Dennis McKenzie can often be found at the bar of his local pub, the White Lion in Sawston, Cambridgeshire, enjoying a bevy or two with his mates. Standing there, beer in hand, roaring with laughter at the raucous jokes batting back and forth, he doesn't exactly come across as the fey, otherworldly type. In fact the only spirits you'd associate with him are the ones the landlord serves by the glass.

Yet Dennis, now known as 'the Soham Psychic', has recently shaken the spiritual world to its roots and caused a good many sceptics to pause and wonder. The ex-gamekeeper was the only medium to come up with astonishingly accurate information about the murders of tragic 10-year-olds Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman, just two days after they disappeared on August 4, 2002, and 10 days before their bodies were discovered.

'Not long after the search started, a friend rang me and asked if I could help find two girls who'd gone missing,' recalls Dennis, 49. 'It turned out she was a friend of the Wells family and of course they were in quite a state. I hadn't been listening to the news that day so at that point I knew nothing about the case. "I don't know if I'll get anything, " I said, "but I'll give it a try". But even as I was saying the words I heard my spirit guide tell me in my head, "They're already dead".'

This put Dennis in a difficult position. The pretty, innocently exuberant schoolgirls had captured the hearts of the whole country and it seemed that the entire nation was clinging to the hope that either they'd run off together on some impulsive adventure - or they'd been kidnapped and were alive and well, hidden in some secret lair. The fact that Holly and Jessica were both strong and fit - not small, easily overpowered children - seemed to add weight to these theories.

Eyewitnesses came forward to report various suspicious vehicles seen speeding away from Soham at around the time of the girls' disappearance There was a possible sighting of them hours after they vanished, walking down a country road miles away.

Against this optimistic background, how could Dennis be the bearer of such terrible news?

'I felt very bad about it,' says Dennis. 'I'm a dad myself and I could imagine what their parents were going through. Also, I never force information on people. If they'd rather not know, that's fine. But Kevin and Nicola Wells wanted to see me. They asked me to their home on the Tuesday afternoon and, as soon as I walked in, I said: "How blunt do you want me to be?"

‘I just want to know the truth,” Kevin told me. “Tell us everything.”

‘I looked at him and I could see he meant it. “I’m so sorry,” I said. “They’re both dead. They were dead before eight o’clock that Sunday evening”.’

‘Nicola broke down and by then I was crying too. But I had to go on. Suddenly I saw the faces of three people - two men and a female. One of the men was young with a round face and short dark hair and I got the impression he spoke with a Northern accent. The other man was older but with a similar accent and the woman was young, quite petite with dark hair and pointy, almost mouse-like features.

‘Then I saw a small red car and I had the feeling the girls bodies had been transported away from the murder scene in it.’

At this stage it was impossible to know whether Dennis’s visions had any bearing on the case at all. The girls’ remains weren’t found until 17 August and it took another four days before they were formally identified.

‘I kept saying, “I hope I’m wrong, I hope I’m wrong,”’ says Dennis. ‘This was such a tragic thing to have happened that I hoped, for the family’s sake, that I was mistaken. Yet deep down I knew I wasn’t.’

Kevin Wells relayed Dennis’s information to the police but Dennis heard nothing more.

‘I have a lot of sympathy for the police in these sort of situations, ‘ he admits, ‘They were contacted by hundreds of psychics - some genuine, some deluded and some weirdoes. Much of the information they received would have been contradictory. How can you tell which is going to turn out to be useful and which isn’t? For all they knew I could have been another nutter.’

Yet as the truth slowly emerged, it became clear that Dennis was right all along.

School caretaker Ian Huntley, a strikingly round-faced, crop-haired young man, and his girlfriend Maxine Carr fitted Dennis’s descriptions exactly – though a second ‘older’ man has never been arrested or charged. And the girls’ bodies had been taken to their woodland graves in the boot of Huntley’s small red Fiesta car.

‘After that I saw Holly herself quite often,’ says Dennis. ‘I had another meeting with Kevin and Nicola Wells and Holly arrived. She was smiling and happy and wanted them to know she was all right.’

‘Mum, I don’t half miss Saturday mornings in Next,’ Holly told Nicola, who explained that every weekend before her disappearance, she and Holly would go shopping together and they always had a look round her daughter’s favourite shop.

‘Tell Olls that Holls loves him,’ Holly added – using the private nicknames she and brother Oliver used for each other.

‘I think Kevin and Nicola found that very comforting and even recently, during readings for other people, Holly has appeared. I think, “What’s Holly doing here?” Then I discover that my new client is yet another friend or relative of the Wellses who’s wanted to see me.’

Dennis is the first to concede that he’s probably not most people’s idea of the typical seer. But he didn’t choose this gift, he says – it chose him.

‘I’m told I’ve got Romany blood on my father’s mother’s side,’ he explains. ‘Whether that’s got anything to do with it, I don’t know. Certainly my two older brothers and my younger sister don’t seem to have inherited the same power. But from the earliest age I could see things that other people couldn’t see. At one point my parents had a pub with a big yard outside and I was always playing there with other children. We played hopscotch and running games, yet my parents could see I was playing on my own. When I mentioned the other kids, they laughed and called them my imaginary friends.

‘Then, when I was about eight, we visited the ruins of an old abbey while we were on holiday. I saw all these monks walking around, but when I mentioned them to Mum she said: “What monks?”

‘“Can’t you see them, Mum?” I asked amazed and she replied, “Don’t be so silly”. That’s when it dawned on me that other people really couldn’t see the things I could.’

