Ghosts & Gallows (27 page)

Frankly sceptical of anything connected with ghosts and mediums, Batters and Smith listened while the young Irishwoman began describing her experiences. At one point during the conversation, Holohan stated that the spirit of Jacqui Poole was close to her and began to relay information in the form of impressions and descriptions of events from her direct to the two policemen. This included a series of names, a description of the interior of Poole’s house, as well as the way she had been attacked and murdered. Holohan also spoke about the reasons Poole had been home alone in Lakeside Close on the previous Friday evening, the jewellery that had been stolen, as well as rings that were missing from the murdered woman’s hands. Batters then asked if ‘Jacqui’ could give them either the name of her killer or a clue as to the whereabouts of the missing items. Holohan, still in a semi-trance state, took the policeman’s notebook and pen and, attempting to obtain the information through automatic writing, moved her hand across the paper. When Batters took the notebook back he saw that as well as some random squiggles, the medium had written the number ‘221’ as well as the word ‘garden’ and two names, ‘Ickeham’ [
sic
] and ‘Pokie’. The second of the two names made the policemen exchange glances as they immediately recognised its significance.

Holohan then stated that ‘Jacqui’ wanted her to give one of the policemen a personal reading to show that the information that was being given out was genuine. This the medium did by psychometrizing DC Smith’s keys. Holding the bunch of keys in her hand she spontaneously gave three precise and clear statements that related specifically to Andy Smith, after which Holohan returned to ‘normal’ and the interview finished. Outside, Smith admitted to his colleague that he was stunned by one of the statements Holohan had given him as it concerned totally accurate private information in extraordinary detail that in no way could have been either guessed or obtained through suggestion or ‘cold reading’. The second statement, about a letter he had recently received in connection with a mortgage application on a house that needed rewiring, was also correct, while the third statement, concerning a transfer to another police station (which Smith was aware of but thought unlikely would happen), came through a few days later.

A number of acquaintances of Jacqueline Poole who had come forward had already been interviewed by the Ruislip police and in total the number of potential suspects from this line of enquiry grew to around thirty people. One of these was twenty-two-year-old petty thief Anthony Ruark, a friend of a friend, who went by the nickname of ‘Pokie’. He had been picked up in a local pub two days before and interviewed but had since been released, and at the time, was not considered to be a major suspect. Impressed by what they had experienced with Christine Holohan, Batters decided that Ruark should be re-interviewed and officers also visited his home and took away items of clothing for examination. During questioning, DS Lundy noticed scratches on Ruark’s hands, which he claimed were due to a minor motorcycle accident; Ruark gave an alibi for his whereabouts on the evening of 11 February and he was later released for lack of evidence. The incident room at Ruislip was kept open for fifteen months but no new leads were forthcoming during that time and eventually it was closed. The Poole murder became a ‘cold case’ and for several years remained unsolved.

Seventeen years later, in 2000, during which time major breakthroughs in forensic DNA analysis had taken place, the case was reopened following information supplied by a police informant, specifically naming Jacqui Poole’s killer. This person was not Anthony Ruark, but during the course of the re-examination, items collected from Ruark’s house and kept in storage, including a pullover recovered from a dustbin, were checked against material recovered from the original crime scene using advanced Low Copy Number (LCN) technology that now enable forensic scientists to obtain matches from minute samples. Investigators found forty-six separate matches between the killer of Jacqueline Poole and Anthony Ruark, including clothing fibres, skin cells and body fluids, and he was quickly arrested. On 25 August 2001, an Old Bailey jury found Anthony ‘Pokie’ Ruark guilty of what Judge Kenneth Machin described as the ‘brutal murder of a defenceless woman’ and he was sentenced to life imprisonment. It was a conviction that has since been regarded as probably the best example of genuine psychic detection and one which prompted
Psychic News
to proclaim on its front page two months later, on 27 October 2001, ‘Medium catches killer and proves life after death’. Had the ‘classic work’ of psychic detection been found at last?

