TV show to document psychic's aid in Elmira murder case

Roger Neumann
Elmira Star-Gazette

(July 22, 2007) — Of the hundreds of police cases to which he has applied his psychic powers, Phil Jordan says the 1988 murder of an Elmira woman is one of the most memorable.

"It's probably one of the best cases that I've worked because some of the things I did were very uncanny," he said recently.

Meeting with investigators, Jordan picked the two suspects' photos out of a stack of 50 to 75 mug shots, described the house where the suspects attended a party after the murder, identified a missing piece of evidence, and pointed out that one of the suspects was already behind bars for another crime.

The case, involving the stabbing and beating death of 74-year-old Rose T. Swartwood in her Hathorn Court apartment, also is the most documented of Jordan's police cases. It has been re-created for CNN and CourtTV, and a crew was in the area last week interviewing sources and taping scenes for a program to be broadcast this fall on A&E.

"It's quite a sad case because this woman has been described as such a wonderful, sweet, kind, gentle person. And to know what happened to her, it's quite heart-wrenching," said Merissa Simonian, associate producer and researcher for Psychic Investigators, the A&E program.

Simonian and the rest of the production crew from Toronto were in the area through Friday. They spent Monday interviewing and shooting video of Jordan at his home near Candor, then shot scenes in Elmira later in the day. Tuesday and Wednesday they interviewed the two lead investigators in the case; Thursday they taped more scenes in Elmira; and Friday they were to have interviewed Star-Gazette columnist Jim Pfiffer, who covered the case for the newspaper.

"The community, especially the people in Hathorn Court, were scared," Pfiffer recalled. "There was a lot of frustration and anxiety."

It was nearly two years before the suspects were arrested. In July 1990, 23 months after the murder, police nabbed Demetrius Moore, who was 25 and formerly lived in Hathorn Court, and William R. Cuddy, who was 46. Cuddy, who lived in Elmira at one time, was already in prison on a sexual abuse charge.

Mike Mucci, who was a Chemung County Sheriff's Department investigator, and Charles "Corky" Patterson, a sergeant in the Elmira Police Department Detective Bureau, had been working the case as a team since November 1989.

Together, they conducted more than 350 interviews, Mucci said recently. They gathered a good deal of evidence against the suspects: DNA, bite marks and witness accounts. But they couldn't connect Cuddy, who was not originally from Elmira, with Moore, a native of the city.

Then, for some reason they can't really explain, the investigators called Jordan and asked if he'd look over the case. It was a fairly bold move at the time — perhaps the first time a psychic had been called in on a case in Chemung County, Mucci said.

"We were well on our way, and we just decided to go down there just as a why-not type of thing, as another tool," Mucci said.

"We had the case pretty much put together," Patterson said. "But there were some things still missing, and we were still not sure about some things."

Jordan told them, for example, that the man who did the killing had a homemade tattoo on his left shoulder. It was a name, Jordan said, but he could not read it.

Of those on the case, only Patterson had that information. Having interviewed Cuddy in prison, he knew Cuddy had a tattoo on his left shoulder.

"It was a woman's name," Patterson said, "but it was blurry. You couldn't read it."

"He was absolutely astounding," said Patterson, who is retired. "Everything he said was right on the money."

Cuddy went to trial first and was convicted of second-degree murder and first-degree burglary. Moore's first trial ended in a hung jury on the murder charge. A short time later, in a second trial, he, too, was convicted. Both are still in prison.