A veteran Miami homicide detective shares a few creative investigative maneuvers he’s learned on the job.
The Urban Dictionary defines a “hack” as a “clever or elegant” tech workaround used by coders to solve problems in a new or creative way. Non-programmers repurposed the word to describe all kinds of inventive fixes, from patching a broken pipe to learning a language.
Another Urban Dictionary definition of “hack” is “a cheap, mediocre, or second-rate practitioner” in a given industry.
So you’re obviously not a “hack” investigator. If you were, you wouldn’t be reading this article.
But you might be interested in learning a few helpful “hacks.”
It’s fair to say that anyone who does a particular job for a long time will develop certain “clever or elegant” strategies to do the job better or faster — by observing colleagues at work, or just by trial and error. During my long career in law enforcement, I learned lots of useful hacks from the fine officers and detectives I worked with. But more important than that, I adopted aspects of their mindsets — a mental shift that prepared me to create hacks of my own.
When you work as a homicide investigator for twenty-two years, you learn a lot about human nature. You see people repeating habits, rituals, and mistakes, and your mindset about how to investigate their behavior draws on this inventory of mental notes. Common sense becomes more common, and more useful.
This article aims to share some of the strategies I’ve collected over those decades of observing and adapting.
Hacks for Finding People
A skip trace or missing person case can feel daunting, especially if subjects don’t want to be found. You know the ones — defendants in a fraud case, or folks laying low to avoid paying a settlement. They no longer own any cars or real estate — they’re renting and leasing or using other people’s vehicles, and your TLO searches aren’t uncovering anything terribly helpful.
You feel like you’re looking for a needle in a haystack. How do you find it?
Start by making the haystack smaller. That is, use your understanding of human nature to eliminate where the subject probably is not and home in on where they may be.
Step 1: Review the knowns.
Make a list of the things you know about the subject: a profession, a love of tennis, or the fact that they’re an alcoholic. (Always, always find out, if you can, what their drink of choice is. A bartender taught me a long time ago that this is how bartenders remember people).
Step 2: Get groceries.
Remind yourself that everyone needs certain things: food is at the top of the list. Anyone who lives in South Florida has shopped in a Publix or will do so — these chain groceries are everywhere. If you can figure out the general area where the subject most likely lives, scope out the neighborhood Publix, Piggly Wiggly, or Giant.
We are creatures not only of habit, but also of the lowest-hanging fruit — we aren’t going to travel very far if we don’t absolutely have to.
More on that in a moment.
Step 3: Map the neighborhood.
Look at a map. See what stores, parks, or other features of the community your subject might frequent, either by necessity or curiosity.
Step 4: Anticipate their next moves.
Apply what you know from Step 1 to your map, and try to visualize the most likely places the subject might go.
These tactics got a little more difficult during the Covid pandemic of 2020. Stores — even grocery stores — started expanding their ability to deliver products to the customer. Doorstep delivery was darned convenient, pandemic or not, so when Covid concerns died down, home delivery did not.
Smart deadbeats will stay indoors as much as possible, but there some things you can’t get at home. If a person has a job, they might have to drive (though the pandemic caused seismic shifts in this aspect of society as well). If they drive, they’ll need to fuel their car (or charge it) at some point. You can’t get gasoline delivered to your doorstep, and that’s where my first story comes in.
Case Study
We were looking for the love interest of a particular cheater. He was an insurance salesman. The client had seen the lover once, and all we knew about her was that she was a teacher with short dark hair and a small red car. Our county has about three million residents, and we are the third largest school district in the country, employing more than seventeen thousand teachers. We are also largely Hispanic, so a dark-haired school teacher with a red car didn’t scrape away much from the haystack.
Here are the investigative steps I took:
1. I reviewed the knowns.
The husband, for one. His wife was our client, so we know who he was and what he looked like, what kind of car he drove, and where is office was. I figured he wouldn’t stray too far from his office to have his frolicking time with the honey. If the wife called, he needed to be close enough to get home quickly.
That meant — and this was nothing more than an educated guess — the honey lived somewhere in the area, too.
