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0:00:00
Ben Radford: Welcome to Squaring the Strange, the podcast that examines all manner of the mysterious and the mundane through a critical lens. So let’s square the strange.

(MUSIC)

0:00:11
Celestia Ward: Welcome back to Scoring the Strange. This is Celestia Ward and with me is Ben Radford.

BR: Hi there.

CW: And Pascual is still getting his household in order and doing a few things and we will give him some time off and Ben, you and I will have to entertain the listeners for this episode.

BR: I’ll do my best.

0:00:53
CW: Okay. Well, this week you’re actually kind of helming the whole discussion because we’re talking about an in-depth look you took at a particular case held up as the quote unquote best case for psychic detectives working. You want to tell us how that all happened?

0:01:11
BR: Sure. Well, basically, I was a guest on a podcast called Skeptiko, Skeptiko with a K, and it’s hosted by a guy named Alex Tsakiris. And I was on the show, I think once or twice. And despite the despite the the name of the podcast, it’s actually not quite not skeptical at all, which I didn’t fully appreciate until until I was halfway through the episode and until much later. But basically, as we’re talking, the host asked me, he said, well, why don’t you skeptical investigators ever investigate the good cases? And I didn’t really didn’t really know what he meant by that. In fact, as investigator, I always want good cases. I want cases that have really good quality evidence. The more evidence, the better. And so it was weird to have someone ask me why I didn’t investigate good cases because that’s what you want is good cases. And so I think he was basically trying to suggest that many or all of the cases that investigators such as myself or Richard Wiseman or Massimo Poldoro or Joe Nickell or Randi or whoever else had investigated were easy. We were carefully avoiding the most difficult cases and picking the easy ones.

0:02:33
CW: That’s because you solved them, right? I mean, anything that has an answer automatically goes into that easy bin. And then you have all these other murky cases that nobody has looked at and those are good.

0:02:44
BR: Right, right. It’s sort of a game of three card money. No, the good case is over here. It’s over there. It’s over there.

0:02:51
CW: Well, I look forward to I look forward to hearing what he came up with for you and what you came up with for him. But in the meantime, is there anything you’re skeptical of this week? So what do you get to call up this week?

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0:03:04
BR: So this week, I’m skeptical of a news story that I saw posted June 13, 2018, and that the headline jumped out at me. It’s, it’s, uh, it says, caller who made false report about active shooter DOJ being the department of justice says she was informed through telepathy.

CW: Oh.

BR: Yeah. Yeah. So apparently, um, um, I’m like, all right then.

0:03:33
CW: That’s taking things a bit, like a step farther than psychic detectives. She’s actually providing psychic information on crimes before the police even know about them.

0:03:44
BR: And ones that don’t actually happen. That’s the more problematic part. So apparently there was a false report of an active shooter situation the DOJ in Washington DC. Apparently sparked by a call who said she was informed through telepathy that a shooting was going to take place. A dispatcher received a phone call around 4.34 p.m. Monday, again this would be June 13th give or take, from a warden in Massachusetts who said there were three unknown suspects inside the building that was going to cause an active shooter situation. The police of course had to take the tip seriously.

0:04:18
CW: Well yeah, this is not like somebody’s calling in and saying, you know, there’s a giant green slug from Pluto on my front yard. An active shooter is a real thing that happens in a lot of places and no matter what she says, you have to go check it out.

0:04:33
BR: Yeah, and there’s a line here that says, Police called the person back for more information about the active shooter tip. The police report states she then told police that she had been contacted by another person through telepathy telling her that there would be an active shooter at the DOJ building. So you have an interesting blend of sort of a friend or friend tale and psychics and it’s just, yeah, no, well, you know, a friend of mine psychically told me and of course, you know, it’s a beautiful way to not take responsibility for what you said. Like, well, what do you want from me? A friend of mine psychically told me this was going to happen. What am I supposed to do?

0:05:12
CW: That begs a couple of questions. Now, I don’t want to jump to the end here, but I’m assuming there was no shooter? Nobody was found? Nothing happened?

0:05:20
BR: That is correct.

0:05:21
CW: Okay, so now that we know everybody’s safe, that begs a few questions in terms of, well, okay, normally there would be charges leveled against somebody who, say, called in a false bomb threat or reported a serious crime that was not happening. But let’s say this woman fully believes this. She really did wake up from a terrifying dream and believed it was a psychic message that there was an active shooter. Is there any room to prosecute for that? If she honestly believes it, I don’t know if there would be.

0:05:54
BR: Well, that’s a good question. And certainly, I mean, I can tell you from researching a wide variety of false reports. Police and prosecutors are generally reluctant to prosecute false reports just in general. It’s remarkable actually, how rarely people who provide false reports of anything, whether it’s abductions or active shooters or school shootings or whatever, how rarely they’re prosecuted.

0:06:23
CW: I can understand that. You don’t want to scare off real victims of crime or real witnesses from coming forward in the future.

0:06:31
BR: Well right, but my question would be why would that deter a real victim? If you actually are the victim of a crime, why would the fact that a person who was not a victim of a crime not be prosecuted, why would that deter you?

0:06:47
CW: I think it goes through everybody’s head when you’re doing something you’ve never done before, be it a job interview, be it any sort of situation that you’re walking into. You’re wondering if even though you’re backed up with the facts, are you going to be believed? And we covered that in an episode way back when.

0:07:03
BR: But yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, you know, it strikes me. It reminds me of another case I wrote about in June 2011. There’s a woman that claiming that she was psychic and she said that there were dozens of dismembered bodies buried on a ranch outside of Houston, Texas. You may or may not remember the story I wrote up for Discovery News. And the cops investigated because again, you have to. If someone, whether they’re psychic or not, calls police and says there’s dead bodies somewhere, if the police don’t investigate and it turns out that there actually is a serial killer’s body there, there could be serious ramifications if you didn’t follow up on something that’s ostensibly plausible.

CW: Absolutely.

BR: So, in this case, the police actually did show up at this ranch and they smelled decomposition and they noticed some blood, some blood stains on a porch. They quickly tracked down whose house it was. It actually was a small ranch that actually belonged to a married couple who were long-distance truck drivers and they were en route, I think, to Atlanta and they had no idea what was going on when they were contacted by the cops. So after the police went there and smelled this and saw some blood there, at that point it became basically a national story. They called in the FBI, helicopters, search teams, the whole thing. Well, it turned out that of course there were no dismembered bodies, there were no buried children as the psychic had claimed. The smell was actually from a broken freezer where there was rotting meat on the property and the bit of blood on the porch was from a what was euphemistically called a drunken incident. Make of that what you will, this is Texas. And the whole thing faded away but again it was a case of where a psychic who claimed claimed that she had visions and angels and talked to God and all this. She apparently gave instructions about the dead bodies and she, according to the police, at least initially, she gave information that she wouldn’t be able to know if she hadn’t been there. It later turned out that in fact she had probably been to the ranch at least once. So, from my research, and this is a story again, it’s been several years, my research My research was that it was a woman and it was not intended to be a hoax. Apparently, she genuinely believed that God or angels or psychics or some spirit entity was telling her that there were dozens of dismembered bodies rotting on the ranch. But, of course, there were not.

0:09:29
CW: Yeah, see, that that begs another question for me. You said that there was evidence that she had been to the ranch before, but she claimed when she told police that she had discovered all this information through some psychic vision.

