her clothes twice on the day of her death, something Holohan reported. Batters replies that the greengrocer for whom she worked saw her in one outfit, the father of her boyfriend saw her in a  second outfit, and she was killed while wearing a third outfit - facts that came out at the trial. 

Keen also wants to know why a news article described the murderer, "Pokie" Ruark, as Poole's ex-lover. Batters answers: 

I have not seen the Times article, but Ruark claimed at the trial that he had been a secret lover – in an attempt to justify the presence of his DNA.

Holohan says the same thing earlier in the book: "He completely changed his story and claimed that he had been having an affair with Jacqui, which would explain any traces of his DNA found on her clothing."

The prosecution, however, was able to prove that the DNA transfer indicated a violent, not an intimate, relationship. For instance, Poole had clawed at Ruark, getting some of his skin under her fingernails. 

It seems to me that the skin found under the nails would be the most crucial evidence, but Batters insists that the pullover removed from Ruark's garbage was key: 

The crux was the DNA exchanges between his pullover, and hers, as developed in 1999 to 2000 by forensics officers. They gave evidence at the trial. I believe that, in the absence of Christine's timely info and fast reactions by officers, Ruark's pullover would have been lost to the bin man. Ruark's pullover was the most damning evidence.

I'm not sure why this evidence would be more damning than the evidence showing that she scratched Ruark in a violent struggle, and I am still skeptical of this point. In another response, Batters writes: 

The case was re-opened in 2000, amidst hundreds of other cold cases which were aided by the development of DNA, particularly Low Copy Number technology. The findings were completely conclusive, identifying numerous exchanges of bodily fluids, skin cells and clothing fibers between the victim and her killer Pokie Ruark. Not least significant of these was his DNA under her fingernails. The chances of error were quoted to the court as less than one in one billion.

"Not least significant" strikes me as a peculiar way of putting it. It seems to me that Batters may have downplayed the fingernail evidence and exaggerated the pullover's importance in order to maximize Holohan's contribution to the case. But perhaps if I knew more details of the trial, I would see his point. 

Other comments by Batters: 

[Holohan] described the scene just as I had found it, including the victim's position, clothing and injuries. In a step-by-step reconstruction of the crime, she relayed a series of events which seemed to match the evidence.

For example, we initially thought the incident had taken place in the lounge, but she insisted it started in the bathroom. There was an overturned rug there, and a towel-rail that had been pulled from the wall, later confirmed to us as very recent damage …

In a series of apparent trances, Christine related information which she claimed to be receiving psychically. She described the murderer in great detail, his age and month of birth, height, skin and hair coloring, 3 tattoos, and the type of work he did. She mentioned his criminal history, and referred to a recent insurance fraud which he subsequently admitted to us. We were to look for scratches, later attributed by him to a collision with a hedge. He would have had a social connection with the victim through a friend who was in prison, and had visited the address before to perform a task. Indeed he had done – to check the fuse box which he was to switch off during the murder months afterward. She warned that some of the killer's associates would support his alibi, and that none of them would believe he was capable of violence. Each of these facts applied to the the man who has now been convicted ...

We were never to find the remotest connection between her and anyone who could have told her all that she seemed to know. In theory, and given enough time and resources, she could have collected much of her information through contact with the actual killer or someone in whom he confided, and with the victim's relatives and friends, and also with Murder Squad officers. I collated every statement and document throughout the 1983-4 investigation. However bizarre the conclusion, the only single source of all her knowledge had to be the victim …

The disclosures to Christine, if 'terrestrial', would have required rapid collusion between many people who were not friends.

The main part of the book is mostly a recapitulation of material presented in Keen and Playfair's SPR Journal article, combined with information on Holohan's childhood and her life after the Poole case. I found only a couple of points of interest.

One is that Holohan's version of the psychometry demonstration she performed for the two police officers varies from that described in the SPR report. She writes:

I told him [Smith] that he would need to get the house that he was thinking of buying rewired or he would not get the mortgage. 

In the SPR report, we are told that Holohan mentioned to Smith only that he had recenttly received an important letter pertaining to electrical work. This was true, but the context - buying a house and needing to bring the wiring up to code - was reportedly not part of Holohan's statement. The difference is probably attributable to lapses in memory after 23 years. 

Holohan also writes: 

I went into the village on Monday morning and overheard two women talking about a young woman by the name of Jacqueline Poole, who had been murdered in the area. 