For a while this disturbed Dennis. ‘Then one day I saw a programme on TV about ghosts and I was fascinated by what the presenter was saying. People who saw ghosts, he explained, were really seeing pictures caught in time. “Ah, that’s it,” I thought. “That’s what I’m doing.” And that satisfied me.’

A few years later, Dennis’s much loved maternal grandmother died. ‘I was pretty upset,’ he remembers, ‘but soon after I went to bed that night, there was this big waft of Lily of the Valley scent. Lily of the Valley was my gran’s favourite flower and she grew loads of them in her garden. The room was suddenly full of this perfume and then Gran appeared and sat down on my bed. She was as real and solid looking as when she was alive. “Don’t worry, I’m fine,” she told me and then smiled.

‘It was so reassuring that I had to tell my mum. Fortunately, this time she seemed to believe me. I think by then she’d come round to the idea that I wasn’t making it all up and she was comforted, too. Dad wouldn’t accept any of it and, as a matter of fact, he still claims it’s a load of rubbish – until someone else criticises what I do. Then he’s the first to jump to my defence!’

Dennis’s strange ways were all very well, his parents reasoned, but they weren’t going to help him in the practical business of earning a living. They believed he should stop mooning around and get a job. Dennis dreamed of being a gamekeeper.

‘But my mum said that was no sort of career so she persuaded me to train to be an electrician,’ says Dennis. ‘I stuck it for a while but I couldn’t seem to settle. I went from job to job. I was an apprentice chef for a while, then a tyre-fitter, but nothing seemed to keep my interest for long. During a spell in an envelope factory, I bumped into an old girlfriend named Janet and we ended up getting married. Soon afterwards, I was offered a job as a gamekeeper and I accepted right away. I knew I’d love the work - I had six dogs, three Labradors and three spaniels, and I drove around all day in a four- wheel-drive, tending the pheasants and partridges and organising shoots.’

Yet despite his down to earth life on the land, Dennis still entertained his friends with his ‘pictures caught in time’.

‘Seen anything interesting lately, Dennis?’ they’d ask in the pub. Sometimes I had to confess that I hadn’t, but other times I’d tell them about the coach and four I’d seen driving down the High Street.’ But some of his experiences were too frightening to retell.

‘For a while Janet and I were living with her mother. It wasn’t an old house – probably built in the 1940s - but one night I woke up and at the foot of the bed was the most terrifying figure I’ve ever seen in my life. It was a man and he was pure evil. He was bald, wore a long black coat and he was staring at me with these terrible demonic eyes.

‘I was petrified. I screamed at the top of my voice, Janet woke up and the man vanished. When I told her what I’d seen, she was unimpressed. “You just caught sight of my Elvis Presley poster on the wall,” she said. But I knew the man didn’t look anything like Elvis Presley and from that day to this I’ve always slept with the light on.’

And something strange was beginning to happen to Dennis’s hands.

‘They kept getting very hot, burning hot, for no reason,’ he says. ‘Nothing I did made any difference. One of the blokes in the pub had been to a spiritualist church and he told me, “That’s the sign of a healer”. I didn’t believe I had healing hands and we had a good laugh about it. Only a few weeks later the subject got raised again at a party and one of the girls there said, “I’ve got a bad back, see if you can heal me”. I didn’t know what to do but I put my hands out – I could feel the heat rise from them - and moved them down her back without actually touching it. She said: “That feels much better now,” and I thought she was joking, or it had had a psychosomatic effect. But after that she kept sending her friends to me with their various ailments and they all seemed to think I healed them.’

Gradually the healing sessions evolved into readings.

‘Sometimes when I was healing, I’d hear voices too,’ says Dennis. ‘At first I thought it was just me - talking to myself in my head, but I was coming out with messages for the person beside me and it was information that I didn’t know but they did.’

Soon Dennis acquired a reputation as a medium as well as a healer and pleas for his help began to snowball.

‘I’ve had to learn how to handle it as I’ve gone along. Now I get all sorts of requests. I was on TV not long ago and afterwards a woman who’d seen me on screen phoned from Brighton. “I’m not surprised you’ve called,” I told her when she explained she needed help. “Your daughter in Australia’s been murdered. And you know your son-in-law did it, don’t you?’

‘“That’s amazing!” she said. It turned out that the case wasn’t being treated as murder, the son-in-law had disguised the death as an accident and he’d already had his wife’s body cremated. It’s going to be very difficult to get evidence. I’m still doing what I can to help the woman fight for justice.’

And since the publicity surrounding the Soham case, Dennis has been asked if he can shed any light on other murder mysteries.

‘A newspaper asked me if I could get any clues about the Milly Dowler case,’ says Dennis. ‘I sat down with a picture of her and some news cuttings about her disappearance in March 2002 and after a while I got an impression of a man in a black bomber jacket, jeans and trainers, driving an old Mazda or Rover. He killed Milly and I’m sure she was his fourth victim. The spirits were giving me the name of Ruth Wilson in connection with this man, too. I didn’t know who she was but later the journalists told me she was a 16-year-old schoolgirl who went missing in 1995. She was last seen setting off for school in Surrey but she never arrived and she hasn’t been seen since. I hate to think she was another of his victims. But this man is very clever. I don’t think he’s married but he’s not a loner. He goes down the pub with his mates and no one would guess what he’s really like. I reckon he’s a sexual deviant who’s into necrophilia. And I’m quite sure he’ll kill again.’

Dennis very much hopes that before this twisted murderer finds his next victim, the spirits will help him pinpoint his identify.

‘We’ll just have to wait and see.’