Ghosts & Gallows (18 page)

At Willesden Magistrates Court on 11 July 1957, Harrison was committed for trial at the September sessions of the Central Criminal Court. ‘We had been rowing for weeks,’ Harrison had told Detective Inspector Cox, continuing:

We had a terrific row one morning, which morning is beyond me, I seemed to black out, it’s very difficult to describe, it just seemed to get the better of me … I got hold of something, it was metallic, and I remember hitting her on the head although I didn’t see her face. I was in a frenzy and after I hit her my mind must have gone completely blank …

He stated he had come round at ten o’clock later the same morning on a bus on his way to his parents’ house at Neasden, but had no recollection of events before that time and was unable to explain how the body of his wife had come to be found in the cupboard under the stairs. While on remand, Harrison was interviewed by Dr Denis Leigh of the Maudsley Hospital. ‘He is … a man of hysterical personality, who reacts to stress by the manifestation of amnesiac manifestations,’ Leigh commented, while the prison psychiatrist at Brixton, Dr J.C.M. Matheson, who had an extensive experience of violent criminals and murderers including Christie, also felt that Harrison’s loss of memory was genuine. They also both agreed that he was sane and fit to stand trial.

The case of Regina vs. Harrison opened at the Old Bailey on 10 September 1957. Prosecuting for the Crown was Mr Christmas Humphries assisted by Mr Griffith-Jones, while Mr William Henning acted for the defence. Much emphasis was placed on Harrison’s hysterical personality and his allegedly morbid and unwell state of mind, as demonstrated by the surviving pages of ‘The Mad Killer of Vermin Alley’, which had been recovered by Detective Inspector Cox from his desk drawer at Arrons and extracts from which were read out in court by William Henning, quickly prompting sensational newspaper headlines such as the
Daily Mirror’s
‘Husband Wrote a Story of Horror’. Despite his early episode of hysterical fugue being shown to be a lie, the defence insisted that Harrison was mentally ill and the proper verdict was one of manslaughter. The jury disagreed and Harrison was found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment. A few months earlier in March, the Homicide Act 1957 had come into force, which reduced the death penalty to acts of premeditated murder as well as a new charge of capital murder,
i.e.
murder during the course of or furtherance of theft.

The case of Francis Harrison, like those of Maria Marten and Eric Tombe, puts forward in a compelling way the idea of some form of supernormal contact from beyond the grave. Sceptics would of course argue vigorously against this. Writing in 1980 in his essay ‘Parapsychology: Science or Pseudoscience?’
2
, Anthony Flew, Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at Reading University, made the comment ‘that the content of visions, dreams, and misperceptions is always in part a function of the wishes, beliefs, and expectations of the subject’, a level-headed approach against jumping to seemingly obvious supernatural conclusions: Anne Marten knew of William Corder’s unsavoury reputation, which may have lead her to suspect that a murder had taken place in the Red Barn; the suicide of Ernest Dyer, a known associate of Eric Tombe, and revelations of his crooked career, could have caused the Revd Tombe to conclude that his missing son was buried somewhere at the site of their failed business venture together at the deserted Welcomes farm; and Myrtle Hughes and Mavis Welch, both worried about their missing friend, may have imagined they had had the same dream of her whispering ghost. But to dismiss things simply out of hand as being just impossible is clearly unscientific, and Professor Flew acknowledged this when, in the same paper, he made the personal observation ‘that, although there was no repeatable experiment to demonstrate the reality of any of the putative psi phenomena, and although the entire field was buried under ever-mounting piles of rubbish produced by charlatans and suckers, nevertheless one could not with a good academic conscience dismiss the case as closed.’ Colin Wilson, originally a sceptic, and after much study of the subject, came to the conclusion that there was as much evidence for the paranormal as there is for atoms and electrons, although it must be said that evidence for the paranormal does not always automatically equate to proof of survival after death.

