Police Will Search for Student In Lake Picked by Psychic

On the advice of a Connecticut psychic, police in Beverly, Mass., will begin to search a nearby lake next week for Joan L Webster a student at the Graduate School of Design missing for five months.

Beverly Police Capt. Gordon Richards said yesterday that a group of 25 volunteer divers will begin to comb the bottom of Wenham Lake, located north of the city, as early as Monday.

Richards said he received the tip to check the lake from 78-year0old Loretta Johnson, who three weeks ago told him she had strong psychic feelings when she saw Webster's photograph in a newspaper.

A special pendulum Johnson uses in a process she called radiesthezure spins wildly when held over a map of Beverly, Richards said, adding that the woman had determined a particular area of the 150-acre lake to search.

Police officials also said yesterday that cold weather and high winds prevented further searches at Walden Pond in Concord and delayed the start of an investigation of a pond with the same name in Saugus. Mass. located on Route One about five miles from the marsh where Webster's purse and wallet were found three days after she disappeared.

The search of the Concord pond began last week after the Middlesex district attorney's office received and anonymous letter stating that the 25-year-old graduate student would be found in a bag on the pond's bottom.

Webster was last seen in the Eastern Airlines baggage claim area at Logan Airport on November 28.