This fact was mentioned in the SPR report, but is worth underlining, as it shows that Holohan made no secret of having heard local gossip about the case. Skeptics, as we have seen, will say that she developed most or all of the information she provided to the police from gossip, but the scope and specificity of what she had to say, as well as the fact that she mentioned details unknown to anyone outside of law enforcement make this explanation unsatisfactory. Moreover, gossip typically includes many untrue claims, but Holohan's testimony to the police was confirmed in 121 out of 130 specific points, with most of the remainder being impossible to prove or disprove, and only one claim, the day of the murder, being demonstrably wrong. It is doubtful that gossip and rumor would yield such a high success rate. 

Holohan also conveyed various details unknown to anyone but the murderer: the fact, not known to police until later, that a St. Christopher's medal had been stolen; the fact that the attack began in the bathroom, when police believed the crime had begun in the living room; the fact that the murderer had recently committed insurance fraud; the fact that the murderer had visited Poole's address on an earlier occasion to perform a task; and the fact (presumably unknown to police at this early stage, and not verified until the trial almost twenty years later) that Poole wore three different outfits on the day of her death.  

A simple synchronicity

I just read Linda Ronstadt's charmingly unpretentious memoir Simple Dreams, which I enjoyed very much. Many celebrity memoirs are tell-all, score-settling brag-o-grams, but none of this is true of Ronstadt's effort, which she appears to have written without the aid of a ghostwriter. She is unstinting in her praise of her colleagues and rivals, barely touches on her romances, and underplays her own commercial success to the point where a reader unfamiliar with the pop music scene of the '70s and '80s might be forgiven for wondering if she was really that big a deal. Even the Booklist reviewer seems to have been a bit misled in this regard, writing that Ronstadt "sold more than a million records" in her career. (The actual figure is north of 30 million records in the US alone.) 

One little incident recounted in Simple Dreams struck me as interesting in terms of the stuff we talk about on this blog. It's a very specific synchronicity:

The inspiration [of performing overseas in smaller venues] was short lived. We were soon back in the USA, pounding the same old circuit in the same distinctly uninspiring arenas. Add to this the gnawing loneliness of life lived perpetually in motion, with not enough time in any one place to nurture relationships or build trust. I was beginning to feel miserable. And trapped.

One night we were playing in Atlanta. We had spent the afternoon fooling around in the little shops that had been established in what is called Underground Atlanta, the recently excavated, fire-charred remains of the pre-Civil War city. Big, smudgy, black-ringed eyes were in style then, and I found what seemed like a particularly exotic way to achieve it in one of the little shops. It was an ancient cosmetic called kohl – new to my experience – which was some kind of black mineral ground into a fine powder, and recently shipped in from India. There was also a blue one, which was a departure for me, but I figured if I couldn't change my life so easily, I could at least change the color of my eye makeup, so I bought that too. It was packaged in a little clay pot with a pointed wooden stick screwed into the lid to use as an applicator.

I was hot to try it out and went immediately to the dressing room of the place we were playing (another arena) and started to smear the stuff around my eyes. The applicator stick and powdered medium were unfamiliar and clumsy for me to use, and I had accidentally dotted my cheeks with what looked like the blue measles. I finished the job of cleaning off all the little stray blue blobs and wondered what I was going to do for the forty-five minutes until I had to sing. I had finished the book I kept in my purse and was scowling at the concrete floor – wishing we were still in a European theater with cherubs [on the walls] and that I didn't have to face an all-night drive in the bus after the show – when someone knocked on the door, bringing me out of my little sulk. It was one of the security guards, who handed me a book that someone had sent backstage with a note attached saying that it was something he or she thought I might like. "Oh goody!" I thought. "Now I won't have to be bored."

I looked at the cover: The Vagabond, by Colette. "Never heard of this book," I thought. Never heard of Colette, either. She had just one name. Like Cher.

I opened the book and began to read. The story is set in France in 1910. La Belle Epoque! My favorite era! There is a woman about my age who performs in music halls sitting backstage in her dressing room. She is applying blue greasepaint circles around her eyes, and some of it has run down her face. Blue for her too? She also uses kohl. Kohl again! I just heard of the stuff that afternoon.

