Ghosts & Gallows (20 page)

The publicity generated by Pollack’s
Croiset the Clairvoyant
brought about an inevitable involvement with the Dutch ‘paragnost’ and British crime. In early 1970, Croiset was asked to assist in the case of the Hosein brothers, two bungling but ultimately murderous immigrants from Trinidad who carried out the very first instance of kidnap and ransom in Britain when they unsuccessfully tried to effect the abduction of the wife of millionaire newspaper mogul Rupert Murdoch. On the evening of 13 December 1969, Arthur Hosein and his younger brother Nizam took by force Muriel McKay, the wife of Murdoch’s deputy Alick McKay, from their house in Arthur Road, Wimbledon, in the mistaken belief that she was Mrs Murdoch. The kidnappers made contact demanding £1m for Mrs McKay’s safe return but days went by with no progress and, after press and television appeals had failed to elicit further response, the McKay family sent details to Croiset in Utrecht. The Dutchman psychometrized maps of the home counties and felt Mrs McKay was being held on a farm somewhere on the border between Hertfordshire and Essex. The British police acted on the information but eventually drew a blank. Forty days after Muriel McKay went missing, the Hosein brothers were arrested at Rooks Farm at Stocking Pelham in Hertfordshire. The police recovered evidence linking the two men to the abduction but Mrs McKay was never found and Arthur and Nizam Hosein were charged with murder and subsequently sentenced to life imprisonment. Croiset had been correct with the farmhouse setting but his powers had failed to pin down the exact location. The Hoseins never confessed to the crime, although it was believed at the time that Muriel McKay had been shot and her body disposed of by being fed to pigs on the farm.

One person who followed Croiset’s involvement in the McKay kidnapping with interest was Frank Ryan, a journalist on the staff of the Scottish
Daily Record
newspaper based in Glasgow. In February 1970, only a few weeks after Croiset had made headlines searching for the newspaperman’s wife, Ryan realised he would be in Holland for a short period and decided to try and visit the clairvoyant in Utrecht personally. Before he left he had the forethought to take with him some material that he was keen for Croiset to look at. This related to a disappearance that had taken place in Dumfries exactly three years before that Ryan had covered for the
Record
and with which the police had been unable to make any progress.

Patricia McAdam was a seventeen-year-old factory worker with an outgoing personality from Dumfries. On Saturday, 18 February 1967, she and a friend, Hazel Campbell, who lived in Annan on the Solway Firth, decided to spend the day clothes shopping in Glasgow. The two girls went by bus to Gretna after which they hitched a lift to Glasgow, where they bought new handbags, shoes and other items. Pat and Hazel spent Saturday evening at a dance hall, The Flamingo, after which they went on with some people they met at the hall to a house party, where they ended up staying the night. In the morning, the girls decided to hitchhike back to Dumfries and, after a short time in the London Road, a heavy articulated lorry stopped and picked them up. The lorry driver took the A74 road towards Lockerbie and twenty miles from Glasgow stopped at Lesmahagow, where he bought Pat and Hazel a meal at a transport café. Afterwards, Pat allowed the driver to kiss and cuddle her in the cab while her friend dozed in the back. Eventually the three got underway again; Pat McAdam sat in the front talking to the driver while Hazel continued to rest in the rear of the cab. Keeping to the A74 the lorry passed Gretna and then at Kirkpatrick Fleming took the road south-west towards Annan. At two o’clock in the afternoon the driver pulled up in Annan High Street and Hazel Campbell got out and waved her friend off. The lorry pulled away and continued on in the direction of Dumfries. Two days later, with no word or contact from their daughter, Pat McAdam’s worried parents went to the police.

Detectives at Dumfries quickly put out a national appeal to find the goods lorry and its driver. Several people came forward who remembered seeing an articulated lorry matching the description given by Hazel Campbell passing with some difficulty along narrow country lanes north of the A75 Dumfries road near the village of Dalton that weekend. At one point it was seen north of Dalton parked off the road near a place called Williamwath Bridge. The police began an intensive search of the Dalton area but, as the days passed, found nothing. Finally, three weeks after Pat McAdam was reported missing, a driver whose lorry resembled the search vehicle admitted to giving Pat and Hazel Campbell a lift on the Sunday afternoon in question.

