Paranormal phenomena or false memories?

Fredericton Detectives Mike Richard and Larry McGuire will never forget the day eight-year-old Jackie Clark was reported missing.

"During my career, I worked on many missing persons [cases]," says Richard, now retired. "You do get a sense of which ones don't feel right. And this one didn't feel right for me personally."

A massive search for her was in full swing when a strange call came in.

"The caller described being awoken by a child in his backyard," recalls Richard. "And he described this child as wearing the same purple jumpsuit as Jackie."

The problem was that the caller placed Jackie in a completely different spot from any other information that had come in at that point.

"Her description hadn't been put out there yet," he explains. "Everybody was convinced that that was Jackie. So, the entire search moved. You know, hundreds of people moved and searched a whole new grid based on that tip."

'It was real. I knew it then. I know it now.'

The detectives would eventually learn that Jackie had been murdered the evening she'd gone missing, but the sighting took place several hours afterwards. The witness reported seeing a child who had already died.

They ultimately excluded the account from the official record. Unofficially, they continued to reflect on the strangeness.

"The witness was a very well-respected businessman in the community, and he knew facts of the case that hadn't been released at that point," explains Richard.  "He shouldn't have known that. He didn't have the information."

The witness, who has asked to remain anonymous, also stands by the authenticity of his account.

"It was real," he says, "I knew it then. I know it now. To this day, I can't explain it other than to say it was real. It was Jackie."

Except it wasn't. While all three men recognize that she was already dead, they also believe the sighting — as incomprehensible as it was — was real. They're not the only ones.

Gaynell Cloney-Bowlen worked alongside Richard and McGuire during the Jackie Clark case. She, too, has vivid recollections of similar incongruous reports from the time.

I consider myself pragmatic. I live in a three-dimensional world. And this is the first time I encountered something that didn't fit into my worldview at all.

"I interviewed two couples that heard her screaming at midnight that night," recalls Cloney-Bowlen. "She had been dead for four hours I believe, then. And then I interviewed a little girl the next morning that saw her run across the yard and described exactly what she had on, and it was the clothes she was wearing when she was murdered."

"When it happened with Jackie, I remember Mike and Larry coming in my office that day. Both their faces were really white. And they said, 'You're not going to believe this'. I said, 'I do believe it. It happens.'"

'I would refer to it as paranormal'

As the Victims' Advocate for the Fredericton Police Force, she spent decades helping victims' families cope with the sudden loss of their loved ones.

"I would refer to it as paranormal," says Cloney-Bowlen. "I don't know if it's an energy or if the spirit isn't ready to leave, or exactly what's happening at the time, but I do know it's common when there's a lot of violence in a death."

Another Canadian murder case where later witness reports contradicted the established time of the victim's death was the abduction and murder of Christine Jessop. The nine-year-old girl disappeared from Queensville, Ont. in October of 1984. As detectives put together a timeline of events and determined her movements in the hours leading up to her murder, they came across a few accounts that to contradicted their findings. A number of residents near where the body was found remembered hearing screams several hours after her estimated time of death. 

Detectives reenacted the screams but weren't able to hear them from where the neighbours lived. They moved forward on the assumption that the screams were imagined.

The 'misinformation effect'

The scientific explanation is that these sightings are "false memories," brought on by information learned after the event took place, otherwise called the "misinformation effect." American Psychologist Elizabeth Loftus, among others, has been able to show through experimentation that memories change as new information about a past event enters our consciousness. As she put it in her TED Talk on the subject, "memory is not a recording device. It's a Wikipedia page."

Cloney-Bowlen, however, says there are more factors to consider than re-shaping memories, especially when discussing the Jackie Clark case.

"False memories don't explain how these things make you feel," she says. "I kept it to myself for years. Never spoke about it again until very recently."

Detective Richard isn't any closer to explaining the phenomenon for himself, but he maintains that Jackie was seen.

"I can tell you, after being in the middle of an investigation where this did happen, I spent a great deal of time thinking about what it means," Richard says. "I consider myself pragmatic. I live in a three-dimensional world. And this is the first time I encountered something that didn't fit into my worldview at all."