Keen Responds: to Detective Shaw/Tony Youens
Let me make it clear at the outset that the description of Tony Batters as the principal detective involved was my wording, not his. He has modestly disclaimed such a role, and asked me to make this clear, although in relation to the events with which my colleague and I were principally concerned — the entry into the deceased's flat, the record taking, and the interview with Holohan -- it seems to me as a layman to be a perfectly fair description. What is objectionable, and rather despicable, is the attempt to disparage and minimise Batters' role as a detective of 30 years standing, whether attached to the CID or the uniform branch, who had the task of scrutinising and analysing all the documents involved in this complicated 15 months murder hunt and was regarded by Lundy as his right-hand man on documented issues, and a source of reference for the three days Lundy spent at the trial, leaving Batters as the source of reference to the prosecuting barrister for the subsequent two weeks of the trial. Despite several attempts made by Division for his return, Batters was sufficiently valuable to be retained by Lundy with one other detective for the entire period of the investigation even though the murder squad was substantially disbanded after six or seven months. So please can we finish with these snide attempts to marginalise Batters' role and the ridiculous quibbles over his technical status?
My only error, and one I immediately corrected, was in the (trivial and irrelevant) reference to Batters having himself retrieved the pullover, as if it mattered. It was made in a letter to Professor Christopher French, editor of The Skeptic magazine, in a comment on Youens' article in which he vainly attempted to provide a non-paranormal explanation of the interview with Holohan. I did not make the assertion in any forum. I have not contacted or corresponded with any forum on this matter, and I have never heard of or been involved in the "Police and psychics thread". I have simply corresponded with you, Steve Grenard. I do not know to whom or what the correspondence has been transmitted but have assumed it has been sent to all who may have read Youens or Shaw's effusions on some network. Shaw has quoted statements I never uttered or wrote, and then made a meal out of them. I have not spoken to Lundy for reasons previously given. I see no reason to now, especially when it is clear that his memory of events at the trial two years ago is almost as fallible as his recollection of the sequence of events twenty years ago. There has been no hedging, retreat, downgrading, evasion and futile re-interpretation on my part, as Shaw alleges; nor is there any mess requiring unravelling, save that laboriously constructed by those determined to find a non paranormal explanation, no matter how far-fetched their assumptions, or how generously they libel Christine Holohan without troubling to produce a single piece of supporting evidence. I find this scandalously irresponsible conduct for a serving police officer.
There is obviously a dispute whether the pullover did or did not play a role in the sequence of events which determined the verdict of guilty and whether it was or was not retrieved because of the heightened suspicion of Ruark consequent on the Holohan interview. It is inconceivable, in the light of the wealth of accurate detail provided by Holohan, that it would not have had a significant effect on those members of the murder squad — and there were some forty of them, with Lundy as their leader — who were apprised of the evidential nature of the interview. Shaw says he has spoken to some of them, but there are no names; and we do not know how many of them were even aware of the Holohan interview or had any reason to be. It is obvious that anyone other than a purblind bigot to whom Batters or Smith reported the outcome of the interview would have been impressed and spurred by it, but more than likely, such is the nature of memory and wish-fulfilment -- that Lundy would not wish his pride to be dented by any recollection of any statements made by a medium, especially if he felt it somehow reflected on his achievement as the man primarily responsible for solving the only outstanding murder mystery of his career.
On the contribution of the pullover to the successful outcome of trial, it is possible to have more than one opinion, since no-one can say what factors swayed the jury. It may well be that McKinlay wasn't even aware of the pullover: there was no reason why he should have been. He wasn't around when all the 1983 information was being gathered. However, the forensic evidence at the trial relating to the blood and semen stains on the garment, indicating a struggle rather than the consensual intercourse claimed by the defendant, must surely have added a significant weight in the balance of probability. It certainly would with me had I been a juror.
It would be an extremely odd procedure to start digging up gardens unless there had been some sort of tip off. There was. It took the form of Holohan's semi-trance scribbled note which both identified Pokie as the murderer and referred to gardens, in response to a question about the location of the stolen jewellery. Shaw joyfully concludes that the medium was unable to give the police any information about the fate of the stolen property. But there is a very high level of probability that she did just that, except that the significance of the information was not recognised until eighteen years later. But even if she had not been able to provide any such evidence, it would detract not a whit from the evidentiality of the rest of her statements. Guy Playfair and I will be giving the precise evidence for this in our paper.
Now for the relevant issue. Shaw's hypothesis, backed by Youens, is that the sequence of events was such that Holohan had time to obtain all the relevant information normally. True, there is uncertainty about the precise sequence, and reluctance on the part of McKinlay to allow access to the documents which would show just when Holohan telephoned in response to the police appeal for information. The body was discovered on Sunday, February 13, 1983. Holohan's call to the police could hardly have been before Monday, and the interview took place either the next day, as Andy Smith vaguely recollects, or Thursday, which is Tony Batters' preference and accords with his note. No-one, including the officer concerned, is quite certain when Ruark was arrested and his apartment searched: it may have been as late as the Friday.
Frankly I don't think it matters. However one juggles around with the dates, the hypothesis is wildly improbable that Holohan, even had she the time, knowledge and incentive to gather all the information which came in unsequential bits and pieces during the interview, would have been able to acquire all the information normally. What astonishes me is the fact that Tony Batters has already provided a copy of his interview notes and analysis of them to Youens, so there's even less excuse for some of the preposterous notions he and Shaw are trying to push.
The suggestion that newspaper reports would have given much of the information to Holohan doesn't hold water either. I have examined all the local newspaper reports, and the dates on which they were published. They reflects the limited amount of information the police considered it prudent to reveal, and could account for only a fraction of the information, not all of it strictly accurate. Nor did any reveal Poole's maiden name as given by Holohan. It is in fact certain that Holohan could not have seen any before her telephone call, since the first local paper with the news was not published until the Thursday, the most likely date of the interview itself.