0:09:42
BR: Yes.

0:09:42
CW: If somebody has information on a crime, and wishes to get that information to the police, but does not want anybody, including the police to know that they were there, or to have some back window into the crime operation, I could see them just relaying information that they actually know, but putting it under the subterfuge of, oh, how do I know this? It came to me.

0:10:08
BR: In a vision, right.

0:10:09
CW: Yeah, so that adds another layer of you kind of have to check it out because maybe they’re lying about the psychic part but not about the real information.

0:10:18
BR: Yeah, absolutely, and that’s one of the things that police deal with unreliable people all the time, jailhouse informants, drug users, people who have grudges. You know, they trade in information from dubious and sketchy sources all the time.

0:10:36
CW: And many little birds, as fairies would say.

0:10:39
BR: Indeed.

0:10:40
CW: Well, that rolls right into our topic. I mean, that’s pretty timely that you discover something in the news just a week or two ago that deals with psychics providing information to police and how useful or distracting that can be. So we’re going to come back and look more into what case Ben unraveled.

(MUSIC)

BR: Probably the best way to begin telling the story is to just read a brief section from chapter 6 in my book, Scientific Paranormal Investigation, The Psychic and Serial Killer. It’s all pretty concisely laid out and so I’ll tell you the story and then we’ll get into how it came about. Amie Hoffman, an 18-year-old cheerleader at Parsippany Hills High School in Parsippany Township, New Jersey, left her part-time job at a local mall on the evening of November 23, 1982. She had worked a double shift and was heading home for Thanksgiving holiday with her parents. Unfortunately, she never arrived. Hoffman’s worried mother later went to the mall, where she found Amie’s car in the parking lot. The keys were in the ignition, her purse and sweater in the front seat. There was no evidence of a struggle. It seemed Amie had simply vanished. She was found floating face down in four feet of water in a concrete water tank in the Mendham Borough Reservoir on November 25th by a couple walking their dog. Hoppen had been stabbed several times in the chest and other areas with a sharp knife. The killing set the community on edge, partly because it was only the latest in a string of recent unsolved murders. A $5,000 reward was offered for any information about Hoffman’s killer, and within a week, the FBI was involved in the investigation. Several eyewitnesses came forward with a description of the man and his vehicle last seen with Hoffman, though as time passed, the case solved.

0:12:40
BR: Finally, one detective working on the periphery of the case, Captain Jim Moore, contacted a local psychic of his acquaintance named Nancy Weber. Moore soon brought another detective, Bill Hughes. Weber told both police officers details about Hoffman’s death that apparently even the police didn’t know at the time, helping convince them of her credibility. After a few initial meetings, the three of them drove together to the crime scene, and Weber gave the police information about Hoffman’s killer.

0:13:06
BR: Weber told them, quote, “The man who did this, his first name is James, his last name is Polish, multiple syllables, beginning with a K and ending with an -ish. He came up from Florida where he had been imprisoned for murder. He lived in the area and his brother owned or worked at a gas station.” Moore and Hughes took down her information but were unable to locate the killer. They tried to arrange a meeting with the prosecutor’s office to formally introduce Weber to the investigation, but the district attorney was not interested in listening to a psychic. The community grew restless and police urged the killer to turn himself in.

0:13:39
BR: Amie Hoffman’s killer murdered a second woman nearly two weeks later on December 5th. Like Hoffman, she had been abducted and repeatedly stabbed. She was rescued by a driver at a truck stop and briefly described her attacker to him, but she bled to death in his arms. On December 10th, Morris County Police released a sketch of the suspected murder. Three of Hoffman’s co-workers had seen the man in his Chevrolet at the mall. This turned up no new leads and the investigation continued. The serial killer was not arrested until six weeks later in the early morning hours of January 17, 1983.

0:14:10
BR: The reign of terror that had gripped Morris County since Thanksgiving finally eased. Police identified the suspect as James Kodatich, a 34-year-old man who lived in nearby Morristown. He had served 10 years in a Dade County, Florida prison for robbery and second-degree murder and was released on August 18, 1982. He was of Polish heritage and his brother worked at a gas station. Nancy Weber’s psychic information about Hoffman’s killer, apparently, turned out to have been true in nearly every detail. Even Moore and Hughes, interviewed years later, were impressed by this amazingly specific and accurate details.

0:14:42
BR: Nancy Weber and others have touted this case many times, including in her self-published book, Psychic Detective, on her website, and most famously in a 2006 episode of the Biography Channel’s TV show, Psychic Investigators. So that’s the overview of what happened with Amie Hoffman.

0:14:59
CW: Now that’s interesting. You covered the actual physical details of the murders and then you also plugged in the information that purportedly Nancy Weber had ahead of time and was able to give detectives even though it was not public.

0:15:16
BR: Right.

0:15:16
CW: Information about his name and he had spent some time in a Florida prison system before coming up to New Jersey, correct? Yes, that’s what she said. All right, well, I’d be curious to know, so Alex Siqueiros pulled that up as the best case scenario for a psychic detective who got things right, who helped solve a case, who, you know, just case closed, this psychic absolutely did help.

0:15:42
BR: Right. And, you know, again, the context is that we see this over and over again. When investigators investigate a case, they’ll point to a best case and then a researcher will spend weeks, months, even longer solving the case. And then what often happens is they say, OK, well, maybe that wasn’t the best case. It’s over there. And then they keep basically moving the goalposts. And this happens all the time. This happens in Bigfoot research. It happens in psychic research. It happens just in virtually every field when skeptical investigators are challenged to solve the best cases. When they do solve them, the proponents sort of – they say, well, okay, well, maybe, maybe that one was, you know, turned out not to be so good, but this one over here. And then of course, uh, the investigators expected to spend another weeks, months, years of unpaid time and effort investigating that one. And then of course, the same thing happens all over again. Well, no, no. Well, okay. I was wrong about that one, but what is the one over here? Yeah.

0:16:43
CW: Bait and switch. Yeah. Well, well, listening to the details you just relayed, and I think anybody who turns off the podcast right now, please don’t, but anybody who would, and anybody who only read that first opening page of your chapter in scientific paranormal investigation might close the book thinking, oh, well, you know, that convinced me. Psychic detectives know their stuff, because that lady knew a whole bunch of things that the police apparently didn’t know. But the investigation into the investigation has not yet even begun.

0:17:19
BR: Exactly.

0:17:21
CW: What did you do to start looking into the legitimacy of this, what was it, like 33, 35-year-old case?

BR: I first heard about the case in mid-2008, so it’s about 10 years ago, almost exactly 10 years ago in fact. And the case, even at that point, was as you mentioned decades old from 1982. Yeah. So, the older a case is, the more difficult it is to investigate, of course. So, what happened was that Alex and I agreed to sort of co-investigate the case. As it turned out, I did virtually all the investigation.

CW: Why did I think that would be the case?

BR: Well, it was weird because, you know, again, I said, okay, well, fine. I said, all right, Alex, you’re so sure that skeptics are not, they’re choosing the easy cases and, you know, what about to say find the best case you can. Look through all the psychics you want. It could be five minutes ago. It could be 500 years ago. Do some research and find the best case, the rock solid, airtight case you think is going to stump any skeptic, bring it to me and I’ll look into it.