Following Ruark’s successful conviction, the Poole case was investigated by Guy Lyon Playfair and Montague Keen, two long-standing and highly respected members of the Society for Psychical Research. We have already encountered Playfair briefly in connection with the Enfield Poltergeist while Keen, formerly a journalist and farmer, was heavily involved in the late 1990s with what has become known as the ‘Scole Experiment’, the last great investigation of physical mediumship and its phenomena of the twentieth century
1
. Playfair and Keen collected as much material on the case as was available to them and also carried out tape-recorded interviews with both Tony Batters and Christine Holohan. The policeman had been impressed enough by his experiences to keep a personal file of information, including the notes taken during his original meeting with Holohan; he had also undertaken his own investigation in connection with the missing jewellery and had written an account of the psychic side of the case, which was published two months after the
Psychic News
article in the Police Federation journal,
Police
.

Batters had transcribed his original notes and collated the medium’s impressions into a list totalling 125 specific statements about the murdered woman, the crime scene, as well as the name, appearance, method of entry and route taken by the killer that, apart from a handful of impressions which were unverifiable, all but one of which proved to be astonishingly accurate. Holohan had described the inside of Jacqui Poole’s house exactly as the policeman had seen it during the extended time he was present at Lakeside Close on 11 February 1983, down to items such as a black address book, a letter and a medical prescription, and two coffee cups, one clean the other a quarter full of cold coffee, on the kitchen draining board. She had given names intimately connected with the life of Jacqueline Poole that could only, it seemed, have come from the dead woman herself: Betty (Poole’s mother), Terry (one of her brothers whom she was particularly close to), Barbara Stone (a close friend, killed in a road accident two years before, who was not identified as such until 2001) and Sylvia (her boyfriend’s mother); she also gave Poole’s maiden name – Hunt – something that had not then been released to the public, and also described someone who lived over a newspaper shop that was later found to be her best friend, Gloria. While Batters was present at the crime scene he answered the telephone three times and the callers proved to be Betty, Gloria and Sylvia. Holohan, through her automatic writing, also gave the names Tony and ‘Pokie’, which were both connected with Jacqui Poole’s killer, and ‘Ickeham’, a misspelt but almost identical version of Ickenham, the London suburb between Ruislip and Uxbridge where Ruark lived with his girlfriend. Her description of Jacqueline Poole’s body including rings missing from her hands, as well as where and how she had been assaulted inside the house were also confirmed by the police investigation as being totally accurate. The one statement that was incorrect concerned the day of the murder: the medium said it had taken place sometime on Saturday rather than the day before.

Although circumstantial, Tony Batters also felt that the word ‘garden’ and the number ‘221’ from the automatic writing were connected with the route the killer would have taken when making his escape from the murder house back to his own home, and where he may have temporarily hidden the stolen jewellery, which to date has never been recovered. This was Swakeleys Road, the only street on the route Ruark (who admitted in court to visiting Poole’s house in Lakeside Close on the evening of the murder) had said he travelled on the way back to Uxbridge, which had house numbers that went up to 221. Interestingly, in the light of the words written down by Christine Holohan while in trance, the plot of what should have been number 221 (between number 219 and some higher numbers) had been replaced with a public garden accessible directly from the road. Batters had found (admittedly in 2001, eighteen years after the event) a hole covered with stones in the shrubbery next to the side wall of number 219 Swakeleys Road that could have been used to store the items while Ruark returned to his house to establish his alibi, later returning to collect the stash and move them to somewhere more secure prior to selling the jewellery on. However, this part of Batter’s account is conjecture as the hole the policeman saw and photographed may not have existed in 1983, although it is conceivable that another suitable hiding place did exist in the same garden at that time and this was the impression that the medium was getting during her interview with Batters and Andy Smith.