2. I mapped all the schools in the area.
From there, I looked to see which Publix I would shop at if I worked at one of those schools. I pinpointed a Publix that fit the bill, and then decided that most teachers — working every weekday — would be more likely to do their grocery shopping on a Saturday morning. (Yes, there was some guesswork here, but my wife is a teacher, and so was my mom.)
We decided to sit on the Publix for eight hours, 8am to 4pm. If that didn’t work, we would try the evening shift.
3. And then a small red car appeared.
When I pulled into the Publix parking lot at 7:25am, I spotted a small red vehicle parked just a few cars away from my position. I took photos of the car and noted that the license plate was one of those specialized plates you can buy from the State of Florida. It had a big red apple in the middle and said: Support Education. In less than forty minutes, a short, dark-haired woman of about forty walked to the car with a bag of groceries. I followed her across the highway, where she gassed up at a BP Station, giving me a great opportunity to get several photos of her.
I texted the images to the client: Bingo, ID confirmed.
After that, we were able to track the couple to a nearby restaurant where they sat at a counter having coffee and light snacks. I went in and became a customer, getting a clear video of them nuzzling, kissing, and carrying on.
Done deal.
Are they all that easy? Of course not. But this model of putting together your known facts with your understanding of human behavior should be an important strategy to keep in your bag of hacks.
And here are some other ideas that you may not have considered:
Do surveillance on Sunday morning.
If your subject goes to church, follow them there. No one will stop you in the church parking lot or inside the chapel itself to ask you what you’re doing there. You might get lucky enough to sit near or behind the subject.
Is this a personal injury case, and you’re trying to document range of movement on a person claiming that they’re debilitated? Here’s an opportunity to watch them interact with their children, load them in the car, and so on.
Are you uncomfortable with the idea of using the church to do your job? That’s your decision to make. I can only tell you this: churches — especially larger ones — are one of the few places where you can view your subject clearly, in an environment where your presence isn’t challenged. That’s a golden opportunity, and you don’t get many of those.
Get a real estate license (or recruit an agent-sidekick).
The video or surveillance you need may require entry into a gated community with manned security. If you have a real estate license, find a house inside the community that’s for sale, make the appointment to preview it or show it to a “client” (your partner or wife), and you’re in. You could do the same thing without a license, if you have a licensed friend who’s willing to play along and let you be the “buyer.”
Another gated community hack: Have a flyer with a missing child on it. Show the guard your PI license and business card. Show him/her the flyer and ask if they’ve seen a black van with Texas license plates (or make up the car of your choice). “This is the vehicle we believe was used in the abduction of this child. I just need ten minutes to drive through and see if we can spot it.”
I’ve used this twice; hasn’t failed yet.
If these hacks make you uncomfortable, you might just be in the wrong business.
And there are many more strategies you can use:
Carry cash.
Always have cash on hand — in a variety of denominations — so you can quickly pay a bar bill if your target finishes and dashes out. You don’t want to be stuck dealing with a credit card transaction or waiting for change.
Have a transit card.
With a transit card, you can quickly jump on your city’s rail system without having to fumble around at the vending machine for a ticket.
There are a ton more hacks like these, many of which I’m sure you’ve already used with success.
Final Report
I spent 27 years as a public investigator. If we needed something we couldn’t find, we could muscle our way in with a subpoena. Getting into a gated community took a mere flash of the badge.
In private investigation, you need to be creative, resourceful, and inventive. It helps to understand what makes people tick and how to tap into human motivations and emotions (like the security guard who probably has kids of their own).
Our clients often present us with haystacks. Our job is to put our imagination to work, find the most efficient ways to hack through the haystacks, and deliver that golden needle to the client.
About the author:
Ramesh Nyberg spent 27 years in Florida law enforcement, 22 as a homicide investigator. He’s written articles on police issues for numerous publications, including the Miami Herald. After retiring from the force in 2006, he founded Nyberg Security and Investigations in Miami. He also teaches regional training courses for law enforcement through Training Force USA.
In February 2024, Ramesh published “Badge, Tie, and Gun: Life and Death Journeys of a Miami Detective.” He’s also the author of “The Ten Must-Haves to be a Great Investigator” and creator of a podcast on investigations called “Nothing But The Truth.”
Ramesh and his wife live in Miami and have six children and two grandchildren.