A retired private investigator reflects on the grimier aspects of collecting evidence.
No cat litter, no
dirty diapers, fingers crossed
there’s good evidence.
This was my haiku, a mantra if you will, for those times when an investigation called for a garbage run. People don’t realize what secrets they’re giving away when they take out the trash — and the treasures we investigators discover in the bin.
I promise you: cases have been won, or at least settled, based on discarded items.
One man’s trash is the plaintiff’s treasure, if you will.
Garbage Rules
There are rules to gathering garbage. If the can is next to a house, those coffee grounds and soiled paper towels are personal effects, like a water hose, a bird feeder, or a garden gnome. But once that can is moved to the curb for pickup, it’s fair game for anyone to grab what’s inside. The trick is getting into the bin once it’s on the street, but before it’s picked up — and to do all this without being seen. Neighbors love to report suspicious activity, and stealing garbage bags from a can is shady behavior. Someone will report you, if not to the police, who will ignore those complaints, but to the former owner of the garbage.
The contents of a trash bag will tell you much about the subject’s habits. Is she a closet smoker? A heavy drinker? A junk food binger? Think about what goes into your weekly trash haul and what the contents say about your lifestyle.
A Garbage Case
The first time I made a trash run was for a divorce case. A woman suspected her husband of an affair. Diligent scrutiny of his lunchtime and post-work activities proved this true. But in Alabama, like most states, adultery is no longer grounds for divorce. “Irreconcilable differences” is the standard divorce pleading — to me, a benign and unsatisfactory phrase. This marriage of over twenty years had run its course. There were no children, no pets, only assets to fight over. We knew her husband had a girlfriend. We just needed to know if he was hiding money or spending it on her.
Here’s a fact: civil cases are always about money. You’ll hear phrases like “in the children’s best interest,” but trust me, it’s always about child support and alimony.
Money. The person who controls the money wins.
One man’s trash is the plaintiff’s treasure.
Abigail, my client with the straying husband, suspected that some of his earnings were not going into their joint account. He was a realtor and worked strictly on commission, so his income fluctuated monthly. But he had been in the business for decades and earned well over a hundred thousand dollars even in a bad year. Their account didn’t reflect his usual income.
One day she met a young couple moving into their new home in her neighborhood. Abigail was stunned to learn her husband had been their agent. Normally Abigail and her husband celebrated a home sale with an expensive meal and champagne, but he’d not mentioned this one. Curious, she began to examine bank statements. Those revealed that deposits had declined over several months. Their credit card bills showed no unusual activity. She suspected he had a secret bank account and credit card.
Scheduled to leave home for several weeks to care for her dying mother, Abigail asked me to snoop into the suspected hidden accounts. Like other past clients of mine, Abigail did not pay me out of marital assets. I sent her father my invoices, and he paid them promptly.
He didn’t like his son-in-law.
Garbage Pickup
Garbage day was Thursday. With quick call to Waste Management, I learned pickups in that area happened between 8:30 and 9:30 am. According to Abigail, the husband didn’t leave for work until 9 am and often dragged the can to the road before his morning jog. It would be tricky pulling trash during daytime hours.
I suspected her husband would spend nights with his girlfriend while Abigail was away. On the first Wednesday evening, I drove to the house after darkness fell. The street was lined with garbage cans, ready for pickup, and Bingo! He had already pulled the can to the curb. The house was dark, the street clear of neighbors. I pulled in front of the can, popped open the trunk of my car, and took two time-stamped photos of the garbage can and one of the house. I grabbed the garbage and photographed it in my trunk. I was apprehensive about leaving an empty garbage can but hoped he wouldn’t notice.
Once in my garage, I set up a video camera before opening the bag. Chain of custody is important: I needed to show the time and date and what items came out of the bag. I lined several black garbage bags on the floor of the garage, pulled on a pair of disposable gloves, and began to unpack the contents from the stolen bag, placing them on the liners. There were at least a dozen crushed Diet Coke cans and an empty Styrofoam egg carton, eggshells, a cereal box, and a squashed one percent milk container. There were two apple cores, a rinsed sardine tin, and an empty cracker box. That was the extent of the food evidence. He had thrown away a pair of raggedy shorts and several pairs of socks, an empty toilet paper roll, some used dryer sheets, dental floss, paper towels, and a real estate magazine. The few food items indicated he was eating most meals elsewhere.
Among the refuse, there were several credit card receipts for meals at an upscale Italian restaurant, a steak house, and a sports bar. The amounts on each were well over one hundred dollars. There was also a receipt for TJ Maxx, showing purchases of bath towels and women’s clothing totaling over $300. I took photos of each receipt, then placed them in a sealable plastic sandwich bag. Abigail would be able to check the last four digits of the credit card and determine if the account was known to her. I put everything else back into the bag, drove to their subdivision, and put it back inside the garbage can, just in case he came home that night and threw something away.
My client stayed away for four garbage cycles. Each week I found more receipts. A deposit slip was in the third garbage bag, and this proved crucial in locating the hidden accounts. Abigail’s attorney was able to glean enough information to subpoena the husband’s banking records. A settlement was quickly reached in the divorce, with Abigail keeping the house and her assets. Primarily because he had been hiding money, her ex-husband was on the hook for five years of rehabilitative alimony.
A Garbage Checklist
Other garbage runs were not so easy or so clean. Most civil cases I worked on, whether it was a divorce, child support modification, custody battle, or embezzlement situation, involved at least one round of garbage scrutiny.
