Psychic Private Eyes tackle army Deepcut controversy

[Big Les]

I'm watching Colin Fry and his band of "Psychic Private Eye" goons interfering in the life of the mother of Geoff Gray, who died at Deepcut army barracks in 2001.

As you'd expect, it's full of shamefully obvious hot reading. "He was shot twice..." Any Sun article from the last five years would have told them that. Disgustingly, they play along with the tabloid line (possibly true) that the chap was "executed" by a fellow soldier, and didn't commit suicide, which was the official finding. A minor debunk is they refer to the gun being recocked or similar before firing again. In fact one of them alludes to it being a shotgun. The British L85 assault rifle is a selective-fire weapon and would only need one (in full-auto) or two (in semi) trigger pulls to discharge the two rounds.

A bit risky I'd have thought - messing with the MoD and the Army with fake psychic antics! Verges on conspiracy theory too; no one disputes the bullying that went on at the barracks at the time. But outright murder, covered up by the Army and MoD, which is what these arses are implying and reinforcing in the mother's mind, is a different kettle of fish.

God I hate Colin Fry.

[Big Les]

I'm actually going to start a thread in conspiracy theories about this, as to be honest aside from the usual cold and hot reading fluff, the bulk of this programme was comprised of conspiracy theory and speculation.

The hot reading and the threads of cold reading are clearly both driven by what the mother and (dubious IMO) ballistics "expert" has told or implied to them, and as such they have become tools of those pushing a political agenda. Understandable in the case of the mother, but no less wrong. Examples of blatant foreknowledge include (paraphrased):

• "I see a young man, very proud, there's intrigue over his death."
• "He did not kill himself, and his mother knows this".
• "He was wearing a uniform but not (points to photo of Gray in a dress uniform) one like this, does that make sense?" [he would of course have been wearing camo fatigues on guard duty, not dress uniform.]
• "I get two shots...you can't shoot yourself twice" [unless you have an automatic weapon with a high rate of fire...]
• "Somekind of explosion, bang bang."
• "Executed...he was executed"
• "Major impact like a gunshot to the forehead or head"
• "They wanted it to look like suicide"
• "Something around the throat"
• "An object that went missing, never found.. [mum fits her expectation that he should have been wearing a watch, but wasn't, to this]
• "The ringleader was a trophy collector"
• "The body was found outside...it was autumn"
• "Position he was found in didn't match his injury"
• "He was moved..it was murder, made to look like an accident"
• "There was an exercise book with pages torn out" [implication that army hid his diary notes)
• "Someone has come forward to you (mother) saying they want to tell what really happened but have been threatened" [no direct confirmation of this, just the soldier who she says swore the body wasn't there when they were out looking]
• "A tattoo on the leg" [this was the only "how could they have known that" moment from the mother, and the only thing not readily googlable/guessable.
• "Evidence destroyed..someone else's blood on the cap badge would prove murder"
• "
  

For the usual untouchable, unfalsifiable claims we have these three goons suggesting that there was a "secret society" ringlead by a mad ex-Falklands veteran. Fry uses a crystal pendulum on a map to somehow confirm that the body had been moved.

That's about it really! Irresponsible in the extreme.

[RSLancastr]

[Big Les]

Quite! For reference, here's the official report section dealing with the young man in question here. Note that whilst it doesn't discount third-party involvement and comes to no firm conclusion as to Gray's motives for suicide, it finds murder to be a much more less likely cause than suicide, and that there was/is no evidence for this. Further, it finds no evidence for a cover-up by the army. It makes clear that five rounds were fired, on full-automatic, at close range, and three out of the five missed his head, either through movement of the rifle, of Gray himself, or both. That two rounds entered the head before the rifle moved out of line with Gray's forehead is no kind of discrepancy, as I discuss in the CT thread linked that I started (no doubt to be buried under an avalanche of 9/11 threads). The gun was found at the base of a tree, presumably where Gray braced it ready to fire, no doubt anticipating a certain degree of recoil. Recognised forensic ballistics experts found everything to be consistent with self-inflicted gunshots to the head.

Neither the psychics, Gray's mother, nor the self-styled ballistics expert provide any real evidence that murder was likely in this case. I found the whole programme to be quite sickening, that the dubious psychics and "expert" would both work to keep Mrs Gray locked in her grief-limbo and more sure than ever that the army and government were hiding the truth, and that Geoff's killer is still out there somewhere. All in the name of entertainment.