Thomas Ross Young was a Glaswegian in his early thirties and, as officers in Dumfries quickly found out, was also a man with a violent past who had been known to the police from an early age. In 1944, at the age of nine, Young had been arrested for theft and four years later was sent to a borstal for indecent assault. By 1962 he had married but that year served a sentence for burglary and in 1963 was imprisoned for three months for failing to pay maintenance on his children. A strongly built volatile man with a violent temper, Young’s real danger lay in his compulsive and vicious sex drive, which had become apparent at the age of thirteen and had resulted in his commitment to an approved school. By the mid-1960s, he was a lorry driver, a job which allowed him to pick up women passengers like Patricia McAdam with relative ease. Young told police that Pat had agreed to have sex with him and he had parked the lorry in a convenient spot in a country lane. Afterwards, he said he had dropped the teenager off near her home in Dumfries and then carried on his way. With no evidence to suggest that Pat McAdam was dead, Detective Inspector Cullinan of the Regional Crime Squad in Glasgow, who now had become involved in the search, had to let Young go. Ominously, later the same year, Young (who would later boast to police of having had sex with over 200 women in the cab of his lorry) was sent to prison for eighteen months for raping a girl in Shropshire and by the time Frank Ryan made his way to see Gerard Croiset in Utrecht, he had begun an eight-year sentence for picking up and raping a fifteen-year-old girl.

Throughout March and April 1967 the hunt for the missing girl intensified. Police held press conferences and combed the countryside and farmland around Dalton. Ditches and rivers were dragged and digging was carried out in wooded areas and fields, but nothing came to light. Both Pat’s parents and the police were disinclined to believe she had left home on purpose. The
Daily Record
printed hundreds of leaflets and posters with Pat McAdam’s photograph and description and distributed them throughout the country, but as the weeks went by with no breakthrough, it seemed almost inevitable that the young factory girl would never been seen alive again. Like Frederick Nodder forty years before, the one man who seemingly knew the real truth of what happened on the afternoon of 19 February 1967 had taken it with him to a jail cell, in this case one in Peterhead Prison. All this would have been running through Frank Ryan’s mind as, on 16 February 1970, almost three years to the day that Pat went missing, the journalist walked into the small consulting room at Croiset’s house at 21, William II Street in Utrecht and came face to face with Holland’s most famous psychic detective.

Through an interpreter, Croiset agreed to try and help and looked at one of the
Daily Record’s
‘Have You Seen This Girl?’ posters that Ryan had brought with him. As the Dutchman looked at Pat McAdam’s photograph, Ryan confirmed she had gone missing three years before but through the interpreter, Croiset asked only if her home life had been happy and the location of where she was last seen; he was quite adamant that he didn’t want to know anything else. The journalist took out a map of Scotland and pointed out the general area between Annan and Dumfries where Pat lived and also where Thomas Young had dropped off Hazel Campbell before driving away. Croiset immediately began describing and sketching on paper the impressions which were coming into his mind and which related to the young Scottish girl’s disappearance: there was a café where Pat had had a meal, then an area where a river ran between the slopes of hills that were wooded with fir trees; in particular the river banks were eroded and the roots of the trees that grew near the water were exposed in a distinctive way; then there was a flat bridge over the same river at the foot of one of the hills – the bridge had a balustrade made from lengths of grey tubular steel, part of which was bent down, and the road over it led to a building like a cottage which had advertising hoardings on it and was surrounded by a white-painted wooden fence. Croiset stated that to get more he would need to handle something that had belonged to Pat McAdam personally. He also asked that nothing be made public until the journalist had checked the area and seen if his impressions were accurate. Ryan thanked the Dutchman for his time and, taking the drawings, he started on the trip back to Scotland.

Back in Dumfries, Frank Ryan together with Jack Johnstone, a local photographer, went on an excursion out to Dalton. Thomas Ross Young’s lorry had been seen parked off the road at Williamwath Bridge and Ryan thought this was the location that Croiset had viewed remotely, but when they arrived they immediately saw that the setting was wrong although the bridge was similar to the way the Dutchman had described it. Unlike Ryan, Jack Johnstone knew the area well and said that around three miles away at Middleshaw was another bridge crossing over a river known as the Water of Milk. Getting back into the car, the two men drove on. A short time later, Frank Ryan got out of the car and realised they had entered into the scene of Gerard Croiset’s vision. Everything was as the clairvoyant had described hundreds of miles away in his consulting room in Utrecht: the wooded hillside, the eroded river bank, the bridge with the tubular railings, the cottage with the advertisements, while a chain-link fence attached to the bridge sagged in just the way that Croiset had sketched. Ryan was stunned and realised that he had to contact Pat’s parents in order to obtain the personal item that the clairvoyant had requested.