What else? She is kind of bored. She has already read the book she has with her. She is waiting to go onstage and do her act. She has lost inspiration to continue in her career as "a woman of letters" and just trying to establish herself as "a woman on the stage." Things are not going as well as they could, and she knows that she is "in for a bad fit of the blues." She is thinking about her dog and her kind-of-awkward boyfriend whom she misses somewhat. There is a knock on her door …

I have a beloved Akita dog and an awkward boyfriend somewhere. I feel that I'm "in for a bad fit of the blues." I can relate!

I finished the book that night on the long bus ride. I started to ponder: How can I work in a more theatrical setting, in smaller theaters, and not a different place every night?

As she tells it, immediately afterward she called a friend in New York for advice. He suggested that she come to New York and meet Joseph Papp, the innovative producer known for his "Shakespeare in the Park" productions. The meeting led to Ronstadt's casting in The Pirates of Penzance, a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta later made into a movie. The play, which was a considerable success, afforded her the change in career direction she'd been hoping for.

Did the Colette book sent by an unknown admirer help prod her in a direction she was meant to go? Or was it only chance? 

The murder of Jacqui Poole

One of the most convincing and best-documented cases of mediumship involves the death of a 25-year-old part-time barmaid named Jacqueline Poole on February 11, 1983, in the West London suburb of Ruislip. Murdered on Friday evening, Jacqui Poole was found dead in her apartment on Sunday, February 13, by the father of her boyfriend, who gained access through a window and discovered her on the living-room floor. She had been raped, beaten, and strangled. 

The next day, Monday, a young woman named Christine Holohan who was studying to become a professional medium learned about the murder from some friends. That night, she had a disturbing vision of a woman calling herself "Jacqui Hunt," not Jacqui Poole. Although the information had not been made public at the time, it later developed that Hunt was Jacqui Poole's maiden name.

On Tuesday evening Holohan experienced a second contact with Jacqui Poole, whom she perceived as the "white outline of a person … [a] white energy of light … [and] a clear voice" in her ear.

In their authoritative article "A Possibly Unique Case of Psychic Detection,"* Guy Lyon Playfair and Montague Keen relate what Jacqui Poole told Holohan: 

Poole had been supposed to go to work on the night of the murder, two men having called for her, but she decided not to go as she was not feeling well. She had then a visit from a man she knew, a friend of a friend whom she had never liked. She let him in, thinking he might have a message from her boyfriend ...

Having been given this information (which later proved to be correct), Holohan went to the police, meeting with police officer ("beat constable") Tony Batters and Detective Constable Andrew Smith. At first, understandably enough, they did not take her seriously, but when she provided some specific information relating to Smith, their attitude changed. Batters' detailed notes of their conversation indicate that she provided a great deal of information -- a total of 130 separate items. Her only apparent error was in placing the murder on "late Saturday night," when it actually occurred on Friday night. Interestingly, the date of the murder was one of the few pieces of information that would have been available in the media.

In the appendix to their article, Playfair and Keen list many of Holohan's specific statements as recorded by Tony Batters in his notebook.

"She was attacked in the bathroom." This was probably correct. Though the body was found in another room, a damaged bathroom towel rack and disarranged bathroom rug suggested that the attack commenced there. 

"There was an envelope and a letter. Just come. A black address book … Furniture was rearranged. Settee cushions moved. Out of place … I changed my clothes twice, she says." This was also correct. The police officers had discovered a recently delivered letter at the apartment, along with a black address book. The living room was mostly undisturbed except for settee cushions thrown on the floor. And it was later determined that Jacqui Poole had changed her clothes twice that day.

"Two cups in kitchen. One washed up. She made a cup of coffee." Also correct. Only two cups had been left out in the otherwise tidy kitchen. One of them had been washed and then left upside down to dry. The other was half full of coffee. 

Other descriptions of the crime scene were accurate but could have been guessed. For instance, Holohan said that there were unread newspapers lying around, that there was a cupboard, and that some of Poole's jewelry had been stolen (a fact reported in the press). Although the notes are unclear, it appears that she said Poole had two rings remaining on her fingers – which was true, since those rings were on so tightly that the killer could not remove them. This fact had not been publicized.

Holohan said that Jacqui Poole had traveled in criminal circles but had recently decided to turn her life around. A friend later described a conversation with Poole shortly before her murder in which she expressed these sentiments. 

The medium also said that Poole had suffered from depression and was taking prescription pills for it. This was correct. She said that Poole was in the middle of a divorce (correct, but this fact had been published in the press).  

The murderer, she said, was connected with the ex-husband. "The link is with nick. Both had the same friend who was in nick. Not nick, she says, 'bird.' She went to visit him two weeks before."