Playfair and Keen cautiously published their findings in January 2004 as ‘A Possibly Unique Case of Psychic Detection’ in the
Journal
of the Society for Psychical Research. Unable to totally endorse the sensational claims of the
Psychic News
three years before, they were prepared to qualify the newspaper’s original headline and conclude that it could at least be said that ‘Medium provides key information that helps lead to the conviction of a murderer and is highly suggestive of discarnate survival’.

In the 1930s, American sociologist and psychical researcher Hornell Norris Hart (1888-1967) carried out extensive research into the phenomenon of apparitions and their relationship to the question of survival after death. Hart, despite concluding that survival was valid, coined the term ‘Super ESP’ (sometimes called ‘super-psi’) as an alternative explanation for evidence obtained from mediums and psychics, that due to its accuracy appears to come from discarnate entities or spirits communicating from beyond the grave. Leaving aside the objections of the sceptics, who by their very nature dismiss out of hand any notion of supernormality where mediums and their phenomena are concerned, it is a counterhypothesis that, like similar non-survival-related concepts such as ‘cosmic memory’, creates a dilemma in psychical research, as it effectively divides investigators into two camps, survivalists and non-survivalists, by suggesting that all information provided by mediums such as Estelle Roberts, Gerard Croiset, Nella Jones and Christine Holohan, is obtained unconsciously by either tapping into the living memory of a person or people, or telepathically reading documents or records that exist somewhere in the world. Non-survivalists, although sympathetic to the existence of paranormality in the Poole case, would contend that all of the 125 statements provided by Christine Holohan were obtained in this way, either by her reading the minds of the investigating policemen, particularly DC Tony Batters who had spent a large amount of time at the crime scene, as well as Jacqui Poole’s relations and friends. Playfair and Keen argue that for the mind reading explanation to be valid, Holohan must have not only been able to read three specific minds (Batters, Ruark and Poole) but, while doing so, select only the information that was relevant from each. ‘The strongest argument against a super-psi explanation and in favour of a survivalist one,’ they note, ‘must surely be that a great deal of the information given by Holohan could only have come from a person who, at the time of communication, was unquestionably dead’.

In assessing the importance of the case as part of the history of paranormal crime investigation, the two researchers also make an important statement when, in the paper’s concluding remarks, they note that, ‘Common criticisms of cases of psychic detection are that they are self-reported, sometimes long after the event; they are not corroborated by the police; evidence is selected to focus on the hits (or lucky guesses) while suppressing numerous misses; and that sweeping or unspecified statements are made that could apply to anything … None of the above criticisms, however, can be justly applied to the Poole case, in which the evidence, much of it highly specific, was recorded within a few days of the murder by the first police officer to visit the crime scene … ’

Criticisms of the importance of Christine Holohan’s involvement in the Jacqui Poole murder and doubts on the genuineness of any paranormality displayed on her part have tended to follow the somewhat well-worn and familiar approach of CSICOP-inspired scepticism that we have encountered elsewhere. In an Internet article published in 2003
2
, Tony Youens and Adrian Shaw (then a serving police detective) argue that it was possible for Holohan to have come by her information by normal non-paranormal means, although they acknowledge, somewhat graciously given the hard-line attitude that organised scepticism has taken in recent years, that just because something
is
possible it doesn’t automatically mean that it did actually take place in that way. Youens and Shaw use a blanket dismissal of ‘cold reading’ as an explanation for the information obtained by Tony Batters during his interview with Holohan on 17 February 1983, and suggest that the medium was likely to have became aware of information concerning the crime and Jacqui Poole’s background through speaking to people in the local area in the days immediately following police appeals for information, particularly in a number of pubs and shops in the part of Ruislip where she was then living. Youen’s initial view of Holohan’s involvement with Batters and Smith was that she was being used as a front to pass on information about a suspect (i.e. Anthony Ruark) by a local person who wished to remain anonymous. All of these explanations were robustly dismissed (in a letter to
The Skeptic
magazine) before his sudden death in 2004 by Montague Keen, who passed away only a few days after writing an afterword for Christine Holohan’s autobiography.