Tina Resch
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Tina Resch (born October 23, 1969) achieved some fame during what the media called the Columbus Poltergeist case. She was an adopted child, and in 1984 unexplained events of alleged spontaneous telekinesis at her home were covered extensively by news media. The coverage included a series of color photographs that were taken by newspaper photojournalist Fred Shannon of "The Columbus Dispatch" of Columbus, Ohio USA, which showed her sitting in an armchair with a telephone handset and flexible cable in flight in front of her from left to right.
The story lost some of its credibility when a video camera that had accidentally been left on by a visiting television station crew revealed Tina knocking over a lamp, an event that had been ascribed to the poltergeist. Tina claimed she had done that to get the reporters to leave. James Randi accused the Resches and parapsychologist William Roll of denying him a look at the phenomena.
In 1992, as an adult with the divorced name of Christina Boyer, she was jailed, along with a boyfriend of only a few months, for allegedly being responsible for the death of her three year old daughter, who was in the sole custody of the boyfriend at the time. She did not have a trial, but in October of 1994 accepted a plea bargain to avoid the possibility of a death penalty. She passed a polygraph examination indicating her innocence less than 24 hours before her plea hearing, and questions have since been raised concerning her convictions on the two counts in her indictment, for which she was sentenced to life plus 20 years in prison. The type of plea she entered is called an Alford plea, one in which the defendant maintains their innocence but accepts a lesser sentence imposed to avoid the possibility of a harsher one, which in Ms. Boyer's case would have been death.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution newspaper gave her the title "Telekinetic Mom" in some of its reporting on the legal issues in 1994. In 2004, a book about the case Unleashed - Of Poltergeists and Murder: The Curious Story of Tina Resch by Roll and writer Valerie Storey was published which shed some light on the family's and paranormal investigators' side of events.
