For over twenty years Zak Martin has used his unique psychological and psychic skills to help police forces around the world with unsolved crimes. He has tracked down several wanted killers and located dozens of missing people.

Today 9,000 crimes will be committed in Britain. Some criminals will feel they’re safe from even the most modern methods of detection – but they’ve reckoned without the strange power of psychic sleuths. Britain has its own squad of psychic detectives. Desperate families and friends, sometimes even the police, turn to them as a last resort to track down a missing child, search out a lost relative, or find a killer.
Zak Martin holds court in one of the private suites of the Sherlock Holmes Hotel in London’s Baker Street, across the busy road from the consulting rooms mentioned in the famous novels. What more apt address could you imagine for a psychic detective?
“It’s a marvellous place to be,” he says. “There’s a great connection. Not so much with Holmes, but with his creator, Arthur Conan Doyle, who was heavily into psychic matters.”
Zak sits back in a shadowy corner, slim and intense. His eyes are huge and dark and grow almost totally black when he is concentrating. The voice is a soft Irish lilt, and his powers of observation and instinct are reputed to be uncanny.
He plays back a tape-recording he made for the Irish police when investigating the disappearance of a young Dublin girl who had vanished after an argument with her boyfriend in a pub in Brittas Bay, Co. Wicklow. This is what he said: “I feel that the girl is dead, and that she has been murdered. I see her leaning over the bonnet of a car, talking to a man’ Another man is walking towards the car. The next impression I have is of the car moving off, stopping after a few hundred feet, then moving again. Next I see the car pulling up close to a lake. The girl has, I feel, been strangled. I have the impression of scratches, but very little blood’ Now I can see the body in shallow water, covered by what seems to be some kind of sackcloth or plastic material, blue or grey in colour'”
The girl was Elizabeth Plunkett, and she was 23. The date was October 1976. She left the pub shortly before closing time, and was never seen alive again. Zak visited the area and recorded his impressions on the spot. At the time it was thought that the girl may have taken the ferry to France, where she was known to have friends. After a nationwide search, however, several items of her clothing turned up near the scene.
“In fact, she was dead. She had been murdered, in the way I described. The body was later found in the bay itself, not in a lake. But it was in shallow water, in a blue sleeping bag.”
Zak talks matter-of-factly today about the case that made front-page headlines, even though his own part was never disclosed at the time. He gave more aid to the police in “seeing” her attackers hiding out in Galway. Eventually two men were arrested in the area Zak described.
For Zak Martin it was just another case to add to his extraordinary and growing file: he is now one of Britain’s leading psychic sleuths when it comes to finding bodies, dead or alive. Zak usually gets approached by relatives or friends of the victim or missing person. Once he is called in, Zak moves fast. “Violent events like rape and murder leave a psychic ‘scent’ that I can usually follow. That’s why I need to handle some item that has been touched or worn by the victim.”
How accurate does he rate himself?
“If a murder weapon is left at the scene , by touching it I can describe the owner with about 80 per cent accuracy.”
And what is the ultimate satisfaction for Zak Martin, the man who measures life and death on another level? “Knowing I was right,” he replies, very confidently.