Psychic searching for missing Australian child instead finds headless torso of adult woman

In a sad and bizarre day, the worlds of two missing people - six year-old Kiesha Abrahams and 31-year-old Carlingford mother Kristi McDougall - yesterday collided in a Doonside reserve. On Wednesday evening a ''psychic'' with a ''hunch'' went to search the Nurragingy Reserve, looking for the Mount Druitt girl - finding instead a torso believed to be that of Ms McDougall. Police, inherently suspicious of such claims, were last night examining the scene and re-interviewing the woman.

By further coincidence, a dozen women - who believed the reserve, an Aboriginal sacred site, to be a likely place to hide a body - had searched for Kiesha there for six hours last weekend. Police said the torso was found wrapped in plastic on a creek bank and officers searched for other body parts yesterday. The decomposed remains will be DNA-tested to determine if they are those of Ms McDougall, who disappeared on June 19. Last night her family had been briefed by police and did not want to comment. But on Monday, Mr McDougall said police had suggested the case may take ''years'' to solve.



''We are resigned to a very bad outcome,'' he said. ''We are struggling. There is nothing we can do [but wait]. We have to get on with our own lives.'' Ms McDougall was last seen at Homebush, but she had said she was meeting someone at Blacktown. It is now believed the mother was again using drugs and may have met with foul play as a result. The western Sydney women who searched the Nurragingy Reserve for Kiesha met on Facebook and went to the reserve believing it was a place where someone might hide a body.

Belinda Murphy, 40, said: ''There are areas … there that are not set aside as recreational ground. If someone wanted to bury a body in an area that would never be dug up, it would be an Aboriginal sacred site like that.'' Police were struggling with the psychic's involvement yesterday. The homicide squad's Chief Inspector Pam Young said: ''For those who believe in such things, I understand that the woman thinks that she might have some powers along that [psychic] line … I have certain strong feelings about people who claim they are psychic. I don't think it will help if we enter a discussion on that.''