0:18:33
CW: You were kind of accepting the burden of proof there.

0:18:37
BR: I was. Shame on you, Ben. Well, no, you’re right. I did something which as a general rule skeptics shouldn’t do, which as you mentioned is accepting the burden of proof. Because in this case, of course, and in this the burden of proof was something that Alex repeatedly failed to grasp. It was fascinating to have these hours long conversations both on and off the record and on and off the podcast in which he he never quite understood why the claimant has the burden of proof. I would explain to him and he was like, okay, yeah, and then he would just go back. It was very strange. And he’s a reasonably bright guy. I think he’s married to a psychologist and apparently he did some entrepreneur stuff. So he’s not an idiot, but it was just weird to have a discussion with somebody who just didn’t grasp the basics of burden of proof.

0:19:35
CW: Burden of prrof, in case anybody is wondering is if somebody tells you I have the ability to fly around like Superman, it’s not your job to disprove it. It’s their job to prove it to you. They have the burden of proof as the claimant.

0:19:50
BR: The burden of proof is in the claimant. This is not controversial. This is how it works in science. This is how it works in the court of law. This is the basis behind innocent until proven guilty. If you’re accused of a crime, you don’t need to prove you’re innocent. The prosecutor has to prove you’re guilty, either beyond reasonable doubt or proponents of evidence depending on the court. The principle is the same, which is exact. If you make some extraordinary claim or even some ordinary claim, it’s your job to prove it. In this case, Alex was saying that this case of Nancy Weber solving this mystery of the serial killer James Kodadich was the best case. And I kept asking him, where is your evidence? And he would he would say, well, you know, watch the TV show. I’m like, OK, no, no, really, though. OK, I’ll watch a TV show. But like, where’s your evidence? It’s in the TV show. Did you see it?

0:20:49
CW: So he was pointing to, I’m assuming, some sort of infotainment show. Do you remember what show it was?

0:20:54
BR: Well, it was featured on a couple of different things. It was featured on Psychic Detectives. And I think the main one he was talking about was the 2006 biography TV show, Psychic Investigators. And it was bizarre because I was talking to somebody over the age of 15 who who like saw like a 22 minute TV show.

0:21:17
CW: Edited, produced, and written for a certain segment of the audience.

0:21:21
BR: Yeah, and he was just sort of taking it at face value. He’s like, yeah, there it is, dude.

CW: Wow, this guy would not last 10 minutes with a timeshare salesman in Las Vegas.

BR: Well, it’s like, and I mean, look, I get that I’m probably more media literate than some people. I mean, I wrote a book called Media Mythmakers. I have a background in media literacy. I get that. But it was just strange to have someone like that was his evidence. And to him, he didn’t need to investigate because the TV producers did his job for him. And I’m just like, oh, man, I’ve done TV before. I, you know, Pascual can talk about that. I mean, the idea that what you see on any given TV show, especially a docudrama something like this, is the unvarnished, balanced truth. It’s just astonishing to me, but that’s…

0:22:18
CW: Yeah. I do hope the general public, you said it’s been about 10 years since this went on between the two of you. I do hope just in general, all the fake stuff that’s been coming out is just making the average person, certainly the average teenager, be way more wary and skeptical of, oh, I saw that happen on TV, so it’s totally true.

0:22:40
BR: Yeah, so, you know, so, anyway, to go back to your question, so we agree, I quickly realized that this case go in a whole bunch of different directions. And so, I mean, not only was the, was it the Nancy Weber case, there’s information that Weber gave to the two detectives. There’s also the Deirdre O’Brien, the woman that Kodatch murdered after her. And there was some information given about that. So I quickly, and Alex agreed to this. I mean, this wasn’t just me. I said, okay, well, there’s lots of different, rather than go off in a bunch of different ways, let’s just focus on this focus very clearly, very specifically on the information that Nancy Weber claimed to have given the two detectives at the time. And he’s like, OK, fine. And so I did the show. And so this was sort of the beginning of the challenge. The show then aired and some of his commenters said things like, well, all of her clues were 100 percent correct. And psychic detective converts hardcore skeptics. I’m like, okay.

0:23:40
BR: So the first thing I did was to begin by constructing a timeline. Tried to fill in the dates. So November 23rd was when Amie Hoffman was abducted, both from the mall. She was found two days later on Thursday, November 25th. Apparently, the psychic Nancy Weber asked about Amie Hoffman, my family friend. She had a psychic vision that night. Nothing happened significantly until December 5th when O’Brien was abducted, found stabbed and soon died. And then it wasn’t until mid-January when the killer was eventually arrested. So the first thing is to sort of, you know, parse out exactly when these things occurred and what were the plausible connections between the two of them. But it was one thing that I noticed right away was that everyone involved, including Nancy Weber, admitted that her information didn’t solve the case.

0:24:28
CW: It sounds like it should have certainly helped if that was correct.

0:24:33
BR: Exactly. This is one of the head scratchers. Like, hey, well, the cops say that she didn’t solve the case. Nancy Weber herself admits that she didn’t solve the case. According to New Jersey reporter Abbott Koloff, quote, law enforcement authorities who were in charge of the Koedatich case said Weber had no role in the investigation. They say Kodatch was caught by old-fashioned police work, a combination of his own mistakes and an examination of the evidence. She played absolutely no role, said Lee Trumbull, the Morris County prosecutor at the time. So we have the prosecutor saying that she played no role and basically everyone involved in the case is saying she didn’t solve the case. I’m thinking why didn’t she solve the case?

0:25:15
CW: Well, even her, she even admits that although her facts and her visions lined up, she didn’t actually like take them to find him. She didn’t give them anything that they could actually catch him with.

0:25:28
BR: Right. And this, to my mind, this is one of the key issues here. And I’ve said this before about psychic detectives is, What is the value? I mean, this happens and we should do a whole show on that, and I’m sure we will at some point. But oftentimes, you have psychics who will, okay, if there’s a missing person, if and when they’re found, they’ll be found near water, or there’ll be something quite nearby, or there’s a number of two or a five or seven, whatever else. And what the psychics do is, is after the case has been solved, after the missing person has been located, they retrofit the information. Okay, well see, I told you that there was a five involved and they were five miles from a house. Or I told you they were near water because there’s a water tank 200 yards away. And so, even if the information the psychics were giving is correct, it’s worthless. It is of no use. There’s nothing a cop can do. There’s nothing a police detective can do. If a psychic comes to them and says, I know where the person’s being held and you know, it’s the there’s this information blah blah blah and eventually they’re found alive or dead three weeks later by some, you know, someone walking their dog or a hunter in the field or wherever else and then the psychic detectives, see I told you.

0:26:50
CW: It just seems like they’re kind of using the deceased person as a way to sort of show off, look I know little bits of stuff. And that’s terribly distasteful. If you don’t know anything that can help, then keep your mouth shut.

0:27:05
BR: Yeah, yeah, it’s just, and you know, there’s all, again, there’s, I’ve, I’m a little, this is a topic that pisses me off. There are many, he talks and it pisses me off from Sylvia Browne, convicted felon to Jaycee Dugard. I mean there’s, I have a lot more to talk about, but on this show we’ll all just focus on the…

0:27:28
CW: Narrow the focus.

