Not so psychic, it seems

Being the sceptical journalist that I am, I have been reluctant to write up my feature story about the psychic from Alberton who claims to have helped the cops solve a murder. This is the woman who told me that detectives asked her for help and took her to the home of a woman who had simply disappeared.

This red-headed mystic told me that she walked into the woman's home and, through her connections with "the other side", was able to watch how the woman was trapped in her home by her domestic worker and accomplices. How they stabbed her, rolled her body in a carpet which they then stashed in the boot of her car before dumping it in a manhole near a squatter camp.

The mystic was apparently able to describe all of this to the police, and all they had to do was go and arrest the suspects and drive out to the place she told them about and find the body.

So I called the Kolonel who is commander of the Germiston Trio Task Team that solved the whole murder and found the murdered woman's body. I informed him of the claims his local fortune teller had made to me and asked him for his view.

"That lady, all those things she is saying, it is complete krepp," was the official line from the man in blue.

He further explained: anybody will know that if a carpet is missing from a crime scene that it was used to roll the body in. You see it in the movies all the time. Nobody ever steals a carpet unless it is a Persian rug, so no - we were not told something we did not know.

With regard to her predicting where the body was: in the 24 years he has been investigating murders, he has discovered that if someone says "the body is somewhere near water" they will be right in about 90% of the cases.

And did she point out where the body was found? Absolutely NOT, he maintains. The suspects themselves showed where they had hidden the corpse. Had they not done so, the body would never have been found - "not even by sniffer dogs".

Ah - somehow it's just what I thought!