However, if the paranormal contents of cases like the murder of Doris Harrison are in fact spontaneous flashes of post-mortem communication, or the fleeting whispers of passing ghosts, what evidence exists (outside of the world of mediums and Spiritualism) for crimes that have actually been solved by direct professional investigation and contact with the spirit world? As the occult revolution of the 1960s began to gather momentum, this question took several steps closer forward to being answered – the time of the psychic detective had arrived.

NOTES

1
. The actual title of Frank Harrison’s story is unknown as its opening pages were never recovered and the typescript, prepared from it for use as an exhibit at his trial and now held on microfilm at the National Archives, is incomplete. For the purposes of the commentary in this book I have taken the liberty of giving it a title as befits the writing style of its author. The whereabouts of the manuscript original, if it still survives, is today unknown as, despite notices published in the press at the time, the record of acquisitions for the Black Museum for the year 1957 show no record of it being added to the collection.

2
. Reprinted in
The Skeptic’s Handbook of Parapsychology
, Edited by Paul Kurtz (Prometheus Books, New York, 1985).

If Uri Gellar was the psychic superstar of the 1970s, then it would be true to say that the Dutchman, Gerard Croiset, was easily his equal during the Swinging Sixties. The ‘wizard of Utrecht’ became a familiar figure in the public eye as newspapers, magazines and television programmes regularly documented his astonishing powers of clairvoyance and telepathy. It was not without foundation that he was also known as ‘the man who mystifies Europe’ and ‘the man with the X-ray mind’; and much of this popular reputation was due in no small way to his own particular application of his psychic talents to the field of murder and crime detection. Almost singlehandedly, Croiset established the figure of the psychic detective in Europe and lived the role to the full. As we will see, he was and remains, a pioneering figure in the history of twentieth-century paranormal research.

As with other mediums and sensitives such as Estelle Roberts, Gerard Croiset’s psychic abilities became apparent at a young age, but for him these childhood years were unhappy ones and culminated in a nervous breakdown when he was in his early twenties. Born Gerard Boekbinder on 10 March 1909 in the northern Dutch city of Laren, he was given up to foster parents at the age of eight by disinterested parents – his father, a philandering actor, was rarely at home while his mother was unable to cope with bringing up Croiset and his younger brother practically singlehanded. Around 1920, Croiset and his mother, who had divorced his father and remarried, effected a reconciliation but the young boy was uneasy around his new stepfather and ran away several times. At home, Croiset found solace in prayer, despite the fact that, although being Jewish, his mother was by choice an atheist and, being disinclined to allow any kind of religious instruction in the home, looked on her son’s acts of faith with contempt, thereby driving a wedge through what little relationship they had managed to rebuild.

During the early 1930s, after a series of ‘dead end’ jobs, Croiset married and started a career as a self-employed grocer in Enschede, close to the border with Germany, with money borrowed from his wife’s parents. The couple eventually raised a family of four children, three boys and a girl; Croiset was imprisoned twice by the occupying Nazis during the Second World War but was released and, during these periods of freedom, worked for the Dutch resistance. Throughout these difficult years, from the time he was a small child at school through to the end of the war years, psychic experiences and contacts with the twilight world of the unseen were also a part of Gerard Croiset’s difficult life.

An often repeated account of the beginning of Croiset’s psychic awareness concerns an incident during the 1930s, when the Dutchman visited the shop of a local watch repairer. As Croiset casually picked up a ruler that lay on a workbench, a series of images connected with the horologist’s youth and early years, subsequently confirmed by the watchmaker as being wholly accurate, came into his head, in the same way that Estelle Roberts had been able to hold Mona Tinsley’s pink dress and know instantly that the child was dead. In fact, Croiset would recall an even earlier incident when, at the age of six, he told a schoolmaster who had been away from the classroom for a day, that he had been visiting a blonde lady who wore a red flower; this was the teacher’s fiancé to whom the day before he had successfully proposed marriage with a gift of a red rose. Croiset was able to make many predictions using his increasing clairvoyant abilities in the years that followed, but it was to be in the period immediately following the end of the war in Europe that he would begin to lay down the foundations that would enable him to build a career as one of the most well known of post-war psychics.