0:27:29
CW: Well before you move on, can I just say that’s something that real detectives have to kind of focus on with actual witnesses to an event. If you’re getting information from a witness and you ask, okay, tell me what the man was wearing and they start by saying, well, I had eggs for breakfast that morning and it was a little windy. That’s not information that’s going to help. Answer the specific question, what was the suspect wearing? And don’t waste two hours of the detective’s recording time going into random little details about, you know, just stuff that pops into your mind. Even on the premise that if psychic detectives have some sort of clue into some sort of alternate dimension that gives them this information, it just seems like they’re they’re kind of f***ing with the police by not giving them anything that will help.

0:28:30
BR: Yeah, and you know, to be fair, I mean, most psychics that I’ve encountered truly believe in their abilities. There are of course some frauds and hoaxers out there, but for the most part, the ones I’ve encountered seem to genuinely believe that their visions and dreams and ideas, whatever, have some connection to reality.

0:28:53
CW: Yes.

0:28:54
BR: But in this particular case, I mean, just to go back and answer your question. So in this case, I basically won by default because, again, going back to the burden of proof, right? It’s like, you know, I say, give me your best case for psych detectives. And I say, prove it. And he says, watch the TV show. Okay. I watched the TV show. What else you got?” And the answer was they had nothing. All the records had been lost. Both the detectives had long since thrown away the records. The only things that were remaining from the time were some notes that Nancy Weber wrote up and eventually published in a self-published book and just memories. So, there was no recordings. There was no audio. No video. No photographs now

0:29:41
CW: That’s a huge red flag is this is starting to sound like that fish my grandfather caught that was like 10 feet long. He swears.

0:29:49
BR: If you’d only seen it, you know, right and so yeah So this is part of the problem was that you know when I asked for evidence he points to a TV show a half-hour TV show and then I say, okay. Well, no, I didn’t mean evidence in quotes, I meant real evidence. He’s like, “well, you can talk to the detectives.” I said, I’m happy to interview the detectives and just keeping in mind that we’re talking about memories from 30 years ago and basically they had no hard evidence at all. And so at that point, I would have been entirely justified to say, you have not met your burden of proof. I asked I’m asking for evidence. You have not provided any evidence whatsoever. I won. That’s how that works.

0:30:32
CW: But then the podcast would be over. And I know you did more.

0:30:35
BR: But number one is that Alex, no matter how many how many times I explained it, he never grasped that he did not accept that the claimant has the burden of proof. Furthermore, I mean, at the end of the day, it would be an unsatisfying case because I wanted to investigate because this is interesting. It’s being called the best case for psychic detectives.

0:30:55
CW: In for a penny, in for a pound.

0:30:57
BR: So basically at that point I unfairly, I want to point out, I unfairly assumed the burden of proof to try and, I basically was taking on Alex’s burden of proof and saying, okay, you can’t do it. Let me try and prove your case for you.

0:31:13
CW: You’re putting the training wheels on for him.

0:31:15
BR: Yes.

(MUSIC)

0:31:16
CW: OK, Ben, so where did you go from there? I’m assuming you took each claim and you tried to look into the validity of it as best you could from what you had to go on there?

0:31:41
BR: Yes, again, there wasn’t, as I mentioned, throughout this whole thing I kept expecting like evidence. I kept expecting someone to say, oh look, here, this is all, and I realized number one, there was no evidence. Number two, I was going to have to dig into it all because what Alex considered evidence, I didn’t consider evidence. I considered it to be an amusing, exaggerated write-up that sort of pointed at evidence or something. I don’t even know what to call it.

0:32:05
CW: Yeah, I should point out here that when I first read your book, Scientific Paranormal Investigation, and I read that chapter, I went ahead and tracked down the episode of Skeptiko you talked about, and it was some of the most frustrating listening I’ve ever put into my ears. You just tried and tried and tried and said, well, we can’t really count on that. And he’s like, what, you don’t believe them? And you kept reiterating, it’s not that I don’t personally believe them. It’s just we’re talking about memories from 30 years old. And yes, listeners, if you’re interested in just pulling some of your hair out, go ahead and give that a listen. Yeah, not before you take some good sedatives.

0:32:50
BR: Well, again it was just – and he later – we will sort of get into the aftermath afterwards but he later pointed to this as an obvious slam dunk case where he had shown up the skeptics. And it was fascinating because even on Skeptiko’s own boards because for several weeks and maybe even several months, I’ve forgotten now, I was actively respectfully engaging in comments. I was like, okay, well, you know, I was, I was giving a fair shake to this. All right, well, I’ll answer your questions. And, and even on, on his own boards, a lot of his listeners were like, ‘Yeah, Alex, maybe, maybe this is not the hill you want to die on.’

0:33:29
CW: So, so what you’re saying is, uh, we have multiple cases of retrofitting here.

0:33:37
BR: Yes.

0:33:38
CW: Not only by the psychic, but by the host of the show talking about the psychic. This is really getting sort of meta.

0:33:45
BR: It was very meta.

0:33:48
CW: But yes, after we peel away the layers of retrofitting here, tell us what you found out and how you found it out.

0:33:53
BR: Sure. So, again, with literally no hard evidence to go on, basically the entire case came down to the memories of three people. Sergeant Bill Hughes, Captain Jim Moore, and Nancy Weber, the New Jersey psychic who claims that she gave important, amazingly accurate information, although all three of them admit that she didn’t solve the case, which…

0:34:15
CW: So there were no paper written notes from that era and no recordings available, correct?

0:34:20
BR: Right, all that had been thrown away. The only lead that I had was the police file and I requested the police file from the police department and I was told that I would not be able to get it. And furthermore, even had I been able to get it, it’s pretty clear from my other research that there wouldn’t have been anything about Nancy Weber in the file because again, the DA himself said that Nancy Weber had no role in it and they made comments about it. Well, you know, if you look in the file, she’s not really mentioned much because they basically suggested that their supervisors were uncomfortable having a psychic provide information and so they sort of nudged it out.

0:35:01
CW: That does lend ammunition to the whole story of, oh, psychics help police all the time, but they just don’t want to talk about it.

BR: Yes, yes.

CW: So, yeah, you have to deal with that as you dig into this.

0:35:15
BR: So in order to get the story, I had a couple of different sources. I had the TV show that so impressed Alex that he chose this as the best case, and I carefully reviewed that and took notes on what each of the police officers said. And then Alex arranged for an interview, a recorded interview for the show, and I have recordings of that. In fact, we will make some recordings available for the podcast. It’s actually, if you go on my website, my benjaminradford.com website, there’s a link to some of the recordings. You can see the transcriptions and you can hear the audio quality isn’t great.

0:35:52
CW: It’s better than 30-year-old memories, though.

0:35:55
BR: Good point. I can throw a direct link up for listeners over on our Facebook page. Yes, so in addition to that, and I’ll get to that in a second. I also Had a book that Nancy Weber titled psychic Detective the True Story of Psychic Detective Nancy Orlen Weber by Nancy O Weber That would be a autobiography. This is published by the Unlimited Mind publications, which I have no idea what that is, I think it’s probably like a either small press or self-published or something and on the back it mentions, it gives her credentials. And she was apparently a nurse. And in 1972 she studied psychotherapy at the Center for Feelings and Creativity. I did a search for the Center for Feelings and Creativity and I found nothing. So apparently she studied psychotherapy at an institute that doesn’t appear to exist.