Ryan went to Lochside Road in Dumfries and introduced himself to Matthew and Mary McAdam. After he had shown them the results of Croiset’s psychometry, the couple allowed him to take away Pat’s Bible and Frank Ryan returned with it to Utrecht, together with Jack Johnstone’s photographs and a larger-scale map of the area he had visited. Croiset was pleased that Ryan had confirmed what he had ‘seen’ but when he picked up the Bible his expression changed. Like Jacob Klerk and Edith Kiecorius before, Croiset had the overwhelming impression that the young Scottish woman was dead. He then turned to the map and described his impressions: at a place called Broom Cottage (unvisited by Ryan and Johnstone) there was a wrecked car; it was being used for something but Croiset couldn’t tell what, but he described a wheelbarrow leaning against the side; Pat had been killed and her body hidden on the river bank among the exposed tree roots; there they would find items of clothing that belonged to her.

With high expectations Ryan returned home and, together with his wife and another
Record
journalist, drove out to Middleshaw. Broom Cottage was three quarters of a mile downstream from the bridge over the Water of Milk that Croiset had described during his first visit, and as the party got out of their car they realised that again the Dutchman had been unbelievably accurate. In the garden of the cottage was an old car, a green Ford Poplar that the farmer was using as a hen house and leaning against the back was a rusty wheelbarrow. Ryan knew Detective Inspector Cullinan, who had headed the enquiry to locate Pat three years before, and, realising it was possible a breakthrough on the case was imminent, contacted the policeman. That evening Cullinan sent two officers with Ryan back to Broom Cottage and the three men searched the river bank looking for the clothing that Croiset had said would be there. Finally, after a long search, Ryan recovered a woman’s long-sleeved black dress, a stocking, and the remains of a handbag caught up in the mud and undergrowth, which were taken back to Dumfries.

Ryan’s reporting of the discoveries for the
Daily Record
made front page news across Scotland and it seemed only a matter of time before Pat McAdam’s body would be recovered. It was not to be. Further searching of the river bank revealed nothing and the clothing could not be matched to the missing girl: the dress was unlike anything Pat had been wearing when she disappeared and Hazel Campbell was adamant that her friend had only bought a handbag in Glasgow, not the dress that Ryan and the police had found.

Disappointed but convinced of the reality of the Dutchman’s psychic powers, Frank Ryan returned to Utrecht and, four days after the discovery of the discarded clothing, asked Croiset to put on record his impressions of the events that led up to Pat McAdam’s death. Croiset said she had walked with a man along the river bank near to Broom Cottage and a place where trees had been recently cut down and it was there that she had been beaten to death with a large metal spanner and her body thrown into the river, where it had become entangled in the tree roots exposed by the action of the water. The killer was in his early thirties, five feet four inches tall, with one ear noticeably larger than the other. Ryan made careful notes and contacted his editor in Glasgow, who agreed to the newspaper paying to fly Croiset to Scotland to see the area in person. The Dutchman, who had never visited Scotland before, spent a day around Middleshaw accompanied by Ryan and a local policeman. He confirmed his previous impressions of the disappearance and claimed that after a time, Pat’s body had become dislodged and had been washed out to sea. It was known that the Water of Milk was subject to periodic flash flooding during episodes of heavy rain and anything picked up by such fast-moving water would soon be swept away out into the Solway Firth. Despite the great efforts made by Frank Ryan and Gerard Croiset, the McAdam case remained unsolved.

In 1975, Colin Wilson and producer Colin Godman interviewed Croiset for an episode of the BBC’s paranormal-themed television programme
A Leap in the Dark
. During the course of filming, Croiset told Wilson that the case was a personal triumph for him as through his involvement the police had recovered the missing teenager’s body. The broadcaster knew this was not the case and the two men argued until Wilson, sensing that nothing would convince the Dutchman otherwise, decided to let the matter drop. Later it became clear that Croiset had been misled by a friend, who had told him that the Scottish police had found a woman’s body in the same area – they had, but it was that of a married woman in her forties who had change in her pocket which had been minted after Pat McAdam had disappeared. Gerard Croiset died in 1980 at the age of seventy-one. Many people, including the clairvoyant himself, have considered his collaboration with Frank Ryan, despite the fact that ultimately Pat McAdam’s body was never traced, to be his finest hour as a psychic detective.