Wilhelm Heinrich Carl Tenhaeff, born in 1894, became one of Holland’s foremost psychical researchers. In 1933, he successfully submitted a thesis on ‘Clairvoyance and Empathy’ to obtain a doctorate from the University of Utrecht and twenty years later, in 1953, held the first ever Chair of Parapsychology at Utrecht, the first academic to obtain such a position, beating Hans Bender at Freiburg by a year. Professor Tenhaeff’s department, although funded by the Danish Society for Paranormal Research, was a major step forward for the fledgling discipline of parapsychology, and Tenhaeff’s pioneering status ultimately made his later fall from grace that much more difficult and painful to accept, both by Tenhaeff himself and particularly for the academic world of psychical research. Although he carried out Rhine-style card experiments, Tenhaeff’s real interest lay in examining clairvoyance and he coined the term ‘paragnost’ (from the Greek
para
‘beyond’ and
gnosis
‘knowledge’) for people able to demonstrate and be tested for these abilities. In 1946, Tenhaeff gave a lecture on parapsychological subjects at Enschede; in the audience that day was Gerard Croiset.

Croiset’s meeting with Professor Tenhaeff was a watershed moment for both men; it marked the beginning of a close working association that would make both the psychic and the scientist famous. Croiset offered himself as a subject for investigation by Tenhaeff’s Department of Parapsychology and, after a time, he became the one ‘paragnost’ with whom the researcher had the most success. It is his involvement with cases of missing persons, and with crime and murder, that Gerard Croiset is most remembered today, and this association began soon after his contact with Tenhaeff.

In the winter of 1946, a twenty-one-year-old girl was attacked and beaten with a hammer while cycling home along a country road near the town of Wierden, around twenty miles from where Croiset was living. Fortunately the girl survived and in his haste to escape, the assailant dropped the hammer, which was recovered by police. It was put on display in a Wierden shop window in the hope that someone might identify it, but after several weeks the police investigation drew a blank and, when the police contacted the Parapsychology Department at the University of Utrecht with a request to involve a clairvoyant, Wilhelm Tenhaeff suggested the hammer should be shown to Gerard Croiset. When Croiset held the hammer he described a tall, dark person of around thirty years of age who was connected with the attack on the girl; but the tool did not in fact belong to him and was the property of an older man, in his mid fifties, in whose cottage it normally hung with other tools. Croiset’s impressions were noted but provided the police with no new leads. However, six months later, in June 1947, the Dutch police arrested a twenty-eight-year-old youth for another crime and, under interrogation, he confessed to carrying out the hammer attack at Wierden; he admitted to taking the weapon from the house of a neighbour and descriptions of the assailant, the owner of the hammer and his cottage all fitted those previously taken down by Croiset.

Two years later, in July 1949, Croiset was asked to give his impressions on a rape case that had taken place in the northern province of Drenthe. A retarded girl had been enticed away from a folk festival near the town of Assen by two brothers, who had taken her to a nearby hay barn and assaulted her. The men had intended to follow through the attack by tying the girl inside a sack and throwing it into a river, but at the last minute they baulked at committing murder and dumped the sack in a ditch. The two brothers were later reigned in by police as probable suspects but the case stalled for lack of evidence, prompting the public prosecutor at Assen to put a call through to Professor Tenhaeff at Utrecht. In a room at the Assen courthouse, Croiset examined several items associated with the two brothers and immediately began reeling off impressions: from a tobacco box and a cigarette holder he described the two middle-aged brothers in some detail, while after holding the sack in which the young girl had been found, Croiset was able to correctly describe the particulars of the attack (which previously had been withheld from him) as well as the fact that it had been used previously as a cow blanket. The same day, Croiset and Tenhaeff drove to the crime scene. When they were several kilometres away from the hay barn, Croiset began giving a description of the building, which the psychical researcher found was wholly accurate once they had arrived and were able to look round. The two brothers had been involved in other crimes and Croiset attended a separate hearing for one of the men. After the hearing, Croiset told Tenhaeff that he felt certain the accused man would die by hanging, a prediction which came true several weeks later when the Dutchman committed suicide.