But anyway, moving on. So on page 114 of her book, which I got on eBay, I think for, I don’t know, five or ten bucks, chapter 15 is Serial Killer. And she goes into the story, it’s sort of a first-person account. It’s slightly offensive because she actually misspells Amie Hoffman. She misspells it A-M-Y. Actually it’s A-M-I-E. So apparently she couldn’t even be bothered to correctly spell the murdered woman’s name.

CW: I’m telling you, as somebody who works in publishing, little typo errors like that, they’re big red flag.

0:37:24
BR: Yeah. Anyway, and not just once. I mean, all throughout, she misspells the murdered woman’s name, which I found to be somewhat distasteful, but whatever. Anyway, I won’t read the whole thing, but you can sort of, she goes over a thing talking sort of back and forth and the information that she used to give. And for example, he says, his first name is James, his last name is K. Itch, something long and Polish sounding. I cannot pronounce it. He’s moderately tall, about 5 foot 10. He’s slim, dark hair. He’s well known to you. He or his brother worked or works at a gas station. And then she’s basically quoting herself. Unfortunately, there are no records other than what she claims she told them. And basically, the captain says, Are you serious? She is showing up the skeptics. Anyway, so there was that book, but much more useful were the interviews with Hughes and Moore. And I won’t bother to summarize them here for you. There was lots of stuff and frankly, a lot of it was very intricate and stuff and you can –

0:38:27
CW: Now these interviews you’re talking about these are interviews that you had yourself with the two police detectives or are the interviews that she had in her book?

0:38:36
BR: No, these are these are audio recorded interviews arranged by Alex as the challenge went on.

0:38:43
CW: Okay, so they were real-time as you did the investigation you were able to talk to them today.

0:38:50
BR: Yes. I interviewed all the principals at least once. And, you know, I got the chance to interview the sergeant and the captain to find out, you know, what, what did they actually say now? Now keep in mind that I can see how Alex would have been impressed because the TV show does show them being impressed. I mean, they, in the TV show, both Moore and Hughes do seem to generally, if not strongly, be impressed with the information that Nancy Weber gave them. So if that’s as far as you look into it, then I can see how some say, Well, there you go. What more do you need? You have these two cops. They say that she gave them amazing information. Nancy Weber says they gave information. OK, maybe they didn’t actually find the serial killer, but hey, amazing.

0:39:38
CW: Okay.

0:39:39
BR: As is often the case with these investigations, the devil’s in the details. So keep in mind that the claim is that Nancy Weber gave at least six very specific pieces of identifying information about the killer, James Koedatich. Now also keep in mind that at the time that Nancy Weber wrote up her book Psychic Detectives, of course, they had already found the killer.

0:40:01
CW: This is years later, I’m assuming she wrote that.

0:40:04
BR: Yes. The book is from 1995. So well over a decade afterwards, after they already knew who the killer was, he was arrested, the whole thing. At this point, she writes her book. You can fudge things all you want. Right. Oh, this is what I said. No, really.

0:40:17
CW: Again, we have potential retrofitting. Yes. In the book that you’re forced to look at for evidence.

BR: Yes, exactly. So, again, I’m not suggesting that Nancy Weber is necessarily lying here, but certainly there’s a self-serving aspect to it when you have the psychic detective writing a chapter about her personal experience and how courageous she was and how she helped solve, you know, this horrific crime.

CW: My grandpa wasn’t lying about that fish neither.

BR: There you go. So, again, keeping in mind that we’re focusing very specifically on what exactly they said. So here are the six items that Nancy Weber and according to the TV show, the police say that she got right. Weber claims that she specified the Hoffman’s killer had served time in prison in Florida. Quote, he came up from Florida where he’d been in prison for murder. Actually, they both dispute this. Both the police officers say she did not say that. That’s odd. No, so here’s what Sergeant Hughes told me and this is a direct quote And again, I have the audio recording if anyone wants to check, Hughes told me that “Weber said that the killer had quote served time in the South I don’t recall her specifically saying that he’d done time in Florida—just that he’d done time in the South.”

CW: There’s a lot of states in the South. What do you mean by the South, you know, Louisiana, Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Tennessee, Virginia, Delaware, you know, and keep in mind this is New Jersey. Most of the U.S. is south of New Jersey.

0:41:49
CW: Yeah. Okay, so we have that one that can kind of be sort of fudged away a little bit. So out of the six, you have one that can kind of at least be partially fuzzed away.

0:41:59
BR: Right, right. So the second item was that Weber claimed that she had specified that Hoffman’s killer, again, then unknown, his last name begins with a K, which of course it did. Unfortunately, despite what Alex says and what the TV show says, that’s not how Moore and Hughes remember it. Sergeant Hughes says, quote, “I don’t specifically recall her coming up with a K.” Captain Moore remembers Weber telling him that the killer “had a hard K in his name.” Not that the killer’s name begins with a K, but instead that there’s a hard K somewhere in the name.

0:42:32
CW: Well, in Polish names, I think that’s a requirement.

BR: That’s exactly it. That’s what they do.

0:42:36
CW: Sometimes two or three Ks.

BR: Well, let me just be very clear about this: So in this case, we have three different people in court remembering three different things. You have Nancy Weber, the psychic whose credibility is on trial here, saying, I told them his last name begins with a K. Direct quote. That’s exactly what she said.

0:42:58
CW: OK.

0:42:59
BR: Sergeant Hughes says, “I don’t remember her coming with a K.” You can’t reconcile the two. He said, I don’t remember that. And Moore says that “she said there’s a hard K in the name.” Well, which is it? Did she did she say it began with a K? Did she say the hard K somewhere in the name? Or I mean, so again, there’s we’re not splitting hairs here. These are three different explanations.

0:43:22
CW: Well, and if the thing that this case is weighted on is how the officers remember it, then right there, they’re canceling out the amazement factor there.

0:43:32
BR: Right. Right. And keep in mind that I mean, this is this is what Alex kept coming back to is how credible and how infallible in memory his witnesses were, his witnesses being the two police officers, Nancy Weber. And again, no one’s saying anybody is lying necessarily. We’re talking 30 years ago. Of course, they don’t remember. And unfortunately, they threw away all the records. So there’s no audio recordings. We don’t know. We don’t know what the hell she said. We’ll move on. So Weber claims that she specified that Hoffman’s killer, his last name ends with an -itch or -ish or, or -ich. Again, this is another detail that was touted as being amazingly specific that did in fact turn out to be true. Koedatich does end at that sound. Once again, neither Sergeant Hughes nor Captain Moore remember Weber telling them that.  According to Sergeant Hughes, quote, “I don’t specifically recall her coming up with the -ish in the name.” Moore agrees. Quote, “to be honest with you, I don’t remember Weber saying the killer’s last name ends with -itch.”

0:44:34
CW: So three out of the six already, just from talking to the police detectives as they recount their memories, three out of the six disappear.

0:44:44
BR: Yes. So we’re already halfway done. In the three cases so far, the police officers’ recollections are at variance with what Nancy Weber said. So, number four. Weber claims that she specified that Hoffman’s killer was of Polish descent and that, quote, his last name is Polish. Well, once again, contrary to what Nancy Weber says and what the TV show says, both Moore and Hughes dispute this. Weber said the killer was of Eastern European descent and Moore also agrees with him. He says the Weber only told him the killer was of Eastern European descent. I asked Hughes about that in terms of whether the information that she gave was useful enough to their investigation. He said “Eastern European descent, maybe Slovak, or Russian, or Romanian, again you’re talking about thousands of names. Where do you begin?”

