How to Be a Good Private Investigator

How to be a Good

Private Investigator

As it applies in the province

of Ontario, Canada

Prepared by Dahn Batchelor,

Criminologist

Copyright © 2013 by Dahn Batchelor.

ISBN:      Softcover      978-1-4836-6881-9

                Ebook         978-1-4836-6882-6

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Rev. date: 09/05/2013

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CONTENTS

Introduction to being aprivate investigator

PART 1   Kinds of Investigations

PART 2   The purpose of investigations

PART 3   Private investigators licenced in Ontario

PART 4   Investigative techniques

PART 5   Collecting evidence and information

PART 6   Proper method of taking notes

PART 7   Investigator’s tools of the trade

PART 8   Forensic Science investigations

PART 9   Searching for illicit drugs

PART 10   Searching for missing persons

PART 11   Principles of Ethical Reasoning/Decision-making

PART 12   Principles of Communication and Interaction

PART 13   Self-Management Skills

PART 14   The Private Security and Investigative Services Act

PART 15   Canadian Legal System

PART 16   Federal, provincial and municipal statutes and regulations

Introduction to being a

private investigator

Many people who aspire to be private investigators acquired the desire when they were young and had transfixed their eyes on television and/or movie screens as they watched stories about private investigators solving crimes and finding missing persons around the world and all the time the private investigators were doing this, there was handgun in a holster strapped to each of them while they caroused in the company of beautiful women.

Anyone who has ever been a licenced private investigator in Canada knows that for the most part, most of what was said in the previous paragraph—isn’t like that. First of all, PIs (private investigators) don’t carry handguns, black jacks and brass knuckles with them when they are on the job in Canada. Maybe they do in the United States but we have laws in Canada that prohibits citizens and private investigators from carrying that kind of weaponry with them when they are in public. Secondly, many PIs on the job are not former cops who have contacts going right up to the chief of police. However, some former cops who become PIs do have some contacts in the police force but for the most part, they can’t really get assistance from their friends on the force since police forces are quite rigid about their policies with respect to ex-cops trying to pry information from their friends still on the force. That kind of interaction with former police officers and their friends on the police force is forbidden. Finally, being a PI is no guarantee whatsoever that you will be surrounded by beautiful women who are wooing you to share their beds with you. All of this is what is commonly referred to as urban myths.

And having shot down those myths, I have some more sad news for you. It is quite conceivable that you will spend a great deal of your time doing surveillance work. No. You will not be actually starring at a naked woman in her bedroom with high powered binoculars. You may be starring at something with your binoculars but it could be as mundane as a closed door, a driveway, a house, a street and sometimes when you are doing this, it is on very cold nights with snow blowing in your face and at the same time, you are standing two blocks away from the warmth of your car. To make matters worse, you will have to cancel your attendance at parties and movies because you have been called to do some investigative work and sometimes, what really sucks; the calls come at night when you are in your warm bed with your wife or sweetheart.

Having got this far, you are now asking yourself, Why then do I want to be a private investigator? The answer to that question is easily summed up with one word, CHALLENGE. Some of the cases that will be given to you are extremely challenging and when you solve them, you will have a great feeling of satisfaction within you that is hard to explain until you experience it yourself.

As a private investigator, you will experience the thrill of following the target (person whom you are investigating or is under your surveillance) as he meanders through the city; the excitement you feel as you are solving a complicated case, and the enjoyment of being the recipient of the gratitude of your client and your employer for a job well done.

But for all of this to happen, you have to learn how to be a private investigator and pass the provincial government exam and then be licenced as a private investigator and finally, be hired by a private investigation firm or hired by another entity, such as a law firm or corporation as their investigator. If you are thinking of going out on your own, you should know that it will be hard to begin your career as a PI that way since you may have to wait a year before your ad is in the Yellow Pages where a great many people look when searching for a private investigator. That first year will be lean ones.

