Clairvoyant Gerard Croiset failed to crack the Beaumont case but gave rise to the ‘psychic detective’
When police came to a dead end in tragic case of the missing Beaumont children a wealthy businessman imported a psychic to try to crack the mystery
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On Australia Day 50 years ago, celebrations were dimmed by breaking news that three children had vanished in South Australia.
Jane, 9, Arnna, 7, and Grant, 4, the children of Jim and Nancy Beaumont, had caught a bus from Somerton Park to go to the beach at Glenelg. When they hadn’t returned home at the expected time, Nancy became concerned and sent her husband out to look. Finding no sign of them, the parents finally reported them missing around 5pm.
Despite some reported sightings, the Beaumont children were never seen again. The mystery has since become part of Australian lore. Despite a major search and police investigation at the time — and several since — no trace of the children has ever been found.
The baffling disappearance sparked all kinds of strange theories and led to the desperate attempt to use world-renowned Dutch psychic Gerard Croiset to solve the mystery. This would prove to be one of Croiset’s most public failures yet would also contribute to the rising popularity of the “psychic detective”.
Croiset was born Gerard Boekbinder in 1909 in Laren in North Holland, a province of the Netherlands. He claimed that as a youth he had worked for a watchmaker and discovered that, when he held an object owned by his employer, he could see things that were confirmed as accurate by the watchmaker.
Croiset decided to go public with his talents.
Known as psychometry, the ability has been claimed by many people in history. It was first studied by the physiologist Joseph Rodes Buchanan, who worked for the Eclectic Medical Institute in Ohio. Buchanan is credited with coining the term psychometry and later wrote the Manual Of Psychometry: The Dawn Of A New Civilisation in which he said that all objects gave off “emanations” that could be read by people attuned to them, such as Croiset.
After surviving Nazi occupation during World War II, Croiset attended a lecture by parapsychologist Wilhelm Tenhaeff in 1946 and offered himself as a subject for Tenhaeff’s studies. When the Dutch police, frustrated by a lack of leads in a murder case, contacted Tenhaeff looking for a clairvoyant, he sent Croiset.
Croiset was given a hammer allegedly used in the crime and described the murderer. His vague description was noted and, while it did not lead to the arrest, it proved to match the man who was eventually arrested. The police sought his expertise on later occasions and his reputation began to spread internationally.
In 1966 when the SA police failed to make headway in the Beaumont case, the public began to call for them to use a psychic.
Croiset was one of several celebrity psychics at the time, including fellow Dutchman Peter Hurkos, but Croiset’s name had become familiar in Australia from news stories reporting his dealings with police in Britain.
Prominent SA real estate developer Con Polites paid to bring Croiset out and met all his expenses.
Amid great clamour from the media, Croiset arrived in November. While the police did not meet him officially and the Beaumont parents refused to dine with him, crowds greeted Croiset when he visited the beach where the children disappeared. He declared that the children had not been kidnapped but rather had been trapped below the concrete floor of a warehouse that was being built.
The police accompanied him to the warehouse but, with only the word of a psychic, there was no way they would get a warrant to dig up the warehouse foundations.
The public were less sceptical and began taking up donations to pay for the excavation. Croiset left the country without a result. The warehouse was eventually excavated (at Polites’s expense) in 1996 when it was being partially demolished but no trace of the Beaumont children was found.
Regardless of his failure, Croiset continued as a psychic. His son, Gerard Jr, followed in his footsteps but is not known to have had any successes in cracking cases. Croiset died in 1980.
Originally published as Clairvoyant Gerard Croiset failed to crack the Beaumont case but gave rise to the ‘psychic detective’
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