A Chicago private investigator who looked into the JonBenet Ramsey case ten years ago says he thinks the real killer will never be brought to justice.

WBBM Newsradio 780’s Steve Miller reports private investigator Ernie Rizzo says he suspected from the beginning that John Mark Karr was, he Rizzo puts it, a “kook.”

And he has some questions about the competence of the Boulder County prosecutor.

As legal firms grapple with the escalating costs of e-mail review and analysis, software applications such as Clearwell’s E-mail Intelligence Platform are expected to grow in popularity, saving law firms and their clients both time and money.

Users such as law firm Pooley & Oliver LLP are already reaping tremendous benefits and gaining competitive advantage from the platform.

“Depending on the particular case, we expect to save our clients between 20 and 80 percent of the cost for e-mail review by using the E-mail Intelligence Platform,” says Scott Oliver, partner at Palo Alto, Calif.-based Pooley & Oliver. The law firm specializes in the litigation and trial of patent, copyright and complex technology-related cases.

How can family, neighbors help older adults suffering from neglect, abuse.

If you observed a family member, even a stranger, on the ledge of a tall building or with a handful of pills, ready to take action to end his or her life, would you watch and do nothing? Not summon help from others? Not call 911?

If you peered out your bedroom window as a masked man held a gun to your neighbor’s head, would you just crawl into bed and hope nothing bad happens?

Domestic investigations are one of the most common reasons private investigators are hired, and they can give you the results you need to get real peace of mind.

According to statistics, private investigators spend the majority of their time working on domestic investigations. Despite this fact, investigators report that clients coming to them for help with domestic matters often are reluctant or are embarrassed to share personal problems. The truth is that there is no reason to be shy about seeking out a domestic investigator. Not only are many investigators very experienced in this type of case, but the results from domestic investigations can dramatically improve your life. Consider the types of investigations that can help you:

read more »

A recent arrest in Colorado shows how fallible criminal records searches can be - and why hiring a professional investigator to run a criminal records search is the best option.

When running a criminal background check, if you are searching records only in your state, you may not be getting the whole story.

In July 2006, convicted sex offender Jermaine Vaden was arrested in Aurora, Colorado for assaulting a minor. Vaden was working as a city worker at the time of the incident and had a previous conviction for sex offenses against minors in Oklahoma. The state laws did not require a criminal check to be run on Vaden because his job did not put him into direct contact with money or children, but he met his victim while working for the city, prompting many to request changes in the way background checks are run.
read more »

Working as an investigator was never in my plans. I never saw myself driving along the coast in red sports car wearing sunglasses at sunset. I had never aspired to be a “P.I.” and never dreamed of sneaking around industrial centers or apartment complexes at night. I had always been disinterested in embezzlers, scammers and con artists. I had never cared about who was cheating on whom.

I never saw any romance in being a private investigator, and after 20 years in the business, I can tell you that pouring through pounds of financial records, examining stacks of court dockets, taking pictures of people eating dinner together and swimming through databases hour after hour is anything but romantic.

Since my days as an infantry officer in the U.S. Army, fact-finding missions have seemed to find their way to me, whether I wanted the assignments or not. I was told that the qualities that make a good infantry officer also make a good investigator: patience, focus, diligence, planning and being flexible. So instead of leading my troops on some foreign mission, doing what I had been trained to do, I often found myself in a boring courtroom or at an intelligence briefing presenting my findings, flipping charts and reading witness testimony aloud.

The recent allegation that 104-year-old Brooke Astor (a multimillionaire who, for decades, was one of New York’s foremost socialites and philanthropists) was living in squalor made for juicy media headlines. But few reporters went beyond the headlines to focus on the bigger story: The growing elder-abuse crisis in the United States.

Here are some of the facts:

• As many as 5 million elderly Americans are injured, exploited, or mistreated every year by someone on whom they depend for care or protection according to the U. S. Senate Special Committee on Aging.
• For every one case of abuse reported to authorities, about five go unreported, according to the National Center on Elder Abuse.

The North Carolina Association of Private Investigators (NCAPI)

September 18th and 19th 2006

read more »

Clash of the information age and civil litigation process?

E-discovery has wrought a measure of confusion as the Canadian legal system struggles to adapt to the rapid injection of the Information Age into the civil litigation process. Behind much of the confusion is the sense of an intuitive link and/or conflict between the discovery of electronic documents and modern notions of privacy.

To some extent that’s overblown: the truth is that most federal and provincial privacy statutes defer to the court process.

“It’s important to remember that so-called privacy legislation is really data protection legislation that deals primarily with the commercial use of private information,” says Janet Allinson of London, Ont.’s Siskind Cromarty Ivey & Dowler LLP.

New rules governing electronic discovery of documents in civil litigation that were scheduled to take effect on December 1 could go into effect three months ahead of time, or even earlier in some states.

Depending on what state you’re in, those rules could go into effect September 1 – or may already be in effect, according to Tom Allman, a senior counsel with Mayer, Brown, Rowe & Maw LLP in Chicago, and one of the prime movers behind getting the rules changed in the first place.

• Group for Private Investigators
• Group for Process Servers