‘Psychic Detective’ Noreen Renier: The Grinch Who Stole Christmas from a Grieving Family

GARY P. POSNER

Noreen Renier

August 12, 1989, was to be a joyous day for nineteen-year-old Kimberly McAndrew, a college student cashiering for the summer at a Canadian Tire store in the heart of the Halifax, Nova Scotia, peninsula. It was her boyfriend’s birthday, and he, along with her sister Heather, were to pick her up from work at 5 pm and begin the celebration. But Kimberly’s boss allowed her to clock out at 4:20, and though she presumably headed home—about a fifteen minute walk away— she remains missing to this day.

Six years and numerous dead-ends later, in October 1995 the Halifax Regional Police hired famed “psychic detective” Noreen Renier in the hopes that her paranormal abilities, endorsed by such notables as legendary FBI Special Agent Robert Ressler (coiner of the term “serial killer”), might lend some needed direction to their efforts. And if the number of directions in which she led them is any measure, they got their money’s worth!

In August 2015, during the course of research for a series of articles about the many long-unsolved murder cases in his city, Halifax Examiner editor Tim Bousquet obtained from Renier audio recordings of her three sessions (conducted by phone from her home in Florida) with Halifax Police Constable David MacDonald and sent them to me for comment. The opportunity for the public to hear and evaluate such a collaboration in its entirety is extremely rare, and I have made the recordings available at gpposner.com/Renier-Kimberly.html. Since interested readers can listen for themselves, I will try to limit this discussion to the most salient highlights.

Renier’s specialty is “psychometry”—holding onto an item (having been mailed to her by the family or police) belonging to the missing person, from which she derives the ability to “become” that person. As she explains, “There will be times

I will be Noreen, so if you really want Kimberly to see something, you have to say, ‘Now Kimberly, we want you to tell us.’ … It’ll be a mixture, and I’ll probably have the bad guy in there too occasionally.”

The first session, which lasts just over an hour, has Kimberly’s sister Heather and their mother on the line (they don’t participate in the next two) with Constable MacDonald. Renier soon makes “psychic” contact and offers news that everyone has been waiting six long years to hear: “I have Kimberly here. … She’s going to show us pretty soon where she is.” Yet matters quickly devolve into a protracted wild goose chase, starting at the very beginning with several serious stumbles. Kimberly (being channeled through Renier) declares, “I’m going to go out the south side of the building.” But although that side does face the street, witnesses attest to her exiting the rear parking lot door, which is along the building’s north side. And mere seconds later Renier tells us, “Her car is taken a short distance,” though Kimberly did not drive to work that day.