The idea that police forces cooperate with mediums sounds at first like a crime novel. In reality it is established practice in several countries: Switzerland, the Netherlands and the USA all have documented cases of cooperation between investigators and mediums – some official, some informal. The fact that police authorities go down this road at all is the clearest possible answer to the question of whether such cooperation works: it would not happen if it produced nothing. This article presents three well-known cases and looks at the situation in Germany.
Switzerland: Pascal Voggenhuber
The best-known German-speaking example is Swiss medium Pascal Voggenhuber. In an extensive interview on Welt im Wandel.TV (YouTube, from 20:47) he describes how he has been working for the Swiss police since 2002. His first deployment came during a seminar: officers showed up unannounced because they had heard he was in town and asked for help with a murder case.
Given only a photo of the victim, Voggenhuber produced – via a reading with the victim – case details he could not have known by normal means. These details were striking enough to deepen the cooperation. Today he describes the following typical use cases:
- Aura reading during interrogations – detecting when a statement is untrue.
- Reconstructing witness blackouts – witnesses often have memory gaps after stressful events; Voggenhuber reconstructs them mediumistically.
- Energetic reading of crime scenes – sequence of events, number of perpetrators, hints about DNA traces.
- Offender profiles – similar to a classical profiler. According to Voggenhuber, police say he produces comparable results – in hours rather than months.
About 90 % of his police work is recorded on video – not least to convince sceptical officers within the authorities. Voggenhuber accepts assignments only directly from the police, not from private individuals asking for help after a crime.
You can watch the relevant excerpt (from 20:47) embedded on the Heaven Connect knowledge page.
Voggenhuber's cooperation with the Swiss police was striking enough that even the famous German-language crime series Tatort dedicated an episode to the story: in the Swiss production "Zwischen zwei Welten" (2014), the medium "Pablo Guggisberg" helps Lucerne detectives Flückiger and Ritschart with their investigation – a character that, according to the Luzerner Zeitung, is modelled on Pascal Voggenhuber. The episode is also linked on the knowledge page.
After several years Voggenhuber ended his police work. The reason was a case with a mafia background in which his mediumistic leads were apparently so precise that they became dangerous for the perpetrators. Soon afterwards, strangers in dark vehicles began appearing at his home – driving slowly past the house at night, lingering at his letterbox, never saying a word. The message was clear: we know where you live. There is no official witness protection for mediums – legally they often do not exist in the case files as contributors at all. Voggenhuber and his wife lived in serious fear, and he drew the line for himself and his family: he withdrew from investigative work.
His role is continued today by other mediums – but these are not named publicly. There are two reasons: to protect the mediums themselves, and because they are not figures in the public eye and deliberately stay in the background.
Pascal Voggenhuber has documented his work – including the police chapter of his biography – in Nachricht aus dem Jenseits 2.0 (2018). The book reached No. 1 on the Swiss bestseller list and also made the German Spiegel bestseller list.
Direct communication with the victims themselves, Voggenhuber says, is often not the most productive source: departed persons sometimes state that the murder "belonged to their life plan" and express no interest in naming the perpetrator. In such cases investigators fall back on the energetic crime-scene reading.
The Netherlands: Gerard Croiset – the "Telepath of Utrecht"
Dutch paragnost Gerard Croiset (1909–1980) was for decades one of the internationally best-known figures in criminal mediumship. He specialised in missing-person searches and crime solving and was consulted many times by Dutch authorities.
At the University of Utrecht Croiset worked closely with parapsychologist W. H. C. Tenhaeff, who examined his perceptions in structured experiments – including the famous chair experiment (1953) together with Hans Bender: Croiset was asked to describe people who would later sit in a specific chair. The experiments made him internationally known.
In 1977, two German investigators travelled to Croiset for help with the kidnapping of German employers' association president Hanns Martin Schleyer – one of the best-known German criminal cases of the post-war era. Croiset is still regarded as the forefather of systematic cooperation between paragnosts and investigating authorities in Europe.
USA: Etta Smith and the Melanie Uribe case
One of the best-documented single cases took place in Los Angeles in 1980. The nurse Melanie Uribe disappeared on 15 December; witnesses had seen two men drag her out of her vehicle at a traffic light.
