It can happen at the worst time. You’ll be knee-deep in a day with contacts, cases and paperwork. Then a sick feeling surfaces from within. “What did I forget?” you ask yourself. “What am I missing?” Your eyes look up at the clock and then down at the papers in front of you. The missing detail is just beyond your awareness. Everything would be okay if you could just get it out…
Jay Rosenzweig can relate. He’s a private investigator from Woodland Hills, CA. His problem is data-related.
“I have to memorize 40 different passwords,” he said.
He runs birthparentfinder.com but he also has several Ad Sense accounts, a Facebook I.D., Yahoo I.D., attorney e-mail and web master responsibility for 20 different sites.
“That’s my dilemma,” he said.
Onlookers would suggest the same password for each account but it’s easy to compromise. That was clear after hackers broke into his ATM and got his password and user I.D.
“You’ve got to write it down,” he said about passwords. “Try not to keep it in your computer. If you want to hack into someone’s account, all you need is their date of birth,” he added, or “your mother’s maiden name.”
Memory can be hard to understand. Jay sees that in his own life.
“What do you remember?” he asked. “Good things, bad things… things that embarrass you.”
He recently got a fraud case and smiled when he looked at the name of the woman who was being investigated; she was a client of Jay’s back in 1988.
“This lady wrote a letter praising my efforts to my boss,” he recalled, “a thank you.”
Now she was being investigated for insurance fraud.
“I saved it,” he said about the thank you note. It helped later when he was applying for another job and used her letter as a reference. “I thought this lady was a saint,” he said.
Detail Delimma…
Walter Metcalf sees a connection with time. He’s a private investigator in Bangor, ME.
“In many situations, details come very fast and it becomes a challenge to separate the ‘wheat from the chaff’.” he said.
He’s learned to “recap” after interviews of meetings.
“I use a micro-cassette recorder and basically ‘ramble’ using my notes and thoughts trying to cover all the basic points or elements of the investigation,” Walter explained.
That backfired in a large insurance fraud investigation. Walter had to interview a lot of people and page through documents.
“I made my ‘rambling’ dictated notes into my recorder after each meeting or day,” he recalled. “Over the course of the investigation I probably had twenty tapes going with various pieces of information on each tape.”
He then created a written report after each segment and put his cassette tapes into the file but a later court action discovered his reports and documents.
“All my thoughts, suspicions, swearing, and often irrelevant points were given to the opposing councils,” he said. “Some of my ‘thoughts and suspicions’ were thrown back into my face,” he said about his testimony. “I was able to justify and defend my ‘rambling notes and thoughts’ successfully,” he remembered but now he tells other investigators to always destroy original notes after the final report is completed.
Writing Helps But…
Bob J. Wilson is a private investigator in Sahuarita, AZ and has a deep suspicion of his ability to remember.
“I DO NOT TRUST anything to my memory,” he said. “I always keep a pen, paper, and camera close to me and write down everything I see, with time and date, and if I can, photo it. It is amazing the things you later see in a photo that you never noticed with your eyes at the time of observation…people, cars, etc…” he added.
Bob keeps a small recorder when he can’t recall all of the details; that helps with exact information like addresses, license plates and interviews.
“The older you get the more jumbled your memory gets…” he said.
Rollie McCarter agrees; he’s an investigator in Holyoke, MA, and he sees the need to record (in audio or video) all of his encounters.
“When you return back to your office, in order to prepare your written report for your client, you’ll have a complete story to tell,” he tells other investigators. “When writing your report, you must allow your reader(s) to feel as though they were actually there, by providing all necessary details, whether big or small.”
Danny Horton takes that one step further. He owns Horton’s Investigative Services in Iuka, MS, and uses a digital tape recorder for “measurements on an accident or crime scene, taking statements, or just notes.” but back at the office, Danny downloads his notes on a computer and transcribes it with a free program called “NCH Swift Sound” and adds those notes to his file.
“Handwritten notes are not reliable because of several factors,” he added, “poor handwriting, weather, and being rushed. I prefer a digital recorder over the tape recorders because they are more reliable and have a much larger capacity,” he tells other investigators.
Practice Can Help…
Jeffrey A. Williams, CPP, takes a different approach. He’s President and Managing Director of Orion Support Incorporated (OSI) in Manila, Philippines; he’s also a retired Counterintelligence Officer with U.S. Air Force Office of Special Investigations (OSI). During the Cold War he worked against various foreign hostile intelligence services. His “sources” would visit with their foreign intelligence “handlers” and then return for a thorough debriefing.
“Memory played a very important role in that activity,” Jeff recalled. “We required our sources to remember as much as possible as to what they saw during their meetings in the East.”
Their approach included practice. Jeff would prepare a serving tray with a “number” of unrelated objects on it. Then he would “cover it with a towel and bring the source into the room” where he would sit at the table where the serving tray rested. Jeff would then pull the towel off the tray for five seconds only.
“Thereafter, the source would then have to write down everything he remembered seeing on the tray for those five seconds,” Jeff explained. “We would do this over and over, which resulted in their improved memory.”
Jeffrey B. Daughtry expanded that approach in McDonough, Georgia. He’s president of Daughtry Investigative Services and recently saw the need for that focused details in recall. He had a domestic surveillance case that “rapidly escalated” to a corporate scandal involving multiple court appearances, sworn testimonies, and memory recall.
“Even the slightest signs of uncertainty would have ruined my client’s likelihood of claiming what was rightfully hers,” Jeffrey said. “Without a series of devices at my disposal to recall technical and specific details I would have failed miserably at the expense of another’s future financial stability.”
Jeffrey is a former U.S. ARMY Sergeant and remembers the shout of “SPORTS” on the rifle range whenever you needed to clear a weapon jam.
“Slap magazine, Pull charging handle, Observe chamber for ejection, Release charging handle, Tap forward assist, and Shoot,” he recalled. “While minor variations of this acrostic exist, ultimately we all have the same goal in mind,” he said.
A Need to Remember…
Allen Wolak understands the need, he’s a private investigator in Hobart, IN. Approximately 18 years ago, he worked on a criminal defense case for a man who was convicted of a murder and had gone through all of his appeals.
“All of our information showed the defendant was innocent, including the fact that none of the evidence at the case was his, and that the defendant was out of town at the time of the murder,” Allen explained. “This information was brought to the attention of the parole board who agreed that the defendant seemed to be innocent.”
The defendant ended up serving the rest of his time and eventually got out of prison on good behavior. Then 15 years passed by.
Allen ended up at a seminar for public defenders and criminal defense investigators when he overheard some attorneys talking about a case.
“After listening to what they were talking about, I heard them mention that the person that was murdered had been laundering money for the mob with gold coins,” Allen added. “I asked the attorneys for the name of the case they were talking about and it turned out to be the same case that I had worked on 15 years ago,” Allen said. “After 15 years, I still remembered the photographs that were introduced as evidence and in several of the photographs, there were gold coins strewn about the victim’s house.”
The details came back to Allen’s memory including the injustice of seeing an innocent man sent to prison.
“The one attorney that was an investigator for the case admitted to me that they always knew that my client was innocent,” said Allen. “However, they needed someone to pin this murder on because of public outcry and that they had phone records of my client being in another town at the time the murder was committed. This former Investigator has come forward and is willing to testify on his findings,” said Allen. “My case is now in the process of being re-opened after all of these years.”
Clay Renick is a freelance feature writer from Statesboro, GA and has written many articles related to private investigation.