While you are learning how to be a private investigator while reading this book, you will learn how to interpret the various federal, provincial and municipal Acts that dictates what investigators can and cannot do, you will learn criminal and civil law. You should also watch trials in criminal courts so that you can hear police investigators solved their cases. By reading this book, you will also learn various investigative techniques and learn the basic principals of reasoning/decision making, and learn how to communicate and interact with the targets and others to whom you seek information from. You will also learn how to search for information through the use of the computer, perform background investigations, skip tracing (looking for missing persons) and how to use the tools of the trade (binoculars, video cameras and still cameras etc). You will learn surveillance techniques and self management skills and learn how to search for, obtain and collect evidence and present it in court and most importantly, you will also learn how to interview the targets and witnesses and how to use your imagination to think up pretexts that will make it possible for the information you are seeking to be given to you by those whom you are seeking the information from.

When you become a private investigator and are hired as a private investigator, you will enter a profession that you have only dreamed of. As mentioned at the beginning of this introduction, it isn’t like it is shown in the movies or on TV but it is nevertheless, an interesting profession to be in—one you will be proud to say; I am a private investigator.

When I was working full time as a private investigator, (I began in 1960) I generally worked in three kinds of investigations. They were; marital infidelity, insurance fraud and process serving. Of course I also did other investigations which included investigating crimes, interviewing witnesses, looking for missing persons, background checks, undercover work and as to be expected, a great deal of my work was conducting surveillances—both stationary and mobile.

And now, I will tell you of the various kinds of investigations that PIs are called upon to solve.

PUBLISHERS NOTE:

Throughout the text of this book, the author has for the most part, used the pronouns; he, him and himself rather than she, her and herself or using the pronouns he/she, him/her and himself/herself. It is to simplify the text and the terms spoken.

PART 1

Kinds of Investigations

Marital Infidelity

There were 26,577 divorces in Ontario in 2001, which is the last year for which statistics were available. This number has remained pretty much the same for the following years. In 1986 a revised Divorce Act was proclaimed in force. The revised act included a ‘no-fault’ divorce and the reasons for divorce now are marriage breakdown, which is defined as either living apart for at least one year or committing adultery or treating the other spouse with physical or mental cruelty.

Private investigators are generally called upon when one spouse suspects the other of committing adultery or alternatively, having an affair with someone else. This kind of behavior comes under the heading of infidelity. Often fiancées and other couples who are intimate friends will also call on the services of private investigators to follow those person’s opposite numbers to see if their opposite numbers are having affairs with other people of with the opposite sex or the same sex. In 2001 Statistics Canada began collecting information about same-sex partnerships, and about 0.5% of all couples reported living in same-sex unions so it follows that private investigators will have spouse of same sex marriages as clients and targets.

Matthew Romanick, president of Star Quality (a private investigation firm) and a former Peel police officer said in a Toronto Star article that business in the private investigation industry generally goes up around Valentine’s Day because people become more aware of their own relationships because it is considered by a great many people as the day for lovers. Peter Grace, president of Titan Investigations in Whitby, said his firm finds more clients become suspicious about infidelity during the Christmas season when their relationship expectations are not fulfilled.

Many investigators work around the clock on those days while investigating cases of suspected infidelity. They will follow their targets in malls, monitoring them in cars, operating hidden cameras in hotel lobbies, checking backgrounds, screening computers and even rare cases, conducting forensic and DNA testing.

Most of the time, the purpose of the call to an investigation firm is to confirm or dismiss the suspicions of the client and/or for personal closure or for collecting evidence for court."

Romanick also said in the Toronto Star article that his firm’s work concerning people and infidelity issues has generated more than 90 per cent of his firm’s business. He said in part; It is very lucrative and already a multi-million dollar business for us. Of course, that doesn’t always apply with all private investigation firms. He added; People mostly fit their extra marital partners in during the morning and afternoon of Valentine’s Day, or the weekend before and after. There is a very different trail people leave behind than a generation ago.

What cheaters generally forget is that a great deal of what they do is stored somewhere and their electronic footprint is everywhere it’s not supposed to be. One source that investigators search is chat rooms.

Private investigators experience a wide variety of assignments such as cheating husbands checking up on their mistresses and women who want to find out exactly who else is sleeping with their spouses.

Contested adultery proceedings are expensive and often take more than a year to come to trial so it’s cheaper and faster in most cases to seek a divorce on the basis of a one-year separation. Furthermore, since the 1985 Divorce Act removed ‘fault’ as a consideration with respect to support, there is no tactical advantage to painting one’s spouse in a bad light. However, the real advantage the party who has been cheated has is that now the suspicions have been confirmed and that person can justify separating from his or her spouse which then begins the year-long wait for the grounds to divorce on the basis of separation for a year for it to come into fruition.

