Doris Stokes, who died in 1987, was once Britain’s most famous psychic, filling the London Palladium for her shows and appearing regularly on television. When the hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper was at its height in 1979, the Sunday People asked Stokes to see if she could identify the killer and on 1 July gave over its front page to her findings, with an artist’s impression of the man she felt was responsible.

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The person the police should be looking for, she suggested, was called Johnny or Ronnie, his surname began with an M, he came from Wearside or Tyneside and he was clean-shaven with a slight bald spot. When the bearded Peter Sutcliffe was arrested and eventually confessed in 1981 to 13 killings, Stokes’s prediction was already long forgotten.

Now the suggestion, in a consultation document produced by the College of Policing, that psychics could play a part in investigations has raised the issue once again. “High-profile missing person investigations nearly always attract the interest of psychics and others, such as witches and clairvoyants, stating that they possess extrasensory perception,” states the draft, cautioning that this should not distract attention from the overall investigation. “The person’s methods should be asked for, including the circumstances in which they received the information and any accredited successes.”

Those accredited successes are hard to find. Stokes was far from the only clairvoyant offering advice to the West Yorkshire police in their bungled inquiry. A Dutch clairvoyant informed them that the killer was probably a washing-machine mechanic aged 27 and living in Aberdeen, which obviously didn’t match Sutcliffe’s profile either.

It is understandable how family members may be open to stories from psychics as to what has happened to their loved ones

As the College of Policing draft document notes, high-profile murders or disappearances almost always attract information from people, many of them sincere, who claim to have received their information from the other side. The Madeleine McCann case has received more than its fair share of such advice. Initially, after the toddler was abducted in 2007, the police in Portugal received many tip-offs from mediums, collecting two dossiers full of them. There was a certain logic to logging the “sightings”, as detectives felt that the real abductor could possibly have used it as a method of clandestinely conveying information to them. The McCann family have sadly become used to such tales. More recently, a psychic in Burnley announced that Madeleine was alive and well and studying at a college in Minnesota.

It is perfectly understandable how distressed family members may be open to stories from psychics as to what has happened to their loved ones or who has been responsible for their deaths. The Missing People charity, which does such sterling work on behalf of people trying to trace relatives or friends, acknowledges as much in its statement about the College of Policing study. “As a non-judgmental organisation, we respect the fact that some families of missing people will want to try every avenue in order to find a loved one,” said a spokesperson, while adding that their research, based on interviews with the families of the missing, indicated “no significant findings through psychics or mediums”.

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Equally, it is understandable that the police, faced with a blank wall in their investigation, may be open to an intervention from outside their normal lines of inquiry. When the hunt was on for the killer of Rachel Nickell on Wimbledon Common in 1992, detectives took advice from a psychological profiler, went up a blind alley and ended up wrongly accusing Colin Stagg with the crime. The real killer, Robert Napper, finally pleaded guilty in 2008. The Nickell case coincided with the television series, Cracker, about a fictional psychological profiler played by Robbie Coltrane. Stand by for a new series in which a psychic magically solves crimes.

In the meantime, the old ABC of detection – “assume nothing, believe nobody, challenge everything” – remains the surest way of ascertaining the truth. And a good detective’s hunch is 100 times more likely to solve a case than a well-meaning psychic’s visitation.