‘Believers’: Surprising Australian police tactic exposed

It was the case that captivated the entire country – but behind the scenes, something truly bizarre was taking place.

Right now in Australia, senior police detectives are trying to solve the case of a missing or murdered person – by using a psychic or medium to guide their investigation.

Not only are they spending taxpayer-funded time on such pseudoscience, there’s even evidence they’ll be paying the psychic from the public purse.

Whenever I’ve shared this with people – the result of my two year investigation into Australia’s psychics and the surprising people who use them – reaction has depended on where the receiver of the news sits on the belief spectrum.

Sceptics are alarmed that a public service could be seduced by the woo-woo in this way.

Believers, meanwhile, ask if the psychic/medium is any good, and if they delivered results.

Psychic mediums have intersected with almost all of the very high profile missing person cases of recent times: Madeleine McCann, William Tyrell and Lynette Dawson.

When Madeleine McCann went missing, 1000 psychics said they knew where she was. The family had to hire someone – Clarence Mitchell – just to deal with them all. One psychic phoned Leicestershire police and named a farm in Seville. Based solely on that tip off, Spanish police headed to Seville and, as Mitchell says, “kicked down some doors”.

Madeleine, of course, wasn’t there.

Madeleine McCann disappeared in Praia da Luz, Portugal on May 3, 2007. Picture: Metropolitan Police/AFP

William Tyrrell vanished from Kendall, NSW on September 12, 2014. Picture: NSW Police

For those believers insisting the use of psychics isn’t a waste of police time, I’d present the cold hard facts: all those missing people remain missing to this day. Although, in one of those cases, the murderer has been jailed in a rare instance where no body has been found. And, according to some believers, some psychics are even taking credit for helping identify the murderer early on: the husband of the missing person, Chris Dawson.

Psychics guided Australia’s biggest murder case

Lynette Dawson’s case specifically is a story underpinned by the use of psychics on several remarkable levels: by NSW police, by a judge in the court case, in valuable minutes on a Walkley-award winning podcast (The Teacher’s Pet) and also, extensively, by the family of the missing woman.

All of this bestowed upon the “investigative” psychics the very qualities senior police and journalists themselves strive to bring to such cases: credibility, rigour, perceived objectivity, trust.

As such, it’ll rankle the sceptics out there.

In Lyn Dawson’s case, psychics didn’t only lead the investigation on where to dig, and, extraordinarily, have the ear of a powerful judge deciding the judge-alone case (with no jury).

They also helped and healed the family – and even finally convinced Chris Dawson’s protective daughter of her father’s guilt.

Lyn Dawson has been missing since 1982.

How often police are using psychics

When my book, The Psychic Tests, was published by Pantera Press in 2021, the large chunk I’d written all about Lynette Dawson was removed as the case was before the courts.

Now, for the first time, I can reveal what I’d written about the notorious case and its intersection with psychics.

Since then, a new book, My Mother’s Eyes by Chris and Lynette’s daughter Shanelle Dawson, reveals her tendency to seek out psychics to help process the devastating double grief of the reality that her dad murdered her mum.

What was striking about the case was how several different psychics were used to help it along and get to the truth.

One in particular was given a lot of time by police, journalists and the judge: psychic Debbie Malone.

Debbie describes herself as “Australia’s No. 1 psychic detective”. She has worked on high-profile cases, been included in serious news reports and even given book deals about her “psychic detective” work by a major publishing house.

On her website, it states: “Debbie does not work on police investigations unless she is invited to by the relevant police officers in charge of the case”.

I found this curious – police in Australia are approaching psychics and asking them to help? I’d assumed it was the other way around and psychics were contacting them with “leads”.

Chris Dawson pictured at the Downing Centre Courts in Sydney in 2019. Picture: AAP Image/Dean Lewins

My default position, though, is follow-the-science style scepticism. As such, having spoken to dozens of psychics, mediums, astrologers, clairvoyants, palm readers, tarot readers and “esoteric chaperones” during the writing of my book, I knew to take absolutely any of their outlandish claims with a pinch of salt big enough to induce a heart attack.

So I decided to embark on some investigations of my own.

First, I did a freedom of information request (FOI) on the NSW Police, who worked on the Lynette Dawson case so closely with Debbie, to see if this was an outlier.

Indeed it was not.

My FOI request showed that NSW Police have used psychics at least 19 times in their investigations in the 16 years to 2019. The actual figure is probably higher; only a limited number of databases are covered by the FOI requests handled by NSW police.

Former detectives reveal the extent to which this happens.

One – former detective senior-constable Jeffrey Little – contacted Debbie and asked her to help with the murder case of missing Southern Highlands woman Maria Scott. He says they paid Debbie’s expenses: “One of my superiors told me not to use Malone’s services, but I ran it past everyone working on the case and they were happy to go ahead with it”.