This is interesting, as it suggests that the medium was being corrected by the communicating spirit as the information was relayed. At first, Holohan used the term nick, but then apparently was told that this term was mistaken and that the correct term was bird. Nick is a slang term for a police station or prison, while bird is slang for a detention center. Holohan "did not understand the difference," Batters noted in later comments on his own notes. But Jacqui Poole evidently did know the difference and was at pains to amend the message. 

The statement about Poole's last visit to the "nick" was also correct; she had been there exactly two weeks before her body was found. 

Holohan did not give the murderer's name, but she described him: "Five foot eightish… Dark skin, coloured, Afro-wavy hair. Early 20s. She knows him. April-May birthday. He's Taurus. Tattoos on his arms. Swords? Snake? Rose? I get a name, Tony. He has a nickname, not a proper name."

The man eventually convicted of the crime was Anthony Ruark, of mixed-race origins, 5'9", born in April, 23 years old in 1983, with many tattoos. 

Pressed for the nickname, Holahan went into a light trance and, via automatic writing, produced the word "pokie." Ruark's nickname was Pokie. 

She also told police: "He's been working recently, like painting or decorating. Doesn't have a regular job, not a proper job. He's cool, sly, got into places before. And he's clever with cars. Grease monkey, she calls it."

All of this was correct. Ruark's only legitimate occupation was that of plasterer, and he had worked at that job on one or two days during the week before the murder. Otherwise, he made his money through burglary and auto theft. He was known as a good mechanic.

"He's got a girlfriend. She knew Jacqui. She's dark-haired, small, pretty. Got a C in her initials." Batters later confirmed that Ruark's girlfriend was a "petite and good-looking brunette whose surname begins with C," and that Poole knew her well.

Holohan mentioned the following names to the police: Betty, Sylvia, Terry, Barbara Stone, and Tony. No other names were given. All of the names connected directly to the victim. Betty was Poole's mother. Sylvia was the mother of Poole's boyfriend. Terry was Poole's brother. Barbara Stone was a close friend of Poole who died in an auto accident about two years before the murder. Tony was the murderer, Anthony Ruark.

Interestingly, no one involved in the investigation had heard of Barbara Stone, and this name remained unexplained until years later -- a fact that tends to rule out mental telepathy as an explanation.

Holohan also mentioned someone who lived in "a flat over a newspaper shop." This turned out to be Poole's best friend, a woman named Gloria, who lived in just such an apartment.

Asked to determine the location of the stolen jewelry, Holahan used automatic writing and produced the words Ickeham and garden and the number 221. Ickeham was understood as an attempt to write Ickenham, a suburb located between the murder scene and Ruark's home. Years later, Batters followed up on this clue with interesting, though inconclusive, results. He discovered that there was only one street in Ickenham where the numbers went as high as 221 – Swakeleys Road. However, where there should have been a 221, there was "an unmarked public garden." He removed some rocks from the garden and found a 6" by 7" hole, now empty. 

Playfair and Keen write:

It is of course possible that the hole was made after 1983, perhaps by children playing, yet it must be granted that it is quite a coincidence to find an ideal hiding place for a handful of rings and bracelets at what may well once have been the garden of No. 221 on the only road in the area in question with that many house numbers.

Batters reckoned that the location was directly on the path Ruark took when he left the murder scene in Ruislip and returned home. 

Even after all this, there was no solid evidence against Ruark or anyone else in 1983, and the case remained unsolved for more than 16 years. Eventually, however, advances in DNA technology made it possible to more thoroughly examine the physical evidence connected to the case. According to Playfair and Keen, DNA matching Jacqui Poole was found on a pullover that police had retrieved from Ruark's trash. Ruark was convicted of the crime. (We will look at some questions surrounding this claim in a minute.) 

The obvious objection to the Poole case is that Holohan could have been told about the murder and then used her purported mediumistic abilities to convey what she knew to the police without incriminating herself. But there are apparently insuperable obstacles to this line of argument. For one thing, the totality of the information provided by Holohan was not known to any one person, so she would have had to be in contract with several people -- perhaps as many as five. Moreover, much of the information was known only to the murderer, who is hardly likely to have discussed his crime with her in detail (or at all). There is no evidence that Holohan had any connection with Ruark, Poole, or any member of the police force.  

