Medium Joe Power says he receives messages and visions from the spirit world - including missives from dead murder victims wanting justice. He tells Lindsay Jennings how, with a little help from his friends, he is hoping to crack some of the country's unsolved crimes

SHE came to him in the middle of the night, during a fitful sleep. "I'm Lynsey, Lynsey Quy, " she whispered. "I've been carnaged, mangled."

Joe Power awoke with a start. He was 33 and in the middle of a pretty scary psychic experience. "Her voice was in my head. She kept insisting that she had been chopped up, that she had been carnaged and mangled, and all this other information, " recalls Joe, now 38.

"I was so frightened by what she had told me, but I knew I couldn't keep the information secret because she kept pushing me and urging me to go to the police."

Joe, who was born in Liverpool, realised he had been communicating with 21-year-old Lynsey Quy, a mother-of-two from Southport who had been missing from home for a couple of years. Her husband, Mitchell Quy, had told police she had walked out on him over Christmas 1998 and insisted she had left him for another man. But, according to Lynsey, the truth was quite different.

Although he felt uncomfortable, Joe turned up at Southport police station the morning after his psychic experience to deliver his message. He found none of the officers involved in the case were on duty, so he gave a statement to a desk officer.

"First of all, they must have been suspicious of me, what with me telling them things like she'd been chopped up, " he says. "I told them that they needed to search around a railway and fairground.

I was getting flashes of those places in my mind."

WHEN nothing happened, and with Joe still getting messages from the spirit world telling him to chivvy the police up, he wrote a letter to them, repeating his theories. But, he says, he received no reply. Four months later, in June 2000, Lynsey's husband confessed to having killed her on December 16, 1998. He led police to the separate sites where her body parts had been buried.

"She was found at the back of the fairground and on parts of the railway, " says Joe. "Her body had been dismembered."

After the Lynsey Quy case, Joe, who lives in Ormskirk, Lancashire, began receiving other messages from spirits. His late grandmother's aunt had shown psychic tendencies, but he says no-one else in the family had ever been so attuned to the other side.

Looking back, Joe can remember hearing someone call his name when he was about ten, when he was alone in the house. Just after he turned 31 he also says he received a premonition that his brother Danny would die, an omen which would later prove true.

"He was just found in his house, " he says quietly, reluctant to go into details.

"Obviously, it was a shock to me and the whole family, but I was quite balanced. I didn't get carried away going into the psychic field."

But since the premonition, he had never experienced anything like the beseeching messages he was to receive from Lynsey.

"That sort of opened the floodgates up, " he says. "For the first couple of years it was quite frightening. I thought I was quite normal. I'd done various jobs, worked in McDonald's for a while, and had been off for about five years because of a bad car crash. Then I had these spirit people talking to me, giving me information."

The next case Joe got involved in was the high-profile Sarah Payne murder in Sussex. The police suspected that known sex-abuser Roy Whiting was connected with her disappearance on July 1, 2000.

By the end of the year, Joe says he was receiving messages from the spirit world that a towel in a van would prove vitally important to the case. He sent the information to Scotland Yard and claims that DNA on a towel later linked Whiting to the eight-year-old and aided his conviction.

After the Sarah Payne case, Joe went on to give private readings for people. He recalls receiving pieces of paper via the landlord of his local pub, around the corner from his spiritual church. He believes they were from CID officers asking for his help in finding missing bodies. One of the bodies was that of Helen McCourt, a 22year-old from St Helens, Liverpool, who went missing 17 years ago. Pub landlord Ian Simms was subsequently found guilty of her murder, although her body has never been found.

Joe began working with Helen's mother, Mary, over three years ago and now believes he knows where the body is.

"Let me say, from the information I've given to the police, I'm pretty certain it will lead to Helen being found, " he says confidently. "We're waiting for the officers to come back to us."

The latest case he is working on is that of a Scottish boy who has gone missing in Brazil. He told the boy's mother that the police should be looking for someone called "Andros" only to discover later that they have been quizzing a man called "Sandros" over the youth's disappearance.

The messages come in various guises, he says, from whispers in his ear to images in his mind, mostly from people he does not know. But he admits some of the more gruesome images can be disturbing.

"When I first started doing it I had to learn to switch off, " he says. "There's a lot of detail in the images and you have to learn how to deal with that and with parents who are grieving. With Helen and Lynsey, their deaths were really sickening but I couldn't show that to the public, to their parents, because you have to be strong for them."

The use of psychic sleuths in British policing is still treated with scepticism.

A guidance report on missing persons for the Association of Chief Police Officers produced earlier this year advised caution.

"Information from psychics. . . can create pressure for searches to be made of these areas, " it reads. "Such information must be treated with extreme caution and evaluated against the prevailing situation."

As well as his private readings, Joe is writing a book about his experiences and is on tour throughout the country with his evening presentation of clairvoyance.

He has also been given a weekly slot on Sky Television's psychic channel, Your Destiny TV, and is hoping to help crack more police cases.

The market he is aiming at is a vulnerable one. Most people do come to his shows, he says, hoping to re-connect with a loved one or desperate for information if they have gone missing. But he denies that he is playing a part in exploiting their grief.

"Death can be a frightening word, " he says. "But at the same time I know there's a certainty of life after death and I have insight into what goes on afterwards. I think that can be comforting."

You can catch clairvoyant Joe Power at the Middlesbrogh theatre on the 28th July, show starts at 7.30pm and tickets are £12.50. Box office 10641 815 181.

Published: 04/07/2005