One particular case I worked on years ago involved a marriage that was to take place in the then near future in Vancouver. Our office got a call from the father of the soon-to-be bride. He said that his daughter had been going out with a man who didn’t appear to be legit. He said that he wanted us to do a background check on the man. The reason why he called our firm was that the man claimed he spent much of his life living in Ontario and Quebec but was vague as to what he did for a living. In the course of my investigation, I learned that he had been married before and was divorced because of adultery. He was not paying child support and he had spent two years in prison in Quebec (which explains why the man was vague) and there was a warrant for his arrest because he didn’t report to his parole officer when he got out of prison. Our firm sent the father our report. Later we got a letter from the father and aside from thanking us; he told us what happened after he got our report.

He discussed our report with his daughter and together they decided to punish the man for his deceit. They were now convinced that because the family had lots of money—the father was the head of a large firm; the suitor was really a gold-digger. They informed their friends at the last minute of what they were going to do to the man and why. They went ahead with the marriage ceremony and just as the minister asked if there was anyone who believed that the couple shouldn’t be married, the police who sat close to the couple, jumped up on cue and arrested the man. As he was being led away, everyone including the daughter clapped their hands. There he was at the doorway to heaven on earth and seconds later, he was on the edge of hell. That is revenge in the nth degree.

Another case I investigated was one where the husband suspected that his wife was having an affair with another man. I and another investigator followed the woman to an apartment building and to the door of the exact apartment she entered. The only voices we heard were those of a man and a woman. We waited outside for her to return to her car. The following week on the same day of the week (she always told her husband that she was visiting her girlfriend). We followed her again and like before; we waited outside her apartment door. After a period of silence inside the apartment, the couple began talking again. It was then that we knocked on the door. The man inside asked, Whose there? We told him that we wanted to speak with Mrs. Davis. (it is not her real name) He replied, There is no Mrs. Davis here. I replied, Have it your own way, Sir but I should add that her car is parked in the parking lot and if she wishes to spend the night with you, I will contact her husband and tell him where she is. Suddenly the door was opened and I and my partner were invited into the apartment. Soon after that, the couple told us that the affair had been going on for over a year and that they were not having sex. They begged us not to tell her husband but I told them that he was our client and that we had to give him our report—which we did.

These are just two of the many cases I investigated with respect to marital infidelity. One of the unexciting aspects of this kind of investigation is that it is generally extremely boring because a great deal of it is done in the form of surveillance work.

As an example, I was hired to prove adultery in a case in Toronto where the woman was sleeping with a man in an apartment building. Our client told me that he suspected that the apartment wasn’t that of her girlfriend where his wife stayed overnight every Tuesday. He gave me the address of where the so-called girlfriend lived and the description of his wife and the licence number of her car. Our client’s wife’s destination was in a high rise apartment building in the west end of Toronto.

I made enquiries about the apartment while speaking to the super in the building and he gave me the name of the man and he told me that he lived there alone.

The next day, I followed the woman into the building and up to the floor the man lived on and watched him open his door and watched the woman enter the man’s apartment. His apartment was next to the indoor fire escape so I could hear if she exited the man’s apartment. I brought a book with me to read and waited on the steps until midnight. Then I placed a small paper match near the bottom of the door where the door meets the door jamb on the side that the door hinges are on. If anyone opened the door, the match would fall unseen to the floor.

The next morning at six, I arrived back in the building and the match was still in place. At seven, the woman walked out of the apartment where I then photographed her leaving the building and getting into her car.

I and our client knew that a photograph of her having sex with the man was not needed to prove that adultery had occurred that night. That is because it is always possible that someone who spends overnight on one occasion isn’t necessarily having sex with his or her lover. In Ontario, one has to prove that the person spent at least three nights from between twelve to five or six in the morning to convince a judge that that person was having an adulterous affair with his or her lover. That being as it is, I went to the building two more times and did my match trick and each time, the match was still in place when I arrived and I watched her and photographed her leaving the building at seven in the morning those two remaining times. I had sufficient evidence for the man to divorce his wife on the grounds of adultery.