The most sustained skeptical treatment of the Poole case that I know of is an essay by Tony Youens titled "Did a Medium Identify a Murderer?" Youens and his associate, police detective Adrian Shaw, interviewed some of the people involved, after which Youens developed his own theory of what happened. The trouble is that his theory relies almost entirely on mere logical possibilities -- that is, things are "possible" in the sense that they cannot be disproved, but for which there is no evidence. 

As an example of a logical possibility, consider the fringe view that the Apollo moon landings were faked. It is logically "possible" that the landings could have been simulated in a TV studio, that everyone in NASA was in on the conspiracy, that astronomers from all over the world were bribed or coerced into playing along, that countless billions of dollars have been spent on an ongoing cover-up, and that no one has ever broken the code of silence and come forward with "the truth."

But while this is a logical possibility, in the sense that it cannot be definitively disproven, it is so far-fetched that it has no realistic chance of being true. The same, by the way, holds true of most conspiracy theories, since any evidence that would falsify the theory can be "explained" as another part of the cover-up.**

Youens does not allege a cover-up, except in the sense that Christine Holohan was covering up the real sources of her information. His version of logical possibility consists of assuming that Holohan could have obtained all 121 items of accurate information by normal means.

How? Well, she could have gotten some of the information from the press. But Playfair and Keen report that Batters and his colleagues monitored all newspaper stories on the case and determined that the only information made public was Jacqueline Poole's name (but not her maiden name) her address, the cause of death (homicide), the theft of jewelry, the absence of any sign of forced entry, and the fact that she and her husband had separated seven months earlier.

Again, it's interesting to note in this connection that a detail that could unquestionably have been gleaned from any newspaper account, namely the day of Poole's death, was the one thing Holohan got wrong.

At any rate, while some details could have been obtained from the media, they constituted only a tiny fraction of the accurate information that Holohan provided. How, then, to account for the rest?

Youens responds to this challenge by assuming that there must have been a great deal of gossip about the murder, that the gossip included many unpublished details, and that Holohan was in a position to overhear this gossip and make use of it -- most likely at the pub where Poole had worked. To strengthen his case, Youens stresses that this pub was only 1.3 miles from where Poole lived. He even suggests that Holohan might have known Poole personally. 

Unfortunately for the skeptical position, there is simply no evidence to support any of this "logically possible" but empirically groundless speculation. As Playfair and Keen report, "We are not aware of any evidence from any of Poole's friends or relatives that they knew Holohan … Had there been any evidence that Holohan patronized the same pubs as Poole, notably the Windmill, where Ruark and many of his associates principally drank, the police would have picked this up immediately." In fact, there is nothing tying Holohan to any pub except one called the Tally-Ho, where she occasionally worked on a part-time basis. Otherwise, she appears not to have visited pubs at all.

Then there are items of information that probably could not have been obtained by any amount of eavesdropping. For instance, the two cups in the kitchen – one washed, and one with coffee in it. To deal with this detail, Youens is forced to speculate that the only civilian who visited the apartment after the murder -- the father of Poole's boyfriend -- paid special attention to these cups and later talked about them with his friends, and that Holohan somehow overheard or learned of these conversations. But as Playfair and Keen point out, the father "entered via the large window to identify the body, remaining for a matter of seconds." He probably did not even enter the kitchen, nor is it likely that he would have focused on a couple of cups when faced with the far more arresting sight of Poole's corpse. And even if he had noticed the cups, what reason would there be to talk about them? Youens himself admits that his speculation in this area is not very convincing. He writes:

In fairness I cannot fully explain this away and neither am I likely to be able to, but if all the other details had been removed would the police have been so impressed with what information was left? Personally I doubt it.

Of course, this assumes that "all other details" can be removed -- i.e., satisfactorily explained -- which, as I see it, is far from true. 

Another line of Youens' attack is to say that Holohan's contribution had no effect on the outcome of the case. According to Youens, Ruark's eventual conviction was entirely due to scientific investigation (the DNA testing) and had nothing to do with mediumship. He writes: 

Much has been made of the pullover retrieved from Ruark's dustbin and how if it wasn't for Holohan's information this might never have been seized. But just how significant did this piece of evidence turn out to be? When asked by Adrian Shaw, D.C.I. [Detective chief Inspector] McKinlay couldn’t even remember the pullover. [Detective Superintendent] Tony Lundy does recall "fibres" being mentioned at the trial but he and McKinlay are emphatic that the conviction was achieved by the DNA evidence from semen and from skin found underneath the victim's fingernails. The pullover played no part and even if it did it was not due to anything Holohan had said. 

