TINA RESCH

Opening

In early March 1984 the house of John and Joan Resch on the North Side of Columbus, Ohio, filled with reporters. Lights, a telephone, furniture and glass were said to move and break around their adopted daughter Tina, aged 14. The Resches had fostered some 250 children. Mike Harden of the Columbus Dispatch, who had written a friendly profile of the family months before, was first on the scene, and on 5 March he brought the photographer Fred Shannon.

One of Shannon's frames, a telephone handset flying across the front of Tina as she flinches in an armchair, went round the world through the Associated Press. The parapsychologist William Roll moved in to investigate. James Randi, sent by the sceptics' committee CSICOP, was refused entry and went to the film instead. Meanwhile a television camera left running caught Tina pulling down a lamp and acting terrified.

Timeline

Early March 1984The Resch household reports objects flying and breaking. More than forty journalists crowd into the 20-foot living room at one press conference.

5 March 1984Shannon shoots a roll of 36 frames at the house in about three hours. Frame 25 becomes the published photograph.

8 March 1984At the end of a press visit, a WTVN-TV camera left on the floor records Tina, unaware it is live, pulling a table lamp over twice while jumping away and feigning fright. The station broadcasts the tape. Tina says she was "only fooling" to get rid of the cameraman.

March 1984William Roll and Kelly Powers of the Psychical Research Foundation stay with the family. Randi arrives on 13 March with two Case Western Reserve astronomers. Joan Resch admits the astronomers but not "the magician".

1984Roll takes Tina to North Carolina for further observation.

Spring 1985Randi publishes his analysis of the Shannon film in Skeptical Inquirer.

April 1992Tina's three-year-old daughter Amber dies of head injuries in Carrollton, Georgia.

October 1994Tina, now Christina Boyer, enters an Alford plea, maintaining her innocence, to felony murder and aggravated battery, and is sentenced to life plus 20 years.

2004Roll and Valerie Storey publish Unleashed, arguing both for her psychokinesis and her innocence.

Key figures

Tina Resch, later Christina Boyer, born 1969, adopted by the Resches.

Fred Shannon, a Dispatch photographer of 30 years' standing.

Mike Harden, the Dispatch reporter who called him in.

William G. Roll, author of The Poltergeist, who concluded the case showed genuine recurrent spontaneous psychokinesis.

James Randi, magician and CSICOP investigator, who concluded it was fakery.

Physical and documentary trail

The evidence is Shannon's roll of film, the WTVN-TV tape, and the statements of reporters and investigators. Randi obtained contact sheets and found seven flying telephones on the roll. Shannon told him he took them while looking away, because nothing happened while he watched. In frame 24, just before the famous shot, the cord already lies stretched across the chair arms with the handset hanging out of sight. The Dispatch later locked the negatives away and refused Randi permission to print them.

It was tricky, and I would have to be tricky if I were to capture it on film. I decided I would outfox the force.

Corrections to the earlier version of this report. The photographs were taken on 5 March 1984, not 17 March. The house belonged to John and Joan Resch. The sceptical argument over the published picture turns on the stretched cord in the frame before it and on the photographer looking away, not on a wrist. Randi did not sit with the case: he was barred from the house.

Things you might not know

• She did it twice. On the WTVN tape the lamp did not fall on her first try, so she pulled it again. Randi said frame 20 of Shannon's roll shows the same lamp falling in the same place.
• A table moved too. Harden reported that the TV crew saw a kitchen table move that night. A WTVN technician, Robb Forest, told Randi he had caught Tina moving it with her foot.
• The photographs post-dated a film. Tina had watched Poltergeist (1982) shortly before the disturbances began.
• One frame shows broken glass. Randi pointed to a frame in which Tina holds a picture whose glass is already broken, before it supposedly shattered in her hands.
• Unsolved Mysteries told her story in May 1993, while she sat in jail awaiting trial over her daughter's death. The segment did not mention the charges.

Competing explanations

Recurrent spontaneous psychokinesis. Roll held that a troubled adolescent produced real effects, with some incidents faked. He never saw an object begin to move by itself; the picture that fell during his stay in Columbus came down while he was facing away.

Trickery by an unhappy teenager. Randi and Paul Kurtz argued that Tina threw, pulled and kicked things when unobserved. The camera caught her doing exactly that, she admitted it, and the photograph that made the case was taken by a man who was looking the other way.

A press frenzy. Reporters Randi interviewed described a free-for-all with no controls, and several said they had seen suspicious details that never made their stories. This explains the volume of reports, not any one event.

Later life of the case

Tina Resch's later life is a separate tragedy. She has maintained her innocence in Amber's death. Roll's 2004 book argued for it, and the Dutch photographer Jan Banning has campaigned for her release. Parole was refused again in 2024, and she remained in a Georgia prison at the latest reports.

Finding

The one incident filmed when Tina believed nobody was looking was faked, and she admitted faking it. The photograph that made the case was taken by a photographer who had turned away, a frame after the cord was already laid across her chair. That incident, at least, was a hoax. It does not prove every reported event was trickery, but no event was ever recorded under conditions that ruled it out.

What still will not resolve: what Roll saw in North Carolina. His accounts were never checked by anyone outside his own team.