0:45:38
CW: Yeah, and Poland, just like Florida is one of many states in the south, Poland is one of many countries that can be called Eastern European.

0:45:48
BR: Yeah, we’ve got Romania, Ukraine, Serbia, Austria, Hungary, Belarus, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria.

0:45:57
CW: Stop it. You’re getting that Animaniacs song in my head. I don’t need that right now.

0:46:01
BR: So again, it’s out of fairness, both the police officers remember her saying that he was of Eastern European descent.

CW: But it’s a lot more impressive to say she hit a two-inch target on the side of a barn rather than just say she hit the side of a barn.

0:46:23
BR: Right, exactly. And again, keep in mind that the memories are important here. I mean, you have two police officers saying she did not tell us that he said he was Polish. I mean, that’s what they said. She did not tell us that. So are the two police officers wrong or is Nancy Weber wrong? I don’t know. I wasn’t there. You weren’t there. We don’t know. But if we’re going to give credibility to the police accounts and memories. Also keep in mind that New Jersey is heavily Polish. Polish residents make up the largest European population by far, comprising about 7% of New Jersey residents.

0:47:07
CW: Well, that matters. Yeah, that matters.

0:47:09
BR: Yeah, it matters.

0:47:10
CW: Okay.

0:47:11
BR: Number five, Weber claims that she specified that the man who did this his first name is James. Now in this case we have one police officer Moore agreeing with Weber.

CW: Okay, so there’s a potential hit.

BR: Yes. Moore says that’s correct. She did say James. The problem is that Sergeant Hughes says quote “she didn’t have complete names for us.” So what’s going on here? So Nancy Weber says, I told them his first name is James, which is a very specific name. That’s a very clear name. And but Hughes says, no, she didn’t have a complete name. So did she only tell “James” to Moore and not to Hughes? Or did Moore not tell his partner that she had said James? I mean, what?

CW: That seems like a detail where if you’re handed a solid first name of a suspect, you would remember that, you would write that down, if you had confidence in the source.

0:48:10
BR: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we’re talking, to be very clear here, this is a person that, at least according to Nancy Weber, was a serial killer. This was somebody who had killed before and was certainly likely to kill again.

0:48:26
CW: And according to according to that TV show, at least, she walked in there and or they walked over to they went to her. They were very impressed with all the details she had. So it’s not like they were just, you know, writing her off as some wacko who had just walked in with all this random, crazy information. If they were very impressed with what she was giving them and she gave them a first name, that would be something to write down. Right, exactly. I mean, it’s just, it’s inconceivable to me that a police detective working on a homicide investigation, if someone gives you a credible tip that the person you’re looking for, his first name is James, you don’t remember that. I mean, just… Yeah, so out of the five out of six you’ve gone over here, we have like half of a possible hit?

0:49:15
BRL Maybe one, sort of depending on how you count the halves. But yeah, basically, I would say two halves of possible hits. And so just to wrap up, so then there’s a sixth one. Now again, I’m narrowing it down to just these six because these are the items that were very specifically mentioned by Nancy Weber that the two police detectives were very specifically asked about. There are a couple other ones that either Weber mentioned that no one else talked about or vice versa, but these are ones that there are some commentary about all three of them that we can look to.

0:49:48
CW: Okay.

0:49:48
BR: The sixth one is Weber claimed that she testified the killer’s brother owned or worked at the gas station. Again, important useful information, right? I mean, this is his first name is James, last name starts with a K, his brother owns or works at a gas station. Well, again, unfortunately, contrary to what the TV show suggested, this isn’t true. Hughes remembers Weber’s information differently. He stated that she instead told him that the killer himself, not his brother, was associated with the mechanic. Either he was a mechanic himself, or associated with the mechanic. Moore’s recollection was even more general. Moore stated, quote, “that either he, the killer, Kodadich, or a member of his family had a gas station or worked at a gas station or had something to do with a gas station.”

0:50:32
CW: Or one of them owned a car or had been in a car.

0:50:34
BR: Or had been to a gas station. Or seen a gas station.

0:50:37
CW: Sorry, I don’t mean to make fun, but that really does sound like, I mean, of all the Eastern European descended guys in New Jersey, how many are associated with a mechanic?

0:50:50
BR: There you go. So, you know, once again, I mean, there’s a very clear pattern here. The information that superficially seems amazingly specific and accurate turns out to be less so. When you get beyond the surface and say, okay, what exactly did she tell you? Did she say the name began with a K? Well, no, there’s Did you say James? Well, no, didn’t really have any names. What’s going on here? I’m not bagging on anybody’s memory. I’m well aware of how fallible memory is. That’s the whole point.

CW: Yeah.

BR: That is the whole point. I have a degree in psychology. I research memory. This is what I do. And I’m not faulting the two detectives for not remembering every last detail. I’m faulting Alex Tsakiris for thinking or assuming that he could build the best case for psychic detectives on 30-year-old memories with no forensic or hard evidence whatsoever.

0:51:55
CW: Based on a 20-minute segment on a TV show where producers were strongly motivated to cut out anything that seemed, you know, waffly and go for things that sounded like hits and cut in reaction shots and everything else that producers do to magnify the drama of something spooky.

0:52:12
BR: Absolutely. I mean, I get to this day, I mean, you know, part of part of this story is how people are misled and misinformed by TV shows, even apparently intelligent people, not realizing that they don’t, that they’re, they’re entertainment, they’re, they’re scripted, they’re, they’re edited to be dramatic and sensational. I’ve done lots of TV shows. I know how this works. Pascual can talk about that. I mean, this is, this is not unknown. And yet to stake his reputation on this half hour TV show I just to this day… I’m astonished.

(MUSIC)

CW:  Okay, so one of the other things that was mentioned by Alex and the detective, the psychic detective, was that she had some information that convinced them that they should pay attention to her in the first place. Now did you look into that at all?

0:53:19
Yeah, that was part of what intrigued me was my question, one of my questions was why did they listen to this woman in the first place? I mean she was a friend of at least one of them and sort of later befriended both of them and they ended up doing TV shows and sort of conflating their memories a lot in some of the TV shows.

0:53:37
CW: As happens.

0:53:38
BR: Yeah, you know, well, they retell the story and then they remember it differently. And you know, these are not uncontaminated memories. At this remove, there’s no way in the world to know what exactly that she said. But there are a couple of things. So one thing that I had asked Sergeant Hughes, what made her confident enough to approach the DA with her information? Now keep in mind that the DA eventually wanted nothing to do with her and said, thanks, but no thanks. But nonetheless, apparently something made them think that she was worth listening to. So I asked Hughes why they were paying attention to her, what gave her credibility. He said, quote, “based on the fact that she knew details about the murder that no one else could have known, such as that Hoffman had been sexually assaulted. Even the authorities didn’t know that at the time.” This gave credibility to everything she was saying, he told me. So Weber had claimed that, this is a quote from the show, she said, quote, “I knew the newspapers reported Amie’s body was found clothed and they couldn’t determine death. That’s the truth.” Well, that’s actually not the truth. Yeah, so this is where a search of archives comes in. So I looked at the archives for both the local newspaper and also the New York Times for the day after Hoffman’s body was found. This is November 26th.