But Tony Batters felt very differently. In 2003 he said: 

Without Christine's information, we would not have (a) retrieved the pullover; (b) interviewed and then taken statements from everyone with whom Ruark came into contact after [the evening of the murder]; and (c)  checked and verified all his movements during the previous fortnight. These three elements were vital to combat potential (and actual) defences, which I believe would have raised sufficient doubt as to lead to a Not Guilty verdict.

This echoes a comment Batters made in 2002: "Without Christine's information, we might have failed to procure the most conclusive evidence" (i.e., the pullover). 

It is hard to reconcile those different views. Either the incriminating DNA was taken from Ruark's pullover, or it was taken from Poole's fingernails. But it is interesting to notice the rather ambiguous nature of Youens' sentence: "The pullover played no part and even if it did …" Well, did it, or didn't it? It sounds as if he is backtracking from his first statement even before the sentence has ended. And it is unclear how "the pullover played no part" if Lundy "does recall 'fibres' being mentioned at the trial." Presumably these were fibers from the pullover, so how could the pullover have played no part? In this respect, Youens' essay raises more questions than it answers. 

A BBC article on the case, which doesn't mention Holohan or mediumship, reports that the conviction was obtained by DNA-testing semen left on an article of Poole's clothing found at the murder scene. If this is accurate, it undercuts the claim that the pullover (found in Ruark's trash, not at the crime scene) was the crucial piece of evidence, although it also undercuts Youens' contention that the evidence was obtained from "the victim's fingernails." But I'm not sure how accurate this article is. For one thing, it identifies Ruark as Poole's lover, when according to the other accounts I've read, he was merely a friend of Poole's ex-husband and someone she did not like or trust. 

Since the BBC article does not go into detail and does not identify the item of clothing in question, and since it states that Poole's body was found "semi-naked," I'm left wondering if the pullover in question perhaps belonged to her, and Ruark took it with him and disposed of it in his trash because it was stained with his semen. If this is true -- I stress if, because I don't know -- then the pullover was indeed the critical piece of evidence. It seems odd that there should be disagreement over such a seemingly basic fact of the case, but there it is. 

Incidentally the BBC piece also states that Poole, after being beaten and raped, was "strangled with the cord from a bathroom light," though her body was found in the living room. If true, this further substantiates Holohan's claim that the attack began (or at least partly took place) in the bathroom, a fact that had not been reported in the press at the time.

Youens also argues that Ruark was already a suspect in the case, and Holohan could have known this from local gossip. It is true that Ruark had voluntarily gone to the police after they asked anyone who'd known Poole to come forward. According to Batters and Smith, he was not considered a serious suspect because he had no history of violence; of the roughly 30 suspects, they say, Ruark was nowhere near the top of the list. On the other hand, in a letter reproduced on Tony Youens' website, supervising detective Tony Lundy says that Ruark emerged as his top suspect. Another contradiction. 

Montague Keen, for his part, wrote in a separate piece that, "Ruark had already given the police a persuasive alibi. He was no longer a suspect when Holohan was interviewed." He seems to have believed that Lundy was misremembering key details of the case in order to place himself in the best possible light and to minimize any contributions made by Holohan. Without more inforrmation, it's impossible to say who's right. 

Youens attributes the rest of Holohan's accurate statements to "cold reading." Yet it is hard to see how cold reading could explain her reference to Barbara Stone, a woman unknown to anyone involved in the investigation at the time; or her statement that Poole had changed clothes twice that day, a fact apparently not established until Ruark's trial nearly two decades years later; or her knowledge of Poole's prescription medication for depression; etc. 

Nor is cold reading a likely explanation for the psychometry test that Holohan used on Andrew Smith in order to prove her abilities. Playfair and Keen write:

She said he [Smith] had recently received a letter about essential electrical work, as indeed he had, from a Building Society telling him that he would have to get the house he hoped to buy rewired if he wanted a mortgage. She said he was about to be transferred to another station, which he thought very unlikely – until he was informed of his pending transfer only days later. Firstly, however, she made a remark which must have been unnervingly accurate. Batters told us that "to my dying day I could not disclose what she said. It was quite extraordinary with detail."

Since Smith himself did not know he was about to be transferred, he could hardly have conveyed this information to Holohan through body language or other giveaways, as required by cold reading. 

