All in the mind: The hypnotist helping crack major crimes
FROM outback victim Joanne Lees to a bashed MP, cold case murders and sexual assaults, hypnotist Margaret O’Brien has been the secret weapon unlocking forgotten clues for police for nearly 40 years.
Behind the Scenes
Don't miss out on the headlines from Behind the Scenes. Followed categories will be added to My News.
“CLOSE your eyes and relax … you are just relaxing, letting go, feeling safe, no tension,” Margaret O’Brien begins in a soft, measured tone.
The anxious 50-year-old factory worker in the chair next to her, looks about then smiles sympathetically and settles deeper into her chair as two plain clothed policemen look on via video link.
“On the count of three, your upper arms, forearms and hands are feeling loose and limp, heavy and relaxed and so you continue to drift. Not a worry or a care, no fears, no anxieties, just allowing yourself to drift deeper and deeper, further and further, way, way down … as I count … you can feel the tensions draining away as you continue to relax. You continue to drift …”
About a quarter of an hour later Mrs O’Brien reminds the woman where she was on a certain day. Softly, in a lower voice still, she concludes: “On the count of three, one, two, three … you feel wonderfully relaxed … do you remember a vehicle on the road that morning?”
NSW Police detectives from Strike Force Grafton watching the screen, subconsciously exhale, lean into the screen and hold their breath in anticipation a fresh lead for their case is about to emerge.
And it does.
It seems not too long ago hypnotherapy was something reserved for the movies or popular culture, think The Manchurian Candidate or comedies Zoolander or Shallow Hal where superficial Hal (Jack Black) is hypnotised to only see Gwyneth Paltrow’s inner beauty.
But this is real life, hypnotherapy being used to help solve real crimes by delving into the subconscious, and for 40 years Margaret O’Brien has been at the forefront of some of Australia’s highest profile cases.
True Crime Australia: Tormented letter writer could solve mum’s murder
Book extract: My drinking buddy was a multiple murderer
She hypnotised Joanne Lees to recall vital aspects of her outback ordeal involving the murder of her boyfriend Peter Falconio, put Labor MP Peter Baldwin under to see if he could subconsciously recall the assailant whose politically-motivated bashing of him put his battered face on the front page of every newspaper in the country, and more recently was called in on a high profile disappearance of a mother suspected to have been murdered by her husband.
There was also the 1999 murder of 38-year-old bobcat operator father Paul Burt who was gunned down in the driveway of his home in Castle Hill in Sydney’s north west. The case remains open with two assassins still being sought and a $100,000 reward on offer.
Strike Force Grafton detectives had no leads but after 19 months they contracted Mrs O’Brien to conduct a hypnotherapy session with the factory worker who happened to drive past the Burt home right before he was murdered. In a police interview she could not remember a thing, but under hypnotherapy recalled a beige Ford Falcon parked in front of her and a partial license plate that happened to be similar to her mobile number and provided a description of a man who could be the killer.
“I saw his arm on the dashboard and there was something, someone moving next to him (second hit man).’ she recalled on the taped hypnotherapy session seen by True Crime Australia. “I saw his face, the side of his face and he scared me. He looked at me really scary.’’
After the chilling 90-minute hypnotherapy session she didn’t believe she had said anything, apologised for not being able to help and for believing she had just fallen asleep.
“There are many times when nothing comes out of that but even if there is one little thing it can give them (police) a lead,” O’Brien said of her long career working with police forces in Australia.
“That lead has to be validated, just because something is said under hypnosis this is what reality is, they still have to follow the lead and prove it, but bits and pieces of extra information that could come up in hypnosis could make a difference between what has been said previously to further leads they could have.”
FOLLOW: True Crime Australia on Facebook and Twitter
Mrs O’Brien began working with NSW Police in 1980 when asked to hypnotise a witness who may have seen an assassin fleeing the scene of a murder in Sydney’s east.
She learnt the hypnotherapy techniques while in Los Angeles and through discussions with the LAPD.
She has since done other cases involving sexual abuse and rape, bashings, missing persons and gave evidence at a recent case where police asked her to hypnotise a child about events the night before the mother disappeared. The mother’s body has still never been found and the father was charged with murder but subsequently acquitted.
There was also the 2005 court case of Bradley Murdoch sentenced to life for murdering British tourist Peter Falconio, who was travelling across Australia with his partner Joanne Lees when he was murdered. His body has never been found. Mrs O’Brien was tasked by police to hypnotise Lees to “virtually” go back to the Stuart Highway near Barrow Creek.
“It was an amazing case and there’s still no answer, of course they’ve convicted somebody but no real answer in so far as a body and this of course creates a bit of a problem because they can establish guilt I guess even without a body,” she said.
Industry body Australian Hypnotherapists Association (AHA) president Mailin Colman said hypnotherapy is often used in probing crimes but never really made public.
“Many years ago I had a very traumatised father ring me at 9 o’clock one night because his daughter had been the victim of an attempted snatching and he knew she had looked directly at the numberplate but the poor kid was so traumatised,” she said. “You will find a lot of us when we get these calls will go pro bono, jump in the car to go and help catch these bastards. I put the kid into a deep trance and she was a little star, out she came with it and they got the man in the white van.
“So things like this happen and we won’t be mentioned in any police record.”
Ms Colman said there were a lot of quacks out there who read a hypnotherapy book and call themselves a therapist in what was a confused industry.
But the better ones were helping unlock the secrets to help in a broad range of circumstances not just crimes.
“The information is there, it’s there, our conscious mind goes into the whole trauma of it, but the subconscious has no ups and down or yoyos about. The conscious mind tells the story whereas the subconscious goes, ‘OK I will just file that away’. Very different responses. So the information is always there and the question is how deep is it buried, is it accessible because by the time you get there the conscious mind has overwritten it with the spectacular and the traumatic and the real has been lost in the noise.”