Stories of psychically gifted individuals using their abilities to aid people and law enforcement, find missing items and persons, solve crimes, and bring criminals to justice can be found in many societies and in most historical periods. These range from the biblical tale (Samuel 9) of Saul Ending lost livestock after consulting a seer in the land of Zuph, through the many incidents recorded during the 15th and 16th centuries where victims of theft recovered their goods through the help of cunning men and wise women, to contemporary cases of psychics being consulted by police and even the Central Intelligence Agency.
Psychics who specialized in working on police cases in Europe during the 1920s and 1930s gained much notoriety, and included Germany’s August Drost, W. de Kerler and George Mittelman; Austria’s Dr. Leopold Thomas (who worked with a hypnotized helper known only as Megalis), Maximilian Langsner, and Raphael Scherman (a psychographologist); Hungary’s Alfred Pathes and Michael F. Fischel and, especially Janos Kele; France’s Madame Luce Vidi; Czechoslovakia’s Frerick Marion; and the United States’s Eugenie (Gene) Dennis and Florence Sternfels. Kele and Marion are particularly noteworthy for volunteering for laboratory studies of their alleged abilities. Among these sleuths, the records left by Dennis and Sternfels are perhaps the most impressive. Eugenie Dennis, who left her native Kansas to give her “readings” on the vaudeville stage when she was 16, had many successes reported throughout the United States and obtained the endorsement of the city’s police department, including testimony on her behalf from the captain of that department’s Missing Persons Bureau. New Jersey’s Florence Sternfels reportedly “read more people and solved more crimes than any medium who ever lived” (according to the American Psychical Institute), received many public police endorsements, and was said to correspond with England’s Scotland Yard and France’s Surete.