Unfortunately, as the above quote indicates, some of the most convincing evidence in the case has not been made public. It would be interesting to know the first item that Holohan relayed to Smith. It would be even more interesting to know the many specific details that she recounted about the murder itself. According to Playfair and Keen, her description of the murder was extremely graphic and (as best anyone can determine through scientific reconstruction of the crime) factually accurate down to the smallest detail. Yet, out of respect for the family's sensibilities, the investigators withheld this information from the Journal article. Obviously, the case would be further strengthened if these details could be published.

Finally, Youens complains that Playfair and Keen did not interview the supervising detective on the case, Tony Lundy, or DCI McKinlay, implying that their investigation was slipshod. He writes archly: 

As far as I am aware the investigation carried out by Keen and Playfair never included the questioning of the two most senior and highly respected detectives involved. A serious omission surely? Still I'm certain he interviewed the medium herself with the typical thoroughness we've come to expect of an SPR investigator.

But in their article, Playfair and Keen note that Lundy, at least, is "now retired and, we were informed, not available for interview." If the man refused to be interviewed, that is hardly the investigators' fault. There is no mention of McKinlay, but given his apparent antipathy to the idea that Holohan contributed anything of value to the case, it is certainly possible that he also refused to talk. By the same token, some people would not talk to Youens and his associate:  

Tony Batters very kindly supplied me with a copy of his notes along with how they related to the crime. We exchanged numerous emails … Adrian Shaw spoke to Detective Chief Inspector Norman McKinlay as well as the detective who originally took Ruark in for questioning and also retrieved the pullover from his dustbin. I managed to contact ex-Detective Superintendent Tony Lundy who now lives in Spain. Lundy was the officer in charge of the original investigation and McKinlay dealt with the 1999 re-investigation. We did contact other officers who either did not wish to discuss the case or never returned our calls. [bold emphasis added]

If it's slipshod of the SPR investigators not to get through to Lundy and McKinlay, isn't it equally slipshod of Youens and Shaw not to get through to anyone other than Batters, Lundy, McKinlay, and an unnamed detective? There is no indication that they spoke to Holohan, Smith, or Jacqui Poole's relatives, for instance. 

In any event, while Lundy did not want to talk to the SPR researchers, Batters and Smith did. They even signed affidavits attesting to the accuracy of the resulting article. Playfair and Keen report:

As Batters has repeatedly told us, the only possible single source for all the information [provided by Holohan] is Jacqueline Poole … Tony Batters stated that "I've accepted the fact that Jacqui communicated with Christine," as, he has told us, have all his police colleagues with whom he has discussed the case.

------

NOTES

* The article "A Possibly Unique Case of Psychic Detection," by Guy Lyon Playfair and Montague Keen is found in the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, Volume 68, Number 874, January 2004, pages 1–17. This article, like all SPR Journal articles prior to 2007, can be found online in an archive open to SPR members. (Membership costs about $100 a year.) Alternatively, you can read the article by subscribing to the Lexscien database, which maintains the SPR's archive. Lexscien charges a fee, but there is a workaround: you can register with Lexscien and then take advantage of their free seven-day trial to read the article online. (The seven-day trial does not allow you to download the full article for offline reading or printout.)

** For a fuller discussion of the problems with arguing by mere logical possibilities, see Chris Carter's Science and the Afterlife Experience.

There's a book on the Jacqui Poole case: A Voice from the Grave (2006), by Christine Holohan and Vera McHugh. I've ordered a copy. Perhaps it will shed further light on some of the loose ends mentioned in the post. 

For another summary and analysis of the Poole case, see this writeup at AECES. 

A hundred push-ups

Here's an incredibly trivial and meaningless coincidence that I mention only because things like this happen to me a lot, and disproportionately involve TV shows. 

Last night I crumpled up a piece of paper and prepared to toss it into a wastebasket. Before throwing it, I said to myself, "If I miss this shot, I have to do one hundred push-ups." 

I don't know what made me think of this. I've never thought of it before. Nor was I serious; I'm sure I cannot do a hundred push-ups.

Anyway, I made the shot.

Shortly afterward, while fixing dinner, I watched an old episode of How I Met Your Mother. In the episode, Marshall joins a gym, and a tyrannical trainer orders him to do one hundred push-ups. He thinks she's joking, because "Nobody can do a hundred push-ups." But she's not joking, and he must attempt it (he fails). 