0:54:55
CW: Finally, we have something besides fuzzy memories.

BR: Yes.

CW: Newspaper archives are legitimate records of what may have happened and what was at least publicized.

0:55:03
BR: Yes, so again, let me very quickly repeat what psychic detective Nancy Weber says: “I knew the newspapers reported that Amie’s body was found clothed and they couldn’t determine death. “Well, according to the New York Times, she was, quote, “stabbed to death.” Yeah, adding that Hoffman had several wounds and the front page of the Daily Record, which is a local newspaper there, quote, had said, “Hoffman had been stabbed several times in the chest and other parts of the body.”

0:55:34
CW: That does not seem like a very obscure way to die.

BR: No, no, well keep in mind that Nancy Weber claimed—she said this explicitly—that the newspapers weren’t revealing how she died. They couldn’t determine death. In fact, both the front pages of the New York Times and the local newspaper both said very clearly and explicitly that she’d been stabbed to death. So she was basically claiming that she had gotten these details through psychic powers instead of just reading the newspaper. The other aspect that seemed to impress the police officers was that Weber knew that Hoffman had been sexually assaulted.

0:56:13
CW: Now, did the newspaper cover that?

0:56:15
BR: It did not. It did not. So this is one case where Weber is correct. The newspaper certainly at the time, the first reports after finding her body did not reveal that she had been sexually assaulted. That is true.

CW: That does strike me though as a guess that would be a pretty good bet. I mean, just like a lot of psychics say, okay, if a kid’s been missing for two years, they’re probably dead. Unfortunately, that jives with the statistics of crime victims. If a child is missing for more than two years, chances are they have been killed. If a teenage girl goes missing or is murdered, unfortunately there’s a very good chance there was a sexual crime that happened as well, right?

0:57:00
BR: Yeah, I mean the various circumstances behind Amie Hoffman’s death point directly to sexual assault. If the person had simply wanted to kill her, he didn’t need to abduct her and take her somewhere else. He could have killed her on the spot. If the person wanted to abduct her and hold her for ransom, then there would have been ransom demand. The only plausible and I would say likely outcome of someone being abducted and later found dead is that they were taken from a location, taken to another location, had something done to them, and they were killed. Most likely if it’s a young woman in these circumstances, she was likely sexually assaulted. So the police officers find this remarkable. I find it rather obvious.

0:57:48
CW: Yeah, it’s not exactly a leap. You don’t have to watch that many crime shows to jump to that.

0:57:53
BR: Right, right. So again, we see lots of sort of sketchy holes in the story, but again, if you watch the TV show, it’s very dramatic. You know, it has her meeting with the detectives and giving her information. And they’re skeptical at first. And then, you know, she wins them over by giving all this amazingly accurate information. And she, they go to the location where she was stabbed and she falls to the ground and relives the experience and all this very dramatic, sensational, you know, TV stuff.

0:58:22
CW: So we have a lot of window dressing around some claims that are based on 30-year-old memories and instances of information that you’ve automatically just debunked.

0:58:34
BR: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So at the end of the day you keep going back to the question of, Well hold on here: Why wasn’t the case solved by Nancy Weber? I mean think about this for a second, right? You have two police detectives who were told the guy you’re looking for is Polish, his name begins with a K ends in -ish, first name James, there’s a height and dark hair and yeah that’s it, and he did time for murder in Florida. How could you not find this guy? So that and this is this is a question I kept asking Alex okay well Alex you’re so shocked and stunned that the amazingly accurate information. Why didn’t they solve the case? Why didn’t they find James Koedatich before he killed Deirdre O’Brien? Well, yes, what’s going on here if Nancy Weber was so convinced about the accuracy and validity of her information why didn’t she track the guy down?

CW: That would be that would be really good evidence that this wasn’t simply retrofitting.

BR: Exactly. So basically, a final nail in the coffin, in this case for me, was that I was actually able to track down the serial killer using Nancy Weber’s information.

0:59:49
CW: You are not a police detective, Ben.

0:59:50
BR: I am not. I am not. Maybe I should be.

0:59:53
CW: You’re not. You’re not even living in the 1980s when this happened. You’re relying on what you can piece together 30 some odd years later.

1:00:02
BR: Well, more specifically, I’m relying only on the amazingly accurate information that Nancy Weber claims she gave the police. And so I said, OK, well, the police –

CW: The police detectives who were really impressed with her and believed her.

1:00:21
BR: Exactly, exactly.

1:00:22
CW: So they would have acted on it.

1:00:25
BR: So here’s what I did. I contacted a friend of mine living in the New Jersey area and obtained a copy of the New Jersey Bell phone book for the Morris area from July 1982. I went through all the last names that began with K and ended in itch and whose first initial was J. It took about 20 minutes and I found a grand total of four names from two different families that fit that criterion. On page 252 in the middle of the second column, are the listings for the Koedatich, the serial killer’s brother Joseph and their father.

1:00:56
CW: So you narrowed it down to four people.

1:00:59
BR: Yes.

1:01:00
CW: So they could have made four phone calls, visited four houses, and sewn this thing up before the second victim was murdered.

1:01:09
R: You would think. And if Weber’s claim that she told the police that the killer’s brother worked at a gas station or owned a gas station, depending on how they remember it. If that’s true, then they could have confirmed validity of this lead with one simple question. Call up these four phone numbers. “Does anybody in your family work at a gas station?” If the answer is yes, then—if Nancy Weber’s information is true and accurate—you found your serial killer. So again, the question is, what happened? Either Moore and Hughes are so incompetent, they couldn’t look in the local phone book to see if Weber’s information matched anybody local, or the information they were given at the time is not as accurate and specific as it’s now being made out to be.

1:01:52
CW: So that leans the truth-o-meter over to the memories that they told you, which was, she didn’t come up with a whole name. She didn’t, you know, she said there was a case somewhere in it. She didn’t say Polish. She said Eastern European. And they didn’t get the first name James.

1:02:10
BR: Right. Right. And so, again, I’m not casting shade on Hughes or Moore or anybody else. I’m just making it clear that if Nancy Weber is telling the truth and her memory is correct and accurate, then there’s something badly bungled in this investigation. And it’s ironic because Alex kept saying, believe the police, believe the cops, believe the detectives. And the answer is: I am! I do believe them. You should believe them. You’re star eyewitnesses who you are talking about how great detectives they are and how good their memory is and they’re super sharp. So believe them when they tell you that Nancy Weber didn’t tell them all these specific details at the time.

1:02:56
CW: And if she had, they would have just looked the guy up in the phone book.

1:03:01
BR: Yeah.

1:03:02
CW: Ah, well. Well, can you say anything on how, you know, knowing your background, you know, you have some psychological insight on how these stories grow, even as a folklorist, when two people talk about a memory that they have, they end up both making that memory change into something else. What happened with these two police officers? How did they get to the point where they were able to sit and be interviewed for a TV show and be incredibly impressed with what happened 25 years prior?