The same thing happens in Victoria. Former Victorian detective sergeant Colin McLaren has said: “Today any detective at the top of the game will have highly credentialed psychics in their kit bag, alongside forensics, fingerprints and DNA”.

My other line of investigation was that I used a team of volunteers who were all avid psychic believers as undercover investigators. This was because, to me, listening to a psychic is like listening to a conspiracy theorist – I immediately find it hard to take any such woo-woo seriously.

Taxpayers are footing the bill for the practice.

But believers – and my research showed there are many of them, a large cohort of whom keep their belief secret – all say it depends how good the psychic is. So, in the interests of balance, I sent one of my most enthusiastically “open” psychic believers, Helen, to get a reading from Debbie Malone. This would test whether she was, indeed, “highly credentialed”.

Helen was very disappointed. She paid $300 to get a reading from Debbie, who wrongly suggested that her mum, then her dad, was dead (they’re both still alive) and ultimately delivered a reading that was “70 per cent inaccurate”.

Yet this is the same Debbie Malone police officers hire and pay. It’s the same Debbie Malone who was hired by NSW Police to “tap in” and advise them where to dig for Lynette Dawson. Debbie suggested Lynette had, from the dead, told them she was under the swimming pool, so that’s where they dug. No body was found.

It wasn’t the first time mystics had been hired by police in this case.

In her book, Shanelle Dawson reveals that the lead detective on the case, Damian Loone, had invited her to be hypnotised.

“It was a bit obscure for a police officer to suggest such a thing but I believe in that kind of thing so it deepened my respect for him to think outside the box,” Shanelle told ABC’s Conversations podcast.

“He knew they’d tried everything else within their power and they were hoping it’d lead to further evidence.”

It didn’t.

However, Shanelle did report, while hypnotised, “seeing mum slumped in a car on the passenger side” and “seeing my father digging in front of headlights near a pool”.

Neither piece of information could be used by police.

The use of psychics is widespread. Picture: iStock

‘They unseated my denial’

Yet there was a deeper reason Shanelle used psychics as her “own line of investigation”.

She said: “I was going to psychics quite a lot which I know to some people is unconventional, but to me is perfectly normal. It was the only avenue to get answers, and I got many different answers.”

She reveals that it was psychics who first unseated her from denial about her dad.

“There were years of processing and trying to come to terms with it and still not believing it. I just couldn’t make sense of the dad I knew committing this crime.”

Then she began seeing various psychics for answers. One said: “I believe your mum was murdered – I can see him. If you show me a picture of your dad, I’ll tell you if it’s him”.

But Shanelle wasn’t ready to receive this news, and left.

The next psychics she saw in the spirit of hope that her mum would be found alive.

When one told her: “I see someone in your family going to jail for a very long time”, Shanelle also recoiled. The same psychic then said something that left her cold: “Your mum is with a new family in New Zealand and doesn’t want to be found”.

Shanelle thinks this psychic knew the truth, but concealed it with a more palatable one.

A different psychic asked for a photo of Lynette. “She immediately felt she was being strangled and believed my father had murdered her. I was really resistant to hearing that,” Shanelle says, conceding that, ultimately, she overcame her resistance and contacted her mum’s side of the family who were “relieved” to hear she, like them, now believed her dad was guilty of murder.

When she reconciled with them, Lynette’s siblings – her brother, Greg Simms and sister, Patricia Jenkins – were spending time with “investigative psychic” Debbie Malone. They had granted her access to Lynette’s possessions, such as a watch, to fondle to “tap in” to her energy (known as psychometry).

There are psychic believers in the police force. Picture: iStock

Three reasons police use psychics

The three reasons police work with psychics go some way towards explaining why they don’t do what many more rational-minded people do, and immediately dismiss them as woo-woo.

The first is that all other leads go cold and the family, convinced by a psychic who claims they know where the body is, implore the police to listen and use them. It’s crucial police keep the family onside, and that they’re empathetic, not dismissive, to the idiosyncratic ways in which people grieve.

The second is that psychopaths like to play games, to mess with the police. They could phone with coded information under the guise of being a psychic. Investigators have to take that possibility seriously – and note it in their databases.

Debbie Malone herself attests to this. She has said: “In the beginning some officers thought I was a crackpot … One officer who asked me to assist him with a case told me that if I solved it, he’d arrest me as I must be the murderer if I located the missing person”.

She didn’t, and remains a free woman today.

The final reason police use psychics is, simply, that there are psychic believers in the police force.

Which brings us back to Greg Simms, Lynette Dawson’s brother.

He said of psychic Debbie Malone: “She told us things no one else knew. She actually took us up to the back of the property privately and she told us that Lyn was buried in a specific area”.

He added: “Everything she told us we believe”.

The former career of Lynette Dawson’s brother?

He was a police officer.

The Psychic Tests (Pantera) by Gary Nunn is available here. X: @garynunn1