As I said: incredibly trivial and meaningless. But because these events happen a lot, I've come to think of them as examples of "information leakage." It's as if what we call "the present" is actually broader and more elastic than we realize, and at times, especially when the mind is wandering, we can pick up on things that are not part of the tiny slice of "the present" that we consciously perceive. 

Some questions (and no clear answers)

The Intertubes are abuzz with comments regarding the latest utterance from famed atheist Richard Dawkins. In this Salon article he is quoted as saying that "mild pedophilia" should not be cause for concern.

In a recent interview with the Times magazine, Richard Dawkins attempted to defend what he called “mild pedophilia,” which, he says, he personally experienced as a young child and does not believe causes “lasting harm.”

Dawkins went on to say that one of his former school masters “pulled me on his knee and put his hand inside my shorts,” and that to condemn this “mild touching up” as sexual abuse today would somehow be unfair.

“I am very conscious that you can’t condemn people of an earlier era by the standards of ours. Just as we don’t look back at the 18th and 19th centuries and condemn people for racism in the same way as we would condemn a modern person for racism, I look back a few decades to my childhood and see things like caning, like mild pedophilia, and can’t find it in me to condemn it by the same standards as I or anyone would today,” he said.

Plus, he added, though his other classmates also experienced abuse at the hands of this teacher, “I don’t think he did any of us lasting harm.”

This is not the first time Dawkins has, at least by implication, downplayed the importance of pedophilia and child abuse generally. Notoriously he once said that raising a child as a Christian could be more damaging than subjecting the child to sexual abuse: "Horrible as sexual abuse  no doubt was, the damage was arguably less than the long-term psychological  damage inflicted by bringing the child up Catholic in the first place." 

His latest statement seems to be in line with his previous comments on the subject. He obviously thinks that raising a child in a religious belief system is an act of intolerable cruelty, but he exhibits no comparable outrage about physical molestation.

This rather peculiar stance could be taken as merely a personal quirk on Dawkins' part. My impression of Dawkins is that, like many highly educated and intelligent people, he is remarkably unskilled at introspection and self-criticism, and also has an exceedingly shallow understanding of viewpoints with which he disagrees. He is, in other words, altogether too sure of himself when he deigns to weigh in on subjects outside the narrow scope of his expertise.

What makes his most recent comment a little more interesting is that it follows in the wake of numerous allegations of sexual misconduct on the part of leading advocates of the "skeptical"-humanist-atheist-materialist position.

A rundown of these allegations, or most of them, can be found here.

Now, it can always be said that these allegations are unproven – which they are – and that even if there is something to them, it has nothing to do with the underlying intellectual positions taken by these individuals. In fact, I've said something similar myself. But I'm starting to wonder if maybe there is some connection between sexual misconduct (or the downplaying or tacit endorsement of such) and the materialist ethos. 

Is it possible that the view of human beings as "meat puppets," "biological robots," and carrying systems for "selfish genes" – humans as mechanistic entities without free will, whose sense of self is an illusion and whose consciousness is only an epiphenomenon, a meaningless side effect – encourages a dehumanizing approach toward physical and emotional intimacy?

Alternatively ... are people who are predisposed, by temperament or upbringing, to treat their fellow humans as objects more likely, on average, to embrace a worldview that explicitly and unapologetically reduces people to objects?

Or ... could the high degree of left-brain dominance associated with militant skepticism, atheism, and materialism give rise to a dismissive or domineering attitude toward women (and perhaps children)? The "men's club" atmosphere of skeptical organizations and get-togethers is pretty well known. 

Or ... could the belief that there is no afterlife, no "life review," and no possibility of being called to account for one's misconduct serve as a rationalization for indulging in misconduct? Was Dostoyevsky right when he had one of his characters say that without God, everything is permitted? 

I know these questions can easily be seen as unfair. Perhaps they are. Sexual misbehavior is hardly limited to the skeptical-atheist camp. There are "spiritual" figures (like Sai Baba, or like any number of adulterous ministers and pedophile priests) who can be tarred with the same brush. 

Still, when we consider the number of leading figures on the skeptic-materialist side – not bystanders or backbenchers, but people at the forefront of the movement – who have been publicly accused of sexual misconduct or who seem to endorse (or at least not condemn) such misconduct, it becomes increasingly hard to dismiss the possibility that their basic intellectual premises may contribute to these problems.

I could be wrong. I really don't know.