In my experience, there are few things nastier than a dirty disposable diaper or a dump of cat litter in a garbage bag, especially the bags that have been marinating in the heat and humidity of Alabama. Think biohazard. Toxic fumes wafting from melted, runny poop. Visualize flies, worms, and roaches.
Think biohazard. Toxic fumes wafting from melted, runny poop. Visualize flies, worms, and roaches.
These bags would sometimes ride in my car unless I convinced my apprentice-investigator son Jacob to steal them. But the bags would still end up in my garage for examination.
Yuck.
Trash runs were so common that I included several questions on my intake paperwork:
- Do you, or the subject have babies, toddlers, or anyone in the household who wears diapers?
- Do you, or the subject, have cats and litter boxes?
Originally, I thought to ask about dog poop. But it didn’t seem anyone was putting that in their garbage cans. Maybe no one picked up dog waste in Alabama. I had also wanted to ask about condoms, but my husband urged me to let that question go.
“It’s best to have some surprises,” he laughed.
Indeed.
If it was a corporate client, we usually had little insider knowledge about diapers or cat litter.
It became my practice to charge higher fees for garbage runs, a hazardous waste surcharge if you will. After some practice Jacob and I got good at opening bags right in the can, late at night, shining a flashlight directly into the bags to get a sense of the contents before hefting them into our cars.
Garbage Evidence
Jacob got the task of pulling the garbage of a woman suspected of embezzling money from a Montgomery manufacturing company. Her can was full the first night. He pulled out three bags of dirty cat litter and set them aside. The fourth bag, at the bottom of the can, held plenty of household trash, but it also yielded printouts of accounts receivables from the company, marked up with margin notes. The woman had devised a code for the transactions. In the evenings, she would renumber and change invoices to hide the skimming from deposits she and her son were transacting.
She had made payments disappear from the reports she turned over to the accountant. She deftly made the accounts balance, although the company was selling far more goods and services than were being reported. During a routine interview with me (before I stole her garbage), she gleefully pointed fingers at long-term, loyal employees, accusing them of theft. But we learned that the goods had been properly purchased and the inventory had not declined through pilfering.
The woman, my subject, had siphoned money from the receivables, wrongly thinking she could perpetuate the fraud. Other family members, disappointed with their declining dividend checks, requested the accountant launch an investigation, and I was hired.
Something was amiss, and we caught her. She and her son had conspired to defraud their family’s company. The irony was not lost on me, especially as my son and I worked to expose their fraud while building our own family business.
Garbage In, Garbage Out
My final garbage run came in 2005.
An attorney hired me to find out whether his legal assistant was misappropriating money from the firm. In many small law offices, a secretary is tasked with managing the accounts receivables and payables. They make deposits, keep track of retainers and trust accounts, and pay the bills weekly, often preparing the checks for the attorneys to sign. But in this case, the bills weren’t being paid on time, if at all, even though the money to pay them was exiting the company account.
The missed payments came to light one afternoon when the legal assistant was out of the office caring for a sick child. The attorney’s wife was there answering phones and greeting clients, when the errors and omissions insurance company called. The premium for their policy was 90 days past due and about to be canceled. His wife saw the payment marked in the register, with a corresponding check number. She searched for the canceled check but couldn’t find it. This led to closer scrutiny of their accounts.
The attorney’s wife soon turned up multiple missing cleared checks and payments made to someone, but not to the vendors. They closed their office for a couple of days and gave the secretary paid time off while they investigated the discrepancies.
The attorney asked me to come in for a meeting. I assumed it was regarding a new client, but then he briefed me on the missing funds. I was heartsick when he confided his suspicions to me. This secretary was a single parent and a friend. She had given me much work over the years and referred clients to me. I never had to chase down invoices; she paid them on the Fridays after receipt. I credited her with helping my agency become established and begin to prosper.
After determining that I had played no role in the fraud, the attorney hired me to go through the private dumpster in the alley behind the law office. It was emptied monthly, so it took me an entire day to work through the leftover lunches and discarded cleaning supplies. But I found damning evidence: several canceled checks the secretary had written to herself for cash, forging the attorney’s signature, as well as a worksheet of the misappropriated funds, and a list of the outstanding bills the secretary had marked as paid on the register.
The secretary was fired, but the attorney declined to press criminal charges against her. I suppose he didn’t want anyone to know that he’d been swindled. He paid me for my time, but he never again sent me work or referred clients to me.
While I never admitted my knowledge of the situation to the secretary, I distanced myself from her, fearing our association had tainted my reputation as well. She went on to work for other attorneys. Several years later I learned she had stolen from the wrong lawyer: she’d been arrested and prosecuted and spent 15 months in prison.
By then my garbage days were long over. But I learned a valuable lesson: don’t throw anything into a garbage can that could incriminate you. Someone someday may pull your trash bag and expose your secrets to the world.
About the author:
Susan Waller Lehmann has been an investigator for nearly three decades and specializes in criminal defense investigations and capital murder mitigation. She is also the author of two true crime books, Visions of Ted Bundy: The Psychic and the Chi Omega Murders and Echoes from the Mind: The Psychic and the Gainesville Student Murders. She is currently working on her next book, Southern Lies and Homicides: Tales of Betrayal and Murder. Her books are available on Amazon and through her website at https://www.whiterhinopress.com/.