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Croiset the Clairvoyant - Jack Harrison Pollack

Croiset Clue in the Dr. Sheppard Case

At the Parapsychology Institute of the University of Utrecht in June 1958, Gerard Croiset touched a pair of dainty red slippers.

To avoid any telepathic response, the American visitor who handed them to Croiset had been told nothing about the slippers. They had been lent to him in the United States for this unique transatlantic experiment by an American police official who said, "If Croiset is so smart, when you're in Holland, see if he can tell me anything about these slippers.'

"Whose are they?"

"I'm not telling you. You have Croiset tell me."

Immediately after touching these slippers, the Dutch psychoscopist exclaimed, "These shoes belonged to a pretty young woman. She was murdered in her home outside a big city in America near a body of water by a bushy-haired man." Croiset then drew amazingly accurate sketches of the woman and her home.

Several weeks later, back in the United States, the bearer of the slippers returned them, reported Croiset's impressions, and now asked, "Whose slippers are they, anyway?"

He was stunned when he heard the answer: "Marilyn Sheppard's."

Yet the man who served ten years in prison for this murder is not bushy-haired. Millions of Americans, including two justices of the Ohio Supreme Court, have had considerable doubt about Dr. Sam Sheppard's guilt in the murder of his wife in their Bay Village, Ohio, home on Lake Erie outside Cleveland on July 4,1954.

During the 1954 trial, Dr. Sheppard insisted that a "bushy-haired intruder" had killed his wife and clobbered him unconscious. Two disinterested witnesses, a steelworker and a shipping clerk, independently testified that they saw a bushy-haired man loitering outside the Sheppard home at the time of the murder, but their testimony was brushed off by the prosecution in the trial's Roman-holiday atmosphere. The defense charged that the prosecution had suppressed evidence that it possessed about a bushy-haired loiterer.

After the trial, the convicted man's brothers, Drs. Stephen and Richard Sheppard, secretly hired a New York private detective, Harold Bretnall, to search for new evidence of their brother's innocence. Croiset's bushy-haired image was turned over to him and he spent the better part of four years investigating it. Bretnall came up with some startling facts not brought out at the trial and had planned to write a book entitled "The Big Frame" naming the bushy-haired murderer.

But he suddenly died on August 23, 1963, and never finished it. Because of my connection with Croiset, Bretnall's materiel was made available to me.

Many experts believe that Dr. Sheppard is innocent of his wife's murder. Among them is Dr. Paul Leland Kirk, University of California criminology professor, who made an intensive first-hand study of the case in a 10,000-word report after the trial.

Dr. Sam Sheppard has never changed his story in eleven years that a bushy-haired intruder killed his wife. His brilliant young Boston lawyer, F. Lee Bailey, succeeded in getting a Federal court to release him in 1964 on the grounds that the original trial in Ohio was illegally conducted. On July 23, 1964 the Cleveland Plain Dealer reported on page 1:
“That book Dr. Sam was carrying the day he got out-Croiset the Clairvoyant-says a pair of slippers proved Marilyn was killed by a bushy-haired intruder."

The bizarre case has Sharply divided judges as well as laymen. On May 5, 1965, the U. S. Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati surprisingly reversed Federal District Court Judge Carl A. Weinman and ordered Sam Sheppard back to the Ohio State Penitentiary. When you read this, the U. S. Supreme Court will probably be pondering this baffling case which is entirely clear in a Dutch paragnost's mind.

Recently in Holland, when I casually mentioned “The Sheppard Case" to Gerard Croiset he excitedly exclaimed, "The red slippers, yes. The bushy-haired man did it-not her Husband! I am absolutely sure! Send me something of the woman's to get another impression."

I did-Marilyn Sheppard's hat and gloves. If Dr. Sheppard is ever retried, as some Ohioans now wish, Croiset the Clairvoyant is apt to come up with decisive new information to solve once and for all one of the most publicized and controversial American murder cases of this generation.