Insurance frauds

It was calculated in the year 2005 that of Ontario’s $9 billion spent in annual auto premiums, $1.3 billion of it was paid out on suspected fraudulent claims and not just for glass and metal. Most of the fraud involved false claims for physical injury and accident benefits. That still continues and it has helped to inflate the average claim by almost 80% from what it was in 2005. Most of this involves opportunistic claimants, unscrupulous rehab clinics, multiple assessments of the scope of injury. The result is inflated monetary values, poor-quality treatment, and rising premiums in which everyone who owns a car must pay.

In the 1970s, I was working for a Toronto-based investigation and security firm (Centurion Investigation and Security) in North York and much of the investigative work being done by our investigators involved phony claims for non-existent injuries with respect to car accidents.

I was amazed at how many people we investigated were actually not as injured as they claimed, albeit some were. There were two ways in which we could ascertain whether or not they were faking their injuries. Both ways involved surveillance. The first way was to simply sit in our cars and watch the so-called injured persons eventually do something that would show us that they were faking their injuries or alternatively, create a scenario in which they would fall for the ploy and act in a manner that clearly showed us that they were faking their injuries.

If the target (person we were investigating) was claiming that as a result of the accident, he was suffering from severe back problems; one of our ploys was to pour dirty motor oil (which we got from garages) under the target’s motor vehicle. Then we would go back to our cars and wait for him to go to his vehicle while we had our movie camera at the ready, (video cameras weren’t in vogue then) and film the target as he bent down to look at the oil under his engine after having read the note on his windshield telling him that oil was leaking from his vehicle.

Of course, we also investigated claimants who claimed that they were really suffering from their injuries and in fact they really were suffering from their injuries. In those cases, our reports reflected that.

One such man claimed that his sense of smell was gone as a result of his injuries. I should add that once that sense is gone, food loses its flavour after that. One day while investigating such a claim, I brought with me a small glass container of a very smelly liquid (Mercaptan) that smelled like skunk spray and immediately before the target invited me into his home, I dabbed a bit of it on an old tie I was willing to get rid of. That stuff was so powerful; one could almost detect it several blocks away. The target never flinched or even made any comment about the odour that was so strong, it would even have chased a skunk away. He had obviously lost his sense of smell when his head went through his windshield and permanently injured the olfactory area of the cortex in his brain. After our client read my report, he was convinced that the claim was legitimate.

I will tell give you other examples of Insurance frauds I investigated later in this book.

Process serving

There is no provincial requirement that process servers have to be licenced as private investigators in Ontario because anyone can serve civil process (court documents) or subpoenas on someone else however, many private investigation firms are called upon to have their investigators do process serving for them.

In 1961 while I was working as a private investigation firm in Ontario, I was asked to serve a court document on a man who had definitely been evading the service for the previous two months. I served him three hours after I was given the document by spending two of those hours drinking with a man who seemed to fit the description of the target given to me. When he told me his name, I served him with the document. Two days later, I got a call from the bailiff of the then Division Court of Toronto (later called the Toronto Small Claims Court) and an hour after our meeting, he hired me on his staff as a deputy bailiff. I did that work for a year.

Years later, I worked for a process serving firm and my work as a process server took me all over southern Ontario. I was sometimes making as much as $1,000 a week doing that kind of work and most of that money was tax free.

I won’t go into detail about all the documents I served but I will explain how I got a man who had appeared to have been evading service for quite a while. He was the president of a large iron works company in Hamilton and every time I went to his office, his secretary told me that the man was out of the office on business. On the third attempt, I parked my car in the parking spot that was strictly allotted for the president of the company. Then I went to his secretary’s office and waited for him. An hour later, he entered his secretary’s office and then told her to find out who was parked in his parking spot. I stood up and said that it was my car. He then said angrily, Move your car from my spot immediately! I replied, And who are you to tell me to move my car? He replied loudly, I AM THE PRESIDENT OF THIS FIRM! As I handed him the court document, I said with a smile on my face, I have been trying to serve you this court document for quite a while. Having done so, I will now move my car from your parking space. Then I left the office and moved my car from his parking space and smiled all the way back to Toronto.