1:03:31
BR: Well, there’s a couple things going on. Again, one of them is that the TV show brought them together. I mean, Nancy Weber has made a career out of being a psychic detective. And she’s written at least one book, maybe more. And she touts herself, last time I checked, she was offering psychic readings for $225 an hour. That’s her persona, that’s what she does. And of course, because of this story, because of the James Koedatich murder and Amie Hoffman, Deirdre O’Brien and all that, they come together and they’re, you know, I’m sure they appear on panels together and they did several TV shows together. And in the course of that, they hear each other talking, they hear each other repeating their stories and this is what I remember. And this is a classic case of cross-contamination. You know, what we would need to validate any of this is contemporaneous notes, audio recordings, video recordings, something other than, well, I remember it this way, I remember it that way. We have three different recollections, and the idea that Alex, on a show called Skeptiko, would point to this case as the best case for psychic detectives based on nothing more than what three people may or may not remember from 30 years ago is frankly astonishing to me.

1:04:50
CW: Yeah, I would like to suggest that Alex change the name of his show to Skeptic-doh!

1:04:57
BR: Well, you know, what would happen is that, you know, I would bring this up with Alex. If you have the stamina, listen to the show. Listen to our back and forth on this. I welcome it. Knock yourself out. And you can hear us, and I’m trying to be very polite and respectful and saying, look, Alex, I get that you’re amazed by this case, but look at these discrepancies. And he’s like, well, it’s close enough.

1:05:30
CW: Close enough is not the best case.

1:05:32
BR: Well, he’s like, well, you’re just being pedantic. You’re missing the bigger picture. No Alex, I’m not missing the bigger picture at all. That’s what investigators do. They look for the discrepancies. They’re not trying to debunk or disprove. In fact, again, I was basically taking on his burden of proof. I was trying to prove that psychics are real. I wasn’t, I was, I didn’t spend all this time and effort. This case took me over nine months. I mean, this was a long involved case.

1:05:59
CW: You didn’t get paid anything to do this.

1:06:01
BR: I didn’t get paid a dime. I did all this because I wanted the challenge and the intellectual challenge of trying to figure out what the hell happened here. How is it that these police officers seemed impressed and later impressed Alex and others so much so that they were willing to hang their hat on this being the best case for psychic detectives. You can’t just arbitrarily pick and choose whose memory you want to believe in order to support your case. You have to look at all the evidence.

1:06:29
CW: That’s a bias. We’re dealing with confirmation bias too. If you hear something that goes with the worldview you want to establish, then it’s the best case for you. Then all the things seem to line up. And it’s something that we have to fight in ourselves too. As you often say, you don’t want to go in and just quote unquote debunk something. You want to make lists. You want to come up with evidence you have to look into to find out whether or not there’s any weight to this. Because I mean if there was weight to it, if the best case for psychic detectives turned out to reveal a woman who really does have this power, that would be amazing.

1:07:08
BR: Yeah, absolutely.

1:07:10
CW: And it would be worth spending nine months of your life proving that.

1:07:14
BR: Well, and the other thing to keep in mind here is, again, all this happened in 1982, 1983. As far as I could tell, these two detectives didn’t use Nancy Weber on future cases. Now, why is that? If you have somebody who you believe truly gave you virtually everything but the photograph of the person, all the information you need to find them, I would be consulting her on every case. I would, I mean, again, we’re talking killers here. You could save people’s lives. If you truly believe that this woman can do these amazing things and come up with this amazing information that no one else could know and solve these mysteries, why in the world wouldn’t she be consulted on every single case from then on?

1:08:01
CW: Well, we could do a whole other show about the downside to this idea that certain people have psychic abilities and can help with crime solving, crime prevention, saving lives of people who’ve been kidnapped. There has been a lot of harm that’s happened from Sylvia Browne professing that certain kids are dead when they’re not really dead, that just the emotional harm it inflicts on parents, and the tremendous amount of wasted time it gives the police departments around the world. But thank you for looking into this one case as deeply as you did.

1:08:40
BR: Well, yeah. I mean, you’re welcome. Again, I enjoy these sorts of cases. I enjoy trying to solve the best cases. And that’s why I took this on.

1:08:51
CW: Well, there’s a lot of things I enjoy but I wouldn’t necessarily do nine months of work in that thing.

1:08:56
BR: Well, you know, a lot of skeptical investigation is what I call finding the asterisk. We see these broad, bold claims, these marquee claims, the headlines, you know, blah, blah, blah, and you know, the psychic does this and Bigfoot reported here and you know, a man survives without eating for 18 months. And in all these claims, there’s a little asterisk somewhere near the headline. And the trick is to find that asterisk, and find out what the caveats are. Look beyond the surface, look beyond the superficial and try to find out if this is really true.

CW: Ben Radford, asterisk hunter.

BR: Yeah.

1:09:37
CW: Well, before we go, Ben, what sort of shoe leather detective work did lead to the capture of this murderer? Well, as it turns out, it’s a weird story. As many things in this case are weird. Koedatich had called the Morristown Police Department on January 17, 1983, to report that he’d been attacked by an unknown assailant. So he called and said somebody had attacked him. It turned out to be a false report. But while the police were at his home, an observant police officer noticed the car matched the description of the suspect’s car, a turquoise Chevrolet, and arrested him on the spot. Now, keep in mind that that several of Amie Hoffman’s co-workers described the suspect’s car, a turquoise Chevrolet. So the police had actual real life evidence to go on and the officer noticed that, hey, we’re looking for a turquoise Chevy, there’s one, and arrested him on the spot. And the tread on his right rear tire matched the tire track left at the scene of O’Brien’s murder and the fibers found in his car matched those from the clothing of one of his victims.

1:10:45
CW: So solid forensic evidence and tips by eyewitnesses are what led to his capture.

BR: Yes.

CW: Well, bully for that.

1:10:52
BR: There you go, right. I mean, this is that’s exactly right. I mean, what we what solved the case? Science, not psychics.

CW: Yep.

(MUSIC)

1:11:33
CW: All right, so thanks again, Ben, for digging into your notes, your solid, actual contemporaneous notes that you took on an investigation into the touted best case for psychic detectives, Nancy Weber, and what she knew and what she didn’t know and when she knew it.

1:11:59
BR: And what she remembered telling them and what she actually told them.

1:12:05
CW: You said she said, they said, nobody said.

1:12:08
BR: Who knows.

1:12:09
CW: So next week, hopefully we’ll have Pascual back with us, but we’re not sure. We’re helming the ship, possibly just the two of us, possibly with Pascual. We’re going to kind of do a topic that I’ve been interested in getting into, and there’s a lot about it out there, but it’s basically pregnancy woo. Not weird things that will get you pregnant according to old wives tales, but more like what pregnant women are told or read about versus, you know, stuff that might make you go, hmm.

BR: That’s an important topic. I think that the listeners would be interested in that, and of course you know it covers everything from alternative medicine to real health to urban legends and medical misinformation.

1:12:59
CW: And there’s a nice strong helping of confirmation bias and to let some listeners know here I have a little window into it because it looks like I’m gonna have a baby in September.

1:13:13
BR: Yay!

1:13:14
CW: So, I’ve been inundated by pregnancy, and I want to bitch about it, okay?

1:13:20
BR: No one better. No one better.

1:13:22
CW: Okay. All right, so we’ll be talking about that next week. Until then, stay strange, everybody.

1:13:28
BR: Bye-bye.

1:13:29
CW: Take care.

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