Then let us consider the 72 statements she made about the scene of the crime. Shaw first imagines that Holohan, on hearing of the murder, promptly inspected a neighbour's flat to familiarise herself with the layout. There is no evidence that she did. No neighbour has come forward to say that this young Irishwoman wanted to nose around her apartment for some reason. Then it is surmised that she must have had the information from a member of the family whom Batters had allowed on the scene when effecting his entry. How does Shaw know this? It is false. No member of the victim's family was allowed entry to the flat, until Poole's husband, Malcolm, saw it one week later. The keys were not released to the family until four weeks later. Could she have got the information from the father of her boy friend, and who identified the body? But this won't do either. The man entered the lounge via the back bedroom window, and never went into the kitchen, orthe bathroom. How, then, did the medium make correct statements about the precise state of the normally tidy kitchen or know that the struggle started in the bathroom? Perhaps the family had a duplicate set of keys, made an unscheduled entry to inspect the flat, and rushed off to tell Holohan, of whom none of them had ever heard, all about it. But even this couldn't account for much of the evidence, even that relating to the corpse and the appearance of the flat.
So far these speculations have been firmly based on a total absence of evidence, however flimsy. Now we come to the pub gossip in The Windmill, from which Holohan is assumed to have gleaned so much information she wished to retail to the police, for a motive or reason unknown. Where are the witnesses that Holohan was an habitué of this pub? She tells me she has never even visited it. The only pub she recalls is the Tally-ho where she spent a couple of evenings serving behind the bar; otherwise she was fully engaged as a cleaner at Northolt Airfield, or giving readings. If she knew so much about the deceased woman, how is it that her name was nowhere to be found in Poole's list of telephone contacts, and that no-one in this gossipy pub world had any knowledge of her or mentioned her to the police? Holohan lived in a different part of the area, about three quarters of an hour's walk away - she depended on public transport - was not a pub frequenter, would not have mixed with or approved of the fraternity of petty criminals with whom the dead woman associated, and had no reason beyond public spirit and the importunate urgings of her ghostly informer to notify the police. If she had given a reading to Poole and gleaned some information thereby, there was no record of it in Poole's diary, and no-one else appeared to know about it. Nor it is likely that this would have helped her to describe the circumstances of the murder.
What of the possibility that one or more members of the murder squad may have spoken to members of the Poole family about the state of the flat? Not only was the state of the apartment not known to more than one or two officers, but Batters' 20-page typewritten statement was not typed out until the end of the week. In any event it is very unlikely that anyone would have given detailed information of so distressing a nature to any of the Poole family, and even less likely to have done so before Holohan's interview.
What specific statements did Holohan make that she could not have known by normal means? Certainly the state of the kitchen; and the nature of the sexual assault: neither could have been apparent at the time without close examination. Likewise the fact that the struggle had apparently started in the bathroom, where there was evidence of a fight; and unless her boyfriend's father, availing himself of his brief and shocking experience in the lounge, had hastened for no imaginable reason to give a woman he had almost certainly never met a detailed description of the scene in order that she could later pretend to the police that a spirit had provided the information ....
I hasten from one absurdity to the next. The record shows that Holohan referred by name to Poole's dead friend, although the identity of this woman was not traced by the police at the time, and remained unknown until after the 2001 trial. She made 42 statements about the murderer, including that he had been recently engaged in an insurance swindle, a fact unknown to the police. So we must assume that Pokie was so intimate with Holohan that he told her of his insurance swindle, as well as showing her his tattoo, revealing his birth date, even indicating where he parked his vehicle on the night of the murder or that his mates would support a phoney alibi. It passes comprehension that anyone, in a desperate effort to ignore the facts, can build one improbable hypothesis on another and wind up with such fanciful nonsense.
Just a few more points arising from Shaw's comments transmitted to you on September 27th. Shaw dismisses all the literature of apparent evidence of discarnate communication as mainly anecdotal "as in this case". It is not altogether surprising that a detective unfamiliar with the psychical research literature he is criticising should display crass ignorance of this sort; but presumably this also reflects the views of Tony Youens who certainly should know better. In no way can the evidence in the present case be described as anecdotal. No more can the vast accumulation of recorded readings and automatic writings which have been the subject of intensive and thorough analysis for well over a century be disregarded as anecdotal.
It is equally absurd and evasive to dismiss as cold reading the spontaneously provided psychometric evidence which so startled Andy Smith. How could his body language, eye contact etc. enable Holohan to know that he had just received a letter about essential electrical work? Youens is an authority on cold reading: he was presented as such in the recent Channel 4 programme on The Ultimate Psychic Challenge, and has since provided a clever analysis of one of the supposedly cold readings by the psychic medium, Keith Charles. With equal cleverness he has avoided attempting this in the more persuasive readings featured; just as he, and Shaw, have preferred to ignore the testimony of Philadelphia police chiefs commending Charles' tried and tested psychic sleuthing work.
Shaw has relied on a device which any ten year-old would see through: demanding absolute proof
that Holohan never visited the Windmill, never met Poole, never knew any of her conacts etc, as though one could prove a negative.
I suggest the time has arrived when the critics await publication of our report; and then ponder the merits of offering an unreserved apology to Batters and, in particular, to Christine Holohan whom they have not hesitated to traduce.
. The mindset was "mind your own business...." -- remember this was in the days when Arnold Schuster fingered Willie Sutton, who got picked up and sent away. Schuster was gunned down afterwards for his good deed. That sent a powerful message to the populace. 