The aforementioned cases are just a few examples of what I had to do as a private investigator. As you read through this book, you will see how other investigations I conducted were done so that you will realize that one of the prime aspects of such work is the ability to use your imagination to its fullest.

I should point out that you don’t have to hand the document to the person you wish to serve it on. I served a man by placing it under his windshield wiper while he tried to flee. Another time, I threw it in the open window of a fleeing man’s car. Another time still, I slipped it in the mail slot of a woman’s apartment when she told me who she was but wouldn’t open the door. Many of the people I dealt with were expecting to be served with court documents and would try to evade service. I just had to outsmart them—which I always did. Here are some examples of how I succeeded is serving these people who were trying to avoid service of the court documents.

One man (Jerry) was living with his girlfriend and he never left her apartment nor did he ever open her door. I had to find a way to get him into the hallway of the building so that I could serve him with the divorce papers his wife needed served on him. I had one of our firm’s secretaries accompany me to the building. While I waited next to the apartment of which the man and his girlfriend lived in, my accomplice then buzzed the apartment and the man’s girlfriend answered. Here is the conversation that took place.

Girlfriend:   Whose there?

Secretary:   I am Nancy. Can I speak to Jerry?

Girlfriend:   Jerry. Do you know a girl called Nancy?

Jerry:   No, I don’t know anyone by that name.

Girlfriend:   He says he doesn’t know you.

Secretary:   Tell him we have a baby.

Jerry:   I swear, I have never gone out with a girl called Nancy.

Girlfriend:   Well go out there and see who the hell she is.

The apartment door opened and my quarry walked out of the apartment and into the hallway and guess what? He was served with the document. His response, You bastards will do anything to serve these documents won’t you? He got that right.

Another time I had to serve a doctor with a court document. He was evading the service by having his secretary saying that he was out of the country on his vacation. I knew where he lived and when I reached the floor where his apartment was, I placed the document in the newspaper that was normally delivered next to his door. I waited for him to pick up his paper. When he opened his door, I had no way of knowing if it was him so I reached for the paper and while it was in my hand, he said that it was his paper. I told him that it was my paper and that it had been delivered to him by mistake. He grabbed a hold of it while I held the other end of the paper in my hand. I then said, It was delivered to me. I am Dahn Batchelor. He replied, I am Dr. Robert Wilson (not his real name) and the paper is mine. I then pulled the document out of the newspaper and handed to him. He wasn’t pleased at all especially when I said to him, I’m glad that you are back. Did you have a nice time while you were on your vacation?"

Another doctor I was attempting to serve a subpoena on was trying to avoid service of the document. At first he identified himself to me but when I told him that I had a subpoena to serve on him, he immediately said that his real name wasn’t what he had just told me. When another man was approaching us, I said to the man, "There is money in that envelope. I tried to give this man the money but he said that he didn’t want it and threw it on the floor. You can have it. The doctor immediately grabbed the envelope before the other man could reach it and then the doctor stomped down the hallway muttering to himself.

There was another man I tried to serve but he never came out of his apartment nor would he open his door. I got him out of his door. What I did was place a small wooden match stick into the small area next to his buzzer. The buzzer then continuously rang. He came down and saw no one in the vestibule so he went back upstairs. Since the buzzer was still ringing, he came back down again. I pretended I knew him and said, Hi. Bob. What’s the matter? He replied, I don’t know. My buzzer keeps ringing. It must be a prankster. I then served him with the document. The prankster had struck again.

One time I had to serve divorce papers on a man who was flying to Egypt the next morning where he would remain permanently. He and his wife were separated and she needed her divorced papers served on him before he left the country. On his last night in Toronto, he was staying at a very posh hotel in downtown Toronto so I went there and spoke to him on the white phone in the lobby. I told him that I was the assistant manager and that we were going to bring him a bottle of our finest wine. I knew from his wife that he drank wine. When he opened his hotel room door, I asked him his name. He gave me his name and I gave him his wife’s divorce papers.

Another time, I had to serve a politician whom I didn’t know and had never seen his face. I went to the room he was in and there were a number of people in the room. I asked where he was standing. He was pointed out to me. I approached him and introduced myself to him. I asked him his name and he asked in return, Don’t you know who I am? I said, "NO. I don’t. He gave me his name.