Two days later, 32-year-old Etta Louise Smith, an employee at Lockheed, heard about the case on the radio and had a spontaneous vision: a canyon, a winding road, a dirt path, something white at the end – she suspected the victim's uniform. Smith, who did not consider herself a medium, went to the police and pointed on a map to a spot roughly 40 kilometres outside Los Angeles: Lopez Canyon.
Because the investigators only wanted to search the area by helicopter the next day, Smith drove out there the same afternoon with her children. Her seven-year-old daughter found the body of Melanie Uribe. Smith was immediately taken into custody as a prime suspect and interrogated for days.
Four days later an informant came forward: he had heard three men brag about robbing and killing the woman. The perpetrators were apprehended and convicted; there was no connection whatsoever between them and Smith. Smith sued the City of Los Angeles for wrongful arrest and was awarded 26,184 US dollars in damages. The case has since been cited in the USA as a textbook example of how valid mediumistic impressions can be in investigations – and how difficult it is for police authorities to deal with them.
Germany: officially no, practically different
Germany – unlike Switzerland or the Netherlands – does not officially cooperate with mediums. The BKA and the state criminal police offices publicly reject the use of parapsychological methods. In practice, however, there are ways for mediumistic support to flow into German cases.
Pascal Voggenhuber has confirmed in interviews that he has worked for German investigating authorities as well. Because German agencies cannot openly commission such work, the cooperation is legally declared as mutual assistance (Amtshilfe) through Switzerland: the case formally moves through Swiss authorities, Voggenhuber is engaged on the Swiss side, and the findings then flow back into the German investigation.
This practice shows two things. First: even in Germany, investigators – at least in individual cases – do fall back on mediumistic methods when conventional paths are exhausted. Second: the public reticence has less to do with effectiveness than with legal and legitimacy questions. A German police office cannot book psychic fees against public funds; a Swiss office can.
What do these cases have in common?
- In all three countries, mediumistic clues lead to verifiable results: locations of remains, DNA traces, suspect descriptions.
- The mediumistic work never replaces classical investigation – it delivers puzzle pieces that help investigators find the right thread.
- The start of each cooperation was almost always hesitant: a single officer trusted the medium, convinced colleagues, and only after repeatedly useful results did the cooperation become routine.
- Where the work is openly practiced (Switzerland, the Netherlands), it is transparent – including video documentation of sessions.
How do mediums and investigative work fit together?
Mediumistic perception usually produces no names and no addresses. It produces images, atmospheres, bodily sensations, symbols – impressions that on their own are often inconclusive but, combined with what the police already know, can reveal leads that would otherwise be missed. Voggenhuber's remark "often I don't even know what exactly I'm talking about" captures this well: the medium provides the raw material, the investigators interpret it.
The fact that police forces allow this form of cooperation at all – with clear protocols, video recordings, and no financial dependence on a given outcome – shows that the results are robust on balance. No investigative team would sacrifice time and procedure for something that produced nothing.
What this says about our worldview
Police authorities are not spiritual institutions. They live by what holds up in court – by evidence, testimony, traces. That they nonetheless, across decades and across borders, keep turning to mediums is neither an accident nor a weakness of individual officers. It is a pragmatic admission: human perception apparently reaches further than our mainstream scientific model allows.
The cases of Voggenhuber, Croiset and Smith all share the same core: someone knows something they cannot know by normal means – and what they know can then be verified on site, in DNA traces, in confessions. Taking that seriously does not require rewriting physics. But it is worth leaving the question open: what might our models of consciousness, time and space be failing to see?
The mafia chapter around Voggenhuber also makes one thing clear: mediumistic perception is not a harmless, esoteric, detached exercise. Anyone working with it moves in the same reality as criminals, investigators and courts – with the same consequences. That is precisely what makes reputable mediumship respectable: practitioners know how real what they do really is.
Heaven Connect and reputable mediums
Mediums who work reputably stick to clear limits: they do not push themselves into investigations, they do not charge success-based fees and they do not overstate their own perceptions. Heaven Connect lists only mediums who speak transparently about their work – whether they offer classical mediumship readings, animal communication or